Taste, narrative, and judgment

In the outline to her promised work on judgment, Arendt invokes Herodotus:

A few paragraphs before, she bemoaned judgment’s “curious scarcity of sources.”Footnote ²⁴ This heightens the importance of those she does cite. Most prominent is Kant,Footnote ²⁵ in whose Critique of Judgment she locates a conception of judgment as “not arrived at by either deduction or induction.”Footnote ²⁶ For Arendt, this renders judgment particularly political—precisely because it does not utilize the tools of philosophy.Footnote ²⁷ This, however, is part of the difficulty of theorizing judgment: it resists general terms. While the Lectures offer a crucial glimpse of her unwritten account, a theoretical approach will be insufficient; as she quotes Kant, judgment is “a peculiar talent which can be practiced only and cannot be taught.”Footnote ²⁸ This highlights the importance of practice, and thus of the ancient histor—of which Herodotus is both first and exemplary. Tracking the confluences between Herodotus’s Histories and Arendt’s extant writings on judgment thus offers an intriguing hint of the possible contours of her unwritten work.

Indeed, much of Arendt’s account in the Lectures resonates with Herodotus’s practice in the Histories. Arendt argues that judgment is particularly political because it communicates and makes public—thereby transforming—subjective perspectives and experiences, thus crafting a “common sense,” the sensus communis. Footnote ²⁹ Crucially, judgment is not determined by metaphysical considerations or universally valid rules, which she deems deeply inimical to political life.Footnote ³⁰ Universals shortcut debate, and it is debate which creates a public world, where individual events gain significance.Footnote ³¹ As Zerilli writes, for Arendt the public space is not merely where opinions are expressed but rather “the actual condition of their formation, articulation, and circulation in a broader process of critical thinking and judgment.”Footnote ³² Public debate allows phenomena to gain significance, precisely because we see them, and see them differently, thereby affirming “worldly reality,” in Arendt’s words.Footnote ³³ This assures us that there really is a “there” there, and engages us with one another as we debate the significance of the different appearances of things, the “sameness of utter diversity.”Footnote ³⁴ Judgment is the faculty appropriate to this, as it offers a way of making persuasive claims without recourse to rules or metaphysics—thus preserving the possibility of debate. For Arendt, a full and flourishing politics is only possible if what matters most to us is indeed “up for debate.”

This informs her rejection of the philosophic tradition. For Arendt, the invention of philosophy by the Greeks undergirds the entire history of Western metaphysics and its dismissal of action: “the topics of metaphysics remained the same and continued to prejudge throughout the centuries which things are worthy of being thought about and which are not.”Footnote ³⁵ Whether labelled “nature,” “the eternal,” or the “objective,” truth-claims (ancient or modern) attempt to compel and thus undermine the possibility of debate by foreclosing what can be debated. For this reason Arendt refers to the “anti-political character of truth.”Footnote ³⁶ This animates her turn to Kant’s Critique of Judgment, for judgments of taste do not rest on universal claims but instead deal with the particular qua particular—and apply only to human beings insofar as we live with other human beings.Footnote ³⁷ Arendt thus deems judgment to be “one of the fundamental abilities of man as a political being insofar as it enables him to orient himself in the public realm, in the common world.”Footnote ³⁸ She locates in Kant’s account of taste a means of making persuasive judgments that lack the compulsion of rational truth-claims—precisely because judgments of taste are not forced by the facts.

In Herodotus’s Histories taste figures explicitly as the vehicle of judgment. Herodotus approvingly recounts the response of two Spartans, Sperthias and Bulis, in their encounter with a Persian satrap who urged them to “medize” (surrender to the Persian invasion):

