The Bloomsbury Companion to Arendt 2020009118, 2020009119, 9781350053298, 9781350053281, 9781350053304

Citation preview

The Bloomsbury Companion to Arendt

ALSO AVAILABLE FROM BLOOMSBURY Hannah Arendt’s Ethics, Deirdre Lauren Mahony Women Philosophers Volume I: Education and Activism in NineteenthCentury America, Dorothy Rogers Mary Midgley: An Introduction, Gregory S. McElwain Why Iris Murdoch Matters, Gary Browning Becoming Beauvoir, Kate Kirkpatrick The Philosophy of Susanne Langer, Adrienne Dengerink Chaplin Bloomsbury Companions The Bloomsbury Companion to Arendt The Bloomsbury Companion to Aristotle The Bloomsbury Companion to Berkeley The Bloomsbury Companion to Ethics The Bloomsbury Companion to Existentialism The Bloomsbury Companion to Hegel The Bloomsbury Companion to Heidegger The Bloomsbury Companion to Hobbes The Bloomsbury Companion to Hume The Bloomsbury Companion to Kant The Bloomsbury Companion to Leibniz The Bloomsbury Companion to Locke The Bloomsbury Companion to Philosophy of Mind The Bloomsbury Companion to Plato The Bloomsbury Companion to Continental Philosophy The Bloomsbury Companion to Political Philosophy The Bloomsbury Companion to Socrates The Bloomsbury Companion to Spinoza

The Bloomsbury Companion to Arendt Edited By Peter Gratton and Yasemin Sari

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2021 Copyright © Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2021 Peter Gratton and Yasemin Sari have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. xi constitute an extension of this copyright page. Series design by Eleanor Rose Cover image © iStock All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Gratton, Peter, editor. | Sari, Yasemin, editor. Title: The Bloomsbury companion to Arendt / edited by Peter Gratton and Yasemin Sari. Description: London; New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. | Series: Bloomsbury companions | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020009118 (print) | LCCN 2020009119 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350053298 (hardback) | ISBN 9781350053281 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350053304 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Arendt, Hannah, 1906-1975. Classification: LCC B945.A694 B56 2020 (print) | LCC B945.A694 (ebook) | DDC 320.5092--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020009118 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020009119 ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-5329-8 ePDF: 978-1-3500-5328-1 eBook: 978-1-3500-5330-4 Series: Bloomsbury Companions Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments  xi

Editors’ Introduction  1 Peter Gratton and Yasemin Sari Part I  Sources, Influences, and Encounters  11   1 Arendt and the Roman Tradition  13 Dean Hammer   2 Concepts of Love in Augustine  29 Charles E. Snyder   3 Thomas Hobbes: The Emancipation of the Political-Economic  34 Peg Birmingham   4 Arendt, Montesquieu, and the Spirits of Politics  44 Lucy Cane   5 Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Sovereign Intimacy  51 Peg Birmingham   6 Arendt and Kant’s Moral Philosophy  60 Robert Burch   7 Arendt and Kant’s Categorical Imperative  72 William W. Clohesy   8 Hannah Arendt and Karl Marx: Beyond The Human Condition  82 Tama Weisman   9 Max Weber: Methodology, Action, and Politics  88 Philip Walsh

vi

Contents

10 Phenomenology: Arendt’s Politics of Appearance  96 Peter Gratton 11 Martin Heidegger: Love and the World  104 Jennifer Gaffney 12 Karl Jaspers, Arendt, and the Love of Citizens  114 Ian Storey 13 Isaiah Berlin: Liberty, Liberalism, and Anti-totalitarianism  126 Kei Hiruta 14 Arendt and America  131 Richard H. King 15 Franz Kafka and Arendt: Pariahs in Thought  138 Ian Storey 16 Walter Benjamin and Arendt: A Relation of Sorts  149 Andrew Benjamin 17 Merleau-Ponty: Hiding, Showing, Being  159 Kascha Semonovitch 18 Arendt and Critical Theory: Impossible Friends  169 Rick Elmore 19 Arendt and the New York Intellectuals  177 Richard H. King Part II  Key Writings  183 20 St. Augustine  185 Charles E. Snyder 21 Rahel Varnhagen  191 Samir Gandesha 22 The Origins of Totalitarianism  199 Richard Bernstein 23 The Human Condition  213 Peter Gratton

Contents



vii

24 Eichmann in Jerusalem  228 Leora Bilsky 25 Between Past and Future  238 Emily Zakin 26 On Revolution  249 Robert Fine 27 Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy  255 Matthew Wester 28 The Life of the Mind  262 Robert Burch Part III  Themes and Topics: Ontology, Politics, and Society  279 Ontology  280 29 Arendt and Appearance  281 Jeremy Elkins 30 Arendt on the Activity of Thinking  291 Wout Cornelissen 31 Judaism in The Human Condition  302 Bonnie Honig 32 Life and Human Plurality  330 Dianna Taylor 33 Natality and the Birth of Politics  336 Anne O’Byrne 34 Place: The Familiar Table and Chair  340 Peter F. Cannavò 35 Plurality  351 Catherine Kellogg 36 The Right to Have Rights  357 Yasemin Sari 37 Truth  366 Ronald Beiner

viii

Contents

38 Two-In-One  376 Robert Burch Politics  386 39 Artificial Equality: Procedural, Epistemic, and Performative  387 Yasemin Sari 40 Arendt and Ecological Politics  395 Kerry H. Whiteside 41 Evil  416 James Bernauer 42 Freedom  420 Catherine Kellogg 43 Imperialism  430 Jennifer Gaffney 44 International Law: Its Promise and Limits  440 Natasha Saunders 45 Justice: Arendt in Jerusalem and the Problem of Judgment  447 Vincent Lefebve, translated by Zachary Fouchard 46 Law: Nomos and Lex, Constitutionalism and Totalitarianism in Arendt’s Thought  457 Vincent Lefebve, translated by Zachary Fouchard 47 On the Lost Spirit of Revolution  467 Samantha Rose Hill 48 Power  475 Patrick Hayden 49 Radical Democracy within Limits  481 Andrew Schaap 50 Reconciliation  492 Roger Berkowitz

Contents



ix

51 Responsibility  498 Phillip Nelson 52 The Sensus Communis and Common Sense: The Worldly, Affective Sense of Judging Spectators  508 Peg Birmingham 53 Sovereignty  523 Christian Volk 54 Violence: Illuminating Its Political Meaning and Limits  528 Maša Mrovlje Society  536 55 Arendt’s Alteration of Tone  537 Susannah Gottlieb 56 Art and Performance  545 Cecilia Sjöholm 57 Biopolitics: Racing and “Managing” Human Populations  551 Dianna Taylor 58 The “Conscious Pariah”: Beyond Identity and Difference  558 Samir Gandesha 59 Education: Arendt against the Politicization of the University  565 Peter Baehr 60 Expropriation: The Loss of Land and Place in the World  576 James Barry, Jr. 61 Arendt and Feminism  583 Julian Honkasalo 62 Labor: The Liberation and the Rise of the Life Society  595 James Barry, Jr.

x

Contents

63 Narrative  601 Adriana Cavarero 64 Political Philosophy of Science: From Cosmos to Power  612 Eve Seguin 65 Arendt on Race and Racism  629 Grayson Hunt 66 The Stateless: The Logic of the Camp  642 Samir Gandesha 67 World Alienation and the Search for Home in Arendt’s Philosophy  650 David Macauley Notes on Contributors 657 Index 668

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This volume could not have come together without the immense support of Bloomsbury’s dedicated editors, especially Liza Thomson and Lucy Russell. Their dedication to this project never flagged and it appears in your hands today as much for their work as for ours. Peter would like to thank Peg Birmingham in particular, whose graduate courses first gave him a love for the complexities and force of Arendt’s work—and whose writings continue to influence his work up until today. We also thank each contributor—the dozens!—who patiently took up our requests to contribute in the first place, then dealt with questions and suggestions quickly and without hesitation. Arendt argued that thinking happens always in dialogue and no doubt, too, this book’s editors thought much together and apart, as all dialogues are, with the major contentions involved in each of these inventive and incisive chapters. The size of the volume makes it the largest such project for each of us. We would thus like to thank our partners and friends who supported us in this work even as life’s events often intruded to divert us from this undertaking, one that is ultimately dedicated to Arendt’s continued importance for thinking a world that we must engage and invent, even as the day’s news would often have us turn away. Arendt is a key inspiration for continuing, despite it all, this love of the world. *** We would like to thank Kerry Whiteside for giving us permission to publish Chapter 39 in this volume from his essay, which appeared as “Arendt and Ecological Politics,” Environmental Ethics 16, no. 4 (1994): 339–58. We would also like to thank the Johns Hopkins University Press for allowing us to republish Richard Bernstein’s “The Origins of Totalitarianism: Not History but Politics,” Social Research 69, no. 2 (Summer 2002): 381–401, as Chapter 21 in this volume. We would also like to thank Bonnie Honig for allowing us to republish her “What Kind of Thing Is Land? Hannah Arendt’s Object Relations, or: The Jewish Unconscious of Arendt’s Most ‘Greek’ Text,” Political Theory 44, no. 3 (June 2016): 307–36, as Chapter 30 in this volume. These are the only chapters that have previously appeared in some form.

xii

Editors’ Introduction Peter Gratton and Yasemin Sari

This book brings together some of the most significant thinkers writing today, all of whom are also specialists on Arendt. This book is not just an introduction to Arendt—though that it accomplishes—but it pushes Arendt’s work in new directions, such as considerations of climate change, science, feminism, and more, all while our writers remain eminently readable and engaging. We take up Arendt’s writings in three sections: first by looking at those who influenced her writings and how she read them, often changing how we read canonical authors; second by introducing each of her major books and how they can be reread today; and lastly by taking on the major topics and themes raised by Arendt’s voluminous writings. But let us break from the tedious pro forma academic introduction—the Table of Contents has told you what to expect before you got here—and get to the point: we put together this book because Arendt remains a vital and relevant thinker with whom we often agree and argue, but all in an era we could undoubtedly call, following the title of one of her books, “dark times.” The present is always said to be one of crisis—Arendt herself lived through the Holocaust and the calamities of the Cold War—but there is little doubt that we are continuing the loss of the common world to which Arendt bore witness. Such a loss was already diagnosed by her in her considerations of the role of factual truths in relation to how we form opinions. Politics, for her, never had any grounding in an eternal truth, and in fact, the most fearsome political regimes are those that want to take away the ability of each of us to persuade others with our opinions in order that we hold to some truth of history, of some race, or what have you. A so-called “post-truth” era, then, only testifies to her prescient analyses of the ability of politics to make malleable what can in fact ground our common world. Politics always occurs between two kinds of power: in the first, might is right and to the victors go the spoils, including the writing of history. Politics is performative in this respect: no God handed down borders for territories, and the truth is that power does create its own conditions on the ground. But politics is also about power in Arendt’s sense: words and deeds that persuade others to one’s side. Arendt’s view is that politics cannot be about

2

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

truth, whether we mean one view of history or a vision of how things should be, since politics is about this trading of opinions or it will fall into violence. Hence, we don’t live in a post-truth politics. The politics of right-wing nationalists across the globe very much believe in truths to which politics should adhere: market forces being the natural order of the world, while there are just inherent truths about who is of this nation and who is not. The danger is not a politics without truth but one with a clear adherence to a set of them. Facts, yes, are stubborn things, Arendt held, but to engage in politics is to give oneself over to the come-what-may of the promise of the new, of what has not come before, and is as foreign to the idea of politics being about making something great “again” as it is about a shared sameness enforced by the ugliest forms of violence all-too-visible to us in these dark times. This is why Arendt, some forty years after her death and despite being a writer of her time, has never been so quoted and commented upon in the contemporary media. But the parts of Arendt used are often moralizing handwaving about totalitarianism and its dangers, not the promise of politics described earlier. Arendt, as you will see, was a thinker of distinctions, and what we face today is not a repeat of the past but something new and, as political, previously unprecedented. We need to reread Arendt and use the tools she gave us to think this new world in which find ourselves, but to simply repeat her, to misapply her key terms (authority, violence, and most of all totalitarianism) is to do an injustice to the horrors of those who faced the holes of oblivion Nazism attempted to create, for example, and to presume history, and therefore politics, is merely a repeat of the past. The future, when it arrives, is never a priori good, as previous generations of utopians believed, and the task of politics is not merely to catalogue facts and truths, as too many trite movies about journalists winning the day suggest. Every day, facts are reported, but the work of politics comes in activities— words and deeds—that little by little can build another world; without that, we are indeed lost and without hope. Politics is not about nostalgia for a past that never was, or a truth that must be brought into the world, but the very play of differences among and between us as we bicker, cajole, banter, and get infuriated in everyday forms of democratic activism. Those who want a politics of truth want us to be rid of this democratic messiness, which is a dream as old as Plato; and yet as long as human beings in the plural exist, there is no wishing such a politics away. Men, not a man, as Arendt would often say in the gendered language of her day, is what makes a world. Such, in any event, is the promise of politics for Arendt—a promise that some days appears as a dim, if not dim-witted, hope, but is ever possible given the human conditions of what Arendt called natality and our ability always to begin anew. As she puts it in On Revolution, one of her most important writings: For political thought can only follow the articulations of the political phenomena themselves, it remains bound to what appears in the domain

EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION



3

of human affairs; and these appearances, in contradistinction to physical matters, need speech and articulation, that is, something which transcends mere physical visibility as well as sheer audibility, in order to be manifest at all.1 To be sure, the authors in the volume take up the responsibility to articulate and understand better the political phenomena of our times, and in an effort to go beyond the “mere physical visibility” and the “sheer audibility” of such occurrences, this book makes a case for the relevance of Arendt’s thought, and to take up what we may call her invitation for a worldly care in thinking. That is what these chapters consider, all in their different ways. Cogent and up to the moment we face (the weaponization of political lies, the rise of white nationalism, and so on), these chapters make clear Arendt’s relevance for not falling for the easy view that politics comes with a pre-given truth or, failing that, we are simply done for. Indeed, she was often clear of the courage and virtues needed to enter politics. This was not some nostalgia for Hellenic values, as some have claimed, but is what is needed politically today and every day. Given the rise of social media, politics can often appear as mere social posturing, but to enter into the realm of the political is to face down damning criticism on all sides, and this is not new; it was ever thus. The stakes are high: our whole humanity is put in question whenever we enter politics, or just think, which Arendt deemed a most treacherous activity on its own since we are often forced to give up even our most precious preconceived notions. Anything else invites what Arendt feared most— political quietism—a retreat into our homes or private spaces as other people take command. And history, if it has shown anything, demonstrates that this is always a real possibility. Hence Arendt argues that we must act in words and deeds against the barbarity of a dark time in which populism is equaled with nationalistic jingoism hearkening back to a time that never was. If we are to have anything but a technocratic order or defer to a small set of rulers, we must practice our freedom and recover shared spaces where our words and deeds can matter—in short, where we can share a love of the world with one another. Hannah Arendt’s lifetime (1906–75) was marked by some of the most consequential moments in the twentieth century. Hers was an engaged life, and she wrote in response not just to horrors of the world wars but also of promising events such as the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the civil rights movement in the United States. Born Johanna (Hannah) Arendt in Hannover, East Prussia, into an old Jewish family from Königsberg, Arendt was raised as a largely secular Jew, though this did not always protect her from the virulent anti-Semitism of her classmates, just as it wouldn’t protect her and her family with the rise of the Third Reich in the 1930s. In 1922–3, Arendt began studying classics and Christian theology at the

4

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

University of Berlin, moving to Marburg University in 1924, where she took up philosophy with Martin Heidegger (1889–1976). She would soon begin a romantic relationship with him, one that would reach its high mark during the period when Heidegger wrote his famous work, Being and Time, but which has become a focus of endless, even lurid, fascination for many of her biographers and commentators. She continued contact with Heidegger even after beginning her studies at the University of Heidelberg for a doctorate with Karl Jaspers (1883–1969), under whom she wrote a dissertation on love in the writings of St. Augustine, obtaining her doctorate in 1928. Her friendship with Heidegger—before moving to Berlin in 1929, she would drop anything to go see him upon his invitation—broke off in 1933, just as she left Germany for Paris due to the rise of the Nazis to power, but also as Heidegger joined the Nazi Party. His last letter to her in 1933 protested that rumors of his anti-Semitism were untrue (they weren’t), but this apparently reached deaf ears, since she would not have contact with him again until after the Second World War. Her friendship with Jaspers, however, was continuous, when not disrupted by mail stoppages during the war, and she engaged in their correspondence about matters both personal and deeply philosophical: the nature of philosophical dialogue, the kind of evil represented by the Third Reich, the kind of consequences that should face those who took part in the regime and what counts as political action. Having completed her doctorate, in 1929, she moved from Heidelberg to Berlin, published her doctoral thesis, Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin, and then met and married the philosopher Günther Stern, with whom she fell in love. In Berlin, she began work on a biography of Rahel Varnhagen (1771– 1833), a Jewish writer and well-known Berlin salon host. She completed most of this biography by 1933, when the German political situation intervened. (The biography would be completed in 1957.) In the months after the Reichstag fire and Hitler’s appointment as chancellor, Arendt first became politically active. Her apartment would become something of a stop on an underground railroad for Jews and Communists under threat of ending up in the hands of the Gestapo and looking for a way out of the country. Stern was one of those who faced getting caught up in the mass illegal arrests after the Reichstag fire, and he escaped for Paris, leaving Arendt, for the moment, behind. This would be a turning point for Arendt. As she later told Günther Gauss in a 1964 television interview, so many “ended up in the cellars of the Gestapo or in concentration camps. That was such a shock to me. Ever after I felt responsible,” she said, “I no longer felt I could be an observer.” While still in Berlin, Arendt quietly carried out research for Kurt Blumenfeld, secretary general of the Zionist Federation of Germany, detailing the anti-Semitic documents of various German business and civic groups rushing to parrot the new regime’s propaganda about World Jewry. Her work was not clandestine enough: she was held under interrogation for eight days (she told the police only a parade of lies about her work and the various Jewish groups with which she was in contact), and not long after,

EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION



5

along with her mother, she fled without travel documents to Prague (whose Jewish population ballooned as it was a stopping point for those escaping persecution), then Geneva, and then to Paris, where she would live as a stateless refugee for the remainder of the decade. Arendt, whose relationship to Zionism would always be complicated, especially after the Eichmann affair of the 1960s, nevertheless heeded her mother’s advice: “If attacked as a Jew, one must defend oneself as a Jew,” not as a German citizen, not as “world-citizen, and not as an upholder of the Rights of Man.” Hence while in Paris she worked with Jewish legal aid groups and Zionist organizations helping to settle refugees safely in Palestine. While working with one these groups, Youth Aliyah, which rescued Jewish youth, she met Heinrich Blücher, who was to become her second husband four years after divorcing Stern in 1936. Her marriage to the former Communist Party member was to be a lifelong romance, friendship, and intellectual partnership until his death in 1970, though his several affairs over the years would wound her deeply. He came from a poor background and lacked Arendt’s elite education, but he would later become a memorable lecturer at the New School and later Bard College, and he held a formidable intellect he would need as co-host to many of Arendt’s salons in the 1950s and the 1960s. The two were very different: Arendt was the only daughter of a traditional bourgeois Jewish family and the former student of two of Germany’s most renowned philosophers, while Blücher grew up poor in Berlin and lacked her Jewish background. Largely self-taught—he had attended some night school but never gained a degree—he had made his living working in cabarets in the period before fleeing Germany. But he was politically active, and Arendt had only begun to think deeply about politics. Blücher, she would later tell Jaspers, taught her “to think politically and see historically.” In Paris, she also met fellow intellectuals in exile, including Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht, as well as the who’s who of French philosophical life: Albert Camus, Alexandre Kojève, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Jean Wahl. Arendt’s life would be upended again in May 1940, when she, along with other stateless persons, mostly Jews, was declared “enemy aliens” by the collaborationist Vichy government. She was taken to the Gurs concentration camp and separated from Blücher, who was placed in a camp outside of Paris. Her life in jeopardy, Arendt fled the camp in July, making her way to a safe house where Blücher had also found his way as a fugitive from his camp. After four months on the run, the couple was able to obtain emergency visas to the United States, though they still faced the constant risk of being caught by Vichy authorities. They first made their way to Lisbon, staying there several months, before gaining passage to the United States, arriving in May 1941. (Benjamin would take the same route not long after, but facing arrest at the French-Spanish border, he took his life.) Despite being luckier than others in getting out of Europe, the family’s adjustment to New York City, which Arendt and Blücher would make

6

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

their home for the rest of their lives, was difficult. They each had to learn English quickly, and in a small, often hot Bronx apartment, Blücher and his mother-in-law found it impossible to get along. His first employment was in a chemical factory. Arendt soon found employment writing a column for Aufbau, a leading German-language newspaper, where she wrote article after article highlighting the plight of European Jews and the frightful growing evidence of the Nazi’s Final Solution. She was uncomfortable, she wrote to Jaspers, writing for a German-language publication, but they needed the money and it gave her a forum to remind readers about the plight of the Jews who remained in Europe. As the German hold on the continent came to an end, Arendt worked for the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction Commission, which undertook efforts at reclaiming Jewish cultural artifacts stolen by the Nazis during their brief hold on much of Europe. In 1946, she became an editor at Schocken Books, where she would eventually champion and edit major publications of Walter Benjamin’s work into English, an effort that continues to bring some of his greatest works to readers in the Englishspeaking world. In 1950, she and Blücher became naturalized US citizens. As if all of this were not enough, Arendt also began work on what is still one of the most important works on the rise of Nazism, her first in English, The Origins of Totalitarianism, which would come out in 1951. The book gained her wide renown: Cold Warriors found her inclusion of the Soviet Union in the last part of the book as further evidence of the need to fight Stalinism at home and abroad, while historians picked apart her historical claims about the rise of anti-Semitism and questioned the equation of the Nazi regime with the Soviet’s. Nevertheless, no one doubted that she was an incisive new voice on the American scene. It was also during these years that she would rekindle her correspondence with Heidegger and helped to rehabilitate his intellectual reputation by supporting the publication of his books in English, even finding translators for his magnum opus, Being and Time, published in English in 1962. Their continued relationship scandalized a number of Jews, who could never forgive Heidegger for his activities in the Nazi Party nor his silence about the Holocaust after it. Yet she made visits to him in Freiburg—at first made uncomfortable by Heidegger’s wife’s knowledge of their affair—and sent him her works, though she doubted he read them with any care, if at all. A year after publishing The Origins of Totalitarianism, she received a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship to study “The Totalitarian Elements of Marxism,” and she began lecturing at prestigious institutions across the United States on Marx and began her critique of the Western philosophical tradition, both of which would come to fruition in The Human Condition (1958). She was also a sought-after voice on contemporary events, with her writings often hard to categorize on the easy left-right split of the era, such as her notorious, if not tone-deaf, essay in 1959 for Dissent magazine critiquing the 1957 decision of the then US president Dwight Eisenhower to use the National Guard to integrate Central High School in Little Rock. Though

EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION



7

worried that the weight of the political world was being put on the shoulders of children surrounded by armed soldiers, Arendt’s essay seemed oblivious to the larger racial context of segregation in America, given her own writings on anti-Semitism, and she chose not to republish it during her lifetime, as she did with numerous other contemporary essays. Indeed, in a letter dated July 29, 1965, she wrote to Ralph Ellison, the great novelist and essayist, that while she wasn’t bothered by what her “‘liberal’ friends or non-friends” had critiqued in her essay, an interview by him showed her just how misguided she had been: “I knew I was somehow wrong,” she wrote, “and thought that I hadn’t grasped the element of stark violence, of elementary, bodily fear in the situation.” Then she adds, “But your remarks seem to me so entirely right that I now see that I simply didn’t understand the complexities in the situation.” The controversy over Little Rock, though, was nothing compared to one she would face as she turned in full to the question of evil in the wake of the capture by the Israeli Mossad of Adolf Eichmann in Argentina in May 1960. A year later, she covered the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem for The New Yorker magazine, publishing her report in five successive issues from February 16 — to March 16, 1963, and her account was subsequently published as Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil by Viking Press later that year. The controversy that her work sparked was not merely academic but deeply personal, and it still has not ceded near six decades after its publication. She lost many friendships, though the novelist Mary McCarthy stood by her and defended her in Partisan Review. The accusations against Arendt’s account were numerous and, as happens too often in supposed intellectual debates, were often made by people who refused to read the book itself: she naively accepted Eichmann’s self-presentation as a mere functionary who held no special hatred for the Jews; his bureaucratic cunning and monstrous deeds were in no way “banal”; she blamed the Jews, especially in her depiction of the Jewish Councils who managed the ghettos, for their own annihilation; she ignored those instances in which Jews did attempt revolts against their Nazi captures; she looked down upon the Israeli crowds and depicted them in anti-Semitic stereotypes; and she used a biting tone that reflected an unseemly lack of empathy for the victims of the Holocaust. In response, partially to her excommunication by her friends, colleagues, and old-time comrades, and partially to the manner in which she was criticized—often with a vitriol not often seen in intellectual debates—she appended a “Note to the Reader,” dated June 1964, to the second edition of the book published in 1965. She wrote, “The factual record of the period in question has not yet been established in all its details, and there are certain matters on which an informed guess will probably never be superseded by completely reliable information.” In the “Postscript,” she describes the “campaign” against her: Even before its publication, this book became both the center of a controversy and the object of an organized campaign. It is only natural

8

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

that the campaign, conducted with all the well-known means of imagemaking and opinion-manipulation, got much more attention than the controversy, so that the latter was somehow swallowed up by and drowned in the artificial noise of the former. This became especially clear when a strange mixture of the two, in almost identical phraseology—as though the pieces written against the book (and more frequently against its author) came “out of a mimeographing machine” (Mary McCarthy)— was carried from America to England and then to Europe, where the book was not yet even available. And this was possible because the clamor centered on the “image” of a book which was never written, and touched upon subjects that often had not only not been mentioned by me but had never occurred to me before.2 Her work on the Eichmann trial centered both on the trial itself and on a discussion of two activities Arendt deemed crucial to it: the human ability to think and judge. As a spectator to the trial, she reported on one famous set of events—the trial itself—arising from another historical event—the Nazi crimes against humanity—that was of an unprecedented nature. The judgment she accorded to the trial could not be found under clichéd categories. Staying true to her Kantian convictions while acknowledging that the faculty of understanding is always at work in judgment, especially in creating new concepts in judging the particular, she set out to demonstrate that at the heart of a trial was a man who was symbolic of the modern “banality of evil.” This phrase was not meant to become yet another cliché, though it has. In judging the nature of the deed, she was mistaken to be condoning—or even defending—Eichmann’s personal motives, given that he was just a thoughtless “nobody.” His personality, his drive to repeat every cliché he ever heard and the fact that he went about his bloody work as if it were but another bureaucratic step up the chain of command—all this marked him as banal, but no less evil for all that. That’s what Arendt’s book attempts to come to terms with. To be sure, the ultimate driving force in her thinking was her unfaltering attempt at understanding and reconciling with the world. In this one instance, however, reconciliation was not a possibility made clear by her final conviction. Arendt wrote: Just as you supported and carried out a policy of not wanting share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations— as though you and your superiors had any right to determine who should and who should not inhabit the world—we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang.34 Arendt responded to the world from out of modernity, from out of her own experiences as a thinker, a writer, a refugee, and, yes, as a Jew who herself

EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION



9

was almost caught up in the Holocaust. She clarifies her thoughts on the activity of thinking and its relation to personal experience to Günter Gaus in a 1964 interview: I do not believe that there is any thought process possible without personal experience. Every thought is an afterthought, that is, a reflection on some matter or event. Isn’t that so? I live in the modern world, and obviously my experience is in and of the modern world. This, after all, is not controversial. But the matter of merely laboring and consuming is of crucial importance for the reason that a kind of wordlessness defines itself there too. Nobody cares any longer what the world looks like. This lack of care, however, comes at a cost. In an interview with Joachim Fest from the same year, she alludes to the importance of reflection in assuming responsibility for one’s actions: Apart from the fact that bureaucracy is essentially anonymous, any relentless activity allows responsibility to evaporate. There’s an English idiom, “Stop and think.” Nobody can think unless they stop. If you force someone into remorseless activity, or they allow themselves to be forced into it, it’ll always be the same story, right? You’ll always find that an awareness of responsibility can’t develop. It can only develop in the moment when a person reflects—not on himself but on what he’s doing.5 Notwithstanding the controversy surrounding the Eichmann book, Arendt continued thinking and writing about the events of her time, attesting to her own conviction that thinking needs to become manifest—in order to be what it is: “Thinking, however, in contrast to cognitive activities that may use thinking as one of their instruments, needs speech not only to sound out and become manifest; it needs it to be activated at all.” Her reflections on the concept of revolution, and the constitution of freedom were published in On Revolution (1963), followed by essays on Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Jaspers, Isak Dinesen, Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, Randall Jarrell, and others in Men in Dark Times (1968). Her critical and timely analyses of culture, education, freedom, politics, and science became Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (1968). Her reflections on the crises of the 1960s and the 1970s resulted in On Violence (1970), which was later included in Crises of the Republic (1972), a book that dealt not only with the questions of violence and revolution but also with lying in politics, a work that has gained a new readership given the events of the past few years. In the 1970s, Arendt continued lecturing and writing, finishing two of three volumes of her last, unfinished work, The Life of the Mind, which was published posthumously in 1978. The volumes brought together her lifelong concern to reconcile between what she understood as the vita activa

10

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

and the vita contemplativa. This work can be said to bring to a quasi-close her ceaseless thinking on how to be in the world as a human being—a being who thinks and acts. The bridge she found between these two activities, namely, the activity of judging—accompanied by willing—was meant to be the topic of the last section of the book, which was never finished. Her Kant’s Lectures on Political Philosophy, published posthumously as well in 1982, brings together her lectures on Kant’s political philosophy, with the novelty resting on its reference to Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790). What Arendt would say in the third volume is often conjecture based on these lectures and archival sources. On December 4, 1975, Arendt went to her desk at her home, rolled in the first sheet of paper of her Judging manuscript into her typewriter—she had skipped a doctor’s visit just days before to collect her notes for it—and then stopped to greet two dinner guests. Over dessert and coffee, they would discuss a Jewish intellectual historian important to Arendt’s work in The Origins of Totalitarianism, Phillip Friedman. But at some point, she coughed and then sunk slowly back into her chair. Her guests called her doctor to come over, but to no avail. At the age of sixty-nine, Arendt died of a heart attack, leaving behind the work of a life of the mind with which we are still attempting to come to grips.

Notes 1 Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin, 1964), 19. 2 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin, 1963), 282–3. 3 Ibid., 279. 4 Hannah Arendt, “What Remains? Language Remains: A Conversation with Günther Gaus,” in Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1994), 1–23, 20. 5 Hannah Arendt, “Eichmann was Outrageously Stupid: Interview with Joachim Fest,” in Hannah Arendt: The Last Interview and Other Conversations, trans. Andrew Brown (New York: Melville House, 2013), 73–120, 122.

PART I

Sources, Influences, and Encounters 

12

1 Arendt and the Roman Tradition Dean Hammer

Despite the variety of interpretations brought to bear on Hannah Arendt, the Greek, and specifically Athenian, contours of her thought remain almost axiomatic starting points in scholarship. Largely unexplored are the Roman aspects, which continually wend their way throughout her writings.1 These Roman influences have implications for how we interpret Arendt. In this chapter, I look at how the Romans help to mediate, in ways the Greeks do not, her paradoxical concerns with newness, on the one hand, and durability, on the other. I look at two Roman strands in Arendt’s thought that revise in important ways the Greek relationship between founding and acting and the role of culture and fabrication.

Founding, Beginning, and Action One of the aims of Arendt’s thought lies in the recovery of action in the modern world. Arendt is reacting to the forces of commercialism, consumerism, and scientism that reduce our relationship to each other and to the world as behaviors driven by either biological impulses or utilitarian calculations. In contrast to a view of human behavior as motivated by some prior cause, whether biological necessity or a means-ends relationship, Arendt develops a notion of action whose distinguishing characteristic is that it is uncaused. Action springs from the miracle of beginning that lies in our origins as being born, an insight Arendt associates with Augustine and Virgil. Appraisals of her notion of action invariably focus on its connection to the Athenian polis and her “beloved Greeks.”2 This model of action is given either a Nietzschean spin, seen as a celebration of agonistic display in which individuals, in competitively appearing before others like Homeric

14

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

warriors on the battlefield, “endow the world with meaning” and “give it a significance and beauty it would otherwise lack,”3 or more of a civic republican guise traced back to Aristotle in which individuals become most human in their ability to act together as political beings.4 Although the Athenian polis continues to be seen by scholars as the “best historical model of a public space” for understanding Arendtian action,5 one quickly encounters its limits in explaining how politics can be something more than “virtuosity” and actually do something.6 We can supplement this Athenian model with what Arendt sees as the paradigmatic models of action in the two foundation legends that would guide Western political thought and, specifically, the American founders: the Hebrew legend of the Israelites and Virgil’s story of Aeneas. Foundations are political beginnings, moments defined less by agonistic display or already formed habits of civic engagement and more by how a community is born. In On Revolution, Arendt explores most fully the American founders’ uncertainty about how to prepare for “an entirely new beginning.”7 The Israelites provided one model, dating their founding as a people back to the Creation of the universe (and of time) by an eternal God. But in a world that can no longer ground its political life in Creation, the American founders turned to the Romans. The Romans, Arendt claims, provide a “lesson in the art of foundation” and a solution to the “perplexities inherent in every beginning,” a model expressed in its “purest form” by Virgil.8 The perplexities to which Arendt refers lay in the tension between the notion that “an act can only be called free if it is not affected or caused by anything preceding it” and the sense that “insofar as it immediately turns into a cause of whatever follows, it demands a justification which, if it is to be successful, will have to show the act as the continuation of a preceding series, that is, renege on the very experience of freedom and novelty.”9 How is action anything but sporadic bursts that have no relationship to what comes before or after? Stated slightly differently, how can we act within history and how can action be a part of history? I think it is precisely these questions that led Arendt to look to the Roman experience for an answer. The thought of an absolute beginning—as something created from nothing—is incomprehensible because it abolishes “the sequences of temporality” so that we are left thinking the unthinkable.10 The Hebrew solution to this incomprehensibility lies in locating that beginning in a God who remains outside time. The Romans, too, though not identifying a Creator, seek to locate their origins in mystery. For Cicero, the founders were like gods.11 And what comes before the founding “remains perpetually shrouded in mystery.”12 What is prior to the Roman foundation exists outside history, as a type of “fairy-tale land” inhabited by gods and nymphs in the timelessness of nature.13 It is precisely through “an imaginative interpretation of old tales,” Arendt suggests, that future generations could “come to grips with the mysterious ‘In the beginning.’”14

ARENDT AND THE ROMAN TRADITION



15

In describing the American founders’ search for models of founding, Arendt notes that they, with some relief, did not have to stare into the “abyss of pure spontaneity” since the Roman founding is “not an absolutely new beginning.”15 In fact, part of Arendt’s point (contrary to some interpretations16) is that action, like its paradigm in founding, always occurs in a world that comes before. Arendt provides us with two different images of what a beginning looks like. One image is of natality, in which the birth of a child brings something new into the world, but “there always was a world before their arrival and there always will be a world after their departure.17 Although the association of political action with natality is often associated with Arendt’s discussion of Augustine, Arendt, in fact, attributes this image to Virgil (and, in turn, to Augustine’s Roman heritage). Arendt traces the image of founding as birth back to Virgil’s fourth Eclogue, which celebrates the reign of Augustus as the beginning of a new order (magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo).18 This new order is one in which a new child and new generation are born into earth.19 The birth of a new age, like the birth of a child, is not an absolutely new beginning, but is a beginning within “the continuity of history.”20 For the Romans, as Arendt suggests, the world’s salvation brought about by Augustus lies not in a divine beginning, but in the “divinity of birth as such.”21 The capacity for beginning, as Arendt argues, “could have become the ontological underpinning for a truly Roman or Virgilian philosophy of politics” in which “human beings, new men, again and again appear in the world by virtue of birth.”22 Arendt provides a second image of beginning, and that is in the interruption of time, between the “no more” of some prior order and the “not yet” of a new order.23 In the founding legends of both the Israelites and the Romans, the interruption of time appears as the gap between liberation from an older order and establishment of freedom through the constituting of a new order.24 In this regard, the Aeneid is the story of the “hiatus” between “liberation from the old order and the new freedom embodied in a novus ordo saeclorum.”25 The lesson that emerges in this recasting of old tales is that freedom is not an “automatic result of liberation.”26 What stands out to the “men of action” who looked to these founding legends was not the “marvelously colorful tales of adventure” but the process by which a yet-constituted people prepare for a new beginning.27 Arendt’s point is that the Roman founding is not the appearance of something from nothing but the marking of human time in the formation of a city. The arrival of Aeneas on the shores of Italy appears as the beginning of time not as a metaphysical moment but as “counting time ab urbe condita.”28 The phrase, which roughly translates as “from the founding of the city,” serves as the title to Livy’s history of Rome and suggests, in Arendt’s interpretation of Virgil, that history begins when there are tales to tell of humans living and acting together. Thus, the Aeneid, as Virgil makes clear in the opening verse, is a song of a man who would found a city (dum conderet urbem).29

16

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

There is a larger point I want to make that goes beyond either the Roman or American model of founding. Foremost among Arendt’s concerns for our modern age is how we orient ourselves from the fragments of a past. The Romans suggest one way. They did not see themselves as establishing a new foundation from something unprecedented, but as forming a renewed foundation (erneute Gründung) from something old.30 Arendt describes the Roman founding as an act of rebuilding their community from the annihilating fires of the Trojan war.31 By conceiving of foundations as “reconstructions,” the past could be rescued and made into something new.32 The task of founding appears, thus, not as an “absolutely new beginning,” but as the “resurgence of Troy” and the “re-establishment of a city-state that had preceded Rome.”33 We have thus far looked at how the Roman founding provides a perspective on one aspect of the perplexity of action: that of the incomprehensibility of an absolutely new beginning. The Roman foundation also addresses the second perplexity of action: How, given its authoritative status, does beginning make possible the future experience of freedom? The Romans are noticeably absent in scholarly attempts to answer this question, largely because Roman politics is seen as almost antithetical to Arendtian freedom. Wolin suggests that the Romans conceived of politics as an activity that had to conform to pre-established institutions.34 Canovan characterizes “the Roman experience of foundation” as “a once-for-all affair that establishes a political world and leaves successive generations to carry it on rather than to repeat the experience of action.”35 And Villa sees Arendt as “making a strong case for relief at the passing of authority.”36 But there is little in Arendt’s discussion of the Romans that suggests such a relief. In describing the “sacredness of foundation” for the Romans, Arendt suggests that “the foundation of a new body politic—to the Greeks an almost commonplace experience—became to the Romans the decisive, unrepeatable beginning of their whole history, a unique event.”37 The two main divinities of Rome mirror the Roman answer to the perplexity of beginning: Janus, the god of beginning, and Minerva, “the goddess of remembrance.”38 It is in this relationship to the founding that Arendt argues that auctoritas as a “word and concept” appears.39 Arendt suggests that auctoritas derives from the verb augere, augment, “and what authority or those in authority constantly augment is the foundation.”40 In crediting the Romans with locating authority in the experience of politics, Arendt is drawing a contrast to the Greeks who identify the foundation of rule as lying outside politics: as an architect who is called upon to set up the institutional structures of the state (the laws and constitution) but (like their own artisans) is not an actual part of the community.41 The auctor, the author of Roman politics, is neither the builder nor the Platonic master who gives orders, but “the one who inspired the whole enterprise” and whose “spirit” is reflected in the res publica.42 Auctoritas lies in its connection to the past, both to the original founders and to subsequent generations who continue to augment

ARENDT AND THE ROMAN TRADITION



17

the founding principles, thus giving some durability to action. Rather than founding being pre-political, as it is for the Greeks, founding for the Romans is itself an ongoing form of action that occurs, as Cicero writes, over “a longer period of several centuries and many ages of men.”43 Roman founding is “not the work of single men,” as Arendt notes, but of “agreement” (der Vertrag) between two groups in conflict, the patricians and plebeians—a sense of agreement that appears in Cicero’s conception of the res publica as a form of societas.44 Wolin, in focusing exclusively on Arendt’s Hellenism, criticizes her for giving us “a politics without the divisive conflicts that have presented the main challenge to politicians” and that have led to the “broadening of citizenship.”45 Arendt does, however, recognize the generative role of conflict in establishing and modifying Roman political life, including, perhaps most importantly, the Conflict of Orders whose “internal civil strife” led to the expansion of citizenship and the establishment of protections.46 Arendt’s use of the Romans gives some depth to Arendt’s conception of action. The association of freedom with “personal display,” as Waldron argues, “tells us very little about what is necessary for politics as interaction, the politics that involves debate, deliberation, and the making of decision.”47 These interactions depend on institutions and procedures, but more than that, they depend on something that is “elusive and intangible.”48 The Romans provide one way of thinking about the intangible ways in which authority serves to bind people together by reference to a past that remains “present in the actual life of the city.”49 But the Romans do more in Arendt’s thought than stand in for the sanctity of the past; their notion of foundation suggests how beginning can be connected to permanence by conceiving of law, legislation, and institutions as ongoing forms of enactment the arise between people. Moreover, her use of the Romans points to how the negotiation of the tension between beginning and remembering is the touchstone of politics as it orients action to the future.

Culture, Fabrication, and Care One of the central concerns of Arendt lies in her diagnosis of the modern condition of worldlessness. Worldlessness is not easily defined, but refers to the sense in which “human artifice,” which comprises our home in the world, is no longer seen as shared, secure, familiar, or enduring.50 Artifice refers to the tangible artifacts of human fabrication: roads and buildings by which we organize space, art and literature by which the invisible and fleeting processes of the human imagination are given visibility and permanence, monuments by which the past can be recalled, and laws and institutions by which we bind ourselves to each other. The problem that Arendt confronts is how we can recover our world as a home, as something familiar to us, when the ways by which this human artifice is transmitted—or what Arendt refers to as the “Roman trinity” of tradition, religion, and authority—no longer

18

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

exist.51 “What has been lost,” Arendt writes, “is the continuity of the past as it seemed to be handed down from generation to generation, developing in the process its own consistency.” Arendt continues, “What we then are left with is still the past, but a fragmented past, which has lost its certainty of evaluation.”52 Villa sounds a note of celebration at the collapse of any claims of the past, suggesting that the elementary problems that face humanity can finally be addressed.53 Fabrication takes a decidedly secondary status in assessments of her thought, seen as reducing value to measures of utility and politics to a “plastic art” that shapes and molds the world.54 Commentators on Arendt have located the recovery of this world in “political action, and only political action.”55 But one of the central problems facing humanity for Arendt is that since we inhabit such a world without stable markers—the artifacts of fabrication—there is little that we share or can talk about. What lies between us, for Arendt, is precisely our cultural world: a world of artificial things that we have endowed with meaning. Curtis, though sensitive to the role of culture and context, seems almost to replace the cultural world of things with the imagination. In Arendt’s account of judging, for example, Curtis notes, “we see the importance of the sheer force of our imagination as it holds our world in common by giving it a certain durability and spatiality. And this we must of course do over and over again.”56 Through this account of the imagination, Curtis sees Arendt as going “a good way toward substantiating her claim” that even with the loss of worldly permanence and stability, we retain the capacity for building and caring for the world.57 As important as the imagination is for Arendt, though, it cannot create a world that endures. The problem is this: not only do images of fabrication abound in Arendt’s discussion of politics but also worldlessness is itself a problem of our attitude toward the things of this world.58 Fabrication’s appearance as art is “the most intensely worldly of all tangible things” because its durability is not worn out in use.59 In its durability, it stands as a “premonition” of “something immortal achieved by mortal hands” that becomes “tangibly present, to shine and to be seen, to sound and to be heard, to speak and to be read.”60 Works of art are also “thought things,” inspired by “thought,” which, for Arendt, “has neither an end nor an aim outside itself” and is not reducible to a use.61 It transforms the “mute and inarticulate despondency” of feeling and introspection into something public and communicable.62 It transforms the futility of words and deeds, which would be lost the moment they are performed, into something that lasts. Its “living spirit,” what gives it life, must be continually renewed through its contact with, and rebirth in, subsequent generations. And this “living spirit” is made possible by its “condensation” of thought and experience, giving it a “closeness to living recollection” that allows the work of art to be transmitted, remembered, and recalled.63 As Arendt writes, “No remembrance remains secure unless it is condensed and distilled into a framework of conceptual notions within which it can further exercise itself.”64

ARENDT AND THE ROMAN TRADITION



19

There is no doubt that action is the hero of Arendt’s political thought. But the attitude toward the world that Arendt hopes to recover is one that she associates with culture and the Romans. In paying closer attention to Arendt’s discussion of the Romans, we can give a little more depth to the role of homo faber in the story that Arendt tells. The issue is not whether fabrication is complementary to action; it is how fabrication may play a part in the recovery of thought and action.65 In understanding this role (or roles) of fabrication, we might gain a better sense of the different ways in which, as Arendt writes, “the human capacity for building, preserving, and caring for a world” can find expression in contemporary politics.66 I know I am cutting against the grain. The modern unleashing of the economic forces of production and wealth, as Arendt argues, could be maintained “only as long as all worldly things, all end products of the production process, are fed back into it at an ever-increasing speed.”67 Even the focus of fabrication changes, from an emphasis on creating durable products to an interest in the process of production, itself.68 With the shift in emphasis from “what” to “how,” and thus the transformation of homo faber from a maker of products to a fashioner of tools and instruments, homo faber is “deprived of those permanent measures that precede and outlast the fabrication process and form an authentic and reliable absolute with respect to the fabricating activity.”69 More than anything, what is lost is an audience. Homo faber’s products no longer have a reference to a public realm where they are valued and beheld (as beautiful, as creative, as unique, and as bold), but have a reference only to measures of efficiency and the private pleasures of the consumer, discarded when they no longer bring that pleasure.70 Our relationship to the fabricated world is defined by two sorts of people: the consumer, who judges items by the gratification they bring when consumed, and the philistine, who judges items in terms of the “immediate usefulness” and “material values.”71 Arendt is speaking to a more general loss of any claims of the past—the obsolescence of old products, the inefficiency of old production methods, the irrelevance of tradition, the loss of common standards of value, and their replacement with individual measures of immediate gratification—so that it is as though we are “living and struggling with a Protean universe where everything at any moment can become almost anything else.”72 Lacking any stable markers by which we know and share the world, we look for certainty in introspection, the “sheer cognitive concern of consciousness with its own content.”73 As Arendt writes, “Man, in other words, carries his certainty, the certainty of his existence, within himself; the sheer functioning of consciousness, though it cannot possibly assure a worldly reality given to the senses and to reason, confirms beyond doubt the reality of sensations and of reasoning, that is, the reality of processes which go on in the mind.”74 Worldlessness is also manifest in our theoretical ventures in which the “living force” of our political concepts gives way to empty formalisms.75 In a particularly instructive passage, Arendt draws a contrast between how we

20

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

have “faithfully preserved and further articulated until they became empty platitudes” the different Greek images of authority—“such as the statesman as healer and physician, as expert, as helmsman, as the master who knows, as educator, as the wise man”—but have “entirely lost and forgotten” the Roman experience “which brought authority as word, concept, and reality into our history.”76 We have so emptied our concepts of any connection to experience that, as Arendt writes in a passage that parallels her description of our Protean world, “we have no reality, either in history or in everyday experience, to which we can unanimously appeal.”77 Arendt points to one response to this disintegrating public realm that she associates with Rome: the use of philosophy to “teach men how to cure their despairing minds by escaping from the world through thinking.”78 Philosophy becomes the animi medicina, as Cicero writes in the Tusculan Disputations, the art of healing the soul.79 Philosophy, as articulated by Cicero and in turn adopted by such a thinker as Hegel, does not appear as a response to “reason’s need” but “has an existential root in unhappiness.”80 The “disintegration of reality” and the corresponding “dis-unity of man and the world” create a “need for another world, more harmonious and more meaningful.”81 Cicero, Arendt argues, discovers “the thought-trains by which one could take one’s way out of the world.”82 But Arendt also identifies in Rome a second response to this disintegration of the public realm, and that is the way in which philosophy, as cultura animi—a cultivation of the soul—may return us to the world. Cicero, Arendt suggests, is the first to extend the metaphor of cultivating nature to “matters of spirit and mind.”83 She points, for example, to Cicero’s claim, “Just as a field, however good the ground, cannot be productive without cultivation (cultura), so the soul (anima) cannot be productive without teaching.”84 Arendt associates the Roman notion of cultivation with culture, suggesting a disposition of care for the things of the world that humans have made: monuments, buildings, works of art, political institutions, and laws. The cultivation of the soul, thus, directs us back to, and instills a particular attitude toward, the tangibility of the world. It is not just by way of philosophy that the Romans extend the idea of fabrication beyond the Greek experience; it is also in their conception of legislation and foundation, which Arendt describes as “the political genius of Rome.”85 Arendt gets to the Roman genius by way of a comparison to the Greeks. For Arendt, Plato and Aristotle “elevated lawmaking and citybuilding to the highest rank in political life” because in such activities, “men ‘act like craftsmen’: the result of their action is a tangible product, and its process has a clearly recognizable end.”86 There is, in fact, an affinity between Greek philosophy and this image of the political actor as architect, and that is that both act from an ideal: an already formed model to which politics is fashioned to conform. But often overlooked is that Arendt is comparing the Greeks unfavorably to the Romans. The problem is that such an image of the craftsman deprives politics of the openness, uncertainty, and spontaneity

ARENDT AND THE ROMAN TRADITION



21

that is the centerpiece of human freedom. In employing the image of politics as craft, Plato and Aristotle, as Arendt argues, turn “against politics and against action” by transforming politics into a form of making (poiēsis).87 For the Greeks, law, like founding, is conceived as “pre-political” because it is understood as originating (like the Greek conception of fabrication) in violence from outside the community as it is derived from the lawgiver.88 For the Romans, law is a form of action, established in settlement and agreement. The power of law exists not as a boundary handed down by the lawgiver that defines the space of politics, but as a “perpetual bond” (dauernde Bindung) forged in speech and argument, in which people continually bind themselves together.89 Thus, Arendt notes that lex initially means “intimate connection.”90 Unlike in Athens, where law creates a fixed space in which political activity can occur, itself limiting the ability of political freedom to be extended beyond the confines of the polis, for the Romans the boundaries of political community can continually be expanded and negotiated as political acts, including the incorporation of previous enemies.91 The Roman revision of the Greek boundaries of fabrication and action appear as well in the overlapping relationship of what are seen by Arendt as the respective realms for these activities: the private realm of the oikos and the public sphere of the polis. Brunkhorst, for example, in grouping together the Greeks and Romans, emphasizes the “stable hierarchy” between the “lower” realm with its emphasis on instrumental action and the “higher” realm where men (specifically) experience freedom and achieve glory.92 But for Arendt, the Romans offer a greater balance between the public and private realm, one that emerges in the Roman revision of the Greek conception of glory and immortality. As Arendt writes, the Greek hero, born in the image of Achilles, can achieve greatness only by sacrificing his private attachments. Glory is the celebration of the great individual and the great deed. But for the Romans, born in the image of Hektor, the guarantee of earthly immortality (die Garantie für irdische Unsterblichkeit) is tied to the defense of the household and “the care for the continuation of the family and its glory” (die Sorge um den Fortbestand des Geschlechts und seinen Ruhm).93 The interpenetration of the republican Roman household and politics is seen in a variety of contexts: the public courtyards for Roman houses, the prominent display of ancestor masks in the house that served both private and public functions, and the public celebration of household deities. The Romans may point to how homo faber might be persuaded to a “change of attitude,” to step back from and take pleasure in his creation.94 This change would not be a “radical turnabout” since, as Arendt suggests, the fabricator would only have to be convinced to “let his arms drop” and prolong the act of beholding the “excellence and beauty” of the model “he had formerly wanted to imitate.”95 In Cicero’s “Scipio’s Dream,” Scipio, in much the same way, is directed to return to earth where he is told that happiness lies in the ability to contemplate that which lies outside one’s body,

22

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

not as a disavowal of the earth, but as a rejection of the devouring impulses of gratification.96 Cicero’s sense of loss of the res publica as a beautiful painting has less to do with the Platonic loss of the conformity of politics to an ideal and more with a change of attitude that extends to all groups of society and has implications for how we think and act. For Cicero, current generations have failed to maintain (tenere), preserve (retinere), or renovate (renovare) the Republic as a work of art.97 Indicative of the importance of homo faber, absent such care, the mark of human permanence on earth faces “oblivion,” erased from earth and from memory.98

Conclusion The Romans disrupt our reading of a Hellenized Arendt, alerting us to the resistance of Arendt’s thought to easy classification: we are not just beginners, but rememberers; we are not just actors, but fabricators; and it is not just the polis, but also the res publica, that serves as a model of politics. But how she uses the Romans also tells us something about her own blindspots. I want to return to her Virgilian reading of the American founding where Arendt makes several interpretive moves. The backdrop of Arendt’s reading is her concern with the emergence of the social question—of how to liberate people from want and misery—that both unleashes the terror of other modern revolutions and is ultimately destructive to politics as a realm of action free from want.99 In her effort to separate violence from politics, she limits the violence of both Virgilian and American origins, suggesting that Aeneas’ war “was necessary in order to undo the war against Troy,” just as the revolutionaries restricted violence to constituting a public realm of its own for the “‘public happiness’ of its citizens.”100 She further minimizes the dislocation of wandering by suggesting that the experience of “mass immigration” was unknown at the time of revolution.101 And she sees in Aeneas’ actions “Virgil’s demonstration of Rome’s famous clementia,” thus freeing future generations from the memory of violence.102 These claims are as incomplete in their depiction of the Aeneid as they are of the American founding. What emerges from Virgil and gives us insight into America’s founding experience is that the connection between past and future hinges on a paradox. In both mythologies of founding, there is less a constitutional moment of beginning than the dislocating experience of wandering that separates a people from who and where they were before. The sense of a future, which for both Rome and America lie similarly in the promise of a new age, rests on the experience of discontinuity. The power of these narratives is that they provide a basis for the incorporation of new peoples and new territory. But the myth of origins haunts the Roman imagination like it does for Americans. There is a tension to this identity between a new history that rests on a rupture from the old and the continual infusion of

ARENDT AND THE ROMAN TRADITION



23

new people who bring with them their own histories. Arendt puts her finger on the issue when she suggests that the American myth of a new age in “a land of migrants” casts education in the political role of continually building a new world by helping to “shed an old world and to enter into a new one.”103 Arendt’s discussion of education mirrors the question of how one begins something new in an already constituted world. Reacting to what she sees as the crisis of education, in which children are increasingly immersed in the world, Arendt seeks to “divorce” education from the “realm of public, political life.”104 In this dislocation from the past, the child—the image of newness and beginning—can be gradually introduced to, and given the possibility of renewing, the world. Moreover, in this divorce from a realm in which authority no longer has validity in our modern world, a type of authority modeled by the Romans can emerge—one in which the children are taught that they are “worthy of their ancestors,” and thus worthy of beginning.105 The problem, and I think Arendt understands this better in “We Refugees”106 than in her essay on Little Rock (though she recognizes it in her response to Ralph Ellison), is the sense of history that individuals bear, even with the illusion of a new history.107 My interest is not to revisit the controversies surrounding the Little Rock essay. I only want to suggest that Arendt shares with both the Romans and Americans a struggle to identify a public place for these dislocated histories in the ongoing renewal of a founding identity.

Notes 1 Noel O’Sullivan, “Hannah Arendt: Hellenic Nostalgia and Industrial Society,” in Contemporary Political Philosophers, ed. Anthony De Crespigny and Kenneth R. Minogue (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1975), 229: Hellenic nostalgia; Peter Fuss, “Hannah Arendt’s Conception of Political Community,” in Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the Public World, ed. Melvyn A. Hill (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979), 157: Athens as last “authentically ‘political’ community in Western history”; Bhikhu C. Parekh, Hannah Arendt and the Search for a New Political Philosophy (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1981), 57: Arendt’s focus on Athens turns politics into “a theatrical and somewhat pointless activity”; George Kateb, Hannah Arendt: Politics, Conscience, Evil (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Allanheld, 1984), 7: “philosophical incapacity of the Romans”; Patricia Springborg, “Hannah Arendt and the Classical Republican Tradition,” in Hannah Arendt: Thinking, Judging, Freedom, ed. Gisela Kaplan and Clive Kessler (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1989), 15: “desire to legitimise the Western nation-state as heir to the political institutions of Athens”; Margaret Canovan, Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of Her Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 143: Rome “lacking in the sparkling creativity” to articulate its political experiences, though recognizes importance of Roman model for Arendt; Jürgen Habermas, “Hannah Arendt’s Communications Concept of Power,” in Hannah Arendt: Critical Essays,

24

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

ed. Lewis P. Hinchman and Sandra Hinchman (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 219: “stylizes the image she has of the Greek polis to the essence of politics as such”; David Macauley, “Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Place: From Earth Alienation to Oikos,” in Minding Nature: The Philosophers of Ecology, ed. David Macauley (New York: Guilford, 1996), 117; Dana Villa, Politics, Philosophy, Terror Essays on the Thought of Hannah Arendt (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 132: “Arendt’s beloved Greeks” without any reference to Romans; Dana Villa, “Introduction: The Development of Arendt’s Political Thought,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt, ed. Dana Villa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 9: Arendt transforms Athens into “ideal type”; Jerome Kohn, “Freedom: The Priority of the Political,” The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt, ed. Dana Villa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 121: Arendt turns to Greeks; Finn Bowring, Hannah Arendt: A Critical Introduction (London: Pluto Press, 2011), 30: Athenian polis as “best historical model of a public space” for Arendt. Discussions of Roman aspects of her thought have been made by Kristie McClure, “The Odor of Judgment: Exemplarity, Propriety, and Politics in the Company of Hannah Arendt,” in Hannah Arendt and the Meaning of Politics, ed. Craig J. Calhoun and John McGowan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); John E. Seery, “Castles in the Air: An Essay on Political Foundations,” Political Theory 27, no. 4 (1999): 460–90; Roy T. Tsao, “Arendt against Athens: Rereading the Human Condition,” Political Theory 30, no. 1 (2002): 97–123; Hauke Brunkhorst, “Equality and Elitism in Arendt,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt, ed. Dana Villa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 188, characterizes a as a “neo-Roman” phase in her thought; Dean Hammer, “Hannah Arendt and Roman Political Thought: The Practice of Theory,” Political Theory 30, no. 1 (2002): 124–49; Dean Hammer, Roman Political Thought and the Modern Theoretical Imagination (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008), 38–77; Dean Hammer, “Authoring within History: The Legacy of Roman Politics in Hannah Arendt,” Classical Receptions Journal 7, no. 1 (2015): 129–39; Patricia Owens, Between War and Politics: International Relations and the Thought of Hannah Arendt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Caroline Ashcroft, “The Polis and the Res Publica: Two Arendtian Models of Violence,” History of European Ideas 44, no. 1 (2018): 128–42. 2 Villa, Politics, Philosophy, Terror Essays on the Thought of Hannah Arendt, 132. 3 Dana Villa, Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of the Political (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 11, emphasis in original. See also Kateb, Hannah Arendt: Politics, Conscience, Evil; Bonnie Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993). 4 Springborg, “Hannah Arendt”; Anne Phillips, “Feminism and Republicanism: Is this a Plausible Alliance?,” Journal of Political Philosophy 8, no. 2 (2000): 279–93; Philip Pettit, “Two Republican Traditions,” in Republican Democracy: Liberty, Law and Politics, ed. Andreas Niederberger and Philipp Schink (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 169. 5 Bowring, Hannah Arendt, 30.

ARENDT AND THE ROMAN TRADITION



25

  6 Ilya Winham, “Rereading Hannah Arendt’s ‘What Is Freedom?’: Freedom as a Phenomenon of Political Virtuosity,” Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory 59, no. 131 (2012): 95.  7 Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, 2 vols. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 2.210.  8 Ibid., 1.152, 2.210.  9 Ibid., 2.210. 10 Ibid., 2.208. 11 Ibid., 2.209; Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Viking Press, 1965), 201; Cicero De republica 1.12, in Marcus Tullius Cicero, On the Republic, On the Laws, trans. Clinton W. Keyes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1928). 12 Arendt, Life, 2.212. 13 Ibid., 2.214–15. 14 Ibid., 2.203. 15 Ibid., 2.216, 11. 16 It is perplexing to me that commentators interpret Arendt as rejecting a Roman conception of beginning. See J. Glenn Gray, “The Abyss of Freedom— and Hannah Arendt,” in Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the Public World, ed. Melvyn A. Hill (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979), 230: Arendt’s “disappointment” in search for models of action; Robert Carl Pirro, Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Tragedy (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2001), 83: Arendt rejects the Roman model of foundation in favor of a Greek one. Others simply pass over the Roman model of revolution and founding: Bowring, Hannah Arendt, 75: Rome did not address the idea of beginning for Arendt and the American founders; Daniel Gordon, “‘The Perplexities of Beginning’: Hannah Arendt’s Theory of Revolution,” in The Anthem Companion to Hannah Arendt, ed. Peter Baehr and Philip Walsh (London: Anthem Press, 2017), 114–18: no mention of the Romans in discussion of revolution; Maurizio Passerin d’Entrèves, The Political Philosophy of Hannah Arendt (vi, 217 pages) vols. (London: Routledge, 2001), 68: revolution tied to the rediscovery of truth known to the Greeks; ibid., 69: in discussion of On Revolution, no mention of the Romans; Gordon, “‘The Perplexities of Beginning’” 114–18: no mention of the Romans in a discussion of revolution. 17 Arendt, Life, 1.20. See Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine, ed. Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott and Judith Chelius Stark (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1996) for her earliest statement of natality and the world. 18 Virgil, Eclogues, 4.5, in Virgil, Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough and G. P. Goold, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); Arendt, On Revolution, 210–11; also Virgil, Aeneid, 6.792–95 in Virgil, Aeneid. See Seery, “Castles.” 19 Virgil, Eclogues, 4.7–8, in Virgil, Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid. 20 Arendt, On Revolution, 211. 21 Ibid.; Arendt, Life, 2.212; see Cicero, De republica 1.12 in Cicero, On the Republic, On the Laws.

26

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

22 Arendt, Life, 2.216–17. 23 Ibid., 2.204. 24 Arendt, On Revolution, 205; Arendt, Life, 2.204. 25 Arendt, Life, 2.204. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid., 2.213. 29 Virgil, Aeneid 1.5 in Virgil, Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid. 30 Hannah Arendt, Was ist Politik?: Fragmente aus dem Nachlass, ed. Ursula Ludz (München: Piper, 1993), 102. 31 Ibid., 105. 32 Arendt, On Revolution, 211. 33 Arendt, Life, 2.211–12. On the theme of refounding in Livy, see Christina S. Kraus, “‘No Second Troy’: Topoi and Refoundation in Livy, Book V,” Transactions of the American Philological Association (1974- ) 124 (1994), 267–89. 34 Sheldon S. Wolin, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 76. 35 Canovan, Hannah Arendt, 147. 36 Villa, Arendt and Heidegger, 158. 37 Hannah Arendt, “What Is Authority?,” in Between Past and Future; Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Penguin Press, 1968), 120–21. 38 Ibid., 121. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid., 122. 41 Arendt, Politik, 109; Arendt, “What Is Authority?” 122. 42 Arendt, “What Is Authority?” 122. 43 Cicero De republica 2.2 in Cicero, On the Republic, On the Laws; also Livy 2.1.2: “successive founders” (deinceps conditores) in Livy, History of Rome, trans. B. O. Foster, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1919). 44 Arendt, Politik, 110. 45 Richard Wolin, “Hannah Arendt: Democracy and the Political,” in Hannah Arendt: Critical Essays, ed. Lewis P. Hinchman and Sandra Hinchman (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994), 293. 46 Arendt, On Revolution, 188. 47 Jeremy Waldron, “Arendt’s Constitutional Politics,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt, ed. Dana Villa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 208. 48 Arendt, “What Is Authority?,” 122. 49 Ibid. 50 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 173.

ARENDT AND THE ROMAN TRADITION



27

51 Arendt, “What Is Authority?,” 125; Arendt, On Revolution, 117. 52 Arendt, Life, 1.212. 53 Villa, Arendt and Heidegger, 158. 54 Ibid., 247. 55 Ibid., 11, emphasis in original. 56 Kimberley Curtis, Our Sense of the Real: Aesthetic Experience and Arendtian Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 121. 57 Ibid. 58 On the abundance of images of fabrication, see Margaret Canovan, “Politics as Culture: Hannah Arendt and the Public Realm,” in Hannah Arendt: Critical Essays, ed. Lewis P. Hinchman and Sandra Hinchman (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994). 59 Arendt, The Human Condition, 167. 60 Ibid., 168. 61 Ibid., 169–70. 62 Ibid., 168. 63 Ibid., 169. 64 Arendt, On Revolution, 220. 65 See Canovan, “Politics as Culture,” for a discussion of the relationship between Arendt’s notion of politics and her understanding of culture. 66 Arendt, “What Is Authority?,” 95. 67 Arendt, The Human Condition, 256. 68 Ibid., 296–97. 69 Ibid., 307. 70 Ibid., 307–8. 71 Hannah Arendt, “The Crisis in Culture,” in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Penguin Books, 1968), 194–222. 72 Arendt, “What Is Authority?,” 95. 73 Arendt, The Human Condition, 280. 74 Ibid. 75 Hannah Arendt, “Tradition and the Modern Age,” in Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin Books, 1968), 17–40. 76 Arendt, “What Is Authority?” 136. 77 Ibid. 78 Arendt, Life, 1.152. 79 Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 3.3.6 in Marcus Tullius Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, trans. John Edward King (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927). 80 Arendt, Life, 1.153. 81 Ibid. 82 Ibid., 1.157. 83 Arendt, “The Crisis in Culture,” 212.

28

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

84 Ibid.; Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 2.3.13 in Cicero, Tusculan Disputations. 85 Arendt, The Human Condition, 195. 86 Ibid. 87 Ibid. 88 Arendt, Politik, 111–12. 89 Ibid., 109. 90 Arendt, On Revolution, 187. 91 Arendt, Politik, 99, 108, 11. Brunkhorst, “Equality and Elitism in Arendt,” 180, 92, for example, sees Roman political freedom as fixed and defined within the walls of the city. Discussions of Arendt’s use of Roman lex include Tsao, “Arendt against Athens,” 108–9; Owens, Between War and Politics I, 77–80; Ashcroft, “The Polis and the Res Publica,” 132–37. 92 Brunkhorst, “Equality and Elitism in Arendt,” 183. 93 Arendt, Politik, 103. 94 Arendt, The Human Condition, 304. 95 Ibid. 96 Cicero, De republica 6.29 in Cicero, On the Republic, On the Laws. 97 Cicero, De republica 1.1–2 in ibid. 98 Cicero, De republica 5.2 in ibid. 99 Arendt, On Revolution, 69. 100 Ibid., 209, 133. Canovan, Hannah Arendt, 223 notes that Arendt “sidestepped the fratricidal violence of Romulus.” See Ashcroft, “The Polis and the Res Publica,” 137–42, for an interesting discussion of how Arendt understood the relationship between violence and politics in the Roman world. 101 Arendt, On Revolution, 139. 102 Ibid., 210. 103 Hannah Arendt, “The Crisis in Education,” in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Viking Press, 1968), 170–93. 104 Ibid., 195. 105 Ibid., 189, 194. 106 Hannah Arendt, “We Refugees,” in The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age, ed. Ron Feldman (New York: Grove Press, 1978). 107 Hannah Arendt, “Reflections on Little Rock,” Dissent (1959), 45–56; also Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 315–18.

2 Concepts of Love in Augustine Charles E. Snyder

The title Love and Saint Augustine deviates from a literal translation of Hannah Arendt’s 1929 dissertation Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin: Versuch einer Philosophischen Interpretation (The Concept of Love in Augustine: An Attempt at a Philosophical Interpretation). In fact, the deviant title of the now-standard English edition of the dissertation is the brainchild of E. B. Ashton, a translator commissioned in the early 1960s by an American publishing company that managed to secure the rights to the dissertation and Arendt’s contractual agreement to assist in the production of an English edition. Ashton was expedient in producing a translation. The manuscript pages of his end of the project reached Arendt’s desk fairly quickly. But for more than two years, Arendt procrastinated. In a letter to Mary McCarthy in 1965, Arendt confessed to the absurdity of the entire project.1 She believed that she had to “re-write the whole darn business,” which meant revisiting the original German dissertation and emending Ashton’s translation. Arendt eventually abandoned the project, leaving behind the “purely philosophical interest” of the dissertation to attend to issues of the present that had more pressing political significance. A passionate concern for illuminating the experiences of modern political life was pronounced in almost all of Arendt’s writings. The dissertation, however, is a clear aberration from that truism. On its own, the work invalidates the judgment that “there was never anything pedantic or scholastic about her.”2 Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott and Judith Chelius Stark preserve Ashton’s translation of the title for their 1996 English edition and remove his proposed subtitle, “An Essay in Philosophical Interpretation.” In a collection of her papers at the Library of Congress, one can see that Ashton’s title page was one of the pages left unmarked by Arendt, along with the pages of the Introduction, the latter half of Part II, and the entirety of Part III.3 Does

30

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

the lack of annotation on these pages confirm Arendt’s satisfaction with Ashton’s English, including his title? It seems unlikely, if one considers the extensive marginal annotations Arendt made on Part I and the first half of Part II, before abandoning the project. Recounting such minutiae in the history of the now-standard English edition might seem otiose. In this case, however, for the afterlife of the Heidelberg dissertation, these details are indicative of the subtle attempts on the part of Scott and Stark to mitigate the excessively formal character of the original interpretation.4 Let’s remember that young Arendt endeavored to interpret Augustine philosophically, with an analysis of concepts, or conceptual contexts. The philosophical character of this interpretation coincides with her attempt to isolate in Augustine’s thought a “pretheological sphere.” In pursuit of the meaning and importance of neighborly love for Augustine, Arendt sought to disentangle the so-called sphere of the pre-theological from questions of Christian faith and religious dogmatism. However, to locate conceptual inconsistencies in Augustine’s disparate writings is not to show that love is a conceptual “problem”5—not in the case of Augustine’s writings anyway. Instead, one encounters in his writings the posing of existential questions by means of which a man of letters gradually transformed from a professor with professional ambitions into a leader of a religious and political community in Roman Africa as Bishop of the Church. The standard English title signals Augustine’s saintly life in a way that young Arendt sought to set aside from the analysis. The English title eliminates any reference to the conceptual mediation of love in the dissertation, as well as young Arendt’s explicit designation of the work as a philosophical interpretation. The original title of the dissertation has only relative significance, however; for such cosmetic adjustments to the title do nothing to mitigate the formal character of its content.

Overview The dissertation consists of three analyses or “conceptual contexts” that focus on Augustine’s concept of love. In a brief introduction, Arendt describes the taxonomy of the three contexts, subdividing each of the first two contexts (Part I and II) into three chapters, respectively. The third and final context (Part III), “Social Life,” by far the most compact part of the dissertation, contains no chapter subdivisions. The first two chapters within the first two contexts (chapters one and two of Part I, and chapters one and two of Part II) examine the conceptuality of an alleged “pre-theological sphere.” According to Arendt, the two basic definitions of love given by Augustine operate independently of the divine commandment to love one’s neighbor, for they correspond to a natural “law written in our hearts” preceding the divine law of God, which commands from the outside: “Do not do to another what you do not wish to have done to you.” The isolation

CONCEPTS OF LOVE IN AUGUSTINE



31

of a pre-theological sphere is the reason that Arendt sets aside Augustine’s personal “subservience to scriptural and ecclesiastical authority.” Instead, she proposed to delineate for analysis a conceptual sphere in which the Greek rudiments of Augustine’s thought guide his concept of love and his conceptual turn to dogmatic Christianity. However, as I will reconstruct grosso modo, the isolation of a pre-theological sphere is an ill-conceived strategy. It misrepresents the Greek legacy of Augustine’s thought and his existential turn to Christianity. In Part I, Arendt analyzes a pre-theological structure of love in terms of a desire for the possession of something for its own sake. The analysis continues in Part II, with love now re-conceptualized by Augustine as the amorous relation of the creature to its source, namely, a divine creator. The first chapter in each part examines each definition in its pre-theological guise. But in the second chapters, Arendt examines the transformations both definitions undergo in the turn to Christianity. The analysis of the first context comes to a close with a third chapter in which Arendt sought to demonstrate how the formal definitions of love foster a certain conceptual incongruity in Augustine’s thought. In this first formal context, the primary object of love is happiness understood in terms of everlasting life. The dark aspect of this love is the anxious fear of death or losing life. A quest for the freedom from such fear ensues. In pursuit of such freedom, love manifests either as cupidity or as charity. In cupidity, one desires the very impermanent things certain to be lost in death, but charitable desire transforms that anxious fear into a love built on the recognition that happiness and eternal life are to be found in God alone. The individual thus turns away from the world in a quest for God—the true object of desire. As the world forfeits its relevance in the liberating desire for eternal life, the individual’s neighbor as a real object of desire becomes a problem for Augustine to conceptualize, according to Arendt. Arendt then shifts to a second formal context. The emphasis is no longer on the anticipated future of an eternally blessed life after death. The individual looks back in remembrance to a transcendent past, to the origin of human existence. Arendt later revises a key portion of the dissertation to link memory more explicitly with birth (or what is in the later revisions called natality), just as desire is linked to death. The individual who covets the world forgets that the world is dependent on God. Memory acts as the corrective of false desire. With the help of God’s grace, an amorous relation to God arises from a comprehending remembrance of God as creator, disentangling the creature from the world and its impermanence. In comprehending oneself as a creature of God’s creation, the creature recognizes the mortal dependence on God’s grace. Charity is given new expression in this context, for with great humility and near total self-oblivion, the creature desires to love the world and others as God loves his creation. But once again a conceptual incongruity rears its formal head, according to Arendt. In brief, charitable loving entails that the other ceases to be anything other than a creature

32

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

of God. The self-oblivion of loving the creator entails the oblivion of the neighbor’s worldly distinctions as a self to be loved for his or her own sake. The first two contexts of love take the self as the basic unit of analysis, as the passionate individual in Part I then becomes the passionate creature whose origin lies with God in Part II. Arendt therefore searches for a neighbor’s relevance by examining the potential relevance of another individual or self, what is termed in the singular as “the other.”6 Up to this point in the dissertation the analysis had been atomic in centering on a “self” for whom “the other” is purported to be relevant. The individual is not the primary bearer of love, however; it is the collective agency of the church, of brothers and sisters joined in loving God as the worthy object of love. To be sure, the creaturely self is an agent of loving the neighbor, but such love has a precondition outside the passionate self: the ontological or existential priority of the community. The church’s love of God establishes in advance the social context in which it is possible for the atomic individual to actualize the proper kind of love. Neighborly love thus acquires its importance in the realm of community, a form of the social based on the incarnation of Christ. Augustinian love departs from the Greek philosophical tradition in giving existential priority to a community of believers for the very possibility of an individual’s love. But this re-orientation is not sensu strictissimo a turn away from a pre-theological sphere. By the “pre-theological,” Arendt can only mean “pre-theological” in the Christian sense, which is not equivalent to the “pre-theological” as such. From Aristotle to Greco-Roman Stoicism, on through Plotinus’s harmonization of Platonic and Peripatetic metaphysics, a theological heritage in the thought of Augustine is undeniable, especially in the two basic definitions of love in terms of desire. In Aristotle, for example, theologikē has explanatory power for a metaphysica generalis (a science of to on hē on or ontology) that yields an account of desire and God’s immutable essence (Metaphysics 12).7 Desire and its proper objects receive their most general ontological determination from the explanatory power of this “science.” Plotinus, too, develops an alternative onto-theological conception of desire in the striving to unite with the absolute simplicity of the One, the cause of all being (Enneads, III.5). Augustine’s philosophy recasts, with profound originality, the onto-theological tendencies of Greek philosophy, capturing the distinct character of desire or love that binds the Christian community. Arendt’s talk of the pre-theological obscures this entire legacy. In the final part of the dissertation, the self or creature is finally considered social. Human creatures share a common descent from Adam, which produces an equality of fate and sinfulness. The fate of death and mortality is the shared destiny of human kind. Creatures thus have their origin in human propagation from Adam, and in the divine through God’s creation of Adam. The former grants creatures a home in the world, while the latter reveals that our proper home is with God. Arendt must now face Augustine’s Christian view of faith more directly, for the death of Christ is redemptive for every person in the equality of sinfulness and death. The creaturely self is

CONCEPTS OF LOVE IN AUGUSTINE



33

now seen as deriving his being from eternity and from the historical fact of God’s revelation in Christ. Because all creatures share equally in sin, Christ’s entrance into the world redeems all people. In this equality of sinfulness and redemption, the neighbor takes on new relevance. Neighbors bond over a shared past, for the neighbor is just like oneself, whether or not God has already worked his grace in the neighbor; even in the case of a neighbor living a life of sin, the neighbor still reminds others of a shared past. In this way, Augustine supplants a series of onto-theological conceptions of desire in Greco-Roman philosophy with a new onto-theological notion of human desire that has its ground in the institution and social life of the Christian church.

Notes 1 Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy 1949–1975, ed. C. Brightman (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1995), Letter to McCarthy, October 20, 1965, 190. 2 L. P. Hinchman and S. K. Hinchman, “In Heidegger’s Shadow: Hannah Arendt’s Phenomenological Humanism,” The Review of Politics 46 (1984): 183–211, 183. Cf. Arendt and McCarthy, Between Friends, Letter to McCarthy, October 20, 1965, 190. 3 Hannah Arendt’s papers are available at http:​//mem​ory.l​oc.go​v/amm​em/ar​endth​ tml/a​rendt​home.​html.​ 4 Cf. P. Boyle, “Elusive Neighborliness: Hannah Arendt’s Interpretation of Saint Augustine,” in Amor Mundi: Explorations in the Faith and Thought of Hannah Arendt, ed. J. Bernauer (Dordecht: Nijhoff Publishers, 1987), 81–113, 109, n. 33. 5 Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine: Hannah Arendt, ed. J. V. Scott and J. C. Clark (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 3. 6 Ibid., 96. 7 Martin Heidegger, “Die onto-theologische Verfassung der Metaphysik,” in Identität und Differenz (Pfullingen: Neske, 1957), 35–73. S. Kampowski proposes what he thinks is a possible solution that Arendt did not consider, and thus elaborates on the onto-theological resources in Augustine’s thought (Arendt, Augustine, and the New Beginning: The Action Theory and Moral Thought of Hannah Arendt in Light of Her Dissertation on St. Augustine [Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008], 184–85).

3 Thomas Hobbes: The Emancipation of the Political-Economic Peg Birmingham

With near unanimity, Arendt’s readers agree that she insists on a strict separation of the political and the economic in order to prevent the perversion of the political into the social. On this reading, the economic entry into the public space is the entrance of private needs, traditionally relegated to the household, into the public space, thereby perverting the public space into a social space of “administrative housekeeping.” In this chapter, I argue that a close reading of Arendt’s engagement with Hobbes does not allow for this unnuanced narrative of a sharp distinction in her thought between the economic and the political. Hobbes is for her the political philosopher of imperialism with its emancipation of the bourgeoisie, the latter a political emancipation based on a new understanding of political power. More precisely, although driven by the economic motor of capitalism, imperialism on Arendt’s account does not transform the political into the social, but instead introduces a new form of the political rooted in a new economicpolitical principle of unlimited expansion. For Arendt, this principle marks the decline of the nation-state and the beginning of global politics that continues unabated today. In other words, this economic-political principle marks a new form of the political and not a perversion of the political into the social. In conclusion, I argue that Arendt’s reading of Hobbes and, by extension, her persistent critique of capitalism as a political phenomenon,

THOMAS HOBBES



35

runs like a subterranean stream throughout her work, a stream that must be brought to the surface in order to reevaluate the relation between the economic and the political in her work.

