The early Sartre and Arendt on action: Exploring a neglected relationship

On January 11, 1945, Jean-Paul Sartre boarded a plane destined for New York City. Representing two ideologically opposed newspapers, Combat and Le Figaro, he was amongst the first group of journalists invited by the State Department to spend two months in the United States observing American culture in the hope that they would write favorable articles and so positively influence French culture (Bair, 1990: 299). In his celebrated study of the reception of existentialism in America, George Cotkin explains that from that moment until the end of the decade, French existentialism was disseminated into American culture, where, whether welcomed or rejected, it was always met with fascination (2003: 92). Rather than being passive witnesses to this, leading existentialists, such as Sartre and Beauvoir, actively fostered and cultivated it through visits, speaking tours, and, of course, publications (Boschetti, 1988; see also Beauvoir, 1999). Interestingly, the dissemination of French existentialism did not tend to take place through academic publications, but through popular magazines, such as Life, the New York Times Magazine, Time, Newsweek, and fashion magazines such as Vogue and Harper's Bazaar (Cotkin, 2003: 92). It was in one of these outlets, The Nation, that on February 23, 1946 Hannah Arendt first comments on the new phenomenon that is French Existentialism. ¹ To do so, she engages with the works of Sartre and Camus, and praises Sartre's literary works, explaining that La Nausée entails “a delightful description of a gallery of portraits of the town's respectable citizens” (1994: 190), before calling his famous play Huis Clos “brilliant” (1994: 190). Further on, she insists that it is necessary to take seriously this new arrival on the intellectual scene due to “the quality of the work” (1994: 193), although she concludes by calling into question its originality: “The nihilistic elements, which are obvious in spite of all protests to the contrary, are not the consequences of new insights but of some very old ideas” (1994: 193). This critical spirit continues just six months later, when, in a letter to Karl Jaspers dated August 17, 1946, Arendt unfavorably compares Sartre to Camus: “Camus is probably not as talented as Sartre but much more important, because he is much more serious and honest” (1992a: 56), which is followed three months later, in a letter dated November 11, 1946, with the claim that “Sartre is … much too typically a Frenchman, much too literary, in a way too talented, too ambitious” (1992b: 66). This sets the scene for the letter dated June 3, 1949, in which the die seems to be definitively cast, with Arendt exclaiming that “I don’t have much use for Sartre” (1992c: 137). From then on, her comments are almost wholly negative: in The Origins of Totalitarianism, she is both critical of Sartre's analysis of Jews (1951: xv) and (far too quickly) ties his affirmation of action to totalitarian movements (1951: 331), while in On Violence, she criticizes his acceptance of the political benefits of violence (1970: 20–21, 13n17). It is this last assessment that has tended to draw the attention of commentators and so be the subject upon which Sartre and Arendt have often been brought together (Gordon, 2001; Gines, 2014a, 2014b: 103–109), with Sartre's later work the focus through which this engagement is conducted. Indeed, the focus on Sartre's later work is also found in Sonia Krugs’ (2006) analysis of their respective views on the question of direct political participation.

Without engaging with the validity of these efforts, it is striking that there has been little attempt to bring Arendt and the early Sartre together through the mediation of their positions of action, especially because both afford action central roles in their respective thinking. For example, Arendt's The Human Condition aims to do “nothing more than to think what we are doing” (1998: 5)—thereby revealing that it is a study of activity—with action not only being of the three identified aspects of the human condition, but also in many respects the privileged one both because it is inherently political and because she maintains that “Action alone is the prerogative of man” (1998: 5). Commentators have, however, long been divided over whether her “central concept of Action [i]s imprecise and unrelated to current conditions” (Canovan, 1978: 8) or whether it is precisely on this topic that her importance as a thinker lies (Knauer, 1980: 721). On the other hand, while Sartre's Being and Nothingness maintains that “the for-itself is the being that defines itself through action” (2018: 568), commentators often tended to downplay the analysis of action therein or discuss it only in relation to and in order to elucidate other concepts, such as freedom (Detmer, 1988), authenticity (Storm Heter, 2006), alienation (Rae, 2011), or value (Poellner, 2015). It is only relatively recently that attention has turned to Sartre's early theory of action as a theory of action per se (Detmer, 2020; Morris, 2010; Rae, 2024).

This recent revival in interest in Sartre's early theory of action lends support to my focus on Being and Nothingness, but it must be admitted that this hermeneutical strategy is not an uncontroversial one, namely because Sartre takes up the question of action in other texts and in different ways, most notably the Critique of Dialectical Reason (2004, 2006). Indeed, as noted, it tends to be his later work that is focused on when bringing Sartre into relation with Arendt's thinking. It might therefore be questioned why I am not, at the very least, supplementing Sartre's analysis in Being and Nothingness with that of the Critique of Dialectical Reason. The basic problem is the relationship between Sartre's early and later works is very much a live and highly controversial issue. While some commentators simply by-pass it to seamlessly move between these works without engaging with their coherence (Smidt, 2019), commentators who have taken it up disagree on whether there is a definitive split between them (Anderson, 1993) or whether they are complementary (Rae, 2011). Although I defend the latter interpretation, I limit the discussion to the theory of action outlined in Being and Nothingness because (1) of the hermeneutical issues regarding Sartre's oeuvre, ² (2) of the revival in interest in Sartre's theory of action in Being and Nothingness, (3) Being and Nothingness focuses on the question of the relationship between will and action, and (4) there has been so little work done to bring together Sartre's theory of action in Being and Nothingness and Arendt's theory of action. ³

Arendt's theory of action is somewhat hermeneutically simpler, insofar as the discussion is found in two complementary places: The Human Condition (1998; from 1958), which emphasizes the question of action, and the essay “What is Freedom?” (2006; from 1960), which supplements it by engaging the relationship between action and freedom with specific reference to the free will tradition. There is, however, contention in the literature as to how these two pieces fit with her later posthumously published work The Life of the Mind (published in 1978), the second volume of which deals with the question of will(ing) (Arendt, 1978). In particular, there is debate between those who maintain that the later The Life of the Mind affirms the importance of free will in a way that contradicts her earlier rejection of it (Jacobitti, 1988: 53; Kalyvas, 2004: 338), and those who argue for a compatibilist reading wherein The Life of the Mind is understood to complement and deepen her previous work (Honig, 1988; Ucnik, 2020). Although my sympathies lie with this latter position (see Rae, forthcoming: 2), I here limit the discussion to the earlier works because they contain the most condensed critique of the relationship between action and free will.