As Herodotus says, “their courage was admirable and also their words”;Footnote ⁴⁰ freedom is glukus, sweet. Elsewhere, he renders judgments in what we might call aesthetic terms: practices that diminish human dignity are “not pleasing”; those that exacerbate inequality are “ugliest”; and institutions that promote equality and dignity are “best/most beautiful” (κάλλιστος).Footnote ⁴¹ The importance of taste in the Histories is most vividly underscored when it is violated. One of the most chilling depictions of the horrors of despotism (in a work that teems with them) is a violation of both literal and figurative taste.Footnote ⁴² Feeling betrayed by his advisor Harpagus, the despot Astyages invites him to a lavish feast and afterwards asks if the meal has pleased him. Harpagus replies “very much indeed”, at which point Astyages reveals that Harpagus had just dined on the roasted flesh of his only son.Footnote ⁴³ Harpagus replies: “whatsoever my lord the king does is pleasing.”Footnote ⁴⁴ The vulnerability of life under despotism is epitomized by the grieving father who must proclaim that all that the despot does is pleasing.

In the Histories, judgments—whether good, bad, or travesties—are expressed as tastes. While, for this reason, some dismiss his judgments as mere opinion,Footnote ⁴⁵ I follow Rosalind Thomas,Footnote ⁴⁶ Arlene Saxonhouse,Footnote ⁴⁷ and Christopher PellingFootnote ⁴⁸ in urging that Herodotus offers substantive judgments, which Arendt likewise highlights. But the resemblances run deeper. Herodotus, like Arendt, depicts judgment as a public activity. He opens the Histories by calling it an ἱστορίης ἀπόδεξις, a performance of inquiry.Footnote ⁴⁹ In the expansive narrative that follows,Footnote ⁵⁰ Herodotus takes his private experiences and transforms them through his apodeixis into an account of political life—one that, like other fifth-century bce performances, seeks to persuade.Footnote ⁵¹ Persuasion is underscored through the text’s “rival inquirers,”Footnote ⁵² pseudo-histors whose cruel experiments teach didactic lessons and silent dissent. Through these foils Herodotus depicts intellectual compulsion as a marker of despotism, on a continuum with physical violence.Footnote ⁵³ In contrast, Herodotus presents himself as persuading rather than forcing, through evidence and careful reasoning, while acknowledging that his audience may harbor doubt and even hostility.Footnote ⁵⁴ Because his performance recreates what one individual has seen or heard,Footnote ⁵⁵ it renders Herodotus’s own particular experiences and perspective public—and thus persuasive.

Herodotus’s apodeixis exemplifies Arendt’s claim that judgments of taste possess validity without compulsion, precisely because of their private character: “smell and taste give inner sensations that are entirely private and incommunicable; what I taste and what I smell cannot be expressed in words at all.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Crucially, these subjective experiences become intersubjective through the imagination, which bridges the distance between us and sensory experience by re-presenting it. This refashions and renders communicable vanished private experiences,Footnote ⁵⁷ transforming them into potentially public objects for judgment that can be shared with the world—crucially, without compelling others. As she quotes Kant, “one can never compel anyone to agree with one’s judgments … one can only ‘woo’ or ‘court’ the agreement of everyone else.”Footnote ⁵⁸ To woo others, one must think about how something might appear to them. This fosters an “enlarged mentality” through the attempt to think where one is not:Footnote ⁵⁹ “To think with an enlarged mentality means that one trains one’s imagination to go visiting.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Judgment is grounded in the subjectivity of the individual yet attempts to ‘think beyond’ this by imagining how others might themselves judge—and how one might persuade them. It is a faculty attuned to others and yet not compelled by them. For Arendt, judgment allows for individual thought in conditions of plurality.

Representation is furthered through narrative. As Seyla Benhabib observes, “narrativity, or the immersion of action in a web of human relationships, is the mode through which the self is individuated and acts are identified.”Footnote ⁶¹ Herodotus’s Histories likewise places individual actors and events in a broad and expansive narrative, in which each occurrence both is conditioned and conditions others to which it is related. Consider his multigenerational account of the Persian empire.Footnote ⁶² He begins with the Median empire that preceded it,Footnote ⁶³ showing both the continuities and disruptions between the two; he then traces multiple generations of Persian rulers (Cyrus, Cambyses, Xerxes), who each vivify the limits, potentials, and contradictions of despotism. The Histories conclude with a warning from the Persian founder Cyrus, one with resonances for Herodotus’s imperialist Athenian audience at the outset of the Peloponnesian war.Footnote ⁶⁴ In the Histories, to understand a thing—“the reason why they fought one another”Footnote ⁶⁵—one must see it (as much as possible) in its entirety. Herodotus’s layered narrative, its callbacks and returns,Footnote ⁶⁶ makes this possible.

