Marx and Arendt could not be further apart on the question of freedom’s relationship to economics. Marx sees the two as integrally linked, while Arendt thinks freedom occurs only in a realm transcendent of economics. Compare and contrast Marx’s and Arendt’s conceptions of freedom’s relationship to economics. Whose conception is more convincing, and why?
No longer than five (5) double-spaced pages
Read the following before answering:
1. Karl Marx, Selected Writings, ed. Lawrence H. Simon (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994)
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Selected-Works
Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844” (pp. 54-55, 58-79)
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848) (pp. 157-176, plus last four paragraphs on p. 186)
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (1845-46), (Middle paragraph on p. 119, third paragraph on p. 129 through second paragraph on p. 131)
2. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (1963), Introduction and Chapter 1, 2
https://monoskop.org/images/b/bf/Arendt_Hannah_On_Revolution_1990
3. Hannah Arendt, “What is Freedom?” (1961)*
4. Karl Marx, Fragment on association from “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844”*
Karl Marx, Fragment on association from “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of
1844,” translated by Martin Mulligan.
“When communist artisans associate with one another, theory, propaganda, etc., is their first end.
But at the same time, as a result of this association, they acquire a new need – the need for
society – and what appears as a means becomes an end. In this practical process the most
splendid results are to be observed whenever French socialist workers are seen together. Such
things as smoking, drinking, eating, etc., are no longer means of contact or means that bring
them together. Association, society and conversation, which again has association as its end, are
enough for them; the brotherhood of man is no mere phrase with them, but a fact of life, and the
nobility of man shines upon us from their work-hardened bodies.”
HANNAH ARENDT
Between Past and Future
EIGHT EXERCISES IN
POLITICAL THOUGHT
Introduction by JEROME KOHN
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This edition with an introduction by Jerome Kohn published 2006
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Modern,’ and “The Crisis in Education” appeared in The Parti… ” Review; a portion of “The Concept o
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Freedom?” in Chicago Review; a portion of “The Crisis in Culture: Its Social and Irs Political Significance”
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The New Yorker; and “The Conquest of Space and the StatUre of Man” in American Scholar.
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Contents
Introduction by JEROME KOHN Vl
l
BETWEEN PAST AND FUTURE
Preface: The Gap Between Past and Future 3
I. TRADITION AND THE MODERN AGE 17
2. THE CONCEPT OF HISTORY: ANCIENT
AND MODERN 41
3. WHAT IS AUTHORITY? 91
4. WHAT IS FREEDOM? 142
5. THE CRISIS IN EDUCATION 170
6. THE CRISIS IN CULTURE: ITS SOCIAL
AND ITS POLITICAL SIGNIFICANCE 19
4
7. TRUTH AND POLITICS 223
8. THE CONQUEST OF SPACE AND THE
STATURE OF MAN 260
Notes 275
Index 295
__________………………………………..
..
4
WHAT IS FREEDOM?
I
To raise the question, what is freedom? seems to be a hopeless
enterprise. It is as though age-old contradictions and antino
mies were lying in wait to force the mind into dilemmas of log
ical impossibility so that, depending which horn of the dilemma
you are holding on to, it becomes as impossible to conceive of
freedom or its opposite as it is to realize the notion of a square
circle. In its simplest form, the difficulty may be summed up as
the contradiction between our consciousness and conscience,
telling us that we are free and hence responsible, and our every
day experience in the outer world, in which we orient ourselves
according to the principle of causality. In all practical and espe
cially in political matters we hold human freedom to be a self
evident truth, and it is upon this axiomatic assumption that
laws are laid down in human communities, that decisions are
taken, that judgments are passed. In all fields of scientific and
theoretical endeavor, on the contrary, we proceed according to
the no less self-evident truth of nihil ex nihilo, of nihil sine
causa, that is, on the assumption that even “our own lives are,
in the last analysis, subject to causation” and that if there
should be an ultimately free ego in ourselves, it certainly never
makes its unequivocal appearance in the phenomenal world,
and therefore can never become the subject of theoretical ascer
tainment. Hence freedom turns out to be a mirage the moment
psychology looks into what is supposedly its innermost do
main; for “the part which force plays in nature, as the cause of
motion, has its counterpart in the mental sphere in motive as
\i\~,::,,-;-“:’,.;::,~··i”;’~;'”i’~”’ ./~-.~;.>’~: “.”. “_,.'””,.”,_..,,\”,:,,,’:…’~ ,.,;,.t~” ,;…,,,,,,~.,o;,~”,\.’
WHAT IS FREEDOM? 1 43
the cause of conduct.”1 It is true that the test of causality-the
predictability of effect if all causes are known-cannot be ap
plied to the realm of human affairs; but this practical unpre
dictability is no test of freedom, it signifies merely that we are
in no position ever to know all causes which come into play,
and this partly because of the sheer number of factors involved,
but also because human motives, as distinguished from natural
forces, are still hidden from all onlookers, from inspection by
our fellow men as well as from introspection.
The greatest clarification in these obscure matters we owe to
Kant and to his insight that freedom is no more ascertainable to
the inner sense and within the field of inner experience than it is
to the senses with which we know and understand the world.
Whether or not causality is operative in the household of nature
and the universe, it certainly is a category of the mind to bring
order into all sensory data, whatever their nature may be, and
thus it makes experience possible. Hence the antinomy between
practical freedom and theoretical non-freedom, both equally
axiomatic in their respective fields, does not merely concern a
dichotomy between science and ethics, but lies in everyday life
experiences from which both ethics and science take their re
spective points of departure. It is not scientific theory but
thought itself, in its pre-scientific and pre-philosophical under
standing, that seems to dissolve freedom on which our practical
conduct is based into nothingness. For the moment we reflect
upon an act which was undertaken under the assumption of
our being a free agent, it seems to come under the sway of two
kinds of causality, of the causality of inner motivation on one
hand and of the causal principle which rules the outer world on
the other. Kant saved freedom from this twofold assault upon it
by distinguishing between a “pure” or theoretical reason and a
“practical reason” whose center is free will, whereby it is im
portant to keep in mind that the free-willing agent, who is prac
tically all-important, never appears in the phenomenal world,
neither in the outer world of our five senses nor in the field of
the inner sense with which I sense myself. This solution, pitting
the dictate of the will against the understanding of reason, is in
genious enough and may even suffice to establish a moral law
144 BETWEEN PAST AND FUTURE
whose logical consistency is in no way inferior to natural laws.
But it does little to eliminate the greatest and most dangerous
difficulty, namely, that thought itself, in its theoretical as well as
its pre-theoretical form, makes freedom disappear–quite apart
from the fact that it must appear strange indeed that the faculty
of the will whose essential activity consists in dictate and com
mand should be the harborer of freedom.