Based on these hermeneutical decisions, I bring Sartre's early theory of action into conversation with Arendt's through the mediation of their respective critiques of the free will tradition. In so doing, I start to overcome the relative neglect that has befallen their relation generally and comparative discussions of their respective theories of action specifically to argue that while there certainly are differences between their respective positions, it is a mistake to view them as diametrically opposed. Despite Arendt's rejection of Sartre the man and his thinking, they offer remarkably similar positions on the question of action, including a shared rejection of any reduction of action to the instrumental means-ends schema; a common claim that action is not arbitrary but is grounded on a constructed ground; a rejection of the free will tradition's claim that action is lodged in or tied to a faculty of mind; and agreement that action spontaneously expressed the entire being of the individual.

Sartre on action

Sartre's discussion of action occurs in a relatively late chapter in Being and Nothingness, wherein he reminds us of a number of the ontological claims that he has previously developed; namely, that the ontological nothingness of being-for-itself ensures that it is defined by the way it projects itself into existence (on this, see Rae, 2017). Because it comes to be through this act, “the for-itself is the being that defines itself through action” (2018: 568). However, he notes that, within Western thought, the question of action has tended to be engaged through the free will/determinism opposition: the former position, broadly speaking, claims that action is grounded in the will which is a faculty that permits free choice between different options, whereas the latter, broadly speaking, insists that free will does not exist because of the existence of (natural) causal laws which predefine action. Although Sartre's insistence on the ontological freedom of being-for-itself ensures that he rejects determinism to seem to align himself with the proponents of free will, he, ultimately, like Arendt, is highly critical of relying on the notion of free will to explain action.

It is important to note therefore that Sartre's account of action in Being and Nothingness is fundamentally an ontological one; practical, situated action is always explained from the ontological structures of consciousness. This ontological focus feeds through into his critique of the free will tradition, which is largely aimed at its perceived subtending ontological commitments. First, Sartre rejects the notion that action can be grounded in a part of being-for-itself, such as the will. As we will see, action is tied up with the entire being-for-itself as it projects itself into existence. Second, explaining action in terms of the free choice of will (or for that matter determinism) is simply too general and fails to recognize that “the concept of an act contains numerous subordinate notions, which we need to organize and place within a hierarchy” (2018: 569).

To start to outline these, Sartre claims that “an action is, by definition, intentional” (2018: 569). This, however, requires a distinction between two senses of intentionality: a technical one that defines the ontological structure of consciousness, insofar as consciousness is always “consciousness of something” (2018: 21) and so always intends an object; and another sense, which is being discussed here, which describes the orientation of consciousness, that is, consciousness intends to act in a particular way to achieve a particular end. The latter permits Sartre to distinguish between action for which consciousness can be held to be responsible and action, lacking such intention, that describes a mere happening: “The clumsy smoker who inadvertently blows up a powder keg has not acted. In contrast, the work charged with dynamiting a quarry, and who has obeyed the orders he was given, has acted when he has set off the anticipated explosion: he knew, in effect, what he was doing or—alternatively—he was intentionally actualizing a conscious project” (2018: 569–570). This is not, of course, to say that the person is responsible for every eventuality arising from their conscious action. Sartre gives the example of Emperor Constantine who did not see when he established himself in Byzantium “that he was creating a city of Greek language and culture whose appearance would ultimately provoke a schism within the Christian Church and would contribute to the decline of the Roman Empire” (2018: 570). Nevertheless, “to the extent that he fulfilled his project of creating a new residence for the Emperors in the Orient, he performed an act” (2018: 570). According to Sartre, it is “the adequation of the result to the intention [that] is sufficient to allow us to talk of action” (2018: 570). In turn, this example reveals that action is premised on (1) a perceived absence (or lack) that the act aims to rectify; and (2) an end that is perceived as a possibility “that is desirable and not achieved” (2018: 570). In relation to (1), there was no counterbalance to the power of Rome and so Constantine created another city and culture to fulfill this end, while (2) it was perceived to be desirable to create just such a counterbalance.

The claim that action is premised on a conscious end that does not exist but which is judged to be desirable brings Sartre to emphasis the role that nothingness plays in action: the desirable but not yet existing end may not physically exist, but it does exist as a perceived (or imagined) desired end. Sartre is drawing a distinction between the being of physical objects and the being of nonphysical (mental) objects to reject the reduction of being to the former. Rather than exist in the manner of the physical thingness of objects, the desired end attached to action exists as (a) no-thing (or nothing in Sartre's problematic terminology).

