Hannah Arendt's Examination Of Political Freedom

Hannah Arendt’s examination of political freedom falsifies the notion that the locust of freedom is our free will. Arendt’s exploration of what freedom looks like completely disproves that freedom is an inner concept that our free wills’ create or experience. By showing the existence of freedom in the political world and public sphere, Ardent demonstrates what real freedom looks like and how we can attain it. According to Arendt, “without a politically guaranteed public realm, freedom lacks the worldly space to make its appearance”(XX). Political freedom is not subject to the same critiques as free will because it is not so deeply involved in the self.

Free will exists within each individual. We all will ourselves to act, but do not always act

If we hadn’t seen someone be free and someone be un-free, we would have no conception of freedom. Arendt points out that it is “safe to say that man would know nothing of inner freedom if he had not first experienced a condition of being free as a worldly tangible reality. We first become aware of freedom or its opposite in our intercourse with others, not in the intercourse with ourselves”(XX). We only know freedom as we have seen it publically. Everyone is able in his or her own mind to think freely, but freedom in reality is what is concrete.

It is the public sphere in which we understand and witness freedom.

The will itself is constantly at war- we subdue our own wills and our selves to create freedom in the public world. Arendt argues, “it is as though the I-will immediately paralyzed the I-can, as though the moment men willed freedom, they lost their capacity to be free” (162). Freedom is shared with others and cannot be our individual “wills” because freedom is not unique to each individual person. Arendt sees freedom as more of a collective entity. We create freedom through what we share with others. Freedom needs an