To the question of politics, the problem of freedom is crucial,
and no political theory can afford to remain unconcerned with
the fact that this problem has led into “the obscure wood
wherein philosophy has lost its way.”2 It is the contention of
the following considerations that the reason for this obscurity is
that the phenomenon of freedom does not appear in the realm
of thought at all, that neither freedom nor its opposite is experi
enced in the dialogue between me and myself in the course of
which the great philosophic and metaphysical questions arise,
and that the philosophical tradition, whose origin in this re
spect we shall consider later, has distorted, instead of clarifying,
the very idea of freedom such as it is given in human experience
by transposing it from its original field, the realm of politics
and human affairs in general, to an inward domain, the will,
where it would be open to self-inspection. As a first, prelimi
nary justification of this approach, it may be pointed out that
historically the problem of freedom has been the last of the
time-honored great metaphysical questions-such as being,
nothingness, the soul, nature, time, eternity, etc.-to become a
topic of philosophic inquiry at all. There is no preoccupation
with freedom in the whole history of great philosophy from the
pre-Socratics up to Plotinus, the last ancient philosopher. And
when freedom made its first appearance in our philosophical
tradition, it was the experience of religious conversion-of Paul
first and then of Augustine-which gave rise to it.
The field where freedom has always been known, not as a
problem, to be sure, but as a fact of everyday life, is the politi
cal realm. And even today, whether we know it or not, the ques
tion of politics and the fact that man is a being endowed with
the gift of action must always be present to our mind when
we speak of the problem of freedom; for action and politics,
WHAT IS FREEDOM? 145
among all the capabilities and potentialities of human life, are
the only things of which we could not even conceive without at
least assuming that freedom exists, and we can hardly touch a
single political issue without, implicitly or explicitly, touching
upon an issue of man’s liberty. Freedom, moreover, is not only
one among the many problems and phenomena of the political
realm properly speaking, such as justice, or power, or equality;
freedom, which only seldom-in times of crisis or revolution
becomes the direct aim of political action, is actually the reason
that men live together in political organization at alL Without
it, political life as such would be meaningless. The raison d’hre
of politics is freedom, and its field of experience is action.
This freedom which we take for granted in all political theory
and which even those who praise tyranny must still take into ac
count is the very opposite of “inner freedom,” the inward space
into which men may escape from external coercion and feel free.
This inner feeling remains without outer manifestations and
hence is by definition politically irrelevant. Whatever its legiti
macy may be, and however eloquently it may have been de
scribed in late antiquity, it is historically a late phenomenon, and
it was originally the result of an estrangement from the world in
t
which worldly experiences were transformed into experiences f
within one’s own self. The experiences of inner freedom are de i
,rivative in that they always presuppose a retreat from the world,
i
where freedom was denied, into an inwardness to which no
other has access. The inward space where the self is sheltered
against the world must not be mistaken for the heart or the
mind, both of which exist and function only in interrelationship
with the world. Not the heart and not the mind, but inwardness
as a place of absolute freedom within one’s own self was discov
ered in late antiquity by those who had no place of their own in
the world and hence lacked a worldly condition which, from
early antiquity to almost the middle of the nineteenth century,
was unanimously held to be a prerequisite for freedom.
The derivative character of this inner freedom, or of the the
ory that “the appropriate region of human liberty” is the “in
ward domain of consciousness,”3 appears more dearly if we go
back to its origins. Not the modern individual with his desire to
14 6
BETWEEN PAST AND FUTURE
unfold, to develop, and to expand, with his justified fear lest so
ciety get the better of his individuality, with his emphatic insis
tence “on the importance of genius” and originality, but the
popular and popularizing sectarians of late antiquity, who have
hardly more in common with philosophy than the name, are
representative in this respect. Thus the most persuasive argu
ments for the absolute superiority of inner freedom can still be
found in an essay of Epictetus, who begins by stating that free is
he who lives as he wishes,4 a definition which oddly echoes a
sentence from Aristotle’s Politics in which the statement “Free
dom means the doing what a man likes” is put in the mouths of
those who do not know what freedom is. 5 Epictetus then goes
on to show that a man is free if he limits himself to what is in
his power, if he does not reach into a realm where he can be
hindered. 6 The “science of living”? consists in knowing how to
distinguish between the alien world over which man has no
power and the self of which he may dispose as he sees fit.
8
Historically it is interesting to note that the appearance of the
problem of freedom in Augustine’s philosophy was thus pre
ceded by the conscious attempt to divorce the notion of free
dom from politics, to arrive at a formulation through which one
may be a slave in the world and still be free. Conceptually,
however, Epictetus’s freedom, which consists in being free from
one’s own desires, is no more than a reversal of the current an
cient political notions; and the political background against
which this whole body of popular philosophy was formulated,
the obvious decline of freedom in the late Roman Empire, man
ifests itself still quite clearly in the role which such notions as
power, domination, and property play in it. According to an
cient understanding, man could liberate himself from necessity
only through power over other men, and he could be free only
if he owned a place, a home in the world. Epictetus transposed
these worldly relationships into relationships within man’s own
self, whereby he discovered that no power is so absolute as that
which man yields over himself, and that the inward space where
man struggles and subdues himself is more entirely his own,
namely, more securely shielded from outside interference, than
any worldly home could ever be.
“,.j.’;:;q~”””~T,,~’
WHAT IS FREEDOM? I47
Hence, in spite of the great influence the concept of an inner,
nonpolitical freedom has exerted upon the tradition of thought,
it seems safe to say that man would know nothing of inner free
dom if he had not first experienced a condition of being free as
a worldly tangible reality. We first become aware of freedom or
its opposite in our intercourse with others, not in the intercourse
with ourselves. Before it became an attribute of thought or a
quality of the will, freedom was understood to be the free man’s
status, which enabled him to move, to get away from home, to
go out into the world and meet other people in deed and word.
This freedom clearly was preceded by liberation: in order to be
free, man must have liberated himself from the necessities of
life. But the status of freedom did not follow automatically
upon the act of liberation. Freedom needed, in addition to mere
liberation, the company of other men who were in the same
state, and it needed a common public space to meet them-a po
litically organized world, in other words, into which each of the
free men could insert himself by word and deed.
Obviously not every form of human intercourse and not
every kind of community is characterized by freedom. Where
men live together but do not form a body politic-as, for ex
ample, in tribal societies or in the privacy of the household
the factors ruling their actions and conduct are not freedom but
the necessities of life and concern for its preservation. More
over, wherever the man-made world does not become the scene
for action and speech-as in despotically ruled communities
which banish their subjects into the narrowness of the home
and thus prevent the rise of a public realm-freedom has no
worldly reality. Without a politically guaranteed public realm,
freedom lacks the worldly space to make its appearance. To be
sure it may still dwell in men’s hearts as desire or will or hope
or yearning; but the human heart, as we all know, is a very dark
place, and whatever goes on in its obscurity can hardly be
called a demonstrable fact. Freedom as a demonstrable fact and
politics coincide and are related to each other like two sides of
the same matter.
