Time and Philosophy by McCumber John

Author:McCumber, John [McCumber, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-317-54791-4
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

SPEECH AND ACTION

Together with her distinction between work and labour, for which it furnishes the basis, Arendt’s discussion of speech and action has been the most influential part of her thought. Speech and action are, for her, closely related and exhibit, in differing degrees, the two traits most distinctive of humanity itself: our capacity for self-revelation and our capacity to initiate new courses of events.

Everything, of course, differs from everything else. But humans are special because we can formulate our distinction from others and display it to those others. A cat acts, basically, like any other cat; but a human being, because of its mortality, wants to act as an individual – that is, differently from any other human being: “Speech and action reveal this unique distinctness. Through them, men distinguish themselves instead of being merely distinct. they are the modes in which human being appear to each other, not indeed as physical objects, but qua men” (HC 176).

Action is self-revealing, as Dante recognized (HC 175), at least to the extent that any actions reveals the intentions of the actor; that is why identifying yourself as the performer of a specific action means taking responsibility for it, rather than dismissing it as mere clumsiness or denying it as somehow compelled. But it is obvious, says Arendt, that self-revelation occurs more completely in speech than in action; it is easier to determine “who someone is” from her words than from her deeds, which are often ambiguous. Words thus complete the revelation of self brought about in acting:

The action [one] begins is humanly disclosed by the word, and though [one’s] deed can be perceived in its brute physical appearance, without verbal accompaniment, it becomes relevant only through the spoken word in which [one] identifies [oneself] as the actor, announcing what [one] does, has done, and intends to do.

(HC 179)

Just who is revealed in one’s speech and actions is, however, generally unclear: not only are actions often ambiguous, in that any of a number of possible intentions may have produced them, but in both action and speech we are often unclear even to ourselves:

It is more than likely that the “who,” which appears so clearly and unmistakably to others, remains hidden from the person himself, like the daimōn in Greek religion which accompanies each man throughout his life, looking over his shoulder from behind and thus visible only to those he encounters.

(HC 179–80)

Speech and action must therefore be witnessed from elsewhere in order to do what they are supposed to do, that is, reveal the nature of the actor to others who can remember it or see that it is remembered:

[I]n acting and speaking, men show who they are, actively reveal their unique personal identities and thus make their appearance in the human world, while their physical identities appear without any activity of their own in the unique shape of the body and sound of the voice.

(HC 179)

Human diversity is therefore the condition of both speech and action. Such diversity requires both equality (sameness) and distinction (HC 175–6).

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