The question that now arises is how a desired end is realized through action. As noted, the traditional response is through an act of free will: consciousness reflects on a desired end, wills to act, and so acts to realize its desired end. To show why this is not the case, Sartre first engages with Descartes's compatibilist position between the freedom of the will and the necessity or determinism inherent in the passions which affect the ego but over which it has no control. Sartre charges that Descartes's position is “wholly unacceptable” (2018: 580) because it requires that the psyche is constituted by a clear-cut duality—a position Sartre that rejects—wherein we “conceive of man as free and at the same time determined” (2018: 579), an issue that raises a myriad of unanswerable questions including how the unconditioned freedom interacts with and can affect the determined processes of psychological life that, by definition, cannot be altered and so are not free. Similarly, “it is in fact impossible for a determined process to act on a spontaneity, in just the way that it is impossible for objects to act on consciousness” (2018: 580). Sartre's general point is that freedom is defined by spontaneity which is precisely what is denied by determinism. A compatibilist position is therefore logically and ontologically inconsistent. The only option appears to be an incompatabilist position wherein “either man is entirely determined (which is inadmissible, especially because a consciousness that is determined—i.e., motivated externally—becomes a pure externality itself, and ceases to be a consciousness) or, indeed, man is entirely free” (2018: 581).

Although Sartre's affirmation of freedom would appear to situate him on the free will side of the debate, he actually offers a more radical position that calls into question the logic upon which the free-will/determinism debate depends. Rather than engage with whether the will is free or determined, he claims that the question of action is not based on the response given to the question of will per se, but to that of freedom (2018: 581). In the first instance, if the will is to be associated with freedom, the will cannot be understood in terms of an object, a given, or a state of consciousness (2018: 581). The will can only be free if it is a process and, more so, based on Sartre's previous claim that freedom is fundamentally negative, it must be based on “a negativity and a power of nihilation” (2018: 581). The problem, however, is that if this is so, then he “no longer see[s] why we should reserve autonomy for it” (2018: 581). Here, Sartre is criticizing the assumptions inherent in the free will tradition, wherein it is held that the will designates an aspect of consciousness that remains free from other aspects of consciousness. As he previously pointed out in the (dense) discussion of being-for-itself, the fundamental feature of consciousness is the pre-reflective nihilation of being-in-itself; it is this (ontological) act that allows consciousness to project itself into existence. However, consciousness's projection does not create a substantive thing (i.e., being-in-itself); it is defined by the ontological no-thingness that “is” consciousness (2018: 57–86). Because consciousness is no-thing and, indeed, must nihilate its intentional object to exist, it is not and cannot be determined by that object. Consciousness's no-thingness ensures that it is free from determinations and so free to engage its intentional object in diverse ways; a diversity that opens up consciousness's existential possibilities. ⁴

A word, however, is needed here on this formulation because it risks appearing as if Sartre's theory of action is strangely unencumbered, lacking any form of social or practical constraints. This would fail to recognize the important role that the situation and, indeed, facticity plays in Sartre's ontology: where consciousness always exists as a situation, which grounds and provides it with the material conditions that it must contend with (2018: 439–440). However, that consciousness is situated does not, for Sartre, mean that it is constituted, much less determined, by its situation (for a discussion, see Rae, 2011: 25–28). On the one hand, consciousness is always embedded in the world by its facticity and so lives a situation as it decides what it means for it; on the other hand, because of the transcendence that marks its pre-reflective nihilation of being-in-itself, consciousness is always ontologically other than its situation. Rather than be constituted by its situation, Sartre maintains that “consciousness is in contact with the world” (1999: 181).

This ties in to, at least, two further points. First, Sartre distinguishes between two senses of freedom: ontological freedom that defines the ontological structure of being-for-itself and practical freedom that describes consciousness's activities in the actual world; that is, its capacity, based on the composition of its natural and social world, to actually realize the project it desires to be (Detmer, 1988: 60). To put it simply, while consciousness is always ontologically free to try to exercise itself in different ways, whether it does actually manage to act in that way depends upon its practical freedom; that is, the structure, norms, values, material world, and possibilities of its actual, physical world.

This, of course, generates the problem as to the level at which Sartre's theory of action should be engaged. Those interested in the practical level will tend to focus on practical freedom and the later works where the situation comes to the fore (see, e.g., Krugs, 2006; McBride, 1991). But the discussion of action that we are analyzing in Being and Nothingness, while obviously linked to practical freedom, is orientated primarily to ontological freedom. Again, however, this is not to insist on a hard distinction between ontological and practical freedom. The relationship between ontological and practical freedom is complicated, insofar as, on the one hand, authenticity requires that consciousness be both practically and ontologically free; that is, consciousness should work to alter its social world to permit it to realize its chosen project (which depends upon its ontological freedom) (see Rae, 2011: 28–33). On the other hand, Sartre does not make freedom dependent upon practical freedom; consciousness is always ontologically free even if it is not practically free. As I have pointed out throughout, this means that, for Sartre, action can be studied at the level of ontological freedom and/or practical freedom. However, because the latter depends upon the former and because the discussion of action in Being and Nothingness is orientated fundamentally to undercovering the ontology of an action, I focus on the relationship between action, the ontology of being-for-itself, and ontological freedom. For this reason, the discussion emphasizes the connection between nothingness, freedom, and consciousness.

From this, Sartre rejects the notion, implicit in the free will tradition, that consciousness is composed of a collection of parts. Consciousness, for Sartre, is a seamless, albeit differentiated, open-ended projection. It cannot therefore be the case that a part of consciousness, such as the will, nihilates and so is free, while the other parts do not and are not: “If the will is nihilation, the whole of the psyche must likewise be nihilation” (2018: 581). It is not then the will that is free; it is consciousness that is free, a conclusion that decenters the will from the foundational place long afforded it when analyzing freedom and action.

This feeds into a second line of criticism that Sartre develops against the notion of free will: its conception of freedom. According to Sartre, the free will tradition maintains that the will is free because it is both unencumbered and open. It can therefore choose freely and without precedent how to act. However, according to Sartre, because it lacks any prior orientation, this means that any exercise of the will is directionless and so must be inherently arbitrary (2018: 583). Sartre's critique of this returns us to his claim that freedom is not bound to will but must be understood as defining consciousness per se. Explaining a free act is therefore tied up with and dependent upon an examination of the ontological structures of consciousness.