Yet it is precisely this coincidence of politics and freedom
which we cannot take for granted in the light of our present
149 i4 8 BETWEEN PAST AND FUTURE
political experience. The rise of totalitarianism, its claim to
having subordinated all spheres of life to the demands of poli
tics and its consistent nonrecognition of civil rights, above all
the rights of privacy and the right to freedom from politics,
makes us doubt not only the coincidence of politics and free
dom but their very compatibility. We are inclined to believe that
freedom begins where politics ends, because we have seen that
freedom has disappeared when so-called political considera
tions overruled everything else. Was not the liberal credo, “The
less politics the more freedom,” right after all? Is it not true
that the smaller the space occupied by the political, the larger
the domain left to freedom? Indeed, do we not rightly measure
the extent of freedom in any given community by the free scope
it grants to apparently nonpolitical activities, free economic en
terprise or freedom of teaching, of religion, of cultural and in
tellectual activities? Is it not true, as we all somehow believe,
that politics is compatible with freedom only because and inso
far as it guarantees a possible freedom from politics?
This definition of political liberty as a potential freedom
from politics is not urged upon us merely by our most recent
experiences; it has played a large part in the history of political
theory. We need go no farther than the political thinkers of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, who more often than not
simply identified political freedom with security. The highest
purpose of politics, “the end of government,” was the guaranty
of security; security, in turn, made freedom possible, and the
word “freedom” designated a quintessence of activities which
occurred outside the political realm. Even Montesquieu, though
he had not only a different but a much higher opinion of the
essence of politics than Hobbes or Spinoza, could still occa
sionally equate political freedom with security.9 The rise of the
political and social sciences in the nineteenth and twentieth cen
turies has even widened the breach between freedom and poli
tics; for government, which since the beginning of the modern
age had been identified with the total domain of the political,
was now considered to be the appointed protector not so much
of freedom as of the life process, the interests of society and its
individuals. Security remained the decisive criterion, but not the
WHAT IS FREEDOM?
individual’s security against “violent death,” as in Hobbes
(where the condition of all liberty is freedom from fear), but a
security which should permit an undisturbed development of
the life process of society as a whole. This life process is not
bound up with freedom but follows its own inherent necessity;
and it can be called free only in the sense that we speak of a
freely flowing stream. Here freedom is not even the nonpolitical
aim of politics, but a marginal phenomenon-which somehow
forms the boundary government should not overstep unless life
itself and its immediate interests and necessities are at stake.
Thus not only we, who have reasons of our own to distrust
politics for the sake of freedom, but the entire modern age has
separated freedom and politics. I could descend even deeper into
the past and evoke older memories and traditions. The pre
modern secular concept of freedom certainly was emphatic in its
insistence on separating the subjects’ freedom from any direct
share in government; the people’s “liberty and freedom con
sisted in having the government of those laws by which their life
and their goods may be most their own: ’tis not for having share
in government, that is nothing pertaining to them”-as Charles I
summed it up in his speech from the scaffold. It was not out of a
desire for freedom that people eventually demanded their share
in government or admission to the political realm, but out of
mistrust in those who held power over their life and goods. The
Christian concept of political freedom, moreover, arose out of
the early Christians’ suspicion of and hostility against the public
realm as such, from whose concerns they demanded to be ab
solved in order to be free. And this Christian freedom for the sake
of salvation had been preceded, as we saw before, by the philoso
phers’ abstention from politics as a prerequisite for the highest
and freest way of life, the vita contemplativa.
Despite the enormous weight of this tradition and despite the
perhaps even more telling urgency of our own experiences, both
pressing into the same direction of a divorce of freedom from
politics, I think the reader may believe he has read only an old
truism when I said that the raison d’etre of politics is freedom
and that this freedom is primarily experienced in action. In the
following I shall do no more than reflect on this old truism.
15 0 BETWEEN PAST AND FUTURE
II
Freedom as related to politics is not a phenomenon of the will.
We deal here not with the liberum arbitrium, 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
“And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover,! To entertain these
fair well-spoken days,! I am determined to prove a villain,! And
hate the idle pleasures of these days.” Rather it is, to remain
with Shakespeare, the freedom of Brutus: “That this shall be or
we will fall for it,” that is, the freedom to call something into
being which did not exist before, which was not given, not even
as an object of cognition or imagination, and which therefore,
strictly speaking, could not be known. Action, to be free, must
be free from motive on one side, from its intended goal as a pre
dictable effect on the other. This is not to say that motives and
aims are not important factors in every single act, but they are
its determining factors, and action is free to the extent that it is
able to transcend them. Action insofar as it is determined is
guided by a future aim whose desirability the intellect has
grasped before the will wills it, whereby the intellect calls upon
the will, since only the will can dictate action-to paraphrase a
characteristic description of this process by Duns Scotus. IO The
aim of action varies and depends upon the changing circum
stances of the world; to recognize the aim is not a matter of
freedom, but of right or wrong judgment. Will, seen as a dis
tinct and separate human faculty, follows judgment, i.e., cogni
tion of the right aim, and then commands its execution. The
power to command, to dictate action, is not a matter of free
dom but a question of strength or weakness.
Action insofar as it is free is neither under the guidance of
the intellect nor under the dictate of the will-although it
needs both for the execution of any particular goal-but springs
from something altogether different which (following Mon
tesquieu’s famous analysis of forms of government) I shall call
a principle. Principles do not operate from within the self as
WHAT IS FREEDOM? 15 1
motives do-“mine own deformity” or my “fair proportion”
but 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. For, unlike the judgment of the intellect which
precedes action, and unlike the command of the will which ini
tiates it, the inspiring principle becomes fully manifest only in
the performing act itself; yet while the merits of judgment lose
their validity, and the strength of the commanding will exhausts
itself, in the course of the act which they execute in coopera
tion, the principle which inspired it loses nothing in strength or
validity through execution. In distinction from its goal, the
principle of an action can be repeated time and again, it is inex
haustible, and in distinction from its motive, the validity of a
principle is universal, it is not bound to any particular person or
to any particular group. However, the manifestation of princi
ples comes about only through action, they are manifest in the
world as long as the action lasts, but no longer. Such principles
are honor or glory, love of equality, which Montesquieu called
virtue, or distinction or excellence-the Greek dei dpunroEzv
( “always strive to do your best and to be the best of all”), but
also fear or distrust or hatred. Freedom or its opposite appears
in the world whenever such principles are actualized; the ap
pearance of freedom, like the manifestation of principles, coin
cides with the performing act. 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.
