The Life of the Mind

by Hannah Arendt

  The legendary hiatus between a no-more and a not-yet clearly indicated that freedom would not be the automatic result of liberation, that the end of the old is not necessarily the beginning of the new, that the notion of an all-powerful time continuum is an illusion. Tales of a transitory period— from bondage to freedom, from disaster to salvation—were all the more appealing because the legends chiefly concerned the deeds of great leaders, persons of world-historic significance who appeared on the stage of history precisely during such gaps of historical time. All those who, pressed by exterior circumstances or motivated by radical Utopian thought-trains, were not satisfied to change the world by the gradual reform of an old order (and this rejection of the gradual was precisely what transformed the men of action of the eighteenth century, the first century of a fully secularized intellectual elite, into the men of the revolutions) were almost logically forced to accept the possibility of a hiatus in the continuous flow of temporal sequence.

  We remember Kant's embarrassment in "dealing ... with a power of spontaneously beginning a series of successive things or states," i.e., with an "absolute beginning," which, because of the unbreakable sequence of the time continuum, will nevertheless always remain "the continuation of a preceding series."127 The word "revolution" was supposed to dissolve this embarrassment when, during the last decades of the eighteenth century, it changed its old astronomical meaning and came to signify an unprecedented event. In France this even led to a short-lived "revolution" of the calendar: in October 1793, it was decided that the proclamation of the Republic was a new beginning of human history; as this had happened in September 1792, the new calendar declared September 1793 to be the inauguration of the Year Two. This attempt to localize an absolute beginning in time was a failure, and probably not only because of the strong anti-Christian cast of the new calendar (all Christian holidays, including Sunday, were abolished, and a fictitious division of a thirty-day month into units of ten days was instituted; the tenth day of each decade was to replace the weekly Sunday as a day of rest). Its usage fizzled out around 1805, a date hardly remembered even by professional historians.

  In the case of the American Revolution, the old legendary notion of a temporal hiatus between the old order and a new era seemed much better suited than a calendar "revolution" to bridge the gap between a time continuum of ordered succession and the spontaneous start of something new. Indeed, it would be tempting to use die rise of the United States of America as a historical example of the truth of old legends, like a verification of Locke's "in the beginning all the world was America." The colonial period would be interpreted as the transition period from bondage to freedom—the hiatus between leaving England and the Old World and the establishment of freedom in the New.

  The parallel with the tales is astoundingly close: in both instances the act of foundation had come about through the deeds and the sufferings of exiles. This is true even of the Biblical tale as told in Exodus; Canaan, the promised land, is by no means the original Jewish home, but the land of the Jews' former "sojourn" (Exodus 6:4). Virgil insists still more strongly on the theme of exile: Aeneas and his companions were "driven ... to distant places of exile in waste lands," weeping at leaving "the shores and the havens ... where once was Troy," exiles "uncertain whither the fates carry us or where a resting-place is given."128

  The founders of the American Republic were well acquainted with Roman as well as Biblical antiquity and they may have taken from the old legends the decisive distinction between mere liberation and actual freedom, but nowhere do they use the hiatus as a possible basis for explaining what they were doing. There was a simple factual reason for that: though the land eventually was to become a "resting-place" for many and an asylum for exiles, they themselves had not setded there as exiles but as colonists. Up to the last, when conflict with England proved to be inevitable, they had no trouble recognizing the political authority of the mother-country. They prided themselves on being British subjects, until the momentum of their rebellion against an unjust government—"taxation without representation"—had carried them into a full-fledged "revolution," a change in the form of government itself, and the constitution of a Republic as the only government, they now felt, fit to rule in die land of the free.

  This was the moment when those who had started as men of action and had been transformed into men of revolution changed Virgil's great line "Magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo" ("the great order of the ages is [re] born as it was in the beginning")129 to the Novus Ordo Seclorum (the "new order"), which we still find on our dollar bills. For the Founding Fathers, the variation implied an admission that the great effort to reform and restore the body politic to its initial integrity (to found "Rome anew") had led to the entirely unexpected and very different task of constituting something entirely new—founding a "new Rome."

  When men of action, men who wanted to change the world, became aware that such a change might actually postulate a new order of the ages, the start of something unprecedented, they began to look to history for help. They set about rethinking such thought-things as the Pentateuch and the Aeneid, foundation legends that might tell them how to solve the problem of beginning—a problem because beginning's very nature is to carry in itself an element of complete arbitrariness. It was only now that they confronted the abyss of freedom, knowing that whatever would be done now could just as well have been left undone and believing, too, with clarity and precision, that once something is done it cannot be undone, that human memory telling the story will survive repentance as well as destruction.

