human conditions for teaching

Human Conditions for Teaching: ThePlace of Pedagogy in Arendts Vita Activa

CHRIS HIGGINS

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Background/Context: If education centrally involves self-cultivation, and the teachers ownrobust selfhood is necessary for inspiring self-cultivation in students, then teacherly self-cultivation is a necessary condition of education. But teaching is seen as a helping profes-sion, where helping others always seems, in practice if not in principle, to preclude helpingoneself. Some scholars refer to teaching as a praxis, a form of ethical/political conduct whereknowing and doing become fused, where freedom is enacted. But is this simply wishful think-ing? Perhaps, as institutionalized, teachers are a cog in a bureaucratic machine, or at bestselfless servants of their students in a noble calling. This study asks what aspects of teach-ing, if any, might nurture the teachers own quest to flourish, without thus becoming a self-ish betrayal of the role. What might it mean to speak of teaching as self-ful?Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: The philosophy of Hannah Arendtis a fruitful context in which to refine and explore this question. Arendt offers a rich typol-ogy of practical activities, distinguishing labor and work from action proper. And sheputs action at the center of her theory of education. However, it is the natality and action ofstudents that drives education, and Arendt seems to suggest that teaching itself amounts toonly labor or work. The problem is that if the teachers core project is not actional, she willgrow estranged from her own natality, and thus be incapable of recognizing and respond-ing to the natality of her students. How can we theorize teaching as action without violat-ing the spirit of Arendts compelling accounts of education and of action?Research Design: This is a theoretical paper and uses philosophical methods such as con-cept clarification and development, textual analysis, and thought experiments.Conclusions/Recommendations: Arendts conception of the classroom as mediating space,sheltered from full exposure to the public realm and the demands of action, is a sound one.However, this need not entail that teaching cannot be a form of action. The classroom medi-ates but does not entirely exclude the public. Meanwhile, action for Arendt itself involvesmediation. The classroom is a theatrical space where participants may adopt roles, but pol-itics too is theatrical for Arendt. The curriculum involves representations of aspects of the

Teachers College Record Volume 112, Number 2, February 2010, pp. 407445Copyright by Teachers College, Columbia University0161-4681

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cultural inheritance, making education akin to an ongoing (cultural) constitutional con-vention, where making is always remaking, where the polis is again called into existence byits representatives.

A teacher in search of his/her own freedom may be the onlykind of teacher who can arouse young persons to go in search oftheir own.

Maxine Greene1

And this freedom, this ripeness of self, is the indispensable ele-ment in all true teaching, simply because it speaks so compellinglyto those who hunger to be freethat is presumably to all.

William Arrowsmith2

Of the many attributes associated with transformative teaching,the most crucial ones seem to concern the teacher as a person.For it is essential to success within that tradition that teacherswho are trying to bring about transformative changes personifythe very qualities they seek to engender in their students. To thebest of their abilities, they must be living exemplars of certainvirtues or values or attitudes. The fulfillment of that requirementreaches its apex in great historical figures, like Socrates andChrist, who epitomize such a personal model; but most teachersalready know that no attitude, interest, or value can be taughtexcept by a teacher who himself or herself believes in, cares for,or cherishes whatever it is that he or she holds out for emulation.

Philip Jackson3

INTRODUCTION

In these epigraphs, we find a simple but powerful argument: (1) educa-tion is fundamentally concerned with self-cultivation; (2) achieved andongoing self-cultivation on the part of the teacher is a necessary (thoughnot sufficient) condition for fostering self-cultivation in students; andtherefore, (3) teacherly self-cultivation is a necessary condition of educa-tion. In three simple steps, we arrive at a conclusion that sounds strangeto our ears.4 Perhaps this is because we think of teaching as a helpingprofession.5 What should sound funny, though, is the very phrase helpingprofession. After all, most professions help someone in some way. Whatdistinguishes practices such as teaching, nursing, and social work is not

Human Conditions for Teaching 409

simply that they help, nor even that the needs of the client are central totheir work. When we look into the matter, it seems clear that what distin-guishes these professions is: first, that they are historically womens pro-fessions; and second, that they involve relatively high levels ofself-sacrifice. Teachers, nurses, and social workers are expected to toil atextremely difficult tasks with little daily recognition of, or even supportfor, what they do. We call something a helping profession not only whenit involves helping but also when it clearly does not involve helping one-self. If the argument in the epigraphs is correct, though, teachingrequires teachers who display a ripeness of self, teachers still in searchof their freedom, teachers who display achieved and ongoing self-cultiva-tion worth emulating. This leads us to ask whether the talk of service isin the end a description of teaching or an apology for the fact that trueteaching is extremely difficult in the context of modern schooling. Thelegacy of sexism and the feminization of teaching along with the dis-courses of helping and service conspire to obscure a crucial question foreducation: How can teaching be part of the teachers own quest to leada rich, meaningful, and excellent life?

This question arises in a fascinating way in the work of Hannah Arendt.In 1958, Arendt published The Human Condition, her argument for thecentral significance of action in human life.6 Action, as Arendtdescribes it, is a basic existential need to cultivate, enact, and disclose ourdistinctive personhood. Famously, Arendt contrasts action with thelabor and work that characterize most human activities and consumethe bulk of our lives. In The Crisis in Education, an essay published inthe same year, Arendt turns her attention to the activity of teaching.7

Here she connects the broad, existential sense of action to the specificscene of the classroom. Thus, it might seem that Arendt is the perfectphilosopher to help us develop a praxis conception of teaching, anaccount of teaching as self-enactment.

There is only one small catch. Teaching, for Arendt, is distinguished byits intimate connection to the action of students. Famously, Arendt arguesthat teachers have the task of mediating between the stock of existingconventions and what she calls the natality of the young: their capacityto initiate, surprise, and renew. The role of the teacher is thus to intro-duce the raw, natal being to the traditional world. This introduction pro-ceeds through a carefully calibrated process so that young people retaintheir capacity for future action, but the meaningful framework of existingsociety is simultaneously preserved. The possibility of future action thusrests to a large degree in the teachers hands. That action, however, iscrucially not the teachers, but rather the students eventual contributionto society.


Reading Crisis in light of The Human Condition, then, raises the ques-tion of the teachers flourishing in a full and forceful way: What is theplace of pedagogy in Arendts vita activa? Can teaching itself be a form ofaction? Or is it simply work, even labor, ennobled solely by its connectionto the future action of students? How can a teacher preserve her ownnatality if the central activity of her life is not a form of action? And howwould someone distanced from her own natality hope to recognize, pre-serve, and stimulate that quality in others? If it is to be a genuine and sat-isfying response to the students natality, it seems intuitive that teachingmust be at least partially an expression of the teachers natality.Therefore, shouldnt we expect that teaching must in some way be a kindof action in Arendts sense?

It is the task of this article to advance an argument for teaching asaction that is fundamentally sympathetic both to Arendts theory of edu-cation and to her phenomenology of practical life.

At the outset, though, we can locate three major difficulties con-fronting the claim that teaching might count as a form of action. ForArendt tells us that action occurs: (a) in public space, (b) in the presenceof peers, and (c) in the manner of energeia (Aristotles term for that modeof activity whose aim lies within its very exercise and not in a product orstate of affairs outside itself). At the same time, she tells us: (a) that theclassroom must be sheltered from the merciless glare of the publicrealm8; (b) that education is essentially and importantly an inegalitar-ian relationship between grown-ups and children, the mature and theuninitiated; and (c) that education is a deliberate activity, aiming at thesimultaneous preservation of the natality of the young and the fabric oftradition, with a definite endpoint in the youngs entry into society. Thus,my argument will require me to show: (1) that the classroom can be astage for action without exposing students prematurely to the demandsof public life; (2) that the teacher may find her teaching to be actionaleven though she acts in concert with others who are in certain keyrespects not her peers; and (3) that there are aspects of teaching that dofit the model of energeia.

In attempting to meet these three interpretive burdens, I will explorethe idea that teaching centrally involves two significant forms of media-tion. First, I will show how the classroom is like a theater where deeds aremediated. Since mediation is itself part of the nature of the deed peda-gogy can be seen as a kind of performing art that straddles the borderbetween work and action. Second, I will suggest that curriculumwhichfor Arendt means the representation of the world as it isconstitutes aform of cultural mediation.9 In representing to her students their culturalworld, the teacher mediates between past and present, amending and


reweaving our cultural constitution. Thus, teaching involves a specialform of making that is never complete, revealing itself again as an activ-ity on the border between work and action.