Thomas Hobbes and Global Politics: A New Political Principle of Power As is well known, Arendt’s discussion of imperialism occupies the second and central book of The Origins of Totalitarianism. Following her analysis of anti-Semitism and her claim that the racialization of the Jews occurred in part at the moment they lost their economic function, the second book of Origins develops the deep and complicit relationship between imperialist capitalism (which for Arendt is a tautology as, for her, capitalism is imperialistic by definition) and a global politics, whose political principle is the expansion of power. As I claimed at the outset of this chapter, Arendt views imperialism, with its emancipation of the bourgeois class, as a political phenomenon: “The central inner-European event of the imperialist period was the political emancipation of the bourgeoisie which up to then has been the first class in history to achieve economic preeminence without aspiring to political rule.”1 To be sure, on her reading the bourgeoisie did not turn to political interests out of a concern with politics, but instead, “turned to politics out of economic necessity; for if it did not want to give up the capitalist system whose inherent law is constant economic growth, it had to impose this law upon its home governments and to proclaim expansion to be an ultimate political goal of foreign policy.”2 Most striking is the number of times Arendt refers to political goals when discussing the emancipation of the bourgeoisie. Rather than perverting the political into the social, this newly emancipated class moves the location of the political to the world stage. World trade requires a global politics. Arendt cites Cecil Rhodes: “‘Wake up to the fact that you cannot live unless you have the trade of the world,’ ‘that your trade is the world, and your life is the world, and not England,’ and therefore they ‘must deal with these questions of expansion and retention of the world.’”3 Arendt does not change her mind on the political form of imperialism. In her 1976 Preface to “Imperialism,” she goes so far as to claim that without imperialism’s claim to world politics, “the totalitarian claim to global rule would not have made sense.”4 At the same time, the principle of unlimited expansion requires that imperialism move beyond a politics of the body politic. As Arendt puts it, “What imperialists wanted was expansion of political power without the foundation of a body politics.”5 Here we must be cautious. Imperialism’s lack of foundation in a body politics with limited territory and a delineated

36

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

citizenry did not make it a nonpolitical space. Moreover, its disregard for the democratic principles of self-determination and consent of the governed did not make it something other than political, although certainly no longer democratic. Thus, when Arendt writes, “The concept of unlimited expansion allowing for the unlimited accumulation of capital . . . cannot be the foundation of new political bodies which need a stabilizing force,”6 she is not arguing that imperialism is apolitical; imperialism’s political aim is to move beyond the confines of the nation-state. Its aim, in other words, is a “politics without a body,” if by the latter is meant a body politic comprised of a common tradition, language, and a body of stabilizing laws. Instead, imperialism’s explicit political aim is instability. As Arendt points out, the laws of capitalism defy the traditional notion of law as boundary and limit; they introduce limitlessness and boundlessness into the laws themselves. While Arendt’s analysis raises the question of whether a concept of the political rooted in a principle of unlimited expansion is able to generate a new form of the political without at the same time containing the seeds of its own destruction, nevertheless, she never denies that imperialism gives us a new shape of the political. With this background, we can turn to Arendt’s reading of Thomas Hobbes, who, she argues, “is the only great philosopher to whom the bourgeoisie can rightly and exclusively lay claim.”7 Importantly, Arendt argues that Hobbes’s theory of the political is driving his description of the human being. In other words, according to Arendt, Hobbes depicts the features of the human being according to the needs of the Leviathan, not the other way around. Hobbes is not giving a general psychological or even a “realistic pessimism” in his description of the human being, but instead is only reckoning with the consequences of the emerging capitalist class of the bourgeoisie. Again, Hobbes is a political philosopher who is giving a specific political picture of the human being as “belonging to a new bourgeois class as it emerged in the seventeenth century.”8 Against Engels, she maintains that this emerging class and its unlimited quest for increased money and power was not the result of accumulation and acquisition, but the beginning.9 In fact, Arendt does not tie capitalism with its imperialist aims to property, but instead, to the inaugural event of expropriation: “This system [capitalism], as is generally known, owed its start to a monstrous process of expropriation such as has never occurred in history in this form—that is—without military conquest. Expropriation, the initial accumulation of capital—that was the law according to which capitalism arose and according to which it has advanced step by step.”10 Against Marx and Engels, whose remedy is the expropriation of the expropriators, Arendt argues that property is not the culprit, but instead, the untying of wealth and acquisition from any specific location in the world, which allows for the free and unimpeded mobility of goods and capital throughout a globalized world. As just noted, according to Arendt, by Hobbes’s ontological claim that he is reading the nature of the human being (the infamous nosce te ipsum at the beginning of Leviathan), he is in fact reading the bourgeoisie whose

THOMAS HOBBES



37

passions are not the foundation of a new politics. As Arendt points out, his description of the human being with no free will, no capacity for thought, but only “reckoning with consequences” and absolved of all responsibility is a description of this newly emancipated class for whom everything is based on power. The dignity of this person is his price, determined by his function and what he will be paid for the use of his power; he has no intrinsic worth or dignity and it is the “the esteem of others that determines his price,” an esteem that is dependent on the on the law of supply and demand.11 Central to Arendt’s reading of Hobbes is her claim that his understanding of power for the sake of power makes him the philosopher of imperialism. As Arendt points out, for Hobbes, everything—whether in the form of knowledge or wealth—is reduced to power: “Therefore, if man is actually driven by nothing but his individual interests, desire for power must be the fundamental passion of man.”12 Going further, she argues, Thus membership in any form of community is for Hobbes a temporary and limited affair which essentially does not change the solitary and private character of the individual (who has “no pleasure, but on the contrary a great deal of griefe in keeping company where there is no power to overawe them all”) or create permanent bonds between him and his fellow-man.13 The sovereign power of the commonwealth, she argues, is made up of private individuals solely interested in the desire for power; it embodies the sum total of private interests: Hobbes’ Leviathan exposed the only political theory according to which the state is based not on some kind of constituting law—whether divine law, the law of nature, or the law of social contract—which determines the rights and wrongs of the individual’s interest with respect to public affairs, but on the individual interests themselves, so that the “private interest is the same with the publique.”14 Arendt develops this point in On Revolution, arguing that Hobbes’s social contract demands that each individual “gives up his isolated strength and power to constitute a government; far from gaining a new power . . . he resigns his power such as it is and . . . he merely expresses his ‘consent’ to be ruled by the government, whose power consists of the sum total of forces which all individual persons have channeled into it.”15 The mutual transfer of power to the sovereign establishes the “principle of absolute rulership, of an absolute monopoly of power ‘to overawe them all’ (Hobbes).”16 The principle of absolute sovereignty resolves the stability issue through absolute obedience to a sovereign whose power takes the form of force. Arendt points out that for Hobbes political stability is only gained by the expansion of sovereign power wherein the state of nature is transferred to

38

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

the state at whose center is the “condition of perpetual war.”17 Going further, she argues that the Hobbesian commonwealth “acquires a monopoly in killing and provides in exchange a conditional guarantee against being killed. Security is provided by the law, which is a direct emanation from the power monopoly of the state . . . . And as this law flows directly from absolute power, it represents absolute necessity in the eyes of the individual who lives under it.”18 The military and the police become the “functionaries of violence,” whose violence constantly increases with an expanding sovereignty. Significantly Arendt reads Hobbes not as the thinker of Westphalian limited territory with its guns at the borders, but instead as the thinker of imperialism whose principle of “power for the sake of power” had from its inception globalized aims that led Leviathan to export its power and guns beyond the national borders. In an important discussion of Hobbes in The Human Condition, Arendt elaborates on his attempt to stabilize an ever-expansive process of power. Here she focuses on the role fabrication plays in the Hobbes’s political philosophy, which, she argues, has the effect of separating reason from the always unpredictability of human affairs: “The political philosophy of the modern age, whose greatest representative is still Hobbes, founders on the perplexity that modern rationalism is unreal and modern realism is irrational—which is only another way of saying that reality and human reason have parted company.”19 Rather than locating reality in a common world, Arendt points out that Hobbes locates it in the interiority of the passions that are “the same in every specimen of the species man-kind. Here again we find the image of the watch, this time applied to the human body and then used for the movements of the passions.”20 The orderliness and predictability of the passions is achieved through the fabrication of the great machine, Leviathan, whose head (literally) is the absolute sovereign. As the Frontispiece depicts, the Hobbesian sovereign, the mortal God, rules through the universal laws of reason—the latter understood as “reckoning with consequences”—which are nothing other than the raison d’être of the state. Here, Arendt already anticipates Foucault’s insight regarding Hobbes, namely, that he brings together a theory of sovereignty with the art of government that was linked not to the model of the family but to the economy.21 Hobbesian sovereign reason as “reckoning with consequences” means that the reason of state is no longer understood as a system of laws to which the just or rational state should adhere, but instead it is “the very being of the state and as such commands the law and suspends the law as is necessary.”22 Here Foucault is very close to Arendt’s reading of Hobbes on the intimacy of violence at the very heart of the state: there is no longer an antimony between law and violence. The sovereign machine can use both in the service of the Leviathan and in its paramount concern with the unceasing expansion of power and wealth. Going further, Arendt points out that Hobbes’s denial of free will and his equation of freedom and necessity contributes to his balancing of a

THOMAS HOBBES



39

political space that is at once unceasingly expansive and, at the same time, stable. In Life of the Mind: Willing, addressing both Hobbes and Spinoza, Arendt writes: “Thus, men are subjectively free, objectively necessitated.”23 Freedom for Hobbes is understood as liberty, that is, “the absence of external impediments to motion.”24 Arendt points out that Hobbes follows the Greek understanding of freedom as movement, but departs from the Greeks with a completely different conclusion that liberty and necessity are one and the same. She cites him at length: Liberty and necessity are consistent: as in the water, that hath not only liberty, but a necessity of descending by the channel; so likewise in the actions which men voluntarily do: which because they proceed from their will, proceed from liberty; and yet, because every act of man’s will . . . proceeded from some cause and that from another cause, in continuous chain . . . proceeds from necessity.25 Hobbes does not deny the will, but instead, only its freedom, understanding the will as the last appetite in deliberation. Insofar as the sovereign’s will is absolute, having replaced the plurality of wills that comprise the multitude, its will is the final appetite, the final deliberation that has the force of necessity. Its freedom lies in its moving without impediment (hence Hobbes’s fear of sedition, the greatest obstacle to sovereign movement), according to the force of necessity, which for Hobbes is the force of unceasing expansion for power for the sake of power. Again, on Arendt’s reading, Hobbes’s philosophy follows from his politics, especially his theory of sovereignty. While Arendt does not explicitly establish the connection, Hobbes’s stabilization of individual passions and inclinations in the absolute will of the sovereign with its force of necessity sets the stage for totalitarianism’s attempt through terror not just to stabilize, but to eradicate altogether the human capacity of unpredictability rooted in the ontological event of natality. If Hobbes stabilizes unpredictability in the absolute sovereign, totalitarianism goes further, attempting to wipe unpredictability off the face of the earth. It may be countered that while Arendt argues that the principle of expansion “as a permanent and supreme aim of politics is the central political idea of imperialism . . . [and] an entirely new concept in the long history of political thought and action,”26 nevertheless, Arendt ultimately views it as an economic principle that has made its way into the political. Certainly, Arendt goes on in the passage just cited to point out that expansion has a “surprising originality” in the “long history of political thought and action,” and this is because “this concept is not really political at all, but has its origin in the realm of business speculation, where expansion meant the permanent broadening of industrial production and economic transactions characteristic of the nineteenth century.”27 Hanna Pitkin argues that Arendt’s concession that this political concept is not “really political at all” indicates that she views imperialism as a social rather than political phenomenon. For Pitkin, Arendt’s discussion of imperialism is entirely consistent with her

40

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

analysis of the social in The Human Condition: the political is perverted into the social when the bourgeoisie take control of politics. Certainly, there is no lack of passages in Origins indicating that Arendt views the bourgeoisie as originating in society. Pitkin cites these passages. For example, she points to Arendt’s claim that with the bourgeoisie entering the public space, “the latent fight between state and society [became] openly a struggle for power.”28 Pitkin concludes, “The seizure of state power by the bourgeoisie that launched imperialism was clearly, to Arendt, also a victory for society over either the state or politics, or both.”29 I disagree. While Arendt clearly views the principle of expansion as originating in the economic and, further, while she sees the bourgeoisie as having their roots in society, nevertheless, their emancipation is political as is the principle of expansion that animates their “freedom.” In other words, Arendt’s analysis of imperialism argues not for society’s victory, but instead for the political transformation of the economic such that the two terms must now be hyphenated: economicpolitical. And with their emancipation into the political, the bourgeoisie became political actors on the global stage; their concerns were properly political: the expansion of power (now associated with wealth) and liberty (now associated with Hobbes’s understanding of movement without impediment). Arendt’s analysis of the rise of the social in The Human Condition illuminates the difference between the perversion of the political into the social and its transformation into a new space of global politics. As is well known, Arendt characterizes the rise of the social as bringing the concerns of the household into the public space. The twin characteristics of the social are conformity and normalization: It is decisive that society, on all its levels, excludes the possibility of action, which formerly was excluded from the household. Instead, society expects from each of its members a certain kind of behavior, imposing innumerable and various rules, all of which tend to “normalize” its members, to make them behave, to exclude spontaneous action or outstanding achievement.30 Rather than Hobbes’s understanding of equality as the equal ability to kill, which is then transferred to the sovereign, Arendt argues that the rise of the social views equality as conformity and uniformity. For her, this accounts for economic theory with its emphasis on statistics to be counted as one of the social sciences. Here caution again must be exercised: the social science of economic theory is not to be conflated with the political takeover of capitalism on the world stage, whose principle is the expansion of power. Instead the science of economics is concerned with “statistical uniformity” and the “leveling out of the fluctuation of behavior.”31 Significantly, Arendt views the rise of the social as inherently linked to “the already obsolete monarchal structure of the nation-state,” with its model of family life and paternal rule. For Arendt, Rousseau, not Hobbes, is the philosopher

THOMAS HOBBES



41

of the social, with the last book of Emile outlining the proper duties of husband and wife as preparation for citizenship as required reading.32 On the contrary, as we have seen, Arendt argues that imperialism contributes to the obsolescence of the nation-state; its aim is not conformity, but unlimited power and expansion. Only in Leviathan, Chapter 21, on civil laws, does Hobbes show any interest in domestic life, an interest driven by thinking those liberties of the subjects that fall outside sovereign command. In other words, family concerns such as diet, dress, and the education of children remain private matters and are not to be brought into the public. In this way, Hobbes continues what Arendt understands to be the Greek distinction between the public and the private when it comes to issues of the household. If there is a meeting between the economic-political space of imperialism and the social space of conformity whose model is that of family life, it is for Arendt in the doctrine of race. As we saw earlier, imperialism moves beyond the nation-state, but does not entirely abandon its principles. The political dilemma is reconciling the nation-state’s commitment to self-determination and the consent of the governed with imperialism’s colonial domination that is inseparable from its principle of expansion. The resolution is to divide human beings into tribes with the doctrine of dominant races. Arendt argues: The philosophy of Hobbes, it is true, contains nothing of modern race doctrines, which not only stir up the mob, but in their totalitarian form outline very clearly the forms of organization through which humanity could carry the process of capital and power accumulation through to its logical end in self-destruction. But Hobbes at least provided political thought with the requisite for all race doctrines, that is, the exclusion in principle of the idea of humanity which constitutes the sole regulating idea of international law.33 And yet she goes on to implicitly distinguish the way in which the doctrine of race operates in Hobbes’s political thought from the shape it takes in the nation-state. In her analysis of the nation-state, the doctrine of race emerges from a conception of a homogeneous unified will that resembles the biological family; in her analysis of imperialism, the doctrine of race is tied to individuals being imprisoned in the “endless process of power accumulation” in which there is “no other unifying bond.”34 Certainly, the two sources cannot be separated and yet there are important differences that ought not to be lost if we are to understand the virulent rise of what could be described as a “global racism” that accompanies the increasing violence of contemporary capitalism and its ever-expansion of global power. In conclusion, Arendt’s reading of Hobbes argues for a rethinking of her position on the relation between economics and the political. Rather than equate her understanding of the imperialism and the rise of global politics with her analysis of the rise of the social, the solution of which would be to empty the political of what are essentially private, household concerns, I have tried to show that imperialism for her introduces a new form of

42

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

the political that is inescapably economic, with a new political principle of unlimited expansion of power and accumulation. Arendt’s preoccupation with this new form of the political runs throughout her work, most notably in the many places where she turns to Hobbes. Here the issue is not private concerns of the needs of the household becoming the public concerns, but, instead, the transformation of the political through an entirely new set of concerns oriented around a new understanding of power, linked to wealth, expropriation, acquisition, and accumulation that move the political space of the nation-state to the world stage. Her reading of Hobbes as the philosopher of imperialism and the emancipated bourgeoisie provides a sustained analysis of this transformation. Arendt could not be clearer: without imperialism and its economic principle of unlimited power and accumulation, of which Hobbes is the philosopher, totalitarianism would not have been possible; she does not claim the same for Rousseau and the rise of the social. While Rousseau certainly contributed to the making of docile citizens all too eager to conform and comply with totalitarian regimes, Hobbes gives the philosophical underpinnings to a concept of world politics, the condition for the totalitarianism attempt at global rule. In an all-brief discussion in a 1970 interview, “Thoughts on Politics and Revolution,” in answer to a question of whether there is an alternative to capitalism, Arendt gives a history lesson on expropriation, “the initial accumulation of capital,” before responding directly to the question of alternatives. She argues that she is not one to think there are alternatives in history as if there is some “grand development of mankind.”35 She suggests that it is neither possible nor desirable to try and sever the political from the economic. Instead, she claims, “only legal and political institutions that are independent of the economic forces and their automatism can control and check the inherently monstrous potentialities of this process.”36 Political institutions must retain an independence from economic forces, but this does not mean they can or should aspire to autonomy. Rather, in the face of unrelenting imperialism and the “inherently monstrous potentialities” of capitalist forces, the task of the political is to engage and resist these economic forces, thereby giving new shape to the economic-political.

Notes 1 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951), 123. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid., 178. 4 Ibid., 164. 5 Ibid., 181. 6 Ibid., 137–38.

THOMAS HOBBES



43

7 Ibid., 139. 8 Ibid., 140–41. 9 Ibid., 145. 10 Hannah Arendt, “Thoughts on Politics and Revolution,” in Crisis of the Republic (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1972 [1969]), 211. 11 Arendt, Origins, 139. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid., 140. 14 Ibid., 139. 15 Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin, 1963), 170. 16 Ibid., 171. 17 Arendt, Origins, 142. 18 Ibid., 139. 19 Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1958), 300. 20 Ibid., 299. 21 Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave, 2004), 103. 22 Ibid., 262. 23 Hanna Arendt, Life of the Mind: Willing (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1971), 24. 24 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Chapter 21. Cited by Arendt, Willing, 24. 25 Ibid. 26 Arendt, Origins, 170. 27 Ibid. 28 Hanna Pitkin, The Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt’s Concept of the Social (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 78. 29 Ibid. 30 Arendt, Human Condition, 40. 31 Ibid., 44. 32 The model for the collapse of the public and the private, the political and the domestic, is found in the final book of Emile, with Rousseau’s long discussion of the duties of Sophie and Emile, husband and wife, as crucial for the preparation of citizenship. 33 Arendt, Origins, 157. 34 Ibid. 35 Arendt, “Thoughts,” 211. 36 Ibid., 212.

4 Arendt, Montesquieu, and the Spirits of Politics Lucy Cane

Although Montesquieu is not always recognized as a central influence on Hannah Arendt, she finds in him a unique resource for conceiving political freedom amid the losses and possibilities of the modern age. Through Montesquieu’s understanding of the principles that animate government, such as virtue and honor, Arendt develops a set of political values oriented toward realizing freedom and sustaining a common world for action. She repeatedly links modern catastrophes to the erosion of those principles, including the failure of the American revolutionary spirit to endure through local institutions and culture, and, most dramatically, the utterly worldless condition of totalitarianism. In doing so, she underscores the modern tendencies toward rootlessness that often stymied possibilities for political freedom. Montesquieu’s concern about the conservation of principles aligns with this melancholic attitude toward the risks inherent in modernity. His perspective is, furthermore, relatively compatible with the performative, sui generis aspects of action that Arendt famously distills from the experience of the Greek polis. Yet, Arendt’s appeal to Montesquieu also demonstrates the limits of her reservations about the modern age, since she draws here on a champion of modern constitutionalism to articulate a new thinking of politics, rather than attempting to revive premodern forms of community. Moreover, it is through engaging with animating principles that Arendt qualifies her contentious critiques of the modern invasion of politics by instrumentality and by “the social.”1

ARENDT, MONTESQUIEU, AND THE SPIRITS OF POLITICS



45

Animating Principles and Arendt’s Worldly Values Arendt claims, most prominently in The Human Condition, that the intrinsic greatness of political action lies in its initiation of radically new beginnings. Given that such beginnings are unpredictable and may even be destructive, some critics worry that her ideal of “greatness” is ethically unrestrained and that she lacks adequate political standards.2 On the other hand, much of her work confronts precisely the question of how to reconceive political values without the traditional bases of authority in which they were once anchored, lest politics be neglected or replaced by deadly ideologies.3 Indeed, while the performative sui generis aspects of action are important for Arendt, she maintains that we must cultivate robust, secular political standards to replace the traditional bases of authority that are lost in modernity, and she considers Montesquieu to be “the greatest representative of this political secularism.”4 The key insight of Montesquieu’s secular “revision of the tradition” is his claim in The Spirit of The Laws that each form of government is animated by a “principle” that operates as a source for law, an ongoing spring to action, and a standard by which to judge the health of the polity.5 He identifies three such principles: virtue (or “love of equality”) in republics, honor in monarchies, and fear in despotisms.6 Arendt refers to Montesquieu in all of her key texts, from The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) to The Life of the Mind (1978), taking up his notion of principles as the “guiding criteria by which all actions in the public realm are judged beyond the merely negative yardstick of lawfulness, and which inspire the actions of both rulers and ruled.”7 For her, it is critical that Montesquieu understand principles as being strictly political, rather than moral or religious: that is, they concern the well-being of “the world” rather than the purity of the inner self or soul. For example, Arendt understands “virtue” to manifest in actions that engage others as equal citizens in public space, rather than to concern the moral character of the soul. In “What is Freedom?” she claims that this worldly understanding of principles enables Montesquieu to envision a strictly political form of freedom based on our capacity to act in public, as opposed to Judeo-Christian and philosophical forms of freedom tied to the inner will.8 Seeking further to divorce principles from any sense of interiority, Arendt insists that their animating force is also distinct from that of motives: they “inspire, as it were, from without.”9 Finding Montesquieu’s enumeration of principles to be “pitifully inadequate,” however, she cites various other egalitarian principles that share this worldly character, including “justice,” “solidarity,” “public or political happiness,” and “consent and the right to dissent.”10 In claiming that action must be animated and judged by such principles, Arendt points toward a distinctly political set of values that exceeds the problematic notion of greatness.

46

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

The Regeneration of Principles and the Meaning of Despotism According to Montesquieu, forms of government can be sustained as long as their principles provide vital inspiration for action. This requires not only that principles be reflected in law but also that they be preserved in the various institutions, memories, practices, and environments that constitute the “spirit” animating the law. For example, while the republican principle of virtue rests on a fundamental constitutional structure of separated powers, it also rests on other mediating institutions of civil society, customs, and even climates that cultivate a worldly sense of equality. Accordingly, Montesquieu holds that the corruption of a form of government begins when the institutional, customary, and environmental roots of its principle are eroded. If the animating principle of a republican or monarchical government thus weakens, the law cannot stand on its own and a slide into despotism becomes more likely.11 For Montesquieu, despotism is distinguished from other forms of government by its lawlessness. Relatedly, its animating principle of fear contrasts with virtue and honor in that it is not sustained by enduring institutions and cultures but is rather destructive of them; it is not vulnerable to corruption but is rather “corrupt by nature.”12 Arendt finds value not only in Montesquieu’s notion of animating worldly principles but also in his account of their preservation and potential corruption. She claims that principles “come down to us through history,” and “can be repeated time and again,” but only if they are preserved in institutions, memories, practices, and cultures.13 For example, in On Revolution, she praises the American founders for what she sees to be their endorsement of egalitarian principles such as “consent and the right to dissent” and, echoing Montesquieu’s concern about absolute power, for their efforts to separate powers constitutionally. The egalitarian principles supposedly embraced by the founders constituted their “revolutionary spirit.” However, Arendt claims that America’s revolutionary spirit was not sustained because a reliance on centralized power and political representation eclipsed any “lasting institutions” in which citizens could enact these principles for generations to come.14 In addition to this institutional failure, she identifies a “failure of post-revolutionary thought to remember the revolutionary spirit and to understand it conceptually.”15 With the erosion of its principles of action, the American republic became prone to a mass politics that prioritized instrumental and social concerns over political freedom. This mass politics, for Arendt, has despotic tendencies of its own, and has the potential to clear the way for the lawless despotism about which Montesquieu warns. Drawing on her notion of “world,” Arendt expands upon Montesquieu’s conception of despotism, specifically his claim that the principle of fear is “corrupt by nature.” She describes fear as an “antipolitical principle

ARENDT, MONTESQUIEU, AND THE SPIRITS OF POLITICS



47

within the common world”: while it is worldly in the sense that it may inspire action and concerns how we appear to each other in public, its anti-political effect is to isolate people and thus undermine the conditions for further action.16 She cites other principles, including “rage,” “distrust,” and “hatred,” that share this degenerative quality.17 Moreover, in Origins, Arendt expands Montesquieu’s typology of governmental forms to include totalitarianism, a phenomenon that exceeds conventional despotism. Like despotism, totalitarianism delegitimizes positive law. But whereas citizens under a despotic government maintain “a minimal, fearful contact with other men,” the erosion of worldly ties and consequent loneliness under totalitarian government is more extreme.18 In totalitarianism, the corrupt principle of fear is overtaken by an overarching “ideology,” which is pursued mechanically through terror, making individuals superfluous and leaving no space for spontaneous action.19

Montesquieu, Arendt, and Modernity Montesquieu is a champion of modern constitutionalism, and his principles provide secular standards for different types of political regimes. However, both he and Arendt worry that there are tendencies inherent in modernity that may erode the support for these principles. Indeed, Arendt does not consider the successful regeneration of principles of action to be the inevitable or even primary tendency of the modern age. This melancholic sensibility enables her to offer powerful diagnoses of catastrophes such as totalitarianism, and it distinguishes her from theorists who find in modernity a rational core to ground discursive theories of the public sphere.20 Yet it is not immediately clear how this concern with the regeneration of principles relates to the other, well-known aspect of Arendt’s apparent anti-modernism: her attempts to distill from the experience of the Greek polis a conception of political action as unpredictable and intrinsically great. In The Human Condition, she deploys sharp distinctions between “action,” “work,” and “labor” to argue that political acts “reach into the extraordinary, where . . . everything that exists is unique and sui generis.”21 This characterization of action is the source of concerns that her only political standard is “greatness.” Ostensibly, this would undermine her emphasis on repetition and structure evident in her claim that egalitarian principles must be regenerated lest we succumb to quasi-despotic, despotic, or totalitarian conditions. Arendt’s emphasis on conserving principles and her contrasting emphasis on singularity and rupture can be reconciled only if we understand the general principles that come down to us through history as having contestable meanings that are open to novel re-articulation in action. The capacity of principles to be “enacted further, augmented and spun out” allows for an unpredictable element of action, even a “measure

48

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

of complete arbitrariness.”22 For Arendt, political values cannot rest on foundations if we are to respect the unpredictability and intrinsic value of action. Nevertheless, principles limit this element of politics: they “save the act of beginning from its own arbitrariness,” providing guideposts for remembrance.23 In other words, Arendt finds that Montesquieu’s conception of principles both impels us to conserve institutions and culture, and allows space to value the “single instances, deeds and events [that] interrupt the circular movement of daily life” and disclose fresh meaning.24 Indeed, she contends that the preservation of the political world in its various dimensions is actually what enables the initiatory action she admires, and in this way, “the concern with stability and the spirit of the new” are “two sides of the same event.”25 Arendt’s appeal to Montesquieu also qualifies the controversial conclusions she draws from her Hellenic view of action regarding the modern invasion of politics by instrumentality and by “the social.” Certainly, she worries that the erosion of political principles in, for example, the United States, allows for the intrinsic greatness of action to be eclipsed by the means-end rationality of “work,” while political freedom is eclipsed by social concerns associated with “labor.” Readers such as George Kateb and Hanna Pitkin worry that this implies an archaic vision of political action as an exercise in hollow dramatics that confines many issues of justice to the private sphere.26 Indeed, some of Arendt’s more extreme statements substantiate these concerns, such as her reference to action’s “practical purposelessness” and her claim that every attempt to solve social problems through politics “leads to terror.”27 However, in her discussions of principles, she clarifies that goals are “important factors in every single act.”28 It is simply that actions are free insofar as they have a meaning that “transcends” both their original motivations and these goals.29 Similarly, she explains that political actors may address social issues so long as they prioritize political freedom by manifesting the principle of solidarity rather than the sentiment of pity.30 In these ways, Arendt’s appeal to Montesquieu ultimately reveals the limits of her supposed anti-modernism. She appreciates durable, secular principles that allow for efficacious and just action, even if she is often pessimistic about the possibilities of sustaining them and seeks also to recognize a sui generis element of action.

Conclusion Arendt’s work is so stimulating and continually generative of commentary partly because of the apparent tensions among its central theoretical elements. She combines a concern about the loss of historical continuity with a celebration of rupture, and expresses both reservations about modernity and various egalitarian and constitutional impulses characteristic of the modern age. Her engagement with Montesquieu’s conception of animating

ARENDT, MONTESQUIEU, AND THE SPIRITS OF POLITICS



49

principles shows how these strands of her thought can be held together in a plausible way. An appreciation of Arendt’s encounter with Montesquieu thus cuts through interpretative disputes over her work and illuminates her insight into the various dimensions of political freedom.

Notes 1 Some of the arguments made here are drawn from Lucy Cane, “Hannah Arendt on the Principles of Political Action,” European Journal of Political Theory 14, no. 1 (2015): 55–75. 2 See, for example, George Kateb, Hannah Arendt: Politics, Conscience, Evil (New York: Rowman and Allenheld, 1983), 32–33. 3 Hannah Arendt, “Tradition and the Modern Age,” in Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin Books, 1968), 17–40. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace 1968), 467–68. 4 Arendt, “What Is Freedom?,” in Between Past and Future, 159. 5 Hannah Arendt, “Montesquieu’s Revision of the Tradition,” in The Promise of Politics, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books), 63. 6 Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, ed. Anne Cohler et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 21–30. 7 Arendt, Promise of Politics, 65. 8 Ibid., 159. 9 Arendt, “What Is Freedom?,” 151. 10 Arendt, Promise of Politics, 195; Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin Books, 1965), 79, 115. 11 Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, 112–28. 12 Ibid., 119. 13 Arendt, Promise of Politics, 195; Arendt, “What Is Freedom?,” 151. 14 Arendt, On Revolution, 224. 15 Ibid., 223. 16 Arendt, Promise of Politics, 68. 17 Arendt, On Revolution, 103; Arendt, “What Is Freedom?,” 151. 18 Hannah Arendt, Essays in Understanding, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1994), 336. 19 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 467–68. 20 See Seyla Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003). 21 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1958), 205. 22 Arendt, On Revolution, 37, 198.

50

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

23 Ibid., 205. 24 Arendt, “Tradition and the Modern Age,” 42. 25 Arendt, On Revolution, 215. 26 Kateb, Hannah Arendt, 29; Hanna Pitkin, “Justice: On Relating Public and Private,” Political Theory 9 (1981): 327–52. 27 Arendt, Human Condition, 177; Arendt, On Revolution, 102. 28 Arendt, “What Is Freedom?,” 150. 29 Ibid. 30 Arendt, On Revolution, 79.

5 Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Sovereign Intimacy Peg Birmingham

Despite Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s reputation as one of the central political thinkers of the modern age, Arendt does not treat him as such. Strikingly, he is completely absent in her seminal text, The Origins of Totalitarianism, and he warrants only a brief mention in her early essays on modern political thought gathered together in German with the title Fragwurdige Traditionsbestande im Politischen Denken der Gegenwart (What Remains of the Tradition in Political Thought Today).1 In the foreword to the four essays that comprise this book written in the years between 1951 and 1956 (the years immediately following the publication of Origins), Arendt states that her reflections on history, tradition, authority, and freedom are unified around the modern break in tradition. As the title indicates, the essays also reflect on the remains of tradition in contemporary political thought, a thought that is at once marked by the collapse of tradition, even as it is haunted by it. Rousseau is discussed briefly in the essay on freedom in the context of free will, but is otherwise absent. Only in The Human Condition, in the context of the social takeover of the political, does Arendt take up Rousseau’s thought, viewing him not as a political thinker, but instead as the modern philosopher of intimacy whose thought is in open opposition to the social. Surprisingly, in her subsequent book, On Revolution, Arendt seems to change her mind about Rousseau, arguing that the French Revolution failed insofar as it turned from the political to the social question, a failure she lays at Rousseau’s feet. Why did Arendt change her mind about Rousseau? Why does her relatively uncritical view of Rousseau in The Human Condition become a highly critical analysis of his role in the French Revolution? More precisely,

52

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

how does Arendt view the relation between intimacy and the social question such that for her intimacy finds itself aligned with the social and against the political? Finally, why does Arendt understand Rousseau’s sovereign general will as falling under the rubric of the social, and therefore contributing to the political failure of the French Revolution? Before taking up these questions, it is important to note that Arendt distinguishes the private, the social, and the economic. All too often her readers collapse the three terms, making it seem as if Arendt understands the social and the economic spheres as private spheres that ought to remain private. On this reading, Rousseau’s concern with intimacy is a straightforward concern with the private, which then finds itself complicit with the social when the latter brings private matters into the public space, thereby destroying the political. However, Arendt does not argue that the political is always destroyed when private concerns come to dominate it. For example, the bourgeois takeover of the public space, discussed extensively in Origins in the chapter, “The Political Emancipation of the Bourgeoisie,” is not the same as the transformation of the public into the social as Arendt describes it in The Human Condition. The economic takeover remains political, while the social transformation destroys the political altogether. Thus, Arendt remains an admirer, even if a strong critic, of Hobbes, who is for her the political philosopher of imperialism, while retaining no such admiration for Rousseau. I want to stay with Arendt’s analysis of the political emancipation of the bourgeoisie for a moment as it illuminates her nuanced views of the relation between the private and the public. She opens the second book of Origins, “Imperialism,” with a consideration of this emancipation, which she considers to be “the central inner-European event of the imperialist period.”2 Pointing out that the bourgeoisie was central to the formation of the nation-state, nevertheless, she argues that prior to the rise of imperialism, it was content to have “economic preeminence” without political rule: “Only when the nation state proved unfit to be the framework for the further growth of capitalist economy did the latent fight between state and society become openly a struggle for power.”3 The struggle for power did not transform the state into society, but instead, the imperialist economic forces took over the state to achieve its political ends: Expansion as a permanent and supreme aim of politics is the central political idea of imperialism. Since it implies neither temporary looting nor the more lasting assimilation of conquest, it is an entirely new concept in the long history of political thought and action.4 Here Arendt is clear: economic imperialism is a political takeover, and this because it is rooted in a certain conception of power: “Power for the sake of power.” Recognizing that expanding capitalist production violated the concept of limited nationalism, including limited territory, “if it [the bourgeoisie] did not want to give up the capitalist system whose inherent law is constant economic growth, it had to impose this law upon its home

JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU’S SOVEREIGN INTIMACY



53

governments and to proclaim expansion to be an ultimate political goal of foreign policy.” Again, emancipated from the private, the bourgeoisie set out to develop a new conception of the political, especially political power. What had been private self-interests of the economic class became political interests in a global, economically expansive politics. As just mentioned, Hobbes is the political philosopher of this emancipation. The transformation of the political into the social is an entirely different matter. The social is neither private nor political, but instead a destruction of both in favor of a “public” space whose paramount concerns are conformity and normalization. The realm of the social excludes political action in favor of the unanimity of behavior among its members. Moreover, it destroys the traditional notion of a worldly private space that protects and shelters for those aspects of existence that cannot bear the light of the public. Arendt characterizes the traditional notion of the private as a “non-privative space” connected to the political through the domain of the law, which gives the private space a worldly appearance. With the rise of the social, this “non-privative space” of the private is destroyed and a new conception of the private as the intimate emerges. Its thinker is Jean-Jacques Rousseau who Arendt describes as the “articulate explorer and to an extent even theorist of intimacy.”5 For Rousseau, the private sphere of intimacy is in opposition to the social; its task is to shelter the intimacy of the individual heart from the demands of social conformity: “The intimacy of the heart, unlike the private household, has no objective tangible place in the world, nor can the society against which it protests and asserts itself be located with the same certainty as the public space.”6 Still further, the private intimacy of the heart bears no relation to the notion of a worldly yet private sphere that offers shelter for various activities of human existence. On the contrary, Arendt points out that for Rousseau, “both the intimate and the social were . . . subjective modes of human existence.”7 On Arendt’s reading, Rousseau sets as his task “a rebellion against the oppression of the state but against society’s unbearable perversion of the heart and its intrusion upon an innermost region in man which until than had needed no special protection.”8 Arendt is not dismissive of this rebellion. In fact, she claims it was “authentic,” a legitimate response to the loss of the political space and society’s subsequent oppressive demand for conformity. The rebellion gave rise to the “modern individual and his endless conflicts, his inability either to be at home in society or to live outside it altogether, his ever-changing moods and the radical subjectivism of his emotional life.”9 Still further, Rousseau’s rebellion, and those who participated in it, produced an “astonishing flowering of poetry and music . . . accompanied by the rise of the novel.”10 Arendt’s positive review of Nathalie Sarraute’s novels gives a glimpse of what she finds promising and authentic in Rousseau’s rebellion of the heart and the flourishing of the arts that followed: Sarraute has cracked open the “smooth and hard” surface of these traditional characters (“nothing but well-made dolls”) in order to

54

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

discover the endless vibrations of moods and sentiments which, though hardly perceptible in the macrocosm of the outward world, are like the tremors of a never-ending series of earthquakes in the microcosm of the self.11 Sarraute, she points out, takes the reader behind the closed curtains, behind the lies and deceptions of society, into “a morass where every step makes you sink deeper into perdition.”12 Sarruate’s novels, therefore, seem to carry out Rousseau’s rebellion against a deceitful and hypocritical society, exposing the inner life of the self as it explodes into scenes that expose the “life-beat of a hell in which we are condemned to going ‘eternally round and round,’ where all appearances are penetrated but no firm ground is ever reached.”13 Unlike Sarraute, however, who understands that the interiority of the heart is nothing other than the ceaseless tumult of its moods and sentiments, Rousseau claims to have found an autonomous realm of the heart beyond the tumult—a silence, as it were—that provides firm ground not only for the self-intimacy of the amour-de-soi-meme (self-love) but also for the ground of the political. Worse, for Arendt, he locates this firm ground in one of these sentiments, namely, pity. The problem for Arendt is that pity, like all sentiments, is boundless. Insofar as for her the space of the political is by definition a space of limit and boundaries,14 this sentiment actually destroys the political, which is Arendt’s claim in her analysis of the role of pity in the French Revolution. At the same time, the sentiment of pity is self-disclosive rather than world-disclosive, the latter being the mark of all properly political affects. While Rousseau seems to claim that the sentiment of pity provides a relation to others through pity at the other’s suffering, in fact, on his own account, pity discloses the self as independent and autonomous, free from the plurality that for Arendt is the condition for the public space. In Emile, Rousseau is explicit that the sentiment of pity provoked by the suffering others is a self-sentiment: “I am, so to speak, in him, it is in order not to suffer that I do not want him to suffer. I am more interested in him for love of myself, and the reason for the precept is in nature itself, which inspires in me the desire of my well-being in whatever place I feel my existence.”15 Rousseau’s three maxims of pity underscore pity’s role as a self-feeling rather than a feeling of the other: (1) pity is only felt for those who are worse off than oneself; (2) pity is felt only for suffering from which one does not feel exempt; and (3) pity is measured by the suffering that the self attributes to another. In all three maxims, the sentiment of pity is tied to self-feeling. Emile feels a sense of well-being when encountering someone unhappier; a similar “self-feeling” is at work when he feels pity for those whose misfortunes might also befall him. The third maxim follows from this: the suffering of the other is measured by the self’s imagined suffering and not by the other who is actually suffering. In other words, pity is oddly self-pity, a pity for the self who imagines how it would feel if it experienced suffering similar to the other’s suffering; at the same

JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU’S SOVEREIGN INTIMACY



55

time, pity provides a sense of well-being vis-à-vis the suffering other. Indeed, Rousseau’s point in exposing Emile to the suffering of others is to increase his own amour-de-soi-meme. Rousseau refers to pity in the Second Discourse as a “virtue all the more universal and useful to man as it precedes the exercise of all reflection in him, and so Natural that even the Beast sometimes shows evident signs of it.”16 Rousseau goes on to argue that the force of natural pity is the voice of conscience: “There is in the depths of souls, then, an innate principle of justice and virtue according to which, in spite of our maxims, we judge our actions and those of others as good or bad. It is to this principle that I give the name conscience.”17 Conscience is the natural, pre-reflective voice of pity. More importantly for the later discussion of the sovereign general will, reason, that is, the ability to adopt the deliberative general standpoint, has its roots in the sentiment of pity and in the natural voice of conscience. At the same time, the sentiment of pity supports Rousseau’s first principle of the heart: the desire for self-preservation and a sense of well-being. Insofar as self-preservation is something human beings share with other animals, Rousseau argues that our sense of “well-being” is the natural sentiment of our freedom, which, he argues, is a higher good than life itself.18 Arendt agrees with Leo Strauss’s assertion that Rousseau can be called the “first philosopher of freedom,” insofar as for Rousseau the individual free will is a good in itself: freedom is the fundamental good, and it is that which defines the nature of the human being in its independence from other human beings.19 With philosophical origins in Augustine, Rousseau shifts the location of freedom from a public space of action to the interiority of the self. As Arendt puts it, “Because of the philosophic shift from action to will-power, from freedom as a state of being manifest in action to the liberum arbitrium, the ideal of freedom ceased to be virtuosity . . . and became sovereignty, the ideal of freedom became sovereignty, the ideal of a free will, independent from others and eventually prevailing against them.”20 Rousseau, according to Arendt, “has remained the most consistent representative of the theory of sovereignty, which he derived directly from the will, so that he could conceive of political power in the strict image of individual will-power.”21 As we have seen, Rousseau’s notion of willpower is rooted in the sentiment of pity, located in the intimacy of the heart. In other words, Rousseau’s models his notion of sovereignty on the sphere of intimacy. Following Arendt, it is not too much to claim that when Rousseau brings intimacy into the public space, it becomes sovereign intimacy. Again, insofar as pity is the sentiment that reveals the interior sense of independence, it is unavoidable that pity becomes the sentiment of sovereignty: boundless, limitless, and therefore tyrannical. Arendt cites Rousseau directly on the consequences of this “extreme individualism,” wherein Rousseau held that in an ideal state in which factions were to be avoided, “the citizens had no communications with one another” and “each citizen should think only his own thoughts,”22 arguing that “this

56

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

identification of freedom with sovereignty is perhaps the most pernicious and dangerous consequence of the philosophical equation of freedom and free will.”23 The equation of free will and sovereignty leads either to the denial of freedom or to the willful domination of one group over another in the name of freedom. In both cases, violence is inseparable from sovereignty because “of the fact of human non-sovereignty,” the latter understood by Arendt as the human capacity of acting in concert with others: Under human conditions, which are determined by the fact that not man but men live on the earth, freedom and sovereignty are so little identical that they cannot even exist simultaneously. Where men wish to be sovereign, as individuals or as organized groups, they must submit to the oppression of the will, be this the individual will with which I force myself, or the “general will” of an organized group.24 To go further, the sovereign and powerful will of the nation is the generalized version of the unified subjective will. Here, Rousseau again follows Augustine who discovers in the Confessions that his inability to convert is tied to a will divided against itself. This is his dilemma: “I will and I cannot.”25 A powerful will is therefore possible only if the will is one with itself. In On Revolution, Arendt points out that “the will if it is to function at all, must indeed be one and indivisible, a divided will would be inconceivable: there is no possible mediating between wills as there is between opinions.”26 Thus, she argues, Rousseau’s sovereign general will replaces a political notion of consent (with its connotations of deliberation and plurality of opinion) with the notion of a will “which essentially excludes all processes of exchange of opinions and an eventual agreement between them.”27 As we saw at the outset of this chapter, on Arendt’s reading, Rousseau’s discovery of the realm of the heart’s intimacy emerges out of a rebellion against the social. Arendt points out that Rousseau’s rebellion took “took place before the principle of equality . . . had the time to assert itself in either the social or the political realms.”28 Her suggestion is that Rousseau bases his understanding of political equality on the model of the social, “for society always demands that its members act as though they were members of one enormous family which has only one opinion and one interest.”29 As we have seen, this is also true of Rousseau’s sovereign general will, which brooks no difference or distinction among the citizens, instead insisting on the unanimity of consent. Moreover, she points out that society “expects from each of its members a certain kind of behavior, imposing innumerable and various rules, all of which tend to ‘normalize’ its members, to make them behave, to exclude spontaneous action or outstanding achievement.”30 Hence, it is no surprise on Arendt’s reading that the education of Emile, Rousseau’s model citizen, concludes with an explicit mention of Emile’s docility. Returning to his teacher with news of the impending birth of his child, Emile assures the former “master” that he will remain true to his

JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU’S SOVEREIGN INTIMACY



57

education in educating the newborn: “Advise us and govern us. We shall be docile . . . . Guide me so that I can imitate you.”31 An education in freedom understood as an interior sense of independence, fostered through a sentiment of pity at the suffering of others that gives an enhanced sense of individual well-being, produces the docile and conforming citizen, who out of the intimacy of his heart obeys the sovereign general will. By way of conclusion, it seems to me that if Arendt had followed more closely those moments in her reading of Rousseau wherein she shows the inseparable connection between the intimacy of the heart, rooted in the sentiment of pity, and Rousseau’s notion of the general will, she would have been on much firmer ground in her analysis of the role of the social in On Revolution. Rather than locating the social question in the sentiment of pity and the “unifying cry for bread,” her all too brief analysis in The Human Condition of Rousseau and his rebellion of the heart suggests that the social question is instead tied to a sentiment of pity inseparably connected to a notion of free will that, in turn, serves as the model for Rousseau’s sovereign general will with its demand for the uniform conformity of its members. The inseparable connection between the intimate sense of pity and freedom perverts the political question into the social, not the cry for bread. Her continual slippage in her analysis of the social question between the sentiment of pity and the outrage on the streets of Paris against the material conditions of poverty suggests that she is implicitly aware of the difference. Outrage is for her a properly political affect, one that that she addresses in several places in her work. As an example, I conclude with her reading of Bertolt Brecht, who provides her with the term “dark times” as a description of a world no longer illuminated by the light of the public: I borrow the term from Brecht’s “To Posterity,” which mentions the disorder and the hunger, the massacres and the slaughterers, the outrage over injustice and the despair “when there was only wrong and no outrage,” the legitimate hatred that makes you ugly nevertheless, the well-founded wrath that makes the voice grow hoarse.32 “Outrage,” “legitimate hatred,” and “well-founded wrath” ought to be the proper political responses by those living in a world awash in hunger, massacres, and deep, pervasive inequality. Given Arendt’s claims regarding the political importance of outrage and anger as proper affective responses to worldly injustices, her discussion of les enragés who appear on the streets of Paris during the French Revolution is surprising, to say the least. As I have shown, Arendt’s reading of Rousseau’s rebellion of the heart shows the intimate connection between pity and free will, on the one hand, and sovereignty, on the other. On Arendt’s own reading, sovereign intimacy perverts the political into the social, not the outraged cry for bread that unites political actors in political solidarity. As I showed briefly at the outset

58

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

of this chapter, Arendt distinguishes between the social and the economic, the latter for her taking the form of the political and thereby inviting political resistance against it. In other words, Arendt’s critique of Rousseau is well-founded when it remains in the intimacy of the heart, but needs to be completely rewritten from her own embrace of legitimate political anger when she finds herself among the outraged on the streets of Paris.33

Notes 1 Hannah Arendt, Fragwurdige Traditionsbestande im Politischen Denken der Gegenwart (Frankfurt: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1957). 2 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1951), 123. 3 Ibid., 123. 4 Ibid., 125. 5 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1958), 38–39. 6 Ibid., 39. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid. 11 Hannah Arendt, “Review of Nathalie Sarraute, Golden Fruits,” in Reflections on Literature and Culture ed. Susannah Young-Ah Gottlieb (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 215. 12 Ibid., 216. 13 Ibid. 14 See, for example, Hannah Arendt, “Karl Jaspers: Citizen of the World?” in Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1993). Arendt states, “Philosophy may conceive of the earth as the homeland of mankind and of one unwritten law, eternal and valid for all. Politics deals with men, nationals of many countries and heirs to many pasts; it laws are the positively established fences which hedge in, protect, and limit the space freedom is not a concept, but a living, political reality” (81–82). 15 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, trans. Harold Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 225. 16 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (London: Cambridge University Press), 152. 17 Ibid., 177. 18 This is the basis of Rousseau’s disagreement with Locke on the proper ends of government. For Locke, the right to self-preservation carries with it the right to appropriate in order to preserve. I have the right not only to self-

JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU’S SOVEREIGN INTIMACY



59

preservation but also to the means of self-preservation, which is cultivated through one’s labor, namely, property. Therefore, the end of government for Locke is to protect private property. Rousseau disagrees. Because freedom is a higher good than life, the end of government is to protect the freedom of the individual (which will also include his or her self-preservation). 19 Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1953), 278. 20 Hannah Arendt, “What Is Freedom?” in Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin, 1977), 163. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid., 163. 23 Ibid., 164. 24 Ibid., 164–65. 25 Augustine, The Confessions, trans. John Ryan (New York: Image Books, 1960), 196. 26 Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin, 1963), 76. 27 Ibid. 28 Arendt, Human Condition, 39. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid., 40. 31 Rousseau, Emile, 480. 32 Arendt, Men in Dark Times, viii. 33 For a longer discussion of Arendt’s affirmation of outrage or anger as a properly political affect, please see my article, “Recovering the Sensus Communis: Arendt’s Phenomenology of Political Affects,” in Phenomenology and the Political, ed. S. Wester Gurley and Geoff Pfeifer (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016), 3–18.

6 Arendt and Kant’s Moral Philosophy Robert Burch

In a crucial endnote to volume one of The Life of the Mind, Thinking, Arendt states, “My chief reservations about Kant’s philosophy concern precisely his moral philosophy.”1 Yet Eric Weil, from whom Arendt gains her most basic insight into Kant’s philosophy in general—that “the opposition knowing . . . and thinking . . . is fundamental for understanding Kantian thought,”2 an insight that Arendt herself acknowledges is “crucial” to her own “enterprise” in The Life of the Mind3—correctly argues that, for Kant, “philosophy is moral in its essence, founded on morality and revealing this foundation to consciousness.”4 Thus, in Arendt’s thinking about Kant’s moral philosophy as a part of her own enterprise, there is a fundamental, perhaps unresolvable, tension. Arendt comments on Kant’s moral philosophy in various contexts: in archived notes for courses on moral issues that she offered in the mid-1960s and the early 1970s—“Kant’s Moral Philosophy” (1964), “Some Questions of Moral Philosophy” (1965), “Basic Moral Propositions” (1966), and “Thinking and Moral Considerations” (1971); in the four essays included in the section “Responsibility” in Responsibility and Judgement (2003), of which the main essay, “Some Questions of Moral Philosophy,” is a posthumously edited version of the lecture notes from the 1965 course of that name, with any “significant variants of her thought” from “Basic Moral Propositions” being “incorporated in the endnotes”;5 in notes on the topic that Arendt kept in her Denktagebuch;6 and in taking up Eichmann’s fantastical claim to have “lived his whole life according to . . . a Kantian definition of duty,” tangentially in her report on the Eichmann trial.7

ARENDT AND KANT’S MORAL PHILOSOPHY



61

In this chapter, it is not possible to undertake a genuine Kant-Arendt “confrontation” on the essence of morality, nor is it possible to sort out fairly the agreements and differences between them on the topic. Their respective approaches to morality—their assumptions, the sense of their questioning, their basic casts of mind, and the “conclusions” they draw— are ostensibly quite different. It is clear that Arendt does not take Kant’s moral teaching seriously on its own terms, that is to say, as a systematic philosophical attempt by Kant to answer the philosophical questions about morality that Kant poses for himself in the way that he poses them. By and large, she treats Kant’s moral philosophy only in order to expose the “mistakes” she presumes to find in it as a means of clarifying her own views by way of contrast. But likewise, serious Kantians are not apt to see much, if anything, in Arendt’s reading, since both in its spirit and in its letter it reprises a stock formalist critique that no sympathetic reader of Kant takes seriously. Perhaps, then, the best way to approach this difference would be to sketch its limits, summarizing the essentials of Kant’s moral philosophy on his own terms, and then to review the essentials of Arendt’s critical response in order thereby to sort out what is at stake in the opposition, if only thereby to get clearer about the trajectory of Arendt’s thinking.

Kantian Moral Agency For Kant, “morality is . . . the relation of action to the autonomy of the will,”8 the ultimate sense of which is the realization of our consummate human vocation. That vocation is the “endeavour to produce and to further the highest good in the world,” as a duty enjoined by the categorical imperative.9 The categorical imperative itself is the supreme principle of morality as “a law by which reason directly determines the will.”10 As such, it has a threefold character. It is the a priori principle that determines universally whatever can count as a duty so as to define in principle the possible range of worldly moral action to strictly moral ends for all finite rational beings—that is, for all imperfect rational agents who can represent the good to themselves as an imperative and whose moral necessitation is obligation. The categorical imperative is also the transcendental condition of the possibility of moral experience, and thereby the condition for any distinctively moral questions to arise for us in the first place. And it is the principle of our unconditioned self-worth as the principle in terms of which we actualize both in ourselves and in relation in principle to every other finite rational being the inherent worth of our rational nature. Kant derives the principle “analytically” from the common rational understanding of morality implicit in moral experience as a function of our universal rational nature. That there is moral experience is not itself in question, since it is already presupposed in any and all moral questions that could be asked. Instead, the issue is how moral experience is possible,

62

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

and thus how as finite rational agents our worldly participation in moral being can be actual. For there to be moral experience, finite rational agents must distinguish a moral “ought” from all pragmatic needs and wants, and thus from all calculation of means to heteronomous ends. For there to be such a distinction, there must be something that is possible to think of as an unconditioned good. Only a good will is thinkable as an unconditioned good. A good will is a will that acts autonomously (i.e., it gives itself a law from its own rational nature) in accord with duty for the sake of duty. The principle of such action is the categorical imperative. “There is only one categorical imperative and it is this: act only according to that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it be a universal law.”11 Yet, Kant’s analytic conclusion is hypothetical: if there is morality, then the categorical imperative is its principle. However, the “analysis” alone does not insure that “morality is no mere phantom of the brain.”12 To dispel that possibility, Kant has to establish the truth of the categorical imperative itself as a synthetic principle known a priori in moral experience itself. It is known, however, not first and foremost as a theoretical principle of detached moral speculation in which it would be “thought abstractly in its universal form,” but as the principle of moral action known as such by agents in medias res who, compelled to choose among competing worldly ends, determine themselves to act morally according to the representation of a law, as if that law “were to become through one’s will a universal law of nature.”13 It is as a finite rational agent compelled to act in the world that I know with certainty that I am morally obligated, without the need for “science or philosophy” to instruct me.14 This certainty is the certainty of a truth. Moreover, were I to lack this moral knowledge as an agent in the world, neither science nor philosophy nor any theoretical perspective alone could provide it. In knowing that I am obligated, I also know that I am free. Obligation is the ratio cognoscendi of freedom; freedom is the ratio essendi of obligation.15 A complete science of knowledge by which we could know the nature of freedom within the totality of being in itself is beyond finite understanding. Nevertheless, in demonstrating the possibility of a finite freedom by way of an encompassing overview of the whole structure of our finite experience, Kant is able to assert philosophically as true for finite rational beings what the common rational understanding of rational agents knows with subjective certainty to be true in moral experience itself, namely, not only the actuality of obligation but also the actuality of freedom. Although Kant legitimates the categorical imperative itself in this way, he has also to show that the conditions exist—God and immortality—by virtue of which we can make sense of the possible fulfillment of the obligation implied in the categorical imperative to realize the highest good as our consummate human vocation. For as Kant argues, we cannot be obligated to realize the highest good unless we can make sense of how in principle we could be able to realize it. However, what as a philosopher Kant shows about God and immortality is not a matter of theoretical knowing at all, nor is it

ARENDT AND KANT’S MORAL PHILOSOPHY



63

a matter of objectively verified cognitions (Erkenntnisse) nor of subjectively justified theoretical beliefs (Glauben) about God and immortality as objects of metaphysical speculation; rather, it is a matter of practical belief (Glaube) in the sheer fact of God and immortality as implicit in the structure of finite moral experience and requisite to its meaning. Thereby, “the ideas of God and immortality gain objective reality and legitimacy and indeed subjective necessity (as a need of pure reason).” But “reason in its theoretical knowledge is not thereby extended.”16 The Kantian philosopher does no more and no less than explicate and legitimate a moral reality in which he or she is in touch, not theoretically as a philosopher in the study, but practically as a moral agent in life.

Arendt and the “Basic Mistake” of Kant According to Arendt, Kant’s moral philosophy involves the “basic mistake” (Grundfehler) of presuming to lay the ground of morality simply in the rational self-consistency of the individual will as pure practical reason.17 In Arendt’s view, this “mistake” sets in stark opposition Kant’s ethics as strictly an “ethics of principle” (Gesinnungsethik) with all “ethics of responsibility” (Verantwortungsethik). As Arendt interprets this opposition, the former ethics excludes a role for judgment in deciding moral action and “leaves the outcome wholly out of account, when a particular action is concerned,”18 whereas the latter takes account of “the course of the world” and, in doing so, of our being in the world as essentially a being with others.19 It is certainly Kant’s explicit thesis that the will is a matter of rational self-determination, “the capacity to act according to the representation of laws, that is, according to principles.”20 Kant further argues that an action with distinctive moral worth is possible only if there is a lawful selfdetermination of the will to action other than according to the representation of hypothetical imperatives as principles serving the willful satisfaction of one’s own inclinations. In other words, if there is morality, “pure reason alone must itself be practical,” and so “must be able to determine the will by the mere form of the practical rule.”21 Now, Arendt interprets this thesis to mean that according to Kant, “one can find the good only through a kind of thinking,” and yet for that very same reason, “the capacity to judge . . . plays no role.”22 Moreover, the kind of thinking involved would be a matter simply of the self-consistency of practical reason that “needs presuppose only itself” in determining categorically the practical law of its own autonomous selfdetermination.23 Thus, according to Arendt, “the validity of the categorical imperative is derived from ‘thinking in agreement with the self,’ and reason as the giver of laws does not presuppose other persons but only a self that is not in contradiction with itself.”24 On Arendt’s reading then, the supreme principle of morality as a practical law of the will “refers only to the will” itself as pure practical reason,

64

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

“irrespective of what is attained by its causality.”25 In that case, willing the unconditioned good would be a matter of rational self-consistency separate from actually bringing about the unconditioned good in the world by means of worldly action. Likewise, in doing one’s duty for duty’s sake out of respect for the law, one has in effect no direct duty to others, but only to oneself in terms of rational, lawful self-consistency. Accordingly, the moral standard is “not a matter of concern with the other but with the self” as a matter of “self-respect.”26 Hence Kant “puts duties man [sic] has to himself ahead of duties to others,” so as to stand “in curious contradiction to what we usually understand by moral behaviour.” Thus, Arendt comments, “It is most striking that in the Critique of Practical Reason and in Kant’s other moral writings the so-called ‘fellow-man’ [Mitmenschen] is scarcely mentioned. It is really only about the self and reason functioning in isolation [in der Einsamkeit].”27 If it were simply a matter of thinking consistently with oneself in isolation, Kantian morality would be, as Arendt says, “inviolable.”28 Yet, insofar as it would leave out of account all worldly outcomes and all relation to others, and therefore all responsibility for our being in the world with others, its inviolability would be the inviolability of an empty tautology. For this reason, Arendt declares Kant’s ethics to be “the morality of impotence [Moral der Ohnmacht],” since it presumes to hold sway in principle without concern for worldly effects. She likewise regards it as “the perfect formula for the powerless individual,”29 since according to it, impotence in terms of worldly effects would need no moral excuse or exculpation, since on Arendt’s reading, no worldly responsibility or effects are entailed by the categorical imperative itself in the first place. In Arendt’s own view, however, “responsibility for the world . . . is primarily political” and “always presupposes at least a minimum of political power.”30 In that respect, “impotence or complete powerlessness” would be “a valid excuse” politically for failing in one’s “worldly” responsibility, whereas on Arendt’s reading of Kant it would be morally irrelevant, since on that reading thinking in agreement with itself is the only moral criterion and incentive. Kantians would be quick to point out the apparent infelicities in this interpretation. Arendt abstracts from Kant’s philosophical grounding of morality the aspect of formal universality and self-consistency, and presents this necessary condition of determining in principle what morally one ought to do as if it were for Kant himself in its sheer formalism the sufficient condition of worldly moral action. Yet, for Kant, the categorical imperative tells us what counts universally and unconditionally as a duty for all finite rational beings; it does not provide an exact calculus that tells us in all actual circumstances what to do, morally, in the world. Thus, Arendt not only merely overlooks (as do many) but also flatly denies the role that Kant himself explicitly ascribes to “anthropology” and the “power of judgement sharpened by experience” in deciding what, under the universal purview of the categorical imperative, one ought to do in particular concrete human

ARENDT AND KANT’S MORAL PHILOSOPHY



65

situations.31 Although more subtle than most, Arendt in effect repeats against Kant the superficial charge of formalism, which is an account of Kant that, ironically, Arendt herself hyperbolically praises,32 and Karl Jaspers astutely sets aside as misdirected.33 By focusing exclusively on the “form” of the categorical imperative, “which consists in universality,” Arendt omits consideration of both its “matter or end” and its “complete determination”—these latter having to do with our treatment of others and our moral responsibility for the world.34 In this way, Arendt effectively reduces the Kantian maxims leading to “practical wisdom” to their merely negative and logical form, and thereby excludes the central positive maxim: “to think oneself . . . in the place of every other person,” a maxim that can become an “unalterable command,” not through the political vicissitudes of our being with others, but only through its relation to the categorical imperative.35 In the end then, Arendt has next to nothing to say about what for Kant is our morally derived human vocation, to wit, the “duty” implied in the categorical imperative “to endeavour to produce and to further the highest good in the world.”36 In this way, Arendt tends to interpret the finite worldly reality of the good will as Kant characterizes it in terms of the pure unconditioned selfactivity of practical reason in itself beyond the world of experience. In other words, she understands the good will “in the world” in terms of the idea of the holy will “beyond the world,” taking the latter as paradigmatic of the good will in general.37 But this approach is misleading. The idea of the holy will is what in Kant’s theoretical philosophy he calls an ens rationis, “a concept without an object, like noumena, which cannot be counted among possibilities.”38 For Kant then, the idea of the holy will is a thinkable but unknowable limiting concept, a practical idea as a model to which the finite will can only endlessly approximate.39 In contrast, Arendt treats the idea of the holy will as if were something like a Platonic eidos in terms of which all instances of the good will can both be and be known. But an actual good will in the world only makes sense in terms of duty, and duty is the objective necessity of an action from obligation; and “obligation cannot be attributed to a holy will.”40

Dismantling the Tradition of Moral Philosophy In Arendt’s defense, however, she does not so much engage Kant’s moral teaching on its own terms as attempt to “dismantle” the tradition of moral philosophy to which it belongs.41 She notes passim some essential features of this tradition.42 It searches out universal and necessary moral truth that transcends all “customs or manners or habits” and all contingent political arrangements set up to serve our being with others.43 Thus, although it may grant that moral awareness and moral being come about initially only under conditions of sociability, it holds that these conditions themselves are

66

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

accidental to the principle of morality itself. Only in that way does morality truly permit resistance to corrupt society, even where the corruption degrades moral conscience generally and reduces all questions of autonomy to questions of a self-serving heteronomy. In searching for moral truth, moral philosophy does not teach anything essentially new; rather it only explicates and legitimates moral truth that is always already immanent in all moral experience and all moral matters, however vaguely or confusedly these matters may happen to be understood by individuals or societies as a whole.44 In some sense, one always already knows one’s duty. The tradition of moral philosophy locates morality in the integrity of “the individual in his singularity”45 as a matter of one’s being at one with oneself in immanent participation in the unconditioned transcendent good. In Arendt’s dismantling, the philosophical question of universal moral truth gives way to the question of the effective meaning of morality as this meaning is constituted and holds sway, experientially, in and through our ongoing being with others. This shift accords with etymology. Derived from the Greek word, ethos, ethics originally meant customs and habits,46 those that were conventionally established as the basic organization that defined a communal life and practice, and thus by extension, the appropriate conduct, manners, and behavior that such life and practice prescribed for “proper” members of the particular community. In this original sense then, “ethics and politics [were] the same.”47 In direct challenge to the tradition of moral philosophy, Arendt recalls this sameness with seeming approval. “Our own experiences,” she writes, “seem to affirm that the original names of these matters (mores and ethos), which imply that they are just manners, customs and habits, may in a sense be more adequate than philosophers have thought.”48 They would be more adequate, presumably, in the wake of the German experience wherein “morality collapsed into a mere set of mores—manners, customs, conventions to be changed at will—not with criminals, but with ordinary people.”49 In other words, “we witnessed the total collapse of a ‘moral’ order not once but twice,” not only in the collapse that marked the Third Reich itself but also in the “sudden return to ‘normality.’” This shift in meaning has three related implications. Although politics and ethics are essential human matters, it is “not Man [sic], but men [sic] [who] inhabit this planet.”50 Thus, insofar as “plurality is one of the basic existential conditions of human life on earth,”51 human being is essentially a being with others. In that measure, the ethical is derivative of the political, and not vice versa. Yet, this shift in meaning also implies that the philosophical search for universal and necessary truth is not itself an essential possibility of our human nature that, once actualized under contingent conditions, can never simply be given up.52 Rather, it implies that philosophy, stricto sensu, is just one contingent way of ordering reality in thought to make comprehensive sense of our being in the world. It is a way of thinking then to which Arendt herself can claim, tout bonnement, to “have said final farewell.”53

ARENDT AND KANT’S MORAL PHILOSOPHY



67

Nevertheless, Arendt’s dismantling cannot without formal dialectical self-contradiction simply reverse the tradition of moral philosophy so as to reduce knowledge (epistēmē) of universal moral truth to the contingent play of particular customs, habits, and conventions (doxai). Rather, her thinking must move on a different level. The task is no longer, as it was for Kant, “to search out and establish the supreme principle of morality” so as to explicate and legitimate our knowledge of universal moral truth that grounds in principle all duty and our human worldly vocation.54 Instead, on the basis of our changing collective experience as the subject-matter proper of thought,55 Arendt’s task is to think through the most “expansive” (erweiterten) horizon of meaning as the proper context for our current willing and judging through which then our human dignity and our being with others can be responsibly realized and carried forward. As it concerns the tradition of moral philosophy, Arendt’s “dismantling process” has both a positive and a negative aspect.56 The negative aspect is a matter of pointing out what, since at least the middle of the last century, our collective experience seems to have confirmed, to wit, that the distinction between epistēmē and doxa that traditionally served as the unshakable cornerstone of the concept of moral truth in contrast to the vagaries of changing parochial positions and opinions, and along with it the distinction of autonomy and heteronomy upon which Kant so unwaveringly insists, no longer serve as the effective ruling moral principle of what is going on in the world (even though, here and there, stalwart individual exceptions do exist57). This experience seems also to confirm for Arendt that these crucial distinctions cannot be effectively renewed as the basis of moral thinking and acting inter homines. And yet, in the event, what has hitherto been identified as unshakable moral truth in its threefold sense (i.e., of that which makes moral experience universally possible, what determines the unconditioned good as such, and what defines our human vocation) is now open to egregious misrepresentation. Eichmann’s appeal to the categorical imperative is a flagrant case in point. On Eichmann’s interpretation, the categorical imperative becomes explicitly a principle “for the household use of the little man,” but then just as the “little man” understands it, and so therefore it is subject to all the resentments, animosities and bigotries that can afflict a parochial, narrow-minded mentality.58 Subject to that sort of mentality, what Kant presents as the supreme principle of morality devolves in the Third Reich into the Führerprinzip of the little man. Hitler’s personal lawyer, Hans Frank, reformulated the categorical imperative for the Third Reich in just this way, a way that “Eichmann might have known,” and that seems to capture Eichmann’s sense of it: “Act in such a way that the Führer, if he knew your action, would approve it.” Yet, the Führer’s approval is not itself a matter of an unchanging moral principle based on universal reason, but of the unprincipled vagaries of the will of the Führer himself to suit his own arbitrary ends. Yet, as Arendt notes, this interpretation of the categorical

68

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

imperative is subject to a peculiar Germanic twist, one that reduces autonomy to one’s heteronomous adherence to the will of another in such a way that “law-abiding means not merely to obey the law but to act as though one were the legislator of the laws one obeys.”59 That twist serves to transform one’s obedience into a self-deceptive illusion of autonomy, in which case, “freedom is slavery” after all. The positive moment of Arendt’s dismantling of the tradition of moral philosophy is more tentative. She does not seek, theoretically, to reconnect the broken thread of that tradition by taking up again its now abandoned archē, namely, the epistēmē and doxa distinction as the cornerstone of the very concept of moral truth. Instead, she seeks, as it were, to “pave anew the path of [moral] thought,”60 by prizing loose from the past “thought fragments” that can now take on a representative significance before and beyond the entrenched distinctions—epistēmē and doxa, meaning and truth, the moral and the political—that have, traditionally, informed all metaphysics of morals. The appropriation of these thought fragments opens the way to rethinking of the whole moral problématique as preeminently a political matter. Yet, in relation specifically to Kant’s moral philosophy, this new path of thinking is an ambiguous achievement. On the one hand, it can be argued that it does make more perspicuous the connection specifically between thoughtlessness and evil than does Kant’s moral philosophy, and that in terms of an account of the two-in-one as a matter of thoughtfulness and accountability, it shows better than does Kant the structure of a responsible conscience in the individual “coming home” from the public world. Yet, on the other hand, having abandoned the “causal” categories of philosophy altogether, Arendt’s new path reveals somewhat less about “why” in principle each individual thoughtless person might be thoughtless as a matter of a human, all-too-human disposition than does Kant about why we might abandon autonomy for heteronomy and even make the occasional deviation from the moral law into a maxim of the will. Moreover, in the context of our present “fragmented” experience, which seems to show no promise of anything like a more “expansive” understanding, but only the threat of a further entrenchment and fragmentation of antagonistic partisan extremes, Arendt’s new path rules out any Kantian appeal to a principled development of personal character as a thoughtful individual stand one might take in response to the sort of resolute narrow-mindedness that constitutes generally our current reality. Moreover, in her quest for meaning over knowledge of truth, she also does not offer anything like a “strategy” for cultivating and carrying forward the goal of an enlarged mentality in the public political world of our being with others. In this, as in all such fundamental matters, we need to work things out for ourselves, but now in the face of a basic paradox: the fundamental condition of the realization of an enlarged mentality in the face of current fragmentation and antagonism is itself a disposition to an enlarged mentality, which everything in our worldly experience seems now to work against.

ARENDT AND KANT’S MORAL PHILOSOPHY



69

Notes 1 Hannah Arendt, Life of the Mind, Thinking Vol.1 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 236–37, n. 83. 2 Eric Weil, Problèmes Kantiens, 2nd ed. (Paris. Libraire Philosophique, J. Vrin. 1970), 112, n. 2; cf. Arendt, Thinking. 3 Arendt, Thinking, 13. 4 Eric Weil, Préface à Gerhard Krüger, Critique et morale chez Kant, trans. M. Regneir (Paris: Beauchesne et Ses Fils, 1961), 8. 5 Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2003), xxxiii. 6 Hannah Arendt, Denktagebuch 1950–1973 (Munich: Piper, 2003), passim. 7 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (New York: Viking Press, 1963), 135–37. 8 Immanuel Kant, Kants Gesammelte Schriften (Berlin: Prussian Academy, 1902–55), IV:439. 9 Ibid., V:126. 10 Ibid., 132. 11 Ibid., IV:421. 12 Ibid., IV:445; cf. Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment, 277, n. 9. 13 Ibid., 421; cf. 403–4, 412. Cf. Weil, Préface à Gerhard Krüger, 8. “Philosophy in Kant’s eyes is the affair of human beings in life, not that of intellectuals [savants] and specialists . . . the affair of the world of the living, not of the study [cabinet].” 14 Ibid., 404. 15 Kant, Kants Gesammelte Schriften, V:5n. 16 Ibid., 4–5. 17 Arendt, Denktagebuch 1950–1973, II:794, 820. 18 Ibid., 820; cf. Kant, Kants Gesammelte Schriften, VI:7n. 19 Arendt, Denktagebuch 1950–1973, II:822. 20 Kant, Kants Gesammelte Schriften, IV:412. 21 Ibid., V:24. 22 Arendt, Denktagebuch 1950–1973, II:794. 23 Ibid., 820; cf. Kant, Kants Gesammelte Schriften, V:21. 24 Hannah Arendt, The Promise of Politics, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2005), 169. 25 Arendt, Denktagebuch 1950–1973, II:820. 26 Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment, 67. 27 Arendt, Denktagebuch 1950–1973, II:818. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid., II:820.

70

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

30 Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment, 45. 31 Ibid., 70, Arendt, Denktagebuch 1950–1973, II:794; cf. Kant, Kants Gesammelte Schriften, IV:411, 389. 32 Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers, Correspondence: 1926–1969, ed. Lotte Kohler and Hans Saner, trans. Robert and Rita Kimber (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992), 317. 33 Karl Jaspers, Die Grossen Philosophen (Munich: Piper, 1957), 481–501, esp. 488–89. 34 Kant, Kants Gesammelte Schriften, IV:436. 35 Ibid., VII:200, 228–29. 36 Ibid., V:126. 37 Ibid., IV:393. 38 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 382 (B347). 39 Kant, Kants Gesammelte Schriften, V:32. 40 Ibid., IV:439. 41 Arendt, Thinking, 212; cf. Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment, 161ff. 42 Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment, passim. 43 Ibid., 75, 101ff. 44 Ibid., 75; cf. Kant, Kants Gesammelte Schriften, IV:404. 45 Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment, 97. 46 Hannah Arendt, The Hannah Arendt Papers at the Library of Congress. Courses, The University of Chicago: “Some Questions of Moral Philosophy,” lectures, 1965 (1 of 2 folders) (Series: Subject File, 1949–1975, n.d.), 024586; Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment, 50, 75. 47 Hannah Arendt, The Hannah Arendt Papers at the Library of Congress. Courses—The University of Chicago, Chicago, IL—“Kant’s Moral Philosophy,” seminar, 1964 (Series: Subject File, 1949–1975, n.d.), 032346; Hannah Arendt, The Hannah Arendt Papers at the Library of Congress. Courses—The University of Chicago, Chicago, IL—“Basic Moral Propositions,” lectures, 1966 (Series: Subject File, 1949–1975, n.d.), 024534. 48 Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment, 75. 49 Ibid., 54. 50 Arendt, Thinking, 19. 51 Ibid., 74. 52 Cf. Kant, Kants Gesammelte Schriften, IV:367. 53 Hannah Arendt, Ich will verstehen: Selbstauskünfte zu Leben und Werk, hrsg., Ursula Ludz (Munich: Piper, 1996), 46. 54 Kant, Kants Gesammelte Schriften, IV:392. 55 Hannah Arendt, “On Hannah Arendt,” in Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the Public World, ed. Melvyn A. Hill (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979), 308.

ARENDT AND KANT’S MORAL PHILOSOPHY



71

56 Cf. Arendt, Thinking, 212. 57 Cf. e.g., Hans Jonas. “When in 1945 I reentered vanquished Germany as a member of the Jewish Brigade in the British Army, I had to decide whom of my former philosophy teachers I could in good conscience visit, and whom not . . . . The ‘yes’ included . . . a rather narrow traditionalist of a Kantian persuasion, who meant little to me philosophically but of whose record in those dark years I heard admirable things. When I did visit him and congratulated him on the courage of his principled stand, he said a memorable thing: ‘Jonas,’ he said, ‘I tell you this: Without Kant’s teaching I could not have done it.’ Here was a limited man, but sustained in an honorable course of action by the moral force of an outmoded philosophy.” (“Contemporary Problems in Ethics from a Jewish Perspective,” in Judaism and Ethics, ed. Daniel J. Silver [New York: KTAV Publishing House, 1970], 31.) It is significant that as a matter of “good conscience,” Jonas decided not to visit his “main teacher,” Martin Heidegger. 58 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 136–37. 59 Ibid., 137. 60 Arendt, Thinking, 210.

