From The Human Condition

From 24. The Disclosure of the Agent in Speech and Action

Action and speech are so closely related because the primordial and specifi-
cally human act niust at the same time contain the answer to the question
asked of every newcomer: "Who are you?" This disclosure of who somebody
is, is implicit in both his words and his deeds; yet obviously the affinity
between speech and revelation is much closer than that between action and
revelation, just as the affinity between action and beginning is closer than
that between speech and beginning, although many, and even most acts, are
performed in the manner of speech. Without the accompaniment of speech,
at any rate, action would not only lose its revelatory character, but, and by
the same token, it would lose its subject, as it were; not acting men but per-
forming robots would achieve what , humanly speaking, would remain
incomprehensible. Speechless action would no longer be action because
there would no longer be an actor, and the actor, the doer of deeds, is possi-
ble only if he is at the same time the speaker of words. The action he begins
 11 7 0 / l·I ANNA II AR E NDT

-is human Iv d". 1sc Iose db,,

, the word . and though b his deed can be Pere .
. bru t c p' h,,s·cal appeara nce without •ver al. accompaniment
h . , it. bt11-ed.1n
Its 1 ,
relevant onli through the spoken " ·ord
ac t or, annou ncl·ng ,,·l,at he docs , has done
Ill": 1lie'.
1 e identifies hii11se1?·011i~
. , and intends to do · as tL11e
No other hum an performance requires speech to the sanie e .
action. In all other performances speech plays a subordinate ~1ent ,
means of commumcat_ion_or a mere accompanimen_t . toe
to soniethin, 1 us a1
could also be achieved 111 silence. It 1s true that speech 1s extreniel g that
a means of communication and information, but as such it could by Useful ii.I
bv a sign language, which then m1g .h t prove to be even more useful erepl . aced
.
client to convev certam . meanmgs.
. . mat I1ematics
as m . . an . d other sci ,1J1de. ~Pe,
ciplines or in ,certam . forms of teamwork. Th us , 1t . a Iso true tient1fic d·1 •
. ts
capacitv to act, and cspecia . II y to act Ill
. concert,
. . extremely usef iat
1s I f Illan1'
Poses of. self-defense or pursuit. of.mterests; but I·r not h"mg more weu , or Pur.1
here than to use action as a mea ns to an en d, 1t. 1s . obv1ous. that there at st Uk·e
could be much more easily attame . dm . mute vm . Ience, so t I1at actio sallle en d
not verv efficient substitute c,or v10 . as speec l1, f ron, the vie,n see111s
. 1ence, Jl)St . a
sheer utilit
. y, seems an awkward su bslltute ' cror sign
. )anguage. Vpoint of
In acting and speaking, men show who they are, reveal active) h .
unique personal identities and thus make their appearance in the t eir
world while their physical identities appear without any activity of th _ulllan
in the, unique shape of. the body an d soun d of t he voice. . This disclose1r own
h
"w o" in · contra d 1stmct1on
· · · to "what " some bodY is- · h 1s · qua 11ties,
· • giftsUte of
d
ents, an shortcommgs, · wh·1c h he may d"1spIay or h"d I e-1s· implicit
· in ' tal.
thing someb_o~y says ~nd ~oes. It can be hi~d_en only in com_plete silenc::;d
perfect pass1v1ty, but its disclosure can almost never be_achieved as a willful
purpose, as though one possessed and could dispose of this "who" in th
same manner he has and can dispose of his qualities. On the contrary, it i:
more than likely that the "who," which appears so clearly and unmistakabl ,
to others, remains hidden from the person himself, like the daimonl in Greei
religion which accompanies each man throughout his life, always looking
over his shoulder from behind and thus visible only to those he encounters.
This revelatory quality of speech and act.ion comes to the fore where
people are with others and neither for nor against them-that is, in sheer
human togetherness. Although nobody knows whom he reveals when he
discloses himself in deed or word, he must be willing to risk the disclosure,
and this neither the doer of good works, who must be without self and pre-
serve complete anonymity, nor the criminal, who must hide himself from
others, can take upon themselves. Both are lonely figures, the one being for,
the other against, all men; they, therefore, remain outside the pale of human
intercourse and are, politically, marginal figur~s who usually enter the his-
torical scene in times of corruption, disintegration, and political bankruptcy.
Because of its inherent tendency to disclose the agent together with the act,
action needs for its full appearance the shining brightness we once called
glory, and which is possible only in the public realm. .
Without the disclosure of the agent in the 11ct, action loses its specific
character and becomes one form of achievement among others. It is then