In offering this sympathetic but revisionist reading of Arendts majorand minor texts of 1958, I take myself to be following the lead of one ofour finest readers of Arendt, Seyla Benhabib. In her masterful TheReluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt, Benhabib offers a hermeneuticprinciple of interpretation.10 She introduces this principle in the specificcontext of those who pose the woman question in Arendt: How canArendt, herself a woman, denigrate reproductive, traditional femaleactivities and celebrate the masculine, agonistic style of politics practicedby the Greeks? The trick in working toward a feminist reading of Arendt,Benhabib says, is not only to avoid the extremes of disinterested histori-cism (which would object to bringing this question to Arendt that sheherself avoided) or a dogmatic presentism (which would debunk Arendtinstead of trying to understand in a sympathetic way where her conscious-ness as a woman was lodged in her work) but also to read from margin tocenter. That is, the question of gender in a sexist world has a way of show-ing up in the footnotes, in the marginalia, in the less recognizedworks.11 In Benhabibs case, this means rereading The Human Conditionin light of Rahel Varnhagen. In Arendts early biography, Benhabib finds amodel for a female public sphere to complement Arendts better known,masculinist, agonistic model of public space.12

In my reading of Arendt, I aim to follow the spirit of Benhabibs model.In calling my reading revisionist, I certainly do not take myself to be cor-recting Arendt in light of some supposed latter-day abundance of wis-dom. Rather, I hope to show that the vision of teaching that emergesfrom my reading is still Arendtian in essence and speaks to, without sim-ply confirming, our current sense of the realities and ideals of teaching.And it will also turn out that posing the question of the teacher, and herneeds, will require just the kind of centripetal, feminist reading thatBenhabib calls for. After all, teaching is a paradigmatic feminized profes-sion, and Arendts two essays on education seem but footnotes comparedto The Human Condition.

Like Benhabib, then, we will be reading from margin to center (andback again), raising in the process an important form of the the womanquestion: How is tending to others a way of becoming oneself? To speakfor the self-cultivation of teachers is to follow the lead of such feministtheorists as Dorothy Dinnerstein, Nancy Chodorow, and JessicaBenjamin, who show us the stakes involved in our dangerous attractionto sorting people into categories of for others and for oneself.13 If Iam able to stage an encounter between Arendts texts and our present


intuitions about teaching that yields a better understanding of each, thenmy account will (given Benhabibs hermeneutic principle) have cleareda final interpretive hurdle.

Part IArendts Hierarchy of Practical Activities

LABOR AND WORK

According to Arendt, underlying the diversity of human activities arethree fundamental modes of activity: labor, work, and action. In the cat-egory of labor, Arendt groups all those frustratingly repetitive activitiesdriven by our needs as embodied creatures living on the earth. Whatmakes labor repetitive, Arendt notes, is its peculiar combination ofurgency and futility:

It is indeed the mark of all laboring that it leaves nothingbehind, that the result of its effort is almost as quickly consumedas the effort is spent. And yet this effort, despite its futility, isborn of a great urgency and motivated by a more powerful drivethan anything else, because life itself depends on it.14

The most familiar of such Sisyphean tasks is probably our daily effortsto feed ourselves. Again and again, we must buy and prepare food, putaway leftovers, and clean up the dishes. Perhaps it is also time to take outthe trash or clean out the fridge. In any case, the next meal is never toofar off, and soon we will be using the energy from the last meal to repeatthe cycle. Most of us have felt the absurdity of this, wondering at somepoint whether we are truly nothing more than a furnace that must con-stantly be stoked with sandwiches.

Arendt contrasts her view both with the ancient, negative view of laboras painful toil and with the modern, positive view of labor as heroiceffort. What unites these seemingly opposed perspectives is their focuson the subjective experience of the laborer. In contrast, Arendt urges usto focus on the products of labor, on their location, function, and lengthof stay in the world (94). If we do this, she asserts, we will conclude thatin fact labor is not productive. It yields not lasting things but commodi-ties: things designed not only to be used, but to be used up.

In contrast to the laborer, Arendt sees the worker, from the humblestcraftsman to the greatest artist, [as] engaged in adding one more, ifpossible durable, thing to the human artifice (93). To say that theproducts of work are added to the world is not quite right since they ineffect create the world. As Arendt explains,


It is this durability which gives the things of the world their rela-tive independence from men who produced and use them, theirobjectivity which makes them withstand, stand against andendure, at least for a time, the voracious needs and wants of theirliving makers and users. From this viewpoint, the things of theworld have the function of stabilizing human life, and theirobjectivity lies in the fact thatin contradiction to theHeraclitean saying the same man can never enter the samestreammen, their ever-changing nature notwithstanding, canretrieve their sameness, that is their identity, by being related tothe same chair and the same table. (137)

We can contrast Arendts view with a purely instrumental view of fabri-cation, according to which humans already possess various needs andpurposes and then go about creating tools to aid them. This view is mis-leading in at least two ways. First, it conceals the fact that things, and thecustoms and purposes embedded within them, shape us. After all, indi-viduals take shape in the context of a human world of artifacts that nec-essarily precedes them. Second, the instrumentalist view suggests that allobjects are created to address a specific need, which obscures the factthat the built environment as a whole speaks to a more fundamentalneed: the need for a world of things and meanings to structure our expe-rience and give us mortal creatures some measure of permanence.

We have spoken of durability and permanence, but of course, thingsfall apart. Thus, even as the durable products of work ease certain labors,they create others. This leads Arendt to identify as the second task oflaboringits constant, unending fight against the processes of growthand decay through which nature forever invades the human artifice,threatening the durability of the human world and its fitness for humanuse (100). The monotonous chores of cleaning and repairing, thoughone step removed from bodily needs, share labors essential structure ofa futile, repetitive battle against the forces of decay and disorder.Interestingly, adding this secondary meaning to labor allows Arendt toextend the category of labor into white-collar professions, many of whichcan easily be described as care for the upkeep of the various giganticbureaucratic machines (93).

DEFINING THE DEED

The final and crowning dimension of Arendts vita activa is that modeof activity that she calls simply action. What is true of labor and


work is even more true of this term: where some philosophers rely ontechnical terms and others stick with ordinary language, Arendt unfortu-nately falls into a third category of thinkers who like to use ordinarywords as technical terms.15 In choosing one of our most general terms tohighlight a very specific subset of the full variety of human doings andefforts, Arendt has invited misunderstanding. Thus, before saying toomuch about what Arendtian action is, I want to head off two of the mostpredictable misunderstandings.

First, because Arendt links action with politics, some readers may takeaction to mean political action. The problem with this is that the wholepoint of retrieving and developing this untimely conception of action isto retrieve an equally untimely notion of politics. One cannot use theconcept of the political to explain her concept of action since we wontknow what politics means until we have understood action. More specifi-cally, we must understand the existential core of her concept of action,and only then can we approach this strange idea of an existential politics.

Second, the word action might lead us to imagine a contrast withspeech, as in the expression, all talk and no action. And in fact, Arendtherself likes to speak of speech and action as if they were two differentthings. When she is being more precise, however, she stresses that actioncan be performed in the manner of speech and in fact that speechlessaction would no longer be action (178; cf. 26).16 Meanwhile, with theterm speech, Arendt is again using an ordinary word in a special sense.Only a small portion of human talk warrants her honorific term speech. Ithink Arendts slightly archaic term deed is helpful for evoking the kind ofrare, heightened speech acts that interest her. Though Arendt sometimesrefers to words and deeds, just as she does speech and action, we cancapture her position more clearly if we reserve the word deed for thelarger category, noting that all deeds accomplish results and make state-ments, even if some are more wordy and some more silent, some morephysical and some less kinetic.

Let me offer two vignettes to clarify this last point and provide us withsome working examples of the deed:

(i) Without moving an inch, a juror finds the words to convince herpeers that they have overlooked a key piece of evidence, thusavoiding a serious misjudgment. Though she accomplishes herdeed with words alone, no one would deny that she has donesomething: she has averted an injustice.17

(ii) Without uttering a word, Jackie Robinson walks onto EbbetsField in his new Dodgers uniform on April 15, 1947. Though he


accomplishes his deed with bat and mitt, no one would deny thathe makes a statement. His silent deed unleashed a torrent of words.Indeed, we are still talking about it today.