7 Arendt and Kant’s Categorical Imperative William W. Clohesy

Hannah Arendt’s study of recent political movements and structures has a profoundly moral character. Totalitarianism, her premier topic of study, requires its subjects to reject all independent thought and responsible action concerning their state, its other members, and themselves—indeed, for human life on earth as a whole. Arendt persistently argued against uncritical, passive obedience toward regimes. She asserted instead that each human being upon entering the world offers a new beginning, for each person is unlike any other that has been or will be. The significance of placing moral responsibility for the world on each person is profound in its opposition to the indifference or opposition toward strong and thoughtful individuals typical of many recent and contemporary political forms such as totalitarianism, fascism, and what is today termed “neoliberalism.” Two moral philosophers, Socrates and Immanuel Kant, stand out in Arendt’s writings above all others. Their closeness is seen in the place of public discourse in their thought on a full human life and in their approach to moral questions through the principle of noncontradiction. Both Socrates’ insistence that he must remain friends with himself and Kant’s categorical imperative rely upon this logical requirement. Arendt’s interchange with these two philosophers is by no means uncritical. Above all, Arendt rejects an ethics based upon noncontradiction alone. Although in early texts, Arendt appears occasionally dismissive of both thinkers’ ethics, she develops her thought on both philosophers so that she finds much that is worthwhile in them.1 Socrates’ arguments with others, with himself, and with fictional opponents are profoundly revealing about ethical reflection as dialogue. Even when arguments take place within one’s imagination, we learn, they

ARENDT AND KANT’S CATEGORICAL IMPERATIVE



73

require that one step beyond one’s own perspective so as to benefit from moral insights that hold true for all who confront moral problems. The same can be said of Kant. Kant attempts in his Critiques a thoroughgoing study of human reason that describes and relates the various tasks toward which we turn our reason: knowledge of the world and ourselves, the form and application of the moral law, and our judgments of objects’ beauty and the sublimity of persons’ moral probity. While Arendt criticizes much in Kant, she opens his work to a use for ethics that Kant did not recognize or pursue. My purpose in this chapter is to demonstrate the power of Kant’s ethics that appears through rereading Kant in light of Arendt’s subtle and suggestive criticism. While this chapter addresses Arendt’s critique of Kant, especially his ethics, I must begin by asking briefly what Arendt finds valuable in Socrates, especially in his interaction with both real and imaginary interlocutors, so as to clarify the core of Kant’s ethics. Arendt hints at a powerful account of human interaction and coordination in Kant’s Critique of Judgment, which was to be the topic of volume three of her final work, The Life of the Mind. I present an element of Kant’s theory of judgment—his notion of “enlarged thought” (“erweiterte Denkungsart”)—that clarifies and strengthens his ethics as represented by the categorical imperative. My intention, then, is to present a brief reflection on Kant’s ethics in light of Arendt’s critique and of her thought generally so as to clarify what is of use in Kant for comprehending moral persons. Socrates urges his fellow Athenians that, as citizens, they are responsible to raise the level of discourse among themselves so that they seek the good for the city, not for themselves alone. Although he had limited success in improving the discourse of Athenian citizens, Socrates did succeed in exciting the interest of a number of thoughtful friends. Most importantly, Socrates profoundly transformed his own thinking. By questioning his fellow citizens so that they think what they are doing, he learned to question himself. Arendt recounts that Socrates goes beyond his usual critical comments and expresses positive teachings in the Gorgias. The following is the chief teaching: “It would be better for me that my lyre or a chorus I direct were out of tune and loud with discord, and that most men would not agree with me and contradict me, rather than that I, being one, should be out of tune with myself and contradict myself.”2 This statement has meaning only for thinking persons; it revolves around the phrase “being one.” As long as I think, I can be both the subject thinking and an object of my thought: I am a two-in-one. If I act in a way that is reprehensible in my own eyes, I am aware of what I am doing, and I am ashamed and oppose myself for acting as I do. A disruption arises within me, a contradiction between my deed and my thought about myself. Thinking persons resist doing wrong because such action brings an upheaval of shame and contempt into their minds. Although the Greeks were extraordinarily competitive, for one who thinks, it is better to be wronged and, therefore, to be free of such inner

74

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

contradiction than to live with oneself as a wrongdoer. Thinking persons who do wrong must endure the shame that they bring upon themselves. Therefore, we can expect such persons to do what is right, if only to avoid the pain that follows from knowing they have done wrong. Arendt ties this positive teaching to the self-awareness of the philosopher, thereby suggesting that it is preventative only for someone who thinks. She compares Socrates’ teaching to Kant’s categorical imperative: “Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.”3 A maxim is a personal rule for action critically considered as the appropriate instantiation of the universal law. This formulation of the categorical imperative calls upon us always to act in a way we would be willing for everyone to do. If we act wrongly for our own selfish interests, we would not want others to follow our example and act likewise. Rather, we would insist that our conduct is only an exception we have allowed ourselves, but not the rule all—including ourselves—should follow. The moral conduct discussed by both Socrates and Kant rests upon the axiom of noncontradiction: we hold ourselves to do what we know is right for all of us, under pain of knowing that if we act otherwise, we are failing to live as we know we ought. Socrates and Kant offer ethical principles that will be convincing to thinkers, for contradiction is a disruptive force only for thinkers. An ethics of noncontradiction is problematic in that the moral agent is a single person whose moral decisions rest only upon that person’s interests, scope of knowledge, and perspective. How one person’s moral view relates to those of others is left largely unconsidered and unresolved except that contradiction among moral agents is to be avoided. Socrates escapes the charge of indifference to others and the city because his decisions are made within a life that is thoroughly engaged in discussing the good with others in all of its forms. Also, Socrates is not alone when he reflects upon his actions. In his thought, he generates internal critics who confront him and demand thoughtful reflection on his proposed deeds. In the Hippias Maior, Socrates asserts that when he goes home, he is confronted by a grouchy, needling old man who cross-examines him on his day’s words and deeds.4 In the Crito, Socrates creates another, more ingenious interlocutor: Socrates must decide whether it is right for him to escape from Athens because the trial was unjust. First, Socrates argues with Crito toward a justified decision to go or stay. Crito, however, proves an inadequate interlocutor. Socrates does not talk with himself alone however. Instead, he conjures up the laws of Athens themselves to confront and pointedly to question him as a citizen, who has become who he is because of them, on whether he is willing to harm them by escaping and showing his contempt for them or whether he will show them their due respect and die as he has lived, within their protection and under them as an Athenian citizen in war and in peace.5 Thus, Socrates’ self-reflection is not an isolated exercise for his own benefit because he himself provides a formidable interlocutor who challenges him on what matters most for his decision on

ARENDT AND KANT’S CATEGORICAL IMPERATIVE



75

leaving Athens. Socrates is concerned to determine whether he can remain a friend to himself if he harms Athens by fleeing. The purpose of his dialogue with Crito, and especially with the laws, is a genuine concern for Athens and the harm he might do it. He decides that only by staying and dying can he be an upright citizen. The test of being at one with himself is a substantive challenge Socrates gives himself and bravely accepts because he has decided it is a civic act owed by him to his city. While Arendt follows Kant in most of his reflections on reason, she departs from him on his neglect of “enlarged thought” in his work on ethics. Kant as a spokesman for the Enlightenment was as committed a proponent of reason as Socrates. Kant did not offer a system of moral laws for people to follow. He sought, rather, for “the public use of one’s reason at every point.”6 There is no fixed set of moral laws for us to obey. We ourselves introduce the moral law into the natural world by determining what we ought to do on each particular occasion that calls for a moral response, as opposed to a prudential or preferential one. As beings of both sensation and reason, we constantly organize our sensible experience into the project we call “nature.” Beyond nature, we find ourselves in relations with one another; among those relations are some we find to be obligatory, they relate us to others in ways that give us a duty we ought to fulfill. It is this fact of duty, indeed, that makes us aware of this capacity that takes us beyond the natural world of our understanding to a moral world we establish through reason. We are able to act so as to realize a state of affairs that we find to our liking. Kant refers to such actions as directed by hypothetical imperatives we give ourselves: if we want some outcome, we must act in a certain determinate way—“if I want B, I ought to do A.” We can also recognize a state of affairs that calls forth from us a response we ought to do simply because of the matter at hand and our presence with an ability to act. If I see a child fall off a pier into the water, I know that I ought to save the child. Anyone else in the vicinity, seeing the child fall, will recognize a similar duty. The state of affairs gives me reason to formulate a duty because of its nature and my capacity. It is not something I want, but something I ought to do. This is a categorical imperative: “So act as if your maxims should serve at the same time as universal law (for all rational beings).”7 It presents me with a moral obligation, an action I ought to undertake because of the objective situation explainable to anyone who inquires. This is the expression of my moral duty. It is a moral law because anyone in my position would formulate a similar duty because it is required by the circumstances and by my reading of my own capacity to respond to them: given a set of circumstances, one ought to respond in a way that addresses the moral problem at hand. Acting as I ought implies that I and other rational, moral beings would willingly account for the moral deed and for the moral world bringing persons together into a rational order of our own articulation; this overlays the world of nature with an “intelligible world” in which our moral duties connect

76

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

us all together because they express obligations that we all could take up were we presented with the obligation.8 Our failure to act morally is not a denial of the categorical imperative, since we are only making an exception for ourselves when our self-interest overtakes our willingness to obey a universal rule we in fact respect. To be sure, we ourselves recognize our selfinterested contradiction in a moment of honest reflection or embarrassment before others. For Kant, then, self-contradiction is the sign of moral failure as it was for Socrates. Kant’s categorical imperative, however, is too easily read as though it concerns only the moral agent alone. The interpolation of Kant’s notion of “enlarged thought,” stressed by Arendt, helps turn us toward others in our moral reflection. I will consider “enlarged thought” and then conclude with a brief discussion of the categorical imperative that brings out the plurality essential to Kant’s moral reflection. Kant argues in several texts that mature thought should be “enlarged thought” (erweiterte Denkungsart), the capacity to place ourselves in the perspectives and thoughts of others: However small may be the area or degree to which a man’s natural gifts reach, yet it indicates a man of enlarged thought if he disregards the subjective private conditions of his own judgment, by which so many others are confined, and reflects upon it [an object of interest] from a universal standpoint (which he can only determine by placing himself at the standpoint of others).9 He never mentions this capacity of thought in the critical works prior to the Critique of Judgment, even when he is discussing the moral law and the thought that relates to it. Kant is interested in the first two critiques, in the Prolegomena, and in the Foundations in justifying categorical propositions concerning our knowledge of nature and the emergent moral world, so I suggest that to propose that “enlarged thought” is ruled out for understanding the critical works is an unjustified extension of his intent. The Logic and the Anthropology are based on lecture courses that he regularly taught. Elsewhere, his interest lies in the full panoply of reason’s capacities in carrying out various mental tasks including the recognition of beauty as opposed to pleasure, and on established moral practice as opposed to a critical justification of moral propositions.10 Arendt explains why it is important that Kant indicates “enlarged thought” as a component of ordinary thought and expression. For Kant, the work of reason cannot be carried on if the thinker is in isolation. Many of his near contemporaries, such as Descartes, considered a single mind at work quite adequate, and even thought of other minds as only reasonable conjectures. Kant, by contrast, was aware of the need for multiple minds in order for any of them to learn successfully about themselves, their fellows, and their world. Kant wrote in a notebook, “Company is indispensable for the thinker.”11 Solitude may be required for study and reflection, but

ARENDT AND KANT’S CATEGORICAL IMPERATIVE



77

solitude is not isolation. When we think, we are often present in thought with friends, opponents, teachers, authors, and collaborators in research. Kant was keenly aware that thought depends upon others—whether present physically or mentally—in order to correct, affirm, and enlarge our own individual experience and insights, and to articulate our thinking fully and artfully. Modern science shows us how important others are for sound discovery and artful articulation of our thinking so that others can engage with us in performing simply that which is hard. Scientific research progresses because scientists publish the results of their work so that others can attempt to duplicate results to bolster trust in them and bring clarity and progress. The duplication of results is crucial for all modern science. If a result cannot be duplicated, it is thrown into doubt and becomes an object of suspicion rather than an advance in the field. Kant expressed this as follows: “Therefore objective validity and necessary universal validity (validity for everybody) are equivalent terms, and though we do not know the object in itself, yet when we consider a judgment as universally valid and hence as necessary, we thereby understand it to have objective validity.”12 No less than scientific research, ethics is a field of study that is open to criticism, agreement, and advancement by the work of others. Moral decisions for action are made within the mind of the moral agent, but they are the result of earlier conversations, teaching, and collaborative study. The decisions themselves are made by looking at the problem at hand from the perspective of all to be affected by moral action or inaction, and further determined by dialogue with the persons involved both in fact and in imagination. We are least likely to make a good, defensible decision when such interchange in reality and in reflection is not done because we are content in the right as we see it and wish to waste no time in argumentation. The feeling that there is no need for deliberation because we already know what we are to do is too often a sign that we are set too firmly in our quotidian convictions. As in good science, so in ethics, there is always a need to share our thinking and enlarge it by exchanging perspectives, doubts, and insights with all those whose words we trust—and even with those whose words we don’t trust. Allow me to conclude by commenting upon the categorical imperative in light of Arendt’s thought regarding Kant’s ethics. In dealing with the categorical imperative, I should begin by addressing the hypothetical and categorical imperatives with Arendt in mind. The opening of the Foundations is crucial: “Nothing in the world—indeed nothing even beyond the world—can possibly be conceived which could be called good without qualification except a GOOD WILL.”13 The key phrase in this statement is “without qualification.” There are many goods within a given context: food, for example, is good for someone who is hungry. But that good is qualified by someone’s hunger and by its nutrition. The good will, by contrast, does not need to be placed in a context. Rather, it establishes or articulates the

78

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

context within which something becomes a qualified good. In our world, human beings alone have a will such that we can determine things and persons to be good. The will (Wille) for Kant has a double meaning: Wille is “practical reason,” the ability to establish purposes and programs to carry out for some worthwhile goods, activities, and relationships; Willkür is the capacity to take effective action toward realizing goals that the will has established. The will, for Kant, restructures the meaning of the world: rather than a complex of objects and organisms moving and acting in ways both meaningful and random, the world has in it human beings who give a purpose or meaning to the whole by structuring it through intelligible directions and purposes. Arendt reasserts the importance of persons by asserting that human beings are beginnings, sources of purposiveness that give meaning to all that has preceded and to a future instead of a continual unfolding of the same. Arendt quotes Augustine on humans as beginnings: “[Initium] ergo ut esset, creatus est homo, ante quem nullus fuit.”14 Without human beings there would be nothing but a continuation of whatever is; only with humans can a reasoned break with the past and a new direction occur. For Kant, as well, there is the continued unfolding of the phenomenal world, broken only by something from outside of it—a moral deed that is a break with the past, not its continuation. This possibility makes the world more than a complex of phenomena that can be articulated verbally and experienced as the causal structure unfolding through time. Transformative events occur because someone says, “I ought,” and acts upon that duty. This, “in a nutshell,” as Arendt would say, is the profound meaning of what a human being is—the introduction of a change, a redirection that can transform the world and give hope in the form of a coherent new beginning for all who live there. Earlier I provided statements of the hypothetical imperatives that tell us to do something if we want some outcome; categorical imperatives tell us that what we ought to do should be such that we would be willing for it to be a universal law—for anyone to effect a change as we are doing. Let us briefly consider these imperatives in terms of Arendt’s sketch of life rooted in the distinctions made in the Greek polis in the first chapter of The Human Condition. Human activity is divided into three parts: (1) labor (ponos), which is any effort we undertake for the attainment of what is necessary for life (including wages); (2) work (poiēsis), which is the construction of an object according to a design; and (3) action (praxis), which is an undertaking, an initiative, for the sake of ourselves and our community. Action always involves more than one agent: people communicate their insights and ideas with one another in order to articulate and agree upon a plan of action; they act in concert so that a complex undertaking can achieve an objective; and they must observe and revise their action over time so that they continue to achieve their agreed-upon goals. Usually, we might suppose that labor and work would be dictated by hypothetical imperatives and action by categorical imperatives. Of course, done in the right spirit and for a purpose

ARENDT AND KANT’S CATEGORICAL IMPERATIVE



79

that extends beyond simple self-interest, labor and work could result from categorical imperatives. And what is taken to be action done merely for selfinterest, vanity, or greed results from hypothetical imperatives. What can the categorical imperative reveal about moral action? The categorical imperative has largely been used as a “test” for determining whether one’s maxim, one’s personal decision for moral action, is to be taken as morally proper objectively. If I plan to perform an action, could I agree with the possibility of everyone acting in the same way under similar conditions? If my answer is no, then I am acting in a way I would not approve were others to do it—I am contradicting myself if I say this action is good for me to do. I am making an exception for myself. This can be an effective test if the conduct under consideration is an ordinary sort of action, the nature of which we all easily understand, and its use in this instance is not controversial or unusual. Such ordinary actions and circumstances are not always what is in question. We are questioning an action—praxis—in using the categorical imperative. Arendt frequently reminds us that praxis can never be something ordinary or routine. Each action is a break, an imposition of something new, that changes people and their world in some way. If we are to make a full, rigorous use of the categorical imperative, we must go beyond the ordinary, toward the novel, the singular act. The problems we face are specific and personal. They cannot be adequately approached by treating them as particulars of a general kind expected from all others. Likewise, the people affected by my action are specific, real persons who will be affected in some concrete way. A substantive use of the categorical imperative will require that we employ our capacity for enlarged thought to step beyond our own view of things, so that we comprehend our full situation and that of the others involved in it with us. We must ask not only whether we would be willing to universalize a maxim, but also whether others affected by it would also be willing that we so act. We cannot be moral persons until we have learned to take the position of others. Arendt insists that “one cannot learn without publicity, without the testing that arises from contact with other people’s thinking.”15 So, we may say, the categorical imperative does not direct us only to think about our actions seeking self-consistency, but to think about both others and ourselves—all relevant people’s perspectives, needs, and vulnerabilities—so that the decision we make genuinely brings us all together around a proposal detailing what we ought to do. Socrates’s dialogue with the laws of Athens is a particularly imaginative case of doing just this: examination of the needs and vulnerabilities of the city as a whole and of its citizens. Arendt writes, “Critical thinking is possible only where the standpoints of all others are open to inspection. Hence, critical thinking, while still a solitary business, does not cut itself off from ‘all others.’”16 The moral problems we face are singular; they are not to be solved by repeating past actions or relying upon moral truisms: they present problems to the moral agent alone, but in so doing, they do not isolate the agent from others;

80

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

rather they propose a purposeful engagement with a problem implicating a number of people together. Moral agents are connected to others through enlarged thought as they try to act while giving due respect to the needs, the vulnerabilities, and the unqualified worth of each person touched by the problem they face. Arendt describes moral thought in a disarmingly sociable way: “To think with an enlarged mentality means that one trains one’s imagination to go visiting.”17 Her thinking has led me to propose a novel reading of the core of Kant’s ethics: moral reason concerns ourselves with others, never ourselves alone.

Notes 1 Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Penguin Books, 1968), 240–41. 2 Gorgias 482b-c, cited in Hannah Arendt, “Some Questions of Moral Philosophy,” in Responsibility and Judgment, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2003), 90. 3 Immanuel Kant, “Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals,” in Kant Selections, trans. and ed. Lewis White Beck (New York: Collier Macmillan, 1988), 288 (4:421). The numbers in parentheses in this and all further references to Kant’s work give the volume and page number of the Academy Edition of Kant’s work. 4 Hippias Maior, 304f, cited in Arendt, “Thinking and Moral Considerations,” in Responsibility and Judgment, 185–86. 5 Plato, Crito, 30a–54d. 6 Immanuel Kant, “What Is Enlightenment?,” in On History, ed. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1957), 5 (8:36–37). 7 Kant, Foundations, 280 (4:438). 8 Ibid. 9 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York: Hafner Press; London: Collier Macmillan Publishers, 1951), § 40, 137 (5:295). Besides enlarged thought, Kant also states that sound thinking requires (1) thinking for oneself and (2) always to think consistently. See ibid.; Logik, §7 (9:95); and Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht, 59 (7:142–43). 10 For a fuller discussion of enlarged thought and its relevance for Kant’s moral thought see my article, “On Rereading the Categorical Imperative,” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 10, no. 2 (1985): 57–74. 11 Immanuel Kant, Reflexionen zur Anthropologie, Nr. 763(15:333), cited in Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1982), 10. 12 Immanuel Kant, “Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics,” in Kant Selections, 184 (4:298). 13 Kant, Foundations, 248 (4:393).

ARENDT AND KANT’S CATEGORICAL IMPERATIVE



81

14 “In order that there be a beginning, humans were created, before whom there was no one,” quoted in Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1958), 177. 15 Arendt, Lectures, 42. 16 Ibid., 43. 17 Ibid.

8 Hannah Arendt and Karl Marx: Beyond The Human Condition Tama Weisman

At first glance, Hannah Arendt is a harsh, albeit sometimes reluctant, critic of Karl Marx. However, what is often less understood is how she came to her analysis and, further, the extent that he influenced her thinking.1 We find that she criticizes Marx with one stroke of her pen, while in the next she appropriates his thought without acknowledgment. Given her lack of acknowledgment, and that her most well-known thoughts on Marx are the very troubling and flawed analysis found in chapter three—“Labor”—of The Human Condition, it is often assumed either that she either did not understand Marx’s work or that she was so virulent an anti-communist that she was willing to misrepresent what Marx had in fact written. Neither of these could be further from the truth. As many commentators have noted, Arendt’s analysis of Marx is for the most part not supported through close readings of Marx’s texts. She primarily comes to her faulty readings of Marx in one of two ways. The first (most commonly found in her analysis of Marxian labor) is to support her claim that Marx reduces human existence to the mode of animal laborans through quoting passages incompletely. In doing this, she is able to make claims that do not stand up when the entire passage is taken into account. The second is that she accepts the mostly discredited orthodoxy of the Second International that conflates the works of Marx and Engels. This is most prominent in her reading of history as it relates to the ideological underpinnings of a deterministic analysis of history that allows for the futural gaze of a messianism that knows its own end. Although this type of

HANNAH ARENDT AND KARL MARX



83

analysis is often taken up in various Marxisms, it is clearly one of Marx’s specific targets of critique in his “Theses on Feuerbach.” Indeed most of what Arendt cites as support for the determinist reading of Marx was written by Engels after Marx’s death. To simply point out the flaws in Arendt’s writings on Marx, however, would do a disservice to understanding how and why Arendt wrote about Marx as she did, and to understanding her more productive insights into Marxism as it manifested in the Soviet Union and totalitarianism in general.2 In order to understand this, we must go back to the period of time between the writing of The Origins of Totalitarianism and that of The Human Condition. In 1952, Arendt was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to work on a project initially titled “Totalitarian Elements in Marxism.” In this project, she proposed to come to understand how Marx’s thought could be used and abused by a totalitarian regime.3 Unlike totalitarianism in Nazi Germany, Arendt determines that conditions for the possibility of totalitarian rule in the Soviet Union arose through a program of conscious, systematic, and purposive policies intended to bring about specific social conditions. Arendt’s claim is that as perverse and un-Marxian as it may have been, Stalin’s dogma would have been ineffectual without the conditions for it to “seize the masses,” which had been set in place by his predecessors. No matter how it could have turned out differently, had Stalin not perverted what was begun under Lenin, Arendt concludes that the necessary conditions for the possibility of totalitarian domination, most especially loneliness, terror, and ideological thinking, inhere within Marxist thought put into action. By the end of her first year of work, Arendt revised the focus of the project. Rather than focusing on totalitarian elements in Marxist thought and the rise of totalitarianism in the Soviet Union, her attention turned to how and why the tradition of Western political thought had failed so miserably when it encountered the changing conditions of modernity. Why was it that the tradition could not attend to the freedoms of the political revolutions of the eighteenth century joined with changing workforce of the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century wherein all who labored were accepted as full citizens? In its revised form, the relationship between philosophy and politics is no longer merely one concern among the many of her original project, but rather became its central focus. In her revised project, now titled “Karl Marx and the Tradition of Western Political Thought,” Arendt proposed to study the writings of Marx, the one thinker of the tradition (in her estimation) who attempted to come to grips with the changing conditions in order to understand the inadequacies of the tradition itself. However, and crucial to understanding Arendt’s published writings on Marx, while her focus shifts to emphasize Marx in relation to the tradition of Western political thought as opposed to Marxism as manifested in the Soviet Union, to a large extent the thoughts, ideas, and conceptual paradigms that Arendt attributes to Marx are driven by that original project—to determine how Marx’s work could have been taken up in ways that fostered the necessary

84

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

conditions for the possibility of totalitarian domination. Thus, much of her analysis of how one might read Marx in order to attain a specified goal is converted into a reading of Marx himself. In the first draft of the Marx project, Arendt highlights what she conceives as the three central claims or pillars of Marxian thought: (1) Labor is the creator of man, (2) violence is the midwife of history, and (3) none are free when others are enslaved. In the second draft, we see her shift of focus away from totalitarian elements in Marx per se and toward the larger topic of the relationship between philosophy and politics through an extremely significant change. Arendt retains her first two pillars; the third, however, she changes. Recognizing that freedom is a central category that runs throughout her analysis, and therefore cannot be separated out from the other categories along with her shift of attention to the tradition of political thought itself, Arendt turns specifically to the philosopher’s relationship to politics by substituting Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, “The philosophers have interpreted the world differently, the time has come to change it,” for the pillar of freedom. The problems of labor, history with its relationship to politics and violence, and philosophy’s relationship to politics become the trinity through which Arendt comes to interpret Marx.

Arendt’s Three Pillars of Marxian Thought Arendt’s first pillar, “Labor is the creator of man,” is the most central to all that she will write about Marx as it is the one place where she claims that he radically leaves the tradition. First and foremost, this pillar is Arendt’s interpretation of Marx’s answer to the question “What does it mean to be human?” While Marx himself answers this question with the concept of “species being” (Gattungswesen) in the 1844 Paris manuscripts or, in his later works, “socialized mankind” (gesellschaftliche Menschheit), Arendt’s own conclusion is that Marx defines human beings as animal laborans. No longer defined through rationality or political capacities, humans are now defined in and through animal necessity. The implications of this claim can only be understood through what has come to be one of Arendt’s most wellknown distinctions—one that is first thematized in her study of Marx—the distinction between labor and work as it is fundamental to her claim that there are totalitarian elements in Marxism. Arendt asks why a totalitarian regime developed out of the thinking of Marx and not Plato, Luther, Hegel, or Nietzsche, all of whom were accused of being progenitors of Nazism. To her mind, the reason is grounded in Marx’s importation of an almost ontological loneliness into the world through the reduction of humans to animal laborans. Humans defined as animal laborans implicate Marx in a radical ontology that gives rise to the loneliness necessary for the possibility of mass society, a precondition for the possibility of totalitarian domination. Arendt’s omission of any comprehensive discussion of Marx’s own answer to the question “What does it mean to be human?” is indicative of

HANNAH ARENDT AND KARL MARX



85

her initial focus on Stalin’s appropriation of Marxist ideas in his quest for total domination. Instead of “What does it mean to be human?” Arendt’s question could more accurately be placed in this narrow context as “What type of human is subject to succumbing to a mass movement?” According to Arendt, the answer is one who is entrenched in loneliness. Since all are now the lonely animal laborans, loneliness, a condition that was radically foreign to any variation of politics within the tradition, was now located at its very core. Yet, it is clear from within the context of her initial project that Arendt is not simply wrong or willfully misleading in her reading of Marx on labor. Rather, she reads Marx as she believes Lenin and Stalin read him, and with what to her mind was more than adequate justification—that which can be found in a reading of The Manifesto of the Communist Party that might be called “In Praise of Capital.” If The Manifesto is read with its praise of capital taken seriously, then it would seem that the necessary preconditions for the possibility of communism would be precisely the conditions attributed to capitalism in Capital, and Marx’s description of human existence within a capitalist system is very much akin to Arendt’s animal laborans. In other words, the methods of the nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution, no matter how alien to human flourishing they may have been in the historical moment—are not only those that must be taken in the most direct path to communism but also those that are praised by Marx for how successful they are in the development of human capacities. If this is the case, then it would seem that the means, that is, the reduction of individuals to animal laborans, may well have been justified by the ends foreseen in the revolutionary plan. For Arendt’s second pillar, “violence is the midwife of history,” she is first and foremost making the claim that Marx understands all history and thus also all political action, including speech, in terms of fabrication.4 Since making is always itself violent, it follows that in one way or another all political action will either be violent or be interpreted from within the context of violence. In other words, the political process proceeds in one of two ways: through fabrication or through the explicit violence of revolution. While not attributing terror, the second necessary condition for the possibility of totalitarian domination, as a foregone or necessary conclusion to Marx, the violent and ends-driven historically determinate process of Marxian politics leaves the door open for terror as a means to accomplish the end. Just as the fabricator of a shoe or desk can determine the process through which the goal is reached, political fabricators choose their tools and processes. Not only can the historical act be completed, since it is part of historical necessity, it must eventually be completed. For this reason, Arendt concludes, overt violence and even terror become acceptable tools of the makers of history since they are quite certain that they know what they are doing. The makers of history are not bound by what might be considered “usual” standards of acceptable action. “In Praise of Capital” returns to the scene.

86

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

Once again we see Arendt falling into a reading of Marx that is more rightly a reading of particular Marxisms. She clearly understood Marx to be far more nuanced on issues of violence than her most common assertions. We find her more precise reading of Marx in such places as On Revolution when she utilizes Marx’s understanding that violence was sometimes necessary, but always was to be a temporary solution to a specific problem. In other words, Arendt recognizes that violence was not at the center of Marx’s politics. In Arendt’s third pillar, Feurbach’s eleventh thesis, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world differently; the point is, however, to change it,” Arendt brings the first two pillars into relationship with philosophy. Arendt’s primary concern is the question of what happens when the philosopher brings philosophical idealism into the world as a guide for action. Denying Marx’s claims of having transformed Hegelian idealism into a materialism, she claims that Marx’s inversion of Hegel’s idealism is but another turning or reversal from within the tradition—one that we can find as far back as Plato when the philosopher turns his head in the cave and makes his way into the light of the sun. If this is what he had actually done, there would be no problem. However, rather than having turned Hegel on his head, Arendt reads Marx as having transformed Hegel’s backward-looking gaze into the past into a forward-looking gaze into the future. In so doing, Marx, says Arendt, claims to unlock the secrets of the future. In his move to a “material ideality,” that is, in taking his idea from worldly experience, he is able to assert that he can discover the very laws of the dialectic as it moves forward into the future. The result, for Arendt, is a determinate messianism wherein the future can be made in the predetermined image of the dialectical outcome. In this third pillar, the one that is most aligned with her study of the tradition of Western political thought, Arendt gives us a glimpse into how and why her predominate reading of Marx was done in terms of how his work was able to be used by a totalitarian regime. As Arendt works through the progression of the tradition of Western political thought beginning with Plato’s retreat from the realm of worldly affairs and ending with Marx bringing philosophy back into that world, she reads Marx, with his scientific understanding of history and politics, as trying to establish certainty in an uncertain world. We might think of it in this way: When Plato retreated from the world, he took thaumazein, the awe and wonder that is tied to that which is unknown, with him. When Marx returned, he left that thaumazein behind and replaced it with a scientific method for certainty in knowledge. Arendt wants us to be very clear on the fact that certainty, that is to say truth, cannot be imported into the human world without facing the danger that truth will become the weapon of true believers. It is no coincidence that in Arendt’s next project she develops some of her most significant contributions to political and philosophical thought: the analyses of plurality and natality.

HANNAH ARENDT AND KARL MARX



87

Notes 1 I do not take up Marx’s influence on Arendt’s thinking in this chapter as much conjecture is needed due to her lack of attribution. However, it is clear that Marx influenced Arendt’s analyses of such things as superfluous persons and ideology in The Origins of Totalitarianism as well as alienation in The Human Condition, to name just several themes important to her work. 2 “Ideology and Terror” was written during the first year of Arendt’s work on Marx and added to the second edition of The Origins of Totalitarianism. 3 Never completed as a project unto itself, substantial portions of Arendt’s writings on Marx generated during this time were published in the form of freestanding essays (e.g., “Tradition and the Modern Age”), appended to other works (“Ideology and Terror” was added to the second edition of The Origins of Totalitarianism), or are found as sections of larger projects (e.g., sections of On Revolution). 4 Note here how Arendt falls into a contradiction of claiming on the one hand that Marx reduces all of humanity to animal laborans, and on the other hand also claims that he defines humans as homo faber. In chapter four of The Human Condition, “Work,” we also find that Arendt implicates capitalism rather than Marx in reducing humans to animal laborans. Statements such as these support the idea that Arendt’s reading of Marx and animal laborans is not merely due to misunderstanding, but is rather a strategic reading of Marx.

9 Max Weber: Methodology, Action, and Politics Philip Walsh

Hannah Arendt was a vehement critic of the social and psychological sciences. Schooled by two of the most prominent philosophers of her time, Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers, she was dismissive of scholarship she did not consider serious, or which did not match her unorthodox conception of the all-important category of politics. Her well-known diagnosis of modernity in terms of the “rise of the social” included, as a major feature, the rise of the social sciences as the dominant mode of thinking. Social science exemplified many of the crises that had presaged the degradation of modern politics and the rise of totalitarianism: the tendency toward reductionism; the conflation of the distinct activities of labor, work and action; and the trivialization of the ends of human life. She denigrated sociology, in particular, as a discipline that “did not really exist” and characterized it in a letter to Jaspers in 1949 as “a substitute for history.”1 In this, and in most of her other critiques of the social sciences, Arendt was thinking primarily of Marxism, especially the work of Karl Mannheim, who had advanced an important variant in the 1930s and was the only self-declared sociologist with whom she engaged at any length in her writings. Arendt became deeply immersed in Marx’s writings in the 1950s, an experience that culminated in the important and profound critique of his ideas that appears in Part II of The Human Condition. Indeed, although she attacked the ideas of both Marx and Mannheim, she was also deeply influenced by them both. The social sciences, and sociology in particular, were therefore formative elements in her intellectual development.

MAX WEBER



89

Nevertheless, both Marx and Mannheim were somewhat marginal figures within American and, to a lesser extent, German sociology in the period from 1930 to 1960. American sociology was largely dominated by the influence of Talcott Parsons, who was himself the intellectual successor to the figure who was, by common consent, the most significant of the “founders” of German sociology: the polymath Max Weber. Arendt’s mentor at Heidelberg, Karl Jaspers, was hostile to Marx and detested Mannheim, but lionized Max Weber, whom he considered to be both the greatest sociologist of his generation and a philosopher in his own right. Jaspers impressed this opinion on Arendt several times over the years, and Arendt obediently read Weber and incorporated some of his ideas into her work. Nevertheless, for all her respect for Jaspers, Arendt remained suspicious of Weber, both as a political theorist and as a social scientist. Arendt’s explicit reasons for this view are illuminating in their own right, but equally important are the subtle ways in which Arendt’s own theories were shaped by Weber’s ideas, both those that she opposed and those that permeated her own thinking. Understanding the reasons for these commonalities and differences highlights Arendt’s distinctive perspective on action, rationality, and politics.

The Intellectual Background Arendt was first exposed to Weber’s ideas during her years in Heidelberg from 1926 to 1930, at which time she completed her doctorate under the tutelage of Jaspers. Heidelberg offered a rich intellectual atmosphere, replete with intellectual rivalries and cross-fertilizations that provided the formative education for such students as Erich Fromm and Norbert Elias, as well as Arendt herself. At the center of much of this was the circle of intellectuals that surrounded Max Weber’s widow, Marianne Weber, who provided a salon-style social hub for many politically and socially minded intellectuals in the university. Jaspers was an integral part of this group, having met the Webers in 1908 and having forged a strong intellectual friendship with Max before his death in 1919. The group also included Weber’s brother, Alfred, as well as other figures. This group was dominated by a consciousness of the centrality of Weber’s work for the human sciences, and much of the intellectual output of the leading figures was shaped by this (not least that of Marianne Weber, a prominent early feminist intellectual in her own right). Arendt therefore was exposed to Weber’s influence as a graduate student, and his groundbreaking study, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, is referenced in her earliest publications. Arendt’s intellectual career was interrupted in 1933 when Hitler came to power and she fled Germany, eventually for New York. She did not resume serious intellectual study again until after the war. In 1949, in response to Jaspers’s urging, she read Weber in some detail. His theories of social action, politics, and ideal types came to play a role in her vision of how to

90

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

understand human activity in The Human Condition. But his methodological writings were also crucial for her reflections on totalitarianism and on the shortcomings of many of her contemporaries’ attempts to understand and make sense of it.

Weber’s Methodological Writings Weber advocated the use of ideal-type concepts in the social sciences. By this, he meant not the simplification of phenomena to make them fit some preexisting schema (although Arendt in several places suggests that this is in fact what sociologists had done with his methodological principles) but, rather, “an analytical accentuation [Steigerung] of certain elements of reality.”2 The preeminent example of the use of ideal types was in Weber’s own historical work, especially in the study of the “Protestant ethic” and its decay into the “spirit of capitalism.” The phenomena to which these concepts refer are not, as Weber was at pains to point out, freestanding historical facts immediately available to the historian’s gaze. They were acquired inductively from careful study of the belief structure and rationales for action on the part of the actors involved, though an act of imagination is required to transform them into useful historical generalizations that possess explanatory power. This insight did not mean merely that all phenomena, as philosophers express it, “appear under some description,” nor that all explanation depends on an act of “social construction.” On the contrary, Weber insisted that not all descriptions are equal: ideal types must have an empirical anchor, but the ideal type depends on a nonreducible conceptual contribution from the historian. Arendt was largely at one with this “strong conception” of ideal typical theorizing and, indeed, practised it herself. But she criticized social scientists for routinely ignoring the caveats with which Weber surrounded his methodological recommendations. By imposing their own ideas on history willy-nilly, social scientists often produced ahistorical typologies in which differences were ignored, crucial nuances lost, and historical reality reduced to flat, nondescript generalities. Indeed, the most important political phenomenon of the twentieth century, the emergence of totalitarian states, had been subjected to typologies that obscured more than they illuminated by their insistence on seeing totalitarianism as continuous with other earlier autocratic and despotic regimes. Totalitarianism, Arendt argued, was fundamentally different from any previous political type. Totalitarian regimes were not—like the absolutist regimes to which social scientists routinely compared them—to be understood simply in terms of the drive for conquest, power, or booty, at least insofar as these objectives were pursued as genuine ends in themselves. On the contrary, she argued, totalitarian regimes do not clearly pursue ends at all, and this is reflected in their “supreme disregard for immediate consequences rather than ruthlessness;

MAX WEBER



91

rootlessness and neglect of national interests rather than nationalism; contempt for utilitarian motives rather than unconsidered pursuit of selfinterest; ‘idealism,’ i.e., their unwavering faith in an ideological fictitious world, rather than lust for power.”3 This insistence on the unprecedentedness of totalitarianism was a central feature of her analysis, and it was worked up in conscious opposition to the typologies of such sociologists as Raymond Aron and Talcott Parsons, who, she thought, were misled by the logic of ideal types into emphasizing the continuity of human affairs and therefore missed the terrifying novelty of totalitarianism. On the other hand, Arendt made use of various powerful images in her depiction of totalitarianism. There is, on the one hand, the conception of totalitarianism in The Origins of Totalitarianism as a raging torrent sweeping away all things in its path and driven by an insane logic of uprooting. She also suggests that the totalitarian regime resembles an onion, or an inverted pyramid. Such images were not exactly what Weber had in mind in his characterization of ideal types, but they are not dissimilar. To see totalitarianism in its true light requires an act of imagination that escapes the boundaries of the merely empirical. Accurate description does not necessarily depend on accurate reflection. Indeed, the careful and precise assembly of “pure facts,” Arendt suggested—such as Martin Gilbert had attempted in his 1961 Destruction of the European Jews—in a certain sense led to an obscuring of the nightmare quality of the phenomena it wished to explain. Arendt also accused sociologists of ignoring Weber’s emphasis on Verstehen, that is, the interpretive understanding of action, which requires the empathic identification with the actor’s motive in order to understand his or her actions. This is in contrast to what Arendt characterized as the “functionalizing” tendencies of positivistic social scientists who, she thought, were intent on ignoring people’s own conceptions of their own actions. She upbraided functionalism in both its Marxist and non-Marxist forms in terms that were strikingly similar to Weber’s own impatience with those of his own time who saw the destiny of the social sciences written in the natural sciences of the day. In this sense, both Weber and Arendt were good hermeneuticists, insisting that reduction and generalization from without were the deadly enemies of historical and social understanding. Weber explicitly contrasted the natural with the social sciences in this way. Arendt had the same sharp contrast in mind when she insisted that the study of human affairs revealed stories in the same way as the study of nature revealed laws.

Weber and Arendt on Action and Technology Weber’s most influential doctrine and the nub of Arendt’s main objections to his approach is his account of social action. In the well-known introductory chapter of Economy and Society, Weber defines the field

92

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

of sociology as concerned with social action, which is delineated via a fourfold distinction: 1. Instrumentally rational (zweckrational), that is, determined by expectations as to the behavior of objects in the environment and of other human beings. These expectations are used as “conditions” or “means” for the attainment of the actor’s own rationally pursued and calculated ends. 2. Value-rational (wertrational), that is, determined by a conscious belief in the value for its own sake of some ethical, aesthetic, religious, or other forms of behavior, independently of its prospects for success. 3. Affectual (especially emotional), that is, determined by the actor’s specific affects and feeling states. 4. Traditional, that is, determined by ingrained habituation.4 According to Weber, all individual and collective action, insofar as it is meaningful, may be captured analytically in terms of particular combinations of these elements. The task of the social scientist is to interpret social action accordingly. While Weber never explained the bases on which these four types could be identified, Jürgen Habermas has proposed that a single principle can be distilled from it by noting how each type can be related to the others with respect to the extent to which it takes account of four action variables: means, ends, values, and consequences. Type 1 takes account of all four, while Type 2 ignores consequences. Type 3 ignores both values and consequences, and Type 4 only acknowledges means. The principles are summarized in The Theory of Communicative Action as follows:5 Subjective meaning covers the following elements Means

Ends

Values

Consequences

Purposive-rational

+

+

+

+

Value-rational

+

+

+

–

Affectual

+

+

–

–

Traditional

+

–

–

–

The theory of human activity that Arendt presents in The Human Condition can be understood as a direct challenge to this typology of social action. While Arendt rejects the specific form of Weber’s theory, there is a shared ambition in terms of what their respective theories are intended to explain. In The Human Condition, Arendt reserves the term “action” for the specific kinds of interaction that occur within the

MAX WEBER



93

“in-between” space of human plurality that she designates “the web of human relationships.”6 This is distinct from the kind of purposive interactions with objects through which human beings accomplish their foreseen goals, which Arendt classifies as “work” or “fabrication.” Work in turn is contrasted with labor, which comprises activities that are oriented toward the reproduction of life. The following schema summarizes many of the features that Arendt takes to be essential to the “triad of activities” as presented in The Human Condition. Institutional correlate

Subjective orientation

Consumables, necessities

Household

Reproduction

Hands

Technology, works of art

Economy

Control

Speech

Web of human relationships

Res publica

Communication/ power

Activity

Achieved via

Outcome

Labor

Body

Work (fabrication) Action

True to her historicist orientation, Arendt does not suggest that the triad of activities is an anthropological constant; there is no essentialism here. However, the distinction between the three activities is both historically persistent and grounded in the fundamental world-orientation of each. Moreover, the meaning of each of the activities is dependent on the others. In other words, Arendt’s theory of activity, like Weber’s, is partly intended to explain how the different meanings of individual actions come to produce an institutionally differentiated society. However, there are marked divergences between the two on how to actually theorize action. For Weber, all conscious, intended activity falls within the category of “rational action,” that is, it is relative to some consideration of the relationship between means and ends. For Arendt, in contrast, means-ends thinking is typified by the activity of “work.” But the category of action cannot be understood in this way. This is so partly because of the intangibility of action, given that it consists primarily in speech, but even more so because communicative (as opposed to exploitative) relationships among human beings are not susceptible to the orientation to mastery, control, and “success” that is obtained within the sphere of work. The realm of action is the sphere in which human beings reveal themselves, in which they seek recognition from and contend with others, and struggle to shape the res publica in accordance with their visions of the good. All this is to say that, for Arendt, action and speech are where politics plays out, and freedom is to be measured by the extent to which spaces exist in which people can engage in political action. Similarly, power consists in the collective capacity for political action and thereby

94

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

affirms human spontaneity and the capacity to begin, that is, to bring something new into the world. This also contrasts sharply with Weber’s perspective, which confines politics within the institutional canopy of the state and conceives of power instrumentally as the “probability that an actor within a social relationship will be able to carry out his will despite resistance, regardless of the basis on which this probability rests.”7 For Arendt, such visions reduced action to fabrication and tempted actors to substitute violence for politics. Arendt’s insistence on the distinction between action and work is therefore seminal to her conception of politics. Nevertheless, there are similarities between Arendt and Weber in another area, namely, their respective understandings of the challenges posed by modern technology. Weber captured this in his well-known distinction between value-rational and instrumentally rational action. His insight that the modern emphasis on the technological enhancement of means threatens to eclipse the capacity to act in accordance with substantive rationality—a process that he thought was accompanied by “the disenchantment of the world”—has been enormously influential within the social sciences. In The Human Condition, Arendt also took aim at the valuations that accompanied the modern orientation toward technological rationality. But her fears were less about the ascendancy of homo faber (the orientation to tool-making) than the orientation to a cycle of labor and consumption that technological enhancement could bring about. The last section of the book, “The Victory of the Animal Laborans,” warns against the modern division and simplification, not only of labor but also of all human activity, that industrial technology presages. A possible future “society of jobholding” that would result would reduce all human activity to a common understanding as “labor,” impoverish the capacity for action, and limit fabrication to the realm of the artist. Both Weber’s and Arendt’s fears on this score remain unrealized, but they continue to loom as disturbing future possibilities.

Conclusion Arendt was affected by Weber’s perspective, but she sought to combat its influence in the form in which it was most obviously present, that of the contemporary social sciences. She thought the methodology of ideal types was vulnerable to abuse by its unreflective adherents. Moreover, Weber’s application of this methodology to the field of human activity could be dangerously reductive. She also opposed his conceptions of politics and power in the name of a subtler and philosophically informed understanding of the political. Arendt and Weber continue to be two of the most important intellectual figures of the twentieth century, and their differences reflect many ongoing debates within philosophy, politics, and social science.

MAX WEBER



95

Notes 1 Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers, Correspondence 1926–1969 (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1992), 114. 2 Max Weber, Methodology of the Social Sciences, ed. and trans. E. A. Shils and H. A. Finch (New York: Free Press, 1949), 90. 3 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1973), 417–18. 4 Max Weber, Economy and Society, trans. E. Fischoff et al. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1978), 248. 5 Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume 1: Reason and the Rationalization of Society, trans. T. McCarthy (New York: Beacon Press, 1984), 282. 6 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1958), 182–83. 7 Weber, Economy, 53.

10 Phenomenology: Arendt’s Politics of Appearance Peter Gratton

The task of writing on Arendt and phenomenology is daunting. It is true that perhaps her greatest influence, Martin Heidegger, engaged in phenomenological analyses that permeate her writings from beginning to end, whatever the critical distance she took from him. And it’s also the case that dozens of book chapters and articles, let alone whole books, can be found connecting Arendt to phenomenology in their very titles. And no doubt, many chapters in this book reference Arendt’s work as “phenomenological.” Yet, among the few times she uses the term in her works (her letters to Jaspers and others reflect on her distance from Husserl), it’s merely to point to the fact that a certain group of thinkers, as she put it in parentheses in her only use of the term in her last great work, The Life of the Mind, were looking to declare the end of philosophy and metaphysics. As she puts it, “The attraction of Husserl’s phenomenology sprang from the anti-historical and anti-metaphysical implication of the slogan ‘Zu den Sachen selbst’ and Heidegger, who . . . aimed at overcoming metaphysics, as he repeatedly proclaimed since 1930.”1 As she put it in her Life of the Mind: I have clearly joined the ranks of those who for some time now have been attempting to dismantle metaphysics, and philosophy with all its categories, as we have known them from their beginning in Greece until today. Such dismantling is possible only on the assumption that the thread of tradition is broken and that we shall not be able to renew it. . . . What has been lost is the continuity of the past as it seemed to be handed down from

PHENOMENOLOGY



97

generation to generation, developing in the process its own consistency. . . . What you are left with is still the past, but a fragmented past.2 Margaret Carnovan, in the introduction to the second edition of The Human Condition (1998), calls this work a “phenomenology of human activities,”3 and one finds all over the commentary for the translation of her doctoral writings, Love and Saint Augustine, over thirty references to a phenomenology available there that is said to inform many of her later writings, even as the term itself never appears in the work and she employs neither the epochē of Husserl nor the kinds of analyses found in Being and Time.4 One could thus be left to wonder how an in-depth analysis of Augustine’s notion of love counts as phenomenological. One often sees the contortions made in order to make Arendt a phenomenologist. For example, here we have Dermot Moran in his Introduction to Phenomenology, near the beginning of his chapter on Arendt: Arendt’s practice of phenomenology is original and idiosyncratic; she exhibited no interest in the phenomenological method and contributed nothing [my emphasis] to the theory of phenomenology. Indeed she was suspicious of all methods and systems. She first encountered Husserl’s phenomenology in Heidegger’s seminars at Marburg, and as a result, she was never attracted to Husserl’s conception of phenomenology as first philosophy. . . . She [also] never showed any interest in Heidegger’s project of a fundamental ontology, though she clearly appropriated and creatively transformed many of his conceptions, including Dasein.5 By the end of his chapter on Arendt, he argues that her “overall framework is heavily dependent on the philosophies of Heidegger and Jaspers and their concerns for human existence and being-in-the-world,” one that provides a “phenomenological account of the conditions necessary for the creation and maintenance of the public space.”6 Serena Parekh, for her part, argues the following: Arendt’s method is phenomenological. Rather than giving one sustained argument on the topic, she develops a number of portraits and examples of the intersubjectivity of the common realm. . . . Because she is a phenomenologist, we must approach Arendt’s view of the common world through these . . . phenomena as they appear, rather than through dialectic argument.7 While it’s true that dialectical argumentation in the broadest sense connects a host of figures, from Plato through Aquinas to Hegel, in the tradition, this is rather thin for making Arendt a phenomenologist, given that all the figures that do not take up philosophical dialectic as their modus operandi. Moreover, since Arendt is often, in collected volumes on phenomenology,

98

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

along with Simone de Beauvoir, among the only female authors included, one could be led to believe her inclusion to be an attempt to diversify a certain school of thought to the point of making phenomenology include everything and hence meaningful of nothing. But I think the surmise that she is a phenomenologist is not wrong-headed and her inclusion in such a canon does not stretch the term beyond its breaking point. Indeed, my argument here is that Arendt accepts the premise that holds various phenomenological accounts together, namely, that there is no Being beneath appearances. Indeed, as she writes in The Life of the Mind, “our whole existence is determined by appearances,”8 and the first, great part of that work is titled nothing other than “Appearance,” with its first chapter being “The World’s Phenomenal Nature.” Given that phenomenology is nothing other than a logos or account of phenomena, Arendt hence fits within a certain set of figures who see a break within the Western tradition and are concerned with how to think afterward. In addition, while many think she showed the limits of phenomenology’s primary theses (see the chapter on Heidegger) in terms of its often apolitical accounts,9 Arendt takes this thinking of appearance to its limits in a different way, thinking the Other, freedom, and death, among other “things,” as always apparent, as appearing. Given the limits of space, I will show how phenomenology informs the work that seems least connected to phenomenology’s dicta and practices, namely, The Origins of Totalitarianism. Other chapters in this volume make the case for her phenomenology, most especially discussing her accounts of Being as appearing in The Human Condition and The Life of the Mind. My surmise is that if I can show a political phenomenology in Origins, then it would follow that her later works were all informed by a certain phenomenology, which is the red thread of her writings. Origins would seem to be least “phenomenological.” It is a work first and foremost of history, but not in any Hegelian sense that history tends toward this or that end. In a study of how the event of totalitarianism came about—one she believed without precedent in the history of the politics— Arendt argues that totalitarianism need not have come to be, and that racism, imperialism, and the rise and fall of the nation-state “crystallized” into being totalitarianism’s historical condition of possibility. Arendt is first and foremost a thinker of the event, of the fact that individual agency here, there, and everywhere brought forward a “subterranean stream”10 of Western history whose appearance was not preordained, since it required cross-global and intra-European bureaucratic decisions, events, and the appearances of new forms of thinking and acting in the broad sense. The task, often not discussed in regarding Arendt, is that while many celebrate her thinking of appearance, of the plurality of being-together, this conflation of being and appearance carries with it its own risks, one seen in various nihilisms of the past century. Without the supposed guarantor of a transcendent God, some Spirit to history, or a transcendental thinking as in Kant that can move back from the stream of appearances, how does one discern some proper morality or politics beyond the mere movement of

PHENOMENOLOGY



99

the becoming of history? There is a typical moral blackmail in those who argue that, with the death of God, that is, absolutes beneath or beyond the realm of appearances, one must fall in with traditional ways of looking at the world. The problem that Arendt has to negotiate is one that is obvious and that has followed all thinking of politics and power since the Greeks: in the realm of appearances, there are not “truths,” but only doxai or opinions, and those opinions circulate without a guarantor beyond or outside the very political conditions to which they gave rise. We must live with a politics only of appearances. The Greeks dealt with this problem in terms of the Sophists, and Plato’s grand metaphysical edifice (and we might say all of Western metaphysics that follows as a footnote to his work) was built, brick by brick, in order to attempt to defeat them. The end of Platonism, that is, the end of philosophy, may mean to some that we do not have a rational basis for defending against the mere play of appearance that occurs when politicians lie or when they use propaganda, a major theme in Origins, to defeat any common sense since any appearance is as good as any other, since when we argue over the facts beyond these appearances, we simply produce further texts and images at odds with one another. But Arendt’s claim in Origins is that rather than thinking the world, as she does, as the space of appearances—a world that is both common and pluralistic at the same time—totalitarianism operates by a sort of horrific parody of metaphysics, presuming in its theories what lay beneath the contingent appearances of history could only lead an inexorable violence to make that contingent world fit with that theory. Ideology and terror, then, are less a state than a “movement” or “process,” making a fact of heretofore imagined laws (the classless future; the battle of races) that ideologies made the key to all of existence. As she puts it: Totalitarian lawfulness, defying legality and pretending to establish the direct reign of justice on earth, executes the law of History or of Nature without translating it into standards of right and wrong for individual behavior. It applies the law directly to mankind without bothering with the behavior of men. The law of Nature or the law of History, if properly executed, is expected to produce mankind as its end product; and this expectation lies behind the claim to global rule of all totalitarian governments. Totalitarian policy claims to transform the human species into an active unfailing carrier of a law to which human beings otherwise would only passively and reluctantly be subjected.11 Terror becomes the principle of Nazi governance precisely because violence is as close as one comes to the logical necessity of history’s movement their race theories envisioned. The “guilty,” she notes, are simply those who stand in the way of some “historical process”; their very freedom from it puts the lie to the ideology in question. Arendt’s claim is that this spontaneity got in the way of the “fabrication of mankind,” which “eliminates individuals for the sake of the species,” and “sacrifices the ‘parts’ for the sake of the

100

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

‘whole.’”12 Arendt argues that freedom, as initium, as the power to begin something, which is at the heart of her chapter on action in The Human Condition, is “identical with the fact that men are being born and therefore each of them is a new beginning, begins, in a sense, the world anew.13” This is why totalitarianism goes beyond just the loss of “plurality” marked by lawless tyrannies, since “the fact that men are born and die can be only regarded as an annoying interference with higher forces.”14 In short, the terror is meant to create “One Man,” not “men in the plural,” which as we have seen is how Arendt defines the world. This “One Man” is defined by ideology, which she defines as follows: 1. They have the appearance of a science, of discerning the reality based upon a given hidden principle beneath the play of appearances of the world. 2. They are based upon the “logic of an idea,” which allows its adherents “to pretend to know the mysteries of the whole historical process-the secrets of the past, the intricacies of the present, [and] the uncertainties of the future.”15 3. They are preternaturally incurious. Racism is no more interested in considering race than a rock is interested in becoming a scientist. All history is consistent with the substratum of one idea; anyone who suggests otherwise is to be killed as an enemy of Being itself. 4. They claim total explanation, the first of three totalitarian elements to all ideologies. 5. They describe not what is, “but what becomes, what is born and passes away,” and everything is about motion and inexorable processes defined by hidden and non-apparent laws of history.16 6. Ideological thinking is “emancipated from the reality that we perceive with our five senses, and insists on a ‘truer’ reality concealed behind all perceptible things.”17 No doubt, this is a key phenomenological insight. 7. They achieve this emancipation from reality not by inconsistency, but by a logical apparatus fully consistent—as nothing is in life— with its fundamental idea or axiom. Once in power, then, plurality—the fundamental human trait—is a threat, and so is the common ability to form one’s own view, to be persuadable and thus to be able to persuade others. She writes: For an ideology differs from simple opinion in that it claims to possess either the key to history, or the solution for all the “riddles of the universe,” the supposed intimate knowledge of the hidden universal laws which are supposed to rule nature and man. Few ideologies have won enough prominence to survive the hard competitive struggle of persuasion, and

PHENOMENOLOGY

 101

only those two have come to out on top and essentially defeated all others: the ideology which interprets history as an economic struggle of classes, and the other that interprets history as a natural fight of races.18 This is not an argument that politics is other than about persuasion in the play of appearances to which doxa and opinion respond. Indeed Arendt long argued that where there are claims to ultimate truths, there can be no politics, since politics is precisely about this play and plurality of appearances. Pace Alain Badiou and the Platonists before him, politics can never be about truth because any claim to truth is an attempt to put an end to that play of appearances. Nor is she claiming that ideologies are deserving of being called a full-fledged theoretical doctrine, as found throughout philosophical history. Rather, “every full-fledged ideology has been created, continued, and improved as a political weapon.”19 Nevertheless, they too must operate within the realm of persuasion: the “tremendous power of persuasion”—she writes about race ideology and vulgar Marxist theories of economic history—in “our time is not accidental. Persuasion is not possible without appeal to either experiences or desires, in other words to immediate political needs.”20 Arendt ends Origins with an account of the appearance of these needs out of which the deadly seeds of totalitarianism grew, namely, the mass loneliness at modernity’s heart. This loneliness is not simply solitude, since the former, she argues, is perhaps best felt in the midst of others. One goes to a cabin for solitude; one logs onto Facebook or takes a seat among a crowd at a bar downtown only to be overwhelmed by loneliness. This will give rise to her account of the “rise of the social” and the loss of the political in The Human Condition. Nevertheless, as with any end, we have the promise of a new beginning, one that can “understand,” in Arendt’s meaning of that term, the past out of which we have come—and which can become, without political vigilance, a precedent to be repeated. Let’s begin to conclude with these last two paragraphs of Origins: There remains the fact that the crisis of our time and its central experience have brought forth an entirely new form of government which as a potentiality and an ever-present danger is only too likely to stay with us from now on, just as other forms of government which came about at different historical moments and rested on different fundamental experiences have stated with mankind regardless of temporary defeats. . . . But there remains also the truth that every end in history necessarily contains a new beginning; this beginning is the promise, the only “message” which the end can ever produce. Beginning, before it becomes a historical event, is the supreme capacity of man; politically it is identical with man’s freedom. Initium ut esset homo creatus est—“that a beginning be made man was created,” said Augustine [De Civitate, 12.20]. This beginning is guaranteed by each new birth; it is indeed every man.21

102

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

This will be the central ontological claim of The Human Condition. But we can see already that Arendt thinks of these births, of these appearances of the new, as always occurring within a common world, a commonality that is prior to any supposed subject or individuality. Thinking appearances as occurring a posteriori to a common world, Arendt develops a thinking of understanding as being attuned to that common world, one that provides a sensus communis that, in the last century, “mean[t] the unpremeditated attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality, whatever it may be.”22 The difficulty of “understanding,” which does not mean accepting but resisting what has appeared in common in our world, including the appearance of the unprecedented: What runs counter to common sense is not the nihilistic principle that ‘everything is permitted,’ which was already contained in the nineteenthcentury utilitarian conception of common sense. What common sense and ‘normal people’ refuse to believe is that everything is possible. We attempt to understand elements in present or recollected experience that simply surpass our powers of understanding.23 Hence, unlike the kind of understanding one finds in Heidegger’s Verstehen, Arendt’s thinking of understanding, like her later thinking of judgment, is always grappling not just with a pre-comprehended totality of involvements but with precisely that which upsets our common place notions, such as what occurs when one thinks totalitarianism to merely be another form of tyranny or its apparatchiks to be mere criminals. Like Heidegger, however, she believed that this understanding could not be broached under the sway of clichés or idle chatter, but could bring us to comprehending a common set of appearances to which the last century and our own has had to bear witness. In sum, what is required in a world of appearances is not to turn from the appearance of the new and unprecedented, but to mark it and narrate it: to give an account or logos of its appearance or phainomena, a phenomenology. Despite some renditions—none found in this book—that depict Arendt as fetishizing the new, Arendt never argued such. Totalitarianism’s appearance in the twentieth century was surely new and unprecedented, for Arendt, but no less monstrous for all that. The task of Arendt’s work, then, is to attend to the world as appearing to multiple agents who can bit by bit create through word and deed a common world, or rather build on the world always already held by us in common. This common world could only be attended to by studying its differing modes of appearing, one that her political phenomenology would diagnose in each of her works.

Notes 1 Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (New York: Harcourt and Brace, 1978), 9. 2 Ibid., 212.

PHENOMENOLOGY

 103

3 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), xiii. 4 Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine, ed. and with an interpretive essay, Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott and Judith Chelius Stark (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1996). 5 Dermot Moran, Introduction to Phenomenology (London: Routledge, 2000), 289. 6 Ibid., 319. 7 Serena Parekh, Hannah Arendt and the Challenge of Modernity: A Phenomenology of Human Rights (London: Taylor & Francis, 2008), 68. 8 Arendt, Life, 45. 9 This is most apparent in her overview of Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenology in “What Is Existential Philosophy?,” in Essays in Understanding, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1994), 163–87. 10 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1973), ix. 11 Ibid., 462. 12 Ibid., 465. 13 Ibid., 466. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid., 470. 17 Ibid., 471. 18 Ibid., 159. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid., 478–79. 22 Ibid., viii. 23 Ibid., 440–41.

11 Martin Heidegger: Love and the World Jennifer Gaffney

Introduction There is perhaps no limit to what one can say about the complexity and depth of the relationship between Hannah Arendt and her mentor Martin Heidegger. Indeed, so much has already been said that it would be imprudent to attempt here to give a comprehensive account of the ways in which they changed, motivated, challenged, and resisted each other over the course of their respective careers.1 My aim instead will simply be to highlight several aspects of their intellectual relationship that I consider crucial if we are to understand the importance of Arendt’s critical appropriation of Heidegger’s project. In so doing, I do not wish to treat as inconsequential or even distinguishable the robust and varied threads of their relationship, but instead to bring into focus the contribution that Arendt makes to deepening and challenging the stakes of Heidegger’s fundamental ontology for understanding our communal and political relations in the modern world. Heidegger’s political, ethical, and personal failures, manifest above all in his support of the Nazi Party at the beginning of the 1930s, have cast a dark shadow over this relationship, leading many to attempt to distance Arendt from the influence of her predecessor.2 Yet, I wish to suggest that it is precisely in Arendt’s refusal to assume this distance herself, to remain in conversation with Heidegger’s project even during long periods of silence between them, that enables her to ask one of the greatest and most pressing questions of the twentieth century: How is it that not only thoughtlessness but also thinking can be an accomplice to totalitarianism?

MARTIN HEIDEGGER

 105

Encountering Heidegger Arendt first met Heidegger just after her eighteenth birthday when she arrived in Marburg to attend his 1924–25 lecture course on Plato’s Sophist.3 By this point, Heidegger had acquired a reputation throughout Germany for reawakening the most ancient and meaningful questions and for teaching his students how to think.4 Looking back on her experience of this period on the occasion of Heidegger’s eightieth birthday, Arendt says: The rumor about Heidegger put it quite simply: thinking has come to life again. . . . We are so accustomed to the old opposition of reason versus passion, spirit versus life, that the idea of a passionate thinking, in which thinking and aliveness become one, takes us somewhat aback.5 Heidegger’s students, who, in addition to Arendt, included Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jacob Klein, Leo Strauss, Hans Jonas, Herbert Marcuse, and Emmanuel Levinas, were understandably taken with his concern for envisioning the task of thinking anew. Advancing the phenomenological insights of his predecessor, Edmund Husserl, beyond the confines of modern epistemology, Heidegger promised to attain the things that Husserl sought in his famous proclamation, “Back to the things themselves!”6 Heidegger made clear, too, that the concern for these “things” was not merely an academic matter, but a concern of thinking men, a concern not just of yesterday or today, but one that constitutes an enduring and timeless dimension of being human.7 This period was, for Heidegger, perhaps the most creative and decisive of his career. In 1919, he began giving a series of lecture courses in Freiburg and Marburg that would provide the basis for his 1927 masterwork, Being and Time.8 Among the most notable of these was the 1924–25 winter semester lecture course that Arendt attended on Plato’s Sophist. As Jacques Taminiaux explains, Heidegger was able to underscore in this lecture course his central argument in Being and Time that “philosophy in its cardinal form, which is metaphysics, is not a doctrine, but rather a form of existence.”9 With this, Heidegger outlines the existential structure of the human being or Dasein as being-in-the-world, developing the implications of this in his discourse on the Greek conception of truth as alethēia or unconcealment in order to give contour to his radical claim that truth is “a determination of the being of Dasein itself.”10 Heidegger begins his inquiry into Plato in this lecture course by first examining Aristotle’s designation of phronēsis in Book VI of the Nicomachean Ethics as the apex of practical life and as a mode in which the human being grasps the truth.11 From this, Heidegger determines that truth is not a fixed property of objects but rather something that comes to appear upon being uncovered or discovered through our effort to interpret the meaningfulness of the world so that we might find a home in it.12

106

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

Human beings are thus concerned or worried about the world they have inherited, and it is this concern or worry—what Heidegger ultimately calls care (Sorge)—that allows truth to appear. This lecture course thus sets the stage for Heidegger’s claim in Being and Time that Dasein’s relation to the world is never indifferent or passive. Instead, insofar as being-in means dwelling, being amid, and being together with the things in the world, Heidegger suggests that Dasein is primordially concerned about the things and others with which it is involved.13 Heidegger’s early articulation of his existential analytic of Dasein as being-in-the-world thus made a decisive intervention in the tradition of Western metaphysics, de-centering the isolated modern subject, while bringing into view the fact that human existence cannot be thought apart from its relation to the world and others.14 These insights remain central to Arendt’s corpus throughout. Yet, Arendt also identifies in these early years Heidegger’s inability to fully grasp the political and communal implications of his early formulation of the project of fundamental ontology. While Heidegger’s interpretation of phronēsis in his 1924–25 lecture course forms the basis for his notion of authenticity in Being and Time, the political significance of this concept—or the fact that phronēsis concerns praxis or action in political life—falls away in subsequent works. In placing being-toward-death at the center of his analysis, Heidegger poses his notion of authenticity in Being and Time in direct opposition to Dasein’s engagement in the world, equating Dasein’s publicly interpreted self with the “they-self” or the leveled down, average everydayness of inauthentic Dasein.15 With this, he stresses that authenticity reaches its apex through the accomplishment of a certain kind of relation to the self, one that takes shape at a distance from Dasein’s normal course of existence as being-in-the-world. As we shall see, Arendt perceives these aspects of Heidegger’s project to be a betrayal of the very interrelatedness that he so radically insists is constitutive of human existence.16 Moreover, while Heidegger undertakes a destruction of the tradition of Western metaphysics by developing a “this-worldly philosophy,” Arendt will suggest that he ultimately reaffirms this tradition by implicating himself in a philosophical prejudice against praxis that has been central to Western metaphysics since Plato.17

Disavowing Heidegger Arendt left Marburg in 1925, traveling first to Freiburg to study with Husserl and then to Heidelberg in 1926, where she completed her dissertation, “Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin,” under the direction of Karl Jaspers in 1929.18 Though her engagement with Jaspers proved crucial for the trajectory of her thinking, Heidegger’s fundamental ontology is far from absent in Arendt’s early philosophical writings. As Roy Tsao explains, “[‘Der Liebesbegriff

MARTIN HEIDEGGER

 107

bei Augustin’] attests to Heidegger’s influence on every page . . . the questions posed, the inferences drawn, and the distinctions insisted upon all lie within the ambit of Heidegger’s fundamental ontology, and conform with exactitude to its protocols.”19 Yet, even in these early years, Arendt’s work is distinguished not just by its proximity to Heidegger’s project but also by Arendt’s critical approach to it. Drawing on Augustine’s notion of love or caritas, Arendt sets out in her dissertation to put into relief the importance of the neighborhood or community for understanding human existence.20 In contrast to Heidegger’s emphasis on the self in his existential analytic of Dasein, we find that Arendt is already thinking in 1929 about the importance of world and the plurality that she believes constitutes it. Beyond this, she takes very early steps toward the development of the concept of birth for understanding the human condition, offering an early but decisive counterpoint to Heidegger’s prioritization of death in Being and Time.21 This, in turn, opens a space for her to begin thinking about our communal relations and responsibilities in ways that appear to remain unfilled in Heidegger’s project. This early work thus offers an important and early example of Arendt’s effort to think both with and against Heidegger; it illustrates the keen critical edge of her own interpretation of his project along with her acknowledgment of the importance of his project for envisioning the task of thinking anew.22 While Arendt was entrenched in this early work in the philosophical discourses she had engaged with Heidegger and Jaspers, Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 provoked a decisive shift in her thinking. She identifies February 27, 1933—the day the Reichstag was burned—as the definitive event in her memory that dated her turn toward the political.23 Reflecting on this period in her acclaimed 1964 interview with Günter Gaus, she says: The year 1933 made a lasting impression on me. . . . The problem, the personal problem, was not what our enemies might be doing, but what our friends were doing. This wave of cooperation . . . made you feel surrounded by an empty space, isolated. . . . I came to the conclusion that cooperation was, so to speak, the rule among intellectuals, but not among others. And I have never forgotten that.24 Upon witnessing the illegal arrests of people, who, under the guise of protective custody, were sent to Gestapo cellars and concentration camps, Arendt decided that “indifference was no longer possible” and, for a time, resolved to disavow the intellectual tradition and profession within which she had been raised.25 Upon being forced to flee Germany in 1933 and becoming a stateless person for a period that would last eighteen years, Arendt resolved to resist all forms of worldless contemplation, leading her to develop a project that emphasized political judgment, action, and communal responsibility.

108

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

It was, of course, in April of the same year that Heidegger was elected rector of Freiburg University, and, only days later, on May 1, 1933, he joined the Nazi Party. Though there is much to be said about Arendt’s response to Heidegger’s decision, it is significant for our purposes that she makes a definitive gesture during this period, not merely against Heidegger the person, but against Heidegger the thinker, identifying the seeds of his political failings in his formulation of the project of fundamental ontology. We see this, for instance, in Arendt’s 1943 essay, “What is Existenz Philosophy?” where she argues that Heidegger’s notion of Dasein devolves from a being that is constituted by being-in-the-world to an isolated self whose “absolute selfness” makes its relation to the world and others irrelevant. She insists, too, that Heidegger’s notion of “being-toward-death” motivates the self-oriented Dasein that emerges in Being and Time, arguing that Dasein’s anticipatory resoluteness offers “the opportunity to devote myself exclusively to beinga-Self . . . and to free myself once and for all from the world that entangles me.”26 And yet, as she explains, “Dasein could be truly itself only if it could pull back from its being-in-the-world into itself, but that is what its nature can never permit it to do.”27 While Heidegger recognizes this problem, Arendt argues that he is led by it to draw on concepts such as “folk” and “earth” in order to “supply his isolated Selves with a shared, common ground to stand on.”28 As she explains: Concepts of that kind can only lead us out of philosophy and into some kind of nature-oriented superstition. If it does not belong to the concept of man that he inhabits the earth together with others of his kind, then all that remains for him is a mechanical reconciliation by which the atomized Selves are provided with a common ground that is essentially alien to their nature. All that can result from that is the organization of these Selves intent only on themselves into an Over-self in order somehow to effect a transition from resolutely accepted guilt to action.29 It is no surprise that the language in this passage resonates with the language of atomization and isolation that she uses to describe the vulnerability of modern mass society to totalitarianism in many of her essays throughout the 1940s, no less than in her seminal 1951 work The Origins of Totalitarianism. Upon finding themselves homeless and uprooted with “no place in the world recognized or guaranteed by others,” Arendt argues that these masses become willing to surrender to the delusional fellowship promised by totalitarianism and the “suicidal escape” that it affords.30 This phase in Arendt’s thinking thus marks a clear and decisive gesture against Heidegger’s project. A period in which she devotes herself primarily to political questions, her critique of Heidegger is marked not just by her efforts to move beyond his project but also by her emphasis on the dangers and limits of this kind of thinking for the modern world.

MARTIN HEIDEGGER

 109

Reconciling with Heidegger In 1949, two years before receiving her US citizenship, Arendt returned to Germany for the first time since her departure in 1933. During this visit, she met with Heidegger, and, as Roger Berkowitz argues, this meeting set in motion another decisive phase in her thinking.31 While her concern for the vulnerability of the modern masses to totalitarianism remained very much at work in her writings from the war period on, Berkowitz insists that a new insight emerges from the conversation they had during this meeting concerning the notion of reconciliation.32 Whereas Heidegger had emphasized the theme of guilt in his existential analytic of Dasein, Arendt takes this concept, and the Christian notion of forgiveness on which it is predicated, to be destructive of the political. Whereas guilt gives wrongful acts permanence and continuity in the world, and forgiveness forgets these wrongs altogether, reconciliation, Arendt suggests, offers a worldly and political alternative to both, creating the possibility for reestablishing solidarity within political communities without forgetting what has been done. In this, Berkowitz says, “The challenge of reconciliation is to love the world as it is, that is, as potentially irreconcilable and inclusive of evil.”33 As Berkowitz argues, this concern for conceiving of reconciliation in terms of love of the world remains central to Arendt’s corpus from this point on and, he says, “Heidegger is a silent partner in Arendt’s life-long reflection on reconciliation.”34 This concern comes into view perhaps most notably in her 1958 work, The Human Condition, where she sets before us the task of loving the world, conceiving of this task as a decidedly political one. To be sure, Heidegger remains in the background of this project. As Arendt explains in the note that she included with the German edition of The Human Condition that she sent to Heidegger: You will see that the book does not contain a dedication. If things had ever worked out between us—and I mean between, that is, neither you nor me—I would have asked you if I might dedicate it to you; it came directly out of the first Freiburg days and hence owes practically everything to you in every respect. As things are, I did not think it was possible, but I wanted at least to mention the bare fact to you in one way or another.35 Yet, Arendt’s original and critical insights into his project enable her to conceive of an alternative interpretation of authentic communal life that Heidegger, in his disavowal of the political, is never able to articulate. It is in this work that Arendt gives a clear articulation to her notions of natality and plurality, concepts that displace Heidegger’s emphasis on death and the self by illustrating that each newcomer who enters the world is at once irreducibly singular while at the same time irrevocably embedded within the

110

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

fabric of communal life. In this, she insists that there is no self without the relations that constitute it and no disclosure without the political—what she calls the “space of appearance”—where I appear to others as they appear to me, not as endlessness reproducible entities but as radically unique and capable of acting against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and probability. Arendt thus remains committed to Heidegger’s claim that the world is something from which we can never hide; yet, she takes a step beyond Heidegger by insisting that it is precisely in virtue of this that the world is something for which we are always already responsible. She thus interprets the stakes of human finitude in terms of care of the world rather than the self, and conceives of this task as emanating not from the silent and inward resolve of authentic Dasein, but from the visible and audible call of human plurality.

Conclusion: Thinking Anew Again Arendt’s lifelong engagement with Heidegger thus makes possible her critical appropriation of his project in the context of communal and political life. By remaining in conversation with his early formulation of the project of fundamental ontology throughout her career, she is able to put into relief the ways in which Heidegger himself falls short in his ability to clarify the significance of his original insights into the relationality of human existence for the modern world. Indeed, it is precisely in virtue of Arendt’s willingness to maintain a critical but proximate relation to Heidegger that she is able in the final stages of her career to ask one of the most important and pressing questions of the twentieth century: How is it that not only thoughtlessness but also thinking can be an accomplice to totalitarianism? As is well known, Arendt famously and contentiously associates thoughtlessness with the rise of totalitarianism in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.36 Yet, it is perhaps no less significant that Arendt returns in such works as The Life of the Mind and Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy to the task of thinking, the same task that Heidegger had promised to envision anew in his lecture courses in the 1920s. Though the The Life of the Mind was never completed, it is nevertheless clear that Arendt had begun in these later writings to put into relief the dangers of worldless thinking, or of thinking that gets trapped within itself. Indeed, it is precisely this kind of thinking that is not only characteristic of the Western metaphysical tradition since Plato but also characteristic of Heidegger, who suggests that thinking is a matter of withdrawing from oneself and the world in order to stand in the clearing of being.37 In its worldlessness, such a notion of thinking can only perpetuate the isolation and loneliness of modern life. Hence, in returning to the question of thinking, the question that first set in motion her intellectual relationship with Heidegger in 1924, Arendt is thus led to insist that the task of thinking must again be envisioned anew. In this,

MARTIN HEIDEGGER

 111

Arendt conceives of thinking not as a retreat into contemplation but instead as something that reaches its summit in understanding and judgment, or those worldly activities that enable us to take responsibility for the world and the plurality that constitutes it.

Notes 1 Principal works on Arendt and Heidegger include Elizabeth Young-Bruehl, For Love of the World, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984); Dana Villa, Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of the Political (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995); Jacques Taminiaux, The Thracian Maid and the Professional Thinker, trans. Michael Gendre (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1997). More recent works include Katrin Meyer, “Ambivalence of Power: Heidegger’s das Man and Arendt’s Acting in Concert,” in Studies in the Philosophy of Sociality 10 (2017): 157–78; Ronald Beiner, “The Presence of Art and the Absence of Heidegger” in Arendt Studies 2 (2018): 9–15; Iain Thompson, “Thinking Love: Heidegger and Arendt,” in Continental Philosophy Review 50, no. 4 (2017): 453–78. 2 See Seyla Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (New York: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2003), 23. 3 Young-Bruehl, Love of the World, 50. 4 Ibid., 51. 5 Hannah Arendt, “Martin Heidegger at Eighty,” New York Review of Books, October 21, 1971: 51. 6 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2010), 28. 7 Arendt, “Martin Heidegger at Eighty,” 53. 8 Taminiaux, The Thracian Maid, 4. 9 Ibid., 5. See also Martin Heidegger, Plato’s Sophist, trans. Richard Rojcewicz and Andre Schuwer (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1997), 22. 10 Heidegger, Plato’s Sophist, 23. 11 Arendt arrived in Margbug in the fall of 1924 immediately after Heidegger had given his summer semester lecture course on the basic concepts of Aristotelian philosophy. Heidegger’s lectures on Aristotle in that course, as well as in the 1924–5 lecture course, Plato’s Sophist, proved decisive, not only for his development of Being and Time but also for Arendt’s political appropriation of his work. See Taminiaux, The Thracian Maid, 3. See also, Young-Bruehl, For the Love of the World, 44. 12 Taminiaux, The Thracian Maid, 11. 13 Richard Polt, Heidegger: An Introduction (New York: Routledge, 1999), 79. 14 For Heidegger’s discussion of being-with (mitsein) as a mode of being-inthe-world, as well as his discussion of the inauthenticity of Dasein’s publicly interpreted, see §25–7 of Being and Time.

112

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

15 See Villa, Arendt and Heidegger, 212–23. 16 See Villa, Politics, Philosophy, Terror: Essays on the Thought of Hannah Arendt, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 67. Arendt offers this criticism of Heidegger in her essay, “What Is Existential Philosophy?” in Essays in Understanding 1930–1954: Formation, Exile and Totalitarianism, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Random House, Inc., 1994), 176–81. 17 Ibid., 232. For Arendt’s criticism of Heidegger see Hannah Arendt, “What Is Existenz Philosophy?” 176–81. 18 Roy Tsao, “Arendt’s Augustine,” in Politics in Dark Times: Encounters with Hannah Arendt, ed. Seyla Benhabib (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 39–57, 40. 19 Ibid., 42. 20 See Young-Bruehl, For the Love of the World, 76. 21 See Hannah Arendt, Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin: Versuch einer philosophischen Interpretation [1929], ed. Ludger Lütkehaus (Berlin: Philo, 2003), and Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine, ed. Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott and Judith Chelius Stark (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1996). It is important to note that the English translation of Arendt’s dissertation, Love and Saint Augustine, is not a direct translation of her original 1929 dissertation, Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin, but is instead based on an unfinished revision of her dissertation that she translated into English in the early 1960s. Though the spirit of the original is retained, there are especially interesting changes that reflect Arendt’s mature thought in works such as The Origins of Totalitarianism and The Human Condition, particularly with respect to the concept of natality. While she had certainly begun to think about birth in this original work, she had not yet fully developed the relationship between birth and the political nor had she discovered the importance of the concept of natality as it emerges in later works like The Human Condition. For more on the differences between the two versions of her dissertation, see Stephan Kampowski, Arendt, Augustine, and the New Beginning: The Action Theory and Moral Thought of Hannah Arendt in Light of Her Dissertation on St. Augustine (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008), 13–24. See also, Tsao, “Arendt’s Augustine,” 41. 22 Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine, 58, 264–69. 23 Hannah Arendt, “What Remains? The Language Remains,” in Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Shocken Books), 1–23, 4. 24 Ibid., 10–11. 25 Ibid., 4–5. 26 Arendt, “What Is Existential Philosophy,” 181. 27 Ibid., 179. 28 Ibid., 181. 29 Arendt, “What Is Existential Philosophy,” 187. 30 Hannah Arendt, “On the Nature of Totalitarianism: An Essay in Understanding,” in Essays in Understanding 1930–1954, 328–60, 358.

MARTIN HEIDEGGER

 113

See also, Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarainism (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1973), 471. 31 Roger Berkowitz, “Reconciling Oneself to the Impossibility of Reconciliation: Judgment and Worldliness in Arendt’s Politics,” in Artifacts of Thinking: Reading Arendt’s Denktagebuch, ed. Roger Berkowitz and Ian Storey (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017), 9–36, 15. 32 Ibid., 10. 33 Ibid., 30. 34 Ibid., 27. 35 Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger, Letters 1925–1975, ed. Ursula Ludz (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2004), 123–24. See also Beiner, “The Presence of Art and the Absence of Heidegger,” 9. 36 See Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin Books, 1964). 37 Berkowitz, “Reconciling Oneself,” 25.

12 Karl Jaspers, Arendt, and the Love of Citizens Ian Storey

The voluminous tracks of Hannah Arendt’s correspondence over her lifetime—her letters with her dear friend Mary McCarthy, the contestatory exchanges with Martin Heidegger, and the intense and complex love in her conversations with Heinrich Blücher—provide a kind of affective tableau, an image in the written word of the relationships that structured her life. Arendt’s academic work describes actors, archetypes of players in the public, social, and private worlds, but her letters show even more vividly the sheer complexity of those archetypes as forms of lived and shared experience. If her philosophy provides a template for seeing and knowing the positions, drives, and acts of the abiding subject, it is in her letters that we begin to see in greater detail what it means to construct those subject positions, and what it means to embrace the vulnerable process of allowing oneself to be influenced, changed, and built up by the love of others. Of those structuring exchanges of senses and sensibilities, few are as striking in expanse and depth as Arendt’s long connection with Karl Jaspers. It has become a common reading of Arendt’s understanding of love that, as Shin Chiba puts it, “love is basically regarded by her as an unpolitical entity . . . one cannot overemphasize Arendt’s political aversion to the notion of love.”1 It is certainly hard to read the account of love in The Human Condition otherwise, in the face of passages that suggest that “love, in distinction from friendship, is killed, or rather extinguished, the moment it is displayed in public . . . because of its inherent worldlessness, love can only become false and perverted when it is used for political purposes such as the change or salvation of the world.”2 “For a long time,” Tatjana Noemi Tömmel notes, “we had little reason to question that ‘worldless passion’ was

KARL JASPERS, ARENDT, AND THE LOVE OF CITIZENS

 115

Arendt’s main, if not her only concept of love.”3 This leads Chiba and others to the suggestion that “her political theory of amor mundi is based mainly on friendship” and “Arendt does not consider friendship to be love”;4 amor mundi must be a useful but misleading name. But as Chiba notes, this is difficult to square with the two accounts of love that bracketed her writing career, the accounts of Augustinian love in “Der Liebesgriff des Augustins” and The Life of the Mind. Is this simply the result, as Chiba suggests, of an essential “aporia” in Arendt between a “premodern, objective understanding of love” and a “rather modern, subjective understanding of it as mere sentiment or emotion,”5 or was the story of love’s position in the architecture of The Human Condition always more complicated than the friendship-notlove narrative suggests? The most decisive answer may lie not in Arendt’s writings on love alone but in understanding them as intertwined with the way she played out her own philosophy in the living loves of her world. To this end, the case of Arendt and Jaspers, as the relationship to the thinker with whom she shared the most in their philosophies of public life, may be the most telling manifestation in practice of the specific relationship Arendt understood between love and the life of the public. To see it in action (and that is, I will suggest, precisely the correct Arendtian term) is to see the meaning of Arendt’s late account of love played out in all its importance for her and Jaspers’s shared understanding of that public, the reason that the phrase is properly amor and not amicitia mundi. One can see in it a complex unspooling of how Arendt could simultaneously hold both of her apparently disparate descriptions of love and publicity. The story of that interrelation appears in her critique of Thomastic love in Willing, in which, in a classically Arendtian maneuver, Thomas inaugurates the essentially modern mistake of translating Augustinian love as an “activity that has its end in itself”6 into mere subjective sentiment. The problem of love in its modern incarnation is the abandonment of precisely the public significance that made it, to the Augustinian mind, the antidote rather than the cause of collapsing of space between two who love. The relationship Arendt cultivated with Jaspers was a model for the prior kind of love, a kind of love that appears most clearly in her eulogies for him: a love for each other that was simultaneously a deeply personal one, and a love for each other as citizens of the world. Arendt describes Jaspers as someone who “loved light so long that it has marked his whole personality,”7 but that was, for her, more than a status and worldly practice that she revered: it was the form of a relationship between them. Arendt’s love of Jaspers, and his love of her, showed a synthesis that appears in her relationship to love itself as a philosophical question. To truly love the “who” of a person, to unabashedly embrace and celebrate their existence of the world, is not at all to separate them from how they live that being; love, in this Augustinian mode, does not put forward a model of love as and for public virtue in distinction to private sentiment, but suggests a relationship between the two in which the private practices of loving each other are co-

116

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

constitutive of the possibility of love as a public force. For Arendt, there was no binary between the subjective “sentimental” love of Jaspers as Jaspers and the love of him as a citizen of the world: to love Jaspers was to love a figure who constantly and resolutely appeared before the world, and to love the staunchness of that commitment to bringing all that he could be before the eyes of the public. Arendt’s multiple elegies for Jaspers contain a circuit of personal and intellectual meaning, not only in making sense of the influence that he had on her and on the world but also in “[praising] the man rather than his work”8 establishing in image of him as a figure in the kind of formal figuration she performed of the laborer or the actor or the maker in The Human Condition. There is a transfer of sensibility from personal intimacy to a realm in which “personality is anything but a private affair”:9 a conscious act of constructing a sense of the true character of the person who is to appear to the world. If “the place in which Jaspers belonged by nature” was “the full light of world opinion,”10 to love him was by necessity to love in the space of appearance and for its sake. In describing Jasper’s love, his love for the world and his love as a force in the world, Arendt is simultaneously describing her own love for him, and the way in which it was proper to love such a person. This peculiar kind of publicity of the private is the nature of a love among citizens. Arendt wrote of Jasper’s marriage to Gertrude11 that “if two people do not succumb to the illusion that the ties binding them have made them one, they can create a world anew between them,”12 but there is little doubt that, in the context of her laudatio, she is equally describing her own long path through the world with him.

The Cradle of Caring The chief concern of Arendt’s laudatio for Jaspers is not only to describe him as a man with a certain kind of public and political character but also to redescribe that character as itself exemplifying a paradigmatic relationship of responsibility to and care for the shared world. Unsurprisingly, since that paradigm was an aspiration that they shared in their thought and lives, one of the most vivid illuminations we have of what Arendt thought that responsibility and care looked like lies in her relationship to Jaspers, and the thought and writing that passed between them. If exemplars need specification, translation of their abstract archetypes into concrete examples of how to live daily life, Arendt and Jaspers’s correspondence provides a lens to deconstruct Arendt’s figure of the public intellectual “Karl Jaspers” into a relation of practices that they carried out not only in the public sphere but between them. A major shift in the relationship between Jaspers and Arendt occurred in the immediate postwar years, as Arendt became a critical lifeline for Jaspers and Gertrude in their struggle to survive in a decimated Europe.

KARL JASPERS, ARENDT, AND THE LOVE OF CITIZENS

 117

The intensity of that mutual concern is carried in the pressing immediacy of their letters, which from Arendt’s side usually came enclosed in a regular stream of packages containing the double sustenance of material needs and publications from across the Atlantic. Arendt frets about “rumors going around here that sending packages would become more difficult,”13 and begs Jaspers to “please allow me to worry a little. I have worried for many years anyhow, that is, without your permission.”14 Jaspers hastens to mollify Arendt’s fears, reporting that “my wife and I are in excellent health again,” detailing how they are gaining weight (“back up to 150 pounds, and my wife to 101”15) and overcoming various illnesses. But even and perhaps because of this time in which materially keeping Karl and Gertrude sustained was the primary order of the day, Arendt and Jaspers’ correspondence takes on a new intellectual tone as well, opening up into a relation of mutual exploration of their new worlds: Arendt of the republic in which she had made her home, itself quite new and still showing it, and Jaspers of the political world arising out of the ashes of a fractured and decimated Europe. This postwar personal transformative moment became, with deliberate effort, an intellectually transformative moment in which Arendt made “empathizing with Jaspers’ personal transformation by the experience of wartime insecurity and deprivation” into a vehicle by which “to understand contingency, rupture, and loss as constitutive dimensions of historical narration.”16 Here, Arendt and Jaspers’ relationship shows one of its most enduring and fundamental qualities: a constant and insatiable desire to mutually explore and untangle their surrounding worlds. Particularly during this phase when both have new worlds to explore, their discourse takes on a quality of reportage that is central to the relation both have to their work and their more public lives. Despite their long history together, there is a demanding contemporaneousness to their reports on the affairs of the day, and “this contemporaneity or rather this living in the present,”17 as Arendt later described it, marks these exchanges as an important part of their larger projects of public thinking, as sharing an essential form of engagement. This commitment to public thinking as a kind of reportage, which Arendt attributes to Jaspers in her Denktagebuch as part of the essential political relationship to truth—“it’s basically, politically speaking, not about us; it’s about the world”18—is perhaps Jaspers’s deepest and most lasting impact on the thought-style of Arendt, the reason her writings for Aufbau and The New Yorker fit strangely neatly alongside her larger, more traditionally academic works like The Human Condition. Underneath the monthly and yearly stream of their publications and interviews is a constant, at times almost frenzied, exchange of the same form of reportage-discourse that would mark the careers of each. In their letters, reportage as a model is distilled down by the demands of time and space to a striking density that only thinkers like these could exchange so freely. For example, in a paragraph of one long letter, Arendt

118

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

reports in a handful of sentences her summation of an entire American complex of freedom, class, society, and race that only someone as intimately acquainted with her thought as Jaspers could map in shorthand onto the complex contours of her thought: The fundamental contradiction in this country is the coexistence of political freedom and social oppression. The latter is, as I’ve already indicated, not total; but it is dangerous because the society organizes and orients itself along “racial lines.” And that holds true without exception at all social levels, from the bourgeoisie down to the working class. This racial issue has to do with a person’s country of origin, but it is greatly aggravated by the Negro question; that is, America has a real “race” problem and not just a racial ideology.19 If we take the description she gives in her laudatio, beneath this reportage is not only a layer of care but also a specific kind of responsibility to the world. Of course, it is not at all clear that those two layers can even be separated; in reporting on the world to each other, they are invoking a responsibility to the world for which they care, a responsibility that arises precisely because of that care. Reportage is itself the mode this responsibility must take. To describe this kind of responsibility in Jaspers, Arendt turns explicitly to the language of love: this is a responsibility that “is not a burden and it has nothing whatsoever to do with moral imperatives,” but rather “flows naturally out of an innate pleasure in making manifest, in clarifying the obscure, in illuminating the darkness.”20 Between the two of them, this was a private love that mirrored the public one, a way to share between them an “affirmation of the public realm” that “is in the final analysis only the result of . . . loving light and clarity.”21 Perhaps more importantly, on Arendt’s account, this small corner of responsibility between them, embedded in the much wider sphere of public responsibility, exists precisely because they are sharing in the mutual construction of a world, “creat[ing] the world anew between them.”22 As she puts it in her later argument on collective responsibility, this “essentially political” responsibility, where “the center of consideration is not the self”23 but the world, comes into being when one enters into a community (even a community of two), and could be dissolved only by the dissolution of that community itself. As Andrew Schaap puts it, for both Jaspers and Arendt “the object of responsibility is therefore the world one shares in common with others.”24 This was not an abstract concern for the pair, but a matter of practice. Their action and speech, “which . . . can be actualized only in one of the many and manifold forms of human community”25 and which is always the subject of that political responsibility, remained a constant object of discussion, even in this nominally private space of exchange. This political responsibility that arises in concern for the world speaks to one of the questions that have been rightly understood as central to

KARL JASPERS, ARENDT, AND THE LOVE OF CITIZENS

 119

Arendt’s thought: the political form of thought itself. Unsurprisingly, in her Denktagebuch, Arendt credits Jaspers directly with originally raising the central question, “Is there thinking that is not tyrannical?”26 Her initial hint of an answer speaks to the process of communication between them that helped sustain both of their thinking: “communication, in contrast to discussion—advokatorischen thinking—does not want to make sure of the truth by superiority of argumentation.”27 The kind of reportage that passes between them—the light disagreements that evolve and dissolve over the course of months, the casual passing of assessments and counterassessments—is not just a search for truth, but the distinctive kind of antityrannical search that she invokes, a search in which the seekers do not attempt to bludgeon each other’s positions with arguments, but rather through a dancing and melding and turning of thought, to discover what the world is revealing to us. Nowhere is this more evident than their exchanges surrounding the trial in Jerusalem of Adolf Eichmann, and through the extended furor that followed.