I. Divine power, especially a power controlling the destin)' of an iindividual.

 THE HUMAN CONDITION I 11 71

d no less a means to an end than making is a means to produce an

iflJee This happens whenever human togetherness is lost that is, when
b·ect, . '
0 l are only for or agamst other people, as for instance in modern war-
I
PeoP where
e ·
men go mto · an d use means of violence in order to ac h'ieve
action
fgre, . objectives for their own side and against the enemy. In these
certainces wh1c . h o f course h ave always existed speech becomes m . d ee cl
• stan ' '
ifl talk" simply one more means toward the end whether it serves to
"rnere ' ' d
·ve the enemy or to dazzle everybody with propaganda; here wor s
Jecei I nothing, disclosure comes only from the deed itself, and this achieve-
revea like al I ot h er ac h 1evements,
' cannot disclose the 1'who," t h e umque
.
rnen t' . . f h
d distinct 1dent1ty o t e agent.
anln these instances action has lost the quality through which it transcends
rnere productive activity, which, from the humble m'aking of use objects .to the
. ired creation of art works, has no more meaning than is revealed m the
~sished product and does not intend to show more than is plainly visible at
:e end of the production process. Action without a name; a "who" attached to
'. is meaningless, whereas an art work retains its relevance whether, or .not we
~~ow the master's name. The monuments to the "Unknown Soldier" after
World War I bear testimony to the then still existing need for glorification;
f r finding a "who," an identifiable somebody whom four ,years of mass
s~aughter should have revealed. The frustration of this wish and ~he unwill-
ingness to resign oneself to the brutal fact that the agent of the war was ,actu-
ally nobody inspired the erection of the monuments to the "unkn~wn," to all
those whom the war had failed to make known and had robbed thereby, not
of their achievement, but of their human dignity. 2 '

25. The Web ~f Relationships and the Enacted Stories

The manifestation of who the speaker and doer unexchangeably is, though
it is plaimly visible, retains a curious intangibility that confounds all efforts
toward unequivocal verbal expression. The moment we want to say who
somebody'is, our very vocabulary leads us astray into saying what he is-; We
get entangled in a description of qualities he necessarily shares with others
like him; we begin to describe a type or a "character" in the1old meaning of
the word, with the result that his specific uniqueness escapes .us.
This frustration has the closest affinity with the well-known philosophic
impossibility to arrive at a definition of man, all definitions being determi-
natio11s ,or interpretations of what man is, of qualities, therefore, which he
could possibly share with other living beings, whereas his specific differ-
ence would be found in a determination of what kind of a "who" he is. Yet
apart from this philosophic perplexity, the impossibility, as it were, to solid-
ify in words the living essence of the person as it shows itself in the flux of
action and speech, has great bearing upon the whole realm of human
affairs, where we exist primarily as acting and speaking beings. lt excludes
in principle our ever being able to handle these affairs as we handle things
whose nature is at our disposal because we can name them. The point is

;~filliam Faulkner's A Fab_le (1954) surpasses a_lmost all o,f World War I, literature in perceptiveness
clarity because ,ts hero is the Unknown Soldier [Arendt s not e].
 I li2 / H ANNA H ARENDT