Herodotus continually comments on the work of the histor, highlighting its labor and difficulty, his mediation of competing accounts, as well as what ultimately eludes his attempt to know.Footnote ⁶⁷ This acknowledgment of limits and failure resonates with Arendt’s emphasis on corrigibility, which spurs the “perspective-taking” of judgment; for Arendt, individual perspective—one’s immediate, subjective sense of things—draws individuals together, insofar as we all experience differently some sort of shared reality.Footnote ⁶⁸ This creates the common world through shared interest; as she writes in the Human Condition, “inter-est, which lies between people and can therefore relate and bind them together.”Footnote ⁶⁹ A multiplicity of perspectives is world-constituting;Footnote ⁷⁰ contestation and difference are the substance of political life. Without this, the common is eroded and human dignity is threatened, whether through the absolute debasement of totalitarianism or the “milder” despotism of isolated, lonely, and utterly private individuals.

This underscores the importance of the particular; individual deeds constitute the common world by supplying shared objects which inform judgment through the exemplary validity they furnish. For Arendt, these particulars allow political actors to derive general concepts from experience rather than universally valid rules or maxims. Memory, the imaginative representation of the past, allows these past events and deeds to be used in understanding the new and the novel—and, moreover, in communicating to others: “what makes particulars communicable is (a) that in perceiving a particular we have in the back of our minds … a ‘schema’ whose ‘shape’ is characteristic of many such particulars and (b) that this schematic shape is in the back of the minds of many different people.”Footnote ⁷¹ Because it offers a record of these occurrences, history (rather than reason or philosophy) becomes central to her conception of both judgment and politics more generally—and in Between Past and Future she credits Herodotus with its invention: “with Herodotus words and deeds and events—that is, those things that owe their existence exclusively to men—became the subject matter of history.”Footnote ⁷² It is for this reason that Arendt deems the histor key to reclaiming human dignity from the threat to political life she locates in philosophy.Footnote ⁷³

Herodotus, authoritative source

Yet Arendt’s engagement with Herodotus extends beyond his capacity as histor. In her works dealing with the Greeks, she takes him as illustrative of pre-philosophic ancient Greek experience and thought; it is not just the number of citations, but their uses that matter. In the Human Condition Arendt turns to Herodotus as her sole source for the Greek understanding of man’s place in the cosmos:

Although this misconstrues Herodotus’s depiction of Persian religion, Arendt takes Herodotus as revelatory of the Greek worldview: they hold the gods to be anthropophyeis, that is, not merely appearing like but possessing the same nature (physis) as human beings. This renders death central to specifically human experience: human beings, unlike the gods whose nature they share, die.

This accounts for the view of human excellence that Arendt attributes to the Greeks: “the task and potential greatness of mortals lie in their ability to produce things—works and deeds and words—which would deserve to be and, at least to a degree, are at home in everlastingness, so that through them mortals could find their place in a cosmos where everything is immortal except themselves.”Footnote ⁷⁵ In a footnote, she specifies that the potentially immortal “works and deeds and words” produced by mortal human beings are captured by the Greek term erga (deeds).Footnote ⁷⁶ This too bears traces of Herodotus: in the opening of the Histories, he declares that one of his subjects will be “the great and wonderful deeds (ἔργα)” of Greeks and barbarians alike (1.1). Arendt quotes this line in Between Past and Future, where she credited Herodotus with being the first to make erga the subject of history—thus inventing history itself.Footnote ⁷⁷ Arendt’s expansive definition of erga coheres with Herodotus; he surveys not only military battles but a whole host of human achievements, from speeches and battles to laws and shipbuilding.Footnote ⁷⁸ Indeed, as Egbert de Bakker argues, Herodotus’s metatextual account of his efforts depicts the Histories itself as one such great and wonderful deed.Footnote ⁷⁹ Herodotus, like Arendt, includes words among the erga; for both, the histor too is a doer of great deeds.Footnote ⁸⁰