As these examples suggest, what distinguishes deeds for Arendt is notonly the way they melt the distinction between doing and saying, but alsotwo further features of their effects/statements: their singularity andtheir theatricality. Both concepts are nicely illustrated by the example ofJackie Robinsons major league debut.18

To bring out what I mean by singularity, we can ask of Robinsonsdebut, of what type of action is this event an example? It is certainly notsubsumable under taking the field for batting practice, nor is it anexample of civil disobedience (as if the action of the likes of a Gandhiand a Rosa Parks could be lumped together in the first place). We couldinvent a category called athletes crossing the color line, but this cate-gory would tell us nothing about it. In contrast, if I tell you that an effortfits into the category of brushing ones teeth, you know almost every-thing there is to know about it. To grasp a deed, we write histories andessays; we have conversations and arguments. To grasp taking out thetrash, we just use the phrase that names the job. Categories help us bringnew iterations under existing patterns. But deeds are singular and there-fore surprising. They do not continue a pattern. They initiate somethingunexpected, something that shows up in the inadequacies of our existingcategories. This is what sets us talking about them. It is a sign of the sin-gularity of Robinsons deed that we are still, to this day, trying to digestwhat happened as he took the field.

Now let us turn to the theatricality of the deed. Arendt notes that actorsderive their name from the fact that, while all the arts represent or reify,theater is the art that represents deeds (18788). (We will return to thispoint later.) Meanwhile, just as actors must act in front of an audience(even if only the ensemble), so do we human beings require the presenceof others to become the author of deeds. It is this presence that occasionsand catalyzes the deed. Talking with Branch Rickey, signing the contract,trying on the uniformnone of these was yet Robinsons deed. The deedrequired the stage of Ebbets Field and the assembled fans. We can saythat the crowd that day witnessed the deed as long as we add that hadthey not been there, there would have been nothing to witness.

What about the example of the juror who averts injustice with herspeech act? How is this event either singular or theatrical? Granted, Ihave treated the jury incident as if it were a generic event, but just likecalling someone a person doesnt mean that we then know everythingabout him or her, this description would be only the beginning. Unlike


toothbrushing or trash disposing, we would want toindeed, have toknow the details of the jury incident to understand it. Once we lookedinto the matter, we would be struck by the impossible contingency of thechain of events that unfolded when these 12 individuals confronted eachother, the evidence, and themselves in an unfamiliar role. The black artsof jury selection notwithstanding, no one can predict how such an inter-personal alchemy will unfold. After the fact, we can try to craft a narra-tive that will make sense of the chain of events that led to the moment ofthe one jurors successful intervention. But no one, not even the jurorherself, could have predicted that she would be the one who really sawthe importance of the particular piece of evidence or that she would becapable of moving a group of her peers to reason more acutely.19

Part of what Arendt is pointing to is the way in which interpersonalinteractions are like a complex physics equation: each persons tenden-cies become one more vector to calculate, and very quickly there are toomany variables to handle. Ultimately, though, Arendt would reject thisanalogy. It suggests that the effects of a deed witnessed by a small enoughgroup could be predicted, whereas Arendt maintains that even a smallnumber of witnesses is sufficient to generate completely unpredictableresults. This is because of the deeds boundlessness, its power to res-onate beyond its immediate context. No matter what its specific con-tent, Arendt writes, the deed establishes relationships and thus has aninherent tendency to force open all boundaries and cut across all rela-tionships (190). What started as a conversation between Branch Rickeyand Jackie Robinson, for example, rippled outward to affect not only theDodgers and Major League Baseball, but all of sports and U.S. race rela-tions. But even if the number of participants could be fixed in some way,Arendt would reject the physics analogy, for it suggests that each personscontribution to an interaction could be known and that it is only thecomplexity of multiple variables that thwarts our efforts to predict theoutcomes of an interaction. But Arendt is not talking about mere behav-ioral tendencies, which may well be predictable, even in combination.Its inherent unpredictability . . . is not simply a question of inability toforetell all the logical consequences of a particular deed, she points out,in which case [a] computer would be able to foretell the future (191).

NATALITY, SELF-DISCLOSURE, AND THE SPACE OF APPEARANCE

We have now considered three key features of the deed: its theatricality,its singularity, and its unpredictability. Still, we have not yet reachedthe heart of Arendts concept. For Arendt, deeds are singular andunpredictable because they spring neither from custom, nor habit, nor


instinct, but from that capacity for initiative that she calls natality. Sheexplains,

With word and deed, we insert ourselves into the human world,and this insertion is like a second birth, in which we confirm andtake upon ourselves the naked fact of our original physicalappearance. This insertion is not forced upon us by necessity,like labor, and it is not prompted by utility, like work. It may bestimulated by the presence of others whose company we wish tojoin, but it is never conditioned by them; its impulse springs fromthe beginning which came into the world when we were bornand to which we respond by beginning something new on ourown initiative. . . . Because they are initium, newcomers andbeginners by virtue of birth, men take initiative, are promptedinto action. . . . This beginning is not the . . . beginning of some-thing but of somebody, who is a beginner himself. (17677)

For Arendt, there is something miraculous about children. They mayget their mothers eyes or their fathers flat feet. And it might be pre-dictable that the child who grows up in the bear-hugging family will adoptdifferent rituals of affection from the child of an air-kissing family.Multiply such examples of inherited traits and learned attitudes howeveryou want. There still remains something radically unpredictable, becauseit is not something at all but somebody. What is astounding is when aperson emerges as if from nowhere. The new person fits no existing tem-plate or slot, but pushes all such boxes aside. The newcomer makes aspace we didnt know was there until he or she occupied it. This is whyArendt says that our first doings and sayings come literally from no-where.They come from a who, but one that is only there in the doing and say-ing. This radical beginning each of us makes, Arendt suggests, vouchsafesthe possibility thathowever much we may later fall into mere continu-ing, the mere behavior of instinct, habit, and the rule of this is what onedoeswe may always surprise ourselves and others and begin again, witha deed.

Thus, for Arendt, all deeds contain the answer to the question askedof every newcomer: Who are you? (178). This means that at the heartof Arendts complex concept of action is the idea of self-disclosure.Signaling this fact, Arendt chooses the following words of Dante as theepigraph to her section on action:

In every action, what is primarily intended by the doer . . . is thedisclosure of his own image. Hence it comes about that every


doer takes delight in doing . . . since in action the being of thedoer is somehow intensified. . . . Thus nothing acts unless [by act-ing] it makes patent its latent self. (175)20

Having already stressed the theatricality of the deed, it should be clearthat self-enactment is not a private process, like writing in ones diary. Infact, Arendt maintains that who we are is most hidden from ourselves:The who, which appears so clearly and unmistakably to others, remainshidden from the person himself, like the daimon in Greek religion whichaccompanies each man throughout his life, always looking over hisshoulder from behind and thus only visible to those he encounters(179180).

Self-enactment requires the presence of others, but this does not meanthat any time we are around other people, we are moved to act and dis-close ourselves. Deeds requires what Arendt alternately calls publicspace and a space of appearance. This is not to be confused with acrowd. Crammed together into a subway car with 40 other commuters, weare no more stimulated to act than in a wooded cabin alone. Public spacerequires not simply numbers of people but a plurality of perspectives,and this in turn requires, paradoxically, a common object of concern.Arendt illustrates this idea with a striking image:

To live together in the world means essentially that a world ofthings is between those who have it in common, as a table islocated between those who sit around it; the world, like every in-between, relates and separates men at the same time.

The public realm, as the common world, gathers us together andyet prevents our falling over each other, so to speak. What makes[modern] society so difficult to bear is not the number of peopleinvolved, or at least not primarily, but the fact that the worldbetween them has lost its power to gather them together, torelate them, and to separate them. The weirdness of this situa-tion resembles a spiritualistic sance where a number of peoplegathered around a table might suddenly, through some magictrick, see the table vanish from their midst, so that two personssitting opposite each other were no longer separated but alsowould be entirely unrelated to each other by anything tangible.(5253)

The table is a nice metaphor for public space, the space where we findourselves suddenly separated by something that we have in common,


something that by its very commonality draws us together from differentdirections. It is because we sit at the same table, that we sit on differentsides of it. It is because we are sitting across from someone that we sud-denly realize our own angle on the matter. Too much of modern life islike a long subway ride or like Arendts sance. We are disoriented,distanced from both our own natality and the plurality around us:conformists without a community.

