michael gendre

transcendence and judgment in

arendt’s phenomenology of
action

In the post-Kantian philosophies, transcendence is an essential

problem for thought. Transcendence means that thought and
meaning are possible only because the human subject is capable
of extending beyond the mere givenness of finite experience. In
Kant, the technical notion of transcendence, connected to
metaphysical dogmatism and the &dquo;transcendent use of the
concepts of the understanding,&dquo; is negative, and falls under the
attacks of the critical enterprise. At the same time, however, the
Kantian notion of &dquo;transcendental&dquo; means that no world can
appear if we do not begin philosophy with an investigation of the
subject. This investigation reveals an interplay of activity and
receptivity which essentially determines how the objective world
appears to us. The world in its totality for the subject is bound up
with the possibility of rev6aling beings as forming a system of
experience. More importantly, this analysis allows the
emergence of the transcendental idea of freedom. This idea of
freedom is given content by the fact that the subject exceeds the
world of mere givenness atthe practical level, i.e., determines the
maxim of his or her action, by rationally and objectively thinking
of himself or herself as universal lawgiver.

For Kant, the capacity for meaning in the world is bound up with
the possibility of discovering structures by which mere givenness
is surpassed. While this is clearly the task of the philosopher,it
 also corresponds to the most vital interest that human beings
have in judging. In submitting the human faculties of cognition to
the tribunal of reason, Kant’s philosophy seeks in each case to
justify the manifold interests we pursue in being in the world.
These manifold interests are instantiated not only in the
determining (theoretical or practical) judgments, but also in thE
reflexive judgment of aesthetics and politics-in which explicitly
a plurality of subjects is posited and where their communication
emerges as the medium in which the world reveals itself to them.
In Kant’s philosophy taken as a whole, one finds an essential
connection between the new, non-dogmatic form of
transcendence, explicit in the transcendental theme, and the
enactment of judgment by which the Autk/ärung, the coming of
age of humankind, comes to pass.

Yet, of the three major philosophers who came after Kant-

Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger~nly Husserl essentially linked
judgment and transcendence while at the same time demanding
that transcendence be suspended in order to analyze its
structural (eidetic) components. For this reason, his philosophy
for the most part remains a transcendental idealism, or at least
essentially focused on clarifying the structures of theoretical
comportment. Since the negativity and transcendence explored
by Husserl require nothing more than the suspension of belief,
i.e., the 6pokh6 or removal from the Lebensweft, and since he
never considers a return to the Lebenswelt as something
essential for judgment, the Husserlian treatment of
transcendence is entirely captive of a theoretical approach to the
issue of judgment. It is this 6pokh6 which reveals the theoretical
acts to a new eidetic seeing.

Hegel and Heidegger also dealt with the issue of transcendence.

Yet both attempted to displace the reality of judgment as an
activity of the individual valid in its own right, and proposed
instead interpretations of judgment aiming at its integration within
a speculative totality. For Hegel, the speculative totality is the
Spirit conscious of itself as world and of the world as Self-in otherr
words, this totality is effective Spirit. It is, for example,
characteristic of the Spirit coming to maturity and self-knowledge,
that in it consciousness is not sundered between Good and Evil
as two irreconcilable powers. On the contrary, consciousness has
experienced the equality of the two, in that the unconditional
aiming at the Good has been found to be an empty consciousness
that cannot be distinguished from the mere aiming at the self, or
the mere assertion of freedom, characteristic of Evil. This
equalization of the two consciousnesses is interpreted
speculatively by Hegel as the &dquo;1=1&dquo; of German Idealism, and is
tantamount to the mutual forgiveness of the acting consciousness
30 by the judging consciousness. In this process of return into the
 Spirit, the one-sidedness of both action and judgment is cancelled
out, along with action’s harsh commitment to particulars and
judgment’s formal and aloof distance in the thought-process. But
it is clear that this cancellation can only take place by virtue of
forgiveness, speculatively understood as &dquo;I=I.&dquo; Forgiveness is the
mutual explicit recognition of the two consciousnesses finally
coming to express for themselves the identity of identity and non-
identity. &dquo;It is God manifested in the midst of those who know
themselves in the form of pure knowledge&dquo; (671 ).1

In Heidegger too, the connection between transcendence and

judgment takes a speculative turn. The concept which Heidegger
finds most congenial is transcendence. For him, transcendence
expresses the fact that Dasein-the entity that has a prior
understanding of the mode of being of other beings and of its
ownmost mode of being-is in excess of all beings
Transcendence is revealed within Dasein’s questioning into the
ground of beings and into its own ground. Thus it is in structural
terms that, in fundamental ontology, transcendence is disclosed
as the ontological difference between Being and beings-a
disclosure that comes to pass when the Dasein turns away from
its fallenness into the presence-at-hand of everydayness. This
fallenness is also involved in the traditionally substantializing
views of a long tradition of philosophy which Heidegger proposes
to deconstruct. Transcendence is further attested within Dasein
by the fundamental mood of anxiety, which prepares Dasein for
the moment of vision and reveals that the ground of beings is not
an assumed subsistence, but the finite temporality to which
&dquo;proximally and for the most part&dquo; we are blind.
Because the human Dasein is so thoroughly permeated with
negativity (i.e., essential, or structural transcendence), it is
capable of revealing and disclosing other beings contrast to what
Dasein is in its ownmost. Hence, transcendence and the
ontological difference are the basis upon which the truth-bearing
character of Dasein must be articulated. Transcendence is the
ground of truth (i.e., of the disclosure of beings taking place in
judgment)-truth whose standard definition in terms of
correspondence between judgment and reality is dismissed, in
order to reappropriate the Greek term alethera. Transcendence,
however, is not the ultimate term and center of reference, since-
even transcending it while making it possible-we are drawn
within the depths of an even more originary ground, letheia, or
concealment. Transcendence thus leads Heidegger to the view
that a specifically ab-original form of concealment or untruth,
letheia, precedes truth, and that, therefore, a specific form of
originary negation is the prior abyss from which aletheia emerges.
Extremely schematic though this presentation is, it allows us to
31 detect that the term transcendence, with its original abyss of
 concealment, is at the heart of Heidegger’s enterprise. In this
view, however, judgment is not so much vindicated
metaphysically as it is emptied of its power of individuation-a
characteristic that is essential in the Kantian notion of a human
thinking interest and orientation by thought. For, in Heidegger,
judgment, as the power to decide for or against appearances, is
strictly connected to a totality which is either the resoluteness of
each Dasein in confronting its finite time or the History of Being,
and is thus not meant to reveal what and who the individual is.
Concurrently, there is no account to be found in Heideggerof how
action, which takes place in fallen everydayness and in
association with other human beings, may decisively be a matter
for transcendence, which-as we saw-he views in its
connection to concealment as a matter for truth and the
theoretical comportment of the human being, or Dasein.