Erga bridge the chasm between men and the gods; they are evidence of human excellence. Yet Arendt’s criterion for greatness offers a stark contrast to Herodotus. For Arendt, great deeds allow men to:

While this undoubtedly captures some Greek thinking about greatness (Arendt cites Heraclitus), it differs from the distinctions Herodotus draws between human and animal. In the Histories, the human–animal difference lies not in proving one’s bestness but rather in two key capacities: speechFootnote ⁸² and moderation.Footnote ⁸³ The importance of moderation in the Histories offers a revealing contrast to Arendt’s emphasis on aristeuein; both require active effort to develop and maintain. The rareness and importance of moderation for Herodotus is made manifest through his comments on the convention, shared by the Egyptians and Hellenes alone, of forbidding human beings but not animals from fornicating in temples.Footnote ⁸⁴ Herodotus explicitly expresses distaste for those who reason that what is permissible for animals is allowed for human beings; they collapse the distinction between human and animal. Like Arendt, Herodotus deems the human–animal distinction potentially porous, in need of active reinforcement, but for him, this distinction lies not in outdoing but moderation, a capacity that his Histories attests is often neglected.Footnote ⁸⁵

Indeed, while Herodotus praises excellent individuals, barbarian and Greek alike, he praises them not for outdoing others, but for their honesty,Footnote ⁸⁶ justice,Footnote ⁸⁷ and wisdom;Footnote ⁸⁸ notably, he also praises a woman, Artemisia, for both her courage and wisdom.Footnote ⁸⁹ The erga he praises most emphatically, however, are political: he commends the Medes for freeing themselves from foreign rule;Footnote ⁹⁰ Babylonian laws for promoting equality and community;Footnote ⁹¹ the Scythians for avoiding domination;Footnote ⁹² and the Athenians for their equal speech.Footnote ⁹³ Outdoing is not condemned; when the Persians hear of the Olympics, one man is shocked: “what sort of men have you led us to fight against, who contend, not for money, but purely for the sake of excelling!”Footnote ⁹⁴ Likewise, the excellence of the Persian Cyrus, the founder of the empire, is clear. But such restless striving comes in for critical examination: Cyrus’s restlessness leads to his ignominious death—his decapitated head thrust in a wine-bag by the grieving mother and warrior queen Tomyris.Footnote ⁹⁵ Most damningly, the nomoi he founded to suit his outsized excellence unleash the madness of his son and successor Cambyses.Footnote ⁹⁶ For Herodotus, particularly human excellence does not consist solely in striving, and is found far from the Hellenic world.

Arendt’s treatment of art is even more Herodotean. She argues that the work of art creates a home for human beings, thus transcending the importance of the deeds these works (themselves erga) commemorate:

Beiner underscores Arendt’s astonishing elevation of art above action:Footnote ⁹⁸ the work of art is an ergon that saves other individual erga from oblivion, both making possible and satisfying the desire for immortality. Notably, Arendt includes history among the arts. The salvific power of the historian is starkly Herodotean: the intention of the Histories is “that time may not draw the colour from what man has brought into being, nor those great and wonderful deeds, manifested by both Greeks and barbarians, fail of their report.”Footnote ⁹⁹

Arendt paraphrases this line in the opening of ‘The Concept of History’:

Later in the essay, she repeats this claim: “Herodotus wanted ‘to say what is’ (legein ta eonta) because saying and writing stabilize the futile and perishable.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ That is, she attributes her conception of the purpose of art, what she terms the “highest capacity” of homo faber,Footnote ¹⁰² to Herodotus himself: it is his understanding of history, it is what he wanted to do. This attribution is striking. Her explanation of the mechanisms of art, how it does what it does, is a description of the activity of the histor: the source of art is thought, which “is related to feeling and transforms its mute and inarticulate despondency … until they all are fit to enter the world and to be transformed into things, to become reified.”Footnote ¹⁰³ This echoes her claims about the imagination in the Lectures, discussed above. In both cases, appearances matter, for objects cannot be divorced from their appearance: “everything that is, must appear, and nothing can appear without a shape of its own; hence there is in fact no thing that does not in some way transcend its functional use, and its transcendence, its beauty or ugliness, is identical with appearing publicly and being seen.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Everything that is, is seen and therefore judged not only by its use but by its beauty or ugliness. For Arendt, we are inescapably aesthetic creatures.