that the manifestation of the "who" comes to pass in the sa=

•c . f .
the notoriously unreliable manuestatmns O ancient oracles wh· h nner
... e Illa
ing to Heraclitus "neither revea nor I h .d
I . d ,
e m wor s but • ' accord
1c •as
3 , . . ' give Ill . .
signs." This is a basic factor in the equally notorious uncerta· an1fe
81
of all political matters, but of _a_ll _affairs that_ ~o ~n ~etween 011~
without the intermediary, stabilizing, an~ sohd1fym~ influence of th· tectly,
This is only the first of many frustrat10ns by which action d 1ngs,1
.
quently the togetherness an d intercourse o f men, are ridden. It ' an. c0 nse.
the most fundamental-of those we sh~ll deal. with, in so far as j~s /erhaps
rise out of comparisons with more reliable and productive activif oes not
as fabrication or contemp Iat10n . or cognition. . or even Iabor, but .Iesd'· su ch
something that f rustrates act10n · in · terms o f its
· own purposes. Wh in teat
. . es
stake is the revelatory ·c haracter without which . action and spee hat 18 at
lose all human relevance. c Would
Action and speech go on between men, as they are directed toward th ·
and they retain their agent-revealing capacity even if their content is e et,
sively "objective," concerned with the . matters of the world of thin Xe ~-
which men move, which physically li~s between them and out of ;~i 1~
arise their specific, objective, worldly interests. These interests constitu c
in the word 's most literal significance, something,which inter-est, which lit:;
between people and therefore can relate and bind them together. 'Most
action and speech is concerned with this in-between, which varies with
each group of people, so that most words and deeds·.arelabo7ft·some worldly
objective reality in addition to being a disclosure of the acting' and speaking
agent. Since this disclosure of the subject•is;an•integral;part ·of all, even the
most "objective" intercourse, the physical, worldly in-between along with its
interests is overlaid and, as it were, ov~_rgrown ,with an .altogether different
1\ ,-, JI \ • l • l
in-between which consists of deeds ·and words and owes its origin exclu-
sively to -men's acting and speaking directly ,to .one another. This second,
subjective in-between is not tangible, .since there . .are · no , tangible objects
into which it could solidify; the process -of, actihg;.and speaking can leave
behind no such results and end products. But for all its intangibility, this
in-between is no less real than the world of things. we ~visibly lhave in com·
mon. We call this . reality the "web" of human relationships, indicating hy
the metaphor -its somewhat intangible quality. ;, , ·, ..
To be sure, this web is no less bound to the objective. world of things t~an
speech is to the existence of a living body, but the relationship is not hke
that of a fa~ade or; in Marxian terminology, of an essentially .superfluous
superstructure 5 affixed to the useful structure of the building itself. ~he
basic error of all materialism in politics-and this materialism is not Marxian

3. Oute legei oute kryptei alla senzainei (Oiels, ' . h. ·s redictable

Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (4th ed., 1922], frag.
B93) (Arendt's note]. Heraclitu's (active ca. 500
B.C.E.), Greek phiJosopher whose work has sur-
vived only in fragments quoted by later authors .
4. Socrates used the same word as Heraclitus,
senrainein ("to show and give signs"), for the
manifestation of his daimonion [litera ll y, "divine
something"] (Xenophon Memorabilia 1.1.2, 4). If
we are to trust Xenophon, ~ocrates likened his
daimonion to the oracle s and insisted ' that both
should be used only for human affa irs, where
nothing is certain, and not for problems of the
arts and crafts, whe re everyt mg I P ( _399
469
(ibic;I; 7-9) [Arendt's no(e)- ,Socr•~~: of his J,i·
n.c.e.), Greek philosopher who spe h' to death;
monion at the trial that condemns ;m )'3sd, by
the most familiar accpunf is in Apo ~g 7 8 .c.E-l•
4
Socrates' St ud e nt PLATO (ca. 42 7-co.) Greek his·
Xenophon (ca·.:428/27-ca. 354 o.c.E- '
torian and student of Socrates. f 50 ciety-
5. In Marxist thought , the ele"!ent·~u~ions, Jegii~
langu~ie, literatur~, p~liti ~a l ~ns~aterial "base
statutes-that e manate from 1 e f oductioll·
of production and tl,e relations O pr
 THE Hu~IAN CoNDITION I 1173