The Eichmann Trials Jaspers’s unflagging support of Arendt through the Eichmann trial, which extended to giving interviews on the topic in Germany and serving as a center point for organizing her support there, is perhaps unsurprising. Although he was an omnipresent source of comfort, to characterize Jaspers simply as a perennial cheerleader for Arendt through the crisis would miss the important intricacies of their relationship and what they reveal about how they each viewed their intellectual projects. Nor would it be quite right to say that Jaspers took the attacks on Arendt personally, although that is closer to the mark. Rather, the relationship of Arendt and Jaspers through the Eichmann period reveals the profound interpenetration of their spheres of personal and public, the way the two begin to fuse together if one heeds Jaspers’s call to live the life of the public. It seems quite right of Curthoys to suggest that the “intensive modes of intersubjective communication that [were] so enabling of Arendt and Jaspers burgeoning friendship” became an integral part of how they understand “post-national agency” itself.28 Jaspers wrote to Arendt that “now you are experiencing what you have never wanted; the ‘risks of public life.’ You’ve stumbled into it, and you’ll have to stick it out. It pains you. It is no help to you to wish you some of my ‘thick skin.’”29 Jaspers understood Arendt’s sensitivity, but also he also understood that the way the public furor penetrated into her deeper life was not a matter of personal character, but an essential trial of publicity, which always crosses and erases the line between public and private. For Jaspers, the assault on Arendt was not merely a sustained attack on someone he loved; it was an assault on the model of public life they shared and the public and private preconditions that make that life possible.

120

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

In the face of his prescient “bad presentiments”30 about the trial and what it might mean for Arendt, Jaspers is conscious to establish as a baseline for Arendt an unwavering support: I thought: Could Hannah ever destroy the bond between us? We have disagreed so often and on crucial matters, or at least so it seemed. No, I said to myself, that is impossible. Even to voice that doubt is inadmissible. For it leads to the point where everything crumbles, and then it is the doubter himself who is at fault.31 But note that Jaspers is careful in his phrasing to distinguish that unassailability from unconditionality. Disagreement, even “on crucial matters,” is placed as an integral part of that bond; to suggest that disagreement threatened it would be an error about the nature of the relationship itself. This distinction proves to be essential in the Eichmann period, in which the entire conversation begins, well before the trial, in a principled disagreement both over the legal basis for the trial32 and over the state of Israel itself (which Arendt says “relates to a number of questions bearing on the so-called Jewish problem, questions on which we have never been in total agreement”33). In keeping with Arendt’s and Jaspers’ distinction between communication and advocatory thinking, though, this disagreement does not become the basis for static camps that endure through their joint exploration of the trial. Instead, their two positions meld and twist into new ones, with Arendt’s initial staunch support for the trial shifting as she reacted to the course and social milieu of the trial, and Jaspers’ initial pessimism moderating as he took in Arendt’s more complicated view of the facts on the ground. Robert Fine suggests that it is in the letters between them that Arendt first “began to take seriously the notion of ‘crimes against humanity’ as having a literal truth.”34 It is not just the presence of disagreement but its form as communication that is integral to its role in their private relationship as public thinkers. There is also an ease of communication between the two that is essential to how they each responded to the crisis, in which the need for shorthand caveats and long-winded expositions is replaced by a historically built relationship of trust. This was the trust of a life lived in the public eye and their knowledge of each other’s thought combined with a belief that their transparency with each other was mirrored in a kind of permanent and militant transparency of public thought. Jaspers gestures at the idea in analyzing Arendt’s reportage when he notes to her that “I sense more in it: a desire for veracity and for the contemplation of man, but you do not speak explicitly about that.”35 As he fastidiously reads the final collected edition of Eichmann in Jerusalem chapter by chapter, withholding commentary beyond where he has read, his notes on his reading progress and the tiniest slivers of response portion by portion are enough to establish the committed intensity of his engagement. When Jaspers writes with a mild chastening

KARL JASPERS, ARENDT, AND THE LOVE OF CITIZENS

 121

“how infinitely naïve not to notice that the act of putting a book like this into the world is an act of aggression against ‘life-sustaining lies.’ Where those lies are exposed and the names of the people who live those lies are named, the meaning of those people’s existence itself is at stake,”36 Arendt knows both the deeper systemic argument behind the comment and its loving meaning, writing back that “you said: ‘what is revealed here is a deep-seated sense of having been struck a mortal blow’ . . . that is absolutely true.”37 As much as that ease of connection existed in their intellectual shorthand for arguments long-established between them, it extended still more (and perhaps more importantly) to the strata of emotional support that was proving so critical to Arendt in getting through her own trial. Arendt did not need long expositions; it was enough to convey the depth and turmoil of her feelings to write: In addition, I feel I am not up to this struggle. It isn’t just a question of nerves and also not just that the coincidence of this business with my worries about Heinrich are simply paralyzing me. I’m incapable of presenting myself in public because my revulsion at this ruckus overwhelms everything else in me.38 This small note is typical of the emotional dimension of their messages to each other, a devastating summary that was enough to stand in for everything that was going on. Arendt sometimes details certain events, like her crowded student talk at Columbia, but in general with Jaspers she is able to achieve a degree of affective distance (and even humor) from the upheaval itself, reducing it to episodic commentaries, as when she tells him that “[people who are] slinging mud at me come to me secretly, under cover of darkness, so to speak, to tell me I should sue, this is a hate campaign . . . all this from people who then publish in the next number of Aufbau! Very odd.”39 This forms the affective dialectic of their connection: from vulnerable struggle to bemused (and amused) detachment, and back. The lesson of Arendt and Jaspers’ relationship through her Eichmann trials is that these aspects of their communication are integral to the meaning of public living as both describe it. Their letters are a vision of something that never appears in Arendt’s account of the actor and the public, but nevertheless in their practice with each other is as articulately developed as anything in The Human Condition: the personal preconditions that make the public life each demanded possible. They shared a commitment to each other in communication, an enabling trust in argument, a dialectic of vulnerability and detachment: these are as much inextricable prerequisites to the life of the actor as the worker’s maintenance of the space of appearance. If Arendt’s and Jaspers’ writings both work to establish the necessary structure of the public space for the vita activa to flourish, their practices with each other show the other side of that necessary structure, the intellectual, affective underpinnings of being Jaspers’ “citizen of the world.”

122

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

Conclusion Arendt made a seemingly curious choice by rendering the title of her second elegy to Jaspers a question: “Citizen of the world?” It was not just the philosophy they shared of world-making and publicity that made it a necessity to open the meditation as a question, but the course of what their shared lives had revealed about the very possibility of that subject position she ascribes to Jaspers. At stake in the requiem is not just the question of what a citizen of the world is and what form contemporary solidarity in citizenship takes, but whether and how there is space for such a person in the public world as it is forming itself. Humankind, Arendt writes, has had a kind of “negative solidarity” forced upon it by the nuclear age and “the fear of global destruction.”40 The question, for Arendt as it was for Jaspers, is whether that negative solidarity can be tied to “the solidarity of mankind” “in a positive sense” by being “coupled” with a novel vision of political responsibility suited to the demands of a new age.41 That new political responsibility was not only one that Jaspers’ philosophy espoused but one that they lived in their lives together. On the terms of her own philosophy as well as those she elevates from Jaspers, the essay could never have been a dogmatic statement of purpose. Subtly, Jaspers’ death provides the occasion for one of Arendt’s most condensed articulations of her answer to that question to which she had claimed the essence of Jaspers’ thought was directed. “The principle itself” of “communication” rather than argumentation, which was to lie at the heart of that responsibility, depends in its first instance on the fact that “truth . . . can never be grasped as dogmatic content,” but as “reason” “communicating itself and appealing to the reasonable existing of the other.”42 When Arendt writes of “the good will to reveal and to listen as the primary condition for all human intercourse,”43 the existence and possibility of that good will is itself a political question, that is, a question that depends on the ways in which we speak and appear to each other, subject to the same complex conditions of possibility of all action. As much as Jaspers tried to reassure her through the Eichmann trials that “a time will come that you will not live to see, when the Jews will erect a monument to you in Israel, as they are doing now for Spinoza,”44 the structure of the reaction and its “classic case of character assassination”45 could not but have left Arendt questioning in her public philosophy as much as in her letters to Jaspers whether this good will was something to which the contemporary world could be committed. Still, even if these things were open questions in “Karl Jaspers: Citizen of the World?” Arendt’s mourning for Jaspers did not extend to a mourning for the passing of the public capacities that made a Jaspers possible in the world. Instead, if the suggestion of a slightly messianic structure can be forgiven, it occasioned a meditation on what would be the necessary demands of the public sphere for a Jaspers to come again, and whether Jaspers own philosophy had provided the groundwork for understanding the conditions

KARL JASPERS, ARENDT, AND THE LOVE OF CITIZENS

 123

for a new public of humankind. It is love that provides a partial but decisive answer to that question of possibility. The second Arendtian story about love, an “experience of love in the sense of an activity” that “like all other activities, does not leave the world, but must be performed within it,”46 already appears in The Human Condition. What we find in her descriptions of Jaspers and her relationship to him is a kind of specification, the provision of substance to her suggestion that love is the first demonstration of the very possibility of true, free action: “love” demonstrates that “there could be an activity that has its end in itself.”47 Love, in “its experience of sheer activity, that is, in a transformation of willing into loving”48 one another and the world that is created between, is expressed as the activities that are the essential conditions for action to exist in the world. To understand the impact Jaspers’ thought had on Arendt and his influence on her development as a person is to understand that the exploration of those conditions was present not only in their intertwined views in their public philosophy but also in the project of their private lives together. There is no subtle hint of her relationship with Jaspers in Arendt’s description that in this new political responsibility, “thinking becomes practical, though not pragmatic; it is a kind of practice between men, not a performance of one individual in his self-chosen solitude.”49 The influence of that “process of mutual understanding and progressing self-clarification” that, as it had played out between them, must now “take place” on “a gigantic scale”50 can be seen too in the form of Arendt’s writing after the war, and her continued commitment to reportage as to mirror Jaspers “in speaking and listening” and so “[succeed] in changing, widening, sharpening-or, as [Jaspers] himself would beautifully put it, in illuminating.”51 It is true that in her essays after his death, Arendt puts forward Jaspers as the paradigmatic figure of his own thinking, listening, and reasoning citizen of the world, an exemplar of his own model, but it is equally true that those visions of the public that made them both famous gestated and evolved within their relationship with each other. The case for Heidegger’s philosophical influence on Arendt has been made and dissected many times over, but Jaspers’ influence was one in which they not only shared (in the literal sense of communicating) commitments on the centerpiece of both of their philosophies—the public—but also molded, in the way they practised it together, the understanding each had of the lived requisites and demands of Jaspers’ “humanitas; to take it upon oneself to answer before mankind for every thought means to live in that luminosity in which oneself and everything one thinks is tested.”52 In as close as Arendt comes to a public profession of her love for him, Arendt declared that “no one can help us as he can to overcome our distrust of this same public realm, to feel what honor and joy it is to praise one we love in the hearing of all,”53 and this formulation bears the essential structure of their relationship. In Jaspers, Arendt had not only a friend, a mentor, and an interlocutor, but one who by his very existence in her life and in the public made it possible to understand

124

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

and to feel a love for the public that was the hallmark of her thought. Jaspers left little doubt that he would say the same of her.

Notes 1 Shin Chiba, “Hannah Arendt on Love and the Political,” The Review of Politics 57, no. 3 (1995): 507. 2 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1958), 51–52. 3 Tatjana Noemi Tömmel, “Vita Passiva,” in Artifacts of Thinking, ed. Roger Berkowitz and Ian Storey (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017), 113. Tömmel’s taxonomy of four different narratives on love in Arendt is especially useful, as is her discussion of Arendt’s evolving reading of Augustine. 4 Chiba, “Hannah Arendt on Love and the Political,” 506. 5 Ibid., 510. 6 Arendt, The Life of the Mind (New York: Harcourt Inc., 1978), 123. 7 Arendt, Men in Dark Times (New York: Mariner Books, 1970), 75. 8 Ibid., 71. 9 Ibid., 72. 10 Ibid., 75. 11 It is clear that the marriage of Karl and Gertrude Jaspers was one that she found inspiring; it also appears in her Denktagebuch. See e.g., Hannah Arendt, Denktagebuch, ed. U. Ludz and Ingeborg Nordmann (Munich: Piper, 2003), II:26, 51. 12 Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 78. 13 Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers, Correspondence, ed. Lotte Kohler and Has Saner (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992), 38. A to J, April 22, 1946. 14 Ibid., 64. A to J, November 11, 1946. 15 Ibid., 67. J to A, November 17, 1946. 16 Curthoys Ned, “The Emigre Sensibility of ‘World Literature,’” Theory & Event 8, no. 3 (2005), https://muse.jhu.edu/ (accessed February 24, 2019). 17 Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 78. 18 Arendt, Denktagebuch, XXIV:21, 626. 19 Arendt and Jaspers, Correspondence, 31. A to J, January 29, 1946. 20 Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 75. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid., 78. See also the wonderful exploration of the relationship of love and plurality in Barbara Hahn, Hannah Arendt: Leidenschaften, Menschen und Bücher (Berlin: Berliner Taschenbuch Verlag, 2005). 23 Hannah Arendt, “Collective Responsibility,” in Responsibility and Judgment, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2003), 155.

KARL JASPERS, ARENDT, AND THE LOVE OF CITIZENS

 125

24 Andrew Schaap, “Guilty Subjects and Political Responsibility,” Political Studies 49, no. 4 (2001): 754. There is not space here to delve into the distinction Schaap makes between Jaspers’ and Arendt’s versions of cosmopolitan responsibility, but they are important and well-articulated, as is his decisive critique of Jaspers’ critics Rabinow and Barnouw. 25 Arendt, “Collective Responsibility,” 158. 26 Arendt, Denktagebuch, II:20, 45. 27 Ibid. 28 Curthoys, “The Emigre Sensibility in ‘World Literature.’” 29 Arendt and Jaspers, Correspondence, 532. J to A, November 16, 1963. 30 Ibid. 433. J to A, April 3, 1961. 31 Ibid., 541. J to A, December 13, 1963. 32 E.g., ibid., 414. A to J, December 23, 1960. 33 Ibid., 423. A to J, February 5, 1961. 34 Robert Fine, “Crimes against Humanity,” European Journal of Social Theory 3, no. 3 (2000): 297. 35 Arendt and Jaspers, Correspondence, 530. J to A, November 2, 1963. 36 Ibid., 531. J to A, November 16, 1963. 37 Ibid., 535. A to J, November 22, 1963. 38 Ibid., 523. A to J, October 20, 1963. 39 Ibid., 516. A to J, August 9, 1963. 40 Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 83. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid., 85. 43 Ibid. 44 Arendt and Jaspers, Correspondence, 527. J to A, October 25, 1963. 45 Ibid., 522. A to J, October 20, 1963. 46 Arendt, Human Condition, 77. It is true that this description of love falls within her critique of the specifically philosophical and religious version of it, that the activity is twisted into “fleeing the world” that “negates the space the world offers to men.” In the light of her later reading of Augustine and Duns Scotus, however, it is worth asking whether this quick criticism is really a terminal critique of this kind of love-activity itself, or a contingent one of the way that it was taken up in the “philosophers” and “Christian[s]” “of late antiquity” (Human Condition, 75). 47 Arendt, Life of the Mind, 123. 48 Ibid., 144. 49 Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 86. 50 Ibid., 84. 51 Ibid., 78–79. 52 Ibid., 75. 53 Ibid., 74.

13 Isaiah Berlin: Liberty, Liberalism, and Anti-totalitarianism Kei Hiruta

Born in Riga in 1909 and an émigré to England at the age of eleven, Isaiah Berlin was a philosopher, political theorist, and intellectual historian famed for his breadth of learning, elegant prose style, and brilliance in conversation. Like Hannah Arendt, he began his academic career in philosophy but came to be preoccupied with politics as a result of the crises of the 1930s and the 1940s. He eventually claimed the history of political ideas as his vocation and spent most of his academic life at the University of Oxford. He travelled widely and socialized extensively. He met Arendt on a few occasions and they had friends in common, including W. H. Auden, Mary McCarthy, and Gershom Scholem. But the combination of philosophical differences, political disagreement, adverse personal chemistry, and unfortunate circumstances prevented the two thinkers from forming a friendship. On the contrary, the poor impression Berlin formed of Arendt at their first meeting in wartime New York developed into a lifelong hatred. Arendt did not respond in kind and remained personally indifferent to Berlin, seeing him as a respectable intellectual historian, if not as an original thinker. Although she did not engage with his work, some of Arendt’s key ideas and arguments should be seen as critical responses to the brand of liberalism that Berlin and his ideological allies developed in the mid-twentieth century.1 Berlin’s primary contribution to political thought is his theory of freedom, built on the distinction he made famous between “negative” and “positive”

ISAIAH BERLIN

 127

liberty. He did not invent this dichotomy. This had been deployed since the eighteenth century by a number of thinkers, including Martin Heidegger, who in a 1943 essay referred to “negative” and “positive” freedom as “commonsense” conceptions and dismissed both as equally inadequate.2 But Berlin forcefully reasserted the old distinction, most notably in his influential 1958 essay “Two Concepts of Liberty.”3 In his formulation, negative liberty is noninterference, and positive liberty is self-mastery. One is negatively free if one is not prevented by others from doing what one could otherwise do. This freedom is called “negative” because it is defined by the absence of that which hinders it: interference. One is positively free, by contrast, to the extent that one is able to exercise control over oneself and to be in charge of one’s life. Standardly, positive liberty takes a rationalist form, according to which one is (positively) free to the extent that one relies on reason to realize what is worth doing and to do it. Freedom in this sense “is not freedom to do what is irrational, or stupid, or wrong.”4 Berlin acknowledged the respectable intellectual heritage of positive liberty, running from ancient Stoic philosophers to Immanuel Kant and T. H. Green. Yet he considered this concept to be dangerous in that it could be abused to justify a politically disastrous form of paternalism. According to the inner logic of positive liberty, Berlin argued, an external interferer may claim to know what is the rational thing for one to do and coerce one into doing it, and then maintain that the one who is coerced has not been made unfree but, on the contrary, has been “forced to be free.”5 Furthermore, Berlin believed that positive liberty had in fact been perverted via paternalism into “something close to a pure totalitarian doctrine” in the mid-twentieth century, because totalitarian oppression, especially in the Soviet Union, had been carried out in the name of “true freedom.”6 He associated positive liberty with the communist East, and its negative counterpart with the liberal West, insisting on the normative primacy of the latter, especially in “Two Concepts of Liberty.” But he also expressed more ambivalent opinions elsewhere, noting that positive liberty in a non-perverted form could be a valid goal to pursue, while negative liberty could also be abused, giving rise to the “evils of unrestricted laissez-faire.”7 His ultimate assessment of the two concepts has been a matter of scholarly debate. As is already clear, Berlin, unlike Arendt, did not distinguish between “liberty” and “freedom,” but used the two terms interchangeably. He claimed to be following the conventions of ordinary language, and many subsequent scholars have followed his example.8 Arendt was not one of them. According to her, liberty is inherently “negative,” as it is associated with liberation.9 Freedom, by contrast, connotes something more “positive.”10 It designates “a state of being manifest in action,” and consists in the exercise of the distinctively human capacity for participation in public affairs.11 It must immediately be noted that Arendt’s distinction between (negative) liberty and (positive) freedom does not correspond to Berlin’s distinction between negative and positive liberty. For one thing, Arendt, unlike Berlin,

128

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

typically speaks of “liberties” in the plural, primarily referring to legally guaranteed “rights and liberties” such as the right to assembly and free speech. As a consequence, she sees the value of negative liberties primarily in instrumental terms, whereas Berlin typically speaks of the ideal of negative liberty in the singular and defends it as an end in itself. More controversial is the relationship between Arendt’s (positive) freedom and Berlin’s positive liberty. While some scholars such as Philip Pettit see the former as a variant of the latter, others such as Richard H. King suggest otherwise, highlighting the uniqueness of Arendt’s conception vis-à-vis both the liberal empiricist tradition that runs from Bentham to Berlin and its idealist counterpart, originating from Kant and Hegel.12 Much of the dispute stems from Berlin’s work rather than Arendt’s. He uses negative and positive liberty as umbrella categories, each encompassing a family of conceptions. This usage has the advantage of allowing Berlin to sketch a broad semantic landscape. Yet it has also generated some ambiguities, including one concerning the precise extension of his notion of positive liberty. Berlin’s theory of freedom may be seen as part of a wider contribution to the revival of liberalism in the mid-twentieth century. Liberalism is a broad ideological church encompassing a range of denominations, but the most influential variant that emerged in Arendt’s lifetime was Cold War liberalism. Its chief architects included, in addition to Berlin, Karl Popper, Raymond Aron, and Jacob Talmon. Less communitarian than their New Liberal predecessors such as L. T. Hobhouse and J. A. Hobson, and less committed to economic egalitarianism than their American successors such as John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin, Cold War liberals were primarily concerned with minimizing cruelty, “to avoid a summum malum, not the realization of any summum bonum.”13 While Arendt shared this concern to some extent, she never accepted the stark contrast that Cold War liberals drew between the decency of liberalism and the inhumanity of Nazism and Stalinism. On the contrary, she highlighted various ways in which liberalism inadvertently contributed to the emergence of totalitarianism. For example, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, she repeatedly associated liberalism with the bourgeoisie and held both accountable for the development of imperialism, which was in her view instrumental in the subsequent rise of totalitarianism. It is true that she appreciated some of the key liberal principles, such as the rule of law, that she shared with classical liberals a concern with the tyranny of the majority, and that she had charitable things to say about some liberal thinkers, such as Tocqueville and Hobson. However, she was generally hostile to, and somewhat prejudiced against, liberalism, and distanced herself from her contemporary Cold War liberals. She knew where she stood, saying in 1972, “I never was a liberal. . . . I never believed in liberalism.”14 There are other common issues that both Berlin and Arendt addressed. One is the critique of scientism, tied to the further critique of rationalism that animates much of the Western philosophical tradition. The two thinkers

ISAIAH BERLIN

 129

basically agreed on this set of issues. Skeptical of postwar enthusiasm for an objective social science, they both argued that the simple application of the methods of the natural sciences to the study of human affairs, including politics, was neither feasible nor desirable. A related shared issue is the nature of political judgment. On this the two thinkers subtly disagreed. They theorized the same concepts, such as imagination and empathy, yet they theorized differently and drew on different sources, including Aristotle and Kant in Arendt’s case, and Vico and Herder in Berlin’s. Another common issue is nationalism, about whose pros and cons they fundamentally disagreed. Berlin attempted to rehabilitate the nation-state system by distinguishing a benign form of nationalism from its inflamed and aggressive cousins. Arendt, by contrast, was deeply skeptical of the constructive potential of nationalism, attempting to formulate a new form of government and a new international order to replace the nation-state system.15 This disagreement gave rise to a further dispute about the Zionist movement. While Berlin consistently endorsed liberal Zionism, Arendt was profoundly ambivalent about, and expressed conflicting opinions on, various kinds of Zionism.16 Finally, both thinkers excelled as essayists, and their literary styles might be fruitfully compared in order to evaluate their contributions to rhetoric and the art of persuasion. Berlin never formally published his opinions on Arendt’s work and personality, although he had much to say in private. We now have a fair sample of his views, thanks to the posthumous publication of his letters.17 A new wave of scholarly work has emerged in recent years, offering a comparative examination of the two thinkers’ lives and works.18 Most contributors to the debate agree that much of what Berlin had to say about Arendt was biased, and that some of his criticisms were based on sheer misunderstanding.

Notes 1 For Berlin’s life see Michael Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin: A Life (London: Chatto & Windus, 1998). 2 Martin Heidegger, Vom Wesen der Wahrheit (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1943), 16. 3 Revised and reprinted in Isaiah Berlin, Liberty, ed. H. Hardy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 166–217. 4 Ibid., 194. 5 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Oeuvres complètes, vol. III, ed. B. Gagnebin and M. Raymond (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 364; and Isaiah Berlin, Freedom and Its Betrayal, ed. H. Hardy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 49. 6 Berlin, Liberty, 198. 7 Ibid., 38.

130

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

8 For a notable exception to the rule see H. F. Pitkin, “Are Freedom and Liberty Twins?,” Political Theory 16 (1988): 523–52. 9 Arendt, On Revolution (London: Penguin Books, 1973), 29. 10 Ibid., 234. 11 Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (London: Penguin Books, 1977), 163. 12 Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); R. H. King, Civil Rights and the Idea of Freedom (Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 1996), 12–28. 13 J.-W. Müller, “Fear and Freedom: On ‘Cold War Liberalism,’” European Journal of Political Theory 7, no. 1 (2008): 45–64, 48. 14 Hannah Arendt, “On Hannah Arendt,” in Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the Public World, ed. M. A. Hill (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979), 301–56, 334. 15 Kei Hiruta, “‘An Anti-Utopian Age?’: Isaiah Berlin’s England, Hannah Arendt’s America, and Utopian Thinking in Dark Times,” Journal of Political Ideologies 22 (2017): 12–29, 23–24. 16 On this issue see A. M. Dubnov, “Can Parallels Meet?: Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin on the Jewish Post-Emancipatory Quest for Political Freedom,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 62 (2017): 27–51. 17 See Isaiah Berlin, Enlightening: Letters 1946–1960, ed. H. Hardy and J. Holmes (London: Chatto & Windus, 2009); Building: Letters 1960–1975, ed. H. Hardy and M. Pottle (London: Chatto and Windus, 2013); Affirming: Letters 1975–1997, ed. H. Hardy and M. Pottle (London: Chatto & Windus, 2015). 18 E.g., S. E. Aschheim, Beyond the Border: The German-Jewish Legacy Abroad (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 113–18; Ronald Beiner, Political Philosophy: What It Is and Why It Matters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), xv–xxii; David Caute, Isaac and Isaiah: The Covert Punishment of a Cold War Heretic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 262–72; Joan Cocks, Passion and Paradox: Intellectuals Confront the National Question (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 71–91; Dubnov, “Can Parallels Meet?”; Hiruta, “‘An Anti-Utopian Age?’”; Kei Hiruta, “The Meaning and Value of Freedom: Berlin contra Arendt,” European Legacy 19 (2014): 854–68; and Kei Hiruta, “A Democratic Consensus?: Isaiah Berlin, Hannah Arendt, and the Anti-totalitarian Family Quarrel,” Think 17 (2018): 25–37.

14 Arendt and America Richard H. King

It is surprising that Hannah Arendt’s relationship with America has received so little attention. Elisabeth Young-Bruehl’s biography, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (1982), does a remarkable job contextualizing Arendt’s thought, but covering Arendt’s links with the United States in any depth proves too much to expect. In addition, most analysts of Arendt’s thought come from disciplines—philosophy and political theory especially—where contextualization focuses on the influence of arguments and ideas over time without spending much time on their historical setting. Also, many of the same people have been trained in a Eurocentric history of political thought and have relatively little interest in, or knowledge of, the thought and culture of the United States. The two questions then become: How did Arendt respond to American thought and culture, and what was her impact on American intellectual and cultural life in her intellectual lifetime?1 Without doubt, what Arendt found most important about America’s political tradition was the framers’ formulation of a modern version of republicanism. Directly and indirectly, she questioned the post–Second World War consensus that interest group politics, representative democracy, and private property were central to the political vision of the American founders. Rather, she asserted that John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and others were committed to “public or political happiness,” not just private happiness. Remarkably, Arendt’s claims about the importance of republicanism appeared before academic historians such as Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood formulated what became known as the “republican turn.” Only J. G. A. Pocock mentioned Arendt in a couple of essays in the 1960s and then in his mammoth study The Machiavellian Moment in 1975.2 In On Revolution (1963), Arendt also suggested that the unsatisfactory state of American political institutions was due to the American failure to remember

132

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

what their revolution had been about—not the pursuit of self-interest, but the creation of a public realm of speech and action among citizens. However, this emphasis upon the classical tradition of politics went with her neglect of the importance of America’s religious, that is, Puritan, origins. The “city set upon the hill” was largely invisible in her mapping of American political ideas and identity, while, historically, the Puritan jeremiad probably outweighed its republican counterpart in political importance.3 On the personal level, too, America meant the possibility of “beginning things anew” for Arendt. Her life hung in the balance when she escaped Vichy France by crossing Spain to Lisbon from where she and her husband sailed to New York in May 1941. Similarly, Arendt’s republicanism emphasized the need to break with the past, to begin things anew, and not attempt to return to it. This, she proposed, was symbolized and actualized by human natality as the basis for human freedom, and it was, in her mind, inextricably bound up with America: a re-orientation to the future, a crisis of authority and tradition, and the worldliness of the political realm. In other words, the American Revolution marked the onset of political modernity. It was while Arendt was studying for her citizenship exam in late 1951 that she first became aware of the power of the framers’ political thought. Of course, Arendt could hardly shed her European-based education and was always comparing her new home with her earlier life in Europe. As a Jew, she welcomed America’s abandonment of the European ideal of national religious, racial, and ethnic homogeneity. The United States was not a nation-state on the European model. She also found her fellow New York intellectuals welcoming and less rigid than their European counterparts. And in the 1950s, when Senator Joseph McCarthy was on the loose, she took on the quasi-Tocquevillian role of mediating between American callowness and European snobbery.4 For all their differences, the United States and Europe belonged to the same intellectual and cultural tradition. She left deep theorizing about the dangers of American mass culture to the Frankfurt School. In fact, she thought the critique of the culture industry and middle-brow culture harkened back to old-world snobbery. But her modernist literary tastes led her to respond quite enthusiastically to American fiction and poetry. In particular, she was taken with the work of Herman Melville on the politics of good and evil (she wrote about his novella “Billy Budd” in On Revolution) and cherished the way much of William Faulkner’s work focused on how memory preserved the past in the present by means of narratives and stories. Among her contemporaries, she was also known to irritate novelist Saul Bellow by giving him instruction in the nature of American literature. In response, Bellow devoted several pages of his novel, Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970), to an attack on Arendt’s idea of the “banality of evil” as applied to Adolf Eichmann, while Arendt’s good friend, the poet and critic, Randall Jarrell, populated his comic academic novel, Pictures from an Institution (1954), with a charmingly eccentric couple allegedly modeled on Arendt and her husband Heinrich Blücher.5 Few contemporary

ARENDT AND AMERICA

 133

thinkers could match the number of mentions from writers and poets. Poet Theodore Weiss dedicated several poems to the couple, while poet Denise Levertov and fiction writer Flannery O’Connor commented on evil and the Eichmann controversy. She was good friends with both Robert Lowell and W. H. Auden, and received support in times of crisis from them. Not long after the war, she wrote to her mentor Karl Jaspers about Germany’s excellence in philosophy combined with political ineptitude, while she praised America’s highly developed political culture, but bemoaned its lack of philosophical achievement. She composed one short piece on Emerson upon receiving an award named after him, and one of her most important late essays took Henry David Thoreau’s “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience” as a point of departure. But she paid hardly any attention to American Pragmatism and blamed it for progressive education’s antiintellectual impact on American education in the postwar world. Aside from a critical review of a minor John Dewey text, there are no other mentions of Dewey or any of William James in her work. She did use Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) to help formulate a critique of consumer capitalism in The Human Condition (1958). Political theorist George Kateb has also suggested that Arendt was averse to what he called American “wildness,” the extremity of thought, feeling, and action that preferred lawlessness to the rule of law and assertion over argumentation. She remained very much the European.6 Like many Europeans in the United States, Arendt was also disturbed by the alleged strength of American social and cultural conformity. Following Tocqueville, whom Arendt was reading as early as the mid-1940s, she emphasized the tension between equality and freedom, and between the social and the political spheres. Indeed, what Tocqueville named the “tyranny of the majority” applied in both realms of existence. It was also through her reading of Tocqueville, her grounding in contemporary European social theorists, and epistolary exchanges with sociologist David Riesman that she formulated her particular version of the idea of mass society (not mass culture) as a crucial ingredient in the emergence of totalitarianism. Published at the height of the Cold War, Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) exerted considerable impact on the debate about the nature of the Soviet threat in the postwar world, though the book was originally intended as a critique of the Nazi regime and ideology alone. Her emphasis upon the camp system in both countries, her observation about the illogic of totalitarianism whereby the operation of the camp system detracted from more conventional economic and military goals, and the way she developed a kind of historically oriented philosophical anthropology made Origins too eccentric for extensive use by political scientists and international relations experts. Arendt also adopted the term “ideology” to capture the spiritual and intellectual deep structure of totalitarian regimes. Her conception of ideology preceded Daniel Bell’s much discussed The End of Ideology (1960). For her, ideology made the claim to provide a total

134

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

explanation for phenomena. It was impervious to experiential contradiction and marked by hyperlogicality. The frightening modernity of totalitarianism was sealed by the ideas “everything is possible” and the rule of historical necessity. Still, despite Riesman’s urgings to add American examples and anecdotes, Arendt hardly mentioned the United States in Origins, though she appeared on the cover of the magazine Saturday Review after the book appeared.7 The idea of mass society, so important in Origins, largely disappeared from Arendt’s work, replaced by the idea of “the social” in The Human Condition (1958). The social sphere was an omnibus conception encompassing the increased role of the state in overseeing the maintenance of biological and family life; the economics of production, distribution and consumption; and the claims of class, race, religion, and ethnicity. In America, she saw the historical obsession with upward social mobility and conspicuous consumption (à la Veblen) as symptoms of the triumph of the social over the political. In the 1970s, her essays on the Pentagon Papers and the Watergate crisis noted the decline of public commitment on the part of a disengaged citizenry. Historically, she claimed that what differentiated the American and French Revolutions was the Jacobins’ attempt in 1793–94 to abolish poverty and want. The embryonic state involvement in creating policies grounded in pity and compassion for the wretched of the earth, she thought, led eventually to a state-controlled command economy and moral and political absolutism. The telos of history was the triumph of the working class, and the eradication of the “social question” was initiated by the Bolshevik Revolution. Yet Arendt avoided any close examination of the causes of the American Civil War bound up with the expansion of slavery, a social institution par excellence. In fact, the United States had its own “social question,” and solved it by politicizing it and then fighting a fouryear war to destroy it.8 Another version of the conflict between the social and the political spheres was found in Arendt’s short essay “Reflections on Little Rock” (1959) in Dissent magazine.9 In this essay, Arendt took on the question of school desegregation at the Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, and thereby offended liberal and left-wing opinion in northern intellectual circles and beyond. Arendt’s argument was that public (state) schools were social institutions and thus (white) parents had the right to choose what children attended them, just as members of a club voted on membership for outsiders. Of course, if public schools were public/political institutions, then the principle of equality of access obtained. She also wondered why black students wanted to force their way into places where they were clearly not wanted, a principle she had learned as a Jew in a predominantly gentile Königsberg where she grew up. All this led African American novelist Ralph Ellison to claim that Arendt had not understood that black southerners were not just acting like “parvenus” in forcing their way into previously all-white institutions. Rather they were pursuing their rights as citizens

ARENDT AND AMERICA

 135

and undergoing the trials of survival.10 In the next decade, Arendt was supportive of the goals of the civil rights movement, especially its resort to civil disobedience, which she distinguished from conscientious objection and which she considered a peculiarly American contribution to political thought and action. But she was very much opposed to the black nationalist and racially oriented politics of black university students. She was all too ready to identify black radicals, not white student radicals, with violence in the late 1960s and the early 1970s.11 In general, something resembling her idea of “action” was at work in the grass roots, more or less spontaneous examples of self-organization in 1960s America. The voter registration campaigns, sit-ins, and marches of the civil rights movement pointed to the New Left’s notion of participatory democracy with which she was sympathetic. She was also sympathetic with the anti-war and student movements (not only in the United States). But the New Left notion of “the personal is the political” was less congenial to an Arendtian perspective, since it opened up the public realm to matters best kept out of politics, such as abortion and birth control. For this reason, feminist political theorists have had problems with Arendt’s strong distinction between the public and private. In general, she was very suspicious of any political entity that was organized by the claims of race, ethnicity, or religion, that is, anything that demanded absolute loyalty based on biologically or ideologically fixed principles. Finally, she insisted in On Violence (1970) that politics was built on power, as defined in terms of popular support from active citizens, not on the possession of the means of violence and domination.12 The two years after Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) was published were marked by public debates about the book, mainly on college campuses and in front of Jewish audiences. The decade also saw the appearance of numerous books and films on what came to be called “the Holocaust.” The sociology of the book’s reception book exposed political, ethnic-national, religious, and gender fault lines among American intellectuals. By paying close attention to Eichmann’s use of language as a window into his psyche, she proposed the controversial notion of “the banality of evil” to describe his intentions as a Nazi SS functionary. He lacked, she contended, any moral imagination, failed to think what he was doing and saying, and in general exuded mediocrity. There was nothing of the “demonic” about him as there was about the perpetrator of “radical evil.” Arendt also divided opinion with her criticisms of the way the Israeli government conducted the trial as a show trial, since he was charged with genocide, not crimes against humanity, and the way the trial was used to build waning support for Israel. Her ruminations on the Eichmann case had their origins in her early post–Second World War exploration of individual and collective guilt, responsibility, complicity, and judgment. Indeed, Arendt spent her last years focusing on the nature of moral judgment and its relationship to thinking, as articulated in “Thinking and Moral Considerations” (1971) and The Life of the Mind (1978).13

136

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

When German director Margarethe von Trotta’s feature film Hannah Arendt was released in 2012,14 the half-century-old controversies about the banality of evil and the allegations that the Jewish Councils had done too little to hinder the workings of the Final Solution were rekindled among American intellectuals and academics. The film itself made clear various objections to Eichmann in Jerusalem, often in strong terms. But it also largely sympathized with Arendt and clearly enhanced Arendt’s stature, not only in America but also abroad. Besides the film, there has also been an upsurge in Arendt scholarship over the last quarter century. Thus, Arendt’s important place in modern American intellectual history is beyond doubt, with many of her concerns still central to contemporary moral and political debate in the United States and beyond.

Notes 1 Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 1982); Richard H. King, Arendt and America (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2015). 2 Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Viking Compass, 1965); J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975); B. Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967); Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1969); Daniel T. Rogers, “Republicanism: The Career of a Concept,” Journal of American History 79 (1992): 11–38. 3 P. Miller, “Errand into the Wilderness,” in Errand into the Wilderness (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1964), 1–15; S. Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978). 4 King, Arendt and America, 103–7. 5 Saul Bellow, Mr. Sammler’s Planet (New York: Penguin Books, 1972); Randall Jarrell, Pictures from an Institution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1954). 6 Hannah Arendt, “The Crisis in Culture,” in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Penguin Books, 1968), 194–222; Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1958); George Kateb, “Wildness and Conscience,” in Patriotism and Other Mistakes (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 2006), 245–71. 7 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2nd ed. (New York: Meridian, 1958); Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1960). 8 Arendt, Human Condition; Arendt, On Revolution. 9 Hannah Arendt, “Reflections on Little Rock,” Dissent VI (1959): 45–56. 10 King, Arendt and America, 179–80, 185–86. 11 Arendt, “Reflections”; Arendt, “On Violence,” in Crises of the Republic (New York: Harvest Books, 1972).

ARENDT AND AMERICA

 137

12 Arendt, “On Violence.” 13 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, rev. and enlarged (New York: Viking Press, 1965); Arendt, “Thinking and Moral Considerations,” Social Research 38 (1971): 8–20; Arendt, The Life of the Mind (New York: Harvest Books, 1978). 14 Hannah Arendt, dir. Margarethe von Trotta (Germany: Heimatfilm, 2012).

15 Franz Kafka and Arendt: Pariahs in Thought Ian Storey

Mary McCarthy was only half teasing when, after reading Hannah Arendt’s manuscript of a 1968 piece on Walter Benjamin for The New Yorker,1 she wrote, “Do I need to warn you that what you say about German Jews and Jewishness, even though backed up by the sacred authority of Kafka, will probably cause another storm?”2 On the one hand, Kafka’s place in the German-Jewish canon was not just unimpeachable but so defining of an era and a despair that his name carried a kind of sanctity in desolation, a final saint not just to the death of saints but also to the lost Jewish world of Old Europe. On the other hand, the invocation of one martyr of the lost world in eulogizing another was far from stable territory as the American diaspora wrestled with what it had been and what it was to become. McCarthy and Arendt were painfully aware that the historical memory of Jews in those darkest times had become intensely fraught territory. The cinders were still hot from the furor around Arendt’s reporting on Eichmann. But there is no extricating the centrality of Kafka, not just to Arendt’s thinking on Benjamin and her thinking in general but to that of an entire intellectual generation of the German-Jewish diaspora: her constructed dialogue between two of that generation’s greatest martyrs reflects an ingrained sensibility that is reflected throughout her corpus. While her longform writing is littered with literary references from Homer to Proust to Faulkner, it is not an exaggeration to say that, in a rigorous cataloging, Kafka holds pride of place as the most consistently and vocally lauded. She had a penchant to name him whenever superlatives were called for: with

FRANZ KAFKA AND ARENDT

 139

Bertolt Brecht as “the greatest poets of the postwar period,”3 with Proust as among “the greatest masters of our time,”4 or with Broch, Joyce, and Proust as the benchmarks of “relevance” by which any contemporary poet could be measured. Her elaborate, intricate pictures of Kafka’s poetics bear signs of the extraordinary degree to which her reading of Kafka suffused and inflected the larger architecture of her philosophy at nearly every point. An early piece for Partisan Review, “Franz Kafka: A Revaluation”—one of her first as she established her reputation in her new country—already telegraphed concepts of truth, bureaucracy, rights, and the position of critical judgment that would become hallmarks of her thought in the coming decades. The understatedly immense importance of Kafka to Arendt’s thought leaves two central questions for the reader: how Kafka influenced and drove Arendt’s thought, and the ways in which Arendt used Kafka’s writing to express her thinking. The former is a difficult avenue to follow, because Arendt read Kafka early in her life and we have little documentation of her engagement with his work during this period. The latter, though, leaves a trail all the way through her later writings and provides some access at least to that question of influence by reflection. Read in this way, we see in Arendt’s engagement with Kafka a distinctive trajectory, one in which the two questions of Kafka’s influence can be seen as a coevolving dialogue around the construction of a problem found nowhere so poignantly to Arendt’s mind than in Kafka, along with a kind of solution arising out of the same oeuvre. First in Kafka’s The Castle and The Trial, and then in his letters and his own status as the paradigmatic pariah Jew, there is a multifaceted problem of where the modern creation of bureaucracy and the alienated social leaves the thinking subject. Arendt’s early writings on Kafka center on three figures—the two “K”s and Kafka himself—each of which opens her path to her late encounters with Kafka. Then, much later in her own writing, the unnamed protagonist of “HE” begins to unfold a kind of answer as well, just as Arendt herself was bringing the strands of her thinking on thinking and judgment to a head. In “HE,” Arendt finds a kind of solution posited in Kafka to the modern labyrinth of his own construction, and a way to finally and fully articulate the role of thinking in her larger architecture of action.

Truth and Bureaucracy: The Two Ks “Franz Kafka, Appreciated Anew” is a kind of prophetic text in its portrayal of a prophetic subject. Published in its first iteration while the war in Europe still raged, the piece not only presages what would become a set of prevalent themes in the postwar intellectual world but also weaves together in striking detail a set of interrelated critiques of the dominance of modern bureaucracy that would be ongoing concerns for much of the core years of Arendt’s writing career. There was no shortage of critiques of bureaucracy

140

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

in the postwar détente between the anti-Stalinist Left and what existed of the anti-McCarthyist Right, but Arendt’s early intervention carries a level of philosophical complexity in its approach to the subject that few would match. Articulated predominantly through Kafka’s two Ks, the protagonists of The Trial and The Castle who share a moniker, Arendt’s reading of Kafka’s driving sensibility brings together her fears of the automatism of the bureaucrat, the role of necessity in truth claims, and the relationship of human rights to the meaning-making process that builds an enduring human world. Those themes, in turn, would play out to their fullness in her later work on postwar humanitarianism, the trial of Eichmann, the American decision-making apparatus of the Vietnam conflict, and her broader philosophical investments in the concept of judgment. If Arendt’s densely knotted set of concerns in “Franz Kafka” could be untied into a single driving trope, it would be the deification of the bureaucratic world. While the piece dwells on the rise of bureaucracy in pre-totalitarian Europe, its echoes sound not just in Germany and the USSR but in the changing character of the American government as well. The theological language Arendt employs, centered on the idea of deification, is unique within Arendt’s writings on bureaucracy: her reading of the two Ks presents a kind of political theology in miniature. For Arendt, Kafka really does describe a society that considers itself the representative of God on earth, and he describes men who look upon the laws of society as though they were divine laws that cannot be altered by the will of men. The evil of the world in which Kafka’s protagonists are caught is precisely the world’s deification, its pretense of representing a divine necessity.5 Arendt builds from Kafka’s bureaucracy the structure of a new and dangerous kind of “secret theology and . . . deep faith of bureaucrats to be a faith in necessity as such” in which the theology of the bureaucratic rule is sustained by a faith in the absolute necessity of its continuation, and the functionary “himself is more than just a natural being, into a tool of active destruction.”6 Against this figure of ensnared functionary, Arendt articulates two positions of the outsider and his encounter with bureaucracy, one “outside the power relations governing the world around him”7 and one definitively inside, a literal prisoner of the bureaucratic process itself. Each of the Ks is a kind of displaced subject, alienated from the normal course of a human life by the bureaucracy’s intercession into the deepest crannies of even the social world of the subject. Both Ks occupy a position that demonstrates, through counterposition, the essential inhumanity of the bureaucratic instrument. With a self-effacing nod toward the “small library of interpretations of Der Prozess,”8 Arendt looks to The Trial to delve specifically into the aspect of necessity that transitions the simple system of rules and processes from which bureaucracy is born into an auto-theology, the self-deification of the functionary. Later, in her reading of America, Arendt would note that this theology itself already entails the alienation of the living, breathing

FRANZ KAFKA AND ARENDT

 141

bureaucrat from himself: “Either he is a human being, subject to the fallibility of human perception and cognition, or he . . . needs to at least pretend to command a sort of superhuman perfection as part of his position . . . they act on the assumption of superhuman omnicompetence.”9 The Trial, though, gives us the wider view of the machine-character generated by this double alienation of the bureaucrat, the creation of a machine built for death out of that sanctification of the bureaucrat’s role. At the center of this political theology is the invention of a specific form of power “caused by the way in which human beings admire necessity,”10 a power that takes as its ultimate end the elevation of rules to the level of the sacred. Law, taken to its fulfillment as the sole and sacred provider of the order of necessity, becomes the tool of its own elimination in the hands of those who wield it through mere interpretation: The domination of bureaucracy implied that the interpretation of the law became an instrument of lawlessness, while the chronic inaction of the interpreters was compensated by a senseless automatism among the lower echelons of the bureaucratic hierarchy.11 As much as Arendt is interested in the peculiarly simple construction Kafka presents of the sacralized bureaucracy, though, perhaps still more interesting to her is K’s failure, despite his best efforts, to escape the machine that has trapped him. It is here that Arendt seems to draw her most important lesson for understanding the terrible power of bureaucratic rule, and it is one of her most unique insights into the much-interpreted story. The strange, alienated world of bureaucracy did not present itself to K, someone from its outside, as anything “real”; K mistakes the fact that it is human-made for mere contingency, failing to understand that eliminating contingency was precisely the heart of bureaucracy’s deification. In K’s attempt to “dismiss the ‘unfamiliar thoughts’ as ‘unreal things’ that did not really concern him,” Arendt locates the fatal error in the fact that the persistence of bureaucracy lies in its ability to render irrelevant its own unreality. The power of bureaucracy is precisely the translation of the contingent and unreal into the necessary and the sacred, and that power cannot be dismissed with a feeble reference to its original contingency. It is difficult to leave this reading of Der Prozess without the lingering suspicion that it is a less-than-subtle admonishment to the American anti-totalitarian Left and to those who seemed to think that merely pointing out the lies that sustained the totalitarian projects would be sufficient to bring them down, or at least ward off their progress.12 The Castle adds to Arendt’s tableau of bureaucratic machine and its two alienated figures—the bureaucrat who kills and the prisoner who is killed—a third figure, so entirely detached from the bureaucratic world that he appears almost as a kind of pure thing, a true human being who, in his impossible innocence, unravels the tableau altogether. The second K is the traveler who finds himself in a new land where the oligarchy of the Castle rules everyday life absolutely, and he is a curious figure of resistance

142

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

precisely because he does not conform to the standing supposition in the political thought of the Mosaic traditions that to resist is to act, to engage in confrontation. His effect on the bureaucratic rule of the town is simply and entirely a result of his existence as himself, his presence as one who simultaneously does not belong to the structure and yet is demonstrably an outside presence and vision in everyday life: “All that K. does achieve he achieves unintentionally. Simply through his attitude and his evaluation of the things going on around him, he manages to open the eyes of the villagers.”13 Everything about his figure is summarized in his occupation, not far in Arendt’s eyes from that of Kafka himself. K is the surveyor, one who sees and notes, one whose very occupation is to describe that which is, without resorting to that which ought or must be. Arendt is hardly the only thinker to posit the resistive potential of the outsider’s gaze, but she is particularly interested in the prosaic nature of K, his everydayness, the way in which, by simply being a living, working human, K’s sheer ineluctable presence begins the unraveling of the power structure of the Castle’s bureaucracy. The importance of K to the Arendt’s narrative, his intersection with the other, doomed K, is the relationship of strangeness K sustains to bureaucratic rule. While both the Castle’s law and Der Prozess’s court function by sustaining the self-evidence of the bureaucratic rule, The Castle’s K sustains his own innocence of the bureaucratic process even while in its grasp. In that sense, Arendt’s reading of the two Ks can be read as the political contrast between two kinds of innocence: The Trial’s K, who in his bewilderment mistakes the strangeness of bureaucratic rule as something that is simply unreal, and is killed for his mistake, and The Castle’s K, who does question the reality of bureaucratic law but sees its necessity and the necessity of submitting to it.14

Kafka the Jew Even the story of the second K, though, only appears as fully emancipatory to Arendt if it is falsely bracketed from the specific social and religious context in which it truly appears: The Castle, according to Arendt, is “the one novel in which Kafka discusses the Jewish problem” and K is the only “hero” who “is plainly a Jew”; “what characterizes him as such is not any typically Jewish trait, but the fact that he is involved in situations and perplexities distinctive of Jewish life.”15 Set against the darkness that had enveloped Europe, Arendt translates K from a figure of hope to a figure of the particular despair of the “modern age.” The sociopolitical place of the “man of good will,” the K who “opened the eyes of the villagers” through his insistence on struggling quietly to “obtain the few basic things which society owes to men,”16 cannot be understood as a strictly and deliberately abstracted model of human selfhood and activity, as she seemed in “Franz Kafka” to suggest.

FRANZ KAFKA AND ARENDT

 143

The “man of good will” was the “last and most recent typification of the pariah,”17 and while he may once have been one of the few models of the pariah available to that paradigmatic pariah class, the Jews of Old Europe, Arendt warned that that was no longer the case. While it could once be said that “the life of the pariah, though shorn of political significance, was by no means senseless,” “today it is,” now that “all the old escape mechanisms have broken down.”18 “Branded” as K “with the . . . mark” of the pariah, he is still an outlaw, and “today the truth has come home: there is no protection in heaven or earth against bare murder.”19 The “‘senseless freedom’ of the individual,” which once could provide not just a modicum of personal solace but also some hope of revealing the lie at the heart of the bureaucratic machine, now merely “paves the way for the senseless suffering of his entire people.”20 In her embrace of Kafka’s Zionism, Arendt repositions the successful aloofness of the “man of good will” as an unsuccessful flight now “impossible within the framework of contemporary society.”21 Perhaps even more so than his own fictional character, Kafka was himself the man of good will, for Arendt, and in the world of modern political murder that figure of good will had become something quite different. Once an avatar of a peculiar kind of freedom, Kafka as the Jewish pariah—along with Walter Benjamin, Karl Kraus, and an entire generation of Jewish “men of letters”—became what a man with his extraordinary gift could not help but become, a pariah figure turned prophet of collapse, an angel of history. In the modern world, which had revealed the terminal blow that bare murder as a political tool had struck against the possibility of merely living as pariah, it was inevitable that Kafka with his K would simultaneously be one of those from “a ‘pariah people’” who is “most clearly appreciated by those who have had practical experience of just how ambiguous is the freedom which emancipation has ensured.”22 The profound ambiguity of the pariah’s empty freedom plays out in how Arendt describes Kafka’s position, trapped as he was in the bourgeois “culture of Jewish letters.”23 To position him as this kind of prophet was to make of him not a new holy figure of redemption but a representative figure of a collapsed subject-position; she writes, quoting Benjamin and applying it to the writer himself, that “one is tempted to say: once he was certain of eventual failure, everything worked out for him en route as in a dream.”24 Once a figure who neither could nor wanted to reconcile himself to the political system’s refusal to acknowledge the basic rights of his humanness, now the man of good will struggled equally with the Jewishness he could neither escape nor fully desire to escape, and a Jewish social world that would neither let him go nor face up to the truth he demanded. The failure of Kafka as the man of good will was a failure that the man himself explored and foretold, with perhaps still more clarity than Benjamin: trapped in a world that had evacuated the meaningfulness of his position of the outside, Kafka found himself “reaching down to the sea bottom of the past” of the Jewish tradition with “this peculiar duality of

144

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

wanting to preserve and wanting to destroy.”25 In Arendt’s narrative of the Jewish prewar moment, Kafka faces a world in which he must belong to the Zionists, yet at the same moment, he rejects their model of belonging; he writes knowing that his very critiques of Jewish middle-class society will become part of the illusory bulwark that sustains their faith such that they can hold on to their impossible position. The already unworldly place of the pariah had in a sense become terminally severed from its last tethers to the world in which they belong: there is no return to a belonging that had previously been promised. The guaranteed belonging of membership in the Chosen People, even (or perhaps especially) changed as it was by the uncertain process of assimilation, had been rejected on principle. Yet the cultural cache of that rejection for the German-Jewish bourgeoisie, which delighted in the pariah’s iconoclasm, and the refusal of the social world to countenance any other place for the pariah to exist as a Jew left the man of good will waffling between ironic and tragic stances toward the only belonging that would be granted him. Despite the appeal of this abstraction, nowhere is this more evident than in Arendt’s reading of Kafka’s (and Benjamin’s and Kraus’s) ambivalent relationship to his own Jewishness: What was decisive was that these men did not wish to “return” either to the ranks of the Jewish people or to Judaism, and could not desire to do so . . . because all traditions and cultures as well as all “belonging” had become equally questionable to them. This is what they felt was wrong with the “return” to the Jewish fold as proposed by Zionists; they could all have said what Kafka once said about being a member of the Jewish people: “. . . my people, provided that I have one.”26 If the problem, for Kafka, “whose outlook on these matters” Arendt says “was more realistic than that of any of his contemporaries,” was that those “intellectual nourish[ed]” by “the Judaism of the fathers” had “their hind legs . . . still stuck” there “and with the forelegs they found no new ground,”27 the pariah who refused the Judaism of the past had neither that historical ground nor a new ground that the pariah could see was missing: “They fought against Jewish society because it would not permit them to live in the world as it happened to be, without illusions,”28 but the commitment to living in truth without illusions left them not with freedom, but with groundlessness. All that remains for the pariah like Kafka the Jew is the truth, and that truth, a truth that he saw Jewish society as denying still more vehemently than gentile society, could not set him free from a modern world that had no intention of letting him go, except in death.29 In spite of this collapse of the resistive potential of the pariah-subject in the face of totalitarianism, Arendt does leave the door open for future possibilities. In her reading of Description of a Fight, Arendt notes, “For Kafka only those things are real whose strength is not impaired but confirmed by thinking . . . thinking is the new weapon—the only one with which, in Kafka’s opinion, the pariah is endowed at birth in his vital struggle against society.”30

FRANZ KAFKA AND ARENDT

 145

The legacy of the prewar models of pariah lay in the innate capacity for “the use of this contemplative faculty as an instrument of self-preservation,”31 and while it would take until the end of Arendt’s writing life to return to the surface, it is the pariah’s thinking as a capacity and as an activity that would serve as the template for Arendt’s model of self-positioning that saves for every human a sacrosanct place in the tumultuous sweep of history.

Standpoints of Judgment When Arendt finally turned in Part I of The Life of the Mind, Thinking, to her description of the nature of the thinking subject, its powers, and its resistances, it is perhaps unsurprising that she returned to her reading of Kafka in Between Past and Future to describe the place the subject carves out for herself in the flow of history. Kafka’s parable “HE” provides Arendt with the perfect model of the nunc stans, the “standing now” that the subject occupies when she surveys her world and positions herself in the stream of time between her no-longer and her not-yet. Her extended reading of “HE,” reprising and elaborating on her depiction in the introduction to Between Past and Future, is concerned with “the time sensation of the thinking ego . . . our ‘inner state’” when “mental activities recoiling characteristically on themselves,” and “the no-longer of the past is transformed by virtue of the spatial metaphor into something lying behind us and the not-yet of the future into something that approaches us from ahead”: “a battleground” made literal by Kafka “where the forces of the past and future clash with each other.”32 The militant metaphor of the battleground is important for Arendt, because “this in-between, and what he calls the present” is defined by its struggle, the “long fight against the dead weight of the past, driving him forward with hope, and the fear of a future (whose only certainty is death), driving him backward.”33 There is more than a tinge of German and French existentialism in Arendt’s attachment here to describing an “exhausting” fight, a “time-pressed, time-tossed existence”34 in which “that past and future . . . manifest[ed] themselves as pure entities,”35 a struggle that leaves the fighter to “[dream] of the unguarded moment when time will have exhausted its force . . . long enough to give ‘him’ the chance of jumping out of the fighting line to be promoted to the position of umpire, the spectator and judge outside the game of life.”36 Thought appears here as the crucial activity through which we “defend [our] presence” against “time itself” by lingering on “what has already disappeared or has not yet appeared,” because “it is only because ‘he’ thinks, and therefore is no longer carried along by the continuity of everyday life in a world of appearances, that past and future manifest themselves as pure entities, so that ‘he’ can become aware of a nolonger that pushes him forward and a not-yet that drives him back.”37 For Arendtians, this moment of jumping out of the line is a particularly fascinating one because it brings to a head and into dialogue with Kafka another old line of her thought, only hinted at in her earlier writings on

146

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

Kafka and bureaucracy, but fully illuminated in Eichmann in Jerusalem and her lectures on Kant: the problem of judgment. Here, at last, Arendt provides some account of the conditions under which the subject, situated in “the gap between past and future [that] opens only in reflection” can actually attain that elusive position of the spectator that she had so long held out but that seemed so at odds with her lionization of action and the stage of appearance. In Kafka, that “‘position of umpire’ . . . the seat of Pythagoras’s spectators, who are . . . intent only on the spectacle itself,” “who can find out its meaning and judge the performance,”38 appears as a movement in a kind of “parallelogram of forces.”39 In outlining this temporal geometry of the judging subject, Arendt invests in the figure of the fighter her fullest account of the importance of the role of the judging subject. Contemporary readers have been struck and bemused by how at odds with her account of action this seemingly detached and inert figure of the spectator appears to be, but Arendt suggests that, on the contrary, that is precisely “the trouble with Kafka’s metaphor”: far from being “a passive object that is inserted into the stream” of action and history, the spectator is and must be its own particular kind of “fighter who defends his own presence” at the intersection of historicity and futurity by prying open the nunc stans through reflection. It is only “thanks to the insertion of a fighting presence” that the no-longer and not-yet do not appear as a simple linear flow of time in which the subject is caught, and crucially, “thought would no longer have to be situated beyond and above the world and human time.”40 Embedded in the field formed by the arrows of the past and the future, the activity of thought does not step out of time and experience to become a spectator, but remains within it like the “quiet in the center of a storm which, though totally unlike the storm, still belongs to it.”41 The metaphor of movement within the field of time evokes her description in her Kant lectures of visiting the material standpoints of others to expand the visual range of the judging subject: it is precisely in the motion along this thinking line between past and future, not in the distance as such that characterizes classical models of thinking as detachment from the world, that we become “sufficiently removed from past and future to be relied on to find out their meaning, to assume the position . . . of arbiter and judge over the manifold, never-ending affairs of human existence in the world.”42 Arendt’s is an embedded concept of thought, one that, even as the mind wraps itself around itself, still remains constantly positioned in the field from which it takes its movement.

Conclusion There is no more succinct way to characterize the importance of Kafka to Arendt than in her description of his poetics. For Arendt, Kafka’s style itself is vitally important, a “technique” that serves the function of simultaneously displaying, dismantling, and evoking in the reader a specific process of

FRANZ KAFKA AND ARENDT

 147

uptake. Arendt is not content to simply describe Kafka as a conventional author of social-criticism-made-literature. “Kafka’s technique could best be compared to the construction of models,” she writes, “just as a man who wants to build a house or evaluate its stability would draw up a blueprint of the building, Kafka practically devises the blueprints of the existing world.” The peculiar power of these models lies for her in the activity required of the reader, the process of thought that they engender, demanding “the same power of imagination . . . of the reader as went into creating them.”43 If Kafka’s imagination is for Arendt one of the, if not the most, powerful of his generation and the prewar world, it is so not merely in its glittering products but in the way that he elevates and demands the imaginations of his readers themselves. Perhaps this is what makes Kafka Arendt’s constant literary superlative: he not only left artifacts of his own thinking but also created an entire world of thinking that would outlast his own, and left intact the blueprints of an age and those to follow.

Notes 1 The New Yorker, October 19, 1968; reprinted as “Walter Benjamin 1892– 1940,” in Men in Dark Times (New York: Harper Brace Jovanovich, 1968). 2 Dated September 19, 1967. Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, Between Friends, ed. Carol Brightman (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1995), 205. 3 Hannah Arendt, “Stephen Zweig: Jews in the World of Yesterday,” in Reflections on Literature and Culture, ed. Susannah Young-Ah Gottlieb (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 64. 4 “No Longer and Not Yet,” in Reflections, 122. 5 Ibid., 98. 6 Ibid., 101. 7 Ibid., 99. 8 Ibid., 95. 9 Ibid., 103. Although he takes issue with different portions of Arendt’s America reading, a particularly insightful engagement with this reading can be found in Howard Caygill, “The Fate of the Pariah,” College Literature 38, no. 1 (2011): 1–14. 10 Ibid., 96. 11 Ibid., 97. 12 Brian Danoff gives a thorough and slightly more charitable read in “Arendt, Kafka, and the Nature of Totalitarianism,” Perspectives on Political Science 29, no. 4 (2000): 211–18. 13 Arendt, Reflections, 100. 14 Julia Kristeva gives a sublime interpretation of Arendt’s relationship to Kafka through figures of strangeness in the third chapter of her Head Cases (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).

148

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

15 Arendt, Reflections, 84. 16 Ibid., 88. 17 Ibid., 82. 18 Ibid., 90. 19 Ibid., 89. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid., 90. 22 Ibid., 70. 23 Ibid. 24 Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 170. 25 Ibid., 196. 26 Ibid., 190. 27 Ibid., 179, n. 12. 28 Ibid., 186. 29 Manu Samnotra gives a slightly less dispiriting reading of the Arendt’s relationship to Kafka himself as a subject in “Sensitive to Shame,” Constellations 21, no. 3 (2014): 338–50. Likewise, a more exhaustive account of the figure of the pariah, including Arendt’s situation of Kafka in her narrative, can be found in Magdalena Zolkos, “Arendt’s Metamorphic Figurations in ‘The Jew as Pariah,’” in Action and Appearance, ed. Anna Yeatman, Phillip Hansen, Magdalena Zolkos, and Charles Barbour (New York: Continuum, 2011). 30 Arendt, Reflections, 83. 31 Ibid., 84. 32 Arendt, Life of the Mind (New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1978), 202–3. This reading is indebted to Elizabeth Young-Bruehl’s “Reflections on Hannah Arendt’s The Life of the Mind,” Political Theory 10, no. 2 (1982): 277–305. Also, on Arendt’s interpretation of “HE,” see Vivian Liska, “The Gap between Hannah Arendt and Franz Kafka,” Archadia 38, no. 2 (2003): 329–33. 33 Arendt, The Life of the Mind, 205. 34 Ibid., 209. 35 Ibid., 206. 36 Ibid., 207. 37 Ibid., 206. 38 Ibid., 207. 39 For a particularly political reading of this subjective geometry, see Kim Lane Scheppele, “A Constitution between Past and Future,” William and Mary Law Review 49 (2007–8), https​://sc​holar​ship.​law.w​m.edu​/wmlr​/vol4​9/iss​4/11 (accessed February 24, 2019). 40 Arendt, Life of the Mind, 207–8. 41 Ibid., 209. 42 Ibid. 43 Arendt, Reflections, 104.

16 Walter Benjamin and Arendt: A Relation of Sorts Andrew Benjamin

Arendt’s relation to Walter Benjamin has an important series of biographical determinations. In a letter to Scholem Gershom sent from New York on October 17, 1941, she recounts the events of the last months of his life. In the same letter, she also proposes that the manuscript of what has recently come to be called On the Concept of History be published as a stand-alone volume by Schocken.1 According to Young-Bruehl, this was the text whose “Theses” she and Heinrich Blücher read aloud to each other as refugees on the pier in Lisbon while waiting for a boat to New York.2 Her oversight of the publication into English of Illuminations and her preliminary work on the subsequent English language publication Reflections (work truncated by her death in 1975) attest to the nature of her commitment: a commitment, it should be added, that was as much personal as it was intellectual. The recently published correspondence between Arendt and Scholem underscores both her closeness to Benjamin and her dedication to making his work more readily available.3 Arendt refers to Benjamin a number of times throughout her published writings, often in the context of discussions of Kafka. Her one text on him, while originally written in German, served as the Introduction—obviously in translation—to the English edition of Illuminations. The aim here is to concentrate on Arendt’s stated engagement with Benjamin. That there is a more subliminal registration is a possible conjecture. It could be argued, for example, that the project of distinguishing between power and violence that informs a great deal of her work and finds its most exact formulation in the 1969 text “On Violence” could be

150

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

interpreted as an attempt to engage the complex argumentation of Benjamin’s Zur Kritik der Gewalt. The latter is a text in which while there are at least two modalities of Gewalt present, neither has any automatic identification with the English word “violence.” Arendt’s conception of “power” and aspects of Benjamin’s conception of Gewalt are linked to what might best be described as operativity.4 Namely, both can be defined in terms of the creation of possibilities. There is an interesting set of connections therefore between concepts such as the “caesura” and “divine violence” in Benjamin and Arendt’s conception of “natality,” understood as a general creative force and then more specifically the way in which the “pardon” and the “promise” work in The Human Condition.5 Tracing that weave of connections is an important project in its own right. Here, however, the text to be considered is the introduction to the English translation of Illuminations now published in Men in Dark Times.6 * * * The introduction to Illuminations needs to be understood as the introduction of Walter Benjamin to an American audience. It was first published in 1968 in Harry Zohn’s translation. (The text has been readily available in the original German since the 1989 publication of Menschen in finsteren Zeiten.7) Arendt’s concern is the reception of Benjamin in America. Hence, there is the creation of portrait, an image of one of the “men” who were later grouped as those who existed in “dark times.” Walter Benjamin figures within this setting. And yet, in addition to the creation of that figure, the only other thinker to appear as a sustained named presence within this introductory text is Heidegger. Arendt is concerned to establish at the end of her text what might be described as a distanced affinity. There are clear biographical determinations that could account for the attempt to construct this connection; however, the project here is to resist the full import of the biographical and stay with what might have been at stake, in addition, in the continuity of reference to Heidegger.8 Between Heidegger and Benjamin, for Arendt, there is a relation of sorts. For the most part, Benjamin is presented as a singular figure. For Arendt, he “thought poetically, but was neither a poet nor a philosopher.”9 This is a curious judgment. In part, it is there to establish what, for Arendt, he shares with Kafka, namely, an Einzigartigkeit. And yet there is a significance that comes to be attached to Benjamin’s work that makes it more important than that of a mere philosopher. On Arendt’s part, there are two elements that orientate her introduction. The first is to continue to demonstrate the way in which not only Benjamin was singular insofar as both his written work and his biography placed him outside the tradition, but also singularity has a further quality since it evinces what she takes to be the break in tradition. This the break that for Arendt defines the current predicament. It emerges in what she diagnoses elsewhere as the collapse of authority or the “crisis in culture.”10 The interplay of singularity and this break are central elements

WALTER BENJAMIN AND ARENDT

 151

in her introduction to Benjamin. Though it should be noted that the way that tradition figures has a doubled presence. While it furthers her own work on tradition, her misconstrual of the radicality of the claims made by both Benjamin and Heidegger simultaneously exposes the limitation of that work. Prior to the final pages of the text in which Heidegger features prominently, there is a sustained attempt, as noted, to secure the singularity of Benjamin. She deploys the objects of his own concerns, for example ruins and flannerie, to account both for his mode of working and for what amounts to the nonexemplary status of that work.11 He was followed by bad luck, forms of failure, and a pervasive hopelessness. The difficulty is that the discussion of hope is initially bound up with biographical concerns. While reference is made to the trope of fortune and thus to the predominating role played by fortuna in the Renaissance (with its allusion to melancholia), the question of hope is not given the philosophical edge that it had already acquired in Benjamin’s work, let alone in the work of Ernst Bloch.12 As with Kafka, these tropes not only traversed his life but also played a defining role, for Arendt, in the direction and in the form of his writing. His separateness becomes important because while it allows for a form of separation from the immediacy of biography, this separation is not given, by Arendt, a genuine philosophical significance. Benjamin is understood as one for whom both tradition and thus the authority within it have come undone. This is the major link to Heidegger. If there is a fundamental point at which they connect—a point that sets in play the other connections—then it occurs when both Benjamin and Heidegger are identified as working within a specific and unalterable breach. Their writings can be situated within that specific call on thought that was “initiated by those who were most aware of the irreparability of the break in tradition (der Unheilbarkeit des Traditionsbruchs).”13 This breach, or rather Arendt’s construction of the breach, comes to have a structuring force both in her interpretation of Benjamin and then in the way the relation to Heidegger is secured. Consistent with arguments advanced in her detailed considerations of authority, the failure of the past to be “transmitted as tradition,” which is how the past attains authority, is central to an understanding of the loss of authority that has occurred as the result of that specific “break in tradition” (Traditionsbruch) that defines the locus of writing insofar as it defines the predicament of thought, its place within and as the contemporary.14 In order to locate this point within Benjamin writings, she quotes from the final pages of his 1931 paper on Karl Kraus. Benjamin wrote of Kraus: Only when despairing did he discover in citation the power (die Kraft) not to preserve but to purify, to tear from context, to destroy; the only power in which hope will still reside that something might survive this age—because it is wrenched from it.15

152

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

Prior to commenting on Arendt’s selective use of this passage, it should be noted that Benjamin continues with the claim that the singularity of Kraus, and thus the potentialities carried by his project, that is, their “necessity,” are no longer “recognized” (zu erkennen). What had been there has been absorbed back into the flow of what always will have been. Of the passage noted earlier Arendt only cites the following—“not to preserve but to purify, to tear from context, to destroy.” Hence, what is lost is not just the link between destruction and hope, but more significantly what does not figure is the possibility that while there might be such a link, it is no longer recognized as such. Of the possible affinities between Benjamin and Heidegger, what is clear is that one of the most decisive would be the claim of nonrecognition at the present of the possibilities that the present contains to be other than it is. For Benjamin, citation opens that possibility—in a sense it actualizes a potential—and does so by linking destruction to hope. The hope in question is not empty. What is hoped is “that something might survive this age.” The problem of survival has already been given its due when she quotes, but does not really comment on, a letter written to Werner Kraft on October 28, 1935. In the letter—indeed in the passage cited by Arendt—Benjamin wants the “planet” to experience a civilization that has abandoned “blood and horror.” If this were not to occur then, in Benjamin’s words, “the planet will finally punish us, its unthoughtful well-wishers, by presenting us with the Last Judgement.”16 It is not simply the evocation of the Last Judgment that is important; there is the intimation of another possibility, namely, overcoming the continuity of barbarism. However, such a possibility is predicated on a preliminary movement, another overcoming. In this case, it would be the projected overcoming of that naturalization of barbarism in which horrors are incorporated into the flow of both time and events, which would then comprise the “homogeneous course of history.”17 That flow, more emphatically its interruption, would occur in its linkage of survival and liberation. This is the destruction that Benjamin is after. In terms of the possibility of freedom or liberation, it is not by chance that Benjamin contrasts “enslaved ancestors” and “liberated grandchild”; both are subject positions as well as temporal designators.18 What Arendt is overlooking in Benjamin, and this point will become more telling, is that if there is a break in tradition, it exists as a potentiality and thus the appearances of breaks and the concomitant undoing of authority need to be understood as epiphenomenal and not as a genuine destruction of tradition. (Here is the most telling affinity between Benjamin and Heidegger.) Arendt misses the force of the reiteration of continuities occurring within and as the naturalization of historical time; it is as though they just occur. The reiteration of progress and indeed its chronological determinations—that is, time as continuity—makes the setting of natality an important area of discussion in its own right. * * *

WALTER BENJAMIN AND ARENDT

 153

The final section of the text on Benjamin is the most important as well as the most problematic. What is striking about this section is not just the reappearance of Heidegger, but the extent to which both are further identified as thinkers whose work occurs within a setting created by the breakdown of tradition, and thus the attendant breakdown in the structures and institutions of authority that tradition brought with it. While there is an argument that can be advanced that would be based almost exclusively on Benjamin’s interpretation of Leskov, in which he (Benjamin) emerges as a thinker of the breakdown of tradition, to center on the position advanced solely in that text would be to miss what is at stake within Benjamin’s more general encounter with tradition.19 Even if a consideration of the terminological distinction between die Tradition and die Überlieferung is left to one side, what is at stake for both Benjamin and Heidegger is the interplay of historical time and how the present is understood. The present is the given locus of thought and activity and, as a result, it is the present that demands to be thought. Hence, the question to be addressed is the following: Is the mode of thought that pertains at the present able to think the present? That question—and it is clear that Benjamin and Heidegger would have formulated it in importantly different ways—has to endure. Arendt’s engagement with tradition takes on a particular formation, though it is not Benjamin’s. As part of a change in the transmission of tradition, there is a related change in the nature of truth. What she terms “obligative truth”—namely a conception of truth that entail certain actions—has been “replaced.” Its replacement resulted in a repositioning of authority. Truth is now linked to forms of presentation that have the quality of secrets, and the secret conveys authority. To establish this point, Arendt quotes a short passage from The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Its concern is truth. However, it is a conception that resists any standard propositional form. Moreover, as a version of truth, it is not one within which truth is identified with the process of an “unveiling” that might destroy a “secret.” Rather truth is “the revelation that does justice to it (the secret).” She goes on to argue that truth has become “perceptible” and thus worldly, and then “comprehended by us as ‘un-concealement’ (Unverborgenheit— Heidegger),”20 as though what Heidegger’s means by “unconcealment” is to be understood in these terms. What then follows is a further set of arguments that develop from the claim that what is coming undone is the interrelationship between truth, tradition, and wisdom. The most significant addition to the argument is that if truth appeared—and this is the possibility she is attributing to Benjamin and Heidegger—it “could no longer lead to wisdom.” What is of interest is neither the viability nor the veracity of the interpretation in any direct sense. Rather what is of concern is that which is presupposed within it. The passage cited by Arendt from The Origin of German Tragic Drama needs to be set in the context of the engagement with the object as a secret

154

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

that occurs in Benjamin’s study of Goethe’s Elective Affinities. In that context, Benjamin argues: Art criticism is not the lifting of the veil but rather, through the most precise knowledge of it as veil (durch deren genaueste Erkenntnis als Hülle), to raise itself for the first time to the true view of the beautiful (zur wahren Anschauung des Schönen). To the view that will never open itself up to so-called empathy and will only imperfectly open itself up to a purer contemplation of the naïve; to the view of the beautiful of that which is secret. Never yet has a true work of art (ein wahres Kunstwerk) been grasped other than when it is ineluctably presented as a secret (als Geheimnis sich darstellte).21 What should be noted is that the question of truth is linked here to the process of knowing. Truth cannot be separated therefore from knowledge. Distanced in the process are both empathy and the contemplation of the naïve (Schiller), as if the world were simply given within poetry or given to the poetic project. In other words, what is distanced with an untrammeled insistence is the aesthetic, were the latter to be positioned in opposition to knowledge. The claim, as a result, is that rather than a concern with either the impossibility or the possibility of the presence in the world of the truth, as though the true could be merely free standing (this is empiricism’s fantasy), Benjamin’s strategy has a twofold determination. First, it is the undoing of the opposition between surface and depth, and, second, there is a reconfiguration both of the nature of appearance and of what appears. Appearing and semblance acquire therefore a philosophical exigency that they had not had before, an exigency, moreover, that far exceeds a concern with worldly presence whether positively or negatively construed. In regards to what appears, the significant aspect here is that this relation has been moved from the domain of the aesthetic—in which what matters is givenness of and within experience—to the domain of knowledge. Here the immediacy of experience gives way to the centrality of the object. Just to be clear, this is not what Heidegger meant by “unconcealment.” The latter, while positioned in terms of truth—hence the supposition that unconcealment is present as the translation of the Greek alētheia—has a very specific configuration. Here truth is to be understood, to use the formulation provided in On the Essence of Truth, as a letting come to presence of things as they are, and thus to the “disclosedness and disclosure of beings.”22 In the realm of art, neither is what is disclosed the material object as simple giveness nor is it that which represents. Rather, the work of art takes on the quality of a riddle. Heidegger writes in “The Origin of the Work of Art” that his “reflections” on art “are far from claiming to solve the riddle.” On the contrary, “the task is to see the riddle (Zur Aufgabe steht, das Rätsel zu sehen).”23 It is important to note here that Heidegger writes both of seeing the riddle and that seeing it delimits the “task” (Aufgabe) at hand.

WALTER BENJAMIN AND ARENDT

 155

While there are different ways of interpreting what is meant by this “seeing,” it is nonetheless possible to argue that there is an important affinity between the presence of the work of art in terms of veiling and its presence as a riddle. It is that connection that calls into question Arendt’s claim that what is at stake is the worldly nature of truth. For Heidegger, unconcealment works in relation to concealment, hence the question of presence is fundamentally reconfigured as a result; for Benjamin criticism as a form of knowledge is equally an undoing of that conception of presentation in which presentation is thought in terms of surface and depth. * * * Arendt positions Benjamin’s concerns with collecting as inextricably bound up with the break in tradition. The collecting of the past—indeed the emphasis on a relation to the past—evidences the break. Heidegger is implicated in this relation to the past. Indeed, Arendt makes the claim that his early “success” (Erfolg) arose as a result. This occurs because he “listened” to the past. Arendt cites a line from Heidegger’s Kants These über das Sein. Again, the citation is partial and misses the point of what Heidegger is actually arguing. As the argumentation is developing in the text on Kant, Heidegger is questioning the extent to which what describes as “present-day thought” (das heutige Denken) is able to engage Kant’s thinking of Being. As a result of both the demand made by Kant’s thought in this regard and the concomitant limitations of contemporary thought, a new “task” then arises. At this point Heidegger states the nature of the task that emerges. (The following passage also contains the line cited by Arendt.) The tasks of thought here with designated to go beyond (überschreiten) the possibilities of a first delineation, go beyond (überschreiten) even the capacity of the thinking still customary today (des heute). All the more pressing is the need for a reflective listening to the tradition (ein nachdenkendes Hören auf die Überlieferung) a listening that does not devote itself to what is past but rather thinks the present (sondern das Gegenwärtige bedenkt).24 Arendt runs two lines together—and Zohn’s translation is itself slightly different. Heidegger’s “success” stems, Arendt claims, from a “listening to the tradition that does not give itself up to the past but thinks of the present.” This “listening” is taken by Arendt to be no more than a relation to the past. And that thinking the present does not entail a refusal of the way the present is currently construed in order that it be thought again. That thinking again—the task of thinking—is inherently destructive, insofar as the possibility of thinking the present is premised by undoing— destroying—the way the present things itself “today.” Inauguration—what Heidegger will continue to insist on thinking in terms of a preparation for a “new beginning”—depends upon destruction.25 What is left out of

156

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

Arendt’s engagement with Heidegger is its destructive character, and hence the fundamentally radical nature of Heidegger’s claim. The insistence of destruction is the elective affinity between Benjamin and Heidegger and therefore is for both the perceived inadequacy of that which occurs in the present. It is not as though tradition has come undone. On the contrary, the claim has to be that despite the apparent strength of present—that is, contemporary philosophical thought—it is unable to think that which it is called upon to think. That is why rather than mere listening there has to be a “reflective listening” (ein nachdenkendes Hören). Thus this is a hearing that is already another thinking. Hence, rather than there being an alreadypresent breakdown in tradition, such a breakdown needs to occur and has to be brought about. It should be added here that the very nature of what constitutes a break, and thus the destruction of tradition, would themselves have to be rethought as part of this particular undertaking. Heidegger’s invocation of “concealing” and “unconcealing” forms part of that process. The task of philosophy has to be destructive in order that such openings— “other beginnings”—are in fact possible. To continue this overall point, it is essential to note that Arendt is correct to identify Benjamin’s continual refusal of the concept of “empathy.” However, the necessity to think interruption and thus to allow for the productive power of destruction, and thus to bring about the breakdown in tradition, necessitates the sustained refusal of empathy. Again, the reason for such an undertaking is not serendipitous. On the contrary. Empathy establishes relations in ways that obviate the need to recognize that relations are structured, now at the present, by the ineliminability of disequilibria of power. Given the naturalization of those relations, the necessity for destruction becomes even more insistent. Arendt engages another possible point of connection between Heidegger and Benjamin in the final section of her text. In this instance, it concerns language. There is an important project linking Benjamin’s conception of “pure language”—that is, language beyond its reduction to either “idle talk” (Gerede) or simple utility—which he develops in a number of places, though most notably in his discussion of translation, and Heidegger’s own thinking of language. The difficulty once again would be assimilating possible points of connection between the way language figures in their respective projects to a setting created almost exclusively by what continues to be identified by Arendt as a breakdown in tradition. The engagement with language rather than the focus on genuine points of contact between Heidegger and Benjamin allows Arendt to return to the position advanced at the beginning of text, namely, that for Benjamin language is essentially poetic. And thus, what he has is the “gift of thinking poetically.”26 Were the same claim to be made of Heidegger, as it could be given the way the connection between Heidegger and Benjamin on language is established, it would be premised on a systematic failure to take into consideration the consistent engagement with the problematic of poetry throughout his philosophical corpus, and the

WALTER BENJAMIN AND ARENDT

 157

specific link between poetry and truth that occurs in the final section of “The Origin of the Work of Art.” While there is a great deal in Arendt’s engagement with Benjamin that is of real value, and the image of Benjamin as a pearl diver has a compelling eloquence, key aspects of his thought are overlooked. The pearl, on the one hand, is the “monad” that appears in the extraordinary Vorrede in the Origin of German Tragic Drama and then, on the other, is the element that begins to inform the structure of the dialectical image that appears in later works. Perhaps more importantly, the pearl as that which is recovered, brought to the surface from the depths of the past, is clearly already implicated in the claim that is made in On the Concept of History that “nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost to history.”27 Recovery brings about destruction; it does not presuppose it. In sum, therefore, Arendt’s engagement with Benjamin’s work, while introducing it to an American audience, does so by muting its force as a political philosophy by attempt to exclude it— along with Heidegger—from the domain of the philosophical itself.

