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autonomy. Thus, she saw politics not merely as irreducibl e to socio–
economic forces, but a lso as unhampered by a ll normative or instru–
mental constraints as well, a position often known as "decisionism .."
As its own end , politics should no t be conceived as a means to anything
else whether it be domination, wealth, public welfare, or social justice:
in sho rt ,
politique pour la politique.
Or as Baumler once put it,
"Acti on does not mean 'deciding in favor of' ... for that presupposes
that one knows in favor of what one is deciding; rather action means
'setting o ff in a direction.... '
It
is really secondary to decide in favor of
something that I have come to know." For Bauml er's "setting off in a
direction," Han nah Arendt subs titutes " the sheer capacity to begin,"
but the meaning is essentia ll y the same. The existentialist roots of her
position are clear in her discussion of Heidegger's stress on nothing–
ness in her 1946 essay, "Wha t is Existenz Philosoph y?"
The peculiar fascination, which the thought of the Nothing has
exercised on modern philosophy, is not simply characteristic of
Nihilism.
If
we look at the problem of Nothing in our context of a
philosophy revolting aga inst philosophy as pure contemplation,
then we see it as an effOrl to become "Master of Being" and thereby to
question philosophically in sllch a manner that we progress immedi–
ately to the deed; thus the thought that Being is really the Nothing
has a tremendous advantage. Basing himself on this, Man can
imagi ne himself, can relate himself to Being that is given, no less
than the Creator before the creation of the world, which, as we know ,
was crea ted out of nothing.
Although she was far less certain about the will as the motor of
political acti on than the decisionists were, Miss Arendt shared their
yearn ing to free politics from a ll extraneous considerations : "Action , to
be free, must be free from motive on one side, from its intended goal as
a predictable effect on the other." In so arguing she seemed to conclude
that action sho uld be free of even purely political goals (e.g., persuad–
ing one's oppon ents) as well as nonpoliti cal ones, which is characte ris–
tic of the binds into which she sometimes fell. Politics is also different,
she argued, from violence, which is a lways instrumental in na ture. It is
moreover unlike authority, which relies on the coercion, albeit legiti–
mized, of religion traditi on , or o ther nonpolitical factors. In fact ,
au thority was a Roman invention , the Greek
polis
hav ing operated on
the principle of persuas ion ra ther than coercion.
If
politics has any
ana logy ou tside itself, it is to the performing a rts where virtuosity is its
own ephemera l end. "The theater is the political art par excell ence;
on ly there is the political sphere of human life transposed into art. By