rid 001 even mod~m i~ 0 r!~in, b~t as old as our history of political theory-
. tooverlook. the mev1tab1hty
d . with which men disclose themselves as sub-
,s . as distmct an unique persons even when they wholly concentrate
·eets, reaching
J
· an a 1toget h er worldly, material
' object. To dispense wit· h t h'is
Uf:~osure, if indeed it could ever be done, would mean to transform rhen
di:o soinething they are not; to deny, on the other hand, that this disclosure
~n real and has consequences of its own is simply unrealistic.
15
The realm of human affairs, strictly speaking, consists of the web of
hurnao relationships which exists wherever men live together. The disclo-
re of the "whO" t hroug h speec h, and the setting of a new begmnmg . .
s~ ough action, always fall into an already existing web where their imme-
td' \e consequences can be felt. Together they start a new process which
,a h · fc .
ventually emerges as t e unique life story of the newcomer, a· 1ectmg
e niquely the life stories of all those with whom he comes into contact. It is
~ecause of this already existing web of human relationships, with its innu-
merable, conflicting wills and intentions, that action almost never achieves
its purpose; but it .is also because of this medium, in which action alone is
real, that it "produces" stories with or without intention as naturally as fab-
rication produces tangible things. 6 These stories may then be recorded in
documents and monuments, they may be visible in use objects or art works,
they may be told and retold and worked into all kinds of material. They
themselves, in their living reality, are of an altogether different nature than
these reifications. They tell us more about their subjects, the "hero" in 'the
center of each story, than any product of human hands ever tells us about
the master who produced it, and yet they are not products, properly speak-
ing. Although everybody started his life by inserting himself into the human
world through action and speech, nobody is the author or producer of his
own life story. In other words, the stories, the results of action and speech,
reveal an agent, but this agent is not an author or producer. Somebody
began it arid is its subject in the twofold sense of the word; namely, its actor
and sufferer, but nobody is its author.
That every individual life between birth and death can eventually be told
as a story with beginning and end is the prepolitical and prehistorical c·ondi-
tion of history, the great story without beginning and end. But the reason
why each human ·life tells its story and why history ultimately becomes the
storybook of mankind, with many actors and speakers and yet without any
tangible authors, is that both are the outcome of ' action. For the great
unknown in history, that has baffled the philosophy of history in the modern
age, arises not only when one considers history as a whole and finds that its
subject, mankind, is an abstraction which never can become an active agent;
the same unknown has baffled political philosophy from its beginning in
antiquity and contributed to the general contempt in which philosophers
since Plato have held the realm of human affai'rs. The perplexity is that in
any series of events that together form a story with a unique meaning we can
at best isolate the agent who set the whole process into motion; and although

6. In Arendt, "labor" is the effort required to pro- not consumed by use, but th at oft en last longer
duce the necessities of life (food , shelter, clothing) th a n th e worker's lifetime. "Action," unlike labor
that are consumed and thus must be produced and work, is nonmateri a l.
again. "\\.'ork" produces materi al objects that a re
 117-t / HANNAH AnENDT