Notes 1 This text, which was initially known in English as “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” is found in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 4, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). 2 Elizabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), 162. 3 Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem, The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem, ed. Mary Luise Knott and trans. Anthony David (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2017). 4 I have argued for this position in considerable detail in my Working with Walter Benjamin. Recovering a Political Philosophy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 94–143. 5 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 236–47. 6 Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968). 7 Hannah Arendt, Menschen in finsteren Zeiten (Munich: Piper, 1989). 8 On the relationship between Arendt and Heidegger that explores both biographical and philosophical considerations, see Antonia Grunenberg, Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger: History of a Love, ed. and trans. Peg Birmingham, Kristina Lebedeva, and Elizabeth von Witzke Birmingham (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2017). I have with Dimitris Vardoulakis edited a volume of essays on the relationship between Heidegger and Benjamin, Sparks Will Fly: Benjamin and Heidegger (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2016). 9 Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 156.

158

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

10 A state of affairs discussed by Arendt in “What Is Authority?” and “The Crisis in Culture,” both of which can be found in her Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin Books, 2006). 11 The ruin has an important history that is as much cross cultural as it is a fundamental figure in Western art and thought. See Alain Schnapp, Ruines. Essai de perspective compare (Brussels: Les presses du reél, 2015). 12 On the complex figure of fortuna in the Renaissance context, see Aby Warburg’s exemplary discussion in his “Franco Sassettis Letztwillige Verfügung,” in Werke in Einem Band (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010), 234–80. For Ernst Bloch, see his monumental study The Principle of Hope: Volumes 1–3 (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1995). 13 Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 201. 14 There is a necessity to think the present as having a determining effect on how the philosophical task is understood. For a direct engagement with the “contemporary” as a philosophical topos, see Giorgio Agamben, Che cos’è il contemporaneo? (Rome: Nottetempo, 2008). 15 Benjamin, Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2, 455. 16 Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 192. 17 Benjamin, Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 4, 396. 18 Ibid., 394. 19 This occurs in Benjamin’s “The Story Teller: Observations on the Work of Nikloai Leskov,” in Benjamin, Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 3, 143–66. 20 Mark Rathall, Heidegger and Unconcealment: Truth, Language, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 21 Benjamin, Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 1, 351. 22 See Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1993), 25. 23 See “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Heidegger, Basic Writings, 204. 24 Martin Heidegger, Wegmarken, Gesamtausgabe: Band 9 (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1976), 248. 25 While there is an extensive literature on this topic of particular relevance, here is the engagement with both the possibility and the quality of beginnings as taken up in Heidegger’s An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Mannheim (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959), 191. 26 Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 205. 27 Benjamin, Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 4, 390.

17 Merleau-Ponty: Hiding, Showing, Being Kascha Semonovitch

This chapter traces how Arendt’s phenomenological practice hides in her early career and then appears more clearly in her later writing, especially as articulated in a dialogue with Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology and his ontology. In her early work including The Human Condition, Arendt does not explicitly identify her practice as phenomenological, but it is implicitly so in its method. She offers a careful phenomenology of relations with others. This chapter contrasts Arendt’s phenomenology with that of Merleau-Ponty to expose Arendt’s view of the human as fundamentally divided into mind, body, and will. Certain critiques of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology are shown to apply to Arendt’s. The chapter concludes by pointing out that for Arendt no phenomenological or ontological project ought to be divorced from political action. For biographical and historical reasons, Arendt is often categorized with phenomenologists of the early twentieth century, but her relationship with phenomenology is as tricky as her relationship with philosophy in general. Arendt, a student of Heidegger, not far from Husserl, did not identify herself as phenomenologist per se. In an oft-cited interview with Günter Gaus, Arendt claimed she was not even a philosopher at all but merely a political theorist.1 Nonetheless, Arendt once remarked that she might actually be a “sort-of phenomenologist . . . though not in Hegel’s way, or Husserl’s.”2 Dermot Moran asserted that she shows “no particular interest in the phenomenological method,” yet includes her work as exemplifying the practice.3 What then is Arendt’s relationship to phenomenology? Arendt’s phenomenological practice reformed itself around the “matter under

160

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

study”—from revolution to the human condition to the life of the mind.4 This chapter will discuss briefly how Arendt’s phenomenological practice hides in her early career, and then point to how the phenomenological method began to show itself in later writing, especially in relation to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology and ontology.

Hiding In a 1948 essay, Arendt categorized phenomenology, as Husserl practised it, as a species of modern and existential philosophy.5 She does not here declare herself to be phenomenologist or an existentialist, but the aim of her essay is to point the way toward the true task of “modern philosophy” and that path is through phenomenology. Is then her subsequent work on human rights and The Human Condition also phenomenological? The answer must be yes. Although Arendt herself might not have consistently and explicitly identified her practice as phenomenological, it is implicitly so in its method, insofar as Arendt focuses on the lived structures of labor, work, and political action. As Marieke Borren puts it “understanding the meaning of political phenomena, facts, and events, as well as the structures of human existence, presupposes a phenomenological analysis.”6 In her articulation of human rights, for example, Serena Parekh identifies Arendt’s work on rights as phenomenological insofar as it focuses on the appearance of the world for those in need of rights rather than in some natural or transcendental world outside human perception that might justify rights.7 The phenomenological tradition in any form asks the thinker to return to the “concrete, lived experience”8 whether that is, for example, embodied experience (as in Merleau-Ponty) or social and emotional experience (as in Sartre).9 The phenomenologist considers rather than accepts the distinction between subject and object, as Arendt consistently avoids simplistic dualities between humans as “natural and worldly beings” or between “‘consciousness’ and ‘nature.’”10 Arendt not only practices phenomenology in the tradition of Husserl or Heidegger but articulates her own methodology. Arendt’s work must be understood in response to the totalitarianism of the early twentieth century rather than the existential and metaphysical questions that prompt Heidegger’s work. Briefly, we might note that in contrast to Husserl, the other is known “not in a direct way” but analogously because they are like me, but for Arendt, others are not necessarily like me and thus cannot be understood analogously.11 Others are to be understood phenomenologically as they appear when “building the world in common through action, fabrication, and judgment.”12 It is when phenomenology grows up from Husserl’s naïve, indirect study of the other that Arendt can claim it for herself. The phenomenologist should think critically, in

MERLEAU-PONTY

 161

the Kantian sense of that term. This isn’t to say that the phenomenologist has the capacity to know all minds from her own mind, nor does she acquire the gift of knowing other minds directly: “Critical thinking does not consist in an enormously enlarged empathy through which one can know what actually goes on the minds of all others.”13 For Arendt, all others in a plurality are not like me and thus such a method would not offer phenomenological insight. Thinking is not just putting one’s self in the position of others and then taking on their prejudices. Instead, the phenomenologist acquires the capacity for “abstracting from the limitations which contingently attach to our own judgment.”14 It is her attention to relation to others in the world that shapes Arendt’s entire practice. To fully appreciate the implications of her choices, it is helpful to contrast her work with Merleau-Ponty’s.

Showing For the early Arendt, Merleau-Ponty was merely one of many “French Existentialists” who offered “radicalizations of Heidegger’s position.”15 But in The Life of the Mind, Arendt takes up Merleau-Ponty’s work, especially The Visible and Invisible, with deeper interest. Like Merleau-Ponty, Arendt finds that since Descartes, philosophy has prioritized interiority, the working of the mind for itself, and she finds this historically prevalent hierarchy of inner over outer person in philosophy frustrating, with its suggestion that “our ‘inner life,’ is more relevant to what we ‘are’ than what appears on the outside.”16 We are visible because we are plural and are plural because we are visible:17 “Not Man but men inhabit this planet. Plurality is the law of the earth,”18 as she puts it in The Life of the Mind. For Arendt, all true human action takes place in a plurality, between people, not in the privacy of an overly hallowed mental life. Having realized that human action must appear, Arendt takes an interest in what that appearance is even at the level of the animal. Alongside MerleauPonty’s work, Arendt reflects on a 1948 book by Adolf Portmann, Animal Forms and Patterns, that interested Merleau-Ponty. The German title of his book is Die Tiergestalt, “Gestalt” denoting the whole of the being: both the process that generates that whole and the whole product itself.19 The animal—apparently including the human animal in this passage of Arendt— cannot be understood in isolation but only as part of an embodied totality. In The Human Condition,20 she denies a human “nature” as such and takes a fairly anti-naturalist stance in that text,21 and emphasizes the fulfillment of appearance in the public sphere rather than as a laboring body within the household. But these passages in The Life of the Mind seem to set aside this rejection of the “natural” human body, now comparable to the animal body. When we truly reverse the Platonic metaphysical hierarchy,22 she claims that we find not only a new emphasis on existence rather than essence but

162

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

also an orientation toward appearance and visibility.23 She quotes MerleauPonty’s Visible and the Invisible, which in turn invokes Husserl: There is no Schein without an Erscheinung, every Schein is the counterpart of an Erscheinung. That modern science, in its relentless search for the truth behind mere appearances, will ever be able to resolve this predicament is, to say the least, highly doubtful, if only because the scientist himself belongs to the world of appearances.24 Like Arendt, Merleau-Ponty took Portmanns’s work as indicative on the ontology he wished to express. This affiliation with Portmanns’s work underscores how others appear more directly in Merleau-Ponty’s later ontology than in Husserl’s; others are known intimates of my species, bodies that appear with me. As Merleau-Ponty puts it, “What exists are not separated animals, but an inter-animality.”25 Inter-animality is not an illusion, but a perceptual relation. This inter-animality arises not among “subjects” or among “minds,” but among visible, displaying bodies, prereflectively oriented toward one another. In aligning themselves with Portmann, Merleau-Ponty and Arendt recognize the whole meaning of the animal form for the beings who experience it as visible.26 In Merleau-Ponty, Arendt finds an ally who does not overlook our embodied relation to others. But does Arendt, denier of human “nature,” wish to use interanimality in the same way as Merleau-Ponty? Despite the citation of Merleau-Ponty in these passages and the affirmation of Portmann’s significantly alongside his work, Arendt’s reading of interiority and exteriority differ significantly.

Revealing—the Other These distinctions show up in two ways: in ethical and ontological critiques of Merleau-Ponty’s account of the other, and finally in Arendt’s privileging of the will in the final volumes of Life of the Mind. Merleau-Ponty has received sustained criticism for his account of the other in his later ontology from feminist readings and ethical studies in general: Arendt’s work merits some of these critiques. For example, consider Mary Rawlinson’s criticism of how indifferently Merleau-Ponty uses the term “man” to identify human existence in general, and how he adopts passages from Hegel without acknowledging the strong sexual biases.27 Like Luce Irigaray, she wishes for poetic terminology that might explicitly identify feminine difference within bodies. Arendt’s work as well would benefit from more poetic, specific terminology to articulate gendered difference. Arendt, in retaining gendered terminology, makes a similar error to that which Rawlinson remarks on in Merleau-Ponty. Even in this famous phrase, “Men not man live upon the earth”—a key passage in which she asserts directly

MERLEAU-PONTY

 163

that the very definition of the condition of plurality is difference—she slips in to traditional substitution of “man” for existence in general. Her own gender does not absolve her of such mistakes. Further, consider Judith Butler’s criticism of Merleau-Ponty’s work as hetero-normative and restricted to defining the body as object;28 others have replied to this critique with the position that although Merleau-Ponty’s account of sexuality might be “rudimentary,” it is not incompatible with a position like Butler’s.29 But even supportive readings admit that MerleauPonty does not fundamentally prioritize the feminine or nonnormative gender. For example, in other scholarship led by Kristeva, Gosetti speculates: It is perhaps true that Merleau-Ponty’s inattentiveness to any account of gender could be due not so much, as has been claimed, to his tendency to neglect femininity in his phenomenology of the body, but rather his lack of an account of the motivations for repression of the intersubjective origins of language.30 Critiques of Merleau-Ponty from Levinas, Derrida, and Kristeva come from a different angle. Levinas claims that Merleau-Ponty does not fully recognize alterity—that his account fails to account for the full range of engagements with the other beyond face-to-face encounters.31 This concern with preserving asymmetry and alterity also runs through Derrida’s critique of Merleau-Ponty. In On Touching, Derrida assesses Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Husserl and remarks that Husserl privileges touching over vision while Merleau-Ponty does not properly distinguish these two senses. This same criticism might be leveled at Arendt, who, like Merleau-Ponty, appears to treat vision as an exemplary sensation that indicates the will to appear. In more recent research, however, authors have upheld MerleauPonty’s work in relation to Derrida and Levinas’s initial propositions. For example, Ann Murphy, defends Merleau-Ponty’s ontology as more ethical than Husserl’s and less violent than Derrida’s.32 Merleau-Ponty’s vision of the flesh is “shot through with passivity” and presented in the language of genesis and birth, while Derrida’s account is restricted to the language of violence.33 Per Murphy’s position, Merleau-Ponty succeeds where Arendt fails. Arendt preserves a radical difference between interiority and exteriority that Merleau-Ponty rightly abandons. Even as she poetically echoes MerleauPonty writing, “whatever appears wants to be seen,” Merleau-Ponty fails, she says, when he declared it an intertwining: “Precisely the lack of such chiasmata or crossings over is the crux of mental phenomena.”34 These early passages in which she engages with Merleau-Ponty must be understood in light of her intentions in the final volume of The Life of the Mind dedicated to the will. The Life of the Mind presents human existences as structured not by a dichotomy of mind and body or subject and object: rather, mind and body belong to a triad controlled by will.

164

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

A radical distinction—rather than an intertwining—must be maintained in order to accommodate the will. Mental phenomena only appear when we will them to. “Every show of anger, as distinct from the anger I feel, already contains a reflection on it. . . . To show one’s anger is one form of self-preservation: I decide what is fit for appearance.”35 This invisible “I,” the willing agent, only appears in the world as expression. The body is meant for just such expression because our way of being is conditioned by belonging to a plurality that demands expression in body and speech. The will, however, controls expression. In fact, the only outward expression of the mind is absent-mindedness.”36 We decide when we show our thinking. The will hides, invisible, from the visible “conditions of either life or the world.”37 The will, which does not appear, retains a fundamental inaccessibility, an impermeability to the other, unlike the chiasmatic subject-object in MerleauPonty’s active-passive, dehiscing flesh. This critique from Arendt points at the same ontological intersection that prompted criticism of Merleau-Ponty from Derrida and Levinas. However, neither Levinas nor Derrida nor Merleau-Ponty reserve the faculty of will as a mediator between subject and object. By contrast, for Merleau-Ponty the body is permeable, fragile, not a will that controls expression: passivity “vitiate[s]” existence.38 One has no reserve of will that can “decide” to express anger; anger washes over mind and body, permeates the boundary—a structural osmosis that passes between the thin, bodily material between visible and invisible life.

Beyond Ontology In an unfinished essay, Arendt praises Merleau-Ponty as one of a few contemporary philosophers who do manage to participate in politics.39 The ethical structure of his later ontology aside, there is no question that Merleau-Ponty prioritized political engagement over what Arendt calls the deprivation of a private life; with Sartre, Merleau-Ponty edited the influential Les Temps Moderne and wrote essays, collected in Signs and Humanism and Terror, that reflect on the unfolding events of their time. She notes that Merleau-Ponty and Sartre “look . . . to politics for the solution of philosophic perplexities that in their opinion resist solution or even adequate formulate in purely philosophic terms.”40 Arendt articulated explicitly what Merleau-Ponty did not: his ontology did not resolve ethical or political problems.41 It did not fully address alterity; it merits critique. But ontology and phenomenology themselves might merit critique if they do not emerge in concrete political action. Like Merleau-Ponty, there is no question that Arendt consistently engaged in public, political action, from The Origins of Totalitarianism to On Violence to her essays on Eichmann published in the The New Yorker. Political action, not ontology in theory, designates philosophy’s task. The

MERLEAU-PONTY

 165

work in The Life of the Mind in which she most explicitly addresses MerleauPonty’s ontology is a brief discussion within a vast, political-focused oeuvre much like Merleau-Ponty’s own body of work. Phenomenology as Arendt and Merleau-Ponty practice it does not finish with the ontology, even an ontology inscribed with ethics—only one that appears in politics. Those issues exceed the scope of this chapter but indicate the direction for further research on Arendt’s troubled relationship to phenomenology and philosophy as such when divorced from concrete action that writes human rights rather than only describes ontological structures that ought to entail them. In understanding Arendt’s relationship to phenomenology and to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology in particular, much rests on the impossibility of properly assessing unfinished work of both of these thinkers: Life of the Mind and The Visible and the Invisible. A critique of their phenomenological projects that are restricted to these texts oriented around thinking, and ontology fails to recognize how the seeds of thinking in this work emerge in political action. In her late Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, Arendt puts it this way: there is a “clash between the spectator and the actor.”42 This clash reflects the intertwinings and reversals of the vita activa and vita contemplativa that engaged Arendt throughout her career. She does not resolve the conflict. She thinks about it, even while broaching the difficulties of the will. She invites phenomenologists working in her wake to avoid restricting themselves the dualistic terminology of mind and body, and instead to think on the living, embodied relationship between the life of the mind and the life with others.

Notes 1 Hannah Arendt, Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2005), 1. 2 Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, For the Love of the World, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 495. 3 Dermot Moran, “Hannah Arendt: A Phenomenology of the Public Sphere,” in Introduction to Phenomenology (London: Routledge, 2000), 289. 4 In his 1927 lecture course on The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Heidegger said, “There is no such thing as the one phenomenology” because true philosophy followed the matters itself and so phenomenological inquiry suited itself to the matter under study. Cited in Moran, “Hannah Arendt,” 227. 5 Arendt, Essays in Understanding, 164. 6 Marieke Borren, “‘A Sense of the World’: Hannah Arendt’s Hermeneutic Phenomenology of Common Sense,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 21, no. 2 (2013): 232. 7 Serena Parekh, Hannah Arendt and the Challenge of Modernity (London: Routledge, 2006), 70.

166

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

8 Moran, “Hannah Arendt,” 2–3. 9 See Ibid., 287. In Moran’s account, such phenomenology originates in Husserl—though he acknowledges one may find roots in Kant and others such as Schiller or Hegel—and fulfills itself in Heidegger who enriches the project with hermeneutics. 10 Borren, “‘A Sense of the World,’” 234. 11 Parekh, Hannah Arendt and the Challenge of Modernity, 70. 12 Ibid., 71. 13 Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1982), 43. 14 Ibid. 15 Arendt, Essays in Understanding, 182. 16 Arendt, Life of the Mind (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, 1978), 30. 17 Phenomenology has shown that “we live in an appearing world” and thus it is “plausible that the relevant and the meaningful in this world of ours should be located precisely on the surface” (Ibid., 27). 18 Ibid., 19. 19 Adolf Portmann, Animal Forms and Patterns (New York: Schocken Books, 1967), 7. 20 Arendt, Human Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 10. Nothing “entitles us” to assume humans have a nature. Rather, our condition is a constant question we are posing to ourselves. 21 For more detailed reflection of Arendt on nature see Birmingham, Hannah Arendt and Human Rights: The Predicament of Common Responsibility (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 71, and “The Pleasure of Your Company: Arendt, Kristeva, and an Ethics of Public Happiness,” Research in Phenomenology 33, Issue 1 (January 2003): 53–74. Arendt does not exclude the possibility that our nature contributes to the unpredictable irruption of natality from the private into the political world. We simply cannot appeal to nature to determine or to secure political rights. 22 For Arendt, this new ontology appeared in the wake of the end of metaphysics with the nineteenth-century “death of God” that accompanied the end of the entire domain of the suprasensory, the transcendent, or “whatever is not given to the senses” (Arendt, Life of the Mind, 10). 23 She summarizes: “These findings suggest that the predominance of outside appearance implies . . . whatever can see wants to be seen, whatever can hear calls out to be heard, whatever can touch presents itself to be touched. It is indeed as though everything that is alive . . . has an urge to appear” (Ibid., 29, emphases in the original). This self-display “reaches its climax in the human species” (Ibid., 30) not in “conscious” human activities but in pre-reflective being (Ibid., 36). 24 Ibid., 26. 25 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Nature: Course Notes from the College de France, trans. Robert Vallier (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2003), 189.

MERLEAU-PONTY

 167

26 Given the historical tendency of natural science to discover that appearances are deceptive Portmann explains that we should “not be surprised” to find it has “contributed to the view that the great riddles of life are concealed in the invisible. . . . But such probing into what is most deeply concealed makes us strangers to the appearances of the living creatures around us” (Portmann, Animal Forms, 17). 27 Mary Rawlinson, “The Contingency of Goodness,” in Interrogating Ethics: Embodying the Good in Merleau-Ponty, ed. James Hatley, Janice McClane, and Christian Diehm (Pittsburgh: Dusquene University Press, 2006), 65. 28 Judith Butler, “Sexual Ideology and Phenomenological Description: A Feminist Critique of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception,” in The Thinking Muse: Feminism and Modern French Philosophy, ed. Jeffner Allen and Iris Marion Young (Evanston, IL: Indiana University Press, 1989). 29 Anna Petronella Foultier, “Language and the Gendered Body: Butler’s Early Reading of Merleau-Ponty,” Hypatia 28, no. 4 (Fall 2013): 779. 30 Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei, “Language as the Flesh of Being,” in Interrogating Ethics: Embodying the Good in Merleau-Ponty, ed. James Hatley, Janice McClane, and Christian Diehm (Pittsburgh: Dusquene University Press, 2006), 223. See also Erinn Gilson, The Ethics of Vulnerability: A Feminist Analysis of Social Life and Practice (London: Routledge, 2014). 31 Drawing on work by Matthey Dillon and Dan Zahavi, Anya Dayla addresses criticisms from Levinas. Anya Daly, “Does the Reversibility Thesis Deliver All That Merleau-Ponty Claims It Can?,” European Journal of Philosophy 24, no. 1 (March 2016): 18. See also Dan Zahavi, “Beyond Empathy: Phenomenological Approaches to Intersubjectivity,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 8, no. 5–7 (2001): 151. As Zahavi points out, the encounter with others not only occur in face-to-face encounters but admits our participation with the world in action, perception and use of tools. Dayla points out that at the least, these conflicts between Levinas and Merleau-Ponty show the need to look at the “concrete embodied encounter” and ensure that ethics includes an asymmetry. 32 Ann V. Murphy, “‘All Things Considered:’ Sensibility and Ethics in the Later Merleau-Ponty and Derrida,” Continental Philosophy Review 42 (2010): 443. 33 Ibid., 446. 34 Arendt, Life of the Mind, 33. 35 Ibid., 31. 36 Ibid., 72. 37 Ibid., 70. 38 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 42. See also 70–71, 261. These passages only exemplify a theme that runs through Merleau-Ponty’s entire oeuvre. 39 Arendt, Essay in Understanding, 436. 40 Ibid., 437.

168

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

41 Arendt wrote these remarks even before the publication of Merleau-Ponty’s “Eye and Mind” or The Visible and Invisible and so it is possible that she might have seen that work head in the direction of resolving on philosophical terms, but given the robust critiques from Levinas, Derrida and feminism, it seems unlikely. 42 Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, 58.

18 Arendt and Critical Theory: Impossible Friends Rick Elmore

There has been in recent years a growing attempt to rethink the longstanding opposition between Arendt and Adorno, or phenomenology and critical theory. For example, Rensmann and Gandesha, authors of the only English collection on these two thinkers, contend that “the stand-off between Arendt and Adorno . . . represents a false either/or” that today “appears well and truly obsolete.”1 For them, the stark oppositions between Marxism and progressivism, critical theory and phenomenology, and dialectics and anti-dialectical method that has structured the supposed incompatibility of Arendt’s and Adorno’s projects no longer makes sense; in the post–Cold War era, the development of and resistance to neoliberalism, disaster capitalism, and the “War on Terror” do not fall cleanly along traditional political and theoretical divisions—a fact that opens up common ground between these two supposed foes. Their worry is that the continued insistence on the incompatibility between Arendt and Adorno, phenomenology and critical theory, leads to an increasingly narrow and canonical understanding of these figures and trends, one that ignores productive tensions. Hence, they argue that it is past time to explore the common ground between these two ardent critics of Nazism and proponents of political freedom and social change. Yet while it is difficult to disagree with the spirit of this attempt, and I am deeply sympathetic to rethinking the relationship between critical theory and phenomenology, I do not think we should be so quick to cede the incompatibility between Arendt and Adorno. More specifically, I think this hope of reconciliation drastically underestimates the degree to which

170

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

Arendt’s and Adorno’s different methodological commitments shape every aspect of their thought. Additionally, I wonder if it is not the differences between Arendt’s and Adorno’s projects, and perhaps also between phenomenology and critical theory, that speak most directly to our political moment, as the question of whether political change comes through reform or revolution remains perhaps the most pressing political concern of our times. Furthermore, one would be hard pressed to find two thinkers more philosophically and personally opposed than Arendt and Adorno. It is well known that Hannah Arendt despised T. W. Adorno, once calling him, in a letter to Karl Jaspers, “one of the most disgusting people that I know.”2 This personal animosity seems to have been driven by three factors. First, Adorno was the director of Günther Anders’ (then Stein’s), her onetime husband, failed Habilitation in philosophy of music at the University of Frankfurt, and Arendt blamed Adorno for effectively ending Anders’ teaching career in Germany.3 Second, she held Adorno and the Institute for Social Research accountable for the tragic suicide of Walter Benjamin. Arendt was convinced that the Institute failed to offer Benjamin financial support at the precise moment that could have made a difference for his survival.4 Lastly, she saw Adorno as the driving force behind the postwar campaign to expose the Nazi sympathies of her teacher and former lover, Martin Heidegger, whom she would increasingly defend against the claim of ideological Nazism.5 Most of these perceived injustices are little corroborated by the facts. For example, it is simply a matter of record that the Institute for Social Research and Adorno in particular did provide material support for Benjamin and that Adorno was hardly the only intellectual of the era calling for Heidegger to explain his relationship to Nazism. Moreover, Arendt and Adorno did not know each other well, with three letters appearing to be the extent of their direct correspondence.6 Hence, as Rensmann and Gandesha succinctly put it, the relationship between these two thinkers was characterized by “lack of interest and indifference on Adorno’s side” and “by an abiding and cultivated animosity . . . on Arendt’s.”7 Yet while neither read the other’s work in any serious way, one might wonder whether such an engagement would have fared any better than their personal relationship. Philosophically, Arendt and Adorno had little in common: one, a devoted civic republican who openly rejected dialectical method as a “dangerous” and “treacherous hope used to dispel legitimate fear,”8 and the other, an avowed Marxist who developed a full-blown dialectical account of contemporary society and for whom dialectics expresses nothing less than “the world’s agony raised to a concept.”9 It is on the basis of this radical methodological difference that each develops their account of the relationship between the public and the private spheres, economics and politics, and the nature of political power and revolution. Thus, while it is certainly too simplistic to stage their opposition as merely a disagreement over dialectics, it is the central issue in the theoretical chasm between them. This disagreement led them to develop profoundly opposed accounts of political power and social

ARENDT AND CRITICAL THEORY

 171

transformation: Arendt led toward a more pragmatic, reformist strategy of social change and Adorno led toward a more utopian, revolutionary strategy. Hence, in what follows, I trace the consequences of this disagreement over dialectics in order to show how it leads Arendt and Adorno to quite different accounts of social transformation, accounts that mark the difficulty of bringing together phenomenology and critical theory more generally. I begin by recalling that it is the rejection of dialectics that shapes Arendt’s central concern, namely, the character and possibility of legitimate political power. In many ways, Arendt’s work is oriented by the insistence on distinguishing political power from violence. As Keith Breen states, “It is no overstatement to argue that the different currents of [Arendt’s] thought are united by a sustained attempt to distinguish violence from power and to resurrect an alternative concept of the ‘political.’”10 This attempt emerges from Arendt’s belief that the problem of modern politics rests on the “misunderstanding” that “politics is essentially a matter of ruling and being ruled, of domination.”11 For her, modernity is defined by this misunderstanding, grounding itself on the assumption that power and violence are two forms of the same thing. This misunderstanding reduces politics to a play of competing violences or political realism, a thinly veiled justification for rule by the strongest that is already on the road to fascism. Hence, central to Arendt’s work is the attempt to articulate a notion of legitimate political power that would not derive its force from a logic of domination—a notion of political power that would have nothing to do with violence. This positive response to political realism has found significant support among thinkers such as Jürgen Habermas, who embraces, to varying degrees, Arendt’s attempt to redefine power in opposition to violence.12 On the other hand, this project has garnered a good deal of criticism from those who contest Arendt’s rigid and seemingly ontological distinction between power and violence.13 The disagreement between these two camps, although quite diverse, comes down to a basic questioning of the ability to maintain the strict separation between a series of seemingly co-conditioning terms, such as power and violence, public and private, and politics and economics; or, put more succinctly, this disagreement comes down to the question of whether the relation between power and violence can be understood non-dialectically. As suggested earlier, Arendt’s project rests on a strict separation of what she argues are legitimate political concepts—for example, the public sphere, freedom, action, and power—and what she argues are their nonpolitical or “social” opposites—the private sphere, domination, means-ends reasoning, violence, etc.14 She argues that these separations admit of no dialectical relation, since dialectics harbors the dangerous and false idea “that good can come out of evil; that . . . evil [and this would hold for violence and injustice as well] is but a temporary manifestation of a still hidden good.”15 For Arendt, a transition from evil to good, violence to power, and the private to the public is problematic not just in the logical sense that something cannot arise from its opposite but also in the material sense that power, freedom,

172

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

and politics emerge at ontologically distinct sites from violence, domination, and the social. One sees this clearly in On Violence, where Arendt contends that power and violence emerge from utterly incommensurate sites: power being collective, inherently justified by its inclusive scope, never governed by means-ends logic, and never in need of technology to achieve its goals, while violence, being always individual, necessarily excludes deliberation, governed by means-ends logic, and always in need of technological prosthesis.16 Hence, in the name of avoiding the modern confusion between power and violence, Arendt places a strict, ontological dualism at the heart of her system. There is of course significant debate about the status of these categories for Arendt. However, what should be immediately clear is that Arendt’s insistence on these non-dialectical separations would be intolerable for Adorno since her granting of conceptual and ontological primacy to power, the political, and the public constitute nothing less than a form of ideology. The question of ideology plays key roles in both Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism and Adorno’s Negative Dialectics.17 They share a deep concern for the pivotal role ideology played in the rise and functioning of fascism and Nazism. Yet as in nearly all other aspects of their thought, they develop quite different accounts of ideology. For Arendt, ideology operates by positing an account of reality that is divorced from the empirical world of facts, allowing its adherents to freely deduce a vision of the world that is totally impervious to contestation by appeal to experience or social realities.18 It is this rejection of a common world that marks the totalitarian horror of ideology, since “we may say that radical evil has emerged in connection with a system in which all men [and any common accounts of the world] have become equally superfluous.”19 In a world in which no facts or competing experiences can change our understanding of reality, we enter a realm in which no one’s experience can matter at all. It is this radical fungibility of the common world that lies at the heart of ideology, for Arendt. Similarly, Adorno also worries about the potential for ideological domination, and the foreclosing of competing conceptions of reality. Yet for him, this risk arises from the assertion of moral primacy, rather than the denial of a shared world of facts. As Adorno argues in Negative Dialectics, “Ideology lies in the substruction of something primary.”20 It lies in “the very category of the root” and the assertion of “the origin.” Ideology emerges the moment one insists that “a man ranks first because he was there first,” the moment one gives primacy to some originary element at the expense of its supposed opposite.21 What Adorno resists in the origin is not that some things come before others but that this fact entails a moral or evaluative priority. This is, he contends, the great conceit that connects dualism to the ideological logic of prima philosophia: “Wherever a doctrine of some absolute ‘first’ is taught there will be talk of something inferior to it, of something absolutely heterogeneous to it, as its logical correlate. Prima philosophia and dualism go together.”22

ARENDT AND CRITICAL THEORY

 173

All forms of dualism and all claims to first philosophy are, for Adorno, fundamentally ideological insofar as they justify the domination of what is posited as secondary by what is taken to be primary. It is this justification of domination that most concerns Adorno about ideology, “the category of the root” always being a category of “domination” and violence.23 Hence from an Adornian perspective, Arendt’s most essential distinctions between power and violence, the public and the private, and the political and the social would be fundamentally ideological, a positing of power, the public, and the political as primary in relation to an always secondary, violent, and private social sphere. Hence, for Adorno, Arendt’s attempt to avoid categorically the confusion of power and violence amounts to an assertion of direct and unmediated access to the truth of the world, an assertion that is the very mark of ideology. Of course, Arendt is hardly naive about the dangers and likelihood of confusing power and violence, given that the vast majority of On Violence is spent detailing the numerous ways in which this confusion can arise. However, her insistence that the way in which one best avoids this danger is through a strict, non-dialectical separation of power and violence marks, nonetheless, a fundamental roadblock to the attempt to bring her and Adorno’s work together. Moreover, this disagreement over power and violence affects the compatibility of their projects as a whole, her rejection of dialectics positioning her account of the relationship between economics and politics, and the processes of social change in opposition to Adorno’s. Whether one is inclined toward Arendt’s civic republicanism or Adorno’s Marxism, it is difficult to square their understandings of the relationship between economics and politics. For Adorno, the economic gives rise to the political, insofar as he follows Marx in seeing the modes of production and the commodity form as essential to the production and reproduction of social and political life. In opposition to this account, Arendt insists on separating the economic and political, her worry being that to see the economic as determinative of political life effectively reduces politics to economics, evacuating the space for free, collective (political) action.24 This distinction helps explain for her the success of the American Revolution over the French Revolution, for example.25 It is outside the scope of this chapter to give a complete account of the role of economics in Arendt’s and Adorno’s thought. Yet generally, their different understandings of the importance of economics to politics fundamentally shift their accounts of political resistance and social transformation. To assert that economics and the forces of production are significant factors in determining social and political realities is to assert their importance, not just for political power but also for political resistance. This is perhaps the essential difference between Adorno and Arendt. For Adorno, politics cannot be theorized apart from the economic, insofar as the “identity principle” (the logic by which nonidentical objects are made identical through the processes of conceptualization) is socially expressed in the “exchange principle, the reduction of human labor to the abstract universal concept of average

174

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

working hours.”26 Exchange, and more specifically the wage labor system, is the “social model” of “the identity principle,” a basic identitarian reduction underlying all forms of sociality, insofar as forming a group of unique individuals into a single collective requires that “non-identical individuals and performances become commensurable and identical.”27 Wage labor is the concrete expression, at least in our current capitalist epoch, of the very possibility of politics and social organization, wage labor embodying the essential reduction around which each of us is given a recognizable identity and around which the very “we” of our social world is expressed. Hence, for Adorno, the contestation of the current social arrangement requires a fundamental overturning of the wage labor system. As he puts it directly, “If no man had part of his labor withheld from him anymore, rational identity would be a fact, and society would have transcended the identifying mode of thinking.”28 For Adorno, social revolution must occur at the level of economic and social production, which is to say, primarily outside the sphere of deliberative debate and policy, since revolution requires the radical transformation of the means of production. Arendt, too, argues that political revolution requires collective action, which, she contends, requires a public, communal space in which equals can come together in “word and deed.”29 Key to this possibility of politically free action is that “man must have liberated himself from the necessities of life” and from concern for self-preservation, since otherwise it will be these concerns of “the home” or economics that will determine their actions.30 Arendt reasserts here the need to separate economics and politics, arguing that politically free action and deliberation ought to have nothing to do with questions of individual, economic survival; rather, for her, politics takes place through active, collective deliberation and the enactment of what is deemed best for us as a political community. Putting aside an elaboration of Arendt’s detailed description of the processes and forms of political action and speech, it is clear that her account of social transformation stands in marked opposition to Adorno’s. While, for Adorno, a change in the modes of production, and specifically an overturning of the wage labor system, is required for true social transformation, Arendt sees economic questions as at best secondary to the deliberative discourses of politics, suggesting a model of social change through collective political reform. Hence, we find in Arendt and Adorno two entirely opposed accounts of historical change, and it is perhaps this opposition that is the lesson of reading their work together. The relationship between Arendt and Adorno was a tense affair both personally and philosophically. Yet, the relationship between their projects forms around the question of how to theorize political power, resistance, and freedom without simply reasserting the dominant ideology of realpolitik that, for both of them, underlies liberal democratic theory as much as fascism and Nazism. In the broadest terms, if Arendt is right that power and violence, the public and the private, and the economic and the political

ARENDT AND CRITICAL THEORY

 175

can and ought to be verifiably separated, then a politics that builds on this division, developing formal and institutional policies that maintain and expand freedom of choice and civic life, seems ideal. However, if Adorno is right that power and violence, the public and the private, and economics and politics can never be reliably divided, then one will never be able to create formal and institutional policies that can guarantee the supposed freedom of choice and civic life so treasured by Arendt. Rather, these possibilities could only be realized through a radical transformation of society, one in which private and public interests were no longer structurally opposed, a system that, for Adorno, would no longer be predicated on private property and individual rights. Thus, no matter which interpretation one is drawn to, we see in the essential differences between Arendt and Adorno not simply competing accounts, but a reminder of the fact that, in political concerns, one cannot always have it both ways. The opposition between Arendt and Adorno, and also often between phenomenology and critical theory, reminds us that all tactics cannot be aligned, that each of us will have to decide in our own political lives whether political power and violence can be reliably distinguished, whether economics is essential to politics, and whether or not social transformation can be best achieved through reform or revolution. From this perspective, the difference between Arendt and Adorno, far from being a problem to solve, actually helps us think through our most essential political commitments, commitments that may be, no less than Arendt’s and Adorno’s relationship, irreconcilable, but which are sharpened because of this.

Notes 1 Lars Rensmann and Samir Gandesha, “Introduction,” in Arendt and Adorno: Political and Philosophical Investigations, ed. Lars Rensmann and Samir Gandesha (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012), 6. 2 Ibid., 5. 3 Ibid., 4–5. 4 Ibid., 5. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid. 8 Arendt, On Violence (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1970), 56. 9 T. W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973), 6. 10 Keith Breen, “Violence and Power: A Critique of Hannah Arendt on the ‘Political.’” Philosophy and Social Criticism 33, no. 3 (2007): 343–72, 344. 11 Arendt, On Violence, 43.

176

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

12 See Jürgen Habermas, “Hannah Arendt’s Communications Concept of Power,” Social Research 44, no. 1 (1977): 3–24; George Kateb, “Political Action: Its Nature and Advantages,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt, ed. Dana Villa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 130–48; John McGowan, “Must Politics be Violent? Arendt’s Utopian Vision,” in Hannah Arendt and the Meaning of Politics, ed. Craig Calhoun and John McGowan (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 263–96. 13 See Seyla Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1996); Richard Bernstein, “Rethinking the Social and the Political,” in Philosophical Profiles: Essays in a Pragmatic Mode, ed. Richard Bernstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 238–59; Breen, “Violence and Power,” 343–72; and Sheldon Wolin, “Hannah Arendt: Democracy and the Political,” in Hannah Arendt: Critical Essays, ed. Lewis P. Hitchman and Sandra K. Hitchman (New York: SUNY Press, 1994), 289–306. 14 For a concise overview of Arendt’s conception of politics, see her essay “What Is Freedom?,” in Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin Books, 1993), 143–72. 15 Arendt, On Violence, 56. 16 Ibid., 44, 46. 17 See, in particular, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, 1968), 460–83, and Negative Dialectics, 37–40. 18 Arendt, Origins, 471. 19 Ibid., 459. 20 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 40. 21 Ibid., 155. 22 Ibid., 138. 23 Ibid., 155. 24 For Arendt’s most detailed account of economics and productive processes, see her analysis of labor, work, and action in The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1958). 25 Arendt, On Revolution (London: Penguin Books, 1963). 26 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 146. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid., 147. 29 Arendt, “What Is Freedom?,” 148. 30 Ibid.

19 Arendt and the New York Intellectuals Richard H. King

Along with her emphasis upon the necessity of solitude for thinking, Arendt also needed others to provide a context for that thinking.1 Whether it was at her university in Marburg, Germany, where her lifelong friendship with Hans Jonas was formed and where she carried on the affair with Martin Heidegger; in Paris where she met her husband Heinrich Blücher and made friends with Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, and a host of French intellectuals; or, finally, in New York City where, after arriving in May of 1941, she quickly became an indispensable part of the New York intellectual scene, she was always in constant intercourse with like-minded thinkers, writers, and academics. Though the term “public intellectual” is pretty threadbare by now, it was the intellectuals around the Trotskyist-modernist Partisan Review (PR; 1934–99); the American Jewish Committee’s new monthly, Commentary (1945-); Dwight Macdonald’s seed bed for the New Left, Politics (1944–49); Irving Howe’s democratic socialist, Dissent (1954–); and the more eclectic New York Review of Books (1964–) that Russell Jacoby had in mind when he bemoaned the disappearance of a certain type of engaged intellectual.2 Here it should be noted that until the 1960s, Arendt shied away from identifying with any community of scholars in America. After her experience in Germany, she was also profoundly wary of the political and moral deformation of her academic friends who let themselves be co-opted by the Nazis, though she certainly had academic friends in New York and Chicago. She preferred to see herself as a freelance intellectual who could speak actively and independently on public matters as well as cultural issues. Much of her written work in America was a response to that which shocked,

178

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

prodded, or enticed her into thought and action, not the disciplinary trends and squabbles in which academics get caught up. After her arrival in America in 1941, she wrote for magazines, such as Aufbau and Menorah Journal, but began publishing (in English) in PR in 1944. PR sought to mesh a modernist literary sensibility with an independent Marxist, often Trotskyist, analysis of contemporary society. For instance, PR’s first issue in 1937 included contributions from T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Edmund Wilson, and Leon Trotsky. Arendt’s first piece in the quarterly in the fall of 1944 was “Franz Kafka: A Revaluation,” which she followed in the next issue with “Approaches to the ‘German Problem.’” Both issues contained reproductions of drawings by artists such as Kandinsky, Masson, Feininger, Miro, and Leger. The names on the cover of the two issues included Robert Penn Warren, George Orwell, and Lionel Trilling along with Elizabeth Bishop, Mary McCarthy, and Randall Jarrell. Other card-carrying New York intellectuals, including Mary McCarthy, Delmore Schwartz, Harold Rosenberg, Nicola Chiaromonte, F.W. Dupee, Isaac Rosenfeld, and Daniel Bell, were already contributors, too. As a group, the New York intellectuals were distinct from their contemporaries in America and Europe. The majority of them were Jews from Eastern European working-class and lower-middle-class backgrounds. They were trying to escape the strictures—and often the poverty—of Jewish life and traditions. Most of them had bachelor’s degrees from City College of New York (CCNY) rather than from Columbia or New York University. Far fewer earned PhDs, but by the 1960s, many had secured places in the academy. Daniel Bell’s provocative thesis about the postwar “end of ideology” grew out of his own experience as and with the emergence of ex-communists, former socialists, and ex-Marxists from the 1930s. According to Bell, the New York intellectuals found themselves in a state of belatedness, of having “come too late” to ride the first historical wave of political or cultural modernism. Though the universalist orientation of the Left in the 1930s had been liberating, the postwar years saw them move back to rediscover their prewar culture roots. They were anti-Stalinists by and large, but still very much Left-of-Center, though each decade one or more of them headed toward the center and some to the Right end of the political spectrum.3 It did not take long for Arendt to be considered one of the “elders,” those who by age and achievement seemed to be leaders. Yet the New York intellectuals lacked a single charismatic figure around whom they could group; nor were they united around a single theory such as the Freudians in Central Europe and then America (or the Lacanians later in France). They lacked the philosophical cohesion of the young academics, mainly historians and political philosophers, who coalesced around Leo Strauss at the University of Chicago from the 1950s onward. The New York group prided itself on being able to write with power and verve, what Irving Howe called “the style of brilliance.”4 Arendt was no literary snob or

ARENDT AND THE NEW YORK INTELLECTUALS

 179

purveyor of esoteric vocabularies in either German or English, but she was one of the few philosophers in the group and enjoyed the prestige of having been educated in the German tradition. Though he had attended Heidegger’s lectures in Marburg in the late 1920s, Sidney Hook was very much a disciple of John Dewey and a militant anti-communist—and not favorably disposed toward Arendt. Another philosopher, William Barrett, helped Arendt with her English in the mid-1940s and later wrote a popular introduction to existentialism, Irrational Man (1958).5 Later, her Marburg friend, the philosopher of science Hans Jonas, came to teach at the New School for Social Research. Nor had Arendt ever been a Marxist, though her husband Heinrich Blücher was a Spartacist in postwar Germany, and three of her most powerful essays dealt with Rosa Luxemburg, Bertolt Brecht, and Walter Benjamin. She bridled at the label “anti-Stalinist,” not because she had any affection for the Soviet leader or for the Bolshevik experiment, but because her politics did not derive from the Bolshevik tradition on either side of the Atlantic. The only tradition she acknowledged as hers, she once insisted to historian Gershom Scholem, was “the tradition of German philosophy.”6 Her German-Jewish bourgeois background in Königsberg contrasted markedly with that of the Ostjuden among the New York intellectuals, both in intellectual and in class terms, yet the fact that she had fled the Nazis and fascists twice and risked her life to come to America gave her a certain moral prestige. Finally, though feminism was not on the political or cultural agenda for the New York intellectuals, Arendt was one among several strong and talented women who were part of the group, including her good friend Mary McCarthy and Diane Trilling, who was married to one of the other elders, Lionel Trilling, as well as writers Jean Stafford and Elizabeth Hardwick, both of whom had been married to poet Robert Lowell. The poet Delmore Schwartz once referred to Arendt as “that Weimar flapper.” All that said, Arendt and her feminine compatriots belonged to a generation just prior to the emergence of second-wave feminism. This meant they were too proud to be feminists and tried to be both full-time wives and intellectuals.7 Though Arendt was well-grounded in German and European literature, her association with the New York intellectuals expanded her literary interests to include American writers. She admired Lowell’s poetry, which often thematized his New England heritage. Her two favorite American novelists were Herman Melville, whose novella “Billy Budd” she mined for insights about good and evil in On Revolution (1963), and William Faulkner, whose fictional exploration of the presence of the past in the present, the importance of narrative for the shaping of individual and group identity, and the memorialization of heroic figures in the past Arendt found powerfully suggestive. She was a senior editor at Shocken Press in the 1940s, and helped translate and publicize the work of Franz Kafka as it came to America. Along with other New York intellectuals, her work had the effect of weaning Americans from their steady diet of British literature

180

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

and creating more space for the great Russian novelists of the nineteenth century and for the classics of German-language literature—and for the expatriate Henry James over the rougher-hewn Theodore Dreiser. Another contemporary poet she admired was W. H. Auden, whom she befriended in the late 1950s in New York, and who proposed to Arendt after Heinrich’s death in 1970. (She turned Auden down, though she felt guilty about it.) Yet another poet, Randall Jarrell, was given tutorials in German poetry from Arendt since he wanted to translate as much as possible into English. In exchange, the astute poet and critic taught Arendt much about the strengths of American poetry. Of the literary critics among the New York intellectuals, Arendt was closest to Alfred Kazin, who was always one of her champions and closest friends, along with McCarthy and Macdonald. But Arendt was never much impressed by American philosophy, for example, pragmatism, and spent more time with political theorists than she did with philosophers. But she had few doubts about the importance of America’s literature, even for European literary types. But what specifically did Arendt get from her New York intellectual colleagues and how did her presence affect them? Above all, Arendt persuaded them of the deep seriousness of the moral collapse suffered by Europe as it spiraled downward into the abyss of the war years. At the end of the war, she and Macdonald were almost alone in explicitly exploring the issues of guilt and responsibility arising out of what was later named the Holocaust.8 The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), one of the great postwar works of historical imagination, supplied her intellectual colleagues with a conceptual and moral framework for responding to the Final Solution. Overall, for them, it was always Arendt, the author of Origins, not Arendt, the political theorist of On Revolution, who struck them as the epitome of moral seriousness. The various editors of the postwar New York journals of opinion gave her the platforms from which she could develop her thought (and, incidentally, work on her English). She belonged to that sector of the New York intellectuals who, though anti-Stalinist, fought against the attempts to curtail the civil liberties of those accused of being fellow travelers and procommunist. Nor did she ever become obsessed with anti-communism, to the exclusion of other concerns. She spoke out clearly against McCarthyism, even though she and her husband faced possible deportation had it become known that he lied about having ever been a communist when he arrived in the United States in 1941. Her first real challenge to Northern liberal opinion was a short essay “Reflections on Little Rock” (1959), which questioned the wisdom of the federal government’s imposition of desegregation on the public schools of the South.9 In doing so, she displayed little knowledge of American history and constitutional interpretation, not to mention the fact that she imposed the experience of Jews in Germany upon the quite different struggles of black Southerners with racial segregation. Then, and in the next decade, she never really found out how to talk about race in

ARENDT AND THE NEW YORK INTELLECTUALS

 181

America or in general. Strangely, except for Nathan Glazer, few of the New York intellectuals had much grounding in the history or sociology of race in America in general or in the South specifically. Only African American novelist Ralph Ellison, author of Invisible Man (1952) and tangentially linked to the New York intellectuals, set her straight about what had been at issue in Little Rock for black Southerners. In one sense, Arendt was intellectually braver than the other New York intellectuals in taking on such a morally and historically complex issue. But she was wrong, even in her own terms, on the substantive issues involved. But it was the controversy over her Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) that clearly had the most disruptive impact on the New York group, even more so than the McCarthy episode of the 1950s. Arendt felt betrayed when the editors of PR, Philip Rahv and William Phillips, gave her book to Lionel Abel to review, since he was known to be hostile to Arendt. Public debates were held in New York and around the country, mainly at universities, about the “banality of evil” and Arendt’s charges against the actions of the Jewish Councils during the war. Some, though, stood up for her: the gentiles, McCarthy, Macdonald, and Lowell, wrote strong defenses; Daniel Bell and historian Raul Hilberg, along with Kazin, defended her at one debate before several hundred people; and Hans Morgenthau and Bruno Bettelheim also wrote in praise, not just in defense, of her Eichmann book. She suspected Isaiah Berlin and Leo Strauss of stirring up feeling against her, something that the Israeli government actually did. Beyond the merits of the arguments on both sides, it was the class-cultural tension between German Jews and Eastern European Jews among the New Yorkers that helped turn the mood of the controversy into something so nasty. Irving Howe, who had worked for Arendt at Schocken, turned on her with a vengeance, while historian Barbara Tuchman and political theorist Judith Shklar were vicious in their criticisms of Arendt and her book. Many who had sought to escape the smothering clutches of Yiddishkeit and the stetl mentality in the 1930s had rather suddenly arrived at a greater appreciation of what Irving Howe called “the world of the fathers,” including Howe and novelist Saul Bellow, who translated works from the Yiddish. To people like them, Arendt’s German-Jewish arrogance, with its heartless criticism of Israel and of the Jewish leadership during the war, was unbearable. By the mid-1960s, some referred to her as a “self-hating Jew.” Beyond that, the fact that Arendt was a woman setting straight a lot of male intellectuals and had publicly criticized Israel’s handling of the trial in Eichmann in Jerusalem helped make this issue even more explosive and divisive among the New Yorkers. Arendt’s former invincibility was further compromised by a piece on Martin Heidegger she published in The New York Review of Books in October 1971 that avoided any serious condemnation of his flirtation with the Nazis in the 1930s (and later it emerged that she had carried on an affair with Heidegger when she was a student). Furthermore, Arendt had no use for the New York intellectuals such as Irving Kristol who became

182

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

neoconservatives after 1968. They were sometimes called “Ex-Trotskyists for Nixon.” They took their distance from the New Left, the anti-war movement, Black Power, and even the Great Society liberalism of the 1960s. One of their number, Nathan Glazer, wrote a stinging criticism of Arendt’s supposed drift to the Left in foreign policy terms.10 But, unlike several of her New York colleagues, she never let her hostility to Marxism and communism define the range, importance, or strength of her moral commitments. At the time of her death, she was clearly worried about the political drift to the Right rather than to the Left, represented by the persisting strength of consumer capitalism and a weakening sense of the public good. Her last public contribution was a speech that later appeared as a short, sobering article in the New York Review of Books. Its title, “Home to Roost,” clearly indicates that she remained concerned with the fate of the republic.

Notes 1 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2nd ed. (New York: Meridian Books, 1958), 476. 2 R. Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe (New York: Basic Books, 1987). 3 Arguing the World, dir. Joseph Dorman (New York: Thirteen/WNET, 1997); Daniel Bell, “The Mood of Three Generations” and “The End of Ideology in the West: An Epilogue,” in The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1960), 286–99, 369–77. 4 Irving Howe, “The New York Intellectuals (1969),” in Selected Writings 1950–1990 (San Diego, CA: Harvest/HBJ, 1990), 240–80. 5 W. Barrett, Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor, 1962). 6 Hannah Arendt, “A Letter to Gershom Scholem,” July 24, 1963, in The Jewish Writings, ed. Jerome Kohn and Ronald H. Feldman (New York: Schocken, 2007), 466. 7 Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (New Haven, CN: Yale, 1982); D. Laskin, Partisans (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000). 8 D. Macdonald, “The Responsibility of Peoples,” in Memoirs of a Revolutionist (Cleveland, OH: Meridian, 1958), 33–72. 9 Hannah Arendt, “Reflections on Little Rock,” Dissent VI (1959): 45–56. 10 Nathan Glazer, “Hannah Arendt’s America,” Commentary 60 (1975): 61–67.

PART II

Key Writings 

184

20 St. Augustine Charles E. Snyder

Aurelius Augustinus (Augustine) was born in the North African city of Thagaste in 354  CE. In his early years, Augustine engaged in a broad and distinguished study of the liberal arts. Later, as a young man, he was inspired by the dialogues of Cicero, principally the Hortensius, a now lost exhortation aimed at persuading readers to pursue a life of philosophical reflection. He decided to apply his precocious talents as a student and pursue a career teaching rhetoric and Latin literature in his hometown of Thagaste before taking up teaching posts at Carthage, Rome, and finally Milan, the last stop of this early professional voyage. For most of this journey, Augustine had been a reluctant adherent of the Manichean religion. At Milan, Augustine attended the sermons of Ambrose, the then bishop of the city. Those sermons put Augustine in direct contact with modern Platonism. The encounter with Ambrose and what we now call neo-Platonism liberated Augustine from the Manicheans, setting him on a path toward his famous conversion to Christianity and eventually his return to North Africa, where he became the bishop of Hippo Regius, near his hometown. He died in 430 CE and was canonized as a saint in 1303 by a Christian pope named Boniface VIII. He left a heterogeneous body of writings, letters, sermons, and treatises, and a masterpiece of philosophical autobiography, the Confessions. Nearly fifteen hundred years after Augustine’s death, Hannah Arendt fulfilled the doctoral requirements of the University of Heidelberg with a dissertation on the concept of love in Augustine. The dissertation was published in 1929 under the title Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin: Versuch einer philosophischen Interpretation, literally in English “The Concept of Love in Augustine: An Attempt at a Philosophical Interpretation.” In conformity with the mores of professional philosophers at modern research

186

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

universities such as Heidelberg, the dissertation of this twenty-two-yearold German-Jewish woman ascended beyond the biographical vicissitudes of Augustine’s eventful life. Young Arendt sought refuge in the purity of rational analysis. The dissertation does exactly what the subtitle states: it is an “attempt” at interpreting Augustine philosophically, or in Arendt’s German, the attempt “einer rein philosophisch interessierten Untersuchung [at a purely philosophically interested investigation].”1 The philosopher in training lifted a single “problem”—the problem of neighborly love—from the heterogeneity of Augustine’s corpus and the turbulence of his intellectual life. Perhaps more than any other single feature of the work, this extraction signifies what Arendt meant by an investigation of purely philosophical interest.

Political Turn Over a decade later, the rise of the Nazi movement in Germany lands Arendt in the United States. By this time, her intellectual interests have shifted dramatically. Arendt is no longer driven by a purely philosophical interest. To be sure, the early philosophical interpretation of Augustine yields dividends on the other end of that shift, especially for the emergence of the theme of human plurality in its relation to the question of politics2 and the modern process of secularization as it contrasts with the ancient quest for immortality.3 Arendt first articulates a notion of freedom under the rubric of “natality” in the early 1950s. That notion soon finds its way into an essay, “Ideology and Terror: A Novel Form of Government,” which she later added to the 1955 and 1958 re-editions of The Origins of Totalitarianism.4 The notion of natality has its conceptual pedigree in the early analysis of the dissertation, but at that point that notion had not been explicitly formulated. After the war, Arendt would characterize Augustine en passant as a “great thinker who lived in a period which in some respects resembled our own more than any other.”5 Any comparison between Roman political hegemony in the fourth century CE and the rise of totalitarianism in the twentieth was unthinkable for Arendt, or anyone else, during the years of the Weimar Republic. But just as Arendt would later publicly identify as a political theorist and resist the label of philosopher, a corresponding transformation had by then occurred in the way that Arendt refers to Augustine. Whatever his thought represented for Arendt in the late 1920s, Augustine certainly wasn’t the political theorist that he became for Arendt in the early 1950s.6 This political emphasis continues. A year before the publication of The Human Condition (1958), Arendt names Augustine “the greatest theorist of Christian politics.”7 Arendt published as early as 1930 a short article for a German newspaper marking the fifteen hundredth anniversary of Augustine’s death. But even then Arendt did not consider the political implications of Augustine’s writings germane to the Protestant and Christian traditions of Western Europe.8

ST. AUGUSTINE

 187

Philosophical Return In Volume II of The Life of the Mind, a section titled “Willing,” Arendt claims that Augustine’s solution to the “problem” of the will resembles the modern philosophical solution of John Stuart Mill, that of the “enduring I.”9 Furthermore, Arendt now attributes to Augustine “a philosophy of natality,” a contention that no other reader of Augustine would ever dare to attribute to his writing. With this philosophy in view, Arendt discerned a second resemblance between Augustine and modern philosophy: Augustine’s philosophy of natality is viewed as the conceptual precursor of Kant’s doctrine of the freedom of the will.10 Karl Jaspers noted Arendt’s tendency to make Augustine say things that he does not say. Augustine’s “philosophy of natality” is a prominent instance of this observation.11 Only in revising the dissertation in the 1960s does Arendt insert the Latin phrase that elicited the later formulation of natality: “That a beginning be made, man was created.”12 Arendt’s use of this passage dates from a period in which she reflected on the devastating experiences of anti-Semitism, mass deportations, statelessness, concentration camps, police terror, and mass murder. A 1951 entry in her Denktagebuch shows Arendt thinking through Augustine’s Latin phrase at De civitate dei (xii 20) in connection with totalitarianism, but the first published citation of this passage and the concomitant elaboration of freedom under the rubric of birth appears only in 1953. Birth becomes natality, the ontological root of human action and the “miracle that saves the world” in The Human Condition.13 The decisive shift in the twenty-year interval from Der Liebesbegriff to the 1958 English edition of Origins is a move toward an explicit formulation of human plurality, as Arendt’s Denktagebuch attests. To preserve the integrity of human plurality for the maintenance of the public sphere, Arendt’s postwar thought banishes love as a passion of antipolitical consequence. If love, this most powerful anti-political force, is to survive and flourish, it must remain private, for “it is killed, or rather extinguished, the moment it is displayed in public.”14 Young Arendt’s analysis of the “problem of love” (das Liebesproblem) gave this force a decidedly formal exegesis it would no longer require. In Liebesbegriff, Arendt had yet to formulate in distinct terms that “men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world.”15 Nor had she articulated an alternative to the passion of love, namely, the solidarity guided by reason, as she does in On Revolution. If those notions had crystallized in the dissertation, Arendt would have been equipped to criticize Augustine’s concept of love for God in the terms she had later reproached Rousseau’s flawed conception of the general will. Both Rousseau and Augustine annihilate the distinction built into the condition of human plurality, the very condition “of living as a distinct and unique being among equals.”16

188

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

Conclusion Arendt admitted that in her youth she had been “truly naïve.”17 Whether, and to what extent, this negative self-assessment was meant to apply to the conceptual analysis of love is difficult to say. Of course, Arendt did sell the rights to the dissertation to a publisher, sensing that the publisher would soon go bankrupt and that she could at least turn a quick profit from the deal.18 But Macmillan later acquired the rights to the dissertation. She contractually agreed in 1962 to assist the publisher in reissuing the dissertation in English, but Arendt later reneged on the contract and abandoned the project. Why does this project of revising the dissertation for publication fall stillborn? One might suppose that Arendt was at the time consumed by the controversy following her report on the Eichmann trial,19 or, given the extent of her annotations, perhaps full-scale revisions would have been too arduous and thus not worth the effort.20 There is, I think, a simpler explanation. Arendt lost interest in completing a philosophical project she hardly had the interest in reviving. Her turn in the late 1940s and early 1950s to the political condition of human plurality set the stage for her theoretical interventions in the dark times of modern life. One might protest against this political reading of Arendt’s postwar development, insisting that the dissertation already contained the fundamental structure of philosophical concerns that would remain in place throughout her work. A political reading might overlook a philosophical dimension of questioning that persists in her thought from the dissertation onward. In other words, Arendt had arrived at this philosophical dimension as a “political philosopher” before the traumatizing events of the 1930s and 1940s. The purpose of Arendt’s The Human Condition, according to this philosophical reading, is to address universal questions about the dignity of worldly existence, given that “the entirety of Arendt’s philosophical work merely elaborates the question she posed directly to Augustine: ‘Why should we make a desert out of this world?’”21 The philosophical reading is, however, anachronistic and one-sided. The form and content of her early philosophical concerns with Augustine undergo a political transformation as she began to respond to incidents of lived experience in the postwar period. Arendt continued to think through universal questions about the world, but those questions generate opinions of her own. Her interpretations of texts no longer seek that naive refuge in the abstruse realms of exegesis and conceptual analysis. Exegesis gives way to what is more often than not the articulation of her own engaged judgments—framed by notions of plurality, solidarity, and natality—that are issued in order to make sense of what we are doing in an age which has lost the capacity for political action. No one should deny that Augustine’s philosophy helped Arendt arrive at those framing notions, but the politically inflected notions of plurality and solidarity foreign to the dissertation would have to wait until after her

ST. AUGUSTINE

 189

exile from Germany and the devastating experiences of the war for explicit formulation. The shift from exegesis and analysis of concepts to the opinionated writings which respond to incidents of human experience is less a formal shift than it is a transformation in the substance of her thought.

Notes 1 Hannah Arendt, Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin: Versuch einer Philosophischen Interpretation, ed. L. Lütkehaus (Berlin: Philo, 2003), 27. Cf. J. V. Scott and J. C. Clark, eds., Love and Saint Augustine: Hannah Arendt (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 6. 2 Hannah Arendt, Denktagebuch, two volumes, ed. U. Ludz and I. Nordmann (Berlin: Piper, 2002), Heft I (21), Heft II (8). 3 Hannah Arendt, “History and Immortality,” Partisan Review 24, no. 1 (1957): 11–53. 4 For a survey of the emergence of natality in Arendt’s thought, see R. Tsao, “Arendt’s Augustine,” in Politics in Dark Times: Encounters with Hannah Arendt, ed. S. Benhabib (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2010), 39–57. 5 Hannah Arendt, “Understanding and Politics,” Partisan Review 20, no. 4 (1953): 377–92, 390. 6 Arendt, Denktagebuch I, Heft III, April 1951 (16), (17), (18). 7 Arendt, “History and Immortality,” 20. Cf. Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future (New York: Viking Press, 1961), 73. 8 Hannah Arendt, “Augustin und der Protestanismus,” Frankfurter Zeitung 902, no. 75 (April 12, 1930): 12. 9 Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, Vol. II (New York: Harcourt, 1975), 104. 10 Ibid., 109. 11 G. McKenna, “Augustine Revisited,” First Things 72, no. 46 (1997): 43–47, 46. 12 “Initium ergo ut esset, creatus est homo,” Augustine, De civitate dei (xii 20). Cf. Arendt, Life of the Mind, 108. 13 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1958), 247. 14 Ibid., 51–53. 15 Ibid., 8, n. 1. Cf. S. Chiba, “Hannah Arendt on Love and the Political: Love, Friendship, and Citizenship,” The Review of Politics 57, no. 3 (1995): 505–35, 510, 520 on Arendt’s bias. 16 Arendt, Human Condition, 158. 17 Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers, Correspondence: 1926-1969, ed. L. Kohler and H. Saner (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1992), Arendt to Jaspers, September 7, 1952. Cf. E. Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For the Love of the World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), 91.

190

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

18 Arendt and Jaspers, Correspondence, Arendt to Jaspers, January 16, 1966. 19 Scott and Start, Love and Saint Augustine, xiv. 20 S. Kampowski, Arendt, Augustine, and the New Beginning: The Action Theory and Moral Thought of Hannah Arendt in Light of Her Dissertation on St. Augustine (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008), 15. 21 R. Beiner, “Love and Worldliness,” in Hannah Arendt: Twenty Years Later, ed. L. May and J. Kohn (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 281.

21 Rahel Varnhagen Samir Gandesha

Rahel Antione Frederike Varnhagen (née Levin), born May 19, 1771, in Berlin, the eldest child of successful merchant Markus Levin, was hostess of one of the most important Berlin literary-philosophical salons of the romantic period between 1790 and 1806.1 She went on to host, with her husband, Karl Auguste Varnhagen von Ense, a subsequent salon from 1821 to 1832, whose participants included such illustrious figures as Bettinia von Arnim, Henrich Heine, G. W. F. Hegel, Leopold von Ranke, and Eduard Gans. The household into which Rahel was born included four other younger siblings: brothers Markus (1772) and Ludwig (1778), and sisters Rose (1781) and Moritz (1785). The family remained orthodox and was relatively unversed in German culture but was also “equally uneducated in Jewish learning.”2 While she published no books of her own and a handful of essays in journals such as Das Schweizerische Museum and Das Morgenblatt, as well as Denkblätter der Berlinerin, Rahel Varnhagen distinguished herself as a gifted letter writer, having penned 10,000 letters over the course of her life, of which some 6,000 have survived. Her husband edited and published her correspondence in the two decades after her death. Hannah Arendt deeply identified with Rahel and published this biography with the Leo Baeck Institute in 1957. She had begun working on the book in the late 1920s and managed to finish all but two chapters before she was forced to flee Germany in 1933. The biography also served as a kind of micrological history of the extraordinary case of German Jews, “an altogether unique phenomenon; nothing comparable to it is found even in other areas of Jewish assimilation.”3 In a letter written on September 7,

192

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

1952, in response to Karl Jaspers’s critical assessment of the book, Arendt explains its significance in the following way: You are absolutely right when you say that this book “can make one feel that if a person is a Jew he cannot really live his life to the full.” And that is of course a central point. I still believe today that under conditions of social assimilation and political emancipation the Jew could not “live.” Rahel’s life seems to me a proof of that precisely because she tried out everything on herself without attempting to spare herself anything and without a trace of dishonesty. What always intrigued me about her was the phenomenon of life striking her like rain pouring down on someone without an umbrella.4 If the biography was a history of the German Jews, it was one that, in the words of Walter Benjamin, “flashed up in a moment of danger”5 insofar as, according to Arendt, it “was written with an awareness of the doom of German Judaism (although, naturally, without any premonition of how far the physical annihilation of the Jewish people in Europe would be carried).”6 What fascinates Arendt most is the oscillation of Varnhagen’s life between being a pariah or an outcast, which Rahel was clearly tortured by, describing her Jewish identity as a “slow bleeding to death,”7 and the seductions of assimilation and simply leaving this identity behind for the life of the parvenu or “upstart.” In writing the biography, Arendt drew upon Rahel’s published letters as well as on a prodigious quantity of unpublished materials. What made Arendt’s labors particularly difficult and arduous were the numerous corrections, interpolations, and “mutilations”8 made by her husband, Varnhagen, himself, especially to the three-volume Buch des Andenkens, published in 1834. According to Arendt, which she reiterates in her letter to Jaspers, Varnhagen “made wholesale corrections, expunged essential portions and coded personal names in such a manner that the reader was deliberately led astray.”9 Especially significant is the fact that while Varnhagen’s actions had been exposed, one thing that remained unchallenged was his deliberate falsifications of her life . . . that almost all of his omissions and misleading coding of names were intended to make Rahel’s associations and circle of friends appear less Jewish and more aristocratic, and to show Rahel herself in a more conventional light, one more in keeping with the taste of the time.10 As we shall see, the irony of her husband’s presentation of her life sought to assimilate her as a parvenu despite her heroic deathbed embrace of pariahdom. If Rahel ultimately rejected assimilation, this did not prevent Varnhagen from seeking to reduce such a deviant embrace of her own difference to identity. To invoke Benjamin once again: “even the dead won’t be safe from the enemy if he wins.”11

RAHEL VARNHAGEN

 193

Arendt considered her approach to writing about Rahel Varnhagen’s life to be an “unusual”12 one insofar as she did not intend the book to be simply about her subject’s life, which is presumably what a biography traditionally is. It was not about Rahel’s “psychology,” as this would have entailed the introduction into her life of categories and norms from “the outside.” Neither was it necessarily intended as a work about the extraordinary role Rahel played in the history of German romanticism, nor was it about the Berlin “Goethe cult” of which she was the originator. Arendt was also not particularly interested in the social history of the period, nor about her ideas or world view. Her interest consisted in narrating “the story of Rahel’s life as she herself might have told it.”13 In describing the biography thus, Arendt betrayed a profound and enduring identification with her subject. So deeply did she identify with Rahel that Seyla Benhabib is compelled to suggest that her biography can be read as narrating Arendt’s own development: “The one narrated about becomes the mirror in which the narrator also portrays herself.”14 The biography sets out the contours of Rahel Varnhagen’s life, and it details her amorous entanglements with Count Karl von Finckenstein, Friederich von Gentz and, most importantly, of course, Karl Auguste Varnhagen himself. It also provides an account of Rahel’s Jägerstrasse salon in Berlin, which was frequented by a veritable who’s who of prominent literary and philosophical figures. The book culminates in Rahel’s courageous, deathbed embrace of her long-repudiated Jewishness. What characterized her life as a whole with the exception of this late embrace, in Arendt’s view, was her refusal to act but rather to accept life as a kind of destiny, a fate over which she had little control. She regarded her erotic relationships with men, for example, as “chance” encounters. This was especially the case with Karl Auguste Varnhagen, whom she met in 1808 in the wake of a hardening of German attitudes toward Jews and, indeed, a resurfacing of anti-Semitism, with the entry of Napoleon’s army into Germany in 1806, after a period in which it had briefly fallen into abeyance. It was arguably this external pressure that led Rahel, already deeply conflicted about her own Jewish identity, to embrace a full-blown assimilationism, to become, in other words, a parvenu. She first sought to change her name to Robert, following the lead of her two brothers, who were also baptized. Upon making the acquaintance of and marrying Varnhagen, she took his name and sought to assimilate into gentile society. This entailed a kind of self-sacrifice and, indeed, outright violence to her own identity. What role does Rahel Varnhagen play in Arendt’s oeuvre as a whole and what is its contemporary importance? According to Arendt herself, it doesn’t play much of a role in her thought after 1933.15 Nonetheless, it is possible to identify three main themes that we find reflected in her subsequent writings, particularly in the decade or so to follow: the relation between pariah and parvenu, and the idea of what Bernard Lazare calls the “conscious pariah” that can be regarded as constituting the essence of Arendt’s idea of political subjectivity; the centrality of reflective judgment in the encounter with the “new”; and the fraught relation between the distinct

194

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

spheres of the “social” and the “political.” Let us takes these up in turn before addressing the question of the actuality of the biography. The word “pariah,” according to the OED, derives from South Indian language Tamil. When capitalized, it refers to “a member of a scheduled tribe of South India concentrated in southern Kerala and Tamil Nadu, originally functioning notably as sorcerers and ceremonial drummers and also as laborers and servants, but later increasingly as ‘untouchables’ in unsanitary occupations.”16 It has come to mean lower caste, outcast, and, more recently, “a member of a despised class of any kind; someone or something shunned or avoided; a social outcaste.” Parvenu, in contrast, designates newly acquired wealth and/or social status; it refers to the assimilated social climber or what Arendt calls the “upstart.”17 In Arendt’s account, this characterized “court Jews” as well as Jewish millionaires. In order to become a parvenu, the pariah was compelled to deny or, indeed, excise those pariah qualities so despised by society at large. The position of the pariah, then, as alluded to earlier, is one of self-sacrifice insofar as the cost of belonging to the dominant order requires the sacrifice of one’s own difference. There is a third option for Arendt that she adopts from Bernard Lazare, and this is the idea of a “conscious pariah,” one who is aware of and embraces her position as a “social outcast,” not simply as kind of fate as an act of political commitment.18 The conscious pariahs constituted in her view a unique tradition within Judaism and included, in addition to Rahel Varnhagen, figures such as Henrich Heine, Sholom Aleichem, Lazare himself, Charlie Chaplin, and Franz Kafka.19 In contrast to the Jew-asparvenu who embodied all “Jewish shortcomings—tactlessness, political stupidity, inferiority complexes, and money-grubbing,” in Arendt’s view, “all vaunted Jewish qualities—the ‘Jewish heart,’ humanity, humor, disinterested intelligence—are pariah qualities.”20 These pariah qualities are exemplified by the poet Henrich Heine, whom she calls the “lord of the dream,” whose status as outcast placed him in solidarity with the “common people” but as the “people’s poet.”21 Indeed, here Arendt’s assessment of Heine is strikingly similar to that of her rival, Theodor W. Adorno, who suggests: “His idea of sensuous fulfillment encompasses fulfillment in external things, a society without coercion and deprivation.”22 Moreover, for Adorno, Heine the homeless outcast showed the way in which homelessness was to become a universal condition in late capitalism. In Arendt’s view, the quintessential pariahs were the refugees who, themselves, “represent the vanguard of their peoples.”23 It was these refugees, exiles, and outcasts who would search for and find a home in the space of the political. For the political was quintessentially the space in which differences could appear without be being reduced to an overarching identity insofar as it was premised on the idea that “men” not “Man” inhabited the earth. Arendt’s early, perhaps unreasonable, idealization of secular Zionism was founded on the idea of a unique sense nationhood rooted in a shared experience of a “pariah people.”24

RAHEL VARNHAGEN

 195

For Arendt, thinking through the fraught and shifting relations between these two categories, again as applied to Jews, enabled her to clarify the relation that is central to her mature political theory as set forth in her 1958 magnum opus, The Human Condition. This is the relation between the “social” and the “political.” As she puts it in The Origins of Totalitarianism, “During the 150 years when Jews truly lived amidst, and not just in the neighborhood of, Western European peoples, they always had to pay with political misery for social glory and with social insult for political success.”25 Significantly, in the Human Condition, published only one year after Rahel Varnhagen, Arendt traces the rise of the social, and Rousseau’s criticism of it for effacing the uniqueness of the individual, in the demands of the salons of “high society.” Although, for Arendt, Rahel’s Jägerstrasse salon was a unique space in which individual differences could be glimpsed between the existing hierarchies of ancient regime, on the one hand, and the equalizing tendencies of Enlightenment reason, on the other. I shall return to the significance of the distinctive nature of the space of the salon below. It was precisely because she was a “conscious pariah,” someone situated betwixt and between German culture, on the one hand, and Jewish traditions, on the other, that she was actually forced to think; and to think, as Arendt makes clear, in her late Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, is to engage in the activity of judging. Given her pariah status, “the world was unknown and hostile to her; she had no education, tradition or convention with which to make order out of it; and hence orientation was impossible for her.”26 Rahel was therefore placed in a position in which she was compelled to think through particulars rather than with universals. Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewish Woman must be regarded as a vital contribution to understanding the role and contribution of this extraordinary woman, the tensions of her historical moment between the spheres of “the social” and “the political,” and the ways in which such tensions forced upon her an oscillation between the contradictory positions of pariah and parvenu. Furthermore, this biography suggests the vital importance during a time of historical transformations of the capacity to think or the exercise of judgment. As Ron H. Feldman, the editor of Arendt’s Jewish Writings attests, “Her awareness that she was a conscious pariah is probably the crucial factor that allowed her to see the political dimension in Kant’s understanding of aesthetic reflective judgment.”27 The latter is to be differentiated from what Kant called determinative judgment insofar as in this form of judgment we apply preexisting universals to new particulars, while in reflective judgment we must, through an act of the imagination by which we put our self in the place of the other, invent new universals out of unprecedented particulars for which no existing concepts are applicable or adequate. The political role of reflective judgment became especially evident for Arendt in the rise of totalitarianism in the middle of the mid-twentieth century. The salon itself was for Arendt an ambivalent space as alluded to earlier. On the one hand, it existed firmly within the sphere of the social insofar

196

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

as it constituted a dimension of “high society” with its characteristic hierarchies and exclusions. But it is also bore features of what she comes to call the political or the public realm: it is a space in which its participants confront one another as equals—so galling to Rahel’s amours such as Count von Finckenstein, because they proved no match for Rahel’s formidable intellectual presence—and in terms of appearance. One could say that the salon could be regarded as a kind of model of the political for Arendt in the same way that the nineteenth-century coffee houses play a key role in Habermas’s account of the bourgeois public sphere.28 In Seyla Benhabib’s view, a reading of Arendt’s Varnhagen biography presents us with an “alternative genealogy of modernity” in which the later sharp differentiation in The Human Condition between the social and the political is drawn in somewhat more finely grained terms.29 If the abiding Jewish experience for Arendt was the paradoxical and shifting relation between “political misery” and “social glory,” “social insult,” and “political success,” for Benhabib, the salon was a unique space in which the opposition between these distinct spheres could be reconciled. Benhabib notes the way in which the space of the salon complements and complicates the normative model of the Athenian polis that she comes to idealize in her mature work. Such a complication throws new light on Arendt’s approach to the “woman question.” Benhabib writes: If we proceed to decenter Arendt’s political thought, if we read her work from the margins towards the center, then we can displace her fascination with the polis to make room for her modernist and women-friendly reflections on the salons. The “salons” must be viewed as transitory but also fascinating precursors of a certain transgression of the boundaries between the public and the private. Arendt developed her political philosophy to ward off such transgression, but as a radical democrat she could not but welcome such transgression if they resulted in authentic political action, in a community of “speech and action.”30 Rahel Varnhagen has a remarkably contemporary resonance. Arguably, this has to do with its overarching concern, of course, with the problem of identity. Over the past few decades, indeed likely dating back to the liberation struggles of the New Left, one of the key problems in political thought has been that of identity.31 Feminists, critical race theorists, and postcolonial theorists have all contributed in important, though at times troubling, ways to thinking about the role of identity in politics. One of the dominant ways of doing so is by linking identity to lived experiences and by conceiving such “intersecting” lived experiences to the subjectivity of specific groups, such as women, blacks, Latino, Asians, and so on and so forth, with one possible implication being a kind of separatism of these different communities from the dominant white society. Such a view would, in Arendt’s view, conflate ethnos and ethos, and familial affiliation with a

RAHEL VARNHAGEN

 197

shared orientation to a certain form of life or bios. Contemporary identity politics assumes that individuals can be grouped under more general categories rather than opening up in-between spaces in which differences within groups are permitted to appear. Therefore, it falls into the trap constituted out of the opposition between pariah and parvenu, between self-segregation and self-abnegating assimilationism. But such an opposition for Arendt would be unacceptable insofar as each option, in its own way, foreshortens the spaces between those individuals and reduces them to an overarching identity. It also forecloses the possibility of there being anything in common between members of these various groups. It is here that the model of Rahel Varnhagen can be especially instructive: at the end of her life she resisted both poles of the opposition—pure pariahdom and assimilationism. She revealed herself at the end of her life to be a “conscious pariah.” Ultimately, the conscious pariah is capable of being together (mitSein) with those who are, themselves, different rather than embodying an identical sameness.

Notes 1 Manfred Frank, The Philosophical Foundations of Early German Romanticism, trans. Elizabeth Millán-Zaibert (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2004), 25, alludes to the vital role played by the Berlin salons in shaping the thought of early romantic writers and challenges the accepted viewed that they were, by and large, reactionary, anti-Enlightenment thinkers: “In the authors of early German Romanticism, the Nazis saw—and rightly so—ground breakers of the literary avant-garde whose irony was biting and whose sincerity was doubted, enemies of the bourgeoisie, friends and spouses of Jews, welcomed guests and discussions partners at the Jewish Berlin salons, aggressive proponents of the ‘emancipation of the Jewry,’ and finally ‘subversive intellectuals’ (a slogan which the Nazis used indifferently to refer to members of the political left, to Jews as a group, and to intellectuals).” 2 Hannah Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewish Woman, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), 229. 3 Ibid., xvii. 4 Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers, Correspondence 1926–1969 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992), 198. 5 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Harcourt Brace Johanovich, 1968), 255. 6 Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen, xvii. 7 Ibid., 7. 8 Ibid., xiv. 9 Ibid., xiv–xv.