Freedom as inherent in action is perhaps best illustrated by
Machiavelli’s concept of virtu, the excellence with which man
answers the opportunities the world opens up before him in the
guise of fortuna. Its meaning is best rendered by “virtuosity,”
that is, an excellence we attribute to the performing arts (as dis
tinguished from the creative arts of making), where the accom
plishment lies in the performance itself and not in an end
product which outlasts the activity that brought it into exis
tence and becomes independent of it. The virtuoso-ship of
Machiavelli’s virtu somehow reminds us of the fact, although
Machiavelli hardly knew it, that the Greeks always used such
153 15 2 BETWEEN PAST AND FUTURE
metaphors as flute-playing, dancing, healing, and seafaring to
distinguish political from other activities, that is, that they drew
their analogies from those arts in which virtuosity of perfor
mance is decisive.
Since all acting contains an element of virtuosity, and be
cause virtuosity is the excellence we ascribe to the performing
arts, politics has often been defined as an art. This, of course, is
not a definition but a metaphor, and the metaphor becomes
completely false if one falls into the common error of regarding
the state or government as a work of art, as a kind of collective
masterpiece. In the sense of the creative arts, which bring forth
something tangible and reify human thought to such an extent
that the produced thing possesses an existence of its own, poli
tics is the exact opposite of an art-which incidentally does not
mean that it is a science. Political institutions, no matter how
well or how badly designed, depend for continued existence
upon acting men; their conservation is achieved by the same
means that brought them into being. Independent existence
marks the work of art as a product of making; utter depend-.
ence upon further acts to keep it in existence marks the state
as a product of action.
The point here is not whether the creative artist is free in the
process of creation, but that the creative process is not displayed
in public and not destined to appear in the world. Hence the ele
ment of freedom, certainly present in the creative arts, remains
hidden; it is not the free creative process which finally appears
and matters for the world, but the work of art itself, the end
product of the process. The performing arts, on the contrary,
have indeed a strong affinity with politics. Performing artists
dancers, play-actors, musicians, and the like-need an audience
!’ to show their virtuosity, just as acting men need the presence of
others before whom they can appear; both need a publicly orga
nized space for their “work,” and both depend upon others for
” the performance itself. Such a space of appearances is not to be
~
~
1;
~ taken for granted wherever men live together in a community.
The Greek polis once was precisely that “form of government”t
t: which provided men with a space of appearances where they
I
~
could act, with a kind of theater where freedom could appear.
f
WHAT IS FREEDOM!
To use the word “political” in the sense of the Greek polis is
neither arbitrary nor far-fetched. Not only etymologically and
not only for the learned does the very word, which in all Euro
pean languages still derives from the historically unique organi
zation of the Greek city-state, echo the experiences of the
community which first discovered the essence and the realm of
the political. It is indeed difficult and even misleading to talk
about politics and its innermost principles without drawing to
some extent upon the experiences of Greek and Roman antiq
uity, and this for no other reason than that men have never, ei
ther before or after, thought so highly of political activity and
bestowed so much dignity upon its realm. As regards the rela
tion of freedom to politics, there is the additional reason that
only ancient political communities were founded for the ex
press purpose of serving the free-those who were neither
slaves, subject to coercion by oth~rs, nor laborers, driven and
urged on by the necessities of life. If, then, we understand the
political in the sense of the polis, its end or raison d’etre would
be to establish and keep in existence a space where freedom as
virtuosity can appear. This is the realm where freedom is a
worldly reality, tangible in words which can be heard, in deeds
which can be seen, and in events which are talked about, re
membered, and turned into stories before they are finally incor
porated into the great storybook of human history. Whatever
occurs in this space of appearances is political by definition,
even when it is not a direct product of action. What remains
outside it, such as the great feats of barbarian empires, may be
impressive and noteworthy, but it is not political, strictly
speaking.
Every attempt to derive the concept of freedom from experi
ences in the political realm sounds strange and startling because
all our theories in these matters are dominated by the notion
that freedom is an attribute of will and thought much rather
than of action. And this priority is not merely derived from the
notion that every act must psychologically be preceded by a
cognitive act of the intellect and a command of the will to carry
out its decision, but also, and perhaps even primarily, because it
is held that “perfect liberty is incompatible with the existence of
154 BETWEEN PAST AND FUTURE
society,” that it can be tolerated in its perfection only outside
the realm of human affairs. This current argument does not
hold-what perhaps is true-that it is in the nature of thought
to need more freedom than does any other activity of men, but
rather that thinking in itself is not dangerous, so that only ac
tion needs to be restrained: “No one pretends that actions
should be as free as opinions.” 11 This, of course, belongs among
the fundamental tenets of liberalism, which, its name notwith
standing, has done its share to banish the notion of liberty from
the political realm. For politics, according to the same philoso
phy, must be concerned almost exclusively with the mainte
nance of life and the safeguarding of its interests. Now, where
life is at stake all action is by definition under the sway of ne
cessity, and the proper realm to take care of life’s necessities is
the gigantic and still increasing sphere of social and economic
life whose administration has overshadowed the political realm
ever since the beginning of the modern age. Only foreign af
fairs, because the relationships between nations still harbor
hostilities and sympathies which cannot be reduced to eco
nomic factors, seem to be left as a purely political domain. And
even here the prevailing tendency is to consider international
power problems and rivalries as ultimately springing from eco
nomic factors and interests.
Yet just as we, despite all theories and isms, still believe that
to say “Freedom is the raison d’etre of politics” is no more than
a truism, so do we, in spite of our apparently exclusive concern
with life, still hold as a matter of course that courage is one of
the cardinal political virtues, although-if all this were a matter
of consistency, which it obviously is not-we should be the first
to condemn courage as the foolish and even vicious contempt
for life and its interests, that is, for the allegedly highest of all
goods. Courage is a big word, and I do not mean the daring of
adventure which gladly risks life for the sake of being as thor
oughly and intensely alive as one can be only in the face of dan
ger and death. Temerity is no less concerned with life than is
cowardice. Courage, which we still believe to be indispensable
for political action, and which Churchill once called “the first
of human qualities, because it is the quality which guarantees
WHAT IS FREEDOM? 155
all others,” does not gratify our individual sense of vitality but
is demanded of us by the very nature of the public realm. For
this world of ours, because it existed before us and is meant to
outlast our lives in it, simply cannot afford to give primary con
cern to individual lives and the interests connected with them;
as such the public realm stands in the sharpest possible contrast
to our private domain, where, in the protection of family and
home, everything serves and must serve the security of the life
process. It requires courage even to leave the protective security
of our four walls and enter the public realm, not because of par
ticular dangers which may lie in wait for us, but because we
have arrived in a realm where the concern for life has lost its va
lidity. Courage liberates men from their worry about life for the
freedom of the world. Courage is indispensable because in pol
itics not life but the world is at stake.