It seemsthat if the concept of transcendence in Kant opened the

way to new validity for judgment as an activity with a
a
transcendental basis in the subject, yet aiming at a totality of the
world, it may have been integrated, superseded, or set aside in
two of the most important philosophers that followed the Kantian
philosophy. In contrast to these philosophers, Hannah Arendt
essentially links judgment and transcendence. Arendt’s project is
one of phenomenological investigation which aims at showing
that some manifold structural components (plurality, natality,
speech) are essentially involved in our capacity to initiate
something new in the world-the capacity to transcend the
merely given-and therefore that action is the vindication of
transcendence. Transcendence, therefore, is not a mere sign of
the most abstract beyond or the most elusive form of otherness.
Instead, transcendence is the test, the revealing limit, by means
of which the descriptive enterprise of The Human Condition2 is
a phenomenology of action. In connection with the
phenomenology of work, Arendt’s phenomenology of action
accounts for &dquo;what we do.&dquo; Her probing allows us to regain access
to the foundation of our tradition, obscured though it is by
modernity. My goal in this paper will be to show how, in her
reliance on articulations between transcendence and judgment,
Arendt’s thought calls for a series of radical steps to formulate her
phenomenology of action. It is these steps that we must retrace
if we wish to understand how she rejected the formulations of
Hegel and Heidegger-the two most prominent previous
phenomenologists-while also enabling us to detect in them the
speculative displacement of judgment which their philosophies
had come to sanction.

How do we gain a phenomenological grounding of action? What

makes any questioning into &dquo;what we do&dquo; a questioning into what
32 we are (the human condition), such that only the human condition
 is capable of it? Action is for Arendt a possibility of human
comportment by which each agent is fully individuated both in him
or herself and in relation to others with whom he or she shares a
common world. This comportment is not the only one since
human beings also can be absorbed in two other comportments:
labor, or toiling in order to satisfy the needs of our bodies, and
work, or the activity of manufacturing artefacts. Yet, what are the
methodological requirements by which we gain access to what
we do [vita activa] ? Doesn’t thinking [vita contemplativa], as
distinct from making or doing anything, represent yet another
comportment of human beings? But then how do we articulate
within ourselves the three modalities, labor, work and action? It
seems that an essential term, that of judgment-securing the
juncture between the requirement for immersion in the
phenomenal realm and the possibility of the withdrawal of
thinking-has to be injected. For without judgment, appearances
cannot be revealed as what they are to a human agent, nor can
a human being identify him or herself or be identified as who he
or she is-namely, the person who has exercised, or abstained
from, the possibility of judging. It is this structural element of
human beings-their capacity to pass judgment on things,
actions, and other human beings-that accounts for
transcendence and the revealing of appearances in The Human
Condition. The elucidation of the connection between
appearances and judgment is the topic we must raise if we want
to clarify transcendence-i.e., how human beings transcend
mere givenness-in Hannah Arendt’s phenomenology of action.

I indicated that withdrawal is an essential characteristic of the

thinking activity and the realm of vita contemplativa. Let us
critically assess the notion of withdrawal. Whoever is familiar with
Arendt’s second major philosophical work, The Life of the Mind,
knows that in it she explores the activity of thinking and argues
that a genealogy of various metaphysical conceptions is possible
only on the presupposition of a withdrawal from the world of
appearances. Such a withdrawal comes to fruition only along
some specific modalities and paradoxes. Consider the two
examples of the suspension of time and wonder. The suspension
of time is an internal requirement of the activity of thinking, the
same requirement that led Nietzsche to the Eternal Return.
Wonder, the absorption in the invisible measure and harmony of
things, is a classical, Aristotelian requirement of philosophy, yet
one that &dquo;ultimately [leaves] no place for the factual existence of
disharmony, of ugliness, and finally of evil&dquo;3-whose
interconnected threads Arendt loosens up, but ultimately leaves
entangled.
This positive attention to withdrawal is not present in The Human
33 Condition. On the contrary, the same term is used in a negative
 way, as the flight from fellow human beings, and defines the
emergence of the modern, private realm-a reality that forcloses
our access to the phenomenon of action. Withdrawal has
therefore a non-phenomenal, or even anti-phenomenal, value
with respect to the realm of public expression. Although Arendt
stresses that this private realm provides a necessary retreat from
public exposure, and that an existence spent entirely in the public
realm would be shallow, she criticizes the modern form of this
private realm. For, in her view, the modern version is based on the
inflation of everything private, and correspondingly, on the
diminished importance of &dquo;others:&dquo;

The presence of others who see what we see and hear what we
hear assures us of the reality of the world and ourselves, and while
the intimacy of a fully developed private life, such as had never
been known before the rise of the modern age and the
concomitant decline of the public realm, will always greatly
intensify and enrich the whole scale of subjective emotions and
private feelings, this intensification will always come to pass at the
expense of the assurance of the reality of the world and of men
(HC, 50).
This criticism indicates that in the modern era, the activity of
judging has been eroded because people fail to assure
themselves of their first impressions by validating them into
objective appearances, i.e., appearances that have public
currency-in a process where the presence of others is an
essential precondition and requisite. Caring about matters
involving the presence of others is incompatible with the safety of
a private realm, or the intensity of private impressions that may
occupy us there. Thoughts, in an unqualified manner, are
included in her description:

Compared with the reality which comes from being seen and
heard, even the greatest forces of intimate life-the passions of
the heart, the thoughts of the mind, the delights of the senses-
lead an uncertain, shadowykind of existence unless and until they
are transformed, deprivatized and deindividualized, as it were,
into a shape to fit them for public appearance.
Then she adds:

The most current of such transformations occurs m storytellmg

and generally m artistic transposition of individual experiences
(HC 50).
Thus, in order to gain currency and validity, that is, to acquire a
space of appearance, the strictly individual element (passion,
34 thought, delight) must be projected against a backdrop of speech
 or plastic expression, and thereby transformed, in order to be
given recognition, and to be apprehended in a &dquo;shape&dquo; adequate
for it. In these reflections lies the implicit detection of the
requirements of modern subjectivity. What is remarkable is the
fact that these requirements of modern subjectivity are not social,
but a-social or non-social at first. It goes beyond my topic to
investigate how the same a-social or non-social requirements
may also determine the emergence of the modern public sphere,
a sphere of social interaction absorbed in and obsessed by tasks
of production (labor and work) and blind to the requirements of
action proper. In any case, Arendt’s reflections at this stage
presuppose in the condition of modernity the suspension of, or
diversion from, the public realm of interaction. This suspension
and diversion, once thematically focussed, determine a problem
in the sphere of the object.
But we may wonder whether in the sphere of the subjects seeking
clarification, i.e., of Arendt and her readers, there might not be a
way of addressing this withdrawal, and of countering its influence
There is one. It is the very reduction-in a phenomenological
sense-that Arendt conducts with respect to the world of action
We must turn our attention to the first pages of The Human
Condition. For in these pages (HC, Prologue, p. 5), Arendt
stresses that her enterprise is truly a phenomenology of action.
Her attempt to clarify what we do aims at investigating the
thematically hidden jointures of vita activa, or the &dquo;most
elementary articulations of the human condition.&dquo; She stresses
that these are activities &dquo;traditionally, as well as according to
current opinion,...within the range of every human being,&dquo; yet the
attempt to take them together has been foreclosed, first, by a
philosophical theoretical bias and, second, by the emergence of
modern times. She thus indicates that she has to suspend any
investigation into &dquo;the highest and perhaps purest activity of which
men are capable, the activity of thinking&dquo; (Ibid.). In doing so, she
resolutely delineates her topic to the articulations of what we do,
that is, to the phenomenological examination of how what we do
comes to pass, and to understanding the origins of the modern
world-a world both increasingly deprived of a space of
appearance, and threatened by lack of judgment. Her
phenomenology of action may perhaps be seen as a
&dquo;reconstruction&dquo; (in the word of Paul Ricoeur) of our condition,
once it is granted that this condition is threatened by a flight away
from itself, i.e., away from the space of appearances of a public
realm, and away from the enactment of judgment which takes
place in our immersion in this common place. As to how this
destruction came to pass, she surely gives some insight. For now,
however, we must note that her attempt at reconstruction, which
leads to the genealogy of the destruction of the common space,
35 is set in motion by a reduction. This reduction has two sides: on
 the side of thought proper, we saw that vita contemplativa is
suspended. Yet, isn’t there another form of belief that is also
suspended by her enterprise, one even that set it in motion and
was its immediate prompting? For indeed, there was another side
which her phenomenology must suspend, namely the
thoughtlessness, and the absence of judgment, evidenced in the
naive modern belief that we may escape this our earth, and
therefore prove a contrario that we are not bound to, and by, it.

She argues that the modern world which is characterized by the

uprootedness from the earth inaugurated by the first atomic
explosions-is led to a &dquo;twofold flight, from the earth into the
universe and from the world into the self&dquo; (HC, 6). She contends
that this notion of the modern world is different from that of the
modern age, which she views as characterized by the scientific
discoveries of the 17th century and a host of social, biological and
economic theories. With the vita activa coming to the forefront of
her descriptions-to the exclusion of vita contemplativa as an
activity in its own right-and with her inquiry moving into the
cloaking caused by the modern theories on society, politics,
instrumentation, etc., her project radically criticizes the
interrelated notions of the modern age: humankind as an end in
itself, its progress, the generalized instrumentality conducted
under the auspices of a society of jobholders, the concept of
universal symbiotic processes between humans and nature, etc.

Yet, how is the phenomenological enterprise different from any

characterization of existence in scientific terms? What
characterizes the world in The Human Condition is the fact that
the conditions of human life (&dquo;life itself, natality, mortality,
wordliness, plurality and the earth&dquo;) &dquo;never condition us
absolutely&dquo; (HC,11 ). In contrast, what characterizes any scientific
study of the world of natural phenomena is the fact that its
appearances are absolutely and universally determined by
specific conditions. Arendt argues that the scientific perspective
taken on beings as absolutely and universally conditioned is
intrinsically connected to the &dquo;Archimedean standpoint taken,
willfully and explicitly, outside the earth&dquo; (ibid.). AsI briefly
indicated before, the development of the sciences in the modern
age led to our radical uprootedness, evidenced in the age of the
atomic explosions and space exploration. This uprootedness was
also prepared by the immersion of the individual within the self,
precisely coinciding with the inflated public realm previously
evoked. Hence, in order to delineate the realm of appearances
appropriate for what we do, Arendt must both prevent the
scientific discoveries from penetrating her topic, and reject the
modern theories of value (e.g., on labor, on the human as an end-
in-itself, etc.) as grounded on such a self-while dismissing,
36 reducing, and deconstructing their scientific pretensions.
 After revealing, in the first two chapters of The Human
Condition, the presuppositions of her enterprise and the stakes
of a retrieval of the human condition of plurality, she shows that
the human condition contains three heterogeneous types of
activities: labor, work, and action, which must never be allowed to
coallesce, or collapse, into a single form, even though they all
pertain to the same human agent. Labor is the activity by which
the human agent wrests from nature the necessities without
which his or her continued biological existence is impossible.
Labor is thus concerned with producing-and then immediately
involved in consuming-food, clothes, and the other things that
temporarily meet the exigencies of biological life. Arendt
reappropriates Marx’s definition of labor as &dquo;‘man’s metabolism
with nature’ in whose process ’nature’s material [is] adapted by a
change of form to the wants of man,’ so that ’labour has
incorpo rated itself with its subject&dquo;’ (HC, 98-99). The validity of this
characterization, frequent in Marx (see note 34 of The Human
Condition), resides in the fact that it allows us to conceive of labor
in terms of physiological life, that is, in terms of a mere
physiological description wherein &dquo;labor and consumption are but
two stages of the ever-recurring cycle of biological life&dquo; (ibid.). She
continues: &dquo;This cycle needs to be sustained through
consumption, and the activity which provides the means of
consumption is laboring.&dquo;
What therefore comes to the forefront of the description and
analysis is the &dquo;destructive, devouring aspect&dquo; of the laboring
activity. Because laboring has this character, it is essentially blind
to anything but itself, and is set in motion not by a specific sight,
but bythe imperious wants of our bodies. In this activity, therefore,
no phenomenal character is ever retained, since whatever labor
concerns itself with, it also destroys and does not let be.
Consequently, Arendt allows us to note that the anti-phenomenal
character of destruction and metabolic incorporation is &dquo;visible
only from the standpoint of the world, and in distinction from work,
which does not prepare matter for incorporation but changes it
into material in order to work upon it and use the finished product&dquo;
(HC, 100). The activity of labor is simply viewed as a photographic
negative when contrasted with work-whose product comes to a
standstill amidst the processes of nature and biological life. Work,
then, is the activity which must be investigated next, as
phenomenally heterogeneous to labor, and as consistant and
valid in its own right.