198

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

10 Ibid. 11 Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 255. 12 Ibid., xv. 13 Ibid. 14 Seyla Benhabib, “The Pariah and Her Shadow: Hannah Arendt’s Biography of Rahel Varnhagen,” Political Theory 23, no. 1 (February 1995): 11. 15 Arendt and Jaspers, Correspondence 1926–1969, 197. 16 “pariah, n. and adj.” OED Online. July 2018. Oxford University Press. http:​// www​.oed.​com.p​roxy.​lib.s​fu.ca​/view​/Entr​y/137​889?r​edire​ctedF​rom=P​ariah​& (accessed November 29, 2018). 17 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 62. 18 Hannah Arendt, “The Jewish State,” in The Jewish Writings, ed. Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 283–86. 19 Hannah Arendt, “The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition,” in The Jewish Writings (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 276–77. 20 Hannah Arendt, “We Refugees,” in The Jewish Writings (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 274. 21 Arendt, “The Jew as Pariah,” 277. 22 T. W. Adorno, “Heine the Wound,” in Notes to Literature Volume I, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 81. For an extended consideration of Arendt and Adorno, see Rensmann and Gandesha, Arendt and Adorno: Political and Philosophical Investigations (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012). 23 Arendt, “We Refugees,” 274. 24 See for example, Leon Botstein, “The Jew as Pariah: Hannah Arendt’s Political Philosophy,” Dialectical Anthropology 8, nos. 1/2 (1983): 47–73. 25 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1973), 56. 26 Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen, 17. 27 Arendt, The Jewish Writings, xxviii. 28 Jürgen Habermas, The Stuctural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An inquiry Into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Berger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991). 29 Benhabib, “The Pariah and Her Shadow,” 5–24. 30 Ibid., 19–20. 31 See, for example, Haider, Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in an Era of Trump (London: Verso, 2018).

22 The Origins of Totalitarianism Richard Bernstein

During the summer of 1950, when Hannah Arendt was on vacation, she was reading proofs for The Origins of Totalitarianism.1 In a letter to her mentor and beloved friend, Karl Jaspers, she wrote: A lot of work here, of course, but also swimming and walks. Reading proofs is awful, that is boring. I’ve taken a different epigraph from Logik from the one I mentioned to you before: “Give yourself up neither to the past nor to the future. The important thing is to remain wholly in the present.” That sentence struck me right in the heart, so I’m entitled to have it.2 We know just how deeply that sentence struck Arendt, because she not only used it as the epigraph for The Origins of Totalitarianism, she also adopted a variation of it for one of her most important collections of political essays, Between Past and Future. In the preface to that collection, she gives an extraordinarily imaginative interpretation of a Kafka parable, a parable intended to illuminate “the gap between past and future”—the gap for exercise in political thinking—the gap in which we gain experience in how to think. This is the “place” where Arendt located all genuine thinking, and it has special significance for this symposium, “Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism—Fifty Years Later.” There is a temptation on such occasions to look back, to praise (or criticize) what she said then—to show the ways in which she was perhaps insightful and/or misguided in her understanding of the phenomenon she was struggling to comprehend: totalitarianism. I hope to resist this temptation, to view the book not as a past document but as an aid in our own present thinking, in our own attempt to live in the gap between past and future. I know from personal experience that this is the

200

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

way in which she would have wanted her work discussed. I had the good fortune to participate in what, I believe, was the first conference that was exclusively devoted to her thought. It took place in Toronto almost 30 years ago, and Hannah Arendt was present. Characteristically, she was not at all interested in honorific speeches. She wanted to discuss the issues, and she actively engaged in discussion and argument with all the speakers. But let me remind you that in her preface to The Origins of Totalitarianism, she already indicated that this is the way in which she wanted the book to be read. She concluded the preface by declaring, “all efforts to escape from the grimness of the present into nostalgia for a still intact past, or into the anticipated oblivion of a better future, are vain.”3 Perhaps the most grim, disturbing, but realistic sentence in the entire book comes near its conclusion, when she says, “Totalitarian solutions may well survive the fall of totalitarian regimes in the form of strong temptations which will come up whenever it seems impossible to alleviate political, social, or economic misery in a manner worthy of man.”4 Anyone who has lived through the uses of terror and torture, the massacres, genocides and “ethnic cleansings” that have occurred all over the world during the past few decades is painfully aware of how strong and ever present these temptations are. The Origins of Totalitarianism is a difficult, complex, disjointed book. At times it reads more like a series of independent essays loosely related to each other. It ranges over the most diverse topics, from observations about various aspects of anti-Semitism to a discussion of nineteenth-century British imperialism, from the nature of rights to the decline of the nationstate and the logic of total domination. Some of her claims appear to be outrageous and perverse. For example, she tells us that anti-Semitism, “a secular nineteenth-century ideology,” did not exist prior to the 1870s. Or again, she asserts that the notorious forgery, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” served the Nazis “as a textbook for global conquest.” The Origins of Totalitarianism defies any simple attempt to state a key thesis or argument, and it is difficult to find coherence among its various parts. Arendt admitted that the title itself is misleading insofar it suggests that she was primarily concerned with discovering the key historical causes of totalitarianism. She explicitly stated that was not her intention. It is even difficult to determine just what she means by totalitarianism and its distinguishing characteristics. The difficulties are compounded because of the different layers of scholarship and analysis—like archaeological strata—some dating back to her study of European anti-Semitism in the 1930s, when she was living in Paris. Even as she was writing the book, she frequently changed her mind about its structure. She originally thought of it as her “imperialism” book. It was only when she was close to finishing it that she decided to include an explicit discussion of totalitarianism. Yet the book—like the classic that it is—is extraordinarily rich and, in the best Arendtian sense, thought provoking. It makes us think! Arendt believed that the only way to communicate thinking is to infect others with the perplexities that stimulate one’s own thinking. It

THE ORIGINS OF TOTALITARIANISM

 201

is in this spirit that I want to probe some themes—some fragments—that are still relevant for us for our exercises in political thinking today. Let me begin by citing a claim she makes in her preface. Like an ominous specter, it hovers over the entire book, and it still haunts us today. She writes, “And if it is true that in the final stages of totalitarianism an absolute evil appears . . . it is also true that without it we might never have known the truly radical nature of evil.”5 But what is the “truly radical nature of evil”? We gain a clue from an exchange of letters with Jaspers. Arendt sent one of the first copies of her book to Jaspers in order to arrive in time for his birthday in February 1951. After quickly reading the preface and the conclusion, he sent a short letter expressing his gratitude, and he concluded his letter with a cryptic question “Hasn’t Jahwe faded too far out of sight?”6 In her reply, Arendt wrote that his question “has been on my mind for weeks now without my being able to come up with an answer to it.”7 But Jaspers’ question did provoke the following reflections about radical evil. Evil has proved to be more radical than expected. In objective terms, modern crimes are not provided for in the Ten Commandments. Or: the Western Tradition is suffering from the preconception that the most evil things human beings can do arise from the vice of selfishness. Yet we know that the greatest evils or radical evil has nothing to do anymore with such humanly understandable, sinful motives. What radical evil really is I don’t know, but it seems to me it somehow has to do with the following phenomenon: making human beings as human beings superfluous (not using them as means to an end, which leaves their essence as humans untouched and impinges only on their human dignity; rather, making them superfluous as human beings). This happens as soon as all unpredictability—which, in human beings, is the equivalent of spontaneity—is eliminated. And all this in turn arises from—or, better goes along with—the delusion of the omnipotence (not simply with the lust for power) of an individual man. If an individual man qua man were omnipotent, then there is no reason why men in the plural should exist at all.8 She reinforces this understanding of absolute or radical evil, when she declares in Origins: Difficult as it is to conceive of an absolute [radical] evil even in the face of its factual existence, it seems to be closely connected with the invention of a system in which all men are equally superfluous. The manipulators of this system believe in their own superfluousness as much as in that of all others, and the totalitarian murderers are all the more dangerous because they do not care if they themselves are alive or dead, if they ever lived or never were born. The danger of the corpse factories and holes of oblivion is that today, with populations and homelessness everywhere on

202

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

the increase, masses of people are continuously rendered superfluous if we continue to think of our world in utilitarian terms.9 I completed this paper before September 11, 2001, but after that infamous day, I reread The Origins of Totalitarianism, and Arendt’s uncanny prescience and relevance struck me. Let me remind you of a few key themes. She had a profound sense of the contingency and unpredictability of catastrophic events. She believed that the twentieth century represented a complete break with tradition. This demands that we rethink the very concepts and categories with which we try to comprehend unprecedented events. We must learn to think without banisters (Denken ohne Geländer). Typically, one’s immediate response—after the initial shock and confusion—is to appeal to what is familiar—demonizing the “enemy”—rather than seeking to comprehend what is new and novel. But this is a temptation that must be resisted. The words from her 1951 preface might have been written today. The conviction that everything that happens must be comprehensible to man can lead to interpreting history by commonplaces. Comprehension does not mean denying the outrageous, deducing the unprecedented from precedents, or explaining phenomena by such analogies and generalities that the impact of reality and the shock of experience are no longer felt. It means, rather, examining and bearing consciously the burden which our century has placed upon us—neither denying its existence nor submitting meekly to its weight. Comprehension, in short, means the unpremeditated facing up to, and resisting of, reality—whatever it may be.10 When Arendt explores the connection between radical evil and the phenomenon of superfluousness, she warns us that fanatics believe in their own superfluousness. They are committed to a movement that transcends the life or death of any individual. This is why she thought that the appeal to conventional utilitarian categories or appeals to common sense were completely inadequate to account for the phenomenon of radical evil. Even more important, although Arendt thought that the problem of evil was the major intellectual problem after the Second World War, and returned over and over again to explore the intricacies of both radical evil and the banality of evil, she also warned how dangerous the concept of evil is when it enters into politics and political discourse. Politics requires judgment, discrimination, and compromise. But “evil” has an absolutistic aura. When used to demonize an enemy, it allows for no compromise. The only response to evil is to eradicate and destroy it. It is frightening the way in which the emotional and rhetorical appeal to “evil” is now being used to manipulate public policy. I also believe that Arendt—if she were still alive—might well have endorsed the claim made by Jorge Semprum when he returned to Buchenwald in 1992. Semprum, who had been imprisoned and tortured at the camp during

THE ORIGINS OF TOTALITARIANISM

 203

the Second World War, spoke of Buchenwald as the “place in the world where totalitarianism of the twentieth century, Nazism and Bolshevism, have together left their mark.” He then declared, “Islamic fundamentalism will wreak incredible havoc in the next century if we do not pursue a politics of reform and justice throughout the world.”11 Superfluousness is one of the most pervasive and intriguing leitmotifs that run through Origins, and it appears in many places in the book. I want to focus on two important aspects of it that are especially relevant for Arendt’s understanding of politics, and what she considered the source of the most troubling, intractable political problems of the twentieth century— problems that loom even larger as we enter the twenty-first century. The first directly concerns what she means by radical evil. The second recognizes that the most significant political events of the twentieth century have resulted in the creation of masses of homeless, violently displaced populations— populations which are treated as if they were superfluous. *** When Arendt explicitly turns her attention to the phenomenon of totalitarianism, the heart of her discussion focuses on “total domination.” Total domination, as she understands it, strives to organize the infinite plurality and differentiation of human beings as if all of humanity were just one individual. . . . The problem is to fabricate something that does not exist, namely, a kind of human species resembling other animal species whose only “freedom” would consist in “preserving the species.” Totalitarian domination attempts to achieve this goal through ideological indoctrination of the elite formations and through absolute terror in the camps.12 The concentration and extermination camps epitomize this “logic of total domination”; they are the laboratories in which the ideological conviction that “everything is possible” is tested: The camps are meant not only to exterminate people and degrade human beings, but also serve the ghastly experiment of eliminating, under scientifically controlled conditions, spontaneity itself as an expression of human behavior and of transforming the human personality into a mere thing, into something that even animals are not; for Pavlov’s dog, which, as we know was trained to eat not when it was hungry but when a bell rang, was a perverted animal.13 Arendt sketches a three-stage analytical model of the logic of total domination. The first stage is the killing of the juridical person in human beings. What she has in mind is something that began long before the death camps were organized and has been graphically portrayed in the

204

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

remarkable diaries of Victor Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness (1998). It is the arbitrary yet systematic way in which groups of individuals are stripped of any and all juridical rights. In the camps no inmates have any rights. The second stage is the murder of the moral person in human beings. Here the SS were diabolically ingenious in seeking to corrupt human solidarity, and undermining the exercise of moral conscience. Totalitarian terror achieved its most terrible triumph when it succeeded in cutting the moral person off from the individualist escape and in making the decisions of conscience absolutely questionable and equivocal. When a man is faced with the alternative of betraying and thus murdering his friends or of sending his wife and children, for whom he is in every sense responsible, to their death; when even suicide would mean the immediate murder of his own family—how is he to decide? The alternative is no longer between good and evil, but between murder and murder. Who could solve the moral dilemma of the Greek mother, who was allowed by the Nazis to choose which of her children should be killed?14 But the murder of the juridical person and the moral person is not yet the worst. It is the third stage in this analytical model of total domination that brings us closest to radical evil—to making human beings as human beings superfluous. This third stage is the attempt to destroy any vestige of human individuality, unpredictability, plurality, and spontaneity. To destroy individuality is to destroy spontaneity, man’s power to begin something new out of his own resources, something that cannot be explained on the basis of reactions to environment and events. Nothing then remains but ghastly marionettes with human faces, which all behave like the dog in Pavlov’s experiments, which all react with perfect reliability even when going to their own death, and which do nothing but react.15 Consider Arendt’s chilling description of the aim of this logic of total domination: What totalitarian ideologies therefore aim at is not the transformation of the outside world or the revolutionizing transmutation of society, but the transformation of human nature itself. The concentration camps are the laboratories where changes in human nature are tested, and their shamefulness therefore is not just the business of their inmates and those who run them according to strictly “scientific” standards: it is the concern of all men.16 Making human beings superfluous as human beings—the epitome of radical evil—takes on much more ominous meaning in this logic of total domination. The manipulators of this system seek to rival an omnipotent

THE ORIGINS OF TOTALITARIANISM

 205

God and prove that everything is possible—including making human beings into something that is other than and less than human. In the camps there is a systematic attempt to annihilate individuality, plurality, natality, spontaneity, and freedom—to create “living corpses.” These are the very characteristics that Arendt thematized in The Human Condition. They constitute the core of our humanity. Contrary to the fashionable but misguided reading of Arendt that claims her understanding of action and politics is derived from an idealized and nostalgic conception of the Athenian polis, the truth is quite different. It was by looking deeply into the abyss of the practices of total domination—by dwelling on its horrors—that led her to appreciate what is distinctive about our humanity— individuality, natality, plurality, spontaneity, and freedom. Margaret Canovan is emphatically right when she says—and shows in detail—“that responses to the most dramatic events of her time lie at the center of Arendt’s thought,” and that “virtually the entire agenda of Arendt’s political thought was set by her reflections on the political catastrophes of the mid-century.”17 Arendt argued that the violent emergence of totalitarianism was unprecedented, something entirely new, which is not to be confused with or assimilated to tyranny or dictatorship. “What is unprecedented in totalitarianism is not primarily its ideological content, but the event of totalitarian domination itself.”18 The event of totalitarianism explodes our categories of political thought and our standards of moral judgment. “Everything we know of totalitarianism demonstrates a horrible originality . . . its very actions constitute a break with all our traditions.”19 And as Margaret Canovan perceptively notes: In other words, totalitarianism illustrated the human capacity to begin, that power to think and act in ways that are new, contingent, and unpredictable that looms so large in her mature political theory. But the paradox of totalitarian novelty was that it represented an assault on that very ability to act and think as a unique individual.20 But it might be said that with the passing of totalitarian regimes and its aim of total domination, the threat of the elimination of human plurality, natality, and spontaneity has also passed—and the threat that human beings are being made superfluous. But this is not the way Arendt understood our situation in the twentieth century. There are less dramatically violent, but no less effective ways of distorting, repressing, and eliminating these characteristics of human life. I, along with many other critics of Arendt, think that she over-draws the distinction between “the social” and “the political,” a distinction elaborated in The Human Condition and developed even more harshly in On Revolution. Indeed, her thesis that “the social” is engulfing, distorting, and repressing the last vestiges of genuine action and public freedom underlies her analysis of the pernicious forces at work in modernity. But I also think

206

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

that she was struggling with a very real fundamental problem that is still with us. She was properly worried about the powerfully effective subterranean forces at work that undermine, distort, and seek to eliminate the conditions required for genuine action and public freedom. Her understanding of modern bureaucracy was shaped more by Kafka than by Weber. It is the “rule of nobodies” that she most feared. At times, she despaired about what is happening to public life, about the disappearance of those public spaces where human beings can argue and debate with each other and can form, exchange, and refine the opinions that are the very stuff of political life. Frankly, when we honestly face the hollowness of what “political life” has become today, it is hard not to share her despair. But Arendt refused to become a prophet of doom. In the preface to Origins, she emphatically declares: “This book has been written against a background of both reckless optimism and reckless despair. It holds that Progress and Doom are two sides of the same medal; that both are articles of superstition, not of faith.”21 *** But let me return to the leitmotif of superfluousness, and to the second aspect that I want to discuss. What Hannah Arendt wrote 50 years ago might just as well as been written today. Much more stubborn in fact and much more far-reaching in consequence had been statelessness, the newest mass phenomenon in contemporary history, and the existence of an ever-growing new people comprised of stateless persons, the most symptomatic group in contemporary politics. Their existence can hardly be blamed on one factor alone, but if we consider the different groups among the stateless it appears that every political event since the end of the First World War inevitably added a new category to those who lived outside the pale of law.22 The phenomenon she describes here has become even more global and acute in our time. In the Middle East, Africa, the former Yugoslavia, and indeed throughout the world, there has been the sudden creation of masses of stateless, homeless people who are treated as if they were superfluous. And there seems to be little hope of stopping this potentially explosive political occurrence. In this regard, Arendt’s comments about rights—and especially the fundamental “right to have rights”—have a striking contemporary relevance. Arendt always believed that all genuine thinking is rooted in one’s lived experience. Let us not forget her own story, her own living experience as a stateless person. In 1933, shortly after she was arrested and interrogated for eight days in Berlin because she was doing research at the Prussian State Library on Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda for her Zionist friends, she fled from Germany, and eventually made her way to Paris. In 1940, like many other German-Jewish illegal émigrés, she was sent to the internment camp,

THE ORIGINS OF TOTALITARIANISM

 207

Gurs, as an “alien enemy.” It was only in the chaos of the first days when the Nazis invaded France that she escaped from Gurs. She rejoined her husband, Heinrich Blücher, and eventually they surreptitiously managed to cross the Spanish border and make their way to Lisbon where they sailed for New York. For 18 years she had lived as a stateless person until she finally became an American citizen. She never forgot this experience of living as a stateless Jew. In one of the first articles written after she arrived in New York, she said: “Apparently nobody wants to know that contemporary history has created a new kind of human being—the kind that are put in concentration camps by their foes and in internment camps by their friends.”23 This experience of statelessness is one reason why Arendt was so skeptical about abstract appeals to human rights. “The Rights of Man, after all, had been defined as ‘inalienable’ because they were supposed to be independent of all governments; but it turned out that the moment human beings lacked their own government and had to fall back upon their minimum rights, no authority was left to protect them and no institution was willing to guarantee them”:24 The calamity of the rightless is not that they are deprived of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, or of equality before the law and freedom of opinion—formulas which were designed to solve problems within given communities—but [that] they no longer belong to any community whatsoever. Their plight is not that they are oppressed but that nobody wants even to oppress them. Only in the last stage of a rather lengthy process is their right to live threatened; only if they remain perfectly “superfluous,” if nobody can be found to “claim” them, may their lives be in danger.25 And she epitomizes this need to belong to a community—to a polity—where rights can be exercised and protected when she declares: Not the loss of specific rights, then, but the loss of a community willing and able to guarantee any rights whatsoever, has been the calamity which has befallen ever-increasing numbers of people. Man, it turns out, can lose all the so-called Rights of Man without losing his essential quality as a man, his human dignity. Only the loss of a polity itself expels him from humanity.26 This is why, according to Arendt, the most fundamental right is the right to have rights, the right to belong to a polity—a community that can guarantee and protect an individual’s rights. It is the loss of a polity that expels one from humanity. Once again, by following Arendt’s thought trains, we come back to her primary concern: the need to cultivate and institutionalize public freedom, and the creation of those public spaces where rights become concrete and effective.

208

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

Arendt’s acute observations about the right to have rights and to live within a community that protects these rights is also relevant in confronting the dangerous excesses of unrestrained nationalism. In 1946, even before the publication of Origins, Arendt warned about the “racism of modern nationalism.”27 She held controversial and idiosyncratic views about the modern nation-state. Although she was right in thinking that, with the First World War, the nation-state, as it had existed in the nineteenth century, had been destroyed, she sometimes wrote as if the very idea of the nation-state was no longer relevant for twentieth-century politics. But despite the inadequacies of her understanding of nationalism and the fate of the nation-state, she was extremely insightful about a key problem that is still very much with us today—one that has become especially urgent. She detected the implicit and potentially explosive conflict between state and nation. This is the conflict between the rights of citizens and the rights of sovereign nations—a conflict that was already present in the very formation of modern nation-states. She tells us, “The Declaration of the Rights of Man at the end of the eighteenth century was a turning point in history. It meant nothing more nor less than that from then on, Man, and not God’s command or the customs of history, should be the source of law.”28 These rights were understood to be inalienable, ahistorical, universal rights that were to be upheld even against the sovereignty of the state. But how were these rights to be guaranteed and protected? Presumably by the sovereign nation to which one belonged. A people becomes a nation when “it takes [consciousness] of itself according to its history”; as such it is attached to the soil which is the product of past labor and where history has left its traces. It represents the “milieu” into which man is born, a closed society to which one belongs by right of birth. The state on the other hand is an open society, ruling over a territory where its power protects and makes law. As a legal institution, the state knows only citizens no matter what nationality; its legal order is open to all who happen to live on its territory.29 As long as the nineteenth-century fiction that all Europeans were members of a nation and belonged to “the family of nations” existed, the unstable tension between the declaration of universal rights and the declaration of territorial national sovereignty— whereby one belongs to a culturally identifiable nation that secures and protects these rights—could be ignored. But with the demise of this delicate balance, the rise of nineteenth-century imperialism, and eruption the First World War, this myth of a stable nationstate was exploded. Nationalism signifies essentially the conquest of the state through the nation. . . . The result of the XIX century identification of nation and state is twofold: while the state as a legal institution has declared and must

THE ORIGINS OF TOTALITARIANISM

 209

protect the rights of men, its identification with the nation implied the identification of the national and the citizen and thereby resulted in the confusions of the Rights of Men with the rights of nationals or national rights. Furthermore, insofar as the state is an “enterprise of power,” aggressive and inclining to expansion, the nation through its identification with the state acquires all these qualities and claims expansion now as a national right, as a necessity for the sake of the nation.30 Unfortunately, the conflict between the demands of the “rights” of the nation and the “rights” of citizens have not disappeared. They have a hyperreality today when we witness the forms of ethnic and religious “cleansing” that seek to eliminate those populations who are not considered to be “legitimate” members of a territorial nation. In its extreme form it inflames violent chauvinist nationalisms. But the same unstable conflict is evidenced in more “civilized” and restrained nation-states. I have recently returned from a year in Europe where I followed the German debates about Leitkultur (leading or dominant culture), and discussions throughout all Europe about how to deal with “foreigners”—including those who have lived within a nation for several generations. Underlying these debates, and the attempts to formulate policies for dealing with immigrants and foreigners, is the implicit conflict between the alleged rights of a nation and the rights of individual citizens residing in a territorial state. Extreme rightist groups are demanding that these unwelcome “foreigners” be excluded. More restrained conservative voices demand that these “foreigners” should be assimilated to the “dominant” culture. And those committed to more flexible democratic policies, who believe that all individuals living in a country deserve full legal and political rights, are apprehensive when “foreigners” are violently attacked and murdered. They are rightly haunted by the specter of the early days of Nazi violence. I do not think that we can turn to Arendt for “solutions” for the complex issues that arise today concerning unrestrained violent nationalism, and the new tensions that arise from the conflict between national sovereignty and the rights of individuals living in a nation-state. But I do think she is helpful in specifying and locating one of the primary sources of a leading contemporary political problem that is manifested in different ways throughout the world, and which has become far more acute and trouble-some since 1989. *** Earlier I stated that it is difficult to discern any systematic unity or coherence in the diverse discussions and the different strata that we find in The Origins of Totalitarianism. But I want to add an important caveat to that claim. For there is a pervasive thematic concern that runs through the book—and through all of Arendt’s thinking. Arendt consistently opposed all appeals to historical necessity or inevitability that seduce us into thinking that what has happened must have happened. The philosophy of history—at least those

210

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

versions that make implicit or explicit appeals to historical necessity—is the deadly enemy of genuine politics. The raison d’être of politics is freedom. Throughout her writings, beginning with, and even preceding The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt stresses the opposition between historical necessity and political freedom. In her critiques of the Enlightenment theories of historical progress, in her quarrels with Hegel and Marx, she constantly returns to rooting out any appeal to historical necessity or inevitability. Totalitarianism is not something that had to happen. She rightly abhorred any suggestion that somehow it was the inevitable consequence of the Enlightenment, the history of metaphysics, the nature of Western rationalism, modern bureaucracy, or modern technology. Like any disastrous contingent political event, it might have been prevented if individuals had collectively assumed the political responsibility for combating it. Arendt concludes The Origins of Totalitarianism with a warning and an expression of hope. There remains the fact that the crisis of our time and its central experience have brought forth an entirely new form of government which as a potentiality and an ever-present danger is only too likely to stay with us from now on. . . . But there remains also the truth that every end in history necessarily contains a new beginning; this beginning is the promise, the only “message” which the end can ever produce. Beginning, before it becomes a historical event, is the supreme capacity of man; politically, it is identical with man’s freedom. Initium ut esset homo creatus est—“that a beginning be made man was created” said Augustine. This beginning is guaranteed by each new birth; it is indeed every man.31 The underlying thematic current that runs through Origins is a summons to assume our political responsibility. Its most urgent message, as Canovan tells us, is to look after the world and to take responsibility for what is done in our name, to understand the character and the limits of political action, to be aware of what political freedom requires, and to have the courage to make it a reality. Like the “he” in Kafka’s parable who has two antagonists— one pressing from behind and the other blocking the road ahead—we must learn to live in that gap between past and future. This is the gap in which we must learn to think without banisters, and this is the gap in which we must assume our political responsibility. Let me conclude by allowing Arendt to speak for herself. In 1958, when the second edition of The Origins of Totalitarianism appeared, she used the occasion to reflect on the book and to clarify her intentions. What does bother me is that the title suggests, however faintly, a belief in historical causality which I did not hold when I wrote the book and in which I believe even less today. . . . While I was writing the book, these intentions presented themselves to me in the form of an ever-recurring image: I felt as though I dealt with a crystallized structure which I had to

THE ORIGINS OF TOTALITARIANISM

 211

break up into its constituent elements in order to destroy it. This image bothered me a great deal, for I thought it an impossible task to write history, not in order to save and conserve and render fit for remembrance, but on the contrary, in order to destroy. Finally, it dawned on me that I was not engaged in writing a historical book, even though large parts of it clearly contain historical analyses, but a political book, in which whatever was of past history not only was seen from the vantage point of the present, but would not have become visible at all without the light which the event, the emergence of totalitarianism, shed on it. In other words, the “origins” in the first and second part of the book are not causes that inevitably lead to certain effects; rather they became origins only after the event had taken place.32

Notes 1 This chapter was first published as Richard Bernstein, “The Origins of Totalitarianism: Not History but Politics,” Social Research 69, no. 2 (Summer 2002): 381–401. We have left in the occasional nature of the article, namely its reference to the conference at which it was presented and the context in which it was written. 2 Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers, Correspondence 1926-1969 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1992), 153. 3 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1st ed. (New York: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1951), vii. 4 Ibid., 437. 5 Ibid., viii–ix. 6 Arendt and Jaspers, Correspondence, 165. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid., 166. 9 Arendt, Origins, 451. 10 Ibid., 8. 11 Jorge Semprun, Literature or Life (New York: Penguin Books, 1998), 288. 12 Arendt, Origins, 438. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid., 452. 15 Ibid., 455. 16 Ibid., 458. 17 Margaret Canovan, Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of Her Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 7. 18 Hannah Arendt, “Reply to Eric Voegelin,” The Review of Politics 15 (January 1953): 80.

212

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

19 Hannah Arendt, “Understanding and Politics (The Difficulties of Understanding),” in Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1994), 309. 20 Margaret Canovan, “Arendt’s Theory of Totalitarianism: A Reassessment,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt, ed. Dana Villa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 27. 21 Arendt, Origins, vii. 22 Ibid., 276–77. 23 Hannah Arendt, “We Refugees,” in The Jew as Pariah, ed. Ron H. Feldman (New York: Grove Press, 1978), 56. 24 Arendt, Origins, 291–92. 25 Ibid., 295. 26 Ibid., 297. 27 Hannah Arendt, “The Nation,” The Review of Politics 8 (January 1946): 141. 28 Ibid., 290. 29 Ibid., 139. 30 Ibid. 31 Arendt, Origins, 478–79. 32 Ibid., iv. Compare this statement with what she says in her reply to Eric Voegelin: The problem originally confronting me was simple and baffling at the same time: all historiography is necessarily salvation and frequently justification; it is due to man’s fear that he may forget and to his striving for something which is even more than remembrance. . . . Thus my first problem was how to write about something—totalitarianism—which I did not want to conserve but on the contrary felt engaged to destroy. (Arendt, “Reply to Eric Voegelin,” 77.)

23 The Human Condition Peter Gratton

The title of Arendt’s The Human Condition is as bold as many of its insights. Originally titled “Amor mundi” (love of the world), it is no doubt her central political work, setting out to do no less than to offer “a reconsideration of the human condition from the vantage point of our newest experiences and our most recent fears.”1 The book is not some scholarly commentary in the history of philosophy or an analysis of some micro-problem in one of its areas (epistemology, ethics, etc.), as was the fashion during her time and since. Rather, it is an ontology of what the human has been and what she may be. Both parts of her title need to be taken into consideration: unlike those after her in philosophy who would dismiss the “who” of the “human being” to the dustbin of humanistic thought, Arendt attempts to think about the specificity of human actions—leaving aside our ability to think, mostly, for her later Life of the Mind—without adhering to the view that human beings have a shared essence or nature: “Action would be an unnecessary luxury, a capricious interference with general laws of behavior,” she avers, “if men were endlessly reproducible repetitions of the same model, whose nature or essence was the same for all and as predictable as the nature or essence of any other thing.”2 For this reason, she argues, defining the human condition “is not the same” as defining “human nature.”3 But human beings, while having no pre-given nature or essence, are nevertheless conditioned, facing the inexorable facts of their existence without which they would cease to be human: “life itself, natality and mortality, worldliness, and the earth.”4 We will see how each of these fits within the three modes of action identified in The Human Condition, with life, natality, and mortality being the province of labor; wordliness being provided by the work of homo faber (man the maker) and the place within which action takes place; and the earth being the condition of possibility for all three modes of human activity in

214

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

the broadest sense. While these conditions determine us, they do not reduce us to being the mere cogs of history or wholly determined in the manner often found in the physical or social sciences. Arendt’s worry, spelled out in her prologue and the book’s closing pages, is that the key to modernity is a secularized wish to have the human transcend all of its conditions: speech, which Aristotle said makes us human, is to be replaced by scientific modes of cognition that cannot be communicated orally (e.g., pop books on quantum mechanics offer but vague analogies for what is buried in mathematics); thinking is to be replaced by artificial machines; natality is to be reduced to what can be created in test tubes; mortality is to be stripped away in a quest to expand human life-spans to lengths last found in Greek myths and the legends of the Talmud; household devices are to provide an escape from the toils of labor; and the incipient space age is to be aimed at giving each human the chance for her final journey beyond our earthly condition. Just as her earlier The Origins of Totalitarianism aimed at identifying what was unprecedented in the event of totalitarianism, The Human Condition, looking at “our newest experiences” (especially in terms of scientific and technological advances) and “our most recent fears” (the Shoah, the threat of nuclear conflagration, and so forth), works to identify the unprecedented, related, and modern events of “world” and “earth” alienation. Arendt’s major thesis is that in modernity, the human being has been reduced to being but a laboring animal. Politics becomes, then, about security and the safety of bare life, which no previous culture in the West saw as its raison d’être. For Arendt, the Greeks held that politics was not about simple living (denoted for her by the Greek term zōē) but about escaping that life into an agonistic relation among equals where life was for something more (the euzēn or living well of civic life, bios). While later Christianity undoubtedly put politics in the service of the church, it nevertheless did not reduce the human to a being merely seeking out its continuance—and nothing more. For Arendt, tragic for the fate of the political was the early modern shift in Hobbes, Spinoza, and others that conceived of politics as providing for individual needs once based in the household, that is, politics no longer provides a space where one acted in concert but merely works to secure one’s life.5 Fear, not courage, it seems, is the quintessential modern political sentiment. The Human Condition operates across three temporal registers: first, it offers the long historical arch, following figures such as Nietzsche and Heidegger from the rise of philosophy in ancient Greece to the dénouement of metaphysics with the death of God and all absolutes in modernity. For Arendt, as with Nietzsche and Heidegger, philosophy covered over insights that the Greeks had in the pre-Socratic period. Where for Nietzsche this meant a denial of the will to power in terms of a will to truth and where for Heidegger this meant a forgetting of the question of the meaning of being, Arendt’s view is that our loss was political—and no less meaningful for all that. We will see this particularly in her thinking of action, since philosophy

THE HUMAN CONDITION

 215

and theory always privileged the life of thought, the vita contempliva, over the life of action, the vita activa, a privileging that has only recently begun to be undone—though to the detriment of both, since thinking is not on the model of dialogical contemplation and action is leveled down to the human capacity for labor. Second, there is her description of the several-hundredyear rise of the social in modernity, which culminates in politics treating life itself as the highest good. Third, Arendt speaks to her own milieu in the post–Second World War period: the triumph of the techno-sciences— the book opens with a description of the meaning of Sputnik—not just continues the world alienation of modernity, that is, a loss of politics on her account, but also provides for an “earth alienation” where “transcendence” is found not in acting in concert with others but by moving beyond the human condition altogether.6 As we’ll see, the roots of this victory arrive with the advent of the natural sciences. The task in this chapter is to take each of these claims in turn.

The West’s Privileging of Theory over Action The Human Condition is centered around defining labor, work, and action, which form the title of its three middle chapters and are the three modes of activity that philosophers since Plato have been found to be diminished forms of being in the world. Arendt argues that the philosophical tradition has always privileged the bios theōrētikos (the life of theorizing) over the vita activa, especially the life of action or praxis in politics, and the latter was always to follow the ideal forms found in the former. This is clear from Plato’s Republic, but this Platonism, she argues, survives wherever politics is to be the manufacturing in the world of a “political” space in the name of some idea or ideology in order to avoid giving politics over to differences of opinion and a plurality of voices. The theorist, from Plato to Marx and beyond, is to tell us what is to be done and politics does not have any dignity on its own, since it is but a means for bringing what is found in theory into the world. While this model borrows, Arendt argues, from the Greek thinking of poiēsis or making, wherein the artisan has the shape or form in the soul of what he or she is to create, post-Socratic thinking nevertheless diminishes the forms of the vita activa in the name of the contemplative life. The vita activa, for Arendt is threefold: 1. Labor, that is, the life of animal laborans (the human as laboring animal), answers to our necessities: food, defecation, cleaning, and the like, whose proper place is the private sphere of the home. “Labor is the activity which corresponds to the biological process of the human body,” she writes, “whose spontaneous growth, metabolism, and eventual decay are bound to the vital necessities produced and fed into the life process by labor.”7 This is life “itself,”

216

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

or rather, a bare life that responds only to its minimal “animal” condition. 2. Work is the activity of homo faber and produces the artificial world in which we roam. This artificiality is the “unnaturalness of human existence, which is not imbedded in, and whose mortality is not compensated by, the species’ ever recurring life cycle,” as in labor.8 This “artificial” world is “distinctly different from all natural surroundings,”9 and only homo faber’s products give the world any sense of permanence. Given that action is the creation of the world, we will need to see just what is meant by work’s “worldliness”; for Arendt, the stakes of getting this right are crucial. 3. Action is what occurs within that manufactured world, and is nothing less than the words and deeds (neither one without the other) performed in concert with others: “action, the only activity that goes on directly between men without intermediary of thing or matter [as labor and work do], corresponds to the human condition of plurality, the fact that that men, not Man, live on earth and inhabit the world.”10 For Arendt, action is inherently creative, and it is premised on the fact that we are born into this world and we can bring something new into the political; this is what she calls “natality.” In action, we are thrown into a web of relations with others who are never the same and whose existence means we can be assured neither that our aims will be carried out nor about the limits between what we have done and what has been accomplished by others. “Plurality,” she writes, “is the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live.”11 It is the fact of this plurality at which totalitarianism aims, and The Human Condition can be rightly read as a positive account of the political lost under the deadly Stalinist and Nazi regimes covered in Origins of Totalitarianism. Though none of these modes could exist without the other—one must have tended to the necessities of life and have built an artificial world in order to take part in action’s web of relations—readers have been right to see her privileging, within the vita activa, one form of living, the life of bios and not zōē, over the others. In fact, her language is downright religious: action provides for the dignity of the human and allows us our only chance at an “earthly immortality” or “transcendence”12 over the privative and repetitive life of labor, where one is but “a specimen of the animal species man-kind.”13 Action, then, can be “the miracle that saves the world,” and when we enter the public realm it is, “as it were, a second birth”14 that “redeems” and “saves” human beings, in a manner that is “like the revelation of divinity,” from the valuelessness of life as laboring animal or as a maker of things.15 After the death of God and all absolutes, it is action, narrated by ourselves

THE HUMAN CONDITION

 217

and others and written down in the work of scribes, that offers our only chance at a this-worldly immortality. Arendt is a thinker of distinctions, and The Human Condition often borrows on the tradition’s binary oppositions—the human (bios) versus the animal (zōē), the artificial and technical (the world made by homo faber) versus the natural (labor), and so forth—that other Continental thinkers during her lifetime were attempting to upend. That the only “world” under consideration in her work is a human one also belies her attempts to critique the tradition’s anthropocentrism at several points in The Human Condition.16 In any event, against this same tradition, which wished to replace making for action so as to bring to an end its unpredictability and the come-whatmay of any future worthy of the name, action, for Arendt, is almost never in fact dissolved. Even in violent, tyrannical regimes, there is a reliance on what she dubs “power,” that is, the acting in concert of those upon whom any politics relies. For Arendt, this is why any claim to sovereignty is “spurious if claimed by an isolated single entity.”17 After all, even the tyrant must rely not just on violence over everyone but also on persuasion over those within the regime—hence there is always room for responsibility, Arendt argues, in even the worst conditions, since one has agency in following the lead of others, even if they are despotic. But philosophy, by conflating making with action, defends violence; after all, if one has contemplated the truth, as the Platonic school wished to do, then one must combat as sophistry any use of persuasion to act politically not in its accord: “Traditionally, therefore, the term vita activa receives its meaning from the vita contempliva,” she writes, where theoretical knowledge of the truth ought to lead action. For Arendt, where there is an adherence to some truth (as opposed to a given set of goals), there is no politics. What Plato and Aristotle wished to rid from the polis was its unreliability, its “uncertainty of outcome,” and the “frailty of human affairs” along with it.18 This is clear in Plato’s political dialogues, in which just rulers have a technē, an expertise, analogous, say, to that of the weaver, as in the Statesman, which the ruler utilizes to find the form or eidos of the just state and then in turn arrange the polis accordingly. And just as there is a violence performed to “matter” by the craftsman, so too, Arendt believes, there is an inherent violence in applying the rulerruled model to the political. The means-end character of Plato’s thought is a result of replacing making for acting, of poiēsis for praxis, which in turn leads to a thinking of the political as a form of rule through which the ruler is provided with all the means at his or her disposal to create a particular end. This thinking of the political in terms of means and ends, rulers and ruled, has been implacable in the West. Arendt’s contention is that the “prephilosophical” experience of politics for the Greeks was quite different: It was understood as a form of political organization in which citizens lived together under conditions of no-rule, without a division between ruler and ruled. This notion of no-rule was expressed by the word isonomy,

218

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

whose outstanding characteristic among the forms of government . . . was that the notion of rule (the “archy” from archein in monarchy and oligarchy, or the “cracy” from kratein in democracy) was entirely absent from it.19 For Arendt, it is this other thinking of politics and its promise of the new that has been forgotten by the tradition, and this line of thinking has proved disastrous: We are perhaps the first generation which has become fully aware of the murderous consequences inherent in a line of thought that forces one to admit that all means, provided they are efficient, are permissible and justified to pursue something defined as an end. . . . As long as we believe that we deal with ends and means in the political realm, we shall not be able to prevent anybody’s using all means to pursue recognized ends.20 We build our castles in the sky, and given this idea’s supposed greatness, all manner of means are admissible for this end. But there is a stronger point to make: rather than seeing persuasion, plurality, and the frailty of action as leaving all manner of “ends” up to those operating within a given public realm, the philosopher always wants to give to the public realm its proper and perfected shape, cutting off the rabble in their discussions and frail actions, which for Arendt is precisely the performance of freedom and equality that provides for the spaces and performances of human dignity. This, as we’ve seen, is denied by a long tradition. She writes: Nowhere, in other words, neither in labor, subject to the necessity of life, nor in fabrication, dependent upon given material, does man appear to be less free than in those capacities whose very essence is freedom and in that realm which owes its existence to nobody and nothing but man. It is in accordance with the great tradition of Western thought to think along these lines: to accuse freedom of luring man into necessity, to condemn action, the spontaneous beginning of something new, because its results fall into a predetermined net of relationships, invariably dragging the agent with them, who seems to forfeit his freedom the very moment he makes use of it. The only salvation from this kind of freedom seems to lie in non-acting, in abstention from the whole realm of human affairs as the only means to safeguard one’s sovereignty and integrity as a person.21 The reason for this is that in a web of relations, one is set within a chain of events for which one is responsible and is always responding in ways unpredictable, as if one had no control over a given situation. If Arendt is first and foremost a thinker of responsibility, it is because ontologically one is always born in such a way as to be responding to others by taking on deeds that one did not begin and sending them along through more action

THE HUMAN CONDITION

 219

whose results are unforeseeable and whose consequences are potentially limitless.

World Alienation: From the Public and the Private to the Social and the Intimate Against this background of a general philosophical dismissal of the meaningfulness of the practical and this-world actions, Arendt provides an historical account of the rise of the social from approximately the eighteenth century onward. This account is crucial to all of her later work, especially On Revolution, and gives greater depth to her account of the atomization of mass man in The Origins of Totalitarianism. Arendt’s interest is very much of her time: the early-to-mid-twentieth century was rife with theorists and literary works diagnosing the rise of mass man and the bureaucratic state that was its political by-product. Martin Heidegger’s notion of das Man (the “they”) in Being and Time (1927) gave these discussions ontological heft, though his depiction rightly strikes many as an elitist attempt to render everyday life as merely inauthentic, even as he noted this was the default mode of each of us. Arendt is often seen as giving in to this temptation, which would have the effect of banishing most from having a singular life, with or without action, whatever the problems of mass conformism. In any case, Arendt argues that while the Greeks and Romans neatly defined the public and private realms, where privacy marked a darkness deprived of the light of the transcendence of action she cherished, the social blurred the affairs of the private realm with the public space of appearances. Far from those who cherish as the ultimate political model the Enlightenmentera rise of civil society and its endless discussions, Arendt paints society largely as Heidegger depicted das Man: a space in which idle chatter prevails, where nothing ultimately is at stake, and “one unanimous opinion is tremendously enforced by sheer number.”22 Distinctiveness retreats into a sphere of intimacy and subjectivity, and a retreat into its endless interiority is introduced—and such modern art forms as the novel are born. “Behavior” replaces action “as the foremost mode of human relationship”23 and the social sciences, using the tools of statistics, keep watch over those “considered to be asocial or abnormal.”24 Indeed, Arendt argues, one no longer needs the despotism of a tyrant or ruling class: mass society’s adherence to conformism makes any such tyranny superfluous. Moreover, our making of science as the ultimate arbiter of truth and human meaning has meant that the human sciences (preeminently, for her, economics, sociology, and political science) ape the science’s mathematization of nature by rendering human relations in terms of statistical distributions around a norm, erasing from consideration the contingencies of history and anything that cannot be enumerated. As Arendt argues, “The trouble with modern behaviorism,” the

220

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

science that would quantify psychological reactions to phenomena, “is not that they are wrong but that they could become true, that they are the best possible conceptualization of certain obvious trends in modern society.”25 No doubt, as iPhone apps and such quantify our intake of calories and graph our outputs in terms of exercise, we don’t need to be told about the goals of this quantification and the efficient, disciplined machines we make of ourselves. “It is quite conceivable,” Arendt continues, “that the modern age—which began with such an unprecedented and promising outburst of human activity—may end in the deadliest, most sterile passivity history has ever known.”26 What is then lost, for Arendt, is the world itself. If society, specifically with the onset of nationalism, is only possible through conformism and adherence to a given norm or single set of opinions, the public realm provides the only possibility for distinctiveness and even reality itself: Under the conditions of a common world, reality is not guaranteed primarily by the “common nature” of all men who constitute it, but rather by the fact that, differences of position and the resulting variety of perspectives notwithstanding, everybody is always concerned with the same object. If the sameness of the object can no longer be discerned, no common nature of men, least of all the unnatural conformism of mass society, can prevent the destruction of the common world.27 This loss of a common world and the isolation of subjects that goes with it provides the breeding ground for the ideologies Arendt spent the previous decade exploring: “A noticeable decrease in common sense in any given community and a noticeable increase in superstition and gullibility,” she writes, are “almost infallible signs of alienation from the world.”28 Nationalisms, for example, are modeled on the private home, and for this reason, governance is described only in terms of managing the national household, while these nationalisms also provide the atomized individuals of modernity a pale form of being-with-others once found in the spaces of action. Lost, too, is the private realm, as all that was once private becomes a public concern (and vice versa), replaced by intimacy, the stuff of novels and idle gossip. Freedom, once an objective fact in the spaces of appearances, is brought within the subject and is all the more ineffective for all that: it is a freedom of will, not of action, or a freedom of thought that fails to involve action. This internalization of freedom is also its worldly disappearance. To be free, in fact, is now thought to be free from politics, to have the chance to choose one’s job and consumer goods and other means for the mere sustenance of life. The links Arendt makes among disparate modern phenomena—urbanization, the rise of mass man, the move to capitalism and the mass accumulation of wealth, the advent of nationalism and depictions of the nation as a single family, rampant subjectivism, the invention of the bureaucratic state and the forms of knowledge (statistics and economics)

THE HUMAN CONDITION

 221

that go with it, and so forth—under the moniker of the rise of social are, are often weak, but there is nevertheless no denying the historical coincidence of these events. And these phenomena all crystalize into a “world alienation” that prevents most from having any place in which one’s words and deeds matter.29 The alienation of modernity, therefore, is not that of human beings from their “species-being” or from the products of their labor, as Marx argued, but from the world as such, the place in which reality is what appears. The accumulation of wealth, the switchover from previous forms of economy to commodity capitalism and its “wealth accumulation,” is not historically prior to this alienation, as Marx would have held, but is in fact only “possible only if the world and the very worldliness of man” have already been “sacrificed.”30 Arendt marks out three major stages in this “world alienation”: First, there is the loss of the “twofold protection of family and property” in early modernity, wherein the labor “market” was produced on the backs of the mass misery and “material wretchedness.”31 This matches Arendt’s claims in The Origins of Totalitarianism about the rise of “superfluous” men and labor in early capitalism, that is, the first step is the expropriation of a “private share in the world,” the oikos or home in which one took care of life’s necessities. The second phase is when one was to be a member of a “social class.” The rise of the social, as Arendt calls it, “replaced the protection previously offered by membership in a family.”32 Where the family’s well-being was indexed to the spaces of the home, social well-being was indexed to the “territory of the nation-state,” which “offered all classes a substitute for the privately owned home of which the class of the poor had been deprived.”33 This would end in the era of nationalism just prior to “racism”—which had no boundaries, according to Arendt in Origins— and was premised on a thinking of a “homogeneity of the population” and “rootedness in the soil of a given territory,” which was for her one of the historical conditions of possibility of totalitarianism. The third stage of this alienation is when there is the decline of the nation-state system and the transformation of humanity from an abstraction into a “really existing entity whose members at the most distant points of the globe” are joined in a common project that we would today call globalization. This era is also one of profound loneliness, Arendt claims, where sameness rules, excellence is leveled out, and spaces for being different are rare. But The Human Condition is not meant to leave us without hope since this is not to say that spaces for action have completely disappeared—though scientists often aim to be, as we’ll see, our last actors.34 For Arendt, wherever human beings in the plural exist, there is the possibility of action. In this way, there is only rarely a zero degree of action, of mutual persuasion and the doing of deeds, that is, there is always the “promise of politics,” to use the apt title of one collection of her essays, even if Arendt in On Revolution and Between Past and Future often depicts action as a “lost” and ephemeral treasure dated to specific moments: 1776, 1848, 1917, and so on. But if

222

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

sovereignty, even the sovereignty of the nation or mass man, is always a myth, and human beings always have the capacity for creating something new in webs of relations with others, this also means that while we are ever fragile, we are also always responsible for how we act when we acquiesce in conformity or give comfort to the strong. Despite the bureaucratized spacing of our geographies, despite all that the tradition has done to shut down the loud and chatty spaces of persuasion, and despite all that violence has wrought in the last century and before, there is action wherever even a few look to persuade others, where deeds are undertaken, and where one in combination with others takes on the responsibility to create the world anew.

Earth Alienation and the End of the Human Condition But if we are to do so today, one must work to stave off climate change and what Arendt describes as the relatively new phenomena of the human beings’ acting into nature. “Earth alienation,” as she dubs it, is marked by the technoscientific conquering of the universe and its view that “nature” is something to be made through experimentation, industry, and the work of homo faber.35 World alienation is the political problem par excellence, but through the concept of earth alienation, we can see diagnosed the contemporary ecological problems whereby the earth is not something out of which we appear, but is that which we make appear through our instruments of coordination and intervention (GPS, satellites, latitude and longitude, etc.)—and that which we can very much destroy.36 Earth alienation, then, is the “hallmark of natural science.”37 In fact, she argues that what heralded the modern age was the inception of a new kind of scientific thinking: What ushered in the modern age was not the age-old desire of astronomers for simplicity, harmony, and beauty . . . [but] the discovery, due to the [telescope], that Copernicus’ image of “the virile man standing in the sun . . . overlooking the planets” was much more than an image or a gesture, was in fact an indication of the astounding human capacity to think in terms of the universe while remaining on the earth, and the perhaps even more astounding human ability to use cosmic laws as guiding principles for terrestrial action. Compared with the earth alienation underlying the whole development of natural science in the modern age, the withdrawal from terrestrial proximity contained in the discovery of the globe as a whole and the world alienation produced in the twofold process of expropriation and wealth accumulation are of minor significance. . . . Under the sign of earth alienation, every science, not only physical and natural science, so radically

THE HUMAN CONDITION

 223

changed its innermost content that one may doubt whether prior to the modern age anything like science existed at all.38 This brings us to the mathematization of the universe. Arendt’s claims align well with Martin Heidegger’s discussions in The Question Concerning Technology. There, Heidegger argues that since around the time of Descartes we have seen a technological “enframing” (Gestell) in which all, including human beings, are quantified and are to be made efficient as a resource or standing reserve, which Arendt critiques in terms of the social sciences. Heidegger writes that there is a “challenging [that] gathers man into ordering. This gathering concentrates man upon order the real as standing reserve.”39 This clearly influences Arendt’s account in The Human Condition. First, earth alienation occurs, Arendt claims, through the replacement of previous forms of thinking with calculative reason or what she calls “reckoning with consequences,” which is at the heart of “utilitarian” approaches to existence critiqued in this book’s last pages: even the gravest issues of human interactions should be reducible to quantifiable formulae.40 For Arendt, mathematics allowed science to “look upon nature from a universal standpoint” and not from within a given place, and in this way the human replaces God as having “mastery over her”41 while having a view from nowhere. Modern science removes any sense of place: based in algebraic symbolization; it doesn’t even relate to space as geometric mathematics previously did. For these reasons, place is removed in the name of abstract space, and no doubt we can also denote the specter of a future time in which human beings are treated as no more than points or numbers on a page—the heart of bureaucratic reasoning, which offers the rule of no one from a view from nowhere. Mathematics, via calculus, gives us a thinking of the infinite, but Arendt details the ways in which we must not lose the importance of “earth-bound experience” and our finite relation to being in the world.42 As Arendt comes to the closing pages of The Human Condition, her claim, often ignored in receptions of the book that focus on the public realm and the import of action, is that “earth alienation” is more devastating than “world alienation,” which is of “minor significance” in comparison. The stakes, for her, are of absolute import: For whatever we do today in physics whether we release energy processes that ordinarily go on only in the sun, or attempt to initiate in a test tube the processes of cosmic evolution, or penetrate with the help of telescopes the cosmic space to a limit of two and even six billion light years, or build machines for the production and control of energies unknown in the household of earthly nature, or attain speeds in atomic accelerators which approach the speed of light, or produce elements not to be found in nature, or disperse radioactive particles, created by us through the use of cosmic radiation, on the earth—we always handle nature from a point in the universe outside the earth. Without actually standing where

224

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

Archimedes wished to stand (dos moi pou stô), still bound to the earth through the human condition, we have found a way to act on the earth and within terrestrial nature as though we dispose of it from outside, from the Archimedean point. And even at the risk of endangering the natural life process we expose the earth to universal, cosmic forces alien to nature’s household.43 At risk, then, is the very loss of the human condition. First, the mathematization of the universe gave us all sorts of natural determinisms, where calculative reasoning had “to leave out the unexpected, the event itself, since it would unreasonable or irrational to expect what is no more than ‘infinite improbability,’” which occurs wherever there is action.44 Nothing is more foreign to Arendt’s philosophy than that one that disallows a thinking of the event and the birth of the new that is the mark of freedom. Second, because science gives us a picture of what is at a distance from any appearance (one can never experience relativity theory), modernity was bound to give us a quasi-Kantian split between the phenomenal and the noumenal, between what appears and nature in itself, and to think that what we share is not a common world, but rather common modes of understanding or cognition that allow us access to nature in terms of mathematics.45 This leads to a philosophical focus on the processes of consciousness away from what appears to a plural “we” in common. Third, Arendt in these pages argues that in the modern age there was a reversal of the vita contempliva and the vita activa. That is, at the beginning of the modern age, homo faber came to the fore and nature was “instrumentalized.”46 In this way, homo faber’s “reckoning” or calculative reason replaced the contemplation of existence—so useless for production—and with it a vital aspect of the human condition. Ultimately, this fabrication, though, was put in the service of life itself and the laboring process: the creative destruction of capitalism means that what is made one day is undone the next, at ever greater speeds. The aim of the natural sciences is not to passively witness nature, but in the end act into it: we see this in dreams that geo-engineering can save us from climate change, which was itself a result of man’s “acting into nature.” Arendt has in mind the atomic bomb and the beginning of ecological catastrophes of the Anthropocene that are the daily background of the modern condition. For this reason, we can see quite literally how we are threatening the destruction of any world in which action takes place through an earth alienation that is another name for its destruction. Kelly Oliver summarizes this nicely: What Arendt calls earth alienation is caused by the scientific worldview symbolized by Einstein’s “observer who is poised freely in space.”47 The view from the universe gives us the illusion that we are not earthbound creatures but universal citizens who can leave earth. . . . With science, we think that the given world is man-made or can become man-made.

THE HUMAN CONDITION

 225

We think that we create the earth and its raw materials. . . . In a sense, earth alienation is the result of scientific hubris and the disavowal of the limits of the human condition.48 Here, in another work written not long after The Human Condition, Arendt pulls many of these threads together and summarizes the powerful critique of the entirety of her book: The modern age, with its growing world-alienation, has led to a situation where man, wherever he goes, encounters only himself. All the processes of the earth and the universe have revealed themselves as either man-made or as potentially man-made. . . . This two-fold loss of the world—the loss of nature and the loss of human artifice in the widest sense, which would include all history—has left behind it a society of men who, without a common world which would at once relate and separate them, either live in desperate lonely separation or are pressed together into a mass. For a mass-society is nothing more than that kind of organized living which automatically establishes itself among human beings who are still related to one another but have lost the world once common to all of them.49 The only actors left, Arendt argues in the closing paragraphs of The Human Condition, are scientists, but their action is one that is from the point of view of the universe, not “the web of human relationships,” and as such their activity “lacks the revelatory character of action as well as the ability to produce stories and become historical, which together form the very source from which meaningfulness springs into and illuminates human existence.”50 We have gained the whole universe and lost the earth, we have gained insights into the farthest reaches of nature and into its furthest depths and lost any worldly meaning. And we have reduced thinking such that some can dream that we can simply be rid of the vita activa and hence the human condition altogether, downloading our minds onto computers and shipping them off before the coming conflagration. Surely, the language is apocalyptic: we are looking at no less than the end of the earth and any possibility of a world along with it. But such is the human condition that we must face up to what is unprecedented in our day and to think again “our newest experiences and our most recent fears.”

Notes 1 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd ed. (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 10. 2 Ibid., 7. 3 Ibid., 10. 4 Ibid.

226

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

5 Ibid., 46. 6 Ibid., 268. 7 Ibid., 7. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid., 8. 12 Ibid., 55. 13 Ibid., 46. 14 Ibid., 246. 15 Ibid., 236. 16 Ibid., 157, 169, 173. 17 Ibid., 245. 18 Ibid., 213. 19 Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Viking Press, 1963), 30. 20 Arendt, Human Condition, 229. 21 Ibid., 234. 22 Ibid., 40. 23 Ibid., 41. 24 Ibid., 42. 25 Ibid., 322, my emphasis. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid, 58. 28 Ibid., 209. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid., 256. 31 Ibid., 278. 32 Ibid., 256. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid., 324. 35 Ibid., 288. 36 Ibid., 172. See also Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1973), 298. 37 Arendt, Human Condition, 264. 38 Ibid. 39 Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, ed. W. Levitt (New York: Harper Collins), 19. 40 Arendt, Human Condition, 310. 41 Ibid., 268.

THE HUMAN CONDITION

 227

42 Ibid., 265. 43 Ibid., 262. 44 Ibid., 300. 45 Ibid., 286. 46 Ibid., 305. 47 She cites ibid., 195, 273. 48 Kelly Oliver, Earth and World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 98. 49 Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 89–90. 50 Arendt, Human Condition, 324.

24 Eichmann in Jerusalem Leora Bilsky

Hannah Arendt is known as the most famous critic of the Eichmann trial. But there is an ongoing debate as to how to interpret her criticism. Is it a warning against the political uses of law? Is it about the inherent limitations of criminal law to address the nature of “administrative massacres”? Or rather, is it about the failure of the court to understand the novelty in the new category of crimes against humanity, and the new type of criminal (“the banality of evil”)? Although Arendt addressed each of these issues, we need to understand better her jurisprudential stance in order to see what brings these issues together as a coherent criticism of the Jerusalem court. Arendt opens and ends her book Eichmann in Jerusalem with a criticism of the direction in which the Israeli prosecution took the trial. She is concerned first with what has come to be known as the “didactic purpose of the trial”—the attempt to use the trial to clarify historical truths and construct collective memory. For Arendt, the sole legitimate purpose of the trial was to determine the guilt of the defendant Adolf Eichmann. Second, she also criticized the Israeli prosecution’s decision to put on the stand over 100 Holocaust survivors to testify about their personal experiences under the Third Reich. Such testimonies, she argued, were irrelevant to proving Eichmann’s guilt and threatened to overwhelm the trial with emotions of suffering, pain, and rage, which undermine the ability to judge the defendant fairly and objectively.1 The conventional understanding of Arendt’s jurisprudential stance is to see her as a “legalist,”2 following Judith Shklar’s definition of legalism as an ethos that holds that law and politics must be separate.3 However, a closer look at Arendt’s arguments reveals difficulties viewing her as an advocate of legalism. First, the opposition that Arendt erects between law and history is undermined by her own advocacy of an alternative historical narrative that

EICHMANN IN JERUSALEM

 229

the trial should promote, one that centers on the rise of the totalitarian state instead of anti-Semitism. Thus, in a previous article, I argued that in order to understand the controversy between Israeli prosecutor, Gideon Hausner, and Arendt, it is better to view it as a “competition of storytellers,” that is, a controversy over historiography, politics, and law.4 Arendt, who seemingly opposed any “historical excursions” by the court, devoted over ten pages5 of her book to discuss the behavior of the Jewish Councils (Judenrat), a discussion with historical and political importance, but irrelevant to proving the defendant’s guilt. Rather than a battle between justice and politics, or justice and history, Arendt’s critique of Hausner should be understood as a controversy about the “right” kind of history needed in order to understand the novel crimes of the Nazi regime that involved the victims in their own victimization. Second, Arendt’s critique of the reliance on victims’ testimonies in the trial is also not a clear indication of a legalist stance. Arendt portrayed the prosecutor Hausner and Judge Landau as two antagonists who asked to pull the trial in two different directions—the political and the legal.6 Arendt sided with Landau, who for her represented the rule of law. A closer reading of the Eichmann judgment shows that the court in fact endorses victims’ testimonies as relevant to the legal examination, while rejecting an expansive didactic role for the trial envisioned by the prosecution. In doing so, the court articulates a victim-oriented jurisprudence for atrocity trials that responds to the nature of the new crimes without falling into pure didactics.7 Thus, again, it is not “law versus politics,” but rather different conceptions of criminal law that better explain Arendt’s critique. Arendt’s solutions to the legal problems that stood in the way of the court, such as retroactivity, extraterritorial jurisdiction, and the interpretation of crimes against humanity, defy our conventional understanding of legalism. We see that on every issue, Arendt goes beyond a purely legalist position in offering ways for the law to properly respond to the novel crimes of the Nazi regime.8 Still, she insisted that criminal law should be the idiom of law with which to judge the novel crimes that were committed by individuals who were law-abiding citizens in Nazi Germany. While “legalism” assumes that judging Nazi criminals does not pose a new challenge for the law (as all we need is to apply the correct rules), the question that concerns Arendt in her book is related to the very possibility of judgment, that is, the moral foundations upon which the criminal law is based. Rather than assuming that the law already possesses the tools to judge, Arendt points to the crisis of judgment that the Eichmann trial exposes. In her view, the totalitarian experience in general and the Third Reich in particular require us to rethink basic principles of criminal law and their relations to morality. The Eichmann trial was a moment of crisis for Arendt, which helped her identify the questions that needed answers, among them: Can we think about the perpetrator of atrocious crimes, such as genocide and crimes

230

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

against humanity, as a law-abiding citizen, a person acting from banal motives? Can the law, that is, traditional categories of criminal law that require that the criminal act be accompanied by the proper mental state, convict such a defendant? And what if the most terrible crimes can occur without proper mens rea—does this signal the bankruptcy of our criminal law, or is there a way to revise the fundamental requirement of individual guilt when we deal with collective crimes that are done under the authority of law?9 Arendt did not give a satisfactory answer to these questions in Eichmann in Jerusalem, but returned to them in subsequent articles and in lectures she gave on Kant’s third Critique. Unlike those who see Arendt as criticizing all the participants in the Eichmann trial, whether prosecutor, witnesses, or judges from the standpoint of the one who knows better, I believe that the Eichmann trial was also a moment of crisis for Arendt. Reading Eichmann in Jerusalem together with her lectures on Kant allows us to identify this crisis as well as the way she tried to resolve it. In the postscript to Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt reconsiders the defense that was raised repeatedly at the Nuremberg trials, which was that they were just obeying orders. The formal legal answer given at Nuremberg was the nullification of this defense for criminals of the Third Reich. The more substantive answer given in Israel in the Kafr Qasim trial in 1958 (regarding the massacre of inhabitants of an Arab village by Israeli soldiers) was the recognition of a duty not to obey an order that is manifestly illegal, which was an attempt to re-connect law and morality.10 However, Arendt believed that this legal doctrine could help judges only in a functioning democracy, when an illegal command sticks out clearly and is “manifest” in its illegality. This response is inadequate in the context of a regime that has turned criminality into state law, a legal system in which the exception has become law. Accordingly, Arendt concludes that Eichmann acted fully within the framework of the kind of judgment required of him: he acted in accordance with the rule, examined the order issued to him for its “manifest” legality, namely regularity; he did not have to fall back upon his “conscience,” since he was not one of those who were unfamiliar with the laws of his country. The exact opposite was the case.11 In contrast to the Jerusalem court, Arendt refuses to ground the obligation to disobey a manifestly illegal order in presupposing the existence of a universal conscience. This goes beyond the problem of legalizing crime and touches upon the core question of conscience presupposed by criminal law. How does one’s conscience change in accordance with legal norms and the norms of civil society? What can we make of the fact that German elites acquiesced with the Nazi regime? Arendt writes, “He did not need to ‘close his ears to the voice of conscience,’ as the judgment has it, not because he

EICHMANN IN JERUSALEM

 231

had none, but because his conscience spoke with a ‘respectable voice,’ with the voice of respectable society around him.”12 A legal system presupposes that ordinary people can distinguish right from wrong. That is, we assume that conscience is different and independent from society’s norms. But what if it is not? How should criminal law deal with the process of “coordination” that German society underwent with the crimes of the Nazi regime? This is a question that moves us from law to moral theory. Why, in the face of the crisis of law, did Arendt not choose to return, as a moral guide, to Kant’s categorical imperative—“Act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law”?13 Here we approach the depth of the crisis Arendt experienced at the Eichmann trial—the moment in which Eichmann himself referred to Kant’s categorical imperative in his police interrogation and later in his court’s testimony, showing the ease with which Kant’s moral philosophy was turned on its head in Nazi Germany. In the eighth chapter of Eichmann in Jerusalem, titled “Duties of a LawAbiding Citizen,” Arendt writes: The first indication of Eichmann’s vague notion that there was more involved in this whole business than the question of the soldiers carrying out orders that are clearly criminal in nature and intent appeared during the police examination, when he suddenly declared with great emphasis that he had lived his whole life according to Kant’s moral precepts, and especially according to a Kantian definition of duty. This was outrageous, on the face of it, and also incomprehensible, since Kant’s moral philosophy is so closely bound up with man’s faculty of judgment, which rules out blind obedience.14 How can Kant’s categorical imperative, based on an autonomous independent moral judgment, be reconciled with Eichmann’s obedience to superior orders? Can it be that his obedience was not blind, but was actually guided by conscience? In court, Eichmann explained that from the moment he was ordered to execute the “Final Solution,” he ceased living according to Kantian principles. However, Arendt identifies a deeper difficulty, as the categorical imperative received a new and distorted interpretation under Nazi rule, in the new wording provided by Hans Frank, “Act in such a way that the Führer, if he knew your action, would approve it.”15 Arendt writes, In this household use, all that is left of Kant’s spirit is the demand that a man do more than obey the law, that he go beyond the mere call of obedience and identify his own will with the principle behind the law the source from which the law sprang. In Kant’s philosophy, that source was practical reason; in Eichmann’s household use of him, it was the will of the Führer.16

232

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

In Arendt’s view, it is precisely this combination of moral idealism and obedience to orders that accounts for “the horribly painstaking thoroughness in the execution of the Final Solution,”17 which she traces to “the odd notion, indeed very common in Germany, that to be law-abiding means not merely to obey the laws but to act as though one were the legislator of the laws that one obeys. Hence the conviction that nothing less than going beyond the call of duty will do.”18 To counter Eichmann’s defense of obedience to superior orders, the prosecution brought evidence of Eichmann’s refusal to follow Himmler’s orders to stop deportations to Auschwitz. This could be an indication that Eichmann was lying, and that it was anti-Semitism and identification with Nazi ideology that guided his actions, not a sense of obligation to obey superior orders. Yet from Arendt’s perspective, there is no internal contradiction in this refusal. She writes, The sad and very uncomfortable truth of the matter probably was that it was not his fanaticism but his very conscience that prompted Eichmann to adopt his uncompromising attitude during the last year of the war. . . . Eichmann knew that Himmler’s orders ran directly counter to the Führer’s order.19 Here we have a glimpse of the horror: in the interpretation of orders by lawabiding Eichmann, it is Himmler’s order that was manifestly illegal. As a result, for Arendt, both law and moral theory fail to respond to the particular challenge posed by the new subject of totalitarianism. She therefore believes that the most urgent challenge for post-Holocaust jurisprudence is to rethink our assumptions about the relations between law and morality. This is the crisis of judgment with which Arendt chooses to end the epilogue to her book.20 As we can see, the crisis does not derive from Kant’s moral philosophy itself, as it is obvious that Eichmann does not take that philosophy seriously, and misinterprets Kant’s categorical imperative. The problem Arendt identifies is that Kant’s moral philosophy is not sufficient to guide action in the world, and therefore a theory of political judgment is required. Interestingly it is Kant’s third Critique’s theory of aesthetic judgment that provides Arendt with a solution for the question of judging the particular without pre-given rules. Two characteristics of Kant’s theory of aesthetic judgment make it especially attractive for Arendt’s theory of judgment. First, aesthetic judgment is discriminatory by nature since it is connected to the most subjective senses of taste and smell, and hence can help orient actors in the political world of new beginnings.21 And yet, Kant’s theory shows that the subjectivity of judgment does not mean a collapse into arbitrariness. What enables us to make subjective judgments that are not merely idiosyncratic is our capacity for what Kant called “enlarged thought,” that is, the ability to view one’s own judgments from the standpoint of others.22 In other words,

EICHMANN IN JERUSALEM

 233

it depends on human beings in the plural, on the judgment of others that we visit in our imagination, in order to examine critically our own subjective judgments.23 Judgment can become impartial with the help of the imagination and through a process of representative thinking. Arendt believes that the dialogic process of enlarged mentality can help orient the actor’s judgments even under conditions brought about by totalitarianism—in which the exception becomes the norm and society coordinates itself accordingly. Instead of being based on universal morality, existing norms, or determinate concepts, reflective judgment involves forming our judgment in the process of imagining trying to persuade others. Arendt did not develop her theory of reflective judgment or “enlarged mentality,” and she left many puzzles unanswered. Here, however, I would like to return to Eichmann in Jerusalem with the guidance of the theory of reflective judgment. We saw that the court found that Eichmann had lied about being bound by orders when he organized deportations to Auschwitz, since his acts did not result from literal obedience to orders (as he refused Himmler’s order to stop the death march) but from ideological identification with the policy. In other words, the court found that Eichmann had the required mens rea for criminal liability. Arendt, in contrast, explored the possibility that Eichmann had not lied, since he believed Himmler’s order to stop deportations was manifestly illegal. That is, Eichmann acted according to his conscience. What, then, would be the basis for morally condemning Eichmann, if he committed his crimes “under circumstances that make it well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel that he is doing wrong”?24 If, following Kant’s theory of reflective judgment, we understand judgment as requiring “enlarged thought,” we see that even if Eichmann did not lie to the court, his actions involved a deliberate failure of judgment to which he has to give account. Eichmann, who was capable of imagining the perspective of his victims for instrumental or manipulative purposes, deliberately failed to do so for the purposes of reflective judgment— to enlarge his judgment so that it could encompass the point of view of his victims. Arendt provides three examples in her book for this failure, examples that seem trivial at first reading. However, if we read them in light of her later lectures on judgment, we can better understand their importance for her condemnation of Eichmann. First, when Eichmann describes his activities in Vienna to organize the forced immigration of Jews, he uses the term “cooperation” to describe his work with Jewish leaders, as if there had really been a common interest and equality to both sides. Arendt writes: A more specific, and also more decisive, flaw in Eichmann’s character was his almost total inability ever to look at anything from the other fellow’s point of view. Nowhere was this flaw more conspicuous than in his account of the Vienna episode. He and his men and the Jews were all

234

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

“pulling together,” and whenever there were any difficulties the Jewish functionaries would come running to him “to unburden their hearts,” to tell him “all their grief and sorrow,” and to ask for his help.25 Second, his failure to understand the perspective of others stands out even more in his description of his meeting with one of the leaders of the Jewish community in Vienna, Mr. Storfer, with whom he had worked, and who was later caught by the Gestapo and sent to Auschwitz when he tried to escape. Eichmann describes their meeting at Auschwitz like this: With Storfer afterward, well, it was normal and human, we had a normal, human encounter. He told me all his grief and sorrow: I said: “Well, my dear old friend . . . we certainly got it! What rotten luck!” And I also said: “Look, I really cannot help you. . . . I hear you made a mistake, that you went into hiding or wanted to bolt, which, after all, you did not need to do.” . . . And then I asked him how he was.26 A third example of Eichmann’s inability to enlarge his thought and look at things from the perspective of others emerges from a recording of his interrogation at the police, when Eichmann unwraps before Captain Less, a Holocaust survivor from Germany, all the details of his biography, as if trying to obtain sympathy for his story of bad luck, without taking into account the perspective of his interlocutor. Arendt comments, “The presence of Captain Less, a Jew from Germany and unlikely in any case to think that members of the S.S. advanced in their careers through the exercise of high moral qualities, did not for a moment throw this mechanism out of gear.”27 With the term “banality of evil,” Arendt pointed to the way language (with its clichés, etc.) loses its communicative function and is used to block the reality of the victim from the perpetrator. We see that each of the examples that I referred to demonstrates this point, as Eichmann uses idioms and clichés to resist the process of enlarged mentality and to block the possibility of visiting through imagination the point of view of his interlocutor. The difficult question Arendt poses to law and moral theory, for which truth plays such an important role, is how to judge people like Eichmann who seem to blur our distinctions between truth and falsehood, fact and fiction.28 To address this problem, Arendt reintroduces the notion of “common sense”—but not in its usual use, of conventions or common social beliefs. Following Kant, she refers us back to its origins in the Latin term sensus communis.29 Accordingly, she argues that the type of reflective judgment explored by Kant requires that the judging subject engages in a process of “enlarged mentality” as a basis for arriving at valid judgments. It is only when one’s judgments become “common”—that is, inspected from the point of view and opinions of others—that they gain their objectivity. It is in relation to such a notion of common sense that we can best identify Eichmann’s flight from judgment. It allows us to notice that even if Eichmann was not

EICHMANN IN JERUSALEM

 235

lying, he nevertheless should be accountable for his failure of judgment, notwithstanding the changed legal and social norms in Nazi Germany. At this point, we can see the importance Arendt attributed to coming to terms with Eichmann’s refusal to obey Himmler’s orders. Arendt urges the Israeli judges to try to engage Eichmann’s viewpoint, to see the world from his perspective in judging him. For this purpose, Arendt uses the narrative strategy of citing Eichmann in the first person and letting his voice be heard in the book. She seems to be saying, “Don’t fit the man to your own stories about monstrosity and sadism of the Nazis, but listen carefully to his words and use your imagination to understand his viewpoint.” It is this act of reflective judgment that can provide the judges with a valid moral basis from which to condemn Eichmann’s crimes. Arendt returned to this question of judgment time and again in later years, but died before she was able to write her third volume of the The Life of the Mind, dedicated to the faculty of judgment. She left it for us, her readers, to try to imagine a postHolocaust jurisprudence that is based not on applying legal precedents to new situations but on engaging in reflective judgment, and going visiting in our imaginations the other’s point of view.30

Notes 1 Arendt writes: “Mr. Hausner had gathered together a ‘tragic multitude’ of sufferers,” Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 209. 2 See Shoshana Felman, The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Traumas in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 120–21. Lawrence Douglas writes, “Arendt’s argument presupposed a strict separation between the legal and the extralegal, between the rule of law and the interests of collective instruction,” The Memory of Judgment (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005), 2. Both Felman and Douglas are critical of Arendt’s legalism. 3 Judith N. Shklar, Legalism: Law, Morals, and Political Trials (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), 1. 4 Leora Bilsky, “Between Justice and Politics: The Competition of Storytellers in Eichmann Trial,” in Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem, ed. Steven E. Aschheim (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001), 236. 5 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, supra note 610, 115–26. 6 Ibid., 4–5. 7 For elaboration see Leora Bilsky, “The Eichmann Trial: Towards a Jurisprudence of Eyewitness Testimony of Atrocities,” Journal of International Criminal Justice 12 (2014): 27–57. 8 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, supra note 610, 253–79. For elaboration, see Leora Bilsky, Transformative Justice: Israeli Identity on Trial (Ann Arbor, MI: Michigan University Press, 2004), 117–44. For Arendt’s view on

236

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

universal jurisdiction see, Leora Bilsky, “The Eichmann Trial and the Legacy of Jurisdiction,” in Politics in Dark Times: Encounters with Hannah Arendt, ed. Seyla Benhabib (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 198–218. 9 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, supra note 610, 276–77. 10 For further discussion of this trial see Bilsky, Transformative Justice, supra note 617, 169–97. 11 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, supra note 610, 293. 12 Ibid., 126. 13 Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 31; Ak. 4:421. 14 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, supra note 610, 135–36. 15 Cited at Ibid., 136. 16 Ibid., 136–37. 17 Ibid., 137. In recent years Arendt’s thesis about Eichmann’s banality was challenged by the historian Bettina Stangneth, Eichmann before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer (New York: Random House, 2014). However, a closer reading of Arendt shows that she was not concerned with blind obedience, but precisely with the mix of idealism and a sense of rulefollowing that allows one to go beyond the black letter of the law, according to his ideals. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid., 146–47. 20 “There remains, however, one fundamental problem, which was implicitly present in all these postwar trials and which must be mentioned here because it touches upon one of the central moral questions of all time, namely upon the nature and function of human judgment. What we have demanded in these trials, where the defendants had committed “legal” crimes, is that human beings be capable of telling right from wrong even when all they have to guide them is their own judgment, which, moreover, happens to be completely at odds with what they must regard as the unanimous opinion of all those around them. Those few who were still able to tell right from wrong went really only by their own judgments, and they did so freely; there were no rules to be abided by, under which the particular cases with which they were confronted could be subsumed. They had to decide each instance as it arose, because no rules existed for the unprecedented.” Ibid., 294–95 (emphasis added). 21 Taste and smell “are quite clearly discriminatory senses: one can withhold judgment from what one hears or touches. But in matters of taste or smell, the it-pleases-or-displeases me is immediate and overwhelming.” Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1989), 64. 22 Arendt writes, “You see that impartiality is obtained by taking the viewpoints of others into account; impartiality is not the result of some higher standpoint that would then settle the dispute by being altogether above the melée. . . . It

EICHMANN IN JERUSALEM

 237

is accomplished by ‘comparing our judgment with the possible rather than the actual judgments of others, and by putting ourselves in the place of any other man.’ The faculty that makes this possible is called imagination.” Ibid., 42–43 (emphasis in the original). 23 For elaboration see Leora Bilsky, “When Actor and Spectator Meet in the Courtroom: Reflections on Hannah Arendt’s Concept of Judgment,” History & Memory: Studies in Representations of the Past 8, no. 2 (Fall–Winter 1996): 137–73. 24 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, supra note 610, 276. 25 Ibid., 47–48. 26 Ibid., 51. 27 Ibid., 50. 28 Arendt wrote earlier, “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.” Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harvest, 1973), 474. 29 “By using the Latin term [‘sensus communis’] Kant indicated that here he means something different: an extra sense—like an extra mental capability . . . —that fits us into community. . . . It is the capability by which men are distinguished from animals and from gods. It is the very humanity of man that is manifest in this sense.” Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, supra note 630, 70. 30 For an attempt elaborate the notion of Arendt’s “reflective judgment” in situations of transitional justice, see Bronwyn Leebaw, Judging StateSponsored Violence, Imagining Political Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

25 Between Past and Future Emily Zakin

The eight essays in Between Past and Future put their titular concepts into uneasy association and tension with one another, engaging in what Arendt calls experimental interpretation in order to reinvigorate their spirit. “Truth and Politics,” perhaps the most well-known and arguably the timeliest essay in the collection, is structured by its conjunction, which shares many of the characteristics that Jerome Kohn attributes to the “between” of Between Past and Future in his introduction. Kohn describes this between as a “gap” or an “abyss”1 that separates more than it connects.2 Likewise, the meeting of “Truth and Politics” hints at a disconnection that is not quite a disjunction—it might have been called “Between Truth and Politics” but not “Truth or Politics.” That sense of a troubled relation among central terms is also at work in three other essay titles: “Tradition and the Modern Age,” “The Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man,” and “The Concept of History: Ancient and Modern.” In each case, there is a juxtaposition of what doesn’t go together but hasn’t fallen apart. Of the four remaining essays in the volume, two (“What Is Freedom?” and “What Is Authority?”) approach their central concept with a question mark, and two approach their central concept as the site of crisis (“The Crisis in Education” and “The Crisis in Culture: Its Social and Its Political Significance”). Caesura, question mark, crisis—these impel Arendt’s reflections, whose “only aim is to gain experience in how to think” in the gap between past and future, not to offer prescriptions or “invent some newfangled surrogates” for overcoming it.3 My purpose here will not be to cover (or uncover) the entire terrain of the concepts and crises Arendt attends to, but to focus specifically on how the break in tradition and the question of freedom illuminate the complex relationship between truth and politics. Though not named as a crisis in its title, “Tradition and the Modern Age,” the first essay in the collection,

BETWEEN PAST AND FUTURE

 239

establishes the premise of the essays that follow with the assertion that the “power of well-worn notions and categories becomes more tyrannical as the tradition loses its living force.”4 The break with tradition and the concomitant unraveling of “willed continuity in time”5 is threaded throughout the reflections that follow. Arendt takes it that “our philosophical tradition”6 is explicitly “antipolitical,”7 founded on the opposition between thinking and acting, philosopher and citizen, singularity and plurality. Throughout the essays, Arendt’s discusses “the tradition” or “our tradition” as though its referent were self-evident and indisputable: “the tradition” is the relation of philosophy to politics that begins with Plato and ends with Marx (who she considers still inside the tradition, coming just before the break). Tradition here is not just the general practice of intergenerational transmission,8 which, like thinking, mediates between past and future, but the more specific tradition that “began when Plato discovered that it is somehow inherent in the philosophical experience to turn away from the common world of human affairs.”9 The tradition of political philosophy, in other words, is inaugurated by (and remains equivalent with) the philosophical removal of concepts from the world of experience, which it subsequently attempts to dominate. In this tradition, ideas are contemplated in the solitude of being “between-two” with oneself, not in the shared exchange of perspectives on a public world between us. Indeed, Arendt writes, “political philosophy necessarily implies the attitude of the philosopher toward politics,” an attitude characterized as “the philosopher’s turning away from politics and then returning in order to impose his standards on human affairs.”10 In formulating the ethos of political philosophy in this way, Arendt takes the cleavage between concepts and experience to be intrinsic to it and to (our) tradition (and not only foreshadowed by it). Even at its end, and however inverted, Marx, like Plato, envisions an “ideal of the best form of society.”11 The break with this tradition is not then simply an imminent fallout of modernity, a general trend within it to leave behind inherited ways of being or thinking, whether philosophical or political. While it has sources that draw from and coalesce around the inwardness of Cartesian doubt, the vanishing of authority, the rise of mass society, the incorporeal formalities and abstractions of modern science, liberal individualism, and the disorientation of world alienation, Arendt ultimately attributes the (final) break to the contingent chain of catastrophic events that took place in the twentieth century, catalyzing the development of totalitarian domination.12 The “break in our history” is “caused,” she writes, by the “chaos of mass-perplexities13 on the political scene and of mass-opinions in the spiritual sphere which the totalitarianism movements, through terror and ideology, crystallized into a new form of government and domination.”14 Here, Arendt marks a clear dividing line between the long histories of philosophical inwardness and modern world estrangement, and the distinctive twentieth-century event of totalitarianism that aimed to annihilate freedom and dissolve the public

240

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

realm. She also previews the way in which the ideological decimation of truth undoes the political realm itself, an insight that returns more vividly in “Truth and Politics.” It might seem that the break with tradition would liberate us from old ideas and liberate us to think and act anew, but it also stymies us because its concepts continue to hold us in their grasp even as they become less able to orient us and less adequate to phenomena we confront in the world. The effect of this disequilibrium and loss of exchange between concepts and experiences is an overall disorientation and loss of meaning. Even though “the tradition” had subtly undermined the public realm by unmooring thinking from acting, and prioritizing necessity over contingency, it had also supplied a source of meaning that made sense of experience and anchored thought. The break with tradition does not overcome but redoubles the implicit discordance of philosophical disdain for action, which continues to resonate in confused and jarring ways,15 leading us into new perplexities.16 For instance, Arendt asserts that the “contradictions and antinomies” of freedom arise from the philosophical concept of inner freedom, and not from the political experience of freedom of action.17 But the “rise of totalitarianism”18 also renders freedom and politics incompatible, and reinforces the “liberal credo” that freedom begins where politics leaves off, that freedom is “freedom from politics,”19 a tenet that banishes freedom from the political realm,20 withdrawing it from action, isolating it from others, and estranging it from the world.21 “What Is Freedom?” distinguishes between (non-phenomenal, inner) philosophical freedom and political freedom:22 the tradition of political thought has misled us into believing that freedom is sovereignty, individual and willful, and it thereby obscures political freedom, the freedom to act. As such, and even though freedom is the “raison d’être of politics,”23 both “the enormous weight of this tradition” and the “telling urgency of our own experiences” press “into the same direction of a divorce of freedom from politics”24 and a distrust of the political realm. In marking the distinction between the philosophical concept and the political experience, Arendt insists that “man would know nothing of inner freedom if he had not first experienced a condition of being free as a worldly tangible reality”25 found not in the solitude of a disengaged self but in interaction with the world and with others. The distorting effects of philosophical freedom are manifold. For one, it transposes what is essentially a public and shared activity that belongs to “a politically organized world”26 into inner life, shielded within the self. For another, it assigns this freedom to the “will” whose “essential activity” is to “dictate and command.”27 Taken together, these two distortions mean that the free activity and movement of political life are philosophically transformed into an invisible and individual sovereignty, replacing action with self-mastery. On Arendt’s account, political freedom requires, beyond liberation, both “the company of other men” and “a common public space.”28 That is, it

BETWEEN PAST AND FUTURE

 241

requires a world between us. The company of others implies that these others have an equal claim to political participation and to the sharing of their perspectives. The common public space implies that one has crossed the threshold of private existence, venturing forth into a space of appearance and visibility. Without these elements of a world (plurality, space, visibility, equality, and shared reality), the capacity to begin is confined to the obscurity of “the human heart,” which Arendt calls “a very dark place.”29 In conceiving of freedom as a capacity for spontaneity, a faculty of beginning, and the freedom to initiate (available even to those without political freedom), the tradition of political thought salvages what might otherwise be lost during conditions of “external coercion.”30 Although spontaneity is not yet political freedom (the full experience of political action in a public realm), nor is it the ambition of willful sovereignty, and Arendt views it as a resource that endures during the dark times when political freedom (experienced in action) is foreclosed. In the dark times of totalitarianism, which isolates human beings from one another and evacuates the common world, “what usually remains intact in the epochs of petrification and foreordained doom is the faculty of freedom itself, the sheer capacity to begin.”31 The loss of shared reality is both a cause and a sign that the political world has entered a zone of darkness. We cannot be free together without also sharing a public world, and this brings us to the problem of truth. In reflecting on the mutual hostilities and shifting alliances between truth and politics, Arendt’s focus in “Truth and Politics” is on the “injury political power is capable of inflicting on truth,”32 even while, as she reminds us at the essay’s conclusion, the political realm “where we are free to act and to change”33 is limited, bordered, and reliant upon “what we cannot change at will.”34 Truth remains at the limit of politics, standing beyond human action as its ground. Taking truth’s perspective, the essay brackets the “dignity” of the political realm,35 which resides in “acting together and appearing in public,”36 in order to display the deformations wrought by a politics concerned only with “interest and power.”37 Arendt launches her analysis on the basis of the distinction between rational truth and factual truth.38 Factual truths, that is, those that concern historical facts (“all factual truth, of course, concerns the past”39), are more vulnerable and fragile than rational truths, both because of their wholly contingent quality (they originated in free human action and could have been otherwise) and because they concern a reality that is among human beings in their plurality rather than within the human mind in its singularity. So even while facts and events “constitute the very texture of the political realm,”40 and are thus what hold the public realm and human reality together, they are also dependent on the flux of human affairs (for both their happening and their remembrance) and might vanish without recovery once lost. A fact that has been “lied away” has little chance of being rediscovered.41 Indeed, the contingency of historical events makes them both implausible and

242

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

unexpected.42 Historical facts43 are not discerned through rational insight, and they can be manipulated: they are easy to disbelieve. Arendt charts a transformation from the ancient (and especially Platonic) conflict between rational truth and politics, where the enemies of truth are error, ignorance, illusion, and opinion, but not lying,44 to the modern conflict between factual truth and politics, where the enemy is falsehoods that undermine both. The original conflict between truth and politics emerged out of the distinctive “ways of life” of the philosopher and the citizen;45 by associating opinion, in its multiplicity, with illusion, and truth with singularity, the Platonic conception degrades political life, the sphere of plurality in which opinions and perspectives are voiced and shared, and makes truth tyrannical.46 With the modern disappearance of transcendent truth, the “ancient antagonism” between philosophy and citizenship has been reborn as the hostility toward “unwelcome factual truths” that are at odds with “a given group’s profit or pleasure.”47 Unlike philosophical truth, which is singular and “transcends, by definition, the realm of the many, the world of human affairs,” factual truth is bound to the human world and “is always related to other people”—it does not concern a different way of life.48 This means that factual truth takes place in the realm of plurality, and lacks self-evidence.49 Emerging from human freedom and action, factual truth is both contingent and relational, it “is established by witnesses and depends upon testimony; it exists only to the extent that it is spoken about.”50 The fabric of human reality is woven by testimony and sustained by a robust web of relationships, a reliance that makes both trust and storytelling51 necessary components of truth since the “apprehension of reality is dependent upon our sharing the world with our fellow-men.”52 Because reality kills “all the other potentialities originally inherent in any given situation,” factual truths are also “intractable.”53 The reality of historical facts, that is to say, their ability to endure as truth beyond the contingent moment of their happening (the ephemeral moment of action), is overwhelmingly dependent on human testimony (on plurality and communication) and has no higher appeal54 than “records, documents, and monuments,”55 the durable artifacts and traces that congeal what has been witnessed and narrated and that anchor the shared reality of the historical object (and the cultural world56), even while retaining an opacity that cannot be elucidated by rational insight. Facts are fragile and resilient, haphazard and opaque, irrational and obtuse, and these qualities make factuality galling and frustrating. Despite their stubbornness, the destruction of historical facts is not at all “inconceivable”—it is easy to imagine a “power monopoly” that would dispose of factual truth and thereby tear the fabric of reality.57 Arendt outlines two predominant strategies of destruction: (1) the transformation of fact into opinion, that is, into the unstable flux of a diversity of views; and (2) the replacement of actuality with potentiality. In the first, factual truth is

BETWEEN PAST AND FUTURE

 243

discredited “as just another opinion.”58 In the second, political lies treat the past as though it were open to action like the future. Recall that for Arendt, the public realm is a space of appearances, understood not as illusion in contrast to reality but as reality: reality is available to us through its appearance. On the one hand, according to Arendt, the political realm relies on the stability of a shared world to sustain it. On the other hand, the stable world of reality is permeated with opinions, with a diversity of views, with multiple perspectives.59 Indeed, there is no public realm unless there is more than one viewpoint in play. As elements of worldly reality and human plurality, opinion and fact “belong to the same realm,”60 but they cannot be collapsed. Facts can be distinguished from opinion in that the former are “beyond agreement, dispute, opinion, or dissent,”61 while the latter seek assent. Historical truths remain, like rational truth, coercive rather than persuasive. But one way that lies work is by “blurring of the dividing line between factual truth and opinion,”62 exchanging the thusness of the former for the flux of the latter. As we saw in the discussion on freedom earlier, human freedom and power require a stable shared reality in order to flourish. Power, for Arendt, is intrinsically transitory and ephemeral: it arises when human beings act in concert, and it disappears with the end of action. If power attempts to usurp reality with its own inventions, it makes not only the world but also its own possibility and practice insecure because it undermines the space of appearance: “If the past and present are treated as parts of the future—that is, changed back into their former state of potentiality—the political realm is deprived not only of its main stabilizing force but of the starting point from which to change, to begin something new.”63 And yet, liars will sound more “persuasive,” “plausible,” and even “logical”64 in their assertions since they can supplant the contingent story of action with a fantasied but logical necessity. Lies are more believable than the truth. These qualities of lying become especially dangerous and pernicious when they become matters of government policy or propaganda, forms of organized lying that aim to rewrite history. Although small particular lies tear “a hole in the fabric of factuality,”65 this will leave noticeable incongruities and patches. But organized lying aims to create a new tapestry that destroys, negates, and violates reality. While the traditional political lie aimed to keep secrets hidden, “modern political lies are so big that they require a complete rearrangement of the whole factual texture—the making of another reality, as it were, into which they will fit without seam, crack, or fissure.”66 The modern lie, aimed at fellow citizens, not enemy nations, makes a full-on assault on public things, things everybody knows, and thereby undermines the texture of trust and testimony that is necessary to sustain a common world embedded among plural actors. Arendt adds that “it can be difficult to lie to others without lying to oneself,”67 and that self-deception becomes an almost inevitable consequence of successful lies that reshape shared reality, both because the liar is himself

244

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

oriented by the perceptions of his deceived fellows, and because self-deception is advantageous since it creates the “semblance of truthfulness,”68 and the appearance of being trustworthy. This susceptibility to self-deception means that the truth no longer finds its “last refuge” in the liar;69 the liar does not even hold the truth within himself. The breakdown in the distinction between truth and falsity has the result that “a whole group of people, and even whole nations, may take their bearings from a web of deceptions.”70 Arendt offers “no remedy”71 for this loss of bearings, since she views its possibility as intrinsic to “the disturbing contingency of all factual reality,”72 but she does write that the “boundless” possibilities for lying are also a “selfdefeat”73 since lies cannot produce “the secure stability of factual reality” that is necessary for the political realm. Lies are actions74 that threaten the space of action. The ability to lie is a “little miracle” that confirms (even as it endangers) human freedom.75 Unlike lying, truth-telling is not intrinsically action; only in circumstances “where a community has embarked upon organized lying on principle”76 has the truthteller “begun to act,”77 that is, moved toward “changing the world”78 rather than stating what is. Arendt depicts the truthteller as an outsider, “alone” and “outside the political realm,”79 without cause or commitment. Even so, there are “public institutions” whose value/criterion is truth.80 The judiciary and academia81 serve as “refuges of truth”82 with an “authentically political significance”83—in their independence from power struggle, they improve “the chances for truth to prevail in public.”84 Arendt does not provide a solution to the contemporary distrust of politics, but she does remind us that truth and politics can be allies. While truth might seem to be outside of politics, it is necessary for and secures the public realm: “no permanence, no perseverance in existence, can even be conceived of without men willing to testify to what is and appears to them because it is.”85 Lies, by contrast, destabilize the world, and lying “pulls the ground from under our feet and provides no other ground,”86 creating the “experience of a trembling wobbling motion of everything we rely on for our sense of direction and reality.”87 By tearing at the fabric of reality, organized political lying endangers not only truth but freedom, since the freedom of being a citizen in a community relies on and requires equal access to a public and durable space of appearance.

