Our Concern With Ourselves
Note: This piece was first published on Medium (May 17, 2026). For more Amor Mundi posts, visit the Medium page (updated weekly) or the official Hannah Arendt Center website, which offers a fuller archive of past writings.
In his reflection on Hannah Arendt’s insight — “In politics, we are concerned with the world and not with ourselves” — Micah White raises a serious question about the boundary between morality and politics. As Arendt writes, “In all moral questions, we are concerned with ourselves. We ask ourselves whether we are guilty of something, whether we can live with ourselves after having done this or that.” We can hear in such a moral question Henry David Thoreau’s insistence on moral purity: If my government uses its taxes to support slavery or a war I disagree with, my obligation is not to end slavery or stop the war, but simply to refuse to pay my taxes and wash my hands of my involvement.
Such moral questions, Arendt continues, “are entirely legitimate and very important questions but they are not fundamentally political. In politics, we are concerned with the world and not with ourselves. What I object to in the New Left, as I sometimes objected to in the Old Left, is this concern with themselves.”
White cites these lines of Arendt to indict “an activist culture that thinks winning is living a progressive lifestyle: recycling, eating organic, voting.” For White, “This turn toward a concern for oneself is symptomatic of the shift away from revolution.” Too many progressives want to keep their hands clean and eschew violence as a moral imperative. In doing so, White sees that they refuse the fundamental maxim of politics, which is to take and wield power.
White sees quite rightly that, as Arendt argues, violence cannot build power. He also understands, as does Arendt, that violence can at times expose the injustice and illegitimacy of a government or system of power. Used intelligently, violence can undermine power and open the door to revolutionaries who would build new systems of power — but it cannot build power itself. White is thus critical of a revolutionary left whose moralism refuses violence on principle, and equally of its thoughtless temptation toward violence when what is needed is the patient building of legitimate power.
In his reflections on violence, power, and legitimacy, White raises important questions, but he turns away from his opening provocation concerning the non-political nature of a concern with ourselves. That provocation is worth pursuing, because Arendt’s opposition between the world and ourselves is central to her larger political project. What looks at first like a simple contrast between moral and political action deepens, in her work, into something more radical: a contrast between moral and political conformity, on one side, and the activity of thinking itself.
For example, in Arendt’s essay “Civil Disobedience,” she refuses Thoreau’s moral understanding of civil disobedience and argues that it should be understood politically, as an organized movement of a substantial minority of citizens who are willing to break the laws in order to demonstrate their illegality. Because civil disobedience is, for her, a political and not a moral act, it reaffirms its commitment to civility and legality. It is not about keeping our souls pure but about a political fight about our common world.
Arendt also opposes the world to our concern for ourselves in her essay “What is Freedom?” Freedom, she writes, is the ability to act in public, to start something new. It is the human faculty to interrupt the status quo, the automatism inherent in all politics when “political life has become petrified and political action impotent.” To act freely is to interrupt political processes and will always appear to be dangerous, even violent. That is why freedom depends on courage, and it is why courage is the first virtue of politics. To act courageously is to risk one’s life in order to change the world. That is why courage and freedom care more about the world than about ourselves. “Courage is indispensable because in politics not life but the world is at stake.”
Arendt’s most direct confrontation between morality and politics occurs in her posthumously published essay “Thinking and Moral Considerations.” Arendt asks whether thinking, which typically has no impact on the world, might actually have the capacity to prevent us from doing evil. Her example is Socrates. Socrates, she argues, is not a moralist. Indeed, he was convicted by the Greeks for undermining their morality. But he is a thinker, someone who, in talking and thinking about piety, justice, and courage, can unfreeze a frozen morality. Such thinking is not moral; it is dangerous, because it calls conventional morality into question. If left unchecked, thinking can lead to cynicism and nihilism, the belief that there is no morality and that therefore everything is permitted. That is why Arendt writes that “There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous.”
As a fundamentally destructive enterprise, thinking seems disconnected from both morality and politics. And yet Arendt does discover in Socratic thinking two positive statements. The first is that “It is better to be wronged than to do wrong.” And the second reads: “ It would be better for me that my lyre or a chorus I directed should be out of tune and loud with discord, and that multitudes of men should disagree with me rather than that I, being one, should be out of harmony with myself and contradict me.” Both of these are typically understood as moral claims about oneself. I should prefer my moral purity over the doing of any wrong, even when I am wronged. And I should prioritize the consistency of my moral oneness over the complexity of political plurality.
For Arendt, however, these Socratic propositions are not rooted in morality, but in thinking. They are not discovered in a knowable morality, but are, she argues, “insights of experience,” to be discovered in the “thinking process as such.” What thinking does is confront us with perplexities. It stops us from conforming to automatic processes of history and frees us from both political laws and moral conventions. The experience of thinking is not moral truth, but the freeing of ourselves from the certainty of all conventional truths. To that extent, conscience emerges as what Arendt calls a “by-product” of thinking. And when it does, its impact is to paralyze us. In moments when “everybody is swept away unthinkingly by what everybody else does and believes” — when “the best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity,” — thinking frees us from conformity. In times of emergency, Arendt argues, “those who think are drawn out of hiding because of their refusal to join is conspicuous and thereby becomes a kind of action.”
Thinking, concerned not with the world but with the quest for meaning, can seem deeply anti-political. And yet Arendt argues that thinking — insofar as it makes us “stop and think” — can, in extreme and emergency situations, serve as a deterrent to the doing of evil. It is in this way that thinking becomes a kind of courageous action, one concerned more with the world than with ourselves.
Arendt’s lesson for activism is not that we must choose between moral purity and the will to power. It is that politics requires what Arendt calls thinking — the dangerous, destructive faculty that interrupts the automatic processes of ideology, morality, and political fashion. Thinking frees us from the conformities of both conventional morality and conventional radicalism. White is right that progressives who recycle and vote and eat organic have mistaken a lifestyle for a politics. But what they lack is not a willingness to dirty their hands; it is the willingness to think. The activist preoccupied with her carbon footprint and the revolutionary preoccupied with the purity of his violence share more than either would admit: both surrender judgment to what their side already knows. Each, in Arendt’s sense, is concerned with the self.
The Socratic preference for being wronged rather than doing wrong, and for being in harmony with oneself rather than with the many, is not a private moral consolation. It is the discipline that makes possible the rarer political act: to appear in public, against the current, in defense of a world held in common. That is the concern for the world that politics demands, and it is what is missing alike from the moralism of the activist left and from the revolutionary’s faith that violence builds power. What both need, and what Arendt insists upon, is the courage to think.
Arendt’s essay “Thinking and Moral Considerations” is published in Responsibility and Judgment, edited by Jerome Kohn, which is the next book we are reading in the Hannah Arendt Center’s Virtual Reading Group. More information here.
You might also enjoy my recent essays, “Know Thy Self,” “Solidarity: What Are We Fighting For?” “Pearl Diving,” “When Crimes Cease to Appear as Crimes: Hannah Arendt’s Warning as the Republic Turns 250,” “Expropriation: Notes on the Revolution to Come,.”
Learn more about the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College here.