30
PARTISAN REVIEW
effective springs of action," said Hegel (in
The Philosophy of History),
and "the facts of known history" taken by themselves, said Vico, "pos–
sess neither a common basis nor continuity nor coherence." From the
viewpoint of achievement, on the other hand, action appears to be at
once more futile and more frustrating than the activities of laboring
and of producing objects. Human deeds, unless they are remembered,
are the most futile and perishable things on earth; they hardly outlast
the activity itself and certainly by themselves can never aspire to
that permanence which even ordinary use-objects possess when they
outlast their maker's life, not to mention works of art, which speak
to us over the centuries. Human action, projected into a web of
relationships where many and opposing ends are pursued, almost
never fulfills its original intention; no act can ever be recognized by
its author as his own with the same happy certainty with which a
piece of work of any kind can be recognized by its maker. Whoever
begins to act knows that he has started something whose end he can
never foretell, if only because his own deed has already changed
everything and made it even more unpredictable. That is what Kant
had in mind when he spoke of the "melancholy haphazardness"
(trostlose Ungefaehr),
which is so striking in the record of political
history. "Action:" said Nietzsche, "one does not know its origin, one
does not know its consequences: -therefore, does action possess any
value at all?"
(Wille zur Macht,
No. 291) Were not the old philoso–
phers right, and was it not madness to expect any meaning to arise
out of the realm of human affairs?
For a long time it seemed that these inadequacies and per–
plexities within the
vita activa
could be solved by ignoring the pe–
culiarities of action and by insisting upon the "meaningfulness" of the
process of history in its entirety, which seemed to give to the political
sphere that dignity and final redemption from "melancholy hap–
hazardness" so obviously required. History, based on the manifest as–
sumption that no matter how haphazard 8ingle actio!1s may appear in
the present and in their singularity, they inevitably lead to a se–
quence of events forming a story that can be rendered through in–
telligible narrative the moment the events are removed into the past,
became the great dimension in which men could become "recon–
ciled" with reality (Hegel), the reality of the
pragmata ton anthro–
pon,
of things which owe their existence exclusively to men. More-