III
Obviously this notion of an interdependence of freedom and
politics stands in contradiction to the social theories of the
modern age. Unfortunately it does not follow that we need only
to revert to older, pre-modern traditions and theories. Indeed,
the greatest difficulty in reaching an understanding of what
freedom is arises from the fact that a simple return to tradition,
and especially to what we are wont to call the great tradition,
does not help us. Neither the philosophical concept of freedom
as it first arose in late antiquity, when freedom became a phe
nomenon of thought by which man could, as it were, reason
himself out of the world, nor the Christian and modern notion
of free will has any ground in political experience. Our philo
sophical tradition is almost unanimous in holding that freedom
begins where men have left the realm of political life inhabited
by the many, and that it is not experienced in association with
others but in intercourse with one’s self-whether in the form
of an inner dialogue which, since Socrates, we call thinking, or
in a conflict within myself, the inner strife between what I
would and what I do, whose murderous dialectics disclosed first
157 15 6
BETWEEN PAST AND FUTURE
to Paul and then to Augustine the equivocalities and impotence
of the human heart.
For the history of the problem of freedom, Christian tradi
tion has indeed become the decisive factor. We almost automat
ically equate freedom with free will, that is, with a faculty
virtually unknown to classical antiquity. For will, as Christian
ity discovered it, had so little in common with the well-known
capacities to desire, to intend, and to aim at, that it claimed at
tention only after it had come into conflict with them. If free
dom were actually nothing but a phenomenon of the will, we
would have to conclude that the ancients did not know free
dom. This, of course, is absurd, but if one wished to assert it he
could argue what I have mentioned before, namely, that the
idea of freedom played no role in philosophy prior to Augus
tine. The reason for this striking fact is that, in Greek as well as
Roman antiquity, freedom was an exclusively political concept,
indeed the quintessence of the city-state and of citizenship. Our
philosophical tradition of political thought, beginning with
Parmenides and Plato, was founded explicitly in opposition to
this polis and its citizenship. The way of life chosen by the
philosopher was understood in opposition to the f3io~ 1l’OA.zn1(~
the political way of life. Freedom, therefore, the very center of
politics as the Greeks understood it, was an idea which almost
by definition could not enter the framework of Greek philoso
phy. Only when the early Christians, and especially Paul, dis
covered a kind of freedom which had no relation to politics,
could the concept of freedom enter the history of philosophy.
Freedom became one of the chief problems of philosophy when
it was experienced as something occurring in the intercourse
between me and myself, and outside of the intercourse between
men. Free will and freedom became synonymous notions,12 and
the presence of freedom was experienced in complete solitude,
“where no man might hinder the hot contention wherein I had
engaged with myself,” the deadly conflict which took place in
the “inner dwelling” of the soul and the dark “chambtr of the
heart.” 13
Classical antiquity was by no means inexperienced in the
phenomena of solitude; it knew well enough that solitary man
~I”w..~,i!i
WHAT IS FREEDOM?
is no longer one but two-in-one, that an intercourse between
me and myself begins the moment the intercourse between me
and my fellow men has been interrupted for no matter what
reason. In addition to this dualism which is the existential con
dition of thought, classical philosophy since Plato had insisted
on a dualism between soul and body whereby the human fac
ulty of motion had been assigned to the soul, which was sup
posed to move the body as well as itself, and it was still within
the range of Platonic thought to interpret this faculty as a ruler
ship of the soul over the body. Yet the Augustinian solitude of
“hot contention” within the soul itself was utterly unknown,
for the fight in which he had become engaged was not between
reason and passion, between understanding and evJ1~, 14 that
is, between two different human faculties, but it was a conflict
within the will itself. And this duality within the self-same fac
ulty had been known as the characteristic of thought, as the di
alogue which I hold with myself. In other words, the two-in-one
of solitude which sets the thought process into motion has the
exactly opposite effect on the will: it paralyzes and locks it
within itself; willing in solitude is always velie and nolle, to will
and not to will at the same time.
The paralyzing effect the will seems to have upon itself
comes all the more surprisingly as its very essence obviously is
to command and be obeyed. Hence it appears to be a “mon
strosity” that man may command himself and not be obeyed, a
monstrosity which can be explained only by the simultaneous
presence of an I-will and an l-will-not. 15 This, however, is al
ready an interpretation by Augustine; the historical fact is that
the phenomenon of the will originally manifested itself in the
experience that what I would, I do not; that there is such a thing
as I-will-and-cannot. What was unknown to antiquity was not
that there is a possible. I-know-but-I-will-not, but that I-will
and I-can are not the same-non hoc est velie, quod posse.1 6
For the I-will-and-I-can was of course very familiar to the an
cients. We need only remember how much Plato insisted that
only those who knew how to rule themselves had the right to
rule others and be freed from the obligation of obedience. And
it is true that self-control has remained one of the specifically
http:posse.16
http:l-will-not.15
BETWEEN PAST AND FUTURE
15 8
political virtues, if only because it is an outstanding phenome
non of virtuosity where I-will and I-can must be so well attuned
that they practically coincide. ~
I
Had ancient philosophy known of a possible conflict be
I tween what I can and what I will, it would certainly have un
derstood the phenomenon of freedom as an inherent quality of
the I-can, or it might conceivably have defined it as the coinci
dence of I-will and I-can; it certainly would not have thought of
l
I
t
it as an attribute of the I-will or I-would. This assertion is no
empty speculation; even the Euripidean conflict between reason
and 8vJl6q, both simultaneously present in the soul, is a rela
f tively late phenomenon. More typical, and in our context more
relevant, was the conviction that passion may blind men’s rea
son but that once reason has succeeded in making itself heard
there is no passion left to prevent man from doing what he
knows is right. This conviction still underlies Socrates’ teaching
f that virtue is a kind of knowledge, and our amazement that
anybody could ever have thought that virtue was “rational,”
that it could be learned and taught, arises from our,acquain
tance with a will which is broken in itself, which wills and
wills-not at the same time, much rather than from any superior
insight in the alleged powerlessness of reason.
In other words, will, will-power, and will-to-power are for us
almost identical notions; the seat of power is to us the faculty
of the will as known and experienced by man in his intercourse
with himself. And for the sake of this will-power we have
emasculated not only our reasoning and cognitive faculties but
other more “practical” faculties as well. But is it not plain even
to us that, in the words of Pindar, “this is the greatest grief: to
stand with his feet outside the right and the beautiful one
knows [forced away], by necessity”?17 The necessity which pre
vents me from doing what I know and will may arise from the
world, or from my own body, or from an insufficiency of tal
ents, gifts, and qualities which are bestowed upon man by birth
and over which he has hardly more power than he has over
other circumstances; all these factors, the psychological ones
not excluded, condition the person from the outside as far as
the I-will and the I-know, that is, the ego itself, are concerned;
WHAT IS FREEDOM? I59
the power that meets these circumstances, that liberates, as it
were, willing and knowing from their bondage to necessity is
the I-can. Only where the I-will and the I-can coincide does
freedom come to pass.
