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etymo logical significance of a word. This leads j ay to the erroneous
conclusion tha t Arendt thought tha t "n ew beginnings out of no thing"
were the h eart of politi ca l acti on . A cl ose look at Arendt 's discussion on
the verbs " to begin " and " to act" in her essay " Wh at is Freedom?"
reveals tha t her concern for words is n ot etymolog ica l, but historical in
terms o f their use by past writers and hi storical actors. Furthermore,
her noti on of beginning rests on a consistent view of human n ature,
which , as she wrote in
Th e Human Condition,
contains the capacity
for contempl ation and politi cal acti o n as axi oms. Beginnings happen
out o f man , which is wha t makes them miracul ous-no t, as j ay
suggests, "out of no thing ." Arendt 's implicit psychology (psychology
is consistentl y absent from her con siderations in a formal sense) is more
akin to Rou sseau' s (des pite her di strust of compassion as a political
virtue) than to Locke's.
j ay compares Arendt
to
Schmidt and Bauml er without much
textua l support from Arendt , but wi th a key mi sinterpreta tion of her
view of "inner emi grati on." Arendt's interes t in inner emigra tion has
little to do with her use of j aspers's concept of inner emigration as an
altern ative to H eidegger's sympa thy with fascism . Ra ther, inner emi–
gration is a stance for Arendt tha t is appropriate onl y to the worldl ess,
to
a pari ah conditi on whi ch shuts out political acti on in the public
realm.
It
is legitimate in the end a ni y for the pari ah and in conditions
o f po litical coercion and terror. In "On Humanity in Dark T imes,"
Arendt is quite critical of the po litical " inner emi gra tion " among
German s in the years pri or to the seizure of power by the Nazis.
In j ay's extensive di scuss ion of Arendt's separati on of the political
from the nonpo litical, the key moments of the argument quote from
Bauml er rather than Arendt. j ay takes her concern for the "sheer
capacity to begin " out of the context of her di scuss ion of freedom . The
text j ay chooses is part of a ti ghtl y argued secti on of her essay on
freedom in which she contras ts po litical extern al fr eedom with the
interna l concept of freedom es tablish ed by Christian traditi on. Arendt
di scusses politi cal external freedom , as a matter not of will or in–
tell ect, but of the fact of action .
If
j ay were to follow her argument as
she presented it, he would soon discover tha t his major contention tha t
Arendt claims tha t "acti on should be free of even political goals" is
erron eous, for Arendt p roceeds in tha t essay, once she has es tabli shed
politi cal freedom as acti on , to assert the necessity for virtue, for
p rin ciples of acti on which can provide action with the transcendent
public purposes without whi ch action would be meaningless. j ay
overlooks Arendt 's lifelon g debt to Kant and her di stinction , especially
in her di scussion o f freedom, of formal logical considera ti ons, from
