Though not grounded in a careful reading of any particular text or set of texts, Arendt convincingly argues in "What Is Freedom?" that political liberty has become—in modern philosophical and theological discourse—“a potential freedom from politics” (149) defined in terms of a “guaranty of security” (ibid.). Though not specifically channeling Hobbes, Arendt points to the Hobbesian security state as the example par excellence of this negative freedom: “security, in turn, made freedom possible, and the word ‘freedom’ designated a quintessence of activities which occurred outside the political realm” (ibid.). Freedom, here, appears not so much the goal of politics or its founding principle, but rather as a kind of byproduct of the security state. Political subjects are only minimally free to preserve their own lives in the realm of biological necessity; as Arendt puts it, “the total domain of the political, was now considered to be the appointed protector not so much of freedom as of the life process” (150), the biopolitical aspirations of the security state effectively quashing freedom through the political.
Against what she terms the modern age’s insistence on the “separ[ation] [of] freedom and politics” (ibid.), Arendt wishes to found a conception of freedom that is thoroughly imbricated within the political itself. Put briefly at the end of the essay’s first section, Arendt states “that the raison d’etre of politics is freedom and that this freedom is primarily experienced in action” (151). This freedom—against the negative freedom of the security state—is a positive one, grounded in the political subject’s right to act in the public (political) realm beyond the mere necessities of biological life, a freedom to politics rather than a freedom from it. In fact, she goes so far as to claim: “Freedom as a demonstrable fact and politics coincide and are related to each other like two sides of the same matter” (149), effectively conflating freedom-in-action and the political as such.
Arendt is able to argue that freedom constitutes the essence of politics rather than its marginalized byproduct by emphasizing the importance of action, community, and (implicitly) natality to her conception of freedom. Action, here, by being free from both the intellect and the will (152), becomes the means through which humans actualize what (through Montesquieu) she calls principles (e.g. “honor or glory, love of equality … but also fear or distrust or hatred” (ibid.), which, due to their abstract character, can enter the political only through action. As she puts it: “Men are free—as distinguished from their possessing the gift for freedom—as long as they act, neither before nor after; for the be free and to act are the same” (153). Moreover, this actualization of principles through action depends entirely on a common, public space in which multiple political subjects act simultaneously, what Arendt calls at one point “a kind of theater where freedom could appear” (154). Extending the metaphor further, she likens the political actor to a performance artist who “depend[s] upon others for the performance itself” (ibid.). What Arendt finds so valuable about this positive freedom to politics—in contradistinction to the negative freedom lying at the heart of the security state—is its capacity “to call something into being which did not exist before” (151) or, to use the term we have been teasing out of The Human Condition, its ability to bring about the event of natality. Freedom—characterized by action, community, and natality—becomes in Arendt’s hands the very stuff of politics, an intersubjective acting together in the public realm to initiate the new and open up the possibility of new futures for the polis.
Despite the seemingly wholly secular character of Arendt’s new definition of freedom which constitutes the first two parts of the essay, grounded in Kant, everyday experience, and scientific views of causality, Arent devotes the second half of the essay almost exclusively to issues of political theology. On the one hand, she levels a critique against a certain strain of Pauline and Augustinian theology. On the other, however, she subsequently reads into them at the very least a kernel of her freedom to politics.
Beginning in Section III, Arendt takes up the issue of “the Christian and modern notion of free will” (157) to analyze (what she sees as) its negative effects on ideas of political freedom. The importance of this Christian tradition for Arendt almost cannot be understated. As she writes: “For the history of the problem of freedom, Christian tradition has indeed become the decisive factor” (157). Locating in Christian theology a fundamental split between what she calls the “I can” and the “I will,” a split unknown and incomprehensible to the ancient philosophers, Arendt contends that freedom becomes interiorized, thought in terms of the individual subject rather than the collective of the polis. As a result, “will, will-power, and will-to-power are for us almost identical notions; the seat of power is to us the faculty of the will as known and experienced by man in his intercourse with himself” (160). This resignation of freedom to the realm of the individual subject and his will, Arendt argues, has “fatal consequences for political theory” (162). More specifically, freedom “became sovereignty, the ideal of a free will, independent from others and eventually prevailing against them” (163). The interiorized freedom of Christian theology thus becomes the grossest suppression of freedom in the forms of, for example, the Hobbesian state and the rise of totalitarianism. Succinctly put: “If men wish to be free, it is precisely sovereignty they must renounce” (165).
While this rejection of both the notion of sovereignty and the individual subject of Christian theology might appear to be an outright rejection of political theology on Arendt’s part, she also finds in the very same tradition an underground current (to channel Althusser) of “a freedom which is not an attribute of the will but an accessory of doing and acting” (165). She finds in Augustine’s only political writing, The City of God, “an entirely differently conceived notion” (167) of freedom than that which he champions in his strictly theological writings. In City of God, Arendt argues, freedom is both “a character of human existence in the world” and the “faculty of beginning” reaffirmed in “the birth of each man” (ibid.), a definition approximating Arendt’s own by emphasizing both being-in-the-world and natality. She goes on to locate a similar tendency in the New Testament which, to her reading, exhibits “an extraordinary understanding of freedom” (168). This extraordinary freedom manifests itself in the decidedly theological concept of the miracle which serves as an “interruption of some natural series of events, of some automatic process, in whose context they constitute the wholly unexpected” (ibid.). The miracle, then, becomes yet another example of natality and, when secularized at the hands of Arendt, an example of political freedom itself.
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