There exists still another way to check our current notion of
free will, born of a religious predicament and formulated in
philosophical language, against the older, strictly political ex
periences of freedom. In the revival of political thought which
accompanied the rise of the modern age, we may distinguish
between those thinkers who can truly be called the fathers of
political “science,” since they took their cue from the new dis
coveries of the natural sciences-their greatest representative is
Hobbes-and those who, relatively undisturbed by these typi
cally modern developments, harkened back to the political
thought of antiquity, not out of any predilection for the past as
such but simply because the separation of church and state, of
religion and politics, had given rise to an independent secular,
political realm such as had been unknown since the fall of the
Roman Empire. The greatest representative of this political sec
ularism was Montesquieu, who, though indifferent to problems
of a strictly philosophic nature, was deeply aware of the inade
quacy of the Christian and the philosophers’ concept of free
dom for political purposes. In order to get rid of it, he expressly
distinguished between philosophical and political freedom, and
the difference consisted in that philosophy demands no more of
freedom than the exercise of the will (l’exercice de la volonte),
independent of circumstances and of attainment of the goals the
will has set. Political freedom, on the contrary, consists in being
able to do what one ought to will (la liberte ne peut consister
qu’ apouvoir faire ce que l’on doit vouloir-the emphasis is on
pouvoir).18 For Montesquieu as for the ancients it was obvious
that an agent could no longer be called free when he lacked the
capacity to do-whereby it is irrelevant whether this failure is
caused by exterior or by interior circumstances.
I chose the example of self-control because to us this is
clearly a phenomenon of will and of will-power. The Greeks,
more than any other people, have reflected on moderation and
the necessity to tame the steeds of the soul, and yet they never
http:pouvoir).18
160 BETWEEN PAST AND FUTURE
became aware of the will as a distinct faculty, separate from
other human capacities. Historically, men first discovered the
will when they experienced its impotence and not its power,
when they said with Paul: “For to will is present with me; but
how to perform that which is good I find not.” It is the same
will of which Augustine complained that it seemed “no mon
strousness [for it] partly to will, partly to nill”; and although he
points out that this is “a disease of the mind,” he also admits
that this disease is, as it were, natural for a mind possessed of a
will: “For the will commands that there be a will, it commands
not something else but itself …. Were the will entire, it would
not even command itself to be, because it would already be.” 19
In other words, if man has a will at all, it must always appear as
though there were two wills present in the same man, fighting
with each other for power over his mind. Hence, the will is both
powerful and impotent, free and unfree.
When we speak of impotence and the limits set to will
power, we usually think of man’s powerlessness with respect to
the surrounding world. It is, therefore, of some importance to
notice that in these early testimonies the will was not defeated
by some overwhelming force of nature or circumstances; the
contention which its appearance raised was neither the conflict
between the one against the many nor the strife between body
and mind. On the contrary, the relation of mind to body was
for Augustine even the outstanding example for the enormous
power inherent in the will: “The mind commands the body, and
the body obeys instantly; the mind commands itself, and is re
sisted.”20 The body represents in this context the exterior
world and is by no means identical with one’s self. It is within
one’s self, in the “interior dwelling” (interior domus), where
Epictetus still believed man to be an absolute master, that the
conflict between man and himself broke out and that the will
was defeated. Christian will-power was discovered as an organ
of self-liberation and immediately found wanting. It is as though
the I-will immediately paralyzed the I-can, as though the mo
ment men willed freedom, they lost their capacity to be free. In
the deadly conflict with worldly desires and intentions from
which will-power was supposed to liberate the self, the most
‘”,.”
WHAT IS FREEDOM? 161
willing seemed able to achieve was oppression. Because of the
will’s impotence, its incapacity to generate genuine power, its
constant defeat in the struggle with the self, in which the power
of the I-can exhausted itself, the will-to-power turned at once
into a will-to-oppression. I can only hint here at the fatal con
sequences for political theory of this equation of freedom with
the human capacity to will; it was one of the causes why even
today we almost automatically equate power with oppression
or, at least, with rule over others.
However that may be, what we usually understand by will
and will-power has grown out of this conflict between a willing
and a performing self, out of the experience of an I-will-and
cannot, which means that the I-will, no matter what is willed,
remains subject to the self, strikes back at it, spurs it on, incites
it further, or is ruined by it. However far the will-to-power may
reach out, and even if somebody possessed by it begins to con
quer the whole world, the I-will can never rid itself of the self; it
always remains bound to it and, indeed, under its bondage. This
bondage to the self distinguishes the I-will from the I-think,
which also is carried on between me and myself but in whose
dialogue the self is not the object of the activity of thought. The
fact that the I-will has become so power-thirsty, that will and
will-to-power have become practically identical, is perhaps due
to its having been first experienced in its impotence. Tyranny at
any rate, the only form of government which arises directly out
of the I-will, owes its greedy cruelty to an egotism utterly ab
sent from the utopian tyrannies of reason with which the
philosophers wished to coerce men and which they conceived
on the model of the I-think.
I have said that the philosophers first began to show an inter
est in the problem of freedom when freedom was no longer ex
perienced in acting and in associating with others but in willing
and in the intercourse with one’s self, when, briefly, freedom
had become free will. Since then, freedom has been a philo
sophical problem of the first order; as such it was applied to the
political realm and thus has become a political problem as well.
Because of the philosophic shift from action to will-power,
from freedom as a state of being manifest in action to the
1 BETWEEN PAST AND FUTURE162.
liberum arbitrium, the ideal of freedom ceased to be virtuosity
in the sense we mentioned before and became sovereignty, the
ideal of a free will, independent from others and eventually pre
vailing against them. The philosophic ancestry of our current
political notion of freedom is still quite manifest in eighteenth
century political writers, when, for instance, Thomas Paine in
sisted that “to be free it is sufficient [for man] that he wills it,”
a word which Lafayette applied to the nation-state: “POUT
qu’une nation sOlt libre, il suffit qU’elie veuille fetre.”