. e sub·ect, the "hero" of the sto

this ag~nt frequ~ntly remain~ th the~ author of its eventual ou/Y, We Ile\'
can pomt unequivocally to him ~s o thou ht that human -~ ff c?me. et
It is for this reason that Pat .g . ) ·I c airs (ta ,
_ _ ) h utcome of acuon (praxis , s 1ou Id not b t011
ant..Iiropon pragmata
. , t e
h o t"ons o f men app ear l1"ke th e gestu e treateJ
with great senousness; t e ac I h res of
. . "bl hand behind the scene, so t at man seem . PlJp.
pets Ie d by an mv1s1 e I ,.. s lo b
. d f I h" f god i It is noteworthy that P ato, who had no . ea
k m o p avt •
mg o a · b h
t f hi"story should have een t e first to in
tnk1 ·
ltJo
of t h e mo d ern concep o ' . h" d Vent h~
·nd the scenes who; be m the backs of t e
metap h or o f an ac tor behl . · acr1 ,
men, pulls the strings and is respcmsible_for ~he ~to~y. ~he Platonic go ~&
c th fact that real stones, .m d1stmct1on from ti dis
but a sym b oI 1or e iose
invent have no author· as such, he is the true forerunner of Providenc We
, , Id . . " I . t s e, th
,,mv1s1
· · "ble h an d ,·• Nature , the "wor · sp1nt, c ass m . t erest, . and th e lik e
with which Christian and ,modern philosophers of. hiS ory . tned to solvet he;
erplexing problem that although history owes its existence to men . _e
P . . f t . d" , It IS
still obviously not "made" by them. (N ot hmg m ac m icates more cl
. . O
f . d early
the political nature of history-its bemg a story. action d . an f deeds rat her
than of trends and forces or ideas-t han t he mtro uctmn o an inv· :b
· II h"I h" f h" tsi le
actor behind the scenes whom we ~n·d m a . 1 osop_ ies O . 1s~ory, whkh
for this r.eason alone can be re<cognized as political philosophies m disgu·
By the same token, the -simple fact that Adam Smith needed an "invisi~k
hand " to guide economic dealings on . the exchange market shows plai I
that more than sheer economic activity is involved in exchange and tk!i
"economic man , " when he .makes his appearance on the market, is an aC.t
ing being and neither exclusively. a·produce~ nor: a_ trade~ and barterer.) hL
The invisible actor b_ehind th~-:scehes : 1s an mv~nt10n arising from.ta
mental perplexity but corresponding. to no, r.eal ·expenence. Through it, the
story resulting from action is misconstrued ias a fictional story, where
indeed an author pulls the ,strings-.and direct~ the play. The fictional stoli}'
reveals a maker just as every work of art clearly .indicates that it was made
by somebody; this does not belong to ,th'eicharacter of the story itself hut
only to the mode in which ,it 'came iinto ie~istence. The distinction between
a real and a fictional story is•prel!isely, that the latter. was "made up" and the
former not made at all ..The :reaJ- stor,y ifr ,which·we are engaged as long/as
we live has no visible ·or in:visib!e .maker ,because it is riot made. The orlly
"somebody" it rev.eals ·is!,.its;herio, and_it is the only medium in which th€
originally intangible manifestation 0£ a uniquely distinct "who" can becorhe
tangible ex post facto? through ,act-ion-'and ·speech. Who somebody is or was
we can know:.only by·knowing ,theistor.y: of,which he is himself the hero~
his biography; in other: words;1everything ..else ,we know of him, including
the work be inay hav.e produced and left ,b,ehind, tells us only what he is,or
was. Thus, -although .we know ,much .Jes~ of Socrates, who did not write a
1
single line and, left no ,work b.e hind, than of Plato or Aristotle, we know
,. ,' . , I~
7. Laws 803° a nd 644 [A;~ndt'J ,;-ot~] . 'Ta t{in
0
0 0

Sccitli~h p h ilosophe~ Adam Smith om-:17~6),

anthropiin pragmata: literally, "practical matters Nature in modern science, the "world spiril ,n
related to humans" (Greek). the writing of GEORG WILHELM FRJ ED RI CJI HEGE[ 0
8. All nonhuman powers used to explain the (1770..:.1831), and class interest in the ll'orks,
source of events and the outcomes of human KARL MARX (1818-1883). ' .j
actions in different explanatory systems: · Provi, 9. ,A fter the fact (Latin). b0·~
dence in much Protestant thought, the "invisible I. Gre~k philosopher (384-322 o.c .E,): see" -1
hand" in The Wealth of Nations (1776) by the
 TH E HUMAN CONDITION / 1 li5

·h better
and more intimately who h
. I I
b
e was, ecause we know his story,
011 ,t
" ,l'e
k·noW who Anstot e "as, about whose . .
opinions we are so muc h bet-.
1h9~1forrned- .
,,•r..-he
,, hero the. story . H
discloses needs no hero1·c l't• h
qua 1 1es; t e wor
d "h ,,
ero
, hat 15 m omer was no mor th
. inall)', t '. .' . e an a name given each free man
or•~ articipated I~ the TroJan enterp_nse2 and about whom a story could be
0
1"ho Yhe connotauo~ ~ courage , which we now feel to be an indispensable

