Hannah Arendt on irreversibility and the power to forgive

It’s no secret I’ve spent a lot of time this year reading Hannah Arendt. If you look close enough, you’ll find references to her work scattered throughout my posts and essays on this Substack and elsewhere. This is a claim to justify elsewhere—I won’t take it up here—but I think she’s got a claim to be one of the great ecological thinkers of the twentieth century. I first encountered her work as an undergraduate, and since grad school, I’ve found myself coming back to her writing again and again. I think she’s a brilliant, idiosyncratic thinker: challenging, exasperating at times, but always manages to find something interesting to say. I’m hopping on here briefly to share an excerpt from The Human Condition. Holy Week is nearly upon us, and my mind flitted back to a strange passage in this book where Arendt discusses two (let us say) very minor-key themes in modern political theory: promising and forgiving. Arendt was no friend of Christianity; she claimed it did more to undermine the ideals of the Roman republic than any other social movement. St. Augustine, she famously said, was probably the last person who understood what it meant to be a Roman citizen. Some of this antipathy comes through in the passages I quote below. Even so, her reflections on forgiveness and the “discovery” by Jesus of Nazareth of forgiveness’s role in “human affairs” remain one of my favorite passages in twentieth-century political theory.

In the selections I quote below, Arendt begins by elucidating the significance of forgiving and promising as speech acts. If you are acquainted with ordinary language philosophy, you’ll notice that what she says here rhymes with some of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s insights in Philosophical Investigations [1953]—particularly, the public character of the rules governing human speech and the role of acknowledgment.Without forgiveness, Arendt says, we’d be consigned forever to the fate of having done some deed. Without promising—an equally crucial faculty for Arendt—we would be “condemned to wander helplessly and without direction the darkness of each man’s lonely heart.” Then, I fast forward a bit and take up her discussion of love as the most “antipolitical” of passions and the role of the child. If you’re curious and want to see more, the full discussion is on pp. 236-47, The Human Condition (Chicago, 1998).

Without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover; we would remain the victims of its consequences forever, not unlike the sorcerer’s apprentice who lacked the magic formula to break the spell. Without being bound to the fulfillment of promises, we would never be able to keep our identities; we would be. condemned to wander helplessly and without direction in the darkness of each man’s lonely heart, caught in its contradictions and equivocalities—a darkness which only the light shed over the public realm through the presence of others, who confirm the identity between the one who promises and the one who fulfills, can dispel. Both faculties, therefor, depend on plurality, on the presence and acting of others, for no one can forgive himself and no one can feel bound by a promise made only to himself; forgiving and promising enacted in solitude or isolation remain without reality and can signify no more than a role played before one’s self. […] (237)

Perhaps the most plausible argument that forgiving and acting [or action, which I’d gloss here as meaning “political doings”] are as closely connected as destroying and making comes from that aspect of forgiveness where the undoing of what was done seems to show the same revelatory character as the deed itself. Forgiving and the relationship it establishes is always an eminently personal (though not necessarily individual or private) affair in which what was done is forgive for the sake of who did it. This, too, was clearly recognized by Jesus (“Her sins which are many are forgiven; for she loved much: but to whom little is forgiven, the same loveth little”), and it is the reason for the current conviction that only love has the power to forgive. For love, although it is one of the rarest occurrences in human lives, indeed possesses an unequaled power of self-revelation and an unequaled clarity of vision for the disclosure of who, precisely because it is unconcerned to the point of total unworldliness with what the loved person may be, with his qualities and shortcomings no less than with his achievements, failings, and transgressions. Love, by reason of its passion, destroys the in-between which relates us to and separates us from others. As long as its spell lasts, the only in-between which can insert itself between two lovers is the child, love’s own product. The child, this in-between to which the lovers now are related and which they hold in common, is representative of the world in that it also separates them; it is an indication that they will insert a new world into the already existing world. Through the child, it is as though the lovers return to the world from which their love had expelled them. But this new worldliness, the possible result and the only possibly happy ending of a love affair, is, in a sense, the end of love, which must either overcome the partners anew or be transformed into another mode of belonging together. Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but anti political, perhaps the most powerful of all antipolitical forces. (242)

The miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal, ‘natural’ ruin is ultimately the fact of natality, in which the faculty of action is ontologically rooted. It is, in other words, the birth of new men and the new beginning, the action they are capable of by virtue of being born. Only the full experience of this capacity can bestow upon human affairs faith and hope, those two essential characteristics of human existence which Greek antiquity ignored altogether, discounting the keeping of faith as a very uncommon and not too important virtue and counting hope among the evils of illusion in Pandora’s box. It is this faith in and hope for the world that found perhaps its most glorious and most succinct expression in the few words with which the Gospels announced their ‘glad tidings’: “A child has been born unto us.” (247)