For Arendt, the highest political value is courage, which is indispensable for political action. She points out that whilst for Thomas Hobbes safety and security were the highest values, these values lead to a retreat inwards.
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.” (p.160)įor Arendt, freedom is never internal, never a retreat from the world, never a freedom of will (which is the mainstream, traditional idea of freedom), but instead a freedom to act.
She attributes the idea of freedom of the will to Christianity, St Paul and Augustine. Freedom as the will is a modern invention. Then she goes on to write that the most dangerous difficulty is ‘ that thought itself, in its theoretical as well as its pre-theoretical form, makes freedom disappear.’ (p.144)Īll of this emerges because of a misunderstanding of what freedom is it comes from thinking of freedom as inner freedom, freedom of the will, but Arendt says that this is not what freedom is about. Hence freedom turns out to be a mirage….” (p.142) 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 ascertainment. “In all fields of scientific and theoretical endeavor …. Does this mean that freedom is an illusion?
Through your actions people notice you and you become meaningful.īut Arendt says, science tells us that everything has a cause, so everything is determined. Freedom is the reason men live together in politics. This chapter is a companion essay to the preceding chapter, What is Authority? in Hannah Arendt’s book, ‘Between Past and Future’.įor Arendt, the problem of freedom is the problem of how human beings live together it is political freedom, the freedom to start something new, the freedom to be human.
Between Past and Future: What is Freedom?
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