Notes 1 Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), xiii. 2 Ibid., xvii. 3 Ibid., 14. 4 Ibid., 25–26.

BETWEEN PAST AND FUTURE

 245

5 Ibid., 5. 6 Ibid., 156. 7 Ibid., 163. 8 Because the world is shared between past and future, “the crisis of authority in education is most clearly connected with the crisis of tradition” (Ibid., 190). Education is bound to human temporality, and its purpose, in Arendt’s view, is to prepare children for participation in a common world, not to “form” them. 9 Ibid., 25. 10 Ibid., 17. 11 Ibid., 18. 12 Ibid., 26. 13 The idea of “mass-perplexities” and “mass-opinions” are an important clue to understanding Arendt’s meaning here. Totalitarianism is not simply opportunistic upon modernity or modernization, but is specifically tied to the vulnerability of truth when shared objects dissolve. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid., 18. 16 What Arendt calls a “perplexity” arises from the persistence of traditional concepts even as they cease to cohere with experience. Arendt attributes the greatness of the nineteenth-century thinkers to their realization that the (political, moral, and scientific) categories of thought they had inherited were inadequate to the contemporary world and its “new phenomena” (Ibid., 24), and to the insights and maneuvers by which they made visible the mismatch between concepts and experience, exploding traditional terms from the inside (Ibid., 23). Kierkegaard, Marx, and Nietzsche set out to overturn their precedent thinkers (to replace doubt with faith, philosophy with politics, and ideas with life), and in their thought she finds an apprehensive foreboding, but not yet a “new beginning and reconsideration of the past” (Ibid., 27). 17 Ibid., 142. 18 Ibid., 148. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid., 154. 21 Ibid., 145. 22 Ibid., 159. 23 Ibid., 145. 24 Ibid., 149. 25 Ibid., 147. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid., 144. 28 Ibid., 147. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid., 145.

246

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

31 Ibid., 167. 32 Ibid., 227. 33 Ibid., 259. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid., 258. 36 Ibid., 259. 37 Ibid. 38 Although she suspends the “legitimacy” of this distinction, she accepts it as a heuristic tool of investigation, and she makes use of a typology that characterizes philosophical truth as more vulnerable than scientific truth, which is itself more vulnerable than mathematical truth. Because philosophical truths are “highly differentiated and always unique thought trains” (Ibid., 226), they cannot be reproduced in the same way that geometric axioms could be if books were burned. The rationality of the human mind is nonetheless a field of stability or “relative permanence” compared with the “ever-changing affairs of men” (Ibid., 227). 39 Ibid., 254. 40 Ibid., 227. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid., 247. 43 Historical objectivity, or the idea of the historical object as common to all, the “same world” appearing in varying aspects, persists through different historiographical epochs and can be found in both “Homeric impartiality” (Ibid., 51, 258) and “Thucydidian objectivity” (Ibid., 52), as well as modern historical science. 44 Ibid., 228. 45 Ibid. 46 Contra Plato, Arendt finds in Greek political life the model for holding a world in common precisely insofar as it is regarded from “diverse points of view” (Ibid., 51). The commonality, the objectivity, of the world emerges from the exchange of “‘it appears to me’” (Ibid., 51), of doxa or opinions. On Arendt’s account, we create a world between us through sharing different perspectives, and this world is in crucial ways differentiated from both the private life of the home and the intimate life of the heart and soul. The public space, the space of appearances, is a kind of theater demarcated by the barely metaphorical “walls” of law (nomos), a worldly space that must also be temporally construed, since there can be no world without temporal continuity. 47 Ibid., 231. 48 Ibid., 233. 49 Ibid., 239. 50 Ibid., 234. 51 “Reality is different from, and more than, the totality of facts and events, which, anyhow, is unascertainable” (Ibid., 257). Stories give meaning to

BETWEEN PAST AND FUTURE

 247

facts, that is, they transfigure contingency by making events more “humanly comprehensible” (Ibid., 257), and they thus help conserve a shared world and a space of freedom by reconciling us to reality: “the teller of factual truth is also a storyteller” (Ibid., 257). 52 Ibid., 249. 53 Ibid., 238. 54 “In the event of a dispute, only other witnesses but no third and higher instance can be invoked” (239). 55 Ibid., 239. 56 Arendt highlights “the objective status of the cultural world, which, insofar as it contains tangible things—books and paintings, statues, buildings, and music—comprehends, and gives testimony to, the entire recorded past of countries, nations, and ultimately mankind” (Ibid., 199). 57 Ibid., 235. 58 Ibid., 239. 59 Given the way in which factual claims are woven into human reality, and are inescapably part of an “interpretive context” (Ibid., 245), Arendt asks: “Do facts, independent of opinion and interpretation, exist at all?” (Ibid., 234). Her reply is that facts can be rearranged in accord with new perspectives, but that no generation “has the right to touch the factual matter itself” (Ibid., 234), a “right” that is seemingly an epistemic right—there might be different perspectives on responsibility or guilt for an historical event, but the event itself is a “brutally elementary data” (Ibid., 234) and even “the most extreme and most sophisticated believers in historicism” have to trust in this factual indestructability (Ibid., 235). On this view, facts are conservators of the past. The totalitarian “disregard for factuality” and “conviction that everything is possible” (Ibid., 87) upends the boundaries of truth with the boundlessness of potentiality. 60 Ibid., 234. 61 Ibid., 235. 62 Ibid., 245. 63 Ibid., 254. 64 Ibid., 247. 65 Ibid., 248. 66 Ibid., 249. 67 Ibid. 68 Ibid., 250. 69 Ibid. 70 Ibid., 251. 71 Ibid., 253. 72 Ibid. 73 Ibid.

248

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

74 A lie is itself a “form of action” (Ibid., 245), and the liar, Arendt writes, “is an actor by nature; he says what is not so because he wants things to be different from what they are—that is, he wants to change the world” (Ibid., 246). 75 Ibid., 247. 76 Ibid. 77 Ibid. 78 Ibid. 79 Ibid., 255. 80 Ibid. 81 Ibid., 256. Arendt points in particular to the political relevance of “the historical sciences, and the humanities, which are supposed to find out, stand guard over, and interpret factual truth and human documents” (Ibid., 256–57). This can also be related to the conservative role (preservative of the shared world) of education. 82 Just as spontaneity is a refuge of freedom in dark political times, so the academy can be a refuge of truth. 83 Ibid., 256. 84 Ibid. 85 Ibid., 225. 86 Ibid. 87 Ibid., 253.

26 On Revolution Robert Fine

Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution was published in 1963 shortly after her controversial Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. It offered a critical assessment both of the modern revolutionary tradition and of the mainstream view that it was no longer relevant to modern political thought. She portrayed revolution as a developmental and unfinished project, the nature of which could not be understood by those who froze it at any one point in time—be it America in 1776, France in 1789, Russia in 1917, China in 1949, or Cuba in 1958. The key question she posed was how the modern revolutionary tradition is to be understood if it is to remain alive in our own times. Her approach was not to prescribe what revolutionary thought and action ought to be, but to understand what it is and how it evolves over time. The structure of On Revolution is triadic. The three main sections address in turn the French Revolution, the American Revolution, and the “lost treasure of the revolutionary tradition.” At first sight, it may appear that Arendt repudiated the French Revolution for its authoritarian populism, endorsed the American Revolution for its constitutional advances, and embraced the radical democracy put forward by revolutionary communes, councils, and soviets on the margins of every revolutionary movement. On closer inspection, we see a different picture. In all cases, Arendt explored the contradictions of the revolutionary tradition, contrasted those of one stage with those of others, traced the uneven development of revolutionary consciousness, and dispelled the illusion of any final synthesis. The final chapter of the book was not a statement of Arendt’s own political views but an analysis of a particular stage of revolutionary thought. The key to re-appropriating this text today is to read it in terms of the immanent development of the revolutionary tradition itself. Arendt’s informing idea

250

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

is that in the development of the modern revolutionary tradition, the more advanced forms may offer solutions to the contradictions present in the less developed forms, but they also reproduce them and call in turn for new solutions. Arendt begins On Revolution with a discussion of the concept of revolution abstracted from its practical application in the world. In the chapter “The Meaning of Revolution,” she argues that the modern concept of revolution broke radically from the traditional definition. The latter was grounded in astronomical metaphors likening political events to the cyclical movement of the planets. It implied restoration of a preordained order disturbed by external sources, such as the despotism of kings or abuses of colonial government. In its modern form, the concept of revolution signifies the end of an old order and the birth of what she terms a “new beginning.” She held that this conception of revolution was unknown prior to the modern age and was irreducible to a generic concept like “social change.”1 The raison d’être of modern revolution is to give political form to the human capacity to begin anew, exemplified by the French revolutionary calendar in which the year of the execution of the king was designated year one. Its aim is not the replacement of one power by another but isonomia, a Greek term Arendt defines in terms of overcoming division between rulers and the ruled.2 It replaces the traditional language of the poor overthrowing the government of the rich by challenging the belief that poverty is inherent in the human condition or a brute fact of life. Arendt maintains that “nothing comparable (with modern revolution) in grandeur and significance has ever happened in the whole recorded history of mankind,” but she spoke also of its “pathos” and “perplexity.” Its dilemma was that “the setting of a new beginning . . . seemed to demand violence . . . the repetition of the old legendary crime (Romulus slew Remus, Cain slew Abel) at the beginning of all history.”3 Modern revolution contains both a new beginning that dissolves “rule” and the violence required to make a new beginning possible. Revolutionaries appear as “agents of history,” but also as “fools of history.” It was the “sad truth” of the French Revolution that it ended in tyranny, of the American Revolution that it lost sight of its revolutionary origins, and of council democracy that it could never escape its own marginality. There are echoes here of Walter Benjamin’s observation in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” that the idea that humanity could take control of its own political destiny can no longer be decoupled from an image of human beings swept backward by a revolutionary storm, faces turned toward the catastrophe of the past, propelled into an uncertain future while piles of debris grow skyward.4 Arendt begins her history with the French Revolution because 1789 represented an attempt to translate the modern idea of revolution into reality. Standing for a clean break from the absolutism of the old order, its Declarations of the Rights of Man and Citizen represented a leap forward in inclusiveness and universality. The idea was that everyone is born free

ON REVOLUTION

 251

and equal and that solidarity must encompass the nation as a whole. While multiple exclusions continued to operate in practice—affecting slaves, colonized peoples, Protestants, Jews, women, servants, foreigners, etc.— the normative expectations associated with the Rights of Man and Citizen pointed toward the equal freedom of all human beings. While inclusion had to be fought for by the excluded classes and their supporters, their struggles were made possible by the logic of universality put in place by the revolution. Arendt contrasted negatively Edmund Burke’s conception of the superiority of the “rights of Englishmen” over the “rights of men” with the “practical attempts” of the European Enlightenment to “include all the peoples of the earth in their conception of humanity.”5 At the same time, Arendt highlights the contradiction between the normative progress achieved by the French Revolution and its empirical disfigurements. Regarding the social question, she acknowledged that liberation from political absolutism and liberation from material poverty were equally urgent—one for “building freedom” and the other for “satisfying material needs”—and she held that “no revolution was possible . . . where the masses were loaded down with misery.”6 Nothing deprives people of “public happiness,” she wrote, more than poverty.7 The attempt to solve the social question by political means, however, proved “futile” and “dangerous” inasmuch as it identified the people with a “unanimous cry for bread” and blamed “enemies of the people” for their suffering.8 Arendt’s argument was not that revolutionaries were wrong to address the social question but that they did so wrongly through a conspiratorial blamegame.9 Arendt acknowledged that the Rousseauian principles adopted by the revolutionaries were democratic in impulse—individuals had the right to participate in person in the making of laws, and mere representation robbed them of public life—but in practice, the idea of the “general will” was used to treat the people as a single “multiheaded monster” always in the right, to subsume the rights of individuals to the general interest, and to undermine all genuine public life in favor of universal suspicion. Arendt argued that while the French Revolution actualized the spirit of universalism in the right of every human being to have rights, it also glorified the French nation and stipulated that citizens had an unconditional duty to the nation that granted their rights. The Rights of Man and Citizen were “supposed to be independent of all governments,” but they turned out wholly dependent on having a government to support them.10 Arendt turned to the American Revolution of 1776 after the French of 1789 to show how it dealt with the perplexities raised by the latter. Like the French revolutionary tradition, the American also presented itself in an illusory form, this time as a restoration of the ancient liberties British colonial forces had suppressed. It concealed actual innovation: “the framing of a constitution.”11 The American revolutionary tradition constructed a constitutional framework in which power was balanced against power, government was based on the consent of the people, and a bill of rights

252

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

guaranteed rights of personality and property. The revolution no longer consisted of a moment of liberation followed by reliance on the “natural goodness of the people,” but bound itself to the ever-present possibility of constitutional amendment and augmentation. Arendt saw this as a massive step forward, but argued that the doctrine of “constitutionalism” converted the constitution into an absolute principle. Its effect was to defend the private realm against public power, but not to defend the public realm against private power. In a society marked by the colonization of the public sphere by private interests, in which the public sphere was in need of guarantees, a different kind of constitutional framework was required: one designed to guarantee public life as well as private interests. Beneath the ideals of constitutionalism, Arendt saw that the shortcomings of the actual constitution were evident in its disregard of slavery and of poverty more generally. It demonstrated the gulf that existed between the universal idea of civic and political rights and the concrete norms of social and political exclusion that were practiced. Following Marx, Arendt argued that constitutionalism could provide a more or less accurate empirical description of how law and government functioned, only to posit the idea of “right” in every institution it discovered. The equivocations of constitutionalism were exemplified by a system of representation that granted only to representatives, not to ordinary people, the opportunity to engage in activities of “expressing, discussing and deciding which in a positive sense are the activities of freedom.”12 Arendt put it thus, “What we today call democracy is a form of government where public happiness and public freedom . . . become the privilege of the few.”13 Arendt traced the origins of the third stage of her inquiry, the “lost treasure” of the revolutionary tradition, back to the sociétés révolutionaires and Communes of 1789, the Paris Commune of 1871 that Marx held up as a model of working-class democracy, the town-hall meetings Ralph Waldo Emerson dubbed “units of the Republic” and “schools of the people,” and the factory councils, rank and file movements, communes and, soviets of twentieth-century working class history. She described this movement as marginal to, but embodying the “true spirit” of, modern revolution. She maintained that it created a modern form of government that would have no convergence with the inner tendencies of totalitarianism. Arendt acknowledged, however, that here, too, the revolutionary tradition was beset by contradiction. While its achievement was to form “spaces where freedom could be realized,” they proved in practice to be better suited to “participation in public life” than to the performance of governmental functions that require more organized structures.14 Revolutionaries could either draw these “spaces of freedom” into the governmental domain of welfare, redistribution and public works, in which case they destroyed them through their own excess, or divest them of social functions, in which case their first rule was to forbid citizens from addressing the oppressive social conditions that led them to participate in the first place. Arendt observed the emergence of a new “aristocracy” among those who are politically “the

ON REVOLUTION

 253

best” and who show “a taste and capacity for speaking and being heard,” while the masses are granted only the consolation of exercising the negative liberty of freedom from politics.15 Council democracy changes the way elites are selected but not elite-selection itself. In The Human Condition (1958), Arendt had already described the creation of public space as a vital component of freedom—today we may think of Tahrir Square in Cairo, Taksim Square in Istanbul, or Syntagma Square in Athens—but not as a foundation for government. She wrote that the public space “comes into being wherever men are together in the manner of speech and action and therefore predates and precedes all formal constitution of the public realm and forms of government.”16 Its limit, however, is that it “disappears with the arrest of the activities themselves.”17 Subsequent to the publication of On Revolution, Arendt was able to analyze the 1968 American New Left along similar lines. She celebrated its “joy in action,” its assurance of being able to “change things by one’s own efforts,” its rediscovery of what the eighteenth century called “public happiness,” and its “indignation” over the colonial practices and legacy of Western powers. But she also discerned a “theoretical sterility” and “curious despair” in its “conviction that everything deserves to be destroyed, that everyone deserves to go to hell”; in its hostility and contempt for “bourgeois rights”; and in its conception of a “Third World” that merely inverted “European-American prejudices” about “subject races.”18 Arendt reaffirmed the role played by constitutional frameworks in upholding civil, political and social rights: What protects us in the so-called “capitalist” countries of the West is not capitalism, but a legal system that prevents the daydreams of big business management on trespassing into the private sphere of its employee from coming true. . . . Freedom is freedom whether guaranteed by the laws of a “bourgeois” government or a “communist” state. From the fact that communist governments today do not respect civil rights and do not guarantee freedom of speech and association, it does not follow that such rights and freedom are “bourgeois.”19 If we compare Arendt’s On Revolution (1963) with Camus’s L’Homme révolté (1951), we find illuminating parallels. Both confronted the specter of “absolutism” in the modern world: the propensity to convert the people into populism, the nation into nationalism, the constitution into constitutionalism, the state into statism, private property into what we now call neoliberalism, public freedom into disregard for private right, and so on. Against the dominance of “isms,” Camus wrote in praise of moderation: “Moderation is not the opposite of rebellion. Rebellion in itself is moderation. . . . Moderation can only live by rebellion.”20 Arendt steered her own middle path between the temptation to idealize the revolutionary tradition despite its betrayals and to repudiate it because of its disfigurements. While Camus

254

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

identified the modern revolutionary tradition as a whole with its French wing, Arendt emphasized its diversity and developmental potential. While Camus constructed a categorical opposition between “top-down revolution” and “bottom-up rebellion,” Arendt faced up to the pathos of revolution without any categorical bolt-holes. The call Arendt heard was to face up to the equivocations of the revolutionary tradition, to humanize it, and thus to preserve it.

Notes 1 Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin Books, 1990), 21. 2 Ibid., 30. 3 Ibid., 38–40. 4 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. H. Arendt and trans. H. Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), 253–64, 257–58. 5 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York, NY: Harcourt Brace, 1979), 176. 6 Arendt, On Revolution, 222. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid. 9 Barrington Moore, Moral Purity and Persecution in History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). 10 Arendt, Origins, 298. 11 Arendt, On Revolution, 136–39. 12 Ibid., 235. 13 Ibid., 269. 14 Ibid., 255. 15 Ibid., 279. 16 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1958), 199. 17 Ibid. 18 Hannah Arendt, On Violence (New York: Harcourt & Brace, 1968), 35. 19 Ibid. 20 Albert Camus, The Rebel, trans. Anthony Bower (New York: Vintage Books, 2000), 301.

27 Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy Matthew Wester

The Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy contains Arendt’s lecture notes for a course that she taught on Kant’s Critique of Judgment in the fall semester of 1970 at the New School for Social Research. Arendt had lectured on Kant’s critical philosophy throughout the 1960s. However, her previous engagement with Kant had been with his moral and political thought, and not with his aesthetic theory. The main claim that Arendt presents us with in Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy is that Kant’s most important contributions to political philosophy and political theory are not to be found in his political writings—such as “Toward Perpetual Peace” and The Metaphysics of Morals. Instead, Kant’s most important political insights are to be found in Kant’s Critique of Judgment, a text devoted to aesthetics and teleology. The large interpretive claim underlying Arendt’s Lectures is that Kant did not sufficiently understand the political nature of the insights that he instead developed in social and aesthetic terms. The primary reason for the importance of Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy is not Arendt’s heterodox Kantianism (to which I will return briefly in the following section); it is historical. The material developed in Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy was to serve as the basis of the third volume of The Life of the Mind. Arendt’s death in 1975 meant that Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy is the only glimpse of the material that would have concluded and completed The Life of the Mind. In this chapter, my purpose is to offer an outline of the Lectures and to sketch a current scholarly assessment of them. In so doing, I shall be sure to introduce Arendt’s most important claims in Lectures and to indicate the degree to

256

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

which this short work fits in with Arendt’s other, more well-known writings on political judgment. Before turning to the content of Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, it is important to situate the Lectures among Arendt’s other writings. By the time that Arendt delivered the Lectures in late 1970, judgment was hardly a new theme of her thinking. She had been interested in developing a model of political judgment since the late 1950s. Her reasons are simple and easy to understand, even if her attempts to outline the details of her model of political judgment are more challenging. One of the foundations of Arendt’s thought is that the political is a discrete and autonomous realm of human life. Arendt was skeptical of the ability of philosophy to adequately theorize the meaning and significance of the political because she believed that politics and philosophy corresponded to radically different facets of the human experience. In an interview with Günter Gaus, she stated that “there is a vital tension between philosophy and politics. That is, between man as a thinking being and man as an acting being.”1 Philosophy failed to understand the meaning and significance of the political because it considered human beings in terms of universally distributed faculties. Arendt believed that philosophy would be correct in its assessment of the political only if “there were one or two men, or only identical men.”2 As a result, Arendt thought, political philosophy applied external standards to politics. Two such standards are truth and goodness. Arendt’s earliest writings about political judgment express wariness of philosophy’s tendency to reduce political speech and action to its truth-content or moral value.3 Such a reduction, Arendt worried, missed crucial dimensions of politics—such as, for instance, the performativity of political speech and action (an important theme of “The Crisis in Culture”). Arendt turned to Kant’s third Critique in order to discover an account of the faculty of judgment that was properly political. This, of course, raises the following question: If Arendt wanted to offer an account of political judgment that was not beholden to other realms of human experience, why turn to Kant’s aesthetics? Isn’t her turn to Kant simply the application of another external standard to politics and political judgment? In my view, any examination of Arendt’s writings on judgment must confront and answer these questions. Arendt’s answer to these questions was that the Critique of Judgment contained a “nonwritten political philosophy.”4 By “nonwritten,” Arendt meant that the Critique of Judgment contained political insights worthy of the political philosophy that Kant never wrote. Her political interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Judgment that appeared in Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy was sketched by Arendt in late 1957 in notebook XXII of her Denktagebuch.5 Two of the essays from Between Past and Future (“The Crisis in Culture” and “Truth and Politics”) also included brief discussions of political judgment that drew on the Critique of Judgment. Arendt discussed Kant’s Critique of Judgment in the context of her acceptance of the Lessing Prize, the script of which may be found in Men in Dark Times.

LECTURES ON KANT’S POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

 257

Despite her nearly fifteen-year preoccupation with the question of political judgment, Arendt’s Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy stands out for the simple and important reason that Lectures is the only text Arendt devoted solely to the exposition of political judgment. With the exception of the fragments found in Denktagebuch XXII, all of Arendt’s other writings on judgment are indirect and brief. In “Truth and Politics,” for instance, Arendt drew on Kant’s Critique of Judgment in order to describe an alternative, political mode of validity that could characterize political judgment without reducing political speech to its truth-value and all the while preserving the crucial relationship between political discourse and factual truths.6 In similar fashion, “The Crisis in Culture” included a succinct discussion of important elements of Kant’s discussion of aesthetic judgment from the Critique of Judgment. What all of Arendt’s writings on judgment from the 1950s and 1960s have in common is that they do not present an account of the faculty of judgment per se. Rather, they indicate that Arendt had recognized the importance of the faculty of judgment to her own theoretical project but had not yet turned to an exposition of this faculty in its entirety. The significance of Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy is that it represents Arendt’s only attempt to discuss the faculty of judgment on its own terms. However, Arendt’s Lectures are unfinished, and she did not intend them to be published. Thus to talk about Arendt’s account of the faculty of judgment is difficult for two reasons. First, the writings about judgment that Arendt published during her lifetime are only peripherally concerned with judgment. Second, her attempt to turn to the faculty of judgment wholesale with the projected third volume of The Life of the Mind7 was cut short by her death in 1975. This has left commentators with the overwhelming task of reconstructing what Arendt might have said or would have said from various essays she wrote and Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy. * * * I have mentioned that Arendt’s interest in uncovering a hidden political philosophy from Kant’s Critique of Judgment did not start with Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy. The beginnings of Arendt’s unique reading of Kant’s third Critique are found in Denktagebuch XXII, dated August 1957. In a letter to Jaspers dated August 29, 1957, Arendt wrote: “I’m reading the Kritik der Urteilskraft with increasing fascination. There, and not in the Kritik der Praktischen Vernunft, is where Kant’s real political philosophy is hidden.”8 In the same letter to Jaspers, she noted her indebtedness to his exegesis on Kant’s critical philosophy in The Great Philosophers (Arendt had edited the English translation of this text), writing, “I’ve always loved this book most of Kant’s critiques, but it has never spoken to me as powerfully as it does now that I have read your Kant chapter.”9 Arendt would continue to develop and deploy her reading of the Critique of Judgment throughout the 1960s. In approaching Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, it is

258

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

important that we recognize it as the culmination of Arendt’s engagement with the third Critique, and not its beginning. However, even if Arendt’s interest in Kant’s so-called hidden political philosophy did not begin with the material found in Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, the Lectures nonetheless contains important differences from her other writings on judgment. Arendt’s writings on political judgment show considerable development from their beginnings in her notebooks to their conclusion in her Lectures. It is not my purpose in this chapter to discuss the reasons for these developments, but I will offer a provisional sketch of the most important similarities and differences between judgment as it appears in Denktagebuch, Between Past and Future, Men in Dark Times, and Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy. All of Arendt’s writings on judgment are unanimous in their insistence that one portion of Kant’s Critique of Judgment—the “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment”10—contained a powerful model of political judgment. Arendt believed that Kant’s aesthetic judgments of taste were political because the validity that characterized these judgments relied upon an appeal to others. In the third Critique, Kant described this appeal by way of terms such as enlarged mentality and common sense, both of which entailed “thinking from the perspective of others.” Arendt was attracted to Kant’s account of reflective judgment for three important reasons. First, in the third Critique, Kant insisted that judgment was autonomous in relation to understanding and reason. Reflective judgments, in Kant’s view, were judgments that were not made in service of the search for truth or the pursuit of goodness. Arendt found the autonomy of judgment in the third Critique attractive because it was a natural complement to her own conviction that politics needed to be understood as autonomous in relation to epistemological and moral categories. Second, reflective judgments of taste—as Kant described them— were not determining judgments. Reflective judgments were judgments that did not simply place an object under a category; instead, reflective judgments made claims about particular objects in such a way that the particularity of those objects was preserved. No two flowers, Kant thought, were beautiful in the same way, despite the fact that we tend to apply the same predicate to both. Arendt found this aspect of Kant’s aesthetics compelling and attractive because of her conviction that human speech and action disclosed something unique about the speaker or actor. Third, and finally, reflective judgments, as Kant construed them, were a fundamentally social phenomenon that corresponded to our existence as members of some community.11 Arendt recognized the social nature of aesthetic judgments of taste. In Lectures (and in her other writings on political judgment) Arendt claimed that the “subjective universality” (subjektiv allgemeine Gültigkeit) that characterized aesthetic judgments of taste was made possible by the presence of other individuals.12 Taking on the appeal to something other than the self that Kant described in terms of enlarged mentality, common sense, and exemplary validity, Arendt argued that the faculty of judgment

LECTURES ON KANT’S POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

 259

was inherently political because of the degree to which it required the presence of other individuals to function. To use Arendt’s terms, because the faculty of judgment relied on the presence of others, it corresponded to human plurality, and because it corresponded to human plurality, it was actually political. In Arendt’s view, Kant had mistakenly elaborated fundamentally political insights in social terms. In Lectures, Arendt suggests to us that Kant’s belief that reflective judgments were limited to aesthetics and teleology was a result of the fact that Kant lived not in a community with a robust public sphere but in a (sometimes) benevolent dictatorship under Prussian monarchs. She wrote that Kant’s emphasis on the reading public in the Critique of Judgment and other writings was a result of the fact that “there could be no truly public realm other than this reading and writing public.”13 However, there are important differences among Arendt’s writings on Kant’s third Critique. The divergences between “The Crisis in Culture,” “Truth and Politics,” and “Thoughts on Lessing” and Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy are so significant that they have led some commentators to suggest that Arendt actually offered two distinct models of political judgment.14 In her earlier writings on political judgment, Arendt used Kant’s Critique of Judgment in order to describe a model of judgment that was tailored to the proper evaluation of political action and speech. In essays such as “Truth and Politics” and “The Crisis in Culture,” Arendt was more concerned with distinguishing political judgment from moral and epistemological judgment than she was in offering a fully worked out theoretical account of the faculty of judgment per se. When one turns from these earlier writings on judgment to her Lectures, one finds Arendt emphasizing that political judgment is the prerogative of the disinterested and uninvolved spectator. The figure of the spectator is absent from her earlier writings on judgment. To be sure, Arendt always understood the importance of the spectator to Kant’s Critique of Judgment. In “The Crisis in Culture” and “Truth and Politics,” Arendt recognized that Kant’s aesthetics privileged the one who experienced works of art over the artistic genius. Kant’s account of aesthetic judgments of taste was an account that was centered squarely on the spectator, and not the artistic creator. However, in Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, Arendt used a notion of spectatorship as one of the necessary conditions for the validity of political judgment that was absent from her other writings on judgment. In Lectures, Arendt appears to claim that one of the conditions for the possibility for political judgment was a degree of disinterest and noninvolvement from the activity or event being judged. Maurizio Passerin D’Entrèves writes that “[In Lectures] judgment is located in the sphere of the vita contemplativa, it is the faculty of non-participating spectators, primarily poets and historians, who seek to understand the meaning of the past and to reconcile us to what has happened.”15 Arendt’s earlier writings on political judgment seemed to place political judgment as

260

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

the prerogative of historical and political actors. However, this appears to change in Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, where Arendt’s emphasis shifts from political actors to uninvolved spectators. Because Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy is fragmentary, there is unfortunately no way to know exactly how Arendt would have resolved the tension between the two models of political judgment that she appeared to offer—or even if she had the desire to do so. * * * In this chapter, I have introduced Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy. I have tried to offer a schematic overview of what I take to be Arendt’s most important claims and to indicate the current interpretive trends in the secondary literature. I have introduced Arendt’s most important reasons for turning to Kant’s aesthetics in order to develop a model of political judgment. Arendt’s concern with offering an autonomous account of political judgment led her to reinterpret Kant in a way that downplayed purposiveness and emphasized the fact that Kant offered a model of judgment that corresponded to our existence as members of a community, and not as isolated knowers or doers. I have also tried to situate Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy among Arendt’s other writings on judgment. As I have emphasized, Arendt’s Lectures represent an important—if incomplete— indication of the development that her thought on judgment was taking at the end of her career.

Notes 1 Hannah Arendt, Essays in Understanding, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Press, 1994), 2. 2 Hannah Arendt, The Promise of Politics, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Press, 2004), 93. 3 It is important to note that Arendt believed that truth and politics were impossible without one another. For a detailed, thoughtful consideration of the relationship between truth and politics in Arendt’s thinking, see Ronald Beiner, “Rereading ‘Truth and Politics,’” Philosophy & Social Criticism 34, nos. 1–2 (January–February 2008): 123–36. 4 Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982), 19. 5 Hannah Arendt, Denktagebuch, ed. Ursula Ludz and Ingeborg Nordmann (München: Piper Verlag GmbH, 2002). 6 Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 223–59. 7 Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (Orlando: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1977).

LECTURES ON KANT’S POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

 261

8 Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers, Hannah Arendt—Karl Jaspers Correspondence 1926–1969, ed. Lotte Köhler and Hans Saner, trans. Robert and Rita Kimber (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992), 318. 9 Ibid. 10 Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), §1–22. 11 In the third Critique, Kant expressed this claim in the following way, “Someone abandoned on some desolate island would not, just for himself, adorn either his hut or himself; nor would he look for flowers, let alone grow them, to adorn himself with them. Only in society does it occur to him to be, not merely a human being, but one who is refined in his own way.” See 5: 297. 12 In reality, Kant did not make such a claim in the Critique of Judgment. In Kant’s view, reflection remained a transcendental affair, and not an empirical one in which some other person’s viewpoint was reflected upon. For a more detailed consideration of Arendt’s reading of enlarged mentality and common sense, see Matthew Wester, “Reading Kant Against Himself: Arendt and the Appropriation of Enlarged Mentality,” Arendt Studies 2 (Fall 2018): 193–214. 13 Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, 60. 14 There is no scholarly consensus as to whether Arendt presented one model of political judgment, or whether she actually offered two separate, irreducible accounts. Richard Bernstein, Ronald Beiner, and Maurizio Passerin D’Entrèves have argued that Arendt’s early texts on judgment are markedly different than Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy in that the former present political judgment as the prerogative of political actors and the latter as the prerogative of uninvolved spectators. See Maurizio Passerin D’Entrèves, The Political Philosophy of Hannah Arendt (New York: Routledge, 2002), 102–4; Ronald Beiner, “Interpretive Essay,” in Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1982), 92; Richard J. Bernstein, “Judging—The Actor and the Spectator,” in The Realm of Humanitas: Responses to the Writings of Hannah Arendt, ed. Reuben Garner (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 1990), 235–54. Others, such as Dana Villa contend that the differences between Arendt’s writings on judgment are more superficial and that the so-called “actor model” and “spectator model” of political judgment complement one another. 15 D’Entrèves, The Political Philosophy of Hannah Arendt, 103.

28 The Life of the Mind Robert Burch

Hannah Arendt’s The Life of the Mind was originally projected as a twovolume, three-part elaboration of her Gifford Lectures (1972–74), the broad purpose of which was to understand and relate three basic “faculties” of our mental life—thinking, willing, and judging. At the time of her death in 1975, Arendt had already delivered the lectures on thinking and the opening part of the lectures on willing. She had also prepared expanded versions of the first two parts of the project for publication, which (subject to Mary McCarthy’s posthumous editorial work) appeared in 1978 as two separate volumes, Thinking and Willing. These volumes were subsequently combined into a single paperback edition, The Life of the Mind (1981). Arendt’s lectures on judging were never delivered, nor were any materials prepared specifically for publication, save for a title page bearing two epigraphs—one from Lucan’s De Bello Civili (Bk I, 128) and one from Goethe’s Faust (II, 11404–7). What presently serves faute de mieux for the missing third part are materials compiled and edited by Ronald Beiner as Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy (1982). This volume consists principally of lectures Arendt gave in the fall of 1970 at the New School. On the premise that “the real political faculty in Kant’s philosophy is . . . judgment,” these lectures focus on Kant’s third Critique.1 Beiner also includes half-a-dozen pages on “imagination” from a seminar that Arendt gave concurrently on the Critique of Judgment itself, plus an edited version of the “Postscriptum” to the Thinking volume. Despite its evident value, enhanced by Beiner’s solid interpretive essay, this collection does not claim to redeem fully the lack of an account of judgment from Arendt herself. For what is missing is not just an Arendtian doctrine of judgment per se as one might piece it together from various sources across her intellectual career, but her own account of the sense of

THE LIFE OF THE MIND

 263

judgment as an integral episode—indeed the consummating episode—of the whole story that she is telling in The Life of the Mind. That lack frustrates any assured attempt to give a straightforward summary of the work as a whole, not simply because the missing third part needs to be filled in, but because it leaves to the reader the task of reinterpreting so as to incorporate into a single coherent narrative the many insights into thinking and willing that Arendt already offers along the way in the existing published parts. Yet, were The Life of the Mind complete as projected, it would still frustrate any ready attempt at philosophical summary. For having “said goodbye to philosophy once and for all,”2 Arendt does not articulate systematically a philosophical position. Instead, she provides a narrative account meant to make comprehensive, integral sense of the contemporary experience of thinking, willing, judging. With this narrative, her purpose is not to advance fixed universal truths about these faculties, but to “realize” (in both senses of the English term) an “enlarged mentality” that would inform our being in the world with others. That “mentality” cannot be meaningfully reduced to a set of philosophical knowledge-claims.

Tradition and Method In undertaking this project, Arendt expressly aligns herself with “those who . . . have been attempting to dismantle metaphysics, and philosophy with all its categories.”3 Thus, she not only declines to satisfy the philosopher’s residual desire to know explicitly in philosophical terms how, in giving a narrative account of the life of the mind, she would account for her own thinking itself as a part of that very life, but also seems to treat the demand for such philosophical self-knowledge with casual sarcasm. “In such an enterprise,” she says, all of that—her “method,” “criteria,” and “values”— “is mercifully hidden from its author, though [such things] may be or, rather, seem to be quite manifest to the reader and listener.”4 Arendt doubtless knew, however, that once one enters into the circle of philosophy’s selfdefining and self-legitimating thought, there is no philosophical escape, no refusal of philosophy as such that would not itself be philosophizing. There must be a different sense then to her “final farewell” to philosophy than simply a flat refusal or determinate negation. Arendt does suggest that her “dismantling process” has “its own technique,” but by her own admission, it is one that she herself treats only “peripherally.”5 Such treatment makes sense insofar as the dismantling of philosophy per se is not Arendt’s main purpose. Nevertheless, it is an explicit part of Arendt’s task in The Life of the Mind to “pave anew the path of thought”6 and to do so from the context of present experience wherein it seems to Arendt, as to those whose “ranks” she has joined, that the traditional path of philosophical thought no longer grants renewed possibilities or a way forward. The question of method in its original sense as meta ton hodon, following a path, is essential to the

264

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

sense of the narrative that Arendt constructs in The Life of the Mind. Thus, although she herself may weave this methodological sense into the narrative itself as inherently “methodo-logical,” for the present task of recounting the overall sense of that narrative, the question of method has to be made more explicit. In Arendt’s view, “the thread of tradition is broken” beyond all possibility of “renewal,”7 not because in principle all the claims of philosophy can be proved false, which eo ipso would be a work of philosophizing in any case, but because the way in which “philosophy, metaphysics, theology” has “framed and answered” its questions so as to define the tradition as such “has lost plausibility.”8 Such a loss cannot be internal to philosophical questioning itself. Rather, it must be that the way in which philosophy as such (i.e., philosophy that defines itself as the “science of truth”9), has framed and answered its questions is no longer maximally plausible as a way of asking about and making comprehensive sense of our contemporary worldly experience, and therefore in giving thought to what in that experience most calls for thought. In such circumstances, to continue along the strict trajectory of philosophical questioning and answering in its exclusive quest for truth, repeating all the old tropes in ever new variations, would not serve to advance, but in effect to work against, the realization of the kind of “enlarged mentality” that Arendt’s project tentatively seeks. In Arendt’s view, there is no life of the mind at all without thinking as our ability to make ongoing integral sense of experience. The constitution of this sense as lived-meaning has its source in the very need of our reason to actualize itself.10 At one level, such sense-making is the order of experience itself, and thereby constitutes the experiential locus of comprehensibility that is presupposed in all our questioning, since one can only question in terms of what one already in some sense understands. But the need of our reason also impels us in remembrance or repetition to think about our experience in a more comprehensive self-conscious way. Most individuals engage in such thinking as the experiential occasion demands. But, collectively, every human society tells itself some or other comprehensive story about the order of experience as a whole in order to endow the fact of existence with meaning. Yet, contrary to all philosophical self-accounting, it would seem to be Arendt’s view that there is no universal necessity that our thinking about experience as a whole be realized as philosophy, nor that it have its end and fulfillment exclusively in the pure grasp of universal and necessary truth, into which then all meaning of experience would have to be subsumed without essential remainder. To be sure, Arendt’s “dismantling” of the philosophical tradition does not presume to speak against truth absolutely, since that would be unintelligible. Moreover, as Arendt herself once remarked, “the reality of experience” requires “the distinction between fact and fiction,” as do “the standards of thinking” require minimally, “the distinction between true and false.”11 But Arendt’s narrative does speak against the continued relevance and the absolute priority of the metaphysical value of truth for the

THE LIFE OF THE MIND

 265

meaning of our being in the world with others.12 She does, so to speak, tell a story, and that story must be communally contestable, but it is not properly contestable on strictly metaphysical terms. Rather, to critique Arendt’s account on its own terms, one would need to provide an alternative, more plausible, comprehensive, and compelling story that would make better sense of our experience of the life of the mind as essentially a life inter homines. This story would not be told abstractly and in general, but in terms of a putatively more comprehensive account of current collective experience, and thus likewise in terms of what in our time most calls for thought. It could be argued that what above all calls for thought in our time is the contemporary loss, together, of human dignity and meaningful plurality amid the rule of increasingly narrowed and opposing mentalities. To borrow Kantian turns of phrase with which Arendt was familiar, what calls for thought is the dissolution of a worldly wisdom that would “accommodate itself to other people’s concepts,” into a self-centered and ultimately self-defeating prudence that simply “uses other human beings for one’s own purposes.”13 There are two aspects of this approach in particular worth emphasizing. With the break in tradition, not only does the past no longer shed meaningful light on the present but also “the continuity of the past as it seemed to be handed down from generation to generation, developing in the process its own consistency . . . has been lost.”14 It now confronts us as “a fragmented past that has lost its certainty of evaluation.” In the face of this fragmentation, Arendt’s historical allusions and references are not meant to renew a lost sense of continuity that would expose a hidden vector of progressive development. “It is against human dignity to believe in [such] progress,” writes Arendt.15 Rather, she responds in thought to the fragmented past precisely as fragmented, seeking in past thought-fragments “rich and strange”16 interpretive possibilities that can be appropriated to the present for the sake of a genuinely new, experientially responsible trajectory of thinking, willing, judging. Second, for Arendt, experience plays the decisive role. “What is the subject of our thought?” she asks rhetorically. “Experience! Nothing else! And when we lose the ground of experience we get into all kinds of theories.”17 This appeal has a twofold structure: philosophical questioning as the search for knowledge of truth has lost plausibility because it cannot make maximal sense on these terms alone of our actual experience here and now in the world. But for the same reason, the “thoughtful” alternative to such questioning cannot be invoked by philosophy itself, but must have an experiential matrix. On the one hand, then, there must be something about our actual experience in these “dark times” such that philosophical questioning and answering in traditional terms cannot make proper sense of it, or misses its meaning altogether. And on the other hand, there must be something we have come to realize in the very experience of philosophizing as the pursuit of the knowledge of universal and necessary truth that philosophy itself cannot make sense of in knowledge on its own terms other

266

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

than as a skeptical shortcoming. In Arendt’s account, these two matrices come together in a such a way that what is realized in making sense of the experience of philosophizing provides a clue to making sense of our experience in the actual world at this time, and vice versa, such that making sense of both experiences is mutually implicated and mutually illuminating. In framing her project in this way, Arendt appeals explicitly to Kant.18 Kant’s own philosophical experience “awakens” him to the realization that the search for metaphysical knowledge is internally and thus inevitably beset by “antinomies” that cannot be resolved in knowledge itself, and hence that the need of our reason to know cannot be truly satisfied in knowledge alone. Kant’s own response is twofold. He realizes “that ‘the urgent need’ of reason is both different from and ‘more than the mere quest and desire for knowledge,’” which he articulates in terms of a distinction between Vernunft and Verstand, “reason” and “intellect,” and on this basis he “finds it necessary to deny knowledge . . . to make room for faith.”19 This Kantian experience suggests to Arendt what she calls the “metaphysical fallacies.”20 These are not remediable mistakes in our objective cognition, but “semblances of reason” as ways in which “naturally” and so “plausibly” our reason deceives itself both in identifying and in satisfying its inherent animating need to make sense of experience and in the way it frames its questions. The most basic of these fallacies is “to interpret meaning on the model of truth.”21 Arendt’s basic thought, “put in a nutshell,”22 is that the need of reason is neither exclusively nor even principally the desire for knowledge, but the need to make comprehensive sense of our experience for the sake of thinking through our ongoing being in the world with others, a need that transcends the “limitations of cognition” and reconfigures the meaning of transcendence beyond all formulations in metaphysical knowledge. But then, according to Arendt, if one reads Kant in these terms, he does not so much deny knowledge to make room for faith as much as he “separates knowledge from thinking.”23 The Life of the Mind then is not itself a work of the intellect in its “quest for truth,” but serves instead the “need of reason inspired by the quest for meaning.”24 Its goal is not knowledge of universal and necessary truth about mental life as the last word—for Arendt there are no “last words” in thinking.25 It is instead to think through the situated experience of thinking, willing, and judging as the categories in terms of which the life of the mind has most recently come to articulate itself structurally, and to do so toward an enlarged mentality as a way to hold open the “mental” space for a renewed, humane way of willing and judging, and thereby a renewed humane way of our being in the world inter homines.

Meaning, Truth, and a Parting of the Ways Arendt makes clear that the measure of such thinking is not truth in its metaphysical value—neither adaequatio intellectus ad rem nor the self-

THE LIFE OF THE MIND

 267

certainty of the cogito cogitationes. But, surprisingly, neither for her is it truth in its Heideggerian formulation as the revealing/concealing function of being (Sein) in its disclosure of beings (Seiende). To the contrary, Arendt judges Heidegger’s thinking of the truth of Being as “disclosedness” (Enthüllkeit) to be only “the latest and perhaps most striking instance of the fallacy” that “interpret[s] meaning on the model of truth.”26 That she should read Heidegger in this way is surprising for two obvious reasons. First, it seems directly at odds with the approval of Heidegger that is implied by the epigraph to the “Introduction” to The Life of the Mind. And it also seems at odds with what is familiarly known to be Heidegger’s express view of the issue thematized in the context of his reading of the history of Being as metaphysics in terms of the “forgetting of Being.”27 It is thus even more surprising that Arendt should think it sufficient evidence to show that Heidegger’s thinking is implicated in this “basic fallacy” merely to cite, without explanatory comment, a single passage. Doubtless, to consider fully the elements of Arendt’s reading of Heidegger would lead too far afield. However, insofar as Arendt regards the fallacy of interpreting meaning on the model of truth as “the basic fallacy, taking precedence over all specific metaphysical fallacies,” and insofar as the basic sense of The Life of the Mind is itself implicated in “dismantling” that fallacy for the sake of a new path of thinking, her judgment against Heidegger on this particular point provides, at least obliquely, an important clue to the overall sense of Arendt’s own project.28 This issue takes on added importance when one considers that many of those thinkers whose “ranks” Arendt has claimed to “have joined”29 might well be accused of simply reversing the fallacy, interpreting all truth on the model of meaning. It could well be argued instead that Arendt herself is charting a third way between the fallacy and its mere reversal. A brief reminder of some Heideggerian essentials will afford some context for what is at issue here. It is Heidegger’s express thesis that “metaphysics interrogates [befragte] beings as beings and does not turn to Being as Being.”30 In not turning to Being as such, metaphysics tends in one way or another to equate being and truth (verum significat omnino idem quod ens) to the effect that the meaning of beings (significatio etium), including even the significatio summum entis, is to be absolved without essential remainder into knowledge of truth (cognitio veritatis). In that respect, in its essential constitution metaphysics is for Heidegger onto-theology. It is with Hegel then—whom Heidegger agrees “is in a way more distant from the subject-matter [Sache] of [his] concern [Anliegen] than any other metaphysical position”31—that the ontotheological trajectory of metaphysical thinking comes to its completion, that is, in the absolute sich selbst wissendes Wissen of Hegel’s Logic in which all difference of meaning and truth, Being and beings is demonstrated to be absolutely and essentially no different at all.32 It is Heidegger’s express thesis then that the “overcoming” of metaphysics, already in play in the thinking

268

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

of Sein und Zeit, is centrally the overcoming of all variations upon the interpretation of “ontological” meaning/truth on the model of “ontic” truth. The single passage Arendt’s cites as evidence that Heidegger’s thinking, too, is implicated in a metaphysical fallacy is taken out of context from the “Introduction to ‘What is Metaphysics.’”33 “‘Meaning of Being’ and ‘Truth of Being’ say the same [dasselbe].”34 To make matters worse, she seems to read this particular passage in a decidedly non-Heideggerian way. In Heidegger’s vocabulary, the “same” (selbe) is explicitly contrasted not only with the “equal” (gleiche) but also in such a way that this passage is more plausibly read on Heidegger’s own terms as suggesting that the essential correlation of the meaning of Being and the truth of Being in the “same” is “undecidable.” In that case, neither correlate could simply “be interpreted on the model” of the other—neither meaning on the model of truth, nor truth on the model of meaning—in such a way as to equate one to the other without essential difference.35 Short of dismissing Arendt’s Heidegger-reading as sloppy, more sense can be made of it if one recalls that Arendt’s insight into the basic fallacy itself is derived from Kant. Theoretically, Kant was awoken from his “dogmatic slumbers” not so much by Hume’s skepticism (though he does say that36), but more profoundly by his recognition of the “antinomies” that inevitably beset our reason in trying to transcend all experience in metaphysical knowledge.37 Yet in setting limits to such knowledge in the face of these antinomies, the point of Kant’s critique is to allow for the “practical extension” of our reason.38 Part of what is revealed in that practical extension is that the need of our reason is not exhausted in theoretical object-knowledge that we obtain as observers of the world, but requires the meaning we come to understand as moral agents who act in the world with others. Thus, the genuine transcendence that constitutes our human selfhood is not found simply in the “transcendental truth that precedes and makes possible empirical knowledge”39 but also and above all in the practical meaning (Glaube) that we must think as agents in the world striving to realize our worldly human vocation and to make sense of that experience: “The human being is destined by reason to live in society with human beings and to cultivate itself, and to moralize itself.”40 Heidegger’s Kant-interpretation has the undoubted virtue of bringing to light the ontological mission of Kant’s first Critique in the face of all of the reductive epistemological readings that seem recurrently in fashion. But not only does it not do justice to the primacy of practical reason in Kant but it also dismisses it out of hand. “Even if the theoretical reason is built into the practical, the existenzial-ontologische problem of the self remains not only unsolved, but even unraised.”41 Herein lies a possible clue to Arendt’s judgment against Heidegger on the meaning/truth issue. It is not really that Heidegger interprets meaning directly on the model of truth, but has to do instead with his particular understanding of how “transcendence constitutes selfhood.”42 Simplistically characterized, transcendence for Heidegger is the

THE LIFE OF THE MIND

 269

coming to be of the truth of Being as the “disclosedness of Being that first makes possible the manifestness of beings.”43 Truth of being then is the being of truth as the most fundamental interpretive horizon that, by illuminating the mass of beings in a characteristic way, accounts for the existence of the “world” as a world of meaning.44 Transcendence constitutes selfhood in that the understanding of Being is itself a determination of the Being of the self as such, the essence of the self, lying in its interpretive “existence” as the locus and medium of Being’s disclosure.45 It remains an open question whether or not this existential-interpretive understanding of transcendence does full justice to what was once thought of as esse rerum, that is, the real in itself existence of things and the relations between them.46 Be that as it may, in accusing Heidegger of interpreting meaning on the model of truth, it would seem that Arendt does think that this understanding fails in a crucial sense to do full justice to the Being of persons as essentially esse inter homines. For Heidegger, being-with is an “Existenzial” of the transcendence of the self; but as such it is not first and foremost a real relation between persons within the world, but a transcending context of meaning that makes possible the manifestness of such persons and relations. Thus, in its “genuine” (echt) mode, an “authentic” (eigentlich) self-understanding does not take its lead from our relations to beings, not even to other human beings, but “arising from out of one’s own self as such,” it takes it lead from the understanding of Being that is always already in play in all encounters with beings and all such relations and that is the very matter of our selfhood.47 Now, on the one hand, Arendt herself does hold that making integral sense of our experience belongs to the need of our reason to actualize itself, and in that respect, we can be said, essentially, to be interpreters of the meaning of Being as the Being of meaning. However, on the other hand, there is the risk that in thinking of our selfhood exclusively in terms of ontological truth, albeit as an horizon of interpretation, we tend to efface ontic differences of interest, outlook, wealth, and power that obtain among flesh and blood people in the world, even though such “plurality” too “is one of the basic existential conditions of human life on earth.”48 But then insofar as it tends to efface that plurality in the name of ontological truth, such thinking would tend, paradoxically, to work against the “enlarged mentality” that would put itself in the place of every other, and for whose actualization it is the animating purpose of The Life of the Mind to open the way.

Three Basic Faculties In a manner loosely analogous to Kant’s system of reason, Arendt frames her project in three parts correlated to three basic “faculties” of our mental life. She regards these mental “faculties” as a “plurality” in that each is “autonomous” and each “obeys the laws inherent in the activity itself.”49

270

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

Yet, she also claims that “behind the obvious plurality of . . . faculties . . . there must exist a oneness.”50 However, insofar as Arendt separates the quest for meaning from the quest for knowledge of truth, and yet also does not analyze this latter capacity as such, her account of the mental faculties is not exhaustive. It does not show how thinking and knowing can fit together with willing and judging as one. Rather, Arendt’s concern is to show how knowing can be essentially thoughtless and thus how there can be a narrowminded willing and judging based on thoughtless knowing. In providing her account, Arendt emphasizes the gerundial form of the nouns—it is thinking, willing, and judging as mental activities that are her focus, not thought, will, and judgment as mental properties. In this sense, the language of “faculties” is misleading. For thinking, willing, and judging are not objective “parts” of the mind that can be theoretically identified and that would serve theoretically to explain the experience of thinking, willing, and judging. There is nothing of faculty psychology in Arendt’s account. Instead, thinking willing, and judging are capacities of the mind as one is reflexively aware of them in the activity itself, and indeed is “aware . . . only as long as the activities last. It is as though the organs of thought or will or judgment came into being only when I think or will or judge.”51 As with questions of method in general, Arendt does not thematize, methodologically, her talk of mental life specifically in terms of “faculties.” One has to gather the sense of such talk from the narrative as a whole. Arendt’s choice of the term “faculty” seems to be principally a Kantian borrowing, “faculty” being the common English translation of the German Vermögen. Yet Kant’s own talk of faculties is ambiguous. It had been a commonplace of pre-Kantian metaphysics to define human being as the rational animal, rationality being the capacity or potential (dunamis, potentia) grounded in a permanent human nature and serving to define that nature specifically, through the exercise of which in speculative knowing each human being in and of itself would reach its specific fullness of being. Now, in separating freedom and nature, Kant in effect rules out a theoretical definition of human being as rational animal, at least one where “rationality” is the specific difference and “animal” is the proximate genus. Indeed, in strict Kantian terms, such a definition would amount to a metabasis eis allo genos, since what is meant by “animal” belongs to nature, whereas what is meant by “rational” transcends nature. Moreover, in Kant’s system of reason there is no universal genus in and for our theoretical knowledge that combines them both. Nevertheless, in the context of the primacy of practical reason, Kant does invoke something of this traditional language, by claiming that human being “as an animal endowed with the capacity of reason (animal rationabile) can make of itself a rational animal (animal rationale),”52 not by gaining theoretical knowledge, but by working practically to realize the highest good in the world, the possibility of which is opened up by setting limits to theoretical knowledge. Analogously, Arendt appropriates this language of “faculties” not to identify theoretically a permanent property

THE LIFE OF THE MIND

 271

of human nature, but in terms of the distinction of the quest for meaning and the quest for truth, to identify a possible ordering of our mental life, having become actual in our time and that, in the context of the break with tradition, could better serve our being in the world with others. Accordingly, insofar as Arendt looks to “dismantle philosophy with all its categories,” her analysis of basic mental faculties in The Life of the Mind is not properly read as a contribution to the metaphysics of experience. Instead, it is a tentative venture that begins to sort out the meaning of thinking, willing, and judging as the way in which at the present time our mental life has come to order itself, and how that ordering serves to make sense of contemporary experience. There are three basic aspects of such talk that are worth particular note. First, the metaphysical talk of capacities grounded in a permanent human nature gives way to talk of mental capacities as they are exercised in relation to the human condition. One sees something of this shift already in The Human Condition, insofar as Arendt speaks of “general human capacities which grow out of the human condition and are permanent, that is, which cannot be irretrievably lost unless the human condition itself is not changed.”53 But notwithstanding the metaphysical predispositions of this earlier work,54 Arendt is already beginning to realize that the relation of “general human capacities” and the “human condition” is one of mutual dependence and mutual implication as an internal relation wherein the relation itself grounds what it relates. Arendt herself hints at this point when she says, “The conditions of human existence—life itself, natality and mortality, worldliness, plurality, and the earth—can never ‘explain’ what we are or answer the question of who we are for the simple reason that they never condition us absolutely.”55 At least tacitly in The Life of the Mind, the meaning of this insight is carried further. There are no actual human mental capacities separate from their being actualized by us within the limits of the human condition, but likewise, there is no actual human condition separate from the ways in which these limits actually enter into and structure our human activities. We can of course identify theoretically mental capacities on the one hand—thinking, willing, and judging—and structures of human condition on the other—natality, mortality, plurality, etc. But to regard these capacities and conditions as externally related objective facts that determine all human beings universally would be a falsifying abstraction. But then, second, the internal relation of mental capacities and the human condition is not itself an altogether fixed structure that simply has different historical variations according to an unchanging pattern. Arendt hints at this point when (as in the case of willing) she claims that the “faculties” have come to be over time as “the result of experiences” for whose meaning they were “discovered.”56 That implies that in their plurality the actuality of the faculties themselves is not a permanent property of human being whose range is predefined, but a need of reason that gives rise effectively to new faculties in the course of experience. Likewise, the effective reality of the

272

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

limits of the human condition are not fixed universal structures that are met in various ways according to our fixed mental capacities, but are effectively actual as the need of our reason and the conditions that limit the fulfillment of that need change in the ongoing course of experience.

Turn to the Life of the Mind Arendt identifies two reasons for turning to the topic of mental life. First is her experience of reporting on the Eichmann trial: that the deeds for which Eichmann was being prosecuted were indisputably “monstrous” and yet they were the actions of such a manifestly ordinary, shallow human being.57 The issue for Arendt is first and foremost one of “thoughtlessness.” Whereas she concedes that Eichmann was “quite intelligent” (ganz intelligent) in a calculative functionary way, she also sees that he was “outrageously dumb” (von empörender Dummheit), evidenced in his basic “incapacity” or “simple unwillingness to imagine what is actually going on with the other.”58 The second “rather different”59 origin of her interest derives from Arendt’s own experience of philosophizing on the question of acting in relation to thinking. In The Human Condition (1958), she broaches this question in terms of the traditional vita activa and vita contempletiva distinction. Yet at the end of that study, Arendt calls for an “altogether different viewpoint.” Later, she explains: “The main flaw and mistake of The Human Condition is the following: I still look at what is called in the tradition the vita activa from the viewpoint of the vita contempletiva, without ever saying anything real about the vita contempletiva.” And yet “to look at it from the vita contempletiva is already the first fallacy.”60 Arendt deliberately characterizes Eichmann’s “incapacity” by paraphrasing Kant, who writes: “To think oneself in the place of every other” is the “maxim” of a “broad-minded way of thinking” (erweiterter Denkungsart) and of a “common [gemeinen] human understanding.”61 It is in these terms that the whole project of The Life of the Mind can be framed; for thinking in accord with this maxim works toward a “universal standpoint” (allgemeinen Standpunkte) and something like this “standpoint” plays a twofold, unifying role in Arendt’s approach to mental life. On the level of experience itself, it is the “universal” measure for the everyday thinking we do in the course of experience “as long as [we] are alive,” the thinking by which we make sense of what has happened.62 On the same level, such thinking affords the standpoint for both “broad-minded” willing and “broad-minded” judging. It does so by uniting these activities in terms of a common “mental” context, that is to say, a more or less comprehensive context of human meaning and human understanding as the interpretive horizon—the enlarged mentality—within which we think and act in the world of our experience. In experience itself then, it is the standpoint specifically both for “broad-minded,” communicable judgment as an “attunement”

THE LIFE OF THE MIND

 273

(Einstimmung) with the “other” that one makes as a “mature” member of a human community and ultimately as a member of the human world, as well as for one’s “broad-minded” willing as a matter of one’s “attunement” with one’s own “erweitertes” self as essentially a human being among others in the world where our willing initiates something new.63 The Life of the Mind repeats and transforms in self-reflective thought the everyday way of thinking that we do as our way of establishing ourselves in the world.64 Yet it starts such reflection with Eichmann’s thoughtlessness, that is, with the poignant recognition of a lack. What precisely is lacking in Eichmann’s case, and that which provokes Arendt’s thinking about mental life, is how a form of such everyday thinking, which at some level we cannot be without, can effectively reduce to a thoroughly thoughtless intelligence. In thinking about the life of the mind then, Arendt is concerned to understand how the particular instance of Eichmann is possible as a “concrete model” of the banality of evil.65 Yet, it is thinking about his “incapacity” that leads her to thinking about the “broadest” standpoint from which to make the most comprehensive and revealing sense of the experiential possibilities of meaning for thinking, willing, judging in general. Thus, in its theoretical form (and so withdrawn from all considerations of action), Arendt’s thinking about the life of the mind explicates an interpretive structure already immanent in mental life itself, though one to which Eichmann himself is largely oblivious. She appropriates and legitimates the meaning of that structure so as to transform what is implicit as a possibility in experience, that is, broadmindedness as a maxim for thinking and thereby as a precept for willing and a rule for judging into an “unalterable command” (unwandelbar Gebot). This “broad-mindedness” involves a presumptive universality, though not of a strict abstract sort (universalitas) that rules in principle over the rational self-activity of all finite rational beings. Instead, it is an indefinite and elusive concrete universality as an always still to be realized “commonality” (generalitas, Gemeinsamkeit) that we strive for “in communication with human beings [in der Mitteilung mit Menschen]”66 (to borrow Kant’s own phrase) in the public world of our experience. It is in these terms that Arendt’s step from what she calls “the relatively safe fields of political science and theory” to the “awesome matters” having to do with the life of the mind makes sense.67 It is a step from a narrower and thus more abstract frame of mind to a more comprehensive and thus concrete universal point of view. In the achievement of something like this “commonality,” the very meaning of “our” experience is contested, to be erweitert toward a genuine, communal “our” amid and out from all fragmentation and disruption with a view to an erweitert and shared sense of human dignity—precisely what at heart Eichmann lacked. As for her second concern, Arendt finds a clue to “an altogether different viewpoint” on the issue of thought and action in a self-description by Scipio Africanus that Cicero ascribes to Cato the Elder. Of himself, Scipio says: “Never am I more active than when I do nothing, never am I less alone than

274

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

when I am by myself.”68 This fragment recalls the sheer self-activity of our reason in its need to actualize itself. This self-activity is more active (plus agere) than when one is doing nothing (quam nihil cum ageret), since while one is simply thinking, this self-activity is not distracted or limited by the demands of worldly action or the company of others. It has only the sheer sense-making activity of thinking to occupy it. Likewise, in simply thinking one is less alone (minus solum) than when one lacks the company of others (quam cum solus esset), insofar as the sense-making self-activity of thinking gathers in explicit understanding, and thereby serves to realize authentically for the first time, a “common sense” that is the very ground of our being in the world with others. In The Life of the Mind, however, Arendt cites this Cicero passage only as the occasion to formulate questions about thinking. Yet, instead of asking how thinking proceeds in time, she asks, “Where are we when we think?” appealing to a Kafka parable for insight.69 This leads to a seemingly contradictory view. Having dismissed out of hand as “the last of the metaphysical fallacies” the thesis that the self is “self-making,”70 Arendt likewise dismisses the whole post-Kantian tradition wherein the activity of thinking is seen essentially as a self-constituting activity. Thus, instead of asking directly how as a self-constituting activity thinking integrates and re-integrates its own past as it projects its future, with the present in and for the activity of thinking itself being a self-renewing moment of integration,71 Arendt invokes “without saying anything real about it,” an image of “thought-trains . . . beaten by the activity of thought,” and of “remembrance and anticipation, [that] save whatever they touch from the ruin of historical and biographical time.”72 The “present” of such activity Arendt represents as “a small inconspicuous track of non-time”—a “track” for which on the one hand she does not account, and on the other represents as analogous to the nunc stans of the vita contempliva. Ironically, then, in excerpting this Kafka parable as a fragment from a disrupted tradition and reading it as she does to form a key step in her effort to “pave anew the path of thought,” Arendt seems inadvertently to remain implicated in the very fallacy she was looking to escape.

In Place of a Summary A comment on the two quotes from the title page of “Judging” may serve to round out our overview of the sense of The Life of the Mind as a whole. In the first, Arendt quotes Lucan. “The victorious cause pleased the gods, the defeated cause pleased Cato.”73 Historically, the “victorious cause” was of course Caesar’s military victory over Pompey, making Pompey’s the “defeated cause.” Caesar’s victory pleased the gods as a decisive advance toward the worldly imperium sine fine that was the divine will. Neither cause pleased Cato; for his was the higher defeated “cause” of Roman libertas, irrespective

THE LIFE OF THE MIND

 275

of divine will. Implicit to the meaning of this passage then is the contrasts in judgment: the judgment of the gods that defines human victory “fatefully” in terms of the success of the divine will itself through its human pawns; and the judgment of Cato in human “worldly” terms between the recurrent worldly possibility of “Caesarism” and regimes “that confer legality on crime”74 as somehow being in accord with a superintending divine judgment and will, and the possibility of a genuine human libertas in the world as the work of human judgment and will. Doubtless, as she suggests in The Life of the Mind, Arendt would have “dismantled” the meaning of this fragment for use against the Hegelian thesis that “die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht.”75 For within the fragmented tradition and thus dissociated from history as the progress of consciousness to freedom, the Hegelian thesis “leaves the ultimate judgement to success,” which has then always to be decided and so deferred. As Arendt makes clear the trajectory of her own account of judgment would have been Kantian,76 the broken thread of the tradition putting the responsibility for judgment, as an unending worldly “decision” for human dignity and communality, on each thinking and acting individual here and now, no longer bound by any List der Vernunft. Kant’s own account of judgment was meant, theoretically, to unite the realms of freedom and nature with a view ultimately to establishing the possibility of the worldly fulfillment of our human vocation. Arendt’s work on judging may well have served an analogous function, showing how the activities of thinking and willing could come together in judging for the sake of our worldly being inter homines, such that—as Arendt’s Goethe epigraph suggests—“the effort to be human would be worthwhile.” Yet, the elusive “freedom” (Freie) that Faust believed would make his being human in the world worthwhile has become for us, in the aftermath of the Nazi experience, an elusive freedom for all reasonable beings having to make their way in common between past and future, though now in circumstances unpropitious and even more obstructed than was Faust by “magic” and “incantations” not yet “completely unlearned.”77

Notes 1 Hannah Arendt, The Promise of Politics, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2005), 169. 2 Hannah Arendt, The Portable Hannah Arendt, ed. Peter Baehr (London: Penguin Classics), 3. 3 Hannah Arendt, Thinking (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 212. 4 Ibid., 211. 5 Ibid., 212. 6 Ibid., 210.

276

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

7 Ibid. 8 Ibid., 10. 9 Aristotle, Metaphysics, 993b20. 10 Hannah Arendt, “On Hannah Arendt,” in Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the Public World, ed. Melvyn A. Hill (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979), 303. 11 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Meridian Books, 1958), 474. 12 Cf. e.g., Arendt, Thinking, 15–16. 13 Immanuel Kant, Kants Gesammelte Schriften (Berlin: Prussian Academy, 1902–55), VII:228, 201. 14 Ibid., 212. 15 Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1982), 77. 16 Arendt, Thinking, 212. 17 Arendt, “On Hannah Arendt,” 308. 18 Arendt, Thinking, 15. 19 Ibid., 14. 20 Ibid., 12, 44–45. Cf. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 386 (B354–55). 21 Arendt, Thinking, 15. 22 Idem. 23 Ibid., 14. 24 Ibid., 13, 15. 25 Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2003), 166–67. Cf. “I think that all thinking . . . has the earmark of being tentative” (“On Hannah Arendt,” 338). 26 Arendt, Thinking, 15. Cf. ibid., 23–24. 27 Martin Heidegger, “Zur Seinsfrage,” in Wegmarken (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1967), 243. 28 Arendt, Thinking, 15–16; 211–12. 29 Ibid., 212. 30 Martin Heidegger, “Einleitung zu ‘Was ist Metaphysik,” in Wegmarken (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1967), 196. 31 Martin Heidegger, Zur Sache des Denkens (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1969), 28. 32 Martin Heidegger, Identität und Differenz (Pfullingen: Neske, 1957), esp. 43–58. 33 Arendt, Thinking, 15; Cf. Heidegger, “Einleitung zu ‘Was ist Metaphysik,’” 206. 34 Heidegger, “Einleitung zu ‘Was ist Metaphysik,’” 206.

THE LIFE OF THE MIND

 277

35 Cf. “The same [selbe] never coincides with the equal [gleichen], not even with the empty oneness of mere identity. The equal always moves toward the absence of difference [Unterschiedlose], so that in it everything unites in one [übereinkomme]. By contrast, the same is the belonging together of what differs through a gathering by way of the difference. The same can only be said, when the difference is thought” (Martin Heidegger, “. . . dichterisch wohnet der Mensch . . . ,” in Vorträge und Aufsätze [Pfullingen: Neske, 1954], 193). 36 Kant, Kants Gesammelte Schriften, IV, 260. 37 Ibid, IV, 338; cf. also Kant, Kants Gesammelte Schriften, XII:257–58. “The antinomy of pure reason . . . first aroused me from my dogmatic slumber and drove me to the critique of reason itself” (Letter to Garve, September 11, 1798). 38 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 117 (Bxxx). 39 Ibid., 276 (B 185). 40 Kant, Kants Gesammelte Schriften, VII:324–25. 41 Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 320n. (§64), Heidegger’s emphasis. This footnote remains the same throughout the editions, and the translation is my own variation on the Macquarrie & Robinson version.  So for the German Sein und Zeit, 13 Aufl. (Tübingen: Verlag Max Niemeyer, 1976), 320n. (§64). For the English, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson (New York and Evanston: Harper & Row, 1962), pp. 496–97.  42 Martin Heidegger, “Vom Wesen des Grundes,” in Wegmarken (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1967), 34–35. 43 Ibid., 28. 44 Cf. e.g., “What is put into question in the question to be worked out is Being, that which determines beings as beings, that on the basis of which [woraufhin] beings are always already understood, however they may be discussed” (Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 6 [§2]). But “that on the basis of which [Woraufhin] . . . something is understood as something is meaning” (Ibid., 151 [§32]). 45 Cf. Ibid., 11–14 (§4). 46 Cf. Martin Heidegger, Metaphysiche Anfangsgründe der Logik (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1978), Bd. 26, 194–95. 47 Ibid., 146 (§31). 48 Arendt, Thinking, 74. 49 Ibid., 70. 50 Ibid. 51 Ibid., 76, my emphasis. 52 Kant, Kants Gesammelte Schriften, VII:321. 53 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd ed. (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 6. 54 Arendt, “On Hannah Arendt,” 305. 55 Arendt, Human Condition, 11.

278

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

56 Arendt, Willing (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 3. 57 Arendt, Thinking, 4. 58 Hannah Arendt and Joachim Fest, Eichmann war von empörender Dummheit (Munich and Zurich: Piper Verlag, 2011), 43–45. 59 Arendt, Thinking, 3. 60 Arendt, “On Hannah Arendt,” 305. 61 Kant, Kants Gesammelte Schriften, V:293–96 (CJ §40) and VII:228–29 (Anthro. §59). 62 Arendt, “On Hannah Arendt,” 303. 63 Cf. Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, 71–75; Arendt and Fest, Eichmann war von empörender Dummheit, 45. 64 Hannah Arendt, Denktagebuch 1950–1973 (Munich: Piper, 2003), II:782. 65 Hannah Arendt, The Jew as Pariah (New York: Grove Press, 1978), 251. 66 Kant, Kants Gesammelte Schriften, VII:228 (Anthro, §59). 67 Arendt, Thinking, 3. 68 Cicero, De Republica, I:17. This is the conventional way of referring to the text, that is, by book and section number. However, I used my own (very old) Loeb Classical Library version, so the details are: Cicero, De Republica, De Legibus, trans C. W. Keyes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1928), 48 for the Latin; 49 for the English translation. 69 Arendt, Thinking, 202–10. 70 Ibid., 215. 71 Cf. e.g., Emil Fackenheim, Metaphysics and Historicity (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1961), 25–44. 72 Ibid., 210. 73 Cato, De Bello Civili, Bk I, 128; also cited in Arendt, Thinking, 216. 74 Ibid., Bk I, 2. 75 Arendt, Thinking, 216. 76 Ibid., 215–16; cf. Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, passim. 77 J. W. von Goethe, Faust, II:11404–7.