In work, a human, rather than a biological, world comes to pass

through the agent, and immediately comes to the forefront of our
attention. This world is revealed in terms of an enduring
permanence thanks to which alone the meaningfulness of public
37 and objective appearances emerges.
 [Tlhe things of the world have the function of stabilizing human
life, and their objectivity lies in the fact that-in contradiction to the
Heraclitean saying that the same man can never enter the same
stream-men, their everchanging nature notwithstanding, can
retrieve their sameness, that is, their identity, by being related to
the same chair and the same table.... Without a world between
men and nature, there is eternal movement, but no objectivity
(137).
The thrust of Arendt’s description of the beginnings of a human
world in the operations of homo faber may seem to be indebted
to Heidegger’s descriptions of the creative poiesis of the Greek
founding of the city in An Introduction to Metaphysics.4 But this
is
impression perhaps just a mere semblance. Two arguments
can be made. First, we must note that Arendt implicitly rejects the
Heraclitean legacy which is central in Heidegger’stext. Briefly, we
may say that in this text, Heidegger describes the Greek city in
terms of an irruption, or a place where beings come to a standing
presence in the wake of an initial and creative violence. This
violence-which exceeds the mere biological needs-creates
the open space of the manifestation of beings, a view to which
Arendt seems indebted. Yet, the gist of her description remains
essentially opposed to the ultimate import of Heidegger’s focus
on Greek Dasein Unlike Heidegger, she does not assign this
creative power to some special individuals (the artist-poet, the
thinker and the state-creator) by which Greek existence-and
Greek existence alone-comes to historical expression, and
establishes the proof of its rank. For her, &dquo;[t]he expenence of this
violence is the most elemental experience of human strength and,
therefore, the very opposite of the painful, exhausting effort
experienced in sheer labor&dquo; (140). Second, an entirely different
view of transcendence may be at work in Arendt’s descriptions
than in Heidegger’s. Again without approaching Heidegger’s
presentation more than obliquely, we may say that
transcendence for him is akin to the detection of the ontological
difference, which resolute Dasein makes and which allows us to
delineate beings as beings. In the Introduction, this delineation
is only possible in the wake of the poetic striking at a rank-done
by the words or the chisel-that took place in the Greek world.
Transcendence, therefore, defines an eminent form of poiesis,
one that is specific to the eminent creators of the city. Put
differently, the phenomenality revealed and instigated by those
creators points to the transcendence of the Greek gods, and to
historicality as the &dquo;extra-ordinary&dquo; feature of Greek Dasein, the
one that compells us-in its wake-to still dare the extra-ordinary
Nothing of the sort is to be detected in Arendt, although she too
will give us an account-a very different one-of the
extraordinary in her treatment of action. From both of these
38 arguments, we may surmise that transcendence for her means
 the transcendence of work over the a-phenomenal or anti-
phenomenal characteristic of labor. Let us now investigate how
the heterogeneity of work consists in transcendence piercing
through human agents and their understanding of how what they
do comes to pass.

In order to explain this, we must,

so to speak, retrace our steps
concerning the formative influence of Heidegger upon Arendt’s
views. For it remains true that Arendt is indebted to Heidegger’s
retrieval of the Greek notions of work [ergon] and productive
comportment [poiesis]. We know that Heidegger elucidated the
rootedness of all our ontological notions in this form of
comportment, and that Arendt was acquainted firsthand with the
Heideggerian investigations, since, like Gadamer, she attended
a Marburg lecture course on Aristotle, whose essential features
may not have differed considerably from the treatment of similar
issues available to the English reader in The Basic Problems of
Phenomenology.5 Yet, no matter how faithfully she followed the
gist of the Heideggerian analyses, she reinterpreted them within
her own framework, and made them answer a different question
altogether: that of the emergence of judgment and the Being-
plural of humans.
What is the main feature of this phenomenology of work inspired
by Heidegger (before the orientation taken in the Introduction to
Metaphysics)? It consists in the thesis that productive
comportment emerges, and develops, thanks to the
understanding of beings implicit in the agent’s pre-understanding
of his or her surroundings and of the horizon of his or her tools. On
this basis, and on the basis of an eidos held in view, this
comportment discloses or releases a new being [ergon] in
conformity with this eidos. Are there structural constraints arising
from this revealing of appearances owing to the techné of the
technitds? Can a structural constraint still be connected to the
notion of transcendence?