Obviously such words echo the political philosophy of Jean
Jacques Rousseau, who has remained the most consistent repre
sentative of the theory of sovereignty, which he derived directly
from the will, so that he could conceive of political power in the
strict image of individual will-power. He argued against Mon
tesquieu that power must be sovereign, that is, indivisible, be
cause “a divided will would be inconceivable.” He did not shun
the consequences of this extreme individualism, and he held
that in an ideal state “the citizens had no communications one
with another,” that in order to avoid factions “each citizen
should think only his own thoughts.” In reality Rousseau’s the
ory stands refuted for the simple reason that “it is absurd for
the will to bind itself for the future”;21 a community actually
founded on this sovereign will would be built not on sand but
on quicksand. All political business is, and always has been,
transacted within an elaborate framework of ties and bonds
for the future-such as laws and constitutions, treaties and
alliances-all of which derive in the last instance from the fac
ulty to promise and to keep promises in the face of the essential
uncertainties of the future. A state, moreover, in which there is
no communication between the citizens and where each man
thinks only his own thoughts is by definition a tyranny. That
the faculty of will and will-power in and by itself, unconnected
with any other faculties, is an essentially nonpolitical and even
anti-political capacity is perhaps nowhere else so manifest as in
the absurdities to which Rousseau was driven and in the curi
ous cheerfulness with which he accepted them.
Politically, this identification of freedom with sovereignty is
perhaps the most pernicious and dangerous consequence of the
.~
WHAT IS FREEDOM? 163
philosophical equation of freedom and free will. For it leads ei
ther to a denial of human freedom-namely, if it is realized that
whatever men may be, they are never sovereign-or to the in
sight that the freedom of one man, or a group, or a body politic
can be purchased only at the price of the freedom, i.e., the sov
ereignty, of all others. Within the conceptual framework of tra
ditional philosophy, it is indeed very difficult to understand
how freedom and non-sovereignty can exist together or, to put
it another way, how freedom could have been given to men un
der the condition of non-sovereignty. Actually it is as unrealistic
to deny freedom because of the fact of human non-sovereignty
as it is dangerous to believe that one can be free-as an individ
ual or as a group–only if he is sovereign. The famous sover
eignty of political bodies has always been an illusion, which,
moreover, can be maintained only by the instruments of vio
lence, that is, with essentially nonpolitical means. Under human
conditions, which are determined by the fact that not man but
men live on the earth, freedom and sovereignty are so little
identical that they cannot even exist simultaneously. Where men
wish to be sovereign, as individuals or as organized groups,
they must submit to the oppression of the will, be this the indi
vidual will with which I force myself, or the “general will” of
an organized group. If men wish to be free, it is precisely sover
eignty they must renounce.
IV
Since the ~hole problem of freedom arises for us in the horizon
of Christian traditions on one hand, and of an originally anti
political philosophic tradition on the other, we find it difficult
to realize that there may exist a freedom which is not an attrib
ute of the will but an accessory of doing and acting. Let us
therefore go back once more to antiquity, i.e., to its political
and pre-philosophical traditions, certainly not for the sake of
erudition and not even because of the continuity of our tradi
tion, but merely because a freedom experienced in the process
of acting and nothing else-though, of course, mankind never
164 BETWEEN PAST AND FUTURE
lost this experience altogether-has never again been articu
lated with the same classical clarity.
However, for reasons we mentioned before and which we
cannot discuss here, this articulation is nowhere more difficult
to grasp than in the writings of the philosophers. It would of
course lead us too far to try to distill, as it were, adequate
concepts from the body of non-philosophical literature, from
poetic, dramatic, historical, and political writings, whose ar
ticulation lifts experiences into a realm of splendor which is not
the realm of conceptual thought. And for our purposes this is
not necessary. For whatever ancient literature, Greek as well as
Latin, has to tell us about these matters is ultimately rooted in
the curious fact that both the Greek and the Latin language
possess two verbs to designate what we uniformly call “to act.”
The two Greek words are apXElv; to begin, to lead, and, finally,
to rule; and npa:r1’Elv: to carry something through. The corre
sponding Latin verbs are agere: to set something in motion; and
gerere, which is hard to translate and somehow means the en
during and supporting continuation of past acts whose results
are the res gestae, the deeds and events we call historical. In
both instances action occurs in two different stages; its first
stage is a beginning by which something new comes into the
world. The Greek word aPXElv which covers beginning, lead
ing, ruling, that is, the outstanding qualities of the free man,
bears witness to an experience in which being free and the ca
pacity to begin something new coincided. Freedom, as we
would say today, was experienced in spontaneity. The manifold
meaning of aPXEl v indicates the following: only those could be
gin something new who were already rulers (i.e., household
heads who ruled over slaves and family) and had thus liberated
themselves from the necessities of life for enterprises in distant
lands or citizenship in the polis; in either case, they no longer
ruled, but were rulers among rulers, moving among their peers,
whose help they enlisted as leaders in order to begin something
new, to start a new enterprise; for only with the help of others
could the apxUJv, the ruler, beginner and leader, really act,
n{Xi,nElv, carry through whatever he had started to do.
In Latin, to be free and to begin are also interconnected,
,
I
WHAT IS FREEDOM? 165 1
though in a different way. Roman freedom was a legacy be !
queathed by the founders of Rome to the Roman people; their
freedom was tied to the beginning their forefathers had estab
lished by founding the city, whose affairs the descendants had
to manage, whose consequences they had to bear, and whose
foundations they had to “augment.” All these together are the
res gestae of the Roman republic. Roman historiography there
fore, essentially as political as Greek historiography, never was
content with the mere narration of great deeds and events; un
like Thucydides or Herodotus, the Roman historians always
felt bound to the beginning of Roman history, because this be
ginning contained the authentic element of Roman freedom and
thus made their history political; whatever they had to relate,
they started ab urbe condita, with the foundation of the city,
the guaranty of Roman freedom.
I have already mentioned that the ancient concept of freedom
played no role in Greek philosophy precisely because of its ex
clusively political origin. Roman writers, it is true, rebelled oc
casionally against the anti-political tendencies of the Socratic
school but their strange lack of philosophic talent apparently
prevented their finding a theoretical concept of freedom which
could have been adequate to their own experiences and to the
great institutions of liberty present in the Roman res publica. If
the history of ideas were as consistent as its historians some
times imagine, we should have even less hope of finding a valid
political idea of freedom in Augustine, the great Christian
thinker who in fact introduced Paul’s free will, along with its
perplexities, into the history of philosophy. Yet we find in Au
gustine not only the discussion of freedom as liberum arbi
trium, though this discussion became decisive for the tradition,
but also an entirely differently conceived notion which charac
teristically appears in his only political treatise, in De Civitate
Dei. In the City of God Augustine, as is only natural, speaks
more from the background of specifically Roman experiences
than in any of his other writings, and freedom is conceived
there not as an inner human disposition but as a character of
human existence in the world. Man does not possess freedom
so much as he, or better his coming into the world, is equated
BETWEEN PAST AND FUTURE
166
with the appearance of freedom in the universe; man is free be
cause he is a beginning and was so created after the universe
had already come into existence: [Initium] ut esset, creatus est
homo, ante quem nemo fuit. 22 In the birth of each man this ini
tial beginning is reaffirmed, because in each instance something
new comes into an already existing world which will continue
to exist after each individual’s death. Because he is a beginning,
man can begin; to be human and to be free are one and the
same. God created man in order to introduce into the world the
faculty of beginning: freedom.
