Arendt and the Poetics of History
Zhang Yaojun
Abstract:Zhang Yaojun’s Arendt and the Poetics of History excavates the unique historical thinking implicit in Hannah Arendt’s political philosophy, conceptualizing it as a distinct “poetics of history”—essentially an art of memory centered on love and care for the world. This framework stands apart from conventional historiography and historical philosophy, as it prioritizes individual agency, concrete speech and action, and the tangible world that renders these human expressions visible.
Keywords:Zhang Yaojun; Arendt and the Poetics of History
Zhang Yaojun’s Arendt and the Poetics of History excavates the unique historical thinking implicit in Hannah Arendt’s political philosophy, conceptualizing it as a distinct “poetics of history”—essentially an art of memory centered on love and care for the world. This framework stands apart from conventional historiography and historical philosophy, as it prioritizes individual agency, concrete speech and action, and the tangible world that renders these human expressions visible.
Zhang Yaojun’s analysis unfolds in three parts. First, he traces Arendt’s poetics of history to its classical Greek roots, revealing a fundamental unity between poetry and history in their shared subject of human praxis, narrative essence, and pursuit of impartiality—a unity subsequently severed by the rise of philosophy. Second, he deploys this classical model to critique modern historiography and historical philosophy, identifying their core crisis as the loss of impartiality and the absorption of individuality by anonymous, technological processes. Finally, he outlines the possibility of reconstructing a modern poetics of history, one that reaffirms individuality through story-telling, upholds authenticity, and prioritizes concreteness and visibility over the abstract, invisible processes of modern historical philosophy. The unchanging core of this reconstructed poetics remains, for Zhang, a profound love and care for the world.
I. Arendt’s Poetics of History in the Classical Sense
Arendt never explicitly uses the term “poetics of history,” yet her thought traces back to Aristotle while subverting his canonical distinction between poetry and history. Where Aristotle argues poetry is more philosophical and universal (focused on the possible), Arendt emphasizes their fundamental unity: both take human praxis (practice) as their subject, belonging to the “vita activa” (active life) in contrast to the philosopher's “vita contemplativa” (contemplative life) (Zhang). For Arendt, poetry and history are both offspring of Mnemosyne (the goddess of memory), tasked with preserving the ephemeral words, deeds, and events of human life—making them endure beyond their immediate occurrence (Zhang).
Human historicity, Arendt posits, stems from the tension between mortality (awareness of death, shaping individual identity) and natality (the birth of new people and new beginnings, the ontological root of human agency). Natality, more pivotal than mortality in her political philosophy, enables humans to build a durable public world and perform great deeds that reveal human excellence (Zhang). This greatness is a paradox: as mortal beings, humans strive for the immortality of nature, and such striving—manifest in individual speech and action—defines historical greatness (Zhang).
Poetry and history are further unified in their narrative essence: history, for Arendt, is fundamentally a “story” (histoire in French). Herodotus the historian is a storyteller, and Homer the poet is a historian; both select and narrate worthy great deeds, and both achieve “reconciliation with reality”—Aristotle’s catharsis in tragedy, and Hegel’s “tears of remembrance” in history (Zhang). Shared too is the Greek conception of greatness: greatness belongs only to mortal individuals, not to immortal nature, and the poet/historian's role is merely to preserve its radiance (Zhang).
Classical poetics of history predates the disciplinary split between poetry and history, with impartiality as its core objective. This neutrality—evident in Homer’s celebration of both Greeks and Trojans, and Herodotus's commitment to honoring the great deeds of all peoples—transcends the parochialism of the polis, granting the poet/historian an independent narrative space. The rise of philosophy and its quest for intellectual dominance in the polis ultimately severed poetry and history (Zhang).
II. Arendt’s Critique of Modern Historiography and Historical Philosophy
Against the backdrop of classical poetics of history, Arendt identifies two opposing yet inherently linked flaws in modern historiography: extreme objectivism and extreme subjectivism (Zhang). Extreme objectivism, modeled on early modern natural science, demands a “pure gaze” that erases the historian's self, resulting in what Droysen condemns as “castrated objectivity” (Zhang). Extreme subjectivism, by contrast, permeates nationalist historiography, which judges by success or failure, imposes subjective frameworks on historical facts, and erodes the particularity and chronological structure of history (Zhang). In reality, even “objective” modern historiography requires selecting materials, introducing human intervention—and thus subjectivity—making it outdated relative to modern natural science’s revised understanding of objectivity (Zhang).
The root crisis of modern historiography is its loss of classical impartiality, a decline driven by multiple forces: the devaluation of “action” in post-Socratic political philosophy, Christianity’s dismissal of earthly greatness, the fall of Rome shattering the classical illusion of immortality, and most crucially, the rise of technological thinking (Zhang). Galileo’s invention of the telescope—an epochal event for modernity—alienates humans from the world, undermines common sense, and spawns a new epistemology: truth is born of making (Verum esse ipsum factum). Humans only know what they create, shifting focus from things themselves to their processes, and reversing the classical hierarchy of contemplative over active life (Zhang).