The main restriction is that fabrication, or the completion of the

work by the craftworker, is guided by an aim and a standard that
lies outside the process of working out the product. &dquo;[W]hat guides
the work of fabrication is outside the fabricator and precedes the
actual work process in much the same way as the urgencies of the
life process within the laborer precede the actual labor process&dquo;
(140-41). Whereas this guide (model or blueprint) is integrated by
Heideggertothe understanding of the world in terms of a present-
at-hand assignable to the operations of the ready-to-hand (and
thus forms for him an inauthentic form of understanding), Arendt
finds that homo faber is directed in his or her endeavors by a
standard/model/image whose place of origin lies outside the
39 agent. Yet, inspired by the Heideggerian commitment to
 appearances, she stresses that the individual is not a subject
conceived in terms of mind-body compound. This conception
must be eliminated because it subscribes to the modern
metaphysical thesis that the mind is in charge of conceiving ideas,
models and ways of implementing them, while the body is afflicted
with passions. Instead of this metaphysical, i.e., neutralized, non
thought-provoking, dichotomy, she urges us to conceive of this
gulf as the critical separation between what is intrinsically
individual and organic (pleasure or pain, desires and
satisfactions) and the world-building images &dquo;which lend
themselves so easily to reification&dquo; (141 ). Reification, therefore, is
not to be conceived of as a flaw or a fallenness as the
Heideggerian presence-at-hand and instrumentality. Reification,
instead, contains the positive seed for other phenomenal
developments, e.g., multiplication (the infinite continuation of
fabrication) by means of which stability erects a human world
against the forces of nature. It is from these characteristics that
she can explain genealogically the basis of the Platonic theory of
ideas.

This quality of permanence in the model or image, of being there

before fabrication starts and remaining after it has come to an
end, surviving all the possible use objects it continues to help into
existence, had a powerful influence on Plato’s doctrine of eternal
ideas.... The one eternal idea presiding over a multitude of
perishable things derives its plausibility from the permanence and
oneness of the model according to which many perishable
objects can be made (142-43).
Yet, the processes of reification and multiplication in their
dependence upon the idea, or standard, held in view by the
craftworker, is covered over for us by the modern machine-based
conception of instrumentality. Modern instrumentation is
characterized by its reliance on modern theories of physics and
cybernetics that operate a &dquo;channeling of natural forces into the
human world [which] has shattered the very purposefulness of the
world, [by the fact] that objects are the ends for which tools and
implements are designed&dquo; (150). The intrusion of the natural
processes of nature is therefore orchestrated in the world of work,
which shows that labor has penetrated the realm proper to
erecting artifacts, and that the possibility of meaning depending
upon the difference between the activities of labor and work is
threatened by this penetration and colliding.

We need not investigate how this development accounts for the

genealogy of the Nietzschean Eternal Return, as aself-sustaining
end-in-itself. Instead, we may note that this development
indicates that two factors of work are covered over: the character
40 of transcendence by which the artifact points beyond mere
 usefulness (its beauty or ugliness), and the character of
reversibility of the process seen in its proper (non-technological)
light.
First, let us consider the character of transcendence of the
artifact. It lies in the fact that the works of the human world are
offered to a judgment that is in excess of mere usefulness. Here
the phenomenological theme of appearing is intricately
connected to that of judgment. Let us quote the full extent of
Arendt’s text:

Everything that is must appear, and nothing can appear without

a shape of its own; hence, there is in fact no thing that does not
in some way transcend its functional use, and its
transcendence, its beauty or ugliness, is identical with
appearing publicly and being seen. By the same token, namely
in its sheer worldly character, every thing also transcends the
sphere of pure instrumentality once it is completed. The standard
by which a thing’s excellence is judged is never mere usefulness,
as though an ugly table will fulfil the same function as a handsome
one, but its adequacy or inadequacy to what it should look like,
and this is, in Platonic language, nothing but its adequacy or
inadequacy to the eidos or idea, the mental image, or rather the
image seen by the inner eye, that preceded its coming into the
world and survives its potential destruction. In other words, even
use objects are judged not only according to the subjective needs
of men but by the objective standards of the world where they will
find their place, to last, to be seen, and to be used&dquo; (HC,173
emphasis added).
This text from the last section (23) of the chapter devoted to work,
shows that functionality is transcended in and by the work’s full-
fledged appearance. Transcendence consists in the fact that the
work released into the public gaze is freely referred to the idea and
standard that presided over its fabrication. But this reference,
which connects the thing to a revealed adequacy, in the beautifulI
or ugly object, is in excess of the mere thing-because this
reference points to a hidden measure, tantamount to the Platonic
idea of the Good, thanks to which all beings (human-made things
included) are what they are.
The other feature covered up by the modern age of machine
production is the reversibility of the work process. Since the
craftworker keeps in view the standard according to which the
object is made and judges his or her operation with respect to
what he or she intends to produce, he or she may decide to start
anew a process that has failed the adequacy (that is failed the
intended usefulness or the intented beauty) he or she was
seeking. One may, therefore, ascribe the reliability of the world
41 instituted by human work not merely to creative violence, as
 Heidegger did in the Introduction to Metaphysics, but to the
craftworker’s sheer application and tenacity, i.e., to features
manifest in the fact that he or she can on occasion start his or her
work anew. Here we must note that the character of destruction
no longer has the value it had concerning labor, where the cycle
of destruction-consumption meansthat no stability is evergained,
and that no footing for shining emergence is ever secured. No
longer is destruction the first step to incorporation and
phenomenal inexistence. It is instead the prerequisite of a
process in which the craftworker’s product potentially aims at
being displayed. Corresponding to this potential display is the
potential destruction of the work. The reversibility of the process
therefore brings light upon the human world, and allows us to gain
a stronghold over nature (a situation that does not come to pass
in the mere activity of laboring).