The strong anti-political tendencies of early Christianity are so
familiar that the notion of a Christian thinker’s having been the
first to formulate the philosophical implications of the ancient
political idea of freedom strikes us as almost paradoxical. The
only explanation that comes to mind is that Augustine was a Ro
man as well as a Christian, and that in this part of his work he
formulated the central political experience of Roman antiquity,
which was that freedom qua beginning became manifest in the
act of foundation. Yet I am convinced that this impression would
considerably change if the sayings of Jesus of Nazareth were
taken more seriously in their philosophic implications. We find in
these parts of the New Testament an extraordinary understand
ing of freedom, and particularly of the power inherent in human
freedom; but the human capacity which corresponds to this
power, which, in the words of the Gospel, is capable of removing
mountains, is not will but faith. The work of faith, actually its
product, is what the gospels called “miracles,” a word with
many meanings in the New Testament and difficult to under
stand. We can neglect the difficulties here and refer only to those
passages where miracles are clearly not supernatural events but
only what all miracles, those performed by men no less than
those performed by a divine agent, always must be, namely, in
terruptions of some natural series of events, of some automatic
process, in whose context they constitute the wholly unexpected.
No doubt human life, placed on the earth, is surrounded by
automatic processes-by the natural processes of the earth,
which, in turn, are surrounded by cosmic processes, and we
ourselves are driven by similar forces insofar as we too are a
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WHAT IS FREEDOM? I67
part of organic nature. Our political life, moreover, despite its
being the realm of action, also takes place in the midst of pro
cesses which we call historical and which tend to become as au
tomatic as natural or cosmic processes, although they were
started by men. The truth is that automatism is inherent in all
processes, no matter what their origin may be-which is why
no single act, and no single event, can ever, once and for all, de
liver and save a man, or a nation, or mankind. It is in the nature
of the automatic processes to which man is subject, but within
and against which he can assert himself through action, that
they can only spell ruin to human life. Once man-made, histor
ical processes have become automatic, they are no less ruinous
than the natural life process that drives our organism and which
in its own terms, that is, biologically, ‘leads from being to non
being, from birth to death. The historical sciences know only
too well such cases of petrified and hopelessly declining civi
lizations where doom seems foreordained, like a biological ne
cessity, and since such historical processes of stagnation can
last and creep on for centuries, they even occupy by far the
largest space in recorded history; the periods of being free ha ve
always been relatively short in the history of mankind.
What usually remains intact in the epochs of petrification
and foreordained doom is the faculty of freedom itself, 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. But so long as this source remains hidden,
freedom is not a worldly, tangible reality; that is, it is not politi
cal. Because the source of freedom remains present even when
political life has become petrified and political action impotent
to interrupt automatic processes, freedom can so easily be mis
taken for an essentially nonpolitical phenomenon; in such cir
cumstances, freedom is not experienced as a mode of being
with its own kind of “virtue” and virtuosity, but as a supreme
gift which only man, of all earthly creatures, seems to have re
ceived, of which we can find traces and signs in almost all his
activities, but which, nevertheless, develops fully only when ac
tion has created its own worldly space where it can come out of
hiding, as it were, and make its appearance.
169
168 BETWEEN PAST AND FUTURE
Every act, seen from the perspective not of the agent but of
the process in whose framework it occurs and whose automa
tism it interrupts, is a “miracle”-that is, something which
could not be expected. If it is true that action and beginning are
essentially the same, it follows that a capacity for performing
miracles must likewise be within the range of human faculties.
This sounds stranger than it actually is. It is in the very nature
of every new beginning that it breaks into the world as an “in
finite improbability,” and yet it is precisely this infinitely improb
able which actually constitutes the very texture of everything we
call real. Our whole existence rests, after all, on a chain of mira
cles, as it were-the coming into being of the earth, the devel
opment of organic life on it, the evolution of mankind out of
the animal species. For from the viewpoint of the processes in
the universe and in nature, and their statistically overwhelming
probabilities, the coming into being of the earth out of cosmic
processes, the formation of organic life out of inorganic pro
cesses, the evolution of man, finally, out of the processes of or
ganic life are all “infinite improbabilities,” they are “miracles”
in everyday language. It is because of this element of the “mirac
ulous” present in all reality that events, no matter how well an
ticipated in fear or hope, strike us with a shock of surprise once
they have come to pass. The very impact of an event is never
wholly explicable; its factuality transcends in principle all antic
ipation. The experience which tells us that events are miracles is
neither arbitrary nor sophisticated; it is, on the contrary, most
natural and, indeed, in ordinary life almost commonplace.
Without this commonplace experience, the part assigned by re
ligion to supernatural miracles would be well-nigh incompre
hensible.
I chose the example of natural processes which are inter
rupted by the advent of some “infinite improbability” in order
to illustrate that what we call real in ordinary experience has
mostly come into existence through coincidences which are
stranger than fiction. Of course the example has its limitations
and cannot be simply applied to the realm of human affairs. It
would be sheer superstition to hope for miracles, for the “infi
nitely improbable,” in the context of automatic historical or
WHAT IS FREEDOM?
political processes, although even this can never be completely
excluded. History, in contradistinction to nature, is full of
events; here the miracle of accident and infinite improbability
occurs so frequently that it seems strange to speak of miracles
at all. But the reason for this frequency is merely that historical
processes are created and constantly interrupted by human ini
tiative, by the initium man is insofar as he is an acting being.
Hence it is not in the least superstitious, it is even a counsel of
realism, to look for the unforeseeable and unpredictable, to be
prepared for and to expect “miracles” in the political realm.
And the more heavily the scales are weighted in favor of disas
ter, the more miraculous will the deed done in freedom appear;
for it is disaster, not salvation, which always happens automat
ically and therefore always must appear to be irresistible.
Objectively, that is, seen from the outside and without taking
into account that man is a beginning and a beginner, the chances
that tomorrow will be like yesterday are always overwhelming.
Not quite so overwhelming, to be sure, but very nearly so as the
chances were that no earth would ever rise out of cosmic occur
rences, that no life would develop out of inorganic processes,
and that no man would emerge out of the evolution of animal
life. The decisive difference between the “infinite improbabili
ties'” on which the reality of our earthly life rests and the mirac
ulous character inherent in those events which establish
historical reality is that, in the realm of human affairs, we
know the author of the “miracles.” It is men who perform
them-men who because they have received the twofold gift of
freedom and action can establish a reality of their own.
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