As Beiner notes, this section evokes Heidegger.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ In a letter to Heidegger, Arendt makes clear his complicated influence on the Human Condition as a whole:

This admixture of ambivalence and gratitude captures the ambiguities of the intellectual connections between the two.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Beiner underscores a key agreement: both believe that “[l]iving a properly human life requires participation in a genuine world, and possessing a genuine world is not a spontaneously available given.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Some worlds—most pressingly, the modern one—are not genuine and thus woefully inadequate.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Both turn to the Greeks as an exemplar of a truly authentic politics, contact with which might yet spur a radical reorientation of modern life. Yet despite this agreement, Arendt’s commitments are, as Beiner notes, “fundamentally egalitarian”—whereas Heidegger’s are profoundly illiberal.Footnote ¹¹⁰

I argue that the presence of Herodotus in Arendt’s work—and his absence from Heidegger’s—is part of her attempted mediation of Heidegger’s thought. Her central departures, pluralism and natality, are both Herodotean, which has not been noted in the scholarship. Herodotus’s influence is more explicit in her account of pluralism and equality: she cites Herodotus as the source for the ancient Greek conception of isonomia, equality or equal law. In the Human Condition Arendt writes: “The most famous and most beautiful reference is the discussion of different forms of government in Herodotus (iii.80–83), where Otanes, the defender of Greek equality (isonomie), states that he ‘wishes neither to rule nor be ruled’.”Footnote ¹¹¹ In On Revolution, Arendt explicitly states that she “follow[s]” this passage,Footnote ¹¹² treating it as revelatory of the self-understanding of the polis as well as the particularly political bent to the Greek understanding of freedom.Footnote ¹¹³ By highlighting the importance of equality and freedom in the Histories, Arendt demonstrates her sensitivity as a reader: it is a thematic concern throughout.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Yet not only does she treat this passage as revelatory, she deems it beautiful.Footnote ¹¹⁵ If appearances and aesthetics are inescapable, an essential component of judgment,Footnote ¹¹⁶ it matters that Arendt judges this beautiful: it is to her taste.

The link between natality and Herodotus is not as straightforward. While Arendt identifies Augustine as the originator of the concept of natality,Footnote ¹¹⁷ there is much resonance between her account and Herodotus’s text. The depiction of erga as a form of birth (“with word and deed we insert ourselves into the human world, and this insertion is like a second birth”Footnote ¹¹⁸) evokes the opening of the Histories. Herodotus promises to record ta genomena ex anthropon, translated literally, “the things generated out of/born from human beings.”Footnote ¹¹⁹ Elsewhere, Arendt quotes this line in Greek and asserts that Herodotus makes his subject (and thus the subject of history itself) “those things that owe their existence exclusively to men.”Footnote ¹²⁰ Indeed, Herodotus attends to a range of things he depicts as originating from human beings: language, laws, empire—even the names of the gods.Footnote ¹²¹ My claim is not that Herodotus rather than Augustine is Arendt’s source; it is rather that Herodotus’s orientation to beginnings offers a suggestive parallel to hers, another reason why Herodotus is to her taste (and not to Heidegger’s). Both Arendt and Herodotus underscore the importance of generation, creation, and the new.