[E]verythlng produced by human hands can be destroyed by

them, and no use object is so urgently needed in the life process
that its maker cannot survive and afford its destruction. Homo
faber is indeed a lord and master, not only because he is master
of all of nature but because he is master of himself and his doings
(144).
This reversibility of the process-understood on the basis of
human independence from, and lordship over, nature-is the
ability to stave off, and cancel, production when the craftworker
finds that the product does not meet his or her antecedent
expectation, and refuses to release the artifact. It inaugurates a
freedom that stands in contrast to the necessity involved in the
laboring processes from which biological life cannot free itself.
The freedom which stands at the basis of reversibility ultimately
depends on a judgment, that is, on a concern for appearances in
keeping with their connection to a standard and model. Judgment
on the part of homo faber was required to discern what is
appropriate for appearance in the hu man world. Judgment on the
part of the spectators accounted for the fact that a work is what it
is in a playing field whose ultimate pole is a non-utilitarian, non-
definable, standard. Thanks to this judgment, the things of the
world reach a level beyond their mere usefulness, and
transcendence-of work with respect to sheer labor-can come
to pass. It is noteworthy that transcendence which depends upon
the projection of the model-this time presumably not a reified
image-upon the world of appearances by the craftworker is
echoed in the realm of the spectators. In short, we may say that
the process in which the craftworker is involved inaugurates
transcendence as the tension between the appearances and their
hidden measure, and that the judgment of the spectators
insistently dwells in apprehending the unique light permeating the
42 thing, over and beyond its usefulness.
 Does this analysis-partially indebted to Heidegger, Aristotle and
Plato-allow us to reach a final point concerning transcendence
in The Human Condition? Not at all. For the very character of
reversibility (which emerges againstthe backdrop of predictability
pertaining to the work), must be stripped of the poietic ambition of
philosophers to erect it as the ultimate standard for thought itself.
Its phenomenological meaning is revealed therefore only when it
is contrasted to the world of action, which is unpredictable and
irreversible. For &dquo;[a]ction, though it may have a definite beginning,
never, as we shall see, has a predictable end&dquo; (ibid.).

Action is the capacity of an agent to disclose him or herself in

speech ordeed on the backdrop of human plurality. This condition
of insertion within a world inhabited by others entails the twofold
condition of equality and distinction. Facing appearances,
individuals must be equal in orderto understand each other Yet,
in their open-ended use of speech and action, they constantly
make themselves understood as the bearers of distinct
perspectives and opinions. &dquo;Signs and sounds to communicate
immediate, identical needs and wants [are not] enough&dquo; (176)
Arendt makes clearthat a second transcendence, by far the most
essential one, is involved in the capacity for action. She compares
it to our &dquo;second birth in which we confirm and take upon ourselves
the naked fact of our original physical appearance&dquo; (176-77)

Could it be that this characterization is reminiscent of the

Heideggerian description of authentic existence? The
Heideggerian analysis of resolute Dasein in Being and Time
show that in the fundamental mood of anxiety, Dasein is brought
face to face with its primordial condition of thrownness, for which
Dasein finds no reason and which is therefore a nullity.6
Instead
of denving any direct inspiration from the Heideggerian analysis
of transcendence in the fundamental mood of anxiety, Arendt
demarcates her enterprise from fundamental ontology, and
seeks the ground for appearances and judgment in a new
problematic of individuation. In an article published in The
Partisan Review7 immediately after the war, Arendt had been
particularly harsh in her criticism of the Heideggerian &dquo;Self,&dquo; the
individuated focus of care revealed by existential anxiety She
argued that the description of the human condition in the terms of
a project of existing for the sake and in the care of oneself-in
which Dasein’s resoluteness in Being-towards-death turns out to
be a nonrelational phenomenon-is a distorted account of
human reality which is fundamentally relational. On the one hand,
&dquo;all those characteristics of Man which Kant had provisionally
sketched as freedom, human dignity, and Reason&dquo; are discarded
to make room for &dquo;a rigid functionalism in which Man appears only
as a conglomerate of modes of Being, [a conglomerate that] is in
43 principle arbitrary, since no concept of Man determines the
 modes of his Being&dquo; (48). On the other hand, and as a
consequence of the intended destruction of the concept of the
human essence already begun by Kant, the Heideggerian
account of human reality is truly phenomenologically flawed:
human reality would be truly itself only if it could withdraw from this
Being-in-the-world to itself, which it essentially never can do,
hence it is always essentially a decline, a falling away, from itself.
&dquo;Human reality always falls away from itself as a real unity-
declines into the ’world&dquo;’ (49). She then argues that the question
of the Self &dquo;without the detour of Man&dquo; comes to the center stage
of Heidegger’s project and replaces the question of the meaning
of Being. But this question is, in her view, &dquo;unanswerable, since
a Self taken in its absolute isolation is meaningless; if not isolated,
on the other hand, it becomes (sunk to the everyday level of life
of the public individual) no longer a Self&dquo; (ibid.).

The last part and conclusion of this article examines Jaspers’s

philosophy. Although a presentation of Arendt’s account would go
beyond my topic, let me point out that she focuses on Jaspers’s
concepts of communication and of &dquo;deed.&dquo; Since modern
philosophy conducts its enterprise against the past and history of
philosophy, i.e., against the established results of thought
conceived in terms of knowledge, its Kantian source should be
resolutely retrieved and reactivated. By showing that speculation
always fails to grasp an unconditional totality of experience, Kant
had prepared the ground for thinking of Ideas in terms of
momentous attempts by which the human subject overcomes the
level of immediate givenness and creates the basis of a
communication based on original thought. Modern philosophy is
thus characterized by an unprecedented attraction to heroism,
that is, the struggle of transforming the thinking enterprise into a
&dquo;deed&dquo; calling others to step in its wake. It is clear that although
in the article in The Partisan Review, Arendt deals with the
modern attempts of reconstruction predicated on the Kantian
situation of a chasm between Being and Thought and, although,
with Jaspers, she stands in favor of a thinking that is essentially
plural (rather than monadological, speculative or entirely Self-
focussed), she has not yet developed the essential articulations
of her first master work. Let us note in passing that the notions of
equality and distinction amidst a plurality of subjects are essential
to thinking activity in Jaspers, and to the concepts of
communication and deed involved in his retrieval of Kant’s
philosophical impulse, the very ones which Arendt singles out in
her presentation as most calling for thought.

