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the fact of slavery. Arendt consistently wrote interpretive history,
around a pressing issue, concept or category, using the past with the
intention to spur action and thought towards what she regarded as a
desirable end. The stress on external rather than internal freedom, on
political action as a separate potential of man, was part of her attempt
to combat a growing alienation within the industrial affluent West, an
alienation explicit in work, in the
animallaborans,
an alienation from
a bureaucratized life increasingly devoid of a meaningful
telos.
The
polis,
and later, in
On Revolution,
the American Revolution,
both lent themselves to an interpretation as moments in which men
acted upon virtue, upon principle, and created freedom and political
equality for an existence with meaning beyond material needs.
Arendt's view of political action as separate was a reading of history
which sought to redress the momentum of two long evolving historical
patterns: I ) the redefinition of man's fundamental nature, from that of
a political being to one as a social animal (for Arendt, a misreading of
Aristotle); and 2) the internalization of meaning, towards the interior
d~alogue
of "me-myself " characteristic of St. Augustine and the
subsequent Christian tradition of the theology of personal conscience.
The practice of political action in the public realm might combat these
historical trends.
Jay mistakenl y assumes lhat Arendl's lheory of political action is
without a profound concern for ends. He supposes that it is a theory of
action for action's sake, not surprisingly then, he considers Arendt to
have been sympathetic with Lessing's supposed "relativism." How–
ever, Arendt's admiration for the courage to act in the political, public
realm always carried with it the concern for principle, for a commit–
ment to ends beyond private self-interest. Such courage is what she
called virtue. That capacity for action on principle constituted evi–
dence for the miracle of beginning, for the potential of renewal which
man possessed even in extreme circumstances. What Jay sees as
relativistic is Arendt's ultimate hesitation, shared with Lessing, not, for
example, to die for the truth, nor to sustain convictions, but rather to
arrogantly assume no room for error, for challenging discourse, and for
pluralism. Arendt ends her 1958 speech "On Humanity in Dark
Times" with Lessing's statement that there is and always will remain a
distinction between man 's sense of truth and the inscrutable truth
possessed only by God. Jay's notion that Arendt admired Lessing as a
relativist is a trivialization not only of Arendt but of Lessing as well,
not only of text but of context. Arendt was accepting a public prize
with a speech to a German audience only thirteen years after the
Holocaust. As she said at the outset of that 1958 Hamburg speech, her