INTERDEPENDENCE AND HIERARCHY IN THE VITA ACTIVA

Having laid out Arendts three modalities of practical life, we turn to thequestion of their interrelationships and their respective contributions tohuman flourishing. According to Arendt, labor, work, and action areinescapable features of human life. As embodied creatures, we mustlabor. As mortals who crave durability, we need a stable world, fashionedfor us by work. As distinctive persons among other distinctive persons, weneed a space to appear as ourselves. Not only is each mode of activityfirmly rooted in an aspect of the human condition, but they are inter-twined. Indeed, Arendt suggests two forms of interdependence amonglabor, work, and action: both a general complementarity and specificcollaborations. In the following passage, she mentions one form of col-laboration while making the case for their structural complementarity:

We have seen that the animal laborans could be redeemed fromits predicament of imprisonment in the ever-recurring cycle ofthe life process, of being forever subject to the necessity of laborand consumption, only through the mobilization of anotherhuman capacity, the capacity for making, fabricating, and pro-ducing of homo faber, who as toolmaker not only eases the painand trouble of laboring but also erects a world of durability. Theredemption of life, which is sustained by labor, is worldliness,which is sustained by fabrication. We saw furthermore that homofaber could be redeemed from his predicament of meaningless-ness, the devaluation of all values, and the impossibility of find-ing valid standards in a world determined by the category ofmeans and ends, only through the interrelated faculties of actionand speech, which produce meaningful stories as naturally asfabrication produces use objects. . . . From the viewpoint of ani-mal laborans, it is like a miracle that it is also a being which knowsof and inhabits a world; from the viewpoint of homo faber, it is likea miracle, like the revelation of a divinity, that meaning shouldhave a place in this world. (236)


Arendts idea is that the each mode of activity is animated by a corevalue but also plagued by a defining predicament that threatens toundermine that value. The core value of labor is life itself or, concomi-tantly: survival, fertility, abundance. Even as we are tempted to say thatlife is the highest good, we find ourselves forced to admit that livinghand-to-mouth is no life at all. Without a place to hang your hat, withoutbeing able to leave some lasting mark on the world, the life of getting andspending is empty. Without the durable objects provided by workthegrain silo, the bakery, the cafethe efforts of animal laborans do not evenseem to lead to a true abundance but to a mere piling up, indistinguish-able from the shifting of sand dunes. At the same time, work cannot itselfsinglehandedly make good on its promise of worldliness. The worldrequires not only durable things but also the web of relations. Withoutdeeds, the instrumentality of homo faber always threatens to become anend in itself. A world created by work alone would be like a stage set afterthe show has been closed. As Arendt points out, what each mode of activ-ity needs to fully redeem its own values lies paradoxically outside it, exter-nal not only to its control but even to its sense of what is possible. Thecomplementary activity enters in like a miracle.

The exception to this, as Arendt makes clear in other passages, isaction. Action is the one mode of activity that possesses the resources tocope with, if not entirely to solve, its defining predicament. The predica-ment of action, its frailty, lies in three interrelated features: its unpre-dictability, its irreversibility, and its evanescence. When the world ofthings is inhabited by speech and action, it is transformed from the stage-set world to a genuinely human world. Deeds generate and rekindlemeanings, the various for-the-sake-ofs that rescue us from the meaning-less regress of in-order-tos, but there are problems with action as well.The outcome of our deeds cannot be predicted in advance. What comesout of it are further idiosyncratic re-actions, and the upshot of each ofthese re-actions is itself only to be found in a set of later and contingentresponses. This ripple effect means not only that you cannot predict theoutcome of an action but also that you cannot reverse the process youhave initiated if you dont like where it is headed. You may be able toreverse the film of the pebble dropping in the lake or of the jar of milksmashing on the floor, but actions in life are irreversible. Finally, there isthe flaw that the meanings created by action are fleeting. The web of rela-tions must be rewoven as soon as it is woven. Deeds are either quickly for-gotten or made more durable through the work of remembrance. Thedifference with action is that it contains a partial remedy for these frail-ties within itself. Arendt points to two special genres of the deed, promis-ing and forgiving, which represent means by which action can ameliorate


at least two of its three shortcomings. By promising, we hedge againstunpredictability; by forgiving, we gain a power to release actors from theirreversibility of their actions.

But there remains the evanescence of action, and for this, action mustrely on work that reifies its deeds and meanings. This leads us from com-plementarity to collaboration. For action, work performs certain keytasksnot only the task of reification and remembrance but also that offraming political structures within which action can flourish. There arealso collaborations between work and labor. As Arendt notes in the pre-ceding passage, work fabricates tools that ease our labors. And, as wenoted earlier, labor contributes to work when it cleans, repairs, and pre-serves the durable objects work fabricates. Thus, the three modes of activ-ity are strongly interdependent, interlocked by a series of essentialcomplementarities and key collaborations.

What has also become clear in this discussion is that though interde-pendent, Arendt sees a clear hierarchy among the activities. This isalready apparent formally in the way that each activity is redeemed by thecomplement of the activity above it. Work rescues labor and is rescuedin turn by action, which, alone among three, does not find its remedy inanother and possibly higher faculty, but [in] one of the potentialities ofaction itself (23637). Notice too that there are modes of collaborationbetween work and action and between labor and work, but none betweenlabor and action. This further suggests a hierarchical series of stepslabor, work, actionrather than three neighboring spheres of equaljurisdiction. Arendts position is that though each is necessary in humanlife, they contribute unequally to our humanity and individual flourishing:

Through [speech and action], men distinguish themselvesinstead of being merely distinct; they are modes in which humanbeings appear to each other, not indeed as physical objects, butqua men. This appearance, as distinguished from mere bodilyexistence, rests on initiative, but it is an initiative from which nohuman being can refrain and still be human. This is true of noother activity in the vita activa. Men can very well live withoutlaboring, they can force others to labor for them, and they canvery well decide merely to use and enjoy the world of things with-out themselves adding a single useful object to it; the life of anexploiter or slaveholder and the life of a parasite may be unjust,but they certainly are human. A life without speech and withoutaction . . . is literally dead to the world; it has ceased to be ahuman life because it is no longer lived among men. (176)


Notice that Arendt is far from celebrating lives without labor or work,calling these characters the exploiter and the parasite. Her point,though, is that while not admirable, they are still recognizably humanlives, whereas a life without action, a life estranged from our natality, ismore radically deformed. Action for Arendt is the pinnacle of humanactivity, the sine qua non of leading a fully human life.

Part IIToward a Praxis Conception of Teaching

Given the privileged place of action in Arendts account of human exis-tence, we are led to ask: Is teaching actional and thus part and parcel ofa fully human life?21 As we mentioned at the outset, any attempt to readteaching as a form of action immediately runs up against three significantproblems:

1. Action requires public space, whereas educational spaces must offerprotection from the world, and in particular from its public aspect.

2. Action requires the catalysis and witnessing of peers, whereas educa-tion requires a differential in authority and status between studentand teacher.

3. Action is its own end, whereas education has an external end, thesafe introduction of the natality of the young into the world, whichmarks its completion and fulfillment.

Each of the final three sections of this article is devoted to understand-ing and resolving one of these tensions.

EDUCATION, SHELTER, AND MEDIATION

Action requires public space for its enactment; alternatively, as Arendtsometimes puts it, public space comes into existence as action arrives onthe scene. In either case, there is a serious problem here for a praxisaccount of teaching. For Arendt specifically sees the classroom as a non-public space, not by chance or failing, but by design; for her, it is one ofthe essential functions of education to provide students with protectionagainst the world, and specifically against the public aspect of theworld.22 To see why this is, we need briefly to reconstruct Arendts theoryof education.

Most readers of The Crisis in Education focus on the crisis part andget exercised by Arendts polemic against child-centered education. Ithink it best to start with this other word in the title. What does Arendtmean by education here? Though Arendt chooses the broad word educa-


tion, she does in fact restrict her focus to schooling.23 Indeed, what shemeans by education comprises only one of the aspects of schooling.For Arendt, the schoolteacher wears three hats. First, she stands in locoparentis, nurturing the student qua growing creature. Second, she is ateacher (proper) instructing students qua learners of specific subjects.Third, and finally, she is an educator introducing students, qua futureactors, to the adult world. Though these aspects of schooling are inter-twined in practice, Arendt distinguishes them to help us identify thedistinctive and essential work of schooling.

For Arendt, all education involves learning of specific skills and con-tentU.S. history, multiplication, the Krebs cyclebut learning neednot entail education. Learning occurs outside of school and (we hope)long after we graduate, and may happen alone or among peers. In con-trast, education requires a special kind of authority. Our collegeShakespeare teacher may be an authority on A Midsummer NightsDream, but what Arendt has in mind is a more fundamental form ofauthority. This is found when the adults of a culture say to their young,This is our world (189). For this gesture to have authority, it must bemade in good faith. The educator must show a willingness to standbehind the world as a whole and suggest to the young that it is worth join-ing. As Arendt puts it, Educators here stand in relation to the young asrepresentatives of a world for which they must assume responsibilityalthough they themselves did not make it, and even though they may,secretly or openly, wish it were other than it is (189).24

Similarly, nurturance and protection of the young, though crucial, isnot a distinguishing feature of schooling since it has another, even fulleroutlet in the family. Meanwhile, Arendt explicitly contrasts education withparenting, situating the school as an intermediate space between ourmore private, familial beginnings, and our destination in a commonworld and the occasional public spaces that open up in that world. Thus,we may conclude that Arendts focus in The Crisis in Education is theessence of formal education, or the fundamental human significance ofthe distinctive aspect of schooling.

