In The Human Condition （German ver.: Vita activa）, Hannah Arendt analyses what she calls three fundamental activities: labor, work, and action. Since the chapter that deals with action is the longest one, we are convinced that action is for Arendt the most important concept among the three. It is not easy, however, to understand the essential characteristics of action. Action is one’s spontaneity or actualization of one’s uniqueness, because it means “to begin something” despite the fact that it consists in the foundation of one’s relationship with others. This paper is an attempt to reconcile these two aspects of the concept of “action.”
First, I examine Arendt’s concept of “plurality in general” and “human plurality,” the former of which enables the latter. Plurality in general means that an entity can never exist and be recognized without being in relation with and different from other entities. According to this principle, a person （an entity） also always already exists as something distinct from other persons.
Then I refer to the definition of “action” as “beginning” or “initiative,” because Arendt argues that action is a faculty to begin, i.e. to release spontaneous processes, which would never occur without human beings. In other words, action causes events par excellence. But this action is not only active but also passive simultaneously, since one’s action always occurs in the midst of relation with others. Doing and suffering thus belong to each other; that is, when one acts, one suffers from other’s reaction and vice versa. Both cannot be unequivocally referred to as an “actor,” i.e. a subject, since they are both actors and sufferers, active and passive. To describe this situation, Arendt makes use of the concept of “in-between.”
Arendt insists that what in-between consists of is not material things but intangible relations. The in-between separates and relates at the same time; hence, subjects are separated from and related to each other. Before the event, neither subjects nor relations exist. Action is, in fact, emergence of this in-between and is itself a separating and relating power. From the subject’s point of view, action is one’s own activity and realization of one’s uniqueness. Nevertheless, its essence is the differentiation and emergence of relation.
Eventually, by virtue of speech or words, the subjects that have emerged here as crystallization of relations are made up into heroes of a story, and the events as such are also told in a meaningful story.