PART III

Themes and Topics Ontology, Politics, and Society

Ontology

29 Arendt and Appearance Jeremy Elkins

The idea of appearance is fundamental in Arendt’s thinking, in a double sense. It is fundamental within her thinking in the sense that it pervades her work. And the reason that it does so is because—in the second sense—it is, in her thinking, a fundamental characteristic of the world. “The world men are born into,” she writes at the beginning of “Thinking,” the first volume of The Life of the Mind: contains many things, natural and artificial, living and dead, transient and sempiternal, all of which have in common that they appear and hence are meant to be seen, heard, touched, tasted, and smelled, to be perceived by sentient creatures endowed with the appropriate sense organs. . . . In this world which we enter, appearing from a nowhere, and from which we disappear into a nowhere, Being and Appearing coincide.1 It is perhaps an indication of both how fundamental and how complex the idea of appearance is for Arendt that we should find her thus beginning her most sustained treatment of the topic in a volume concerned precisely with “mental activities,” which, in her account of them, “have in common a withdrawal from the world as it appears and a bending back toward the self.”2 In this, we are immediately met with an apparent paradox, one that frames the project of The Life of the Mind: The primacy of appearance for all living creatures . . . is of great relevance to the topic we are going to deal with. . . . [That mental activities involve a withdrawal from appearance] . . . would cause no great problem if we were mere spectators [of] . . . the world. . . . However we are of the world

282

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

and not merely in it; we, too, are appearances by virtue of arriving and departing . . . [and] [t]hese properties do not vanish when we happened to be engaged in mental activities. . . . [S]ince Being and Appearing coincide for men, this means that I can flee appearance only into appearance. . . . Our mental apparatus, though it can withdraw from present appearances, remains geared to Appearance.3 And so, it might be said, “mental activities” do not really involve a withdrawal in toto from “the world as it appears,” but only a withdrawal from a certain kind of immediate encounter with objects into a different kind of “appearance.” Along the lines of this distinction, Arendt finds it a “first consoling” response that, even within the old metaphysical view that “(true) Being [lies] behind (mere) Appearance,” there is the assumption that “when the philosopher takes leave of the world given by the senses . . . to the life of the mind, he [nonetheless] takes his clue from the former, looking for something to be revealed to him that would explain its underlying truth,” and that this “truth . . . can be conceived only as another appearance.”4 Although Arendt rejects the “two-world theory” that underlies this, she could nonetheless preserve the idea that both thinking and that which thinking thinks are themselves forms of appearance. Yet for Arendt this will not do. Immediately after saying that thought, though “it can withdraw from present appearances, remains geared to Appearance,” she insists that “that does not solve the problem,” for the fundamental “problem concerns the fitness of thought to appear at all . . . whether thinking and other invisible and soundless mental activities are meant to appear or whether in fact they can never find an adequate place in the world.”5 To see why this remains a problem for Arendt requires that we go further into the meaning for her of appearance. There are three elements here that are of special relevance. The first concerns the subject of appearance. The opening passage of this chapter ends with the idea that “Being and Appearing coincide.” But what it begins with is the idea that the world “contains many things,” and the rest of that sentence makes clear that we are talking about things that are perceptible through the “appropriate sense organs.” It is this world of objects that appears to the senses that is primary for Arendt. The problem of thought, then, is, for her, what place it has in a sensory world. The second element concerns the fundamental importance for Arendt of plurality to appearance. If the world is “meant to be seen,” it follows for Arendt that “nothing and nobody exists in the world whose very being does not presuppose a spectator.”6 To be seen—for Arendt “seeing” is often used as shorthand for sensory perception in general—is always to be seen by some particular being. And in the world there is not one being capable of seeing, but many. “Not Man but men inhabit this planet. Plurality is the law of the earth” and “each single object appears in a different perspective to each individual.”7 Every appearance is thus plural and perspectival: “the

ARENDT AND APPEARANCE

 283

world opens up differently to every man, according to his position in it.”8 For Arendt, then, seeing implies seeming, and seeming is—in one of Arendt’s favorite phrases—dokei moi (“it seems to me”). The third element concerns the importance for Arendt of the idea of a common world. That appearance always implies an “it seems-to-me” does not mean that appearance is the same as seeming. For while “the world opens up differently to every man,” the objects of the world are common, and they are common precisely because they can appear to all, even as they appear differently to each. The “‘sameness’ of the world, its commonness . . . resides in the fact that the same world opens up to everyone.”9 For Arendt, then, both the notion of a common object and the notion of plurality are entailed in the very idea of appearance. These three aspects of appearance for Arendt—the primacy of the sensory world, the plurality of perspective, and the commonness of objects—are brought together in her description of “common sense.” Common sense, she argues, is bound to the five senses as a synthetic function. It is “a kind of sixth sense needed to keep my five senses together and guarantee that it is the same object that I see, touch, taste, smell, and hear.” At the same time, common sense also “fits the sensations of my strictly private five senses . . . into a common world shared by others. The subjectivity of the ‘it-seemsto-me’ is remedied by the fact that the same object also appears to others though its mode of appearance may be different.”10 The problem posed by thinking, for Arendt, then, is how an activity that is not sensory and that takes place privately can be at home in a common world of sensory objects. We refer to this problem not in order to answer it, but because the fact that it is a problem at all for Arendt is revealing of her complex view of appearance. For Arendt, appearance is in one sense an ontological condition of the world. This is the sense in that “Being coincides with Appearance,” and in that (for example) thinking, even as it withdraws from “present appearances,” cannot be other than appearance. At the same time and in another sense, appearance is associated for Arendt with a world perceived by the senses and encountered by a plurality of individuals from differing perspectives. It is in this sense of appearing that thinking, for example, can be said to involve a “withdrawal from the world as it appears,” and in relation to which the question of whether “thinking and other invisible and soundless mental activities are meant to appear or whether in fact they can never find an adequate place in the world” can arise as a question. Arendt herself does not clearly distinguish these senses of appearance, and one can have the impression that she is not wholly comfortable in making the distinction. (The same can be said of associated ideas, such as “world” and “common,” which can each refer to appearance in either the first sense or the second sense.) A simple way of treating the relationship between these two senses of appearance would be to say that while all that is appears, the sensory world remains primary for us and all other forms of

284

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

appearance rest in some manner on that primary encounter. In a number of places, Arendt indeed says something very much like this.11 Still, Arendt seems to resist distinguishing too sharply between these two senses of appearance, as though to do so would undermine the importance of that which appears immediately to the senses and in common. So instead, there is often the inclination to bend the ontological itself toward the sensory, to equate appearance itself with a world of sensory objects that are held in common. The form of the question of whether thought is fit to appear at all is one example of this. (The significance of that question for Arendt’s thinking is not diminished by her project of seeking an answer to it.) A yet more forceful example comes in Arendt’s brief and dismissive treatment of “feelings, passions, and emotions.” In reading Arendt’s account of these aspects of the inner life, one can sense an urgency to repudiate them, for there is nothing that demands more the distinction between the idea of appearance as coinciding with Being and the idea of the primary importance of a common world of sensory objects than the idea of an inner life. And so it is not surprising that Arendt should regard the emotions with a combination of disdain and fear of their contagion “when they” leave their “depths” and “come forth into the day.”12 Comparing inner life with the inner organs, Arendt declares that “the monotonous sameness and pervasive ugliness so highly characteristic of the findings of modern psychology, and contrasting so obviously with the enormous variety and richness of overt human conduct, witness to the radical difference between the inside and outside of the human body.”13 At times, she limits herself to dismissing the relevance of emotions to what appears in public.14 But the significance of appearing in public is so great for Arendt that she often seems to feel the need to deny to the inner life the status of appearance at all. “Emotions and ‘inner sensations,’” and indeed any “inside self” are “‘unworldly’ in that they lack the chief worldly property of ‘standing still and remaining’ at least long enough to be clearly perceived— and not merely sensed—to be intuited, identified, and acknowledged.”15 Therefore, “it is misleading to speak . . . of inner ‘appearances,’” she argues, and relegates emotions insofar as they remain internal to the status of “inner sensations whose relentless succession prevents any of them from assuming [the] lasting, identifiable shape” necessary to “appear . . . to either the inner or outward sense.”16 It is only by showing emotions, Arendt insists, that we can have thoughts about them at all; only by display of emotions do they gain appearance. It is the “show of anger, as distinct from the anger I feel” that “contains a reflection on it.” To “show one’s anger is . . . [to] decide what is fit for appearance,” and it is only this that “gives the emotion the highly individualized form which is meaningful for all surface phenomena.”17 This self-display, Arendt insists, is not an expression of “something inside.” The “expressiveness of an appearance” rather has the character that what “it ‘expresses’ [is] nothing but itself.”18 “Seen from the viewpoint of” this reality, “of the spectators to whom it appears and from whose view it finally

ARENDT AND APPEARANCE

 285

disappears,” there is no self other than what is displayed. The “courageous man is not,” for instance, to be understood in terms of an inner state, but rather as “one who has decided that fear is not what he wants to show.” It is through “such choices” of how to present oneself that “courage can then become second nature or habit.” Arendt accordingly dismisses “psychology, depth psychology, or psychoanalysis” not only as having no relevance to public life but also as having literally nothing to say about individuals qua individuals at all, “discover[ing] no more than the ever-changing moods, the ups and downs of our psychic life.”19 “Distinction and individuation occur through speech,” by which Arendt refers here not to language or the capacity for speech, but actual speech to an audience of spectators. “Individual psychology,” she concludes, is solely the “prerogative of fiction, the novel, and the drama.”20 This is a very poor account of emotions. But the main point for our discussion is not that, but rather that what seems to impel Arendt to give such an account is the need to diminish the conflict that re-appears again and again between the broad ontological idea that all that is appears, and the more specific commitment to the importance of displaying oneself in public to others. One way in which Arendt seeks to bridge the difference between these senses of appearance is through a different ontological claim: that it is part of the very beingness of human beings that they are “possessed by an urge toward self-display,” an “urge to appear.” “Prominent already in the higher forms of animal life,” this urge to “self-display . . . reaches its climax in the human species”: the need by humans to “make their appearance like actors on a stage set for them” and in this way to “answer . . . the fact of [their] own appearingness.”21 The urge to appear can only be realized in the presence of others, and it thus depends on the existence and quality of a public world. “For us,” writes Arendt, it is “being seen and heard by others as well as by ourselves” “in public” that “constitutes reality,” and, “since our feeling for reality depends utterly upon appearance,” it requires “the appearance of a public realm into which things can appear out of the darkness of sheltered existence.” “Compared with the reality which comes from being seen and heard” in public, “even the greatest force of intimate life”—including “the delights of the senses”—“lead an uncertain, shadowy kind of existence unless and until they are transformed, deprivatized and deindividualized, as it were, into a shape to fit them for public appearance.”22 In this vein, the idea of a “common world” takes on a more specific meaning. It is equated here not with the world of objects that are “common” just in respect of the fact that they are the same objects regardless of the perspective from which they are seen, not the world of all “things, natural and artificial, living and dead, transient, and sempiternal,” but to that part of the world that appears in public. Especially in her writings on the vita activa and politics, what appears in the common world of humans is distinguished both from what is private and from what is natural. “This world . . . is

286

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

not identical with the earth or with nature,” but “is related, rather, to the human artifact, the fabrication of human hands, as well as to affairs which go on among those who inhabit the man-made world together.”23 While occasionally Arendt will distinguish the public realm as only a “part of the world common to us all,”24 more generally, it “signifies the world” just “in so far as it is common to all of us and distinguished from our privately owned place in it.”25 “The common world is what we enter when we are born and what we leave behind when we die,”26 writes Arendt in The Human Condition, in virtually the same words that she will use in The Life of the Mind (“To be alive means to live in a world that preceded one’s own arrival and will survive one’s own departure.”)27 But here it is insisted that the “common world” can “survive the coming and going of the generations only to the extent that it appears in public,”28 where “public” refers to a specific, contingent, and very fragile realm, one that can be founded, nurtured, or, as Arendt argues has happened in mass society, lost. “The reality of the public realm relies on the simultaneous presence of innumerable perspectives,” that “everything that appears in public can be seen and heard by everybody and has the widest possible publicity.” And it is only here that “worldly reality [can] truly and reliably appear.”29 Because “our feeling for reality depends utterly upon appearance and therefore upon the existence of a public realm,” those “things” that remain in “the darkness of sheltered existence”30 not only appear less (in the obvious respect) but also have less reality for having less of the quality of “appearingness.” Indeed, in the more extreme language that Arendt often uses, they do not truly appear at all. This does not imply for Arendt that all things are realized best when they appear in public, for there are “matters which can survive only in the realm of the private”—such as, in Arendt’s view, “good deeds” and “love, in distinction from friendship”— and these are “extinguished the moment [they are] displayed in public.”31 Yet those things that can only properly exist in private can for that reason never genuinely appear. “Goodness,” for instance, “must go into absolute hiding . . . if it is not to be destroyed,” and this means that it must “flee all appearance.”32 It is only when in public we “talk about things that can be experienced only in privacy or intimacy” that “we bring them out into a sphere where they will assume a kind of reality which . . . they could never have had before,” though they still remain still in “twilight” compared to the full reality of what belongs fully in the public realm.33 “To men the reality of the world is guaranteed by the presence of others and its appearing to all; ‘for what appears to all, this we call Being,’ and whatever lacks this appearance comes and passes away like a dream, intimately and exclusively our own but without reality.”34 Although the public realm includes the work of fabrication—“Unlike the animal laborans . . . who . . . is incapable of . . . inhabiting a public, worldly realm, homo faber is fully capable of having a public realm of his own”35—the public realm of homo faber is not “a political realm, properly

ARENDT AND APPEARANCE

 287

speaking.” And just as, for Arendt, what appears in the public realm has more reality than that which appears in “privacy or intimacy,” so it is in the political arena, in contrast to “the spaces which are the work of our hands” where the true “space of appearance comes into being.”36 It is in this “space of appearance . . . where I appear to others as others appear to me, where men exist not merely like other living or inanimate things but make their appearance explicitly.” It is here where, for Arendt, “each individual in his unique distinctness” most authentically “appears and confirms himself.” Only in this realm, through “disclos[ure] . . . in speech and action,” can a human “achieve . . . his own appearance and actualization”; only in this “space of appearance,” of which “plurality . . . is the condition sine qua non,” can “the reality of one’s self, of one’s own identity, . . . [and] of the surrounding world” be “established beyond doubt.”37 To be sure, for Arendt, the private realm is necessary, and “no man . . . can live in” the political realm of “action and speech . . . all the time.”38 But this is at least in part because the very “quality” of the public realm involves “rising into sight from some darker ground which must remain hidden” and which cannot itself appear.39 To be deprived of the political realm in general, is “to be deprived of reality, which, humanly and politically speaking, is the same as appearance.”40 It was earlier suggested that Arendt’s tendency to elide the idea that Being and Appearance coincide with the idea that what appears in the common world of sensory objects is primary has important implications for her treatment of inner life. Similarly, the tendency to identify “appearance” with what appears in, and is fit for, the public realm, when “men are together in speech and action”41 has important implications for her understanding of politics. For instance, in the very broad ontological idea of appearance, according to which everything that is appears, it must be the case that the “everyday common-sense world” must “know . . . error as well as illusion,” and that the concerns of the public realm properly include the critical examination of what appears to common sense: the “elimination of errors” and “dispelling of illusions”—not in order to “arrive at a region beyond appearance,” but as, and “always for the profit of,” “a new appearance.”42 However, when appearance is identified more narrowly with what is seen and heard together in the public realm, common sense assumes a special and privileged status. It is, Arendt writes, because “the only character of the world by which to gauge its reality is its being common to us all” that “common sense occupies such a high rank in the hierarchy of political qualities.”43 Indeed, so closely is common sense here identified with the political realm that “the withering of common sense,” Arendt argues, brings “the atrophy of the space of appearance” itself.44 What is thus displayed in public through “words and deeds,” seen by all through the senses, and recognized as common through common sense are the primary “political ‘products,’”45 and the natural focus of attention for what aims to be political. What may, in this view of things, tend to be dismissed as not wholly fit for this space of appearance because it can “never find an adequate place in the

288

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

[common] world” is thus not only that which occurs in the “private realm” but also that which is not perceived by the senses or that runs up against common sense. What, for example, Ricoeur referred to as the “hermeneutics of suspicion”—a mode of inquiry that rests on the idea that the world is not just what it seems—must, at least according to the spirit of this idea of the public realm, whether or not by its absolute logic, have an uncomfortable standing in relation to the political. Such matters as are taken up in that mode may tend to be regarded as questions of “scientific” or “philosophical” thought whose relation to, and fit for, inclusion in the political realm are at best secondary. And this all the more so when that inquiry takes as its object not what appears to the senses as objects in the distinctly “public realm,” but the dynamics and the structure of the “common world” more broadly understood. To be sure, we can find in Arendt’s discussion of politics passages that indicate the possibility of a more inclusive scope for the political realm. There is, for instance, the suggestion that the concerns of politics are as broad as “culture” itself and involve the “judicious exchange of opinion about the sphere of public life and the common world, and the decision what manner of action is to be taken in it, as well as to how it is to look henceforth, what kinds of things are to appear in it.”46 Yet in almost all such passages, there is ambiguity—in this case in the meaning of the “common world” and of the “kinds of things [that] are to appear in it.” This ambiguity is not merely one of exposition, but rather a reflection, now at a different level, of the duality that runs throughout Arendt’s account of appearance: between, on the one side, the idea that the common world of appearance is that in which all “things can be seen by many in a variety of aspects” and “from . . . different position[s],”47 and, on the other, the idea that what is truly common and capable of appearance is that particular category of things fit for the public realm, in contrast with the private or the social—a particular realm that is destroyed when “social and economic matters intrude . . . into” it.48 Among that which the former view includes and the latter excludes is not only such matters as “questions of social discrimination” (including integration of the public schools)49 but even the kind of political reflection, “clarification,” and inquiry attempted by Arendt herself, who considered her work as “shy[ing] away from the public realm” and herself as a “mere spectator” rather than as one who properly lives within the realm of the political as a “political animal.”50 This is but a particular version of what we find over and again in Arendt’s thinking about appearance. On the one side, there is this constellation of ideas: that all that is appears; that all objects are objects of appearance; that they are in their nature “common” insofar as they are “the same object” regardless of the perspective from which they are viewed, and insofar as they are capable of “being perceived . . . by different persons” as “common to them”; and that this shared world of appearance is a function of the “commonness” of “language” and of “intersubjective communication.”51

ARENDT AND APPEARANCE

 289

On the other side, there is this: that “true” appearance has a qualitative character; that things that are can either appear or not; and that this depends on whether they appear in a common, public space. This ambiguity is never quite taken account of by Arendt, and that is of no small significance. For there is the danger that by transposing the full weight of the ontology of appearance first only to those objects that can be perceived directly by the senses, and then only to what can be seen and heard in a particular public sphere, what may disappear from the “space of appearance,” from Being itself, and from “the political,” are not only those “things” whose natural home is said to be other “realms” but also those non-“things” that do not appear directly to the senses at all—such as dynamics and relations—both “within” the “public realm” and between that which is constituted as the public realm and that which lies outside of it.

Notes 1 Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1978), 19, italics in original. 2 Ibid., 22, italics in original. 3 Ibid., 22–23, italics in original. 4 Ibid., 24. 5 Ibid., 23. 6 Ibid., 19, italics in original. 7 Ibid., 19, 50. 8 Hannah Arendt, “Philosophy and Politics,” Social Research 71, no. 3 (Fall 2004): 427–54, 14. 9 Ibid., 14. 10 Arendt, Life of the Mind, 50. 11 E.g., Ibid., 24, 32. 12 F. W. J. Schelling, Of Human Freedom trans. James Guttman (Chicago, IL: Open Court Press, 1936). Quoted in ibid., 35. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid., 31. 15 Ibid., 39–40. 16 Ibid., 39. 17 Ibid., 31. 18 Ibid., 30. 19 Ibid., 35. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid., 21, 29–30. 22 Ibid., 50–51, italics added.

290

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

23 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1958), 52. 24 Ibid., 198. 25 Ibid., 52. 26 Ibid. 27 Arendt, Life of the Mind, 20. 28 Arendt, Human Condition, 55. 29 Ibid., 57, italics added. 30 Ibid., 51. 31 Ibid., 51, 76. 32 Ibid., 75. 33 Ibid., 50–51. 34 Ibid., 198–99. 35 Ibid., 160. 36 Ibid., 199. 37 Ibid., 207–8. 38 Ibid., 198–99. 39 Ibid., 71. 40 Ibid., 199. 41 Ibid. 42 Arendt, Life of the Mind, 26. 43 Arendt, Human Condition, 208. 44 Ibid., 209. 45 Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future (New York: Viking Press, 1961), 218. 46 Ibid., 223. For other examples, see Hannah Arendt, Essays in Understanding (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1994), 22; Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1955), 75; The Promise of Politics, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2005), 99, 103, 128–29, 135; Human Condition, 7, 199. 47 Arendt, Human Condition, 57. 48 Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin Books, 1990), 91. 49 Hannah Arendt, “Reflections on Little Rock,” Dissent 6, no. 1 (1959): 45–56, 53. 50 Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2003), 8. 51 Arendt, Life of the Mind, 119.

30 Arendt on the Activity of Thinking Wout Cornelissen

Introduction Arendt’s reflections on thinking occupy a central role in her work. Yet they are layered and complex, and remain, to some degree, fragmentary. A suitable way to reconstruct her thoughts on thinking is by considering her account of the phenomenon of thinking in its relation to reality, or to what she calls “the world of appearances.” More concretely, we will start with two concepts with which thinking is often contrasted in her work, each of which points, in Arendt’s view, to a particular form of separation between thought and reality, between the mind and the world. The first contrasting concept is “thoughtlessness,” sometimes also called a “lack of thought,” or the “absence of thinking.” The second is “philosophy,” or, rather, the tradition of Western metaphysical thinking as it manifested itself in the vita contemplativa, a life directed toward the beholding of eternal truth. An analysis of both will lead us toward an understanding of Arendt’s account of the activity of thinking in its various aspects, and of its relation to the world in which we appear to others, and speak and act together. The fundamental challenge Arendt finds herself confronted with is to do justice, on the one hand, to the fact that thought necessarily withdraws itself from the visible world into the invisible realm of the mind, and, on the other hand, to thought’s need to establish a meaningful relation to the phenomenal world. I will start with Arendt’s critique of thoughtlessness, and then proceed with her critique of the tradition of philosophy.

292

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

Thoughtlessness The need to reflect on the problem of thinking arose for Arendt because she saw herself confronted with the phenomenon of totalitarian rule. In the first place, its unprecedented character confronted her with “the difficulties of understanding” the shortcomings of the traditional concepts of political thought when fulfilling the task of comprehending it. In her view, the very phenomenon of totalitarian rule has “exploded our categories of political thought and our standards for moral judgment.”1 In the second place, under totalitarian rule, the very capacity to think and to exercise moral judgment is compromised. The latter phenomenon is analyzed by Arendt in “Ideology and Terror: A Novel Form of Government” (1953),2 which was included as Chapter 13 in the third edition of The Origins of Totalitarianism. The driving force of totalitarian rule is “ideological thinking,” which Arendt describes as the logical deduction of an idea, whether it be the idea of the extinction of inferior races, in Hitler’s national socialism, or of inferior classes, in Stalin’s communism.3 In both cases, the idea serves as a premise that is thought to the extreme: “You can’t say A without saying B and C and so on, down to the end of the murderous alphabet.”4 Out of a fear of contradicting oneself, one’s thought follows an iron logic, thereby emancipating itself from reality, from common sense, from experience, and from contact with fellow human beings: the “capacity for thought and experience are lost at the same time.”5 Arendt contrasts the compulsory force of logical deduction with the freedom inherent in the activity of thinking as a soundless dialogue between me and myself, which “does not lose contact with the world of my fellow-men because they are represented in the self with whom I lead the dialogue of thought.”6 Arendt’s best-known account of thoughtlessness, however, is to be found in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), where she uses the term to refer to Adolf Eichmann’s “inability to think,” that is, his inability “to think from the standpoint of somebody else.”7 She notes how his thoughtlessness manifests itself in his “empty talk,” that is, his use of “stock phrases and self-invented clichés,” which safeguarded him against “the words and presence of others and, hence, against reality as such.”8 In addition, Arendt points to the lack of a proper functioning of Eichmann’s conscience, for which Kant’s categorical imperative perversely came to mean: “Act in such a way, that the Führer, if he knew your action, would approve it.”9 Finally, Arendt’s emphasis on the intrinsic connection between thought and language is also apparent in her critique of the concepts we use in order to understand events, experiences, and phenomena in our political world. For instance, in its Prologue, she presents her book The Human Condition (1958) as “a re-consideration of the human condition from the vantage point of our newest experiences and our most recent fears,” an attempt “to think

ARENDT ON THE ACTIVITY OF THINKING

 293

what we are doing,” while noting that “thoughtlessness,” now described as “the heedless recklessness or hopeless confusion or complacent repetition of ‘truths’ that have become trivial and empty,” seems “among the outstanding characteristics of our time.”10 In a similar vein, she states in the preface to Between Past and Future (1961/1968) that “the very key words of political language” have left behind “empty shells” “with which to settle almost all accounts, regardless of their underlying phenomenal reality.”11 Moreover, in On Revolution (1963), she laments the “lack of conceptual clarity and precision with respect to existing realities and experiences” ever since “the men of action and the men of thought parted company and thinking began to emancipate itself from reality, and especially from political factuality and experience.”12 In The Human Condition, she notes that “the men of thought and the men of action began to take different paths,”13 since the rise of political thought in “the Socratic school.”14 The break with tradition, which entered the political stage with the advent of totalitarian rule, led Arendt to an investigation of the roots of that tradition, beginning in the Greek polis of Athens with the trial of Socrates and the conflict between the philosopher and the polis.15

The Philosophical Tradition It is with “the Socratic school”—in particular Plato and Aristotle, while the position of Socrates himself, as we will see further, is ambiguous—that the experiences of thinking and acting are turned into separate ways of life, the bios theōrētikos and the bios politikos, and eventually, after the disappearance of the ancient city-state, the vita contemplativa and the vita activa. The latter came to comprehend not only the bios politikos— the life of political speech and action of the “men of action”—but also the activity of work or fabrication of the homo faber and the activity of labor of the animal laborans. From the perspective of the vita contemplativa, all activity is a disturbance of the quiet beholding of eternal truth. As a result, all distinctions and articulations within the vita activa became blurred, including of the activity of thinking itself, which Arendt calls “the highest and perhaps purest activity of which men are capable.”16 Indeed, she concludes The Human Condition by saying that “if no other test but the experience of being active, no other measure but the extent of sheer activity was to be applied to the various activities within the vita activa, it might well be that thinking as such would surpass them all,”17 which she illustrates with the following words from Cato: “Never is he more active than when he does nothing, never is he less alone than when he is by himself.”18 Arendt’s rehabilitation of the activity of thinking is tied up with her critique of the Western philosophical tradition, which has modeled thought on contemplation, that is, on passivity rather than activity. The activity of

294

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

thinking has been reduced to a mere means by which to reach the end of beholding the truth, of experiencing the eternal: “the activity of thought, which goes on within one’s self by means of words, is obviously not only inadequate to render it but would interrupt and ruin the experience itself.”19 In the modern age, as the vita contemplativa lost its relevance, thinking came once more to be used as a handmaiden, but this time in the service of doing, that is, of changing the world by means of science and technology.20 Arendt contends that Plato modeled thinking as the contemplation of ideas after the experience of the craftsman, who uses ideas as blueprints that “survive both the fabrication process and the fabricated object and can serve as model again and again, thus taking on an everlastingness that fits it for eternity in the sky of ideas.”21 Thus, a form of instrumental thinking has crept into our understanding of the activity of thinking—ideas can serve as standards by which to measure the world—just as it crept into our understanding of acting; acting and speaking in concert having been substituted by the rule of the few who know and command the many who do not know and obey. In Arendt’s view, however, thinking—again, like acting—is an energeia, a free activity that carries its end in itself. Thus, she distinguishes thought, which “has neither an end nor an aim outside itself, and it does not . . . produce results” and is “as relentless and repetitive as life itself,”22 from cognition, which “always pursues a definite aim,” and “once this aim is reached, the cognitive process has come to an end.”23 Moreover, she distinguishes it from logical reasoning, that is, “deductions from axiomatic or self-evident statements, subsumption of particular occurrences under general rules, or the techniques of spinning out consistent chains of conclusions,”24 processes generated by the exercise of our brain power.

Mental Activity Arendt’s most exhaustive and most systematic treatment of thinking is to be found in Part I of her last and unfinished book, The Life of the Mind.25 In its introduction, she provides two reasons for her return to the problem of thinking. First, she attempts to answer, in the wake of the controversy following the publication of her book on Eichmann, the question whether, if thoughtlessness can cause evil, the activity of thinking can prevent us from doing evil. Second, she wishes to further pursue her attempt, already hinted at in The Human Condition, to think the activity of thinking after the end of the metaphysical tradition, without the self-proclaimed superior perspective of the vita contemplativa, by asking the following questions: “What are we doing when we do nothing but think?” and “Where are we when we, normally always surrounded by our fellow-men, are together with no one but ourselves?”26

ARENDT ON THE ACTIVITY OF THINKING

 295

In response, Arendt develops what may be called a “phenomenology” of thought. As she emphasizes the primacy of the world of appearances, this may sound paradoxical, since thought is invisible and deals with invisibles, and, to that extent, does not seem to “appear.” She needs to do justice, on the one hand, to the fact that all thinking implies a withdrawal from the world—it seems “a living death”—while showing, on the other hand, how the mind’s own activity—the life of the mind—manifests itself and is able to retain and establish a meaningful relation to the world. Thinking as such is “out of order,”27 in Arendt’s view, for it requires one to stop whatever one is doing and to make what is actually present, absent, and what is actually absent, present. The faculty of imagination turns senseobjects into images, which are stored by our memory or remembrance, and which thinking, in its turn, transforms into “thought-objects.” Of the latter, concepts, ideas, or categories, that is, “universals” like justice, courage, and happiness, are the proper object of thinking in the sense of “understanding.” Thinking in this specific sense is distinguished by Arendt from the other two mental activities, willing and judging, which both focus on particulars—a project to be realized in the future and a past event to be judged, respectively—rather than on universals. Insofar as all mental activities imply reflection and representation, thinking in its generic sense has a certain priority over the other two. Yet Arendt emphasizes that all three mental faculties, although they have certain common characteristics, are autonomous; each obeys its own laws. Moreover, they are not necessitated or conditioned by either life or the world: mentally, human beings can transcend their conditions. In addition, Arendt draws a distinction between thought and common sense, which she presents as a “sixth sense.”28 In combining the impressions of the five individual senses, common sense provides us with a guarantee of the reality of the object perceived, which is in turn confirmed by others who perceive the same object. Thus, common sense generates a “sensation of reality.”29 The loss of this common sense, and, thereby, of the feeling of realness, is natural to everyone who engages in thinking, and it accounts for the proverbial “absent-mindedness” of the thinking individual. Mental activity as such requires a withdrawal from the sensible world of appearances, the concrete, tangible “thereness” of which the mind will never be able to reach. This withdrawal from the world is inherent to the thinking experience as such, and, Arendt argues, it accounts for many of the metaphysical fallacies of the philosophical tradition, which universalize certain aspects that are peculiar for the experience of thinking only. What occurs, in fact, is that “the intramural warfare between thought and common sense” is projected onto the world: “Both the philosopher’s hostility toward politics, ‘the petty affairs of men,’ and his hostility toward the body have little to do with individual conviction and beliefs, they are inherent in the [thinking] experience itself.”30

296

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

The Activity of Thinking: Three Aspects The distinction between thought and cognition, introduced in The Human Condition in terms of the difference between cognition which has a clear end and thinking which is endless, continuously undoing itself, is deepened in The Life of the Mind. While knowledge (including scientific knowledge) strives for truth—it asks “what something is and whether it exists at all”— thinking strives for meaning—it asks “what it means for it to be.”31 While truth is located in the evidence of the senses,32 meaning manifests itself in speech. The need of reason is “to come to terms with whatever may be given to the senses in everyday experience”; it is “to give account,”33 that is, “to justify in words,”34 and this need is prompted not by the thirst for knowledge but by the quest for meaning. Arendt claims that the basic metaphysical fallacy has been to interpret thought on the model of knowledge, and meaning on the model of truth. They are incompatible insofar as intuition, regarded by her as the guiding metaphor for truth, “always presents us with a co-temporaneous manifold,” whereas speech “necessarily discloses itself in a sequence of words and sentences.”35 Discourse can never match the simple, unquestionable certainty of visible evidence, the model of the adaequatio rei et intellectus, and the agreement of knowledge with its object. Yet Arendt shows us how the activity of thinking is capable of bridging the gap between thought and reality, mind and world, in alternative ways. Therefore, we will now turn to three distinct positive characteristics of the thinking activity, all three of which were already hinted at in her three accounts of thoughtlessness, or of nonthinking. First, Arendt posits that all thinking is discursive in the sense that it is conducted in speech, and that language is essentially metaphorical. In her essay on Walter Benjamin, Arendt points to his gift of “thinking poetically,” which refers to his acknowledgment that “metaphor is the greatest gift of language.”36 This idea is elaborated in chapters 12 and 13 of The Life of the Mind, on metaphor. The Greek verb metapherein refers to the “carryingover” of meaning derived from our experience of the external, visible world of appearances, into the internal, invisible concepts of the mind. A metaphor establishes “a perfect resemblance of two relations between totally dissimilar things.”37 Indeed, “all philosophical terms are metaphors, frozen analogies, as it were, whose true meaning discloses itself when we dissolve them into the original context, which must have been vividly in the mind of the first philosopher to use it.”38 One of the examples Arendt gives is Plato’s carryingover of the notion of an “idea” as blueprint, already mentioned earlier, from the experience of the craftsman into the experience of the philosopher contemplating an “idea.” Hence, metaphors are “the threads by which the mind holds on to the world even when, absentmindedly, it has lost direct contact with it,”39 and through metaphor, the world of appearances inserts itself into the mind.

ARENDT ON THE ACTIVITY OF THINKING

 297

Second, throughout her entire oeuvre, and from an early stage on, Arendt consistently describes thinking as “the soundless dialogue between me and myself.”40 It is the actualization of the duality of myself with myself that makes thinking a true activity. The critical element of thinking consists in a going back and forth between me and myself. What is crucial in this case is that the plurality of the world of appearances is reflected in the duality of the inner two-in-one: “As the metaphor bridges the gap between the world of appearances and the mental activities going on within it, so the Socratic two-in-one heals the solitariness of thought; its inherent duality points to the infinite plurality which is the law of the earth.”41 Third, thinking enables us to place ourselves in the standpoints of others. In her essays “The Crisis in Culture” (1960) and “Truth and Politics” (1967), Arendt develops an account of “representative thinking,” that is, of the ability to represent the standpoints of one’s fellow citizens, not by blindly adopting their actual views, but by “being and thinking in my own identity where actually I am not.”42 Arendt’s main source for this form of thinking is Kant’s Critique of Judgment, the specifically political importance of which she discovered in the late 1950s. She adopts his notion of an “enlarged mentality,”43 which anticipates agreement not between me and myself, but with others, thereby constituting the form of thinking that prepares judgment.

Socrates as “Ideal Type”: Thinking, Morality, Politics Now that we have reconstructed three different ways in which, on Arendt’s account, the activity of thinking is able to establish a form of correspondence between itself and the world different from philosophy’s adaequatio rei et intellectus, we will focus on the remaining question of the relation between thinking and morality, and between the thinker and the polis. To this end, we will take our cue from Arendt’s reconstruction of Socrates as the “ideal type” of the thinker,44 and we will go through the three aspects of the thinking activity in the order mentioned earlier. First, Socrates asks what we mean when we use a certain concept, such as happiness, courage, or justice. Arendt characterizes a concept as a “frozen thought that thinking must unfreeze whenever it wants to find its original meaning.”45 Socrates, unlike Plato and Aristotle, did not have a teaching. His “unfreezing of frozen concepts” does not produce any positive results. Rather, it has a negative effect on established criteria and values. What one is left with are perplexities, and the best one can do is to share them with others. It seems, Arendt contends, that Socrates “felt the urge to check with his fellow-men to learn whether his perplexities were shared by them.”46 Thinking is not without dangers: by subverting conventional values, it may

298

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

lead to nihilism, a denial of all values. Yet, Arendt believes, nonthinking had its dangers too: “What people . . . get used to is less the content of the rules, a close examination of which would always lead them into perplexity, than the possession of rules under which to subsume particulars.”47 The examples she gives are Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, where traditional commandments “Thou shalt not kill” and “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor,” respectively, were reversed.48 Second, in Arendt’s view, Socrates did not believe that it is the object of thought that could prevent us from doing evil—keeping the mind’s eye focused on the idea of the good—but rather some property inherent in the activity of thinking. For he said, “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 than that I, being one, should be out of harmony with myself and contradict me.”49 There is an ethical implication to this conviction, a turning of the consciousness of the thinker into “conscience,” which tells him “not to do anything that would make it impossible for the two-in-one to be friends and live in harmony.”50 The criterion of conscience is “whether I shall be able to live with myself in peace when the time has come to think about my deeds and words.”51 The partners of one’s inner two-in-one ought to be friends and to live in harmony. In the end, Arendt claims, Kant’s categorical imperative rests on this principle as well. All of this only works, however, if one chooses to engage in thinking at all. Moreover, even if one does, this activity only becomes politically meaningful in emergency situations: “When everybody is swept away unthinkingly by what everybody else does and believes in, those who think are drawn out of hiding because their refusal to join in is conspicuous and thereby becomes a sort of action.”52 Third, it is precisely the destructive, purging effect of thinking that may liberate another faculty, that of judgment: “If thinking—the two-in-one of the soundless dialogue—actualizes the difference within our identity as given in consciousness and thereby results in conscience as its by-product, then judging, the by-product of the liberating effect of thinking, makes it manifest in the world of appearances.”53 Judging itself, however, “the faculty that judged particulars without subsuming them under general rules,” “the most political of man’s mental abilities,”54 is identified by Arendt with the exercise of the “enlarged mentality” mentioned earlier.55

Thinking after the Break with Tradition Both in the Preface to Between Past and Future and in The Life of the Mind, Arendt notes that it has become more difficult to move in “the realm of the invisible,”56 to settle down in “the gap between past and future,”57 since the breakdown of tradition. In both texts, she uses a parable of Kafka in order to illustrate that thinking starts in the here and now, but in attempting to

ARENDT ON THE ACTIVITY OF THINKING

 299

grasp the meaning of events, phenomena, and experiences, it opens up a “gap” between past and future, a “small non-time-space in the very heart of time,” which, unlike the world and the culture into which we are born, can only be indicated, but cannot be inherited and handed down from the past; each new generation, indeed every new human being as he inserts himself between an infinite past and an infinite future, must discover and ploddingly pave it anew.58 Arendt thus articulates the possibility of overcoming the alternative of a form of thinking that considers itself to be either entirely timeless—that is, eternal—as in the case of traditional metaphysics, or entirely time-bound, as in the case of historicist forms of thinking (Hegel and Marx). Moreover, she accounts for her own approach of contributing to the dismantling of metaphysics by wresting thought fragments from the past, which, “after their sea-change,”59 she uses in order to illuminate the present. Tentatively, we might say that Arendt herself answers the quaestio facti— “How did I come in possession of a particular concept?”—by going back to the original experience for which the concept in question was used, that is, by “unfreezing” the “frozen concept,” which is a “frozen analogy,” in order then to answer the quaestio juris—“Is my possession and use of a particular concept justified?”—by judging by which concept, that is, by analogy to which originating experience, to understand the event, phenomenon, or experience in question.60 It is to this exercise of the activity of thinking that Arendt’s own writing on thinking attests its fragmentary character is a manifestation of the discursive and, hence, self-destructive character of the activity of thinking itself.

Notes 1 Hannah Arendt, “Understanding and Politics,” in Essays in Understanding: 1930–1954, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken, 1994), 310. 2 Hannah Arendt, “Ideology and Terror: A Novel Form of Government,” The Review of Politics 15, no. 3 (1953): 303–27. 3 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, 1968), 469, 471–72. 4 Ibid., 472. 5 Ibid., 477. 6 Ibid., 476. 7 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (New York: Penguin Books, 2016), 49. 8 Ibid., 49. 9 Ibid., 136.

300

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

10 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1958), 5. 11 Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (London: Penguin, 1968), 15. 12 Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin, 1990), 177. 13 Arendt, The Human Condition, 17. Arendt takes this notion from F. M. Cornford, “Plato’s Commonwealth,” in Unwritten Philosophy, ed. W. K. C. Guthrie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950), 54. 14 Arendt, The Human Condition, 16–18. 15 Ibid., 12. 16 Ibid., 5. See also Arendt, Origins, 473. 17 Ibid., 325. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid., 20. 20 Ibid., 291–92. 21 Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, vol. 1, Thinking (New York: Harcourt, 1978), 104. Cf. Arendt, The Human Condition, 302–4. 22 Arendt, The Human Condition, 170–71. 23 Ibid., 170. 24 Ibid., 172. 25 When Arendt died, her book manuscript of The Life of the Mind remained unfinished. Its first two parts, on Thinking and Willing respectively, were posthumously edited and published by her close friend and literary executor, Mary McCarthy. All quotations and citations from The Life of the Mind included in this chapter are from the McCarthy edition. 26 Arendt, The Life of the Mind: Thinking, 8. 27 Ibid., 78, 85, 109. Arendt takes this notion from Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), 12. 28 Arendt, The Life of the Mind: Thinking, 50. 29 Ibid., 49, 50. 30 Ibid., 84–85. 31 Ibid., 57. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid., 101. 34 Ibid., 102. 35 Ibid., 118. 36 Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt, 1968), 166. 37 Arendt, The Life of the Mind: Thinking, 104. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid., 109.

ARENDT ON THE ACTIVITY OF THINKING

 301

40 Ibid., 185; Arendt, The Human Condition, 76; cf. Plato, Gorgias, 482c; Plato, Sophist, 263e, among other sources. 41 Arendt, The Life of the Mind: Thinking, 187. 42 Arendt, Between Past and Future, 241. 43 Ibid., 220; 241. 44 Arendt, The Life of the Mind: Thinking, section 17, “The Answer of Socrates,” and section 18, “The Two-in-One.” Cf. Hannah Arendt, “Thinking and Moral Considerations: A Lecture,” Social Research 38, no. 3 (Autumn 1971): 417–66. 45 Arendt, The Life of the Mind: Thinking, 171. 46 Ibid., 172. 47 Ibid., 177. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid., 181. 50 Ibid., 191. 51 Ibid. 52 Ibid., 192. 53 Ibid., 193. 54 Ibid., 192. 55 Ibid., 94. 56 Ibid., 12. 57 Arendt, Between Past and Future, 13. 58 Ibid. 59 Arendt, The Life of the Mind: Thinking, 212; cf. Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 206. 60 See Hannah Arendt, Denktagebuch (München: Piper, 2002), 754, entry no. 5, in which Arendt quotes Immanuel Kant, AA XVIII, 5636: “Quaestio facti ist, auf welche Art man sich zuerst in den Besitz eines Begriffs gesetzt habe; quaestio juris, mit welchem Recht man denselben besitze und ihn brauche.” Cf. Arendt, “Thinking and Moral Considerations,” 419.

31 Judaism in The Human Condition Bonnie Honig

“Viewed as part of the world, the products of work—and not the products of labor—guarantee the permanence and durability without which a world would not be possible at all.”1 In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt distinguishes three domains of active human life (labor, work, and action) and gives a phenomenological account of them, specifying what properly belongs to each, which include, as many of her commentators note, different activities, mentalities, and temporalities.2 Arendt expresses some concern that in late modernity the domain of action has been overtaken by labor and work, with likely deleterious consequences for the freedom and meaning-making activities that are action’s unique treasure. This is, at its best, a critique of biopolitics avant la lettre. At its worst, it seems to be a rather conservative effort to insulate the political from contamination by so-called social issues such as material or sex-gender inequality. Many critics, including myself, have faulted Arendt on the latter point, with Hanna Pitkin at greatest length in her fine book, The Attack of the Blob.3 I will not rehearse those criticisms. In this chapter, I look at a detail in Arendt’s argument that has not thus far been examined, as rooted in Judaic thinking, though it might open up a host of questions about her work and about postcolonial political theory and practice more generally. Toward the start and the end of the work section of The Human Condition, Arendt considers two liminal examples of possible use-objects—cultivated land and poetry. Cultivated land could belong to labor or to work, she says at the start. It could even force the collapse of the distinction between them: “The most necessary and elementary labor of man, the tilling of the soil, seems to be a perfect example of labor transforming itself into work in the process, as it were.”4

JUDAISM IN THE HUMAN CONDITION

 303

Likewise, poetry is pitched between two domains. It could belong to work or to action, insofar as it is “perhaps the most human and least worldly of the arts . . . [and] less a thing than any other work of art.”5 But, in the end, poetry belongs to work because its “memorability,” which is to say “its chance to be permanently fixed in the recollection of humanity,” is underwritten by writing, which transforms the poem “into a tangible thing.” As text, poetry moves from intangible speech and language to a thing, an object. Cultivated land, though, is not durable enough to count as a thing. It is not a “true reification” because land, left to lie fallow, returns to nature: “The tilled soil, if it is to remain cultivated, needs to be labored upon time and again.”6 Thus, Arendt assigns land cultivation to labor, that is, what we must do by nature. She does not ask whether cultivated land, like poetry, might also have a textual (durable) form—even though land, too, can be written down, as it were, when it is mapped, for example.7 These are two brief moments in Arendt’s work, and I will make (perhaps too) much of them. First, though, I revisit the relevant parts of The Human Condition, emphasizing aspects of Arendt’s argument that dovetail with the work of D. W. Winnicott’s object relations theory. I do not discuss Winnicott in detail, but the impact of his work will be felt as I read Arendt as a kind of object relations theorist.8

Work as a Holding Environment In The Human Condition, labor is the domain of life preservation and consumption where life is biological and causally determined. The activities here are typically ceaseless and repetitive. Arendt’s description calls to mind things like cooking, cleaning, diaper-changing, growing food, weeding, and tending to people’s health and illness. No matter how well we do these things, they always need to be done again and again, and what is at stake in doing them is life itself. Notably, the subject of labor is animal laborans, and muteness is our creaturely condition in that domain. In action, by contrast, life is not biological and mortal; it is immortalizable. Action is the domain of speech, meaning-making, and politics. People, governed not by causality but by contingency, act in concert and contribute to the world’s (wide) web of human relations and meaning. In labor, we live under the sign of necessity, but in the realm of action, we experience freedom. Anything can happen: we are subject to surprise and, indeed, “miracle” is a term to which Arendt commonly resorts when discussing action. Positioned between labor and action, work serves as a stable partner for each of the other two. Indeed, a close reading of The Human Condition suggests that work is the spine and soul of the book. This domain underwrites and secures the others. Without work, labor and action are both impermanent, each in its own way. Labor is subject to the ceaseless

304

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

cyclicality of bio-reproduction, and action to the uncertain immortality of great acts. Both depend on work to offset the vicissitudes of their unique temporalities. The fabricated objects of work provide shelter from the storms that labor must weather (the hammers, nails, and ploughs that ease the burdens of labor are made by homo faber), while the fabricated objects of work also house the memories created by action (poems, memorials, sculptures, museums, and histories provide a secular immortality).9 In sum, work provides what D. W. Winnicott would call a “holding environment” for labor and action. Work’s products are objects, and their contribution to the ceaseless repetition and flux of the human world is nothing less than what Winnicott would call object permanence. Things, rather strikingly, are said by Arendt, who likely knew nothing of Winnicott, to contribute something unique to the human condition, which neither labor nor action on their own can secure: durability or (a bit later in The Human Condition) permanence.10 “The ideals of homo faber [man in the domain of work], the fabricator of the world . . . are permanence, stability, and durability,” Arendt says, and these serve the ideals of the other two domains of human life: survival (in labor’s cyclical time) and immortality (in action’s linear time).11 Work transitions us from the immersive infantile environment of labor into the more individuating experience of action. It is a recognizable Winnicottian development along a recognizably Winnicottian trajectory.12 Arendt says at the very beginning of The Human Condition: “The vita activa, human life insofar as it is actively engaged in doing something, is always rooted in a world of men and of man-made things.”13 For Arendt, things provide us with a world in which to move, and they provide the friction of finitude, and the sense of futility and possibility that limits or thwarts, but also drives, human care for the world. We vest things with meaning, but things also do the same for us: they anchor, limit, and orient us. Arendt gives several examples of things that do this for us: shoes, tables, craft-work, sculpture, and art are all made by us but exist independently of us. In their durability, their permanence, they serve as sources of orientation for us. Because she worries about how politics is increasingly overtaken in the twentieth century by labor (biopolitics) and by work (the sovereign posture and means-end calculations of the maker, homo faber), Arendt is often assumed to be hostile to labor and work, and there are sentences in her book that seem to warrant this assumption. But these are mostly aimed at what is becoming of labor and work in late modernity, not at labor and work as such. Her overall project is not to demean these two, but to contain them, to insulate them from corruption. In any case, her depiction of these domains is not quite so univocal, in fact. In her account of work, for example, homo faber molds raw materials into planned shapes such as houses, sculptures, tables, and shoes. The wood, leather, and stone that he saws, nails, or carves are his to command; they bend to his will. Arendt scholars rightly point out that homo faber’s sovereign relation to his materials is precisely the wrong orientation for politics, where we act among equals and cannot shape

JUDAISM IN THE HUMAN CONDITION

 305

events to our purpose. Trying to master events in politics undoes precisely the freedom and contingency that characterize action and invariably leads, instead, to violence. But, what has thus far been largely neglected is that, on Arendt’s own account, sovereignty is not homo faber’s only experience. In the domain of work, he is pressed by his objects out of sovereign mastery and into mutuality, dependence, and vulnerability. When he takes his things to market for sale or barter, for example, others decide the value of his things.14 That is hardly a sovereign experience; it is actually one of vulnerability. To brand work as the domain of sovereignty essentializes it. Arendt does not do that. On her account, the domain of work stretches from sovereignty to mutuality, from solitariness in fabrication to interdependence in market relations, and from the deadness of the thing in production to the aliveness of the (market) encounter.15 Not only does Arendt sketch out a range of moods or orientations, not just one, in the work chapter in The Human Condition but she also considers a range of things. One by one, she assesses them, asking after their thingness, but also eyeing each one’s ability to serve the natural and political worlds well or ill. Not all things serve the cause of world-constitution and care. We are alerted to the problem early on, in the opening pages of The Human Condition, where Arendt worries that Sputnik, a man-made thing, serves the cause of world alienation:16 In 1957, an earth-born object made by man was launched into the universe, where for some weeks it circled the earth according to the same laws of gravitation that swing and keep in motion the celestial bodies— the sun, the moon, and the stars.17 The satellite entered into the company of celestial bodies whose circling path is different from the linear roads travelled by humans, and whose temporality (which looks to “us mortals” as though it “lasts from eternity to eternity”) is rather different from the “earthly time” by which humans are “bound.” The result18 is that “human existence as it has been given, a free gift from nowhere (secularly speaking)” can now be exchanged “for something [man] has made himself.”19 The problem posed by Sputnik suggests that Arendt was aware that things can only do their world-making work in a context supportive of the worldiness they help to constitute and whose givenness they also have the power to betray. Among the several examples of things that Arendt considers in the work section of The Human Condition, as noted earlier, are land and poetry. Discussing the status of fallow land in the 1950s may not have been a matter of mere phenomenological interest, given the colonial treatment of fallow land as abandoned and free. And once we think about land in relation to poetry, which Arendt casts as written, questions about the politics of mapping press themselves upon us as well, though Arendt herself seems to have avoided them.

306

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

Land and Poetry: A Puzzle? Arendt’s somewhat asymmetrical consideration of two liminal cases toward the beginning and the end of the work chapter generates a productive puzzle. The second case comes at the end of the chapter, en route to action from her consideration of work. Having just outlined in detail the thingness of things (stable, durable, and permanent) that belong to the domain of work, Arendt stops at the end of the work section to consider poetry, which is a made thing, like work’s objects, and includes artistic creations. But poetry is spoken, like the deeds in the domain of action. So where does poetry belong? In work? Or in action? The problem is that poetry (along with music) is the least dead of the various arts, “less a thing than any other work of art,” Arendt says.20 In poetry, reification is “kept to a minimum.”21 Since poetry is speech, it may seem to belong to action, which is, after all, the realm of speech. Like action, poetry, too, seems to lack the staying power of things. But poetry is not political per se, which the realm of action is, and, though available to be spoken, a poem exists because it is written down, and so, Arendt argues, it has a thingness to it after all: A poem, no matter how long it existed as a living spoken word in the recollection of the bard and those who listened to him, will eventually be “made,” that is, written down and transformed into a tangible thing among things, because remembrance and the gift of recollection, from which all desire for imperishability springs, need tangible things to remind them, lest they perish themselves.22 If we think of poetry as text, then there is no question: it belongs in the domain of work.23 At the beginning of the chapter on work, Arendt considers a different liminal example, cultivated land, which hovers between labor and work. Like the stuff of labor, cultivated land is in nature. Left to lie fallow, it returns to nature; it dissolves or decays. But, like the objects of work, cultivated land has some resilience. When neglected or abandoned, it lasts for a long time, as cultivated land with its boundaries legible to the passer-by before the land finally disappears into nature. Such temporary lastingness is not enough, however. Arendt writes, Cultivated land is not, properly speaking, a use object, which is there in its own durability and requires for its permanence no more than ordinary care in preservation; the tilled soil, if it is to remain cultivated, needs to be labored upon time and again.24 For Arendt, poetry and land seem to mirror each other: both are minimally dead. Neither one is dead enough to obviously count as a thing.

JUDAISM IN THE HUMAN CONDITION

 307

Why, then, did Arendt not do for land what she did for poetry: consider land in its textual form? Like oral poetry, told and retold, so land, tilled and re-tilled, could arguably acquire object permanence when given written form, when it is mapped.25 Mapping does what Arendt’s things do: it lends permanence to the world. It renders durable certain relations or claims. Maps interpellate us into their frames. They often operate as devices of conquest, hegemony, absorption, and occupation, but they may also be vehicles of subversion or counter-organization.26 Maps shape our self-understandings, and they constitute the world of our imagination, care, and action.27 So why does Arendt seem to neglect the possible magic of cartography in the case of land while attending to the alchemy of writing in the case of poetry? Part of the reason might be that Arendt took a dim view of mapping as a betrayal and not as a fulfillment of the proper aims of work. Where poetry and poets add meaning to the world, stabilize and deepen our relationship to it, maps and surveyors do precisely the opposite, Arendt argues: The maps and navigation charts of the early stages of the modern age anticipated the technical inventions through which all earthly space has become small and close at hand. Prior to the shrinkage of space and the abolition of distance through railroads, steamships and airplanes, there is the infinitely greater and more effective shrinkage which comes about through the surveying capacity of the human mind, whose use of numbers, symbols, and models can condense and scale earthly physical distance down to the size of the human body’s natural sense and understanding.28 This is how Arendt saw mapping, as a device of diminution whereby the world is put at our fingertips for use and escape. Maps, for her, are an abstraction, the very opposite of thingification. There is truth in that, as critical geographers have pointed out in their critiques of “cartographic reason,” which also note the role of mapping in imperial and nation-state projects of dispossession and territorialization.29 But mapping is also a mode of democratic taking by way of which people claim the world and orient themselves in it collaboratively, collectively. That is, mapping does not only shrink space, but it also expands and reconfigures it. Art mapping is just one telling example. As Denis Wood and John Krygier explain, Map artists do not reject maps. They reject the authority claimed by professional cartography uniquely to portray reality as it is. In place of such professional values as accuracy and precision, art maps assert values of imagination, social justice, dreams, and myths; and in the maps they make hurl these values as critiques of the maps made by professionals and the world professional maps have brought into being. . . . Some, Guy Debord among them, have explicitly called for a “renovated cartography” as a form of intervention. The project of art mapping is nothing less than the remaking of the world.30

308

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

The Politics of Mapping: The Castle and Translations That Arendt had some sort of blind spot regarding mapping may be suggested, too, by her earlier, well-known essay, “The Jew As Pariah,” where she explores the politics of exclusion and assimilation, collaboration, and resistance by way of four examples: Heine, Lazare, Chaplin, and Kafka’s K.31 Of particular relevance to the politics of mapping is her admiration for Kafka’s K., the hero of The Castle, since K. is a surveyor; but Arendt does not note that.32 She is more struck in her reading of The Castle by the thwarted effort of Kafka’s K. to belong (on her reading, he is a Jew) than she is impressed by his thwarted effort to work (he is a surveyor).33 This even though her focus regarding the essay’s other exemplary pariahs is on their work life (Heine’s poetry, Chaplin’s films, and Lazare’s journalism), even though the mayor in The Castle repeatedly addresses K. as “Mr. Land Surveyor,”34 and even though K. says repeatedly that he wants to get to work.35 He is there to do a job. But he cannot do it because he cannot find his tools and he cannot find his way to the Castle to get his orders. It is surely important, and satirical or comedic, that he is a surveyor who cannot find his way around. Is he just a bad surveyor? If we attend to K.’s protests that he wants to do his work, and not to Arendt’s assumption that he wants to belong, a new reading of The Castle opens up in which the politics of mapping is key. We are helped by pairing The Castle with Brian Friel’s great play, Translations, which also features a surveyor thwarted in his work. Pairing The Castle, Kafka’s great modernist novel, begun in 1922 and published in 1926, with Translations, a 1980 Irish play set in 1830s rural Ireland subject to British imperial rule, may seem an unlikely move, but there is some warrant for the pairing in recent efforts by some to read Kafka’s work in colonial contexts. Noting that “K. encounters unreadable signs virtually everywhere he turns,” M. Keith Booker makes the case for “imperialism as a referent of The Castle” and treats Kafka’s novel as “a satirical depiction of the absurdity of imperialism” in which rule is always enigmatic:36 “one of the distinctive features of imperialism in general is the distance and lack of communication between the colonizers and the colonized, a separation that makes each group appear unreal and inhuman to the other.”37 Reading Kafka’s novel with the works of the Irish writer, Flann O’Brien, Booker argues that Kafka’s Castle “irresistibly recalls Dublin Castle, traditional seat of British imperial authority in Dublin.”38 Booker does not note it, but his case is strengthened if we recall that Dublin Castle was in fact called, simply, the “Castle” by those fighting for Irish independence until the end of 1921. These historical details entice with the reassurance of reference, but ultimately the warrant for this approach is the new reading of The Castle suggested by reading Kafka alongside Friel. Translations tells the story of a

JUDAISM IN THE HUMAN CONDITION

 309

translator and surveyor sent by the British military in the nineteenth century to create a map of a remote part of Ireland. As Paddy Duffy points out, “the Ordnance Survey and the General Valuation of the mid-19th century” were “pioneering episodes which were later replicated in the outreaches of the empire.”39 These events were preceded by the British mapping of Ireland almost 200 years earlier. The “first official [imperial] maps [the British] prepared were of Ireland in 1653, when they wished to confiscate the landholdings of the rebellious Irish,” explains Meron Benvenisti, and “ever since then, the surveyor has walked beside the British officer, and sometimes has gone before him.”40 This is what is depicted in Friel’s play, in which, however, the surveyor is the officer and he walks with the translator. The latter, an Irishman, suspected by some of the locals of being a collaborator, is impatient with what he sees as the backwardness of his community and is resigned to, even accepting of, the inevitable progress to be visited upon it by colonization. The former, an Englishman prone to romanticization, longs for the community that such “backwardness” seems to offer. The two work together, translating lyrical beautiful names of places connected to a changing natural landscape, and a mythic shared history into more reliable and transparent markers that do not just obviate the land’s unique Irishness and history, but also put in their place another identity—rational, impositional, English. Several waves of dispossession, emigration, and proletarianization will follow. As Benvenisti points out, this was done by the British everywhere they went from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. From Kenya to Canada, Australia, and Rhodesia, “topographical maps were plotted, and upon them, were printed official names: a mixture of English names (personalities and places in the old country), names chosen by colonists and soldiers, and local “native” names, altered so as ‘to be pronounceable in a civilized tongue.’”41 But in Friel’s play, some Irish villagers resist the British effort to take them into possession cartographically. They cannily speak Latin and Irish in the presence of the uncomprehending British who claim to be bringing civilization to the Irish. In so doing, the Irish locals defend against the “modern” by positioning themselves in the timelessness of the ancients. Others, “the Donnelly boys,” engage in guerilla warfare against the occupying forces. What if we read The Castle in the same way? Primed by Friel’s Irish villagers’ use of Latin and Irish in the presence of the uncomprehending British soldiers, we may want to look anew into the sources of K.’s miasma. Perhaps there, too, the surveyor is being played. Perhaps there, too, the villagers are not unaware of what it means to be visited by a surveyor, and they resist. What if the opacity that is K.’s undoing is neither a theological trait nor a modern or bureaucratic ill (the usual readings of The Castle), nor even a trait of colonial governance (the more recent readings, by Booker and Zilcosky), but a weapon of the weak?42 Why attribute all the agency to the Castle? K.’s sense of impenetrable fog might also be induced, conspiratorially,

310

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

by the villagers who K. has been hired to map.43 The agencies at work may be plural. John Zilcosky comes close to such a reading when he cites Timothy Mitchell’s account of a nineteenth-century Middle Eastern city (as an “uncontainable negative topos”) and says that it “uncannily characterizes K.’s 1922 frustrations with the geographically obscure village.”44 In the passage in question, quoted by Zilcosky, Mitchell says: “‘The city refused to offer itself . . . as a representation of something. . . . It had not been arranged . . . to effect the presence of some separate plan or meaning.’”45 That line “the city refused to offer itself,” points us beyond the geographic obscurity emphasized by Zilcosky and toward willful resistance. The city that refuses to offer itself is not simply a “negative topos,” mysterious and impenetrable to the outsider. It may be that, but it may also be a city in rebellion. When we readers share in K.’s sense of miasma as he loses his bearings, when we wonder at the oddity of a mayor meeting with him from his bed, or at the weirdness of entering a stranger’s home only to stumble immediately on one of its elder members bathing in a bathtub in a common room, we may, as Kafka’s readers have done for nearly a century, share in K.’s anxiety, and feel awkward about things being so out of place.46 Or we may laugh with the villagers who seem to be finding ways to disorient the surveyor whose task is to provide orientation. Nature even comes to the villagers’ aid when it provides the blinding snowstorms and early darkness that help disorient the would-be surveyor.47 What an irony that the villagers make themselves unmappable, turning themselves from mappable (colonized) objects into unmappable (postcolonial) subjects, foiling the surveyor brought in by the Castle. Kafka’s K., Arendt says, only wants to live a normal life, and he is thwarted everywhere he turns, like the Jews in Europe. But we need not Semitize him. Arguably, the villagers too want only a normal life and they are threatened by K., not by his Jewishness or alienness, but by his surveyor’s quest to map them. Perhaps the villagers know that maps are “weapons of imperialism.”48 If so, their intelligence as citizens is manifest in their refusal to be intelligible to the surveyor’s gaze and their resistance to being ordered by cartographic reason.49 “What do we need a map for?” says the Chairman at one point to the would-be surveyor.50 We all get along fine. True, he says, years earlier “a decree came from I forget which department, saying in the categorical terms typical of the gentlemen there that a land surveyor was to be appointed, and the village was directed to have all the plans and sketches necessary for his work ready.”51 But, he explains, intimating resistance, “‘land surveying is an issue that deeply affects peasants, [and] they scented some sort of secret deals and injustice.’”52 The villagers did not hire a surveyor. And if the Castle did, no one confesses to know enough about that for the work to begin. Perhaps they have been expecting him. Regardless, they are ready for him. They practice a verbose noncompliance. A great deal is said, and nothing

JUDAISM IN THE HUMAN CONDITION

 311

ever happens, at least not as far as land surveying is concerned. The map that was contracted for never comes into existence. The surveyor dies, or expires, and that is all. If it is from sheer exhaustion, as Arendt suggests, then he has—on this reading—been exhausted by the abundant efforts of the villagers to prevent him from fulfilling his task. We may wonder, though, whether these conspiring villagers might have done still more. Is it enough just to prevent the hired surveyor from making a map, to, as James Scott puts it, “modify, block and even overturn the categories imposed” on a local community?53 This is the aim of the Donnelly boys in Translations. They kill the British surveyor and attack the British military camp. But is a politics of refusal adequate to the challenge? In Kafka’s novel, as in Friel’s play, resistance is reasoned, poetic, canny, conspiratorial, violent, and inspiring.54 But it remains defensive, a NO to cartographic colonization, and no YES, or a yes only to the status quo under assault.55 Illegible, Kafka’s villagers outsmart K., they get rid of him, but do they not remain vulnerable to the whims of the Castle? To the next surveyor? And the next? Had the villagers also made a map of their own, reflecting and structuring the village as they know it and want it to be, they might even have enlisted K. into their cause.56 Why do such a thing?57 Because a map of their own might have made of the village and its land an Arendtian thing—a use-object around which people could constellate and by which they might be interpellated in the future. It would no doubt also have started some arguments. But that is how it is with “participatory mapping,” an arguably Arendtian practice of action in concert. Mapping lends a new reality to the world, birthed by difference, agonistic contention, contest, and care. A map of one’s own is not necessarily enough, though. The locals in Translations do have their own maps, their own texts, their own place names, and their own ancient myths and heroes. But their land is nonetheless susceptible to the graphematic occupation, appropriation, and erasures of Empire.58 Still, the question is not only tactical, and the worth of participatory mapping need not be tethered to its immediate success or failure. What is at stake here is the world-building that Arendt endorsed as world care.

A Map of One’s Own Participatory mapping, an Arendtian possibility, is one that Arendt herself missed because of her antipathy to early modern mapping. That antipathy may have a contemporary context as well. During the 1940s and the 1950s, when Arendt was writing “The Jew as Pariah” and The Human Condition, there was a flurry of mapmaking going on in Israel/Palestine. Various Israeli boards and committees were hard at work mapping the new state, replacing local Arab place names (curiously preserved in some form in the British mandatory maps) and replacing them with Hebrew names. “Ironically,”

312

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

argues Benvenisti, one of these mapping committees, the Negev Names Committee (NNC), only was able to successfully accomplish the task of the Hebraization of the map of the Negev thanks to the fact that the very regime and civilization it had come to uproot and expunge from memory [the British and their Mandate] had furnished it with all the necessary tools and means. The entire area had been mapped, plotted, and drawn, and names had been collected—by emissaries of the British Empire.59 What was left now was only to legitimate the erasure of the Arab place names preserved by the British. Hebraization was legitimated, with the NNC claiming, often falsely, that they were returning to places their proper, ancient, biblical names nearly lost to time. The ancient world was leveraged for modern purposes.60 Here the diasporic journey that takes us—in George Steiner’s words—from homeland to text is a story of dispossession: a people’s homeland, also claimed by another people, becomes text, another people’s text, a map or mapped land made available for settlement. Much of the territory mapped by the various Israeli committees included cultivated lands, then lying fallow because their former owners and residents were dead or gone as a result of contingent and deliberate events that cleared the land of Palestinian Arabs and readied it for Zionist takeover. In the late 1940s, the new State of Israel’s Ministry of Agriculture developed an “Agrarian Reform Plan” that, Benvenisti argues, enabled “the takeover of abandoned land [which] was designated (at [Agriculture Minister] Aharon Zisling’s request) as ‘fallow land’—that is, land that was, supposedly, simply not being cultivated—with no mention of the reason.” This made it seem like these regulations were simply continuous with “Ottoman and mandatory laws providing for the expropriation of land that was not in use.”61 The socalled “fallow land,” then, was a highly politicized thing when Arendt was ruminating, supposedly abstractly, about whether cultivated land left to lie fallow was enough of a thing to merit inclusion in the “Work” section of The Human Condition. This context may seem to suggest that Arendt’s refusal to grant the status of thingness to fallow land is no mere phenomenological finding, but rather a political claim strikingly in keeping with Zionist efforts ongoing at the moment to take possession of Arab lands. But this would not be consistent with her own criticisms of Zionism voiced repeatedly and at some cost during the 1940s. And, in any case, the same evidence points also in the opposite direction. We could just as well see the matter as follows: when Arendt focused on cultivated land as a particular problem worthy of attention, she knew that land cultivation has been taken by political theorists, from Locke to Tocqueville and beyond, as a sign of legitimate claim to displace indigenous peoples and exercise sovereignty over them. She also knew that Zionists, right then, were claiming that the land as they found it had been a desert

JUDAISM IN THE HUMAN CONDITION

 313

and that their capacity to “make the desert bloom” in Palestine vindicated their possession of the Promised Land. By yielding its (agricultural) promise to them, the land was said to side with Jewish claims to sovereign statehood in Palestine/Israel.62 We could say, then, that when Arendt says, without ever naming such familiar arguments, that land cultivation does not produce an object with the sort of permanence needed to qualify as work object, she is undercutting such claims, perhaps even warning that they can only send us in the direction of an immersive biopolitics, tethered to nature, bound to its rhythms, and destructive of the worldliness that unites and separates us. When she says that even cultivated land is not removed enough from nature, that it is not stable enough, not object-like enough (ultimately, as she will say at the end of the Work chapter, not “dead” enough, that is, even dead cultivation is not dead enough!), to constitute the objective reified world needed by the realms of both labor and action, is she not pulling the ground out from beneath the feet of those, like Locke and Tocqueville, who claim native peoples never possessed the land because they never cultivated it (which was not true, in any case; often they practiced live, not dead, cultivation), and that settlers do possess it because they do cultivate it?63 In favor of this interpretation, we may note that in the 1940s, in The Jewish Writings (which includes “The Jew as Pariah” and its discussion of Kafka’s K.), Arendt is quite critical of Zionism as an increasingly violent, ethno-national state project.64 She does, however, have some appreciative things to say about pioneer life and the transformations that result from a life of land cultivation. She expresses admiration for the chalutzim and for members of the kibbutzim whose hard work, she said, created a new type of man and a new form of life, in contrast with what she took to be the indolence of Arabs disinclined to enter modernity.65 She had drunk a bit of the Zionist Kool-Aid, it seems, or else they had all drunk quite a lot from the European Enlightenment’s well. She had similarly reprehensible things to say, elsewhere, about Jews from the so-called Orient.66 But her admiration for this new type of man was qualified. These new pioneers fell for the lure of land, she thought. They mistook land cultivation for actual politics, and thus left politics and the work of world care to others whose project of national sovereignty would ultimately undo theirs. She worried especially about those precious joint Jewish-Arab projects, fragile islands of neighborly stability, that became the targets of violence from both sides, not for military or strategic reasons in the usual sense but for tactical ones: the aim was to destroy sites of Jewish-Arab cohabitation and cooperation, to force all parties to conform to the dictates of a friend/enemy divide. Thus, when in 1958 Arendt bars cultivated land from object-hood in The Human Condition, she might well be undercutting the promise of the Promised Land. The Human Condition has been called Arendt’s most Greek text by admirers and critics alike (Adrienne Rich and Hanna Pitkin, for example). I am suggesting here that it might have a Jewish unconscious.

314

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

Of course, a critique of Zionism need not be Jewish, exactly (though there are reasons to think that in Arendt’s case it was67). The possibility that Arendt’s text has a Jewish inflection is furthered if we think about land not just by comparison with but also in connection with the other liminal case in The Human Condition, the one at the end of the section on Work: poetry. In the Work chapter’s passage from land to poetry, we retrace in reverse the route of the earlier “The Jew as Pariah,” where the first and last of Arendt’s pariahs are Heine and Kafka’s K., a poet and a land surveyor. Thus, “The Jew as Pariah” moves from poetry to land, while the Work chapter moves from land to poetry, tracking the familiar diasporic journey “From Homeland to Text.” This is George Steiner’s phrase for the Jewish passage from the Promised Land to the story of the Promised Land told in exile, from materiality to symbolization, the anchor of Jewish diasporic identity. It may be no accident, as it were, that the passage from homeland to text, conjured by Arendt’s move from land to poetry in The Human Condition’s Work section, is prefigured by her journey in “The Jew as Pariah” from text to homeland. “The Jew as Pariah” was written in 1944 when Arendt was still hopeful about the future of a possible Zionism in Palestine. The Human Condition, however, is published in 1958, by which time the binational State of Israel for which Arendt had once hoped had yielded to a reality of which she is quite critical: the sovereign State of Israel as Jewish Homeland.

Shmita: The Human Condition’s Other Antiquity As we have seen, leaving cultivated land to go fallow is not just a random example for an Arendtian thought experiment. It was, at the time of Arendt’s writing, a political product of a colonial and nationalizing politics. But it is also something else. Leaving land to lie fallow is also a Sabbath practice—land sabbatical— mandated in the Hebrew Bible. Arendt may have been acquainted with it from Hegel, who has some choice things to say about it in his Early Theological Writings, by which Arendt may have been influenced when she relegated cultivated land to labor rather than work.68 In any case, Arendt herself calls the land sabbatical practice to mind in this context, because her essay “The Jew as Pariah” begins with an appreciative reading of Heine’s Sabbath poetry. She does not stop to consider the Sabbath in detail because what she admires in the poem is its canny commingling of “homespun Judaism” and Greek antiquity. Heine was, in any case, writing about the weekly Sabbath day, not the land and debt sabbaticals of the ancient laws. But this weekly ritual—commemorating the seventh day of Creation on which the Creator rested and was ensouled or refreshed (Shavat va-yenafash)—is connected to and recalls the biblically enjoined land and debt sabbaticals of every seven years (shmita) and the jubilee of emancipation (Yovel) every fifty years, as

JUDAISM IN THE HUMAN CONDITION

 315

well. All of these offer rest and refreshment to the people, and they are biblically linked to each other. The biblical practice of land sabbatical is called shmita, which means release. Since the land sabbatical lasts a year, it is called in Hebrew sh’nat shmita, which means a year let go. Shmita restores the nutrients of land as well as those of community. The land lies fallow, so it is restored. But community is also restored, since plants that grow on fallow land must be left for the poor to glean. They may not be harvested by the landowner. Sh’nat shmita is also a year of debt forgiveneness. It is a way to redress the accumulations of inequality. Here fallowness is a cultural practice and not a sign of neglect, violence, or abandonment. And release is active. Notably, “release” is the term used by Arendt, herself, when she talks about forgiveness, that feature of action described in The Human Condition as a process of “constant mutual release.” In its cyclicality (every seven years), shmita cites the temporality of labor (cyclical and repetitive), but in its orientation to the lasting effects of inequality, and its operation as a communal collective ritual that interrupts the cycle of nature, it belongs very much to work, and institutes the land as a kind of object around which to relate. Sh’mita postulates rule-governed action, a redistributive mindset, and a community oriented toward the alleviation of misery. It is an an-economic breaking of the calculative paradigm of debt relations.69 Importantly, the release of shmita is not just a kind of “destituent power” (as Giorgio Agamben might say) but a constituent practice.70 Destituent and constituent powers here presuppose and require each other. People and organizations concerned about the devastation of debt and industrial agriculture today have turned in recent years to biblical practices of sabbatical and jubilee to inspire new practices of debt forgiveness and environmental care.71 Strike Debt’s Jubilee Project is just one such example.72 Its precedent is the jubilee work of the United Church of Canada, working for debt relief in Africa for decades now.73 Other great examples are the many Gleaning Projects from Project Share’s to the EU’s gleaning network, many of which invoke a very famous gleaner, the biblical Ruth.74 Shmita can be variously conjugated, or so I would argue, and it offers an important supplement to our considerations, thus far, of the politics of mapping, in which land is reified for colonial and postcolonial purposes. I see Ariella Azoulay’s film, Civil Alliance,75 as an example of such conjugation, though the film makes no reference to land sabbatical, nor to Arendt.76 The film gathers a group of Jews and Arabs around a table (Arendt’s favorite example of a thing that gathers people together).77 The table is a map of mandatory Palestine, which the viewer realizes when it is filmed from above.78 And one by one, or really two by two, those gathered around the map/table, speaking in Hebrew and Arabic, name places in the land at which various parties entered into civil alliances in 1947–48. These alliances—collected and reinterpreted by Azoulay—were agreements not to fight and commitments to live together in peace, no matter what

316

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

political elites and military leaders would decide to do.79 This is not the usual religious sense of shmita: letting land lie fallow. But if we see it as a conjugation of shmita, we see how the film un-cultivates the land (undoes the cult of the land), releasing it from its usual constitution by practices of agricultural and ethno-national reproduction. Indeed, we could well see it as an effort to relocate land from labor to work, from biopolitics to thing-politics, from tilling to tabling (meaning: putting things on the table, for discussion, for action). When the people gathered in and by the film overcome an inherited cartographic illiteracy by repeating the place names in relation to the map, supporting each other in doing so, they re-perform a colonial practice, but that is not all: they go beyond participatory remapping all the way to “constant mutual release.” In this conjugation of shmita,80 ancient and modern come together to overcome the seemingly intractable inequalities of the present. Moreover, Civil Alliance unites land and poetry by way of performance, and thus attenuates the Steinerian trajectory—from homeland to text—that often undergirds diasporic longing and grievance. The film alters our experience of the mapped land of Israel/Palestine. The room in which this occurs—and the film that stages and captures it all—are holding environments in which something precarious and possible might emerge, or re-emerge, to unsettle what seems so settled. Returning to a very old map, that of mandatory Palestine, the collective makes a new map. Through their practice of alternative mapping, they come into community. Of course, they can only achieve this mapping because they come into community.81 Unburying a buried history of the neighbor from beneath the unforgiving lines that divide friend and enemy, the film’s collective instances a practice of constant mutual release on which Arendtian action depends.82 The film’s performance of constant mutual release finds its powerful precedents in the land’s own history of promising, mutual compacts, and civil alliances, which are Arendt’s favorite examples of action. Here binding operates in the service of release. Neighbors bind themselves to resist the incitement to friend/enemy relations. If I have suggested here that the film should be seen as belonging also to another history, that of shmita, a Sabbath practice of constant, or at least regular, mutual release, that is because giving the land a rest requires wresting it from its usual functions and releasing it into new contexts, meanings, and possible futures. Such (w)resting is a poetic practice, and a political one, too. It is even a Jewish tradition. When Arendt subtitled her “The Jew as Pariah” essay, “A Hidden Tradition,” she meant to point to the tradition of “conscious pariahs,” who found alternatives to the pariah and parvenu options to which minority populations and refugees are driven, and which she found wanting. But her example of Heine’s Sabbath poetry recalls another hidden tradition, the Sabbaths of shmita and jubilee, which join with the weekly Sabbath to form a braided tradition of constant mutual release.83 The argument advanced here has one other particular implication for Arendt scholarship that may be worth underlining: it takes Arendt’s Jewishness

JUDAISM IN THE HUMAN CONDITION

 317

out of the so-called “Jewish Writings,” and indeed attenuates the ongoing division of her work into the Jewish and the non-Jewish, where the latter is considered the more genuinely philosophical (because not Jewish?) and the former is treated or even disparaged as merely “public intellectual” or even “journalistic.” The aim here is not to repair the division and unify her work; it is to contest the legacy of such divisions, attributable to an older secularism in political theory scholarship and to a newer multiculturalism.84 Arendt herself argued vociferously against the twin poles of social assimilation and exclusion/exoticization (which she analyzed in detail in Rahel Varnhagen), identified by her as the parvenu and pariah options.85 It is an irony worthy of Kafka that Arendt’s own work thus far has been studied in precisely these two terms, as either part of the tradition of political theory (parvenu-ish and criticized therefore for its sad self-betrayals, its Greekness, its masculinism, etc.) or as a pariah form of political theory—that is to say, Jewish and therefore not of mainstream interest, until it was suddenly of interest, due to the multicultural shift to identity politics in the 1980s and 1990s, which Arendt would have seen as a branch of exoticization. This shift to a focus on identity paved the way for the publication of The Jewish Writings, a collection of Arendt’s writings on Jewish topics and themes. Arendt’s own proposed alternative to the problematic binary of pariah-parvenu was that of the “conscious pariah,” which suggests she may have thought of the pariah position she rejected as, in some sense, unconscious. My own alternative here has been to explore The Human Condition’s textual unconscious with the aim of developing some affinities between an Arendtian political theory and the several ancient or modern practices of sabbatical egalitarianism.

Notes 1 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd ed. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 97. 2 This chapter is dedicated to the memory of Richard Flathman. 3 Hanna Pitkin, The Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt’s Concept of the Social (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1998). 4 Arendt, The Human Condition, 138. 5 Ibid., 169–70. 6 Ibid., 139. 7 Her knowledge of the ward system might have led her to think of land or ward as dependent upon writing, as George Shulman reminds me. On landwriting, see also Rancière, “Balzac and the Island of the Book,” in The Flesh of Words, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 94–112. 8 For two of my more detailed accounts of Winnicott as a contributor to political theory, see “Out Like a Lion: Melancholia with Euripides and

318

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

Winnicott,” in Politics, Theory, and Film: Critical Encounters with Lars von Trier, ed. Bonnie Honig and Lori J. Marso (Oxford University Press, 2016: 356–88) and “Resilience,” Political Concepts 3, no. 4 available at https://www. politicalconcepts.org/honig-resilience/. 9 There is some circularity here, as Arendt points out, unperturbed (and as Winnicott would acknowledge as well): The world “consists of things produced by human activities; but the things that owe their existence exclusively to men nevertheless constantly condition their human makers.” Arendt, The Human Condition, 11. 10 In psychological terms, the domain of labor is immersive. (As Pitkin also notes, this trait is characteristic of the social, that bastard offspring of labor’s spread into all other domains of the vita activa, which Pitkin compares to the 1950s film creature, the blob.) Attentive above all to survival, labor does nothing to secure personal boundaries, and so the problem posed by it is how to separate or individuate from others. Labor is also ceaseless, and so another problem posed by it is how to interrupt or punctuate its ceaseless temporality. From an object relations perspective, we could say that we need durable objects to give definition to persons and time, lest we be consumed by Labor and remain always and everywhere animal laborans. The aim here is to identify the conditions under which persons and time can be bounded and defined. Work and its objects help with this. Similarly, in psychological terms, the realm of action poses challenges of its own. Action is individual (though we may act in concert), and so the problem posed by Action is not how to individuate but how to create and sustain human connection. Here, too, one aim is to punctuate time. Action offers its own temporality, that of immortality. Patchen Markell says Arendt shifts during the course of her treatment of work from durability (of objects) to permanence (via art). See Markell, “Arendt’s Work: On the Architecture of ‘The Human Condition,’” College Literature 38, no. 1 (Winter 2011): 15–44. Work’s objects are first characterized as physically durable by contrast with Labor’s immediate consumption, but she attributes