What is this human significance? For Arendt, education is the drama ofcultural renewal, dramatic because it rests on a double paradox. Theparadox of natality is that the young need the conventional precisely toexpress their new point of view; the paradox of tradition is that in orderto be extended, it must be amended. Taken together, this means thateducation must be conservative if it is to be radical. Arendt evokes theseparadoxes nicely in the following passage:

We are always educating for a world that is or is becoming out of


joint, for this is the basic human situation, in which the world iscreated by mortal hands to serve mortals for a limited time ashome. Because the world is made by mortals, it wears out; andbecause it continuously changes its inhabitants it runs the risk ofbecoming as mortal as they. To preserve the world against themortality of its creators and inhabitants, it must be constantly setright anew. The problem is simply to educate in such a way thata setting-right remains actually possible, even though it can, ofcourse, never be assured. Our hope always hangs on the newwhich every generation brings; but precisely because we can baseour hope only on this, we destroy everything if we so try to con-trol the new that we, the old, can dictate how it will look. Exactlyfor the sake of what is new and revolutionary in every child, edu-cation must be conservative; it must preserve this newness andintroduce it as a new thing into an old world, which, however rev-olutionary its actions may be, is always, from the standpoint ofthe next generation, superannuated and close to destruction.(19293)

Education, as we noted, involves the introduction of newcomers intoan old world, and this might sound rather pedestrian. However, whatgives education its dynamism, difficulty, and import is that the world isnot simply old in the sense of predating the new generation, but super-annuated and close to destruction. That is, if we leave the world alone,it ossifies and crumbles. The literal objects created through work needconstant labor to help them fight the effects of time. And the web ofmeanings must be constantly rewoven. Otherwise, rituals become rote,symbols become empty, practices get swallowed up by institutions, wordsthemselves can lose their very capacity to speak to us. The cure for thisdisease is the natality of the young. And the young in turn need a conven-tional world in which to insert themselves.

The problem is that unless this double introductionof the young toand into the worldis gradual and careful, either party in this dialoguebetween the generations can easily be overwhelmed. The young can losetouch with their natality as they become inundated with conventions.Conversely, the continuity of tradition can easily be lost if each generationbecomes a world onto itself. This is why Arendt says that precisely becauseit promises something revolutionary, conservation . . . is of the essence ofthe educational activity, whose task is always to cherish and protect some-thingthe child against the world, the world against the child, the newagainst the old, the old against the new (192). Meanwhile, the avowed


anticonservative does not end up being radical at all. Hoping to use edu-cation to change the world, the would-be radical falls into the aforemen-tioned bad faith and the disastrous trap of trying to produce the new asa fait accompli . . . as though the new already existed (176). This is the firstreason why Arendt wants to decisively divorce the realm of educationfrom . . . the realm of public, political life (195). Education is the chiefmechanism by which we renew a common world of meanings and extendand revise our projects; but if it is to fulfill this longer-term political pur-pose, the classroom itself must not become prematurely politicized.

Arendts second reason concerns the effect that premature exposure tothe public world could have on the still developing young person.Though the function of the school is to teach children what the world islike (195), this must not occur through raw exposure to the world itself.25

For Arendt, school is the institution that we interpose between the pri-vate domain of home and the world in order to make the transition fromthe family to the world possible at all (18889). Thus, in school, the childbegins to experience a wider world, but only through representations.School in a sense represents the world, Arendt writes, although it is notyet actually the world (189). For the childs protection, the worldandparticularly the public aspect of the worldmust be mediated.

Why? What is dangerous about premature entry into public life?Arendt explains:

Everything that lives, not vegetative life alone, emerges fromdarkness and, however strong its natural tendency to thrust itselfinto the light, it nevertheless needs the security of darkness togrow at all. This may indeed be the reason that children offamous parents so often turn out badly. Fame penetrates the fourwalls, invades their private space, bringing with it, especially inpresent-day conditions, the merciless glare of the public realm,which floods everything in the private lives of those concerned,so that the children no longer have a place of security where theycan grow. But exactly the same destruction of the real livingspace occurs wherever the attempt is made to turn the childrenthemselves into a kind of world. Among these peer groups thenarises public life of a sort and, quite apart from the fact that it isnot a real one and that the whole attempt is a sort of fraud, thedamaging fact remains that childrenthat is, human beings inprocess of becoming but not yet completeare thereby forcedto expose themselves to the light of a public existence. (18687)

Here Arendt is in the middle of her critique of U.S. learner-centered


education, which tends, she claims, to imagine childhood as its owneducative world, a world whose laws the teacher as facilitator must follow.Arendt suggests that this does not make sound educational sense, butrather expresses a uniquely American ambivalence about granting stu-dents and teachers unequal amounts of authority in the educativeprocess. Our passion for equality and distrust of authority is so strong,Arendt reasons, that we fail to realize that the very point of education isto introduce the young to the adult world and that the teacher necessar-ily has an authoritative role in this process. The irony, she suggests, is inthe vacuum of authority that ensues, children experience an even worsetyranny, the tyranny of the peer group. Though not a true public realm,peer pressure amounts to an invasive force similar to that of the pressureof the public realm, the pressure to say where you stand and disclose whoyou are. As she illustrates with the extreme example of celebrity children,Arendt fears that this sort of public scrutiny or quasi-public peer pressurecan have the ill effect of fixing a being in place, freezing the developmentof someone who is in process of becoming but not yet complete. Thus,for Arendt, education aims at a successful public debut of each youngadult, but this requires both exposure to the workings of the world andprotection from having to make this debut too early.26

And here is where we confront our first problem concerning teachingas praxis. The word private, Arendt reminds us in The Human Condition, isrelated to the word privation.27 To lead a private life is to be deprived ofthe opportunity to appear in a public role. Arendts teacher is not headedfor the fully private realm of the family, but she is accepting a partial pri-vation, setting up shop in the liminal world of the school, a space moreworldly than the family but still not public. Like Platos allegory of thecave, in which the philosopher escapes the darkness of convention forthe light of reason, only to feel moved to go back down to tell those stillentranced by shadows about the more solid realities outside, Arendtsteacher is an adult who has crossed the thresholds from family to schoolto the common world and public realm, only to then head back into thestrange twilight realm of the school. By design, the world appears inschool only in a mediated way. The call to teach is motivated by the loveof the world, but it issues in a choice to spend ones time with but mererepresentations of the world. This already would seem to prove thatteaching is not actional.

To address this problem, we need to shift from a digital conception ofthe public/private distinction to an analogue one. That is, the problembecomes insurmountable if we start from the notion that teachingrequires a purely nonpublic space and action a purely public space.Meanwhile, there are good reasons for thinking that Arendt herself has


more of a graduated spectrum in mind, even if she sometimes likes topaint in black in white for dramatic effect. After all, she sees the schoolas a transition from the family to the world. Thus, without rejectingArendts call for shelter and mediation entirely, let us attempt to add inthe shades of gray she sometimes neglects.

Arendts essential point is this: Growing beings require shelter ininverse proportion to their age or maturity. The world of the very youngis made simpler and safer in various ways, and these buffers are only grad-ually removed as the growing child becomes both ready for, and in needof, greater complexity and challenge. Frustration, Freud once noted,is the motor of human development, but of course this does not meanthat we expose people to as much frustration as we can as fast as possible.There is, to adapt the famous phrase from Vygotsky, a zone of proximalfrustration (which, if adequately proximal, will be experienced not asfrustration at all, but as enrichment). Arendt is worried that the youngmight suddenly find themselves in the wide and cruel world too soon.This is why she suggests a series of graduated steps from home (private),to school (prepublic, postprivate), to full entry in the adult world.28

As an instructive example, consider the beginning of Seamus HeaneysNobel Lecture, Crediting Poetry, in which he describes the way thewider world appeared in his childhood home as a subtle, almost imper-ceptible trickle:

In the nineteen-forties, when I was the eldest child of an ever-growing family in rural County Derry, we crowded together inthe three rooms of a traditional thatched farmstead and lived akind of den life which was more or less emotionally and intellec-tually proofed against the outside world. It was an intimate, phys-ical, creaturely existence in which the night sounds of the horsein the stable beyond one bedroom wall mingled with the soundsof adult conversation from the kitchen beyond the other. Wetook in everything that was going on, of courserain in thetrees, mice on the ceiling, a steam train rumbling along the rail-way line one field back from the housebut we took it in as if wewere in the doze of hibernation.29

To this opening description, offering a bucolic match to Arendtsvision of the home as retreat from wider world, Heaney adds this crucialaddendum:

When a wind stirred in the beeches, it also stirred an aerial wireattached to the topmost branch of the chestnut tree. Down it


swept, in through a hole bored in the corner of the kitchenwindow, right on into the innards of our wireless set, where a lit-tle pandemonium of burbles and squeaks would suddenly giveway to the voice of a BBC newsreader speaking out of the unex-pected like a deus ex machina. And that voice too we could hearin our bedroom, transmitting from beyond and behind thevoices of the adults in the kitchen; just as we could often hear,behind and beyond every voice, the frantic, piercing signallingof Morse code.