This technological epistemology gave rise to a new conception of history: history becomes a human-made process, blurring the essential line between nature and history—both are reduced to an infinite stream of making, and individuality is annihilated (Zhang). Modern historical philosophy (represented by Vico, Hegel, and Marx) centers on two core concepts: making and process (Zhang). These thinkers frame history as a holistic process of truth’s unfolding or realization; Marx even equates historical creation with practical making, positing an “end of history” (Zhang).
Arendt rejects the mainstream view that modern historical consciousness is a secularization of Christian redemptive history: Christian history has a definite beginning and end, while modern history is an infinite stream, replacing individual immortality with the immortality of the human race (Zhang). Secularization—the separation of politics and religion, and the loss of the transcendent—erodes the concept of immortality entirely. Human words and deeds become meaningless links in an infinite sequence, reducing history to a “mixture of error and violence” (Goethe) or a “senseless process of human affairs” (Kant) (Zhang). Interest in history supplants interest in politics, leaving political thought either in despair (Tocqueville) or conflated with history (Marx) (Zhang). Ultimately, historical philosophy rooted in making leads to nihilism: the means-end logic of making destroys meaning, creating an endless process, and the belief that “anything is possible” fostered by making provides an ideological foundation for totalitarianism (Zhang).
III. Reconstructing a Modern Poetics of History
Modernity’s central predicament is the absorption of individuality by an anonymous process: making has supplanted action as the core of human affairs, marginalizing action to the realm of science (a “privilege of scientists”) (Zhang). The classical standard of “greatness” devolves into an empty slogan, attached to grand concepts like the nation or state rather than individual persons (Zhang). The public sphere descends into chaos, severing action from meaning: scientists’ actions lack connection to human relational networks (losing their revelatory power), while those immersed in human affairs lack moral and existential signposts (Zhang). Human deeds become “pathetic contingencies,” driven by passion and self-interest (Zhang).
Yet Arendt insists that process does not entail necessity: the redemption of individuality remains possible. She distinguishes three processes of the vita activa: labor (a cyclical, necessary process of biological metabolism), work/making (a finite means-end process), and action (an open, irreversible, and unforeseeable process driven by concrete individuals) (Zhang). Action's process does not inherently harm individuality; modernity's problem is the fusion of all three processes into a single, impersonal natural process—not an inevitable fate (Zhang). Even action’s marginalization is not decisive: classical exemplary actions (e.g., the war deeds in Homer’s epics) already existed on the margins of the political public sphere (Zhang).
The poetics of history, in its essence, is an art of memory. The world—the material product and carrier of human coexistence—is an “organized memory”; its destruction is the destruction of human memory (Zhang). As a higher form of memory, the poetics of history is a special kind of making, akin to works of art: it is non-utilitarian, enduring, and resistant to the stream of natural processes (Zhang). Like art, it reveals and remakes the world—not a mere reflection, but a disclosure of the world’s essential structure, becoming a new measure and standard for the world (Zhang).
A modern poetics of history is defined by its emphasis on story-telling, with three key narrative features: it centers on individual cases and extraordinary events that interrupt the cycle of daily life (distinguishing it from modern objectivist historiography’s undifferentiated recording); the narrator maintains a critical distance from actors and events, a phenomenological reduction that excludes ideological biases and allows the meaning of actions/events to reveal itself (the foundation of its impartiality); and it adheres to selectivity—honoring only those who “open the world and illuminate history” (Zhang). Hitler and Stalin, for example, do not deserve definitive biographies, as such works would distort history and incite admiration (Zhang).
Crucially, a modern poetics of history is distinct from three other discourses: 1. Modern historiography: It has explicit selectivity and orientation, rejecting indiscriminate “objectivity.” 2. Fiction/literature: It upholds authenticity and non-fiction—historical stories have no author, only a witness-narrator, while literature is a product of invention (Zhang). History is the only medium that reveals the unique “who” of an individual through retrospective narration of their words and deeds (Zhang). 3. Modern historical philosophy: It prioritizes concreteness and visibility, focusing on particular individuals, concrete speech/action, and the tangible world in which they appear. Modern historical philosophy, by contrast, posits an “invisible author” (God, Absolute Spirit, etc.), directing visible history toward a transcendent, unseeable realm (Zhang).
The reconstruction of a modern poetics of history is ultimately the reaffirmation of individuality—a return to caring for human speech, action, and great deeds. Its unchanging core theme remains love and care for the world: safeguarding the common human world, preserving a public space for individual expression, and restoring history to a meaningful “story” (Zhang).
Works Cited
Zhang, Yaojun. “Arendt and the Poetics of History.” Unpublished manuscript, 26 Dec. 2025.
The Author
ZhangYaojun, Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, Tongji University. He is a co-editor of the Chinese translation of Merleau-Ponty Collection (The Commercial Press) and the author of The Metaphorical Body: A Study of Merleau-Ponty’s Somatic Phenomenology. His translations include Alexandre Kojève: Philosophy, the State, and the End of History, Introduction to Hegel’s Philosophy of History, On Marx and Hegel, and The Visible and the Invisible.