Page - 77 - in Limina - Grazer theologische Perspektiven, Volume 2:2

78 | www.limina-graz.eu Isabella Guanzini | Ideas of Freedom “What all Greek philosophers, no matter how opposed to polis life, took for granted is that freedom is exclusively located in the political realm, that necessity is primarily a prepolitical phenomenon, characteristic of the private household organization, and that force and violence are jus- tified in this sphere because they are the only means to master neces- sity – for instance, by ruling over slaves – and to become free. Because all human beings are subject to necessity, they are entitled to violence toward others; violence is the prepolitical act of liberating oneself from the necessity of life for the freedom of world. This freedom is the essen- tial condition of what the Greeks called felicity, eudaimonia, which was an objective status depending first of all upon wealth and health. To be poor or to be in ill health meant to be subject to physical necessity, and to be a slave meant to be subject, in addition, to man-made violence. This twofold and doubled ‘unhappiness’ of slavery is quite independent of the actual subjective well-being of the slave” (Arendt 1998, 31). According to Arendt, the Greeks’ extraordinary awareness of the superi- ority of active life, of the political space as the essential condition for the exercise of their freedom subtracted from the realm of natural necessity, loses much of its original force already with Plato and Aristotle, but es- pecially in the medieval and modern epoch. The result is a shift towards “contemplative life”, which denies the value of political action and the great interhuman discourses. It is the industrial age, then, that marks the definitive disappearance of action in favour of a productivistic, utilitarian, and indistinct kind of labour focusing exclusively on things. With resigna- tion and dark pessimism, Arendt thinks that in her epoch, action has been replaced by labour and that this constitutes an authentic attack against de- mocracy. In her view, political action has become “impossible”, because all subjects’ efforts are aimed at surviving. The crisis of politics turns common life into a “labouring society”, which transforms people into “jobholders”, “as though individual life had actually been submerged in the over-all life process of the species and the only active decision still required of the individual were to let go, so to speak, to abandon his individuality, the still individually sensed pain and trouble of living, and acquiesce in a dazed, ‘tranquilized’, functional type of behaviour” (Arendt 1998, 322). By emphasising the primacy of action, Arendt does not mean to diminish other human activities or faculties, nor to philosophically ground this pre- eminence, but rather she aims to fully recognize its role, its extraordinary capacity to represent human identity. Action, especially in the special mo-