Inspired by Hannah Arendt
Without acting and speaking, we can’t be men. It’s a condition of being human. Without speech and action, men is numb to the world. We do not live in the world in the condition of humanity without speaking and action. Action is the second birth into the human world. We can be men without working and labouring — the main fundamental categories of the vita activa (labour, work, action). However, without work, art, poetry, storytelling, it would not be possible for action to be remembered and thus to create genuinely human lives. Unfolding this with an epigraph by Isak Denisen: “All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.”
To be fully human, one needs to act and speak. A self-disclosure of who is opposed to what one is. Following this logic, I only am a person and become a person in the human world; insofar stories are told; I only have stories told about me insofar I act and insert myself into the world. We appear in front of one another in plurality and equality in the web of human relationships. This prevalence is a condition of acting and speaking and thus for politics. We cannot have plurality without equality. Plurality is the conditions of politics and implies the otherness and uniqueness of organic living creatures. Uniqueness separates one human being from another. Speech and action reveal this unique distinction where men distinguish themselves — without being merely distinct — in the private realm, where we have individual perspectives based upon our experiences.
Human plurality has a character of distinction and equality. The unique difference that speech and acting reveal in the world. “To be free and to act are the same” (Arendt, 1958). We only become free in acting. Freedom means to act in the world with others. Freedom means acting and initiating (to begin, ‘anfangen’) in the world with others. Action requires the courage to leave the private realm and anonymity, take the risk to engage in the public realm with people who are meaningfully distinct to one’s self. Thus it’s about democracy, where one participates in speech and action to persuade others who disagree with oneself.
It reminds us that the capacity to act is present even in circumstances where it can not be expected. This startling unexpectedness, therefore, appears in the guise of a miracle. All real politics is miraculous. The change will emerge as long as there is humanity, action and politics.
Sources:
Arendt, Hannah (1958). The Human Condition. 2nd ed., University of Chicago Press, 2018.