We could pick up the names of neighbours being spoken in thelocal accents of our parents, and in the resonant English tones ofthe newsreader the names of bombers and of cities bombed, ofwar fronts and army divisions, the numbers of planes lost and ofprisoners taken, of casualties suffered and advances made; andalways, of course, we would pick up too those other, solemn, andoddly bracing words the enemy and the allies. But even so,none of the news of these world spasms entered me as terror.30

As Heaney stands in Stockholm to deliver his lecture and receive hisprize, he is reflecting on his journey from a world of sensation, to a worldof words floating largely free of their referents, to the world of those ref-erents: from hearing the name Stockholm to standing there. In this way,Heaney affirms Arendts basic idea of the home as a sheltering, mediat-ing space. On the other hand, his description of these early years showshow even a sheltering home allows the wider world to enter through theattitudes, speech, and concerns of parents, through media, and in otherways. But notice how, even when the terrifying facts of war wiggle theirway in through the hole in the corner of the kitchen window, a bufferremains. To the young Heaney, numbers of casualties are just numbersand the enemy is just a word. Even the terror of war can be muffledwithin the secure walls of home.

Benhabib makes a similar point about Arendts overly simplistic equa-tion of the domestic with the privative:

Are not the walls that Arendt sought to erect between the publicand the private more porous and more fragile than she wouldlead us to believe? If the adult members return to the familyfrom the world outside, how well and how much can theyleave behind the world of work and labor when crossing thethreshold?


The world for the child widens and becomes less heavily mediated overtime, but where and when was the child ever perfectly insulated from theemotional, cognitive, and interpersonal demands of the world? And whatis true at one end of the spectrum seems to be true at the other. If weadmit that early, familial life narrows and heavily mediates the world forthe child without ever being completely impermeable, so must we con-clude that adult life, too, still requires powerful forms of insulation fromthe demands of worldliness. Some have more stomach for complexityand difficulty than others, but all of us have myriad ways of simplifyingand sweetening reality. Adult life is never perfectly worldly: at best, itamounts to an ongoing increase in our understanding of how to removevarious sorts of blinkers and filters and in our capacity to tolerate theirremoval. Thus, we can reverse our earlier question to ask of this end ofthe spectrum, Where and when is the world perfectly unmediated by ourneed for safety and comfort?

This suggests that we can and must understand Arendts point aboutschooling and shelter in terms of an graduated spectrum rather than astark, public/private dichotomy. The school sits on a continuum ofincreasing exposure to the emotional, cognitive, and interpersonaldemands of the world, stretching between childhood home, whichalready represents a partial exposure to the world, and adult indepen-dence, which still requires powerful forms of insulation. Relative to thehome, the school seeks to increase the young persons exposure to thebreadth and complexity of the world. Relative to adult life, the school isstill heavily mediated. The school should not then be conceived as exist-ing in an interstitial space, neither public nor private, but as a space thatallows a precisely calibrated amount of the world to filter into its semi-sheltered confines. And this further tallies with our intuition that an ele-mentary school should be more like the home, while later schoolsbecome less and less sheltered. Colleges, of one sort at least, can be readthen as places where 1822-year-olds are given the opportunity to putexactly one foot in adult, worldly existence.

This is enough already to move beyond our earlier reading of Arendtsschool as a darkened cave where the world, stripped of its public aspect,enters only in the form of shadowy representations. The teacher, like allof us, occupies a mediated, quasi-public realm. Perhaps after work, shewill head to a town meeting that fulfills even more clearly Arendtsrequirements for action, but we have already weakened the notion thatin her fundamental project, the teacher has chosen to inhabit a privativeand therefore nonactional space. In other words, we have traded ouropening paradox (that action requires public space for its execution,while education requires shelter from publicity) for a pair of productive


questions: What does it mean to think of teaching as a form of mediation,and mediation as a kind of action? As it turns out, we can expand on thisvery notion of mediation to tackle the remaining two interpretiveburdens.

TEACHING AS ENDLESS REHEARSAL

We have just shown some of the limits of Arendts metaphor that we startwithin the four walls of private and domestic space, move through themediated space of the school, and emerge into the worldy expanse of theadult arena. However, let us retain and play with this metaphor a bit. Ifthe home is distinguished by the enclosure of four walls, and the schoolis a step toward leaving these local precincts, then let us say that theschool erects only three walls around its students, opening the fourth, asthe theater does, to the public world. This accords with our intuition thatthere is something theatrical about classroom interactions and it squareswith Arendts picture of teaching as a representation of the social world.31

Furthermore, it helps us forge a connection between teaching andaction, since Arendt sees theater as having a close relation to action.

According to Arendt, art is the portion of work closest to action, andtheater is the most actional of the arts, the political art par excellence.32

Arendts reasoning is that while various forms of art and literature mayreify deeds in an attempt to reveal their significance, drama is the only arttruly capable of capturing the specific revelatory quality of action andspeech, the implicit manifestation of the agent and speaker.33 The self-disclosing quality of the deed cannot be describedthis would be to turnthe who into a whatbut it can be imitated, brought to life in an art-ful repetition. This indicates, Arendt writes, that playacting is actuallyan imitation of acting.34 For Arendt, theater is the only place where thepolitical sphere of human life [is] transposed into art, the only artwhose sole subject is man in his relationship with others.35

Thus, theater is actional for Arendt, but we can also reverse this equa-tion. As I noted in my initial explication of the vita activa, Arendts con-ception of action, politics, and public space is itself a theatrical one. Foraction, Arendt writes, the presence of others is always required, but itcannot be simply the casual and familiar contact of the social realm.Action requires the formality of the public.36 It requires a space ofappearances... a kind of theater where freedom [can] appear.37

For Arendt, then, both action and its artistic representation requiretheatrical spaces. We have literal theaters for our thespians and, whereverdeeds occur, we also find what Kimberley Curtis calls the theater of dis-play and witness.38 Arendt describes this space of appearances as a kind


of theater, as if first there were literal theaters which then provided uswith a handy metaphor for our actional existence. What Arendt says else-where, however, suggests a deeper isomorphism: our political and dra-matic inventions are both expressions of a more fundamentaltheatricality in existence.39

On the first reading, while drama nearly rises to the level of action(since it represents deeds themselves), it remains (like all art) mimeticand thus consigned to the sphere of work. This position starts to fallapart, though, when we consider that actions for Arendt can spur furtherre-actions, as one persons deed catalyzes anothers. This opens the doorfor a kind of response to deeds that is not merely a second-order repre-sentation. Consider two further ideas of Arendtsher concepts of virtu-osity and the maskwhich suggest how deeply intertwined are politicsand the performing arts.

Arendt defines virtuosity as that excellence with which man answersthe opportunities the world opens up before him.40 Here Arendt is draw-ing on Machiavellis concept of virt, which Arendt says:

is the response, summoned up by man, to the world, or rather tothe constellation of fortuna in which the world opens up, pre-sents, and offers itself to him, to his virt. There is no virt with-out fortuna, and no fortuna without virt; the interplay betweenthem indicates a harmony between man and worldplayingwith each other, succeeding together.41

This concept serves like a hinge, enabling us to see the relevance of vir-tuosity in our moral-political conduct and of virtue in the performingarts. Rather than speak of applying an aesthetic metaphor to our publiclife or vice versa, this concept of virt-osity enables us to see political andartistic performances as flowerings of a common, existential tap-root. Ata fundamental level, human life involves this attempt to respond finely,flexibly, and fluently to the moment, finding the right words, notes,images, and gestures for the occasion. In an influential early article thathas become a reference point for those wanting to think through theexistential and aesthetic dimensions of Arendtian action, George Katebput it nicely:

The political actor reveals that he had latent strengths that wereawaiting the opportunity to manifest themselves, transformed bystylization as they were in the passage from natural propensity topublic display. When the political actor shows these strengths-courage, judgment, self-control, eloquence-in a publicly remark-


able style, he has revealed himself as virtuosic, as possessing virt as a distinctive performer. He shows himself and others thathe is more than he knew.42

Thus, the concept of virtuosity reveals a closer connection between thetheatrical and the actional than that suggested by Arendts distinctionbetween acting and play-acting, with the second being an imitation of thefirst. What makes acting playful is not its make-believe quality, but itsresponsiveness to what is there in the moment.43 And this is a qualityshared by artful performance, whether it occurs in Arendts politicalrealm or in the performing arts.