  This applies only to the realm of action, the "many-in-one of human beings,"130 that is, to communities where the "We" is properly established for its journey through historical time. The foundation legends, with their hiatus between liberation and the constitution of freedom, indicate the problem without solving it. They point to the abyss of nothingness that opens up before any deed that cannot be accounted for by a reliable chain of cause and effect and is inexplicable in Aristotelian categories of potentiality and actuality. In the normal time continuum every effect immediately turns into a cause of future developments, but when the causal chain is broken—which occurs after liberation has been achieved, because liberation, though it may be freedom's conditio sine qua non, is never the conditio per quarn that causes freedom—there is nothing left for the "beginner" to hold on to. The thought of an absolute beginning—creatio ex nihilo— abolishes the sequence of temporality no less than does the thought of an absolute end, now rightly referred to as "thinking the unthinkable."

  We know the Hebrew solution for this perplexity. It assumes a Creator-God who creates time along with the universe and who as legislator remains outside His creation, and outside of time as the One "who is who he is" (the literal translation of "Jehovah" is "I am who I am") "from eternity to eternity." This concept of eternity, having been framed by a temporal creature, is the absolute of temporality. It is what is left of time when time is "absolved"—liberated from its relativeness—time as it would appear to an outside observer not subject to its laws and by definition unrelated by virtue of his One-ness. To the extent that the universe and everything in it can be traced back to the region of this absolute One-ness, the One-ness is rooted in something that may be beyond the reasoning of temporal men but still possesses a kind of rationale of its own: it can explain, give a logical account of, the existentially inexplicable. And the need for explanation is nowhere stronger than in the presence of an unconnected new event breaking into the continuum, the sequence of chronological time.

  This seems to be why men who were much too "enlightened" to still believe in the Hebrew-Christian Creator-God turned with rare unanimity to pseudo-religious language when they had to deal with the problem of foundation as the beginning of a "new order of the ages." We have the "appeal to God in Heaven," deemed necessary by Locke for all who embarked on the novelty of a community emerging from "the state of nature"; we have Jefferson's 'laws of nature and nature's God,"
John Adams' "great Legislator of the Universe," Robespierre's "immortal Legislator," his cult of a "Supreme Being."

  Their explanations clearly work by analogy: just as God "in the beginning created the heavens and the earth," remaining outside His Creation and prior to it, so the human legislator-created in God's own image and therefore able to imitate God-when he lays the foundations of a human community, creates the condition for all future political life and historical development.

  To be sure, neither the Greeks nor the Romans knew anything of a Creator-God whose unrelated One-ness could serve as the paradigmatic emblem for an absolute beginning. But the Romans at least, who dated their history from the foundation of Rome in 753, seem to have been aware that the very nature of this business demanded a transmundane principle Otherwise Cicero could not have held that "human excellence nowhere so closely approaches the paths of the gods as in the founding of new and the preserving of already founded communities."131 For Cicero as for the Greeks, from whom he derived his philosophy, the founders were not gods but divine men, and the greatness of their deed was to have established a law that became the font of authority, an immutable standard against which all positive laws and decrees enacted by men could be measured and from which they received their legitimacy.

  Harking back to religious beliefs right in the middle of the Age of Enlightenment might have sufficed if there had been no more at stake than the authority of a new law; and indeed it is striking to find explicit mentions of a "future state of rewards and punishments" inserted into all American state constitutions, although we find no allusion to a hereafter in the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution of the United States. The motives for such desperate attempts to hold fast to a faith that in reality would be unable to survive the co-tem-poraneous emancipation of the secular realm from the Church were entirely pragmatic and highly practical. In his speech on the Supreme Being and the immortality of the soul to the National Convention on May 7, 1794, Robespierre asks "Quel avantage trouves-tu à persuader l'homme qu'une force aveugle préside à ses destins, et frappe au hasard le crime et la vertu?" ("What advantage do you see in persuading men to believe that a blind force presides over their destinies, striking crime and virtue at random?"), and in the Discourses on Davila, John Adams speaks in the same curiously rhetorical way of "the most disconsolate of all creeds, that men are but fireflies, and that this all is without a father...[which would] make murder itself as indifferent as shooting a plover, and die extermination of the Rohilla nation as innocent as the swallowing of mites on a morsel of cheese."132

  In brief, what we find here is a short-lived effort on the part of secular government to retain not the Hebrew-Christian faith but political instruments of rule that had been so very effective at protecting the medieval communities against criminality. In retrospect it may look almost like a tricky device of the educated few to persuade the many not to follow on the slippery road to enlightenment. In any case, the attempt totally failed (at the beginning of our century few indeed were left who still believed in "a future state of rewards and punishments") and was probably foredoomed to failure. Nevertheless the loss of belief and, with it, of a good deal of the old panic-stricken fear of death has certainly contributed to the massive invasion of criminality into the political life of highly civilized communities that our own century has witnessed. There is an odd built-in helplessness about the legal systems of entirely secularized communities; their capital punishment, the death penalty, only gives a date to and accelerates a fate all mortals are subject to.