1oldi·ry 0 f the hero, is m fact already present in a willingness to act and

qua at all, to insert ~ne's self into the world and begin a story of one's
sp1e;_ And this courage is not necessarily or even primarily related to a will-
01 ess to suffer th e consequences; courage and even boldness are already
ingn nt in leaving one's private hiding place and showing who ohe is in
PreselOsing and exposing . ones' st'If· Th e extent of this orig'inal courage. with- ,
disc • d h d h f
· ,hich act10n an speec an t ere ore, according to the Greeks free- · ' ,
out \\ would not be possi'bl e at a II , Is· not less great and may even be greater'
Jorn, ''hero" happens to be a coward.
if the . II h .
fhe spec1~c content as w~ as _t e _general meamng of action and ~peech
e various forms of reificat1on m art works which glorify a deed or an
rnav ta k d b . , ,
· plishment an , Y transformation and condensation, show some
accorn . . f II . .fi
' . aordinary event m its u sigm cance. However, the specific revelatory
extr
uality of acu_on· _an d spec~ h , th e 1m~
· 1·1_c1t
· mani1estation
s: · o f the ,agent ,an d

q ker. is so md1ssolubly tied to the hvmg flux of acting and speaking that
spea
. n be represente d an d "re1'fi e d " on Iy t.h rough a kind of repetition, the
11
~ta tion or ,nimesis,3 which according to Aristotle prevails in all arts but IS
in11a .
ally appropnate on Iy to t he drama, whose very na·me (from , ' the Gre~k
~c:~ dran, ''to act") indicates that play-acting actually is an imitation of act-
,e • But the imitative element lies not only in the art bf the actor, but, as
;~~totle rightly claims, in the making or writing of the play, at ledst to the
. tent that the drama comes fully to life only when it is· enactecl in the tne-
ex
ater. Only the actors an d spea kers who re-eract · the .story's plot 'can convey
the full meaning, not so much of the story itself, but ' of 't he "heroes" who
reveal themselves in it. 5 In terms of Greek tragedy, this would mean that the
story's direct as well as its universal meanhig is ret ealed by the chorus,
which does not imitate 6 and whose comments are pure poetry, whereas the
intangible identities of the agents in the story, since they es.c ape all generaf-
ization and therefore all reification, can be conveyed only through an imita-
tion of their acting. This is also why the theater is the political art par

2. In Homer1 the word lier6s has certainly' a con- · generalization of'the concept to make it applicable
notalion of di stinction, but of !JO other than every to all arts seems rather awkivard \Arendt's note] .
free man was capable. Nowhere does it appear in 5. Aristotle therefore usually speaks not of an
the later meaning of "half-god," which perha ps i/nitation of action (praxis) but of the agents (prat-
arose out of a deification of the ancient epic tontes) (see Poetics l448al ff. , l448b25 , 1449b24
heroes \Arendt's note]. Homer (ca. 8th c. B.C. E.), ff.). I-le is not consistent , howeve r, in this use (cf.
Greek epic poet to whom the Iliad (the story of t451 a29, 1'4 47a28). The decisive point is that
"the Trojan entcrprise"-the Trojan War) and th e . tragedy does not dea l with the ,qu_alities of men ,
Odyssey arc attributed. th eir poioti!s, but with wh atever happened with
l. lmitation or representation (Greek): a key term respect to th em, with their actions and life and
in Plato's work and especially in Aristotle's Poetics good or ill fortune (1450a l5-18). The cqntent of
(see above), where art is seen as a mimesis of real- tragedy, th erefore, is not what we would call char-
itv. acter but action or the plot [Arendt's note].
4:Aristotle alreadv mentions that the word drama 6. That the chorus "imitates less" is mentioned in
~1'3 ~ chosen becau.se dr{mtes ("acting people") are the Ps. Aristotelian Proble11wta (918b28) \Arendt 's
imitated (Poetics 1448a28). From the treatise not e]. The Pseudo-Aristotelian Problems is a com-
itself. ii is obvious that Aristotle's model for ''inii- pilation of perhaps the 5th or 6th century c .E.
tation" in art is taken from the drama, and the
11 7 6 / H A N NA H ;\RENDT

excellence : only there is the political sphere of human life

a rt. Bv· the same token ' it is th e only art whose sole sub,i,ecttranspo,-,
·,
15 ., ,., 1I0·
11
i ,1 his
re lationship to others. 11la . to