I Am Not (Alone):

Rethinking Arendtian Action Through Kierkegaardian Irony

Abstract

This essay challenges the widespread assumption that Hannah Arendt’s concept of political action precludes meaningful solitude. Drawing on Søren Kierkegaard’s notion of irony, I argue that action, in Arendt’s sense, requires not only plurality but also a preparatory solitude grounded in ironic distance. I suggest that both Kierkegaard’s anxiety-ridden subject and Arendt’s public actor share a natal stance toward the world—one that resists conformism and opens a space for genuine appearance. By placing Arendt in conversation with Kierkegaard, I recover an ironic, natal dimension within her vita activa—a mode of inwardness often eclipsed in dominant interpretations of her work. Rather than signaling a withdrawal from the public realm, this inwardness forms the hidden ground upon which meaningful political association becomes possible.

Bringing Arendt and Kierkegaard into dialogue—a pairing rarely made—reveals affinities deeper than typically recognized. Despite their temperamental differences, both exhibit a sustained attentiveness to the nature of disclosure. For Arendt, to act is to begin—to introduce the new into the world through speech and deed. For Kierkegaard, to live ironically is to hold one’s identity at a slant: to resist the given, to refuse the merely inherited. Both involve risk. Both expose the individual (though in different ways and directions).[1] And both, crucially, are rooted in natality: the idea that one can begin anew, not from mastery, but from finitude.[2]

Kierkegaard’s account of irony, especially as developed in The Concept of Irony, articulates a form of solitude that is neither resignation nor quietism, but rather a posture of critical distance from inherited identities and unexamined social roles. The ironist stands apart—not in apathy, but in anticipation. This inward estrangement is not yet action, but it is what makes action possible. It is, as Kierkegaard might suggest, a form of pre-political becoming: a stripping away of the conventional that prepares the self for authentic self-disclosure. In this sense, irony becomes natal solitude—a space where the self is both unsettled and readied for emergence. When read alongside Arendt, Kierkegaard’s ironic inwardness appears not as the antithesis of political action, but as its condition: the space where a self first gathers sufficient freedom to appear meaningfully before others.

[1] Closer phenomenological inspection (begun here) suggests that this appearance of “differing direction” is no less superficial than the oft-assumed lack of affinity between Arendt and Kierkegaard.

[2] Their apparent difference turns not on any ontic essence but on temporal emphasis. This essay aims to open space in which Arendtian natality and Kierkegaardian irony both appear as the creative ground where something new begins. The publicness and exteriority of Arendt’s vita activa is found in her deliberate emphasis of this aspect of being human in The Human Condition. Whereas Kierkegaard’s treatment deals more specifically with the conditions for the existential move he makes in The Concept of Irony. They are not two distinct descriptions of two different people, but two possible stages of being that could happen in one body at one time, many bodies at different times or even in one body at different times over time.