Let us return to the third and most important focus of The Human
Condition, the realm of action. The characters of natality and
insertion move to the forefront of the inquiry into &dquo;what we do,&dquo; an
44 inquiry conditioned aswe saw upon the suspension of the thinking
 activity itself. &dquo;What we do&dquo; has now the meaning of action and is
predicated upon the reality of communication between us and
others. It is clear that the modern sense of &dquo;deed,&dquo; previously
evoked concerning Jaspers’s philosophy and connected to a
heroism of thought, is put aside forfurther investigation since now
she resolutely conducts a retrieval of the Greek notion of
excellence, in &dquo;the words and deeds&dquo; [logoi kai pragmata] that
were a constant focus of attention by the people of the isonomic
city. Her approach to the notion of courage bears witness to this
change.
The connotation of courage, which we now feel to be an
indispensable quality of the hero, is in fact already present in a
willingness to actand speak atall, to insert one’s self into the world
and begin a story of one’s own.... The extent of this original
&dquo;

courage... is not less great and may even be greater if the &dquo;hero&dquo;
happens to be a coward (186-87).
The action carried out by the individual reveals who he or she is
and the consequences of his or her actions are echoed and felt in
the human world. By attempting a schematic outline of Arendt’s
analysis of those consequences (which form an integral part of
the phenomenon in its totality), we may be able to delineate the
essentials of her phenomenology of action, i.e., action’s
connection to the world of appearances. Arendt stresses that
action on the part of one individual almost constantly leads to
unforeseeable responses and reactions on the part of others, all
of which take place in a &dquo;medium where every reaction becomes
a chain reaction and where every process is the cause of new
processes&dquo; (HC 190). Thus, unpredictability in addition to
irreversibility is an essential characteristic of the phenomena
unfolding in this realm. But because action also tends to &dquo;force
open all limitations and cut across all boundaries&dquo; (ibid.), this
boundlessness-itself &dquo;the other side of its tremendous capacity
for establishing relationships&dquo; (191 )-is tantamount to
unreliability. Not surprisingly, then, the world in which action takes
place is fraught with dangers whose origins are structural and
essential, rather than random or accidental, i.e., with an &dquo;inherent
frailty&dquo; which the various historical contexts of the West have
always addressed without ever being capable of mastering.
Not surprisingly, then, Arendt attempts a retrieval of the Greek
world by classifying some features of this world underthe heading
&dquo;The Greek Solution&dquo; (Section 27). In it, she shows that the
Greeks built the experience of the polis upon two tenets: first, the
notion of a diamon-the accompanying double or enduring
presence unseen by the individual but open to the sight and
judgment of others; and second, the saying that not until their
45 death could humans be called happy, which entails the hero’s
 early death &dquo;because [the hero, Achilles] withdraws into death
from the possible consequences and continuation of what he
began&dquo; (193-94). The activity of politeuesthai is thus entirely
concerned with the celebration and eliciting of deeds in the space
created by their interaction. It aims at guaranteeing the
permanence of this space, both as safekeeping of past glory and
as inspiration for later attempts.

Since action cannot remove itself from originating and emerging

in the frailty of human affairs (with their unpredictability and
unreliability), what sort of abiding presence can it gain by defining
itself exclusively against the backdrop of the shared deeds and
words (logon kai pragmaton koinonein, Nicomachean Ethics,
1126 b 12) of a public realm? It seems that the Greek solution
consisted in relying on the capacity to seek the immortality of glory
in the expectation that the polis guarantee the memorializing of
glorious deeds and inspire others to rise to new ones. In her
retrieval (end of Section 28) of the Periclean definition of politics
in the Funeral Speech, Arendt views it as the art &dquo;that teaches men
how to bring forth what is great and radiant and .[inspires them]
to dare the extraordinary&dquo; (206). The previous section had shown
that, for a Greek, law-making cannot be included in the realm of
action proper, or praxis, and is merely a form of product-making,
or polesis. This makes it possible for Arendt to claim that action
in the Greek sense of politeuein is enacted power, something that
is not diminished by being shared. &dquo;Power is actualized only
where word and deed have not parted company, where words are
not empty and deeds not brutal, where words are not used to veill
intentions but to disclose realities, and deeds are not used to
violate and destroy but to establish relations and create new
realities&dquo; (200). Thus, she dismisses the identification of power
and strength because strength is the characteristic of individuals
taken in isolation and does not flourish in the space freely open
between them.

The Greek response to the inherent frailty of human affairs was

the institution of isonomia (making possible both philia and eris,
friendship and challenge, equality and distinction). This institution
aimed at the safekeeping of the space of interaction The abiding
presence of the public realm is not based on law-making or the
strength of some individuals, but on everyone’s interest in-that
is, insistence and reliance on-the living deed and the spoken
word What is at stake is the insistent articulation of these
&dquo;actualities,&dquo; that is, of this power enacted by all.

Aristotle is the philosopher who gave philosophical expression to

the way of life instituted by the Greeks of the classical age. His
notion of energeia translated by &dquo;actuality&dquo; applies to those
46 activities that do not pursue an end outside themselves and leave
 no work behind. Although the notion of work, or ergon, is a term
of the realm of fabrication also used in the Nicomachean Ethics
(1097 b 22), Aristotle makes clear that the meaning does not lie
in a product outside the agent, but is identical with him because
it consists in eu zen, living well. In other words, the activity itself
becomes entelecheia and the actuality of the process is not
concluded in a work that &dquo;follows and extinguishes [it], but is
embedded in it&dquo; (206). The means by which living-well [eu zen]
and acting-well [eupraxia] are achieved are the virtues [aretai] of
the phronimos, the prudent person who is also well-inspired and
regarded [kalos k’agathos]. These are not external to the process
of living itself because they remain with the agent and in fact
define him or her. Further, they are not a mere potentiality, or
dunamis, that may or may not be actualized, as the capacity to
build, where the enjoyment of the product lies outside the very
activity. In opposition to Plato’s reduction of politics to a form of
skill, or techne, the doxastic and political virtues in Aristotle’s
account of the classical city depend on the specific and irreducible
gaze cast by the individual on the particulars of his or her life. This
gaze is attentive not to universals (as is the theoretical gaze), or
to the standard and model (the idea held in view by the technical
gaze of the craftworker), but to the specifics [ta ekasta] faced by
each person. It favors the individual’s response of moderation [to
meson] and keeps an eye on the right moment [kairos] at which
the agent should act or speak. Without the essential sight of
practical wisdom or judgment [phronesis] cast on these
particulars, the individual would never be able to come to
appearance, nor in the first place could anybody have the
assurance of his or her reality in the midst of Being, &dquo;for what
appears to all, this we call Being&dquo; (Nicomachean Ethics, 1172 b
36 ff.). Arendt concludes: &dquo;Whatever lacks this appearance
comes and passes away like a dream, intimately and exclusively
our own but without reality&dquo; (199).