The fundamental aspect of this for current purposes is the crucial distinction between consciousness's reflective and pre-reflective dimensions. Whereas the former is defined in terms of objective, thetic, conceptual understanding, it is grounded in and expressive of the latter, which is described in terms of nonthetic, nonobjective awareness (for a discussion, see Webber, 2002). The notion of pre-reflective awareness is, definitionally, difficult for the simple reason that it escapes conceptuality; it is, after all, fundamentally different to reflection, conceptuality, and understanding. In a seminal paper, Yiwei Zheng tries to resolve this issue by helpfully describing pre-reflective awareness in terms of “feels” (2001: 24). These are not feelings, which are reflective and appear to consciousness. Feels (imperfectly) describe the nonpositional awareness that consciousness has of itself and its intentional object prior to trying to reflectively understand what that thing is. There is no reflection involved in this fundamental form of consciousness; reflection, including its spatiotemporal determination, may but does not have to occur subsequently, but, if it does, it depends upon and modifies this nonpositional spontaneous awareness. Freed from determinations, pre-reflective consciousness is not a state or a substance; pre-reflectivity is an ongoing process of spontaneous experience. It is a doing prior to any reflection on what is done. For this reason, Dan Zahavi (1999: 182) associates it with a nonsubstantial stream of consciousness. This continuous nonobjective, nondeterminate experiential stream provides the material that can be modified into reflective consciousness but it does not have to be; indeed, Sartre insists that the majority of conscious experience is and must be pre-reflective (2018: 8–16).

Sartre's basic point is that consciousness is always pre-reflectively aware of itself prior to any attempt to reflectively understand itself. This is important because Sartre associates the notion of free will with reflectivity, insofar as it is premised on the idea that different options are available to the will and it must choose what it will do by reflecting on those options and its own ends. However, because reflective consciousness depends upon pre-reflectivity, the (reflective) will is not foundational but, at most, a second-order phenomenon that depends upon the pre-reflective dimension. Indeed, because the pre-reflective dimension defines the fundamental structure of consciousness, Sartre points out that “far from it being the case that the will is the unique or, at least, the supreme manifestation of freedom, it requires on the contrary—like any event of the for-itself—the foundation of an original freedom in order to constitute itself as the will” (2018: 582).

According to Sartre, pre-reflectivity is the primary and fundamental dimension of consciousness. Rather than a substance, it is defined by pure activity and, in particular, the act of nihilation that brings consciousness to existence. Through this nihilation (which is not annihilation) of being-in-itself, consciousness brings itself into existence opposed, but related, to being-in-itself. Consciousness does not then pre-exist the act that nihilates its object; consciousness only exists in and through that nihilating act. Consciousness is therefore nothing other than a spontaneous and autopoietic process of self-generation. ⁵ This is not a one-time act nor is it achieved in the sense of a state obtained. Consciousness is continuously pre-reflectively nihilating its object to bring itself into existence as a nonthing; that is, as pure flux (Sartre, 2018: 604). Yet consciousness does not simply nihilate its other to exist as nothing opposed to the somethingness of being-in-itself. That confusion has long sustained Anglo-American “analytic” criticisms of Sartre's affirmation of nothingness (see, e.g., Ayer, 1945). It will be remembered that Sartrean consciousness is intentional, in the sense that it always requires an object to distinguish itself from. The object that consciousness intends, including the way it intends its object, creates (the being of) consciousness. Consciousness's pre-reflective nihilation of being-in-itself simultaneously distinguishes “consciousness” from its object to bring consciousness into existence as a form of being that is ontologically different to its object, and projects consciousness into a particular way of life based on its chosen intentional relation (2018: 605). This is not a two-step movement, where there is an original nihilation that momentarily allows consciousness to exist as no-thingness, before choosing how it will project itself. Consciousness ontological nihilation of being-in-itself is simultaneously a projection of itself into existence, with its chosen form of existence depending upon its “choice” of intentional relation. Regardless of its chosen projection, consciousness never becomes a substantive being (i.e., being-in-itself); it always exists as a being defined by nonsubstantivity or, put differently, the ontological characteristic of not-being-a-thing (i.e., no-thingness).

The language is highly abstract, but the basic point is that consciousness does not nihilate being-in-itself to not exist (or be nothing); its pre-reflective nihilation of being-in-itself always simultaneously entails the projection of itself into existence, with the form of its existence depending upon the way in which it intends its object, including which object it intends. By choosing how it will project itself, consciousness chooses how it will engage with (its) existence; that is, the end and values that will define it. In turn, this will shape, without determining, the subsequent ways in which it projects itself. For this reason, Sartre maintains that consciousness's existence is defined by the pre-reflective fundamental (or originary) project(ion) that it chooses for itself. This choice is not, however, lodged in one aspect of itself such as the will, nor is it a reflective choice or decision; it is a pre-reflective spontaneous commitment that emanates from and defines the entire ontological structure of consciousness (2018: 604, 625). Consciousness, as a whole, projects itself into (a form of) existence and does so through its entire being. Because the end toward which consciousness projects itself is one that defines its existence, it is only in and through the projection of this end that consciousness (and its action) exist: “human reality does not exist first in order to act, but being, in its case, is acting, and to cease to act is to cease to be” (2018: 623). From the perspective of reflexivity, this appears to be arbitrary, but Sartre points out that we are talking about a level of being that occurs “prior” to reflexivity, with the consequence that the category “arbitrary” simply does not apply. Instead of being arbitrary, the choice, while situated in a specific environment is nevertheless not determined by that situation; it is a foundationless, individual, and “absurd” (2018: 626) commitment. By committing itself to a particular form of existence (which it must do; it is a condition of consciousness), consciousness provides itself with a normative orientation, an end, and, by extension, value-schema for its existence; one that “operates” pre-reflectively and which, in so doing, grounds any and all reflective actions.