Arendt’s attention to erga is tied to her attempt to construct a phenomenology of political experience—of what is real rather than theorized. She shares, at a deep level, Herodotus’s dedication to legein ta eonta. If the Greeks are central to her reconstructive phenomenology, in the Life of the Mind she takes Herodotus as illustrative of pre-philosophic Greek thought as a whole; Arendt points to his intention to “say what is” as the decisive contrast to philosophic nous, the concern with the eternal.Footnote ¹²² Nous transformed (one might say corrupted) the earlier logos, which Arendt, citing Herodotus, terms the “specifically, uniquely human ability that is also applied to mere ‘mortal thought,’ opinions or dogmata, to what happens in the realm of human affairs”Footnote ¹²³—mortal matters that nous came to regard as mere seeming,Footnote ¹²⁴ thus ushering in a turn away from human affairs to the realm of the eternal.Footnote ¹²⁵ Arendt wishes to return to what is, to politics without philosophy; Herodotus, who said what was, is emblematic of this lost world.

What Arendt shares with Herodotus, the interest in human affairs, speaks to the gulf between her and Heidegger—at least as Heidegger saw it:

Both see a resuscitation of Greek thought as essential, yet Heidegger is dismissive about the possibility of individual agency in modernity (as he says, “the individual can no longer do anything”), while Arendt thinks that individual agency is still possible. Herodotus’s emphasis on the fertile possibilities of individual deeds clearly resonates with Arendt’s hopes—and not Heidegger’s despair.

The histor versus history

The threat to agency—and the histor’s role in resuscitating it—is foregrounded in the “Concept of History” in Between Past and Future. Arendt there offers a history of history:

Here, as in the Human Condition, the tension between immortality and mortal humanity can only be imperfectly resolved by the potentially immortal deed. This is because of the singularity of erga:

By recording these interruptions, the “futile” actions of man can gain something of the immortality of the natural world: “[t]hrough history men almost became the equals of nature, and only those events, deeds, or words that rose by themselves to the ever-present challenge of the natural universe were what we would call historical.”Footnote ¹²⁹ In Arendt’s presentation, the ancient Greeks understood great human deeds to rival nature. Meeting this challenge immortalized great human deeds (and their doers).

For Arendt, the ancient Greek historians not only saved individual deeds from oblivion (and, with this, the dignity of individual agents) but also crafted a kind of impartiality she deems more conducive to politics than contemporary “neutrality.” She argues that ancient impartiality—which she locates in Herodotus’s intention to praise Greek and barbarian alike,Footnote ¹³⁰ even claiming that he originates itFootnote ¹³¹—is possible precisely because it lacks any concept of historical progress and is therefore unconcerned with the so-called “judgment of history.”Footnote ¹³² Arendt contends that impartiality creates a common world because it keeps alive the dispute and debate constitutive of such a realm: “the Greeks discovered that the world we have in common is usually regarded from an infinite number of different standpoints, to which correspond the most diverse points of view.”Footnote ¹³³ This is on display in the Histories. Footnote ¹³⁴ This impartiality is possible, Arendt contends, only because the ancient historian sought only to judge what is worthy of preservation, not the true meaning of what happened. Ironically, it is this refusal to judge that keeps alive dispute and thus makes possible a common world.

In contrast, the modern concept of history denies the possibility of a shared world: “the birth of the modern idea of history not only coincided with but was powerfully stimulated by the modern age’s doubt of the reality of an outer world ‘objectively’ given to human perception as an unchanged and unchangeable object.”Footnote ¹³⁵ Sensation tells us nothing of the sensed object, thus reducing everything other than moral principles or self-interest to mere matters of “taste,” yet without a shared reality, we cannot render these tastes explicable and thus persuasive to others. One person might prefer beer, another wine; another might prefer democracy, yet another fascism—and nothing can mediate between them. The utter unreliability of our senses to disclose the world leads to a new emphasis on making and technology, for if we cannot know the world as it is, we can at least understand what we ourselves have made.Footnote ¹³⁶ This technological turn shifts attention away from particular deeds by insisting on the importance of process and progress,Footnote ¹³⁷ which in turn renders the past meaningless: it “cancels out and makes unimportant whatever went before.”Footnote ¹³⁸ For Arendt, the modern concept of history degrades the worth of the particular; what the histor celebrated and preserved no longer matters.