A second Arendtian concept that reveals the limits of her own mimeticreading of the performing arts is the mask. Specifically, Arendt links thepersona, the mask worn by actors on the ancient stage, with action in thepublic realm. Here is Margaret Canovans helpful distillation of Arendtsdiscussion of the persona:

Political actors meet on a public stage not just as natural persons,but wearing a legal persona, the mask of the citizen, which dis-guises and equalizes them even as it allows the individuals voiceto sound through.44

What Arendt is pointing to is the paradoxical relation between role-playing and authenticity. She is specifically challenging the familiar con-trast between a genuine identity and a fictitious persona projected forsocial consumption. For Arendt, to make this distinction is to mistake thetrue self with the natural Ego.45 It is only when we find ourselves caughtup in a genuine scene of inter-action that we with discover with relief thatwe need no longer identify ourselves with our needs, wants, attributes,and records. We are more than our CVs. We are not only, as Thoreauacutely pictured the everyday self, a parcel of vain strivings tied.46 In ourresponse to others and the irreducible situation, something more orother is called forth. We surprise ourselves. We finally, it feels, rememberagain to become ourselves.

The true hypocrite, according to Arendt, is not one who dons a maskin public forums, a mask that screens out the merely personal and privateso that the real person may sound through on this public matter. It is notsomeone who purposely assumes a role that helps him or her say some-thing true, something that truly sits at the intersection of virt and for-tuna, of self and world. The real hypocrite, Arendt writes, is someone whopretends to be the assumed role, or constructs an artificial natural-ness.47 As Kateb explains:


A hypocrite... is one who when unmasked reveals that there wasnothing behind the mask: he is a compulsive role-player, chang-ing from one role to another, able to feign even naturalness, andfinally succumbing perhaps to self-deception, to being an actorwithout knowing it, paradoxically filling himself with emptiness.48

The discussion of persona shows that the dialectic of concealment andrevelation, of playing a part and of being yourself, is more fundamentalthan is the idea of playing a dramatic role. The performer of a deed isalready donning a mask, becoming himself through a special kind of arti-fice; and the thespian may in fact be enacting himself through the rolehe assumes rather than merely echoing the action of another. Arendtwould say that Shakespeare overstates the case: not all the world is a stage,only our evanescent and endangered public spaces. But the idea of a pub-lic stage, it turns out, is a fundamental existential notion entwining thetheatrical and the political. That the dramatic actor confronts a public isno mere political metaphor applied to the dramatic arts; conversely, thata public person occupies a stage is no mere theatrical metaphor appliedto politics.

After all, it is not as if we have our own words and gestures but then ifplayacting adopt the words or gestures of another. We can but borrow thewords of others; the phrases we find are already well used. We search forwords we can make our own. We search for the phrase that will not ringhollow, that taps into something authentic in us, that we can speak withconviction. So it is not that we exist simply as ourselves and subsequentlyadopt roles and disguises. We are daughters, brothers, mothers, students,teachers, neighbors, and friends, not to mention reporters, relief pitch-ers, and Russian literature professors. We search for those roles thatfinally put us in touch with who we are.

Still, someone might object that there is a difference between gen-uinely occupying a social role and merely playing one on the stage orscreen. To this we respond first that even these genuine roles carry withthem a measure of theatricality. Furthermore, it is precisely the virtue ofa good stage actorat least in one school of thoughtto move beyondpretending. Consider this exchange between director ConstantinStanislavski and actor Vasili Toporkov. In Toporkovs memoir of hisretraining under Stanislavski in the Moscow Art Theater from 1927 to1938, he relates Stanislavskis response to a scene he had just performed:

Contrary to my expectations, I didnt see a hint of approval onhis face. Having watched the scene, he was silent, then hecoughed and with a polite smile said:


Excuse me, but youre using a certain tone. . .How so?Youre trying to play the part with a certain tone which youhave already worked out.

I didnt know what he was talking about. What else was I sup-posed to do? Of course there was a tone. I had given a greatdeal of thought to it. After all, he had liked what I had done atthe presentation! What was going on? I told him I didnt under-stand what he meant. Stanislavski explained that the most valu-able thing in acting is to be able to find a living person in everypart, to find oneself.

Youve saddled yourself with something you have workedout in your head, and its preventing you from responding towhats going on around you as a living person. Youre play-ing a character type and not a living human being.49

What Stanislavski says to his actor could just as easily apply to us. Wefind that we have saddled ourselves with something worked out in ourheads, that we are failing to respond in a living way to what is going onaround us. The roles we inhabit have become not ways to tap into our realfeelings, perspectives, and character, but mere character types. We havelost touch with what we are feeling, adopting instead a repertoire of emo-tive tones. Toporkovs is a narrative of re-education. It is not the story ofsomeone who has grown up, learned to be himself, and then learns in thetheater an art of disguise. He comes to Stanislavski having learned in thereal world and in his first theatrical training in St. Petersburg how tofeign action. Under the guidance of Stanislavski, he learns to act authen-tically for the first time. The challenge of finding (as Toporkov attempts)a living person inside the words of Chekhov, Gogol, and Molire is not atbase dissimilar from finding something living and real in any of the partswe play, scenes we find ourselves in, expressions we utter.

Returning to Arendt, then, we can assert that the classroom is not a pub-lic space proper, but a theater in which students are introduced to aspectsof the world. Because students are themselves being only gradually intro-duced into the world and must not be prematurely cast out into the open,the world must be brought to them in representational form. This is espe-cially true of deeds, the most existentially challenging aspect of the world.In this way, teachers and students are like a dramatic troupe, recalling andreenacting deeds that have formed the web of human affairs, the mediumin which students will later act, against which they will define themselves.The trick here is finding the balance between two ideas.

On the one side, we have the idea that the students are reacting to the


actions of others (as represented in the curriculum) and to each othersreactions. But this is just what we call action, this response to the actionof others. We have just seen that it is necessary to complicate the receivedidea that there is personhood and there is impersonation, that there isbeing whoever you are and pretending to be someone you are not.Personhood, we found, is itself a series of impersonations, reperson-ations, depersonations. When students read the letters of John andAbigail Adams, for example, they try out the ideas, tones, sensibilities,and norms contained therein. But of course this is no different fromwhat the Adamses are themselves doing in these letters, namely trying tofigure out who they are and what they stand for by quoting Cicero,Terence, or Scripture.

On the other side, we have the intuition that the classroom is in someway preparatory, preliminary to and proofed against the real deal, what-ever this might be. We want to capture our sense of classrooms as placeswhere students may try out positions, stances, voices, personae. Arendtspeaks of the irreversibility of action. There is forgiveness, and this helpsus cope with irreversibility, but there is no undoing. You cannot run thefilm backward and watch the pieces of the broken vase fly back together.In contrast, the classroom space would seem to offer the chance for amore tentative kind of deed. We are looking for signs of you emerging,the teacher signals, but we do not expect this to happen in a straight line.We accept, we expect that you will need to zigzag, backtrack, or meander.Here is a place, the teacher says, where your words will have weight butwhere you also may write your story in pencil. If all action is theatrical andinvolves elements of representation of, and response to, the scripts of cul-ture, the classroom space seems best described as a full dress rehearsal.

What the Toporkov book suggests, however, is that the dress rehearsalis in a certain sense as real as it gets. Torporkov had believed that whenrehearsing was going poorly, he could rely on the gaze of his public onopening night to call out of him that extra level of feeling. UnderStanislavski, though, he comes to the realization that what calls forth hispotency and authenticity as an actor is not being watched by the audi-ence, but paying careful attention to the his fellow actors. It is their gen-uine action that catalyzes his own. He is acting for them, but he is alsoacting, if you will, from them. The fourth wall of the theater may be justanother wall, as in a rehearsal space, or the curtain may be drawn back tolet the audience observe. But the drama is in an important respect inwardturned, already complete. Teaching, like life, is an endless rehearsal, afull dress rehearsal, for an opening night that never quite comes.