This feeds into and returns us to his earlier critique of free will. As noted, according to Sartre, any appeal to free will ultimately implicitly understands freedom in terms of arbitrary choice. For Sartre, however, actions are not arbitrary but are expressive of consciousness's (freely) chosen fundamental project; that is, the way in which consciousness has committed to project itself into existence. It is only by grasping the fundamental project of the actor that his or her action can be (reflectively) understood. To highlight this, Sartre distinguishes between motives (mobiles) and reasons (motifs). Reasons are normally taken “to mean the reason for an act, i.e., the set of rational considerations that justify it. If the government decides to convert its securities, it will give its reasons: to reduce public debt, to stabilize the Treasury” (2018: 585). Reasons are “characterized as an objective assessment of the situation” (2018: 585). Motives, on the other hand, are “usually regarded as a subjective fact. It is the collection of desires, emotions and passions that drive me to perform a certain act” (2018: 586). If the government decides to convert its securities, it is because its ministers (not the government per se; actions, for Sartre, are always the actions of individuals) have the desire to reduce debt and balance the books.

Although Sartre accepts that the attempt to explain the impetus for action through reasons and/or motives is an advance over the traditional focus on whether action is free or determined, he is ultimately critical because he insists that it does not go far enough. Any attempt to ascertain the objective reasons for an act must ultimately appeal to the subjective motivations of the agent: the government may wish to covert securities to reduce the public debt, but this depends upon its ministers “possessing” the motivation to reduce the public debt. The subjective motives for an action must, however, be explained: why, for example, are these ministers motivated to reduce the public debt in this way and others, for example, are not? Why do these individuals perceive and judge the world in the way they do? This, according to Sartre, cannot be explained at the reflective level; it can only be explained by the pre-reflective fundamental project that structures the individuals taking the decision regarding the public debt. It is because they have chosen to project themselves in terms of a particular value-system that maintains, for example, that public debt is negative that the ministers make this value judgment and so are motivated to act to reduce that public debt. The reason and motive provided to explain the action can, in fact, only be explained through the end that consciousness has pre-reflectively chosen to define itself by (2018: 574). There can be no reason or motive given for the choice of fundamental project; the reasons and motives given to justify or explain an action are consequences of the parameters established by the choice of fundamental project. This is not, however, easy to determine because it requires that the entire being of the individual be discerned; that is an ongoing process which by definition cannot be completed.

The key point for current purposes is that action is not arbitrary or unencumbered; it is grounded in a prior orientation, in the form of the value-system that defines the individual's fundamental project. This value-system brings that individual to experience him or herself and his or her object in a particular way. Action is both orientated to the choice of fundamental project and is structured by that choice. By the time the individual gets to reflect on it to give reasons or motives to justify or explain it, “the die is already cast” (2018: 591); reflective consciousness must interpret its action in terms of the parameters of its pre-reflective fundamental project. This necessity does not undermine consciousness's ontological freedom and hence future action because the fundamental project (1) is freely chosen by consciousness—it gives itself its orientation and so is not limited by anything else—and (2) can be changed at any moment (2018: 607–608, 626). Action, for Sartre, is then grounded because consciousness is orientated toward a freely chosen end, but that grounding does not restrain consciousness's or the act's freedom; the orientation provided by such grounding is, in fact, a condition of a free act and an expression of consciousness's being.

Arendt on action

Arendt's most extensive analysis of action is found in The Human Condition, published in 1958. Its stated aim is defined rather straightforwardly, if rather deceptively, as entailing “nothing more than to think what we are doing” (1998: 5), a statement that reveals the important role that she gives to activity and, by extension, action. Crucially, however, her analysis is a phenomenological one (broadly understood), insofar as she aims to answer this question by actually examining what we do in everyday, concrete life (Chartouny, 2023; Loidolt, 2018). This is necessary to combat the tendency within Western thought to privilege the vita contemplativa, a privileging that reduces concrete action to abstract mental processes. The dominance of the vita contemplativa is attributed to the pejorative role that philosophy has played within Western thought and, indeed, in the second volume of her unfinished posthumously published The Life of the Mind, Arendt charges that this dominance has led to action being explained in terms of a privileging of free will, understood in terms of the liberum arbitrium—“the freedom of choice between two or more desirable objects or ways of conduct” (1978: 29); an explanation that reduces action to an abstract activity grounded in the faculty of the mind and, which, in so doing, both reveals and, indeed, brings the discussion onto the terrain favored by philosophers who are the exemplars of the contemplative rather than active life. Rectifying this, on Arendt's telling, requires that we explain action in terms of the actual activity that defines it, a strategy that, as she explains in The Human Condition, requires that we engage action from the perspective of activity per se and, as such, the vita activa.

According to Arendt, the vita activa is composed of three different, but interlinked, fundamental activities: labor, work, and action. This obviously differs quite substantially from Sartre's early account, which focuses on the ontological structure of consciousness rather than the far broader human experience, or condition. In many respects, Arendt's analysis is pitched at the level of what Sartre would call practical freedom. As noted, however, for Sartre, practical freedom depends upon ontological freedom and so necessitates an originary ontological analysis. For Arendt, however, ontology is a symptom of a privileging of the vita contemplativa that takes us away from the question of action per se. It is, in other words, the very problem to be avoided.