Yet this view of progress still grants the past a certain dignity as a step along the way. For Arendt, what is truly catastrophic is the nihilism that follows when faith is lost in any narrative of history, as happens when any given interpretation can force the particular to fit its parameters:

That the past can be persuasively interpreted in any number of contradictory ways gives rise to the belief that “everything is possible.” But rather than liberating human beings from the dead hand of history, this allows for the emergence of totalitarianism, which, as Arendt summarizes, “is based in the last analysis on the conviction that everything is possible—and not just permitted.”Footnote ¹⁴⁰

In sum, the concept of nature foundational to modern science stimulated a notion of history as process, ultimately giving rise to a technological understanding of the world and, as a consequence, profound world-alienation.Footnote ¹⁴¹ For Arendt, technology has utterly transformed the world, and the disenchantment of history has rendered it meaningless. Human beings are left utterly alone, consumed by the drive for comfortable self-preservation; or, desperate to create meaning—any meaning—they are made into a mass under totalitarianism: “This twofold loss of the world—the loss of nature and the loss of human artifice in the widest sense, which would include all history—has left behind it a society of men who, without a common world which would at once relate and separate them, either live in desperate lonely separation or are pressed together into a mass.”Footnote ¹⁴² It is this bleak picture of modernity—one she shares with Heidegger—that drives Arendt’s turn to judgment. This is central to her work: as Beiner puts it, “the impetus behind Arendt’s affirmation of politics and active citizenship was neither romanticism nor utopianism, but fear and dread.”Footnote ¹⁴³ The turn to the histor—and Herodotus—is key to her project of preserving human freedom against threats both novel (totalitarianism, nihilism) and old (the drive to transcend particularity through contemplation of eternal truths).

Flourishing and nature

I suggest, however, that Arendt mistakes both Herodotus’s practice of judging and the nuances of his depiction of nature—precisely because of the Heideggerian quality of her understanding of the Greek concept of nature. This is evidenced by her contention, discussed above, that the Greeks understood nature to be a rival, and that men must meet “the ever-present challenge of the natural universe.”Footnote ¹⁴⁴ This is deeply agonistic: nature here is not a telos or a guide but a rival that must be outdone. Not only does she attribute this view to Herodotus, she takes it as the essential “Greek concept and experience of nature.”Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Furthermore, she deems this to be self-evident: “Herodotus … never would have doubted that each thing that is or was carries its meaning within itself and needs only the word to make it manifest”;Footnote ¹⁴⁶ for the Greeks, “great things are self-evident, shine by themselves … the poet (or later the historiographer) has only to preserve their glory.”Footnote ¹⁴⁷ For erga to be worthy of preservation, human beings must challenge and outshine nature; this is so primary that these individual deeds required not understanding but beautiful words to preserve their (self-evident) glory.

Arendt admits that there is an element of interpretation to this preservation: in the Human Condition, she writes that “[a]ction reveals itself fully only to the storyteller, that is, to the backward glance of the historian, who indeed always knows better what it was all about than the participants … [it is] the storyteller who perceives and ‘makes’ the story.”Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Yet the meaning that the “backward glance of the historian” perceives and thereby makes is straightforward:

As an account of judgment, this is curious. It seems to suggest that the historian judges only what is great—and that the standard of greatness is plain, that is, requires no judgment. At stake is not the nature of greatness but whether a given ergon disrupts the ordinary and thus rivals nature. As Wolin notes, this is markedly Heideggerian: “For Arendt, as well as Heidegger, politics is primarily a matter of existential self-affirmation: a terrain of virtuoso performance and individual bravado, a proving grounds for authenticity.”Footnote ¹⁵⁰

But it is not Herodotean. This is evident if we consider an episode from the Histories that comes closest to Heideggerian/Arendtian overcoming. Pixodarus urges his fellow Carians to be better than nature in their fight against the Persians—yet this is in service not of individual excellence, but the survival of a community.Footnote ¹⁵¹ Even so, his advice is not taken; so far from being self-evident, this standard of “outdoing” is rejected by the Carians (who are defeated). Something else is at stake. The difference between Herodotus and Arendt is suggested when Herodotus restates his topic shortly after he begins:Footnote ¹⁵²