  In any event, wherever men of action, driven by the very momentum of the liberation process, began to prepare in earnest for an entirely new beginning, the novus ordo seclorum, instead of turning to the Bible ("In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth"), they ransacked the archives of Roman antiquity for "ancient prudence" to guide them in the establishment of a Republic, that is, of a government "of laws and not of men" (Harrington). What they needed was not only an acquaintance with a new form of government but also a lesson in the art of foundation, in how to overcome the perplexities inherent in every beginning. They were quite aware of course of the bewildering spontaneity of a free act. As they knew, an act can only be called free if it is not affected or caused by anything preceding it and yet, insofar as it immediately turns into a cause of whatever follows, it demands a justification which, if it is to be successful, will have to show the act as the continuation of a preceding series, that is, renege on the very experience of freedom and novelty.

  And what Roman antiquity had to teach them in this respect was quite reassuring and consoling. We do not know why the Romans, in the third century B.C. or perhaps even earlier, decided to trace their descent not from Romulus but from Aeneas, the man from Troy who had brought "Ilium and her conquered household gods into Italy" and thus became "the fount of the Roman race." But it is obvious that this fact was of great importance not only to Virgil and his contemporaries in Augustus' time, but also to all those who, starting with Machiavelli, had gone to Roman antiquity to learn how to conduct human affairs without the help of a transcendent God. What men of action were learning in the archives of Roman antiquity was the original purport of a phenomenon with which, curiously enough, Western civilization had been acquainted ever since the end of the Roman empire and Christianity's definite triumph.

  Far from being new, the phenomenon of re-birth or renaissance, from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries onward, had dominated the cultural development of Europe and had been preceded by a whole series of minor renascences that terminated the few centuries of what really were "dark ages," between the sack of Rome and the Carolingian renaissance. Each of these re-births, consisting in a Revival of Learning and centering on Roman and to a lesser degree Greek antiquity, had altered and revitalized only the rather restricted milieus of the educated elite inside and outside monasteries. It was not till the Age of Enlightenment—that is, in a now completely secularized world—that the revival of antiquity ceased to be a matter of erudition and responded to highly practical political purposes. For that enterprise the only predecessor had been the lonely figure, Machiavelli.

  The problem men of action were being called upon to solve was the peiplexity inherent in the task of foundation, and since for them the paradigmatic example of a successful foundation was bound to be Rome, it was of the greatest importance to them to find that even the foundation of Rome, as the Romans themselves had understood it, was not an absolutely new beginning. According to Virgil, it was the resurgence of Troy and the re-establishment of a city-state that had preceded Rome. Thus the thread of continuity and tradition, demanded by the very continuum of time and the faculty of memory (the innate lest-we-forget, which seems to belong to a temporal creature as much as the ability to form projects for the future) had never been broken. Seen in this light, the foundation of Rome was the re-birth of Troy, the first, as it were, of the series of re-nascences that have formed the history of European culture and civilization.

  We need only recall Virgil's most famous political poem, the Fourth Eclogue, to understand how vital it was for the Roman view of their state to interpret constitution and foundation in terms of the re-establishment of a beginning which, as an absolute beginning, remains perpetually shrouded in mystery. For if in the reign of Augustus "the great cycle of periods is born anew" (as all standard modern-language translations render Virgil's great line "Magnus ah integro saeclorum nascitur ordo"), it is precisely because this "order of the ages" is not new but only the return of something antecedent. To Augustus, who in the Aeneid is supposed to start this re-birth, a promise is even given that he will lead the way still further back and "again establish the ages of gold in Latium over the fields that once were the realm of Saturn," i.e., the Italic land before the arrival of the Trojans.133

  At any rate, the order invoked in the Fourth Eclogue is great by virtue of going back to and being inspired by an earlier beginning: "Now returns the Maid, returns the reign of Saturn
." And yet the way back, seen from the viewpoint of those now living, is a true beginning: "now from high heaven a new generation is sent down."134 This poem, no doubt, is a nativity hymn, a song in praise of a child's birth and the arrival of a nova progenies, a new generation. It has long been misunderstood as a prophecy of salvation through a theos sōtēr, a savior god, or at least as the expression of some pre-Christian religious yearning. But, far from predicting the arrival of a divine child, the poem is an affirmation of the divinity of birth as such; if one wishes to extract a general meaning from it, this could only be the poet's belief that the world's potential salvation lies in the very fact that the human species regenerates itself constantly and forever. But that meaning is not explicit: all the poet himself says is that every child born into the continuity of Roman history must learn "heroum laudes et facta parentis" "the glories of the heroes and the deeds of the fathers," so as to be able to do what all Roman boys were supposed to do—help "rule the world that his fathers' virtues have set at peace."135

  In our context, what matters is that the notion of foundation, of counting time ab urbe condita, is at the very center of Roman historiography along with the no less profoundly Roman notion that all such foundations—taking place exclusively in the realm of human affairs, where men enact a tale to tell, to remember, and preserve—are re-establishments and re-constitutions, not absolute beginnings.