When we turn to the vita activa, we discover that labor “is the activity which corresponds to the biological process of the human body, whose spontaneous growth, metabolism, and eventual decay are bound to the vital necessities produced and fed into the life process of labor” (1998: 7). Work is the activity “which corresponds to the unnaturalness of human existence” (1998: 7). It defines “an ‘artificial’ world of things, distinctly different from all natural surroundings” (1998: 7). We might call it the creation of the symbolic world of meaning, the creation of institutions, value, and so on. Whereas both labor and work occur between individuals and things, action is “the only activity that goes on directly between men and within the intermediary of things or matter” (1998: 7). It corresponds to and ultimately deals with the “human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world” (1998: 7). Because of this originary plurality—the idea that human existence is a common and public one—Arendt reminds us that all activity is inherently embedded and political. Politics, here, does not relate to law per se, but describes interactions between individuals and the struggle to make sense of them and, indeed, manage the competing claims that constitute those positions. Action does not entail fleeing from that plural embeddedness but of dealing with it: “The vita activa, human life insofar as it is actively engaged in doing something, is always rooted in a world of men and of manmade things which it never leaves or altogether transcends” (1998: 22). As we will see, this has implications for her notion of freedom, which, in distinction to Sartre's early distinction between ontological and practical freedom, is singularly understood as fundamentally politically; as situated, embedded, and realized through interactions with others.

Plurality reveals that “we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as everyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live” (1998: 9). Plurality has, in other words, “the twofold character of equality and distinction” (1998: 175); the former because without it “men could neither understand each other and those who came before them nor plan for the future and foresee the needs of those who will come after them” (1998: 175), and the latter because without such diversity, speech and action to make ourselves socially understood would not be necessary. Action allows us to create and express ourselves in the world, while speech is necessary to explain ourselves, intentions, and our actions. Without the accompaniment of speech, “there would no longer be an actor, and the actor, the doer of deeds, is possible only if he is at the same time the speaker of words” (1998: 178–179). Action without speech would therefore “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 incomprehensible” (1998: 178). Through the combination of action and speech, “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 their body and sound of the voice” (1998: 179). Identity is therefore a performative, created through the actions and interactions of individuals: “This disclosure of ‘who’ in contradistinction to ‘what’ somebody is—his qualities, gifts, talents, and shortcomings, which he may display or hide—is implicit in everything somebody says and does” (1998: 179).

Sartre would reject the notion that speech and language generally are constitutive of who we are and, indeed, can reveal who we are. For him, such a position (1) implicitly depends upon the notion that we are something that can be revealed, rather than an activity that we do; and (2) confuses the practical nature of speech as a “tool” of social interaction and arrangement, with ontological disclosure. For Sartre, speech is a practical not ontological activity; it is not constitutive of who we are per se, although it is necessary to mediate our practical inter-actions with and relation to others, with this taking different forms (see Rae, 2009).

It might be objected, however, that, while verbal speech cannot tell us what we are, other nonverbal forms of communication (such as bodily gestures and movements) might do so. In the first instance, however, the issue is not which means reveal what consciousness is; it lies in the assumption that there is “something” to be revealed. Sartre rejects that notion by defining consciousness in terms of no-thingness that is performatively expressed through a fundamental project. As no-thingness, consciousness is not a thing to be revealed, but an activity that is done via commitment to a fundamental project.

This, however, generates a further problem because it might be thought that if consciousness is a doing, then what it does is synonymous with what it is: consciousness's body language would then reveal its experience of a particular act which would reveal what it is. This, however, fails to remember that we do not approach the other in a neutral stance, but always with and from a fundamental project that brings us to interpret the other's actions in light of our own projections and, by extension, prejudices. It also fails to remember that, for the early Sartre, consciousness “chooses” how it will live its body (and facticity more generally) based on its “choice” of fundamental project, but its body is not synonymous with consciousness's ontological structure which always remains other and so fundamentally free (see Rae, 2011: 25–28). The body is therefore lived but it is not disclosive of what consciousness fundamentally is. Indeed, in Being and Nothingness, Sartre repeatedly warns us that focusing on the body and our facticity runs the risk of bad faith and the concealment of the ontological nothingness and hence freedom that defines being-for-itself. For the early Sartre, consciousness is always ontologically distinct from its facticity and the practical activities through which it expresses itself. For Arendt, on the contrary, there is no ontological realm distinct from the practical one; the individual is what it does. Speech is therefore a doing that, in permitting social interactions and practical activity, is, on Arendt's telling, absolutely fundamental to what it is to be human to the extent that a “life without speech and without action … is literally dead to the world; it has ceased to be a human life because it is no longer lived among men” (1998: 176). This self-revelation is, however, “possible only in the public realm” (1998: 180) because it has to entail a revealing to another; a claim that, as we shall shortly see, ties action to the question of freedom and, for Arendt, politics.

Crucially, the ability to reveal oneself through action is based on “initiative … from which no human being can refrain and still be human” (1998: 176). Action is made possible because of an impulse to act that is inherent in what it is to be human. It “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” (1998: 177). The impetus or spark that brought forth our initial birth into the world continues to cling to our existence and, in so doing, always makes possible “a second birth, in which we confirm and take upon ourselves the naked fact of our original physical appearance” (1998: 176–177). There is no necessity to this, meaning that action is both inherently unpredictable and unexplainable; it occurs in the guise of a “miracle” (1998: 178), which means that regardless of the situation and its constraints, action (in the sense of the establishment of a new beginning) is always a possibility: “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” (1998: 178).

It is at this point that Arendt's critique of the free will tradition enters the scene, for the simple reason that this initiative has traditionally been attributed to an act of voluntary, free will. Arendt is highly critical of this position, which she claims ultimately emanates from a philosophic conception of action that fails to appreciate the actual concreteness of action; in other words, the free will tradition accounts for action by divorcing it from actual conditions of plurality to think of action in terms of a strangely unencumbered mental impulse. Arendt therefore explicitly rejects the claim that the notion of freedom that she is discussing is “a phenomenon of the will” (1998: 150), by which she means the tradition of liberum arbitrium wherein action is defined from “a freedom of choice that arbitrates and decides between two given things, one good and one evil, and whose choice is predetermined by motive which has only to be argued to start its operation” (1998: 150). Arendt's problem with the liberum arbitrium tradition is three-fold. First, in a similar vein to Sartre, she associates it with reducing action to a particular mental faculty, which fails to recognize that, by virtue of natality, it is tied to the human condition per se. Every human, by virtue of being human, always has the capacity to act; that initiative is “in-built” into what it is to be human.