In this way, we can preserve the crucial aspect of Arendts requirementthat the classroom be a nonpublic space, while also admitting that action


occurs there. The classroom does not expose students to the full scope ofworldly concerns, nor does it saddle them with the full existential burdenof defining themselves through their deeds on matters of adult, commonconcern. But the classroom can be in another way a space of appearances.The teacher works (and labors) to create a theatrico-existential space, astage where the participants can step forth and become themselves to thedelight of all assembled. If this much is right, then we have shown that theclassroom can be a space for the students action, but you recall that it isthe teachers action we are after. To be sure, the teachers role in this the-ater is not the same as that of her students. The teacher is like anactor/director, helping the students dramaturgically with questions ofhow to interpret and find themselves in the cultural, curricular material.The teacher may comment on the text and on the personations as theyare attempted, but the teacher too will don roles and take on voices,searching for the moment and the words to convey something of importabout where we are at, what we are about, what we have tried and become.

Earlier, we said that the teacher for Arendt wore three hats: caringadult looking to the growing childs needs, teacher proper looking at thestudent as learner of a specific subject, and educator looking at the stu-dent as a newcomer who must be gradually brought into the world by theworlds being carefully brought to him or her. We might now add a fourthdimension: the teacher as actor, whose natality sparks and is sparked bythe natality of students as it occasionally reveals itself in the midst ofschooling. The classroom, as we have seen, is not solely or purely a spaceof appearances in Arendts sense, but it is at times precisely a stage wherestudents can step forth in the presence of others and enact themselves,flashing something of their personhood that upends our expectations,cuts against the grain of conventions, and surprises even themselves. It isin these moments that the teacher finds her own natality stimulated, inwhich her witnessing is not merely pedagogical. It is in these momentsthat the teacher laughs at the idea of graduation and of preparation forthe real world. There is nothing realer than this preparation.

In these moments and in this aspect, the teacher is a peer to her stu-dents. When the classroom becomes a space of appearances, even if onlyoccasionally and in the ways I have qualified, the whats of age, rank,knowledge, and skills give way to the question of who, a question thatequalizes all those present.

TEACHING AS CULTURAL ELABORATION

One obstacle remains for this revisionist reading of how Arendts theoriesof education and practical life might fit together in a way that captures


our intuition that teaching has an important praxial dimension, and thisconcerns Arendts adoption of Aristotles distinction between kinesis andenergeia. Fundamental to her distinction between work and action is theidea that work is an example of a kinesisa process that aims at some-thing outside itself, the attainment of which marks its completionwhereas action fits the model of energeia, as an activity that contains itsaim within itself and could be considered complete at any moment.50 ForArendt, teaching would seem to be a kinesis since it has an external aim(the safe introduction of the students natality into the world, and theconsequent renewal of the world) and a definite endpoint (the studentsfulfillment of a societys mandatory schooling requirement). Put anotherway, teaching (which must, on this logic, be a form of labor or work) isbut a means to the future action of students.

In responding to this final interpretive problem for an Arendtian,praxis conception of teaching, we can again take our cue from the con-cept of mediation. In mediating the public realm of deeds, we said, teach-ing represents a kind of theatrical art that is itself importantly, if notpurely, actional. Now we may add that in mediating the world, in re-pre-senting the stock of conventionsand introducing the young to what wehave tried and done, asked and found, sought and avoidedteachingrepresents a kind of hermeneutical art that puts it in an interesting grayzone between kinesis and energeia.

Arendt herself admits the existence of such a liminal zone by drawingour attention to the unique activity featured in the U.S. constitutionalconventions. Here we would expect Arendt to say that though the debatesin these conventions would count as action, the drafting and foundingthemselves would be work, since work leads to reified products (here, adocument and a republic) that lie outside of, and complete, the process.As we have already noted, however, she in fact considers the foundingand preserving of political bodies to be a form of action.51 Typically,activities of making and preserving would seem to fit into Arendtscategories of work and labor. Why does she make an exception here?

The answer is found in Arendts On Revolution (1977), which exploreswhat it might mean for a polity to embody the spirit of revolution. Whatthe founders discovered in the congresses leading up to the declarationand in the conventions that followed was public happiness. Pushedtogether by the British impingement on their negative freedoms, whatthey discovered in Philadelphia was a space of positive freedom, a spaceof appearances. Even amidst distressed and unique historical circum-stances, they returned to themselves: this is who I am, this is what itmeans to be fully human, this is what it means for words and deeds tohave weight, for people to truly be together, but also for individuals to


reveal their distinctiveness. In Philadelphia, Arendt argues, the colonialdelegates happened upon the deep connection between politics andnatality. To be a part of this experience was the greatest privilege they hadknown. This caused a dilemma: the revolution would either fail or leadto the foundation of a republic. But success would mean another kind offailure if the principle of public freedom and public happiness withoutwhich no revolution would ever have come to pass should remain theprivilege of the generation of the founders.52 Thus, Arendt is concernedwith what it means to found a polity animated by the spirit of beginnings,and the problem is that if foundation was the aim and end of revolution,then the revolutionary spirit was not merely the spirit of beginning some-thing new but of starting something permanent and enduring; a lastinginstitution, embodying this spirit and encouraging it to new achieve-ments, would be self-defeating.53

Translating the question of political foundations back into the terms ofthe vita activa, we can say that if the founders thought of their activity aswork, then they risked making a polity that would have space in it onlyfor laboring and working and not for the acting they themselves had dis-covered. If, however, they thought of foundation as action, an activity thatleaves no tangible trace, then there would be no republic at all.

The solution to the dilemma, according to Arendt, lies in the constitu-tion, or more precisely, in our attitude toward the constitution. The U.S.revolution led to something lasting, Arendt suggests, because of our devo-tion to the constitution, but there are two very different forms this devo-tion might take. Constitution, she suggests, is not simply a documentbut the act of coming together, of constituting a people. This action isembodied in the document and in the institutions that call for us to con-tinue to come together and reconstitute ourselves. In particular, Arendtquotes with approval Woodrow Wilsons remark that the supreme court isa kind of constitutional assembly in continuous session.54 ThoughArendt thinks that the founders erred in restricting this ongoing act ofinterpreting, augmenting, and thereby reviving the beginnings inherentin the action of the foundersshe favored a democratic ward systemshe nonetheless thinks that this was the genius of the founders: the cre-ation of an entity whose very durability lay in its constant re-creation.

As Hannah Pitkin observes, Arendt wants us to distinguish between twoforms of devotion to the constitution: one reactionary, one radical. Thereactionary gesture is the return to origins as something done; this is toreify the constitution. The radical move (though paradoxically, it is thisattitude that genuinely preserves the spirit set in motion in Philadelphiain the 1770s) is to call for a return to the spirit of origins, the humancapacity to originate.55 Building on Pitkins account, Bonnie Honig


suggests that

Arendt, like Machiavelli, sees that a beginning too firmly rootedin the past is in danger of becoming reified and foundational.Our commitment to augmentation and amendment may derivefrom our reverence for a beginning that is in the past; but ourpractices of augmentation and amendment make that beginningour ownnot merely our legacy but our own construction andperformative. The commitment to augmentation protects thatwhich was glorious because it was a performative from beingsanctified and turned into a law of laws, an absolute whose irre-sistibility would ultimately and necessarily destroy the uniquelypolitical character of the republic. On this reading of Arendt,augmentation is both a necessary condition of politics and con-stitutive of one form of the activity of politics itself. What LeoStrauss says of Machiavelli applies equally to Arendt:Foundation is, as it were, continuous foundation.56

We are now ready to pull together the two threads of this discussion:politics as preservation by augmentation, and teaching as mediation.Earlier, we concluded that the teacher must humbly acknowledge thatshe is part of an old world whose chance for renewal lies in the hands ofthe young. She puts her faith in the natality of the young and swears offthe temptation to dictate the future to the young. Utopian schemes andrevolutionary gestures dress up one part of the old world as new, whileshort-circuiting the genuine renewing power. Thus, she accepts the hum-bler-seeming task of representing the world as it is. Recall, though, thatwe also called this activity mediation, noting that despite the realismcalled for by Arendt (as opposed to utopianism), there is also a filteringgoing on. Certain elements of our cultural life and history are selectedand re-presented.

Now, if we turn for a moment to a related 20th-century thinker, Hans-Georg Gadamer, we find that we have chanced upon what is one of thecentral insights of his theory of interpretation and understanding. ForGadamer, understanding is itself a form of mediation between past andpresent, between one lifeworld and another.57 Or, to put this in Arendtsconstitutional language, cultural texts and traditions exist because of, notdespite, constant amendment and augmentation. For example, Gadamerchallenges the conception that an artwork is most fully itself at itsmoment of authoring and then proceeds to degrade, both literally andfiguratively, as it moves away from its original time an