Conclusion

It is now clear that transcendence is a leading component of

Arendt’s phenomenology of action. We witnessed the importance
of the term in connection with the preparatory analyses of work
and the plural judgment in excess of mere functionality. Then we
saw the central importance for the Greeks of the frailty of human
affairs-a frailty not to be eliminated. In their public realm they
acknowledged this intrinsic frailty and made it key to the
Immortalizing of individuals and to the notion of the enacted power
of polltheuem Transcendence-a term intimated both in the
sobriety of Pericles’s &dquo;knowledge without effeminacy and beauty
without extravagance&dquo; and in his insistence on daring-seems to
47 lie in the tension between a world of appearances requiring a
 power of decision (for or against some appearances) and the
measure sought to enact such judgment. Yet, shall we say that
the Greek solution provides Arendt with the last word for her
phenomenology of action? To this question, we must answer
negatively, for two reasons.
First, the Christian element of Western Culture seems to be
granted a minimal in
place comparison with her retrieval of the
Greek world. A world of Christian virtues, she tells us, is a world
that fails the test of publicness for action. Yet, she also points out
that Christianity may have thought more essentially than the
Greeks the requirement of natality in defining the greatest &dquo;act&dquo; as
love, i.e., as the forgiveness of those sins of the parents which,
unforgiven, are borne endlessly by their sons and daughters. This
reflection suggests that Augustine’s amor mundfas the hidden
measure of what we have come to call transcendence-
expresses both the distance and the proximity between the 5th
century world, which, like ours, neared destruction, and love-
which unremittingly must be granted in order to affirm life and
hope. Yet, the fact remains that the act of forgivenness is so
enigmatic and unfathomable in its connection to the political, as
perhaps to belong to the category of the miraculous. Hence, even
though the political import of forgiveness is detected in and by
Arendt’s phenomenology, such forgiveness also expresses an
essential limit to our capacity to judge, to memorialize, and to
enact political power-which makes it problematic to view her
philosophy and phenomenology in light of amor mundi pure and
simple.
Second, we must not forget that the activity of vita contemplativa
was suspended in order to open the way to the articulations of
action. It could be that this phenomenology of action, although
successful in its reconstruction of &dquo;what we do,&dquo; cannot form a
system of what we may, or may not, think. That is, the striving for
meaning in the very thought processes in which our thoughts are
formed may indeed belong to a different phenomenological
account of our thinking, rather than acting, faculties. The account
of this striving involves a different project, one whose threads
Arendt soughtto unravel in The Life of the Mind. In that work, she
suggested that there is also a transcendence specific to the life of
the mind, which our interest for action-lest it be converted into
activism, and the mindlessness of busybodies-must be capable
to note and heed, although perhaps, to follow Descartes’s
remark, we have to grant that the interest for, and pursuit of,
thought can never be as universally shared as the requirements
of common sense.

48 Boston College
 Endnotes

1. This comes to pass when the acting consciousness (upon whom

judgment is passed by the "beautiful soul") "renounces the divisive
thought, and the hardheartedness of the being-for-self which clings to it,
because it has in fact seen itself in the first [i.e., in the judgment and
criticisms of the beautiful soul]" , Phenomenology 670). But
(
simultaneously,
...the first [judging] consciousness which turns its back on its actual
existence... displays itself as in fact a universal. It returns from its external
existence [which is sundered from the acting consciousness and bearing
judgment on it] back into itself as essential being, and therein the
universal consciousness thus recognizes itself. The forgiveness which it
extends to the other is the renunciation of itself, of its unreal essential
being, which it put on a level with that other which was a real action, and
acknowledges that what thought characterized as bad, viz. action, is
good (ibid.)
.
In this process, the one-sidedness of both action and judgment is
cancelled: the commitment to the particulars of action and the formal
distance of judgment as thought-process. But it is clear that this
cancellation can only take place by virtue of forgiveness, speculatively
understood as "I=I." Forgiveness is the mutual explicit recognition of the
two consciousnesses finally coming to express for themselves the
identity of identity and non-identity. "It is God manifested in the midst of
those who know themselves in the form of pure knowledge" (671).

The non-speculative transcendence of a separate God is to be sacrificed

in order to lead to the phenomenal emergence of forgiveness, and this
treatment allows Hegel to supersede the antithesis between action and
judgment. In such forgiveness or mutual recognition, the political realm
(of Sittlichkeitor ethical life) becomes manifest to all, although in its truth
it is nothing but a sphere in the unfolding of the Spirit. Yet, we may suspect
that the authenticity and validity of action and judgment are not grasped
in their phenomenal emergence if they lead to the speculative concept
of the mutual cancellation of their difference, and if the transcendence
that allows the process to unfold is the speculative interpretation of the
death of God, and rebirth in the Holy Spirit.

2. The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

1958).

3. The Life of the Mind / Thinking (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,

Publishers: New York, 1971), p. 150.

4. Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics

, trans. Ralph
Manheim (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959).

5. , trans. Albert
Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology
Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982). See
especially Section 11, b for the genealogy of the Greek ontological
49 concepts from the productive comportment.
 6. For Heidegger, authentic understanding projects itself upon past
possibilities—a "basis"—already disclosed to Dasein and which Dasein
takes upon itself. Dasein did not lay this basis itself , yet,

[it] reposes in the weight of it

...
, which is made manifest to it as a burden
by Dasein’s mood
.

And how is Dasein this thrown basis? Only in that it projects itself upon
possibilities into which it has been thrown. The Self, which as such has
to lay the basis for itself, can never get that basis into its power; and yet,
. To be its own thrown basis
, it must take over Being-a-basis
as existing
is that potentiality-for-Being which is the issue for care (Being and Time
,
330 English
, 284 German) .
A difference emerges in that authentic understanding reveals Dasein’s
past possibilities, or basis, as a nullity, namely the fact that the reality of
birth—and of the life alloted to Dasein ever since—have no ground or no
reason within themselves. This situation needs to be accounted for
phenomenologically in fundamental ontology which ascribes the
character of thrownness as an existentiale of Dasein.

7. "What is Existenz Philosophy?" The Partisan Review XII (Winter,

1946), pp. 34-56.

50