Second, she rejects the chain of reasoning behind the liberum arbitrium, which, like Sartre, she maintains is based on the idea that an end is first reflectively identified or judged as being desirable, with the will then stepping in as executor by way of choosing the most appropriate means to achieve that end, which then leads to action. Action reduced to the liberum arbitrium is then defined in terms of the “power to command, to dictate action” (2006a: 150). This, however, is not “a matter of freedom but a question of strength and weakness” (1998: 150). Indeed, Arendt notes that the dominance of this perspective has not only been philosophically malevolent but also had disastrous political consequences because the drive to command implicit in the liberum arbitrium tradition is bound up with the affirmation of the unencumbered ego and, linked to this, the affirmation of sovereignty.

Arendt's point is that the affirmation of free will, as liberum arbitrium, is based on the idea that what is most important or what defines freedom is the capacity to will, as opposed to the capacity to act in the concrete world. Arendt traces this back to Christianity, wherein the distinction between “I-will” and “I-can” arose. Rather than defining freedom, as the ancient Greeks had tended to, in terms of the “I-can,” that is, the capacity to act, Christianity aimed to overcome the constraints of action by defining freedom in terms of the simply capacity to “will” regardless of whether that will could be expressed through concrete action. It was in the sheer activity of willing that freedom was found, as opposed to the realization of that will in concrete activity. With this “philosophic shift from action to will-to-power, from freedom as a state of being manifest in action to the liberum arbitrium, the ideal of freedom ceased to be virtuosity in the sense we mentioned before and become sovereignty, the idea of a free will, independent from others and eventually prevailing against them” (2006a: 161–162). By defining freedom in terms of the individual act of will, rather than the capacity to act in relation to and through others in the actual world, the individual as a separate sovereign entity arose and, in so doing, defined itself in opposition to others as opposed to defining him or herself through his/her relations with others. Politically speaking, this led to the affirmation of monadic individuals competing against and setting themselves in contrast to others, instead of recognizing, accepting, and expressing themselves through the concrete plurality. For this reason, she concludes that “If men wish to be free, it is precisely sovereignty they must renounce” (2006a: 163). Rather than affirm freedom in opposition to and distinct from the plurality of individuals that defines concrete life, we must recognize and affirm that action takes place, and freedom is realized, in terms of concrete action through the originary plurality. Freedom is not mental and philosophical; it is existential and political.

Third, Arendt joins Sartre in rejecting the arbitrariness inherent in the free will tradition; that is, the notion that action emanates from a free—that is, ungrounded—choice between two (or more) options. In Arendt's terminology, the liberum arbitrium functions through a three-step movement: first, there is a judgment made about the right aim—this is a reflective act—which then results in the willed choice about how to realize that end, which is (third) based on an(other) act of judgment. In other words, willing is a reflective act that executes a prior judgment. Arendt's fundamental problem is that this bases action on reflective, unencumbered activity. At no point during the process is the concrete, plural reality taken into consideration. The liberum arbitrium is free precisely because it is divorced from that concrete plurality, with all the conflicts, struggles, and negotiations it entails. As noted, however, for Arendt, freedom is not realized in opposition to the originary plurality, but occurs and is realized through it. Furthermore, action is not groundless and so arbitrary: “What saves the act of beginning from its own arbitrariness is that it carries its own principle within itself, or, to be more precise, that beginning and principle, principium and principle, are not only related to each other, but are coeval” (2006b: 205). As such, action that 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” (2006a: 150). It is not therefore based on reflection but on the projection of “a principle” (2006a: 150) and so is spontaneously directed. While motives emanate from the self, principles do not. They “inspire, as it were, from without; and they are much too general to prescribe particular goals, although every particular aim can be judged in the light of its principle once the act has been started” (2006a: 151).

For Arendt, then, action is not centered on nor does it emanate from the will, much less the free will of the liberum arbitrium. In this, she joins Sartre in decentering the will from the privileged position it has long been afforded in Western thought. Furthermore, the impetus for action is not defined in terms of an executive function that chooses between pre-established options; it is premised on an explosive projection, “the sheer capacity to begin, which animates and inspires all human activities and is the hidden source of production of all great and beautiful things” (2006a: 167). This activity is miraculous (2006a: 146–147). It is not, however, located in one part of the individual, much less his or her mind, but is bound with the human condition per se; it is inherent in what it is to be human. How this miraculous event is expressed depends upon the principle(s) that define the community within and through which the individual acts, an occurrence that, as noted, grounds action and so further undermines the notion of freedom sustaining the free will tradition. Rather than being free because it is unguided, action is free precisely because it is guided (by community-driven principles), with that guidance permitting the individual to exist and act politically.

However, while Sartre grounds action in the value-system inherent in the individual's freely chosen (albeit socially situated) pre-reflective fundamental project, Arendt claims that action is grounded on a principle that is given to the individual externally. It is, in other words, given to the individual from his or her community; the plurality in which he or she lives and through which he or she expresses him or herself. This is one of the fundamental differences between Sartre's early theory of action and that of Arendt: both agree that action is grounded and so not arbitrary, but whereas Sartre grounds action in an individual's chosen fundamental project, Arendt grounds it in the general principles that structure the political community within which the individual exists. They both, however, agree that the ground of action—the value-system inherent in the fundamental project for Sartre and the principle for Arendt—are open-ended performatives that only exist to the extent and as long as they are affirmed and expressed through individual action (Arendt, 2006a: 151).