That is, rather than evaluating deeds in terms of what rivals nature, Herodotus tracks the flourishing (eudaimonia) of human beings—wherever and whenever it is found (and lost).Footnote ¹⁵⁴ The meaning of flourishing, however, is not straightforward. The different peoples Herodotus surveys offer competing visions of its character. For Cyrus, flourishing consists of empire, of having the “ten thousand good things” by ruling over others;Footnote ¹⁵⁵ for the Scythians, it lies in escaping domination;Footnote ¹⁵⁶ for the Athenians, it is to dwell in a city where, in striving for the city, one wins for one’s very self.Footnote ¹⁵⁷

Indeed, one of the most famous episodes of the text is a debate over flourishing: the confrontation between Solon, the Athenian law-giver known for his wisdom, and Croesus, the doomed Lydian despot.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ During Solon’s travels, he came to stay with Croesus. Croesus took the wise man to see his vast treasury, and then asked “whether, of all men, there is one you have seen as the most blessed of all.” Herodotus observes that Croesus was in no doubt that “he himself was the most blessed.”Footnote ¹⁵⁹ But Solon’s answer reveals a very different view of blessedness: the happiest man, he says, is Tellus the Athenian:

While Tellus excelled in battle, the point is not his strength but the whole of his life. Solon makes this clear when, after Croesus pressed him to name his second happiest (still not Croesus!), the despot is “sharply provoked”Footnote ¹⁶¹ and demands that Solon explain himself. Solon provides a whirlwind speech expounding the frailty of human life: “man is entirely what befalls him”; while riches might help an individual withstand the vagaries of fortune, “wait till he is dead … till then call him not blessed but lucky.”Footnote ¹⁶²

Over the course of the encounter, the meaning of happiness is interrogated, both explicitly in Solon’s speech and implicitly through Herodotus’s treatment. Croesus began by asking who is most olbios—“blessed” but with connotations of “wealthy.” But Tellus’s life is noted not for its wealth but for its completion, its ordinary excellence (children, grandchildren, sufficient but not extraordinary wealth), culminating in an honourable death in service of his city. As a stunned Croesus presses Solon to name the second most blessed, Solon makes the even more surprising selection of Cleobis and Biton, two twins who died in their sleep (despite being in the flower of their youth) after performing a supreme feat of service for their mother—for which she prayed that the gods give them “whatsoever is best for man to win.”Footnote ¹⁶³ While Solon and Croesus had been using the language of olbios, Herodotus marks this shift through his narration: “So Solon assigned his second prize in happiness (εὐδαιμονίης) to these men”Footnote ¹⁶⁴—moving from blessedness to flourishing.

Solon is not Herodotus; Herodotus does not speak through his characters but instead either renders explicit judgments in his own voice, or, as scholars have shown, through the staging of the text—the interplay generated between competing stories, the meaning developed through the drama rather explicitly stated.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ Yet this debate demonstrates both Herodotus’s interest in questions of eudaimonia, of what constitutes human flourishing—and his philosophical approach. That is, Herodotus offers neither a didactic moral with an easily extricable teaching, nor is he a relativist who abjures any substantive vision of human flourishing.Footnote ¹⁶⁶ Instead, his inquiry is philosophical; it examines the past, the various deeds of human beings, as offering a guide to a deeper and more complete understanding of human flourishing,Footnote ¹⁶⁷ nature,Footnote ¹⁶⁸ and thereby human beings themselves. He considers alternative ideals and, through the generational span of his Histories, can trace more fully the unintended consequences, costs, and potentials of competing visions of flourishing.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ Rather than a chronicle of the self-evidently great, the Histories is a philosophically rich, fundamentally aporetic approach to grasping the elusive truth of human beings, offering provisional judgments and competing nonideals of political life as it provokes readers to grapple with the significance of these.Footnote ¹⁷⁰ Herodotus’s inquiry, his practice of judgment, is not separate from his philosophy but an aspect of it. He does not merely record the self-evidently great but rather investigates it.