Nietzsche, Arendt, and the Promise of the Future

In considering Hannah Arendt’s philosophical debt to Nietzsche, commentators have often drawn attention to the figure of the promise and to its central significance in the work of both thinkers. “The real problem regarding man,” as Nietzsche famously wrote in the programmatic opening remarks to the second essay from On the Genealogy of Morals, is how “to breed an animal with the right to make promises.” For Arendt, too – who cites this remark approvingly in the closing section of her analysis of action in The Human Condition – the faculty of promising distinguishes human from animal life, and she goes still further, describing it as a “miraculous” faculty with the power to “redeem” the man of action from the necessity and anonymity of natural life and from the inherent meaninglessness of productive activity. For neither thinker can promising be grasped simply as one activity among others, as one possible expression or accomplishment of the self; rather, albeit in importantly different ways, promising is for them constitutive of the human subject, exemplifying a complicated temporal structure (a dialectic of memory and forgetfulness) that is the indispensable condition of both agency and responsibility.