To reiterate, therefore, freedom, for Arendt, is not an ontological condition of human consciousness, as it is for the early Sartre; it is a political phenomenon that only exists when the plurality that is the political community spontaneously affirms the principle of freedom and this actually affirmed in concrete reality through concrete action: “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” (2006a: 151). Arendt is aware that “we find it difficult to realize that there may exist a freedom which is not an attribute of the will but an accessory of doing and acting” (2006a: 163), but she maintains that the long-standing association between freedom and will dissolves once we start to actually engage with the constitution of concrete activities. Explaining action through the will is to affirm the Christian understanding of freedom, a conception that, as noted, reduces action to an act of will and depends upon an abstract mental process that occurs in distinction to the concrete world and which has had dramatic and unfortunate political consequences. In contrast, for Arendt, freedom is not an abstract, individual phenomenon, but is an inherently practical and public activity. It is guided by the principle given to it by its community, which only exists because it is affirmed by the individuals of the community. For the individual to affirm freedom through his or her acts requires that the individual's public world be so structured as to allow him or her to actually be able to act freely. According to Arendt, freedom simply depends upon the individual's ability to actually express him or herself concretely, with this requiring that the actions and interactions of others be taken into account. Individual free expression requires a public realm that is receptive to and facilitative of such expression—“Without a politically guaranteed public realm, freedom lacks the worldly space to make its appearance” (2006a: 147)—and it is only if it makes its appearance in the public realm that freedom actually appears: “Freedom as a demonstrable fact and politics coincide and are related to each other like two sides of the same matter” (2006a: 147).

However, that the realization of freedom depends upon the community continuously adopting and affirming freedom as its principle, with this depending upon and being affirmed in a particular manner by the individuals that express it, means that the realization of freedom, and by extension the possibility of a free act, is as much a communal and public activity as it is an individual one, and depends upon fragile processes that often go awry. After all, because “the actor always moves among and in relation to other acting beings, he is never merely a ‘doer’ but always and at the same time a sufferer” (1998: 190). Rather than overcome this frustration by reverting to a notion of self or freedom based on dominating or negating others, the individual can only be free by negotiating this web of entanglement. However, because action takes place within a web of existing human relationships, “with its innumerable, conflicting wills and intentions” (1998: 184), it “almost never achieves its purpose” (1998: 184). Nevertheless, because the impetus for action defines the human condition, each individual always has the capacity to start again to once more attempt to achieve that purpose. Action is not then defined by an unencumbered act of free will, but, because natality is a condition of human being, action is always possible and always takes place within and through the possibilities and constraints of the plurality that it expresses and exists.

Sartre would appreciate much about this, especially when he turns to talk about practical freedom, but he would also maintain that freedom cannot be reduced to the practical or political level; it is also an ontological condition of consciousness that allows it to choose its practical expression (within the parameters of its social world). Indeed, he would presumably point out that while she resists framing it in this way, Arendt makes a similar point when she relies upon her notion of natality to show how the individual is always able to nihilate his or her practical world to start anew. While she aims to reduce freedom to the practical realm, Arendt continues to appeal to an ontological characteristic to reveal that individuals can always start again or challenge the communal principle; this is not a contingent phenomenon, but constitutive of the being of the human. While critiquing ontology for being synonymous with the vita contemplativa, Arendt's affirmation of the vita activa actually ends up relying upon an ontological capacity to explain practical action. In so doing, she actually agrees with Sartre that practical freedom depends upon and so requires an ontological explanation. While Sartre calls this ontological freedom, Arendt maintains that it “is ultimately the fact of natality … in which the faculty of action is ontologically rooted” (2006: 247). For this reason, the Sartre–Arendt debate regarding action is, as noted, intimately connected to their respective positions vis-à-vis freedom and the question of the impetus that generates action.

Concluding remarks

There is, of course, far more that could be said about Sartre's and Arendt's thinking generally and theories of action specifically, but I have tried to show that despite Arendt's assessment of Sartre's philosophy and, indeed, the differences that exist between them on a range of issues, their respective positions on action do overlap in significant ways. In the first instance, both reject the long-standing claim that action is grounded in or synonymous with (free) will. For both, such a notion depends upon a notion of freedom that is unencumbered and arbitrary, while they also reject the idea inherent in it that the impetus for action is lodged in or tied to a faculty of the mind. For both Arendt and Sartre, the impetus for action is tied to the entire human being (rather than a part) and is based on projection into the future. Far from being arbitrary, action is also always defined from and conditioned by a prior ground: in Sartre's case, the value-system that the individual has committed to as part of their choice of projection; in Arendt's case, it is defined by the abstract, general principle that defines the public realm within and through which the individual exists and that concrete individuals actualize through their actions. Although they differ in terms of the specifics of the ground of action, they agree that action is (1) not fundamentally a reflective activity, and (2) depends upon and is conditioned by a prior schema. In turn, action is not constrained by nor is it defined in terms of an instrumental means-end schema. Action emanates from the entire being of the individual and while it may be orientated toward and from a particular value or principle, those values and principles are both open and flexible. They do not constitute an end, in the sense of a fixed determined point of termination, but are always orientating without determining. For this reason, Arendt and Sartre agree that action is not constrained within the restricted economy of instrumental reason; for both Arendt and Sartre, action is defined by an openness and explosive projection into the future, one grounded in a prior value (Sartre) or principle (Arendt), but which conditions without determining action—individuals can always change it—and which always remains open so that it does not foreclose subsequent action. With this, I have tried to show that Sartre and Arendt, (1) offer common criticisms of the free will tradition, (2) rethink the question of action outside of the restrictive parameters of the historically and contemporarily dominant free will/determinism schema, and, in so doing, (3) offer us an original perspective from which to think about the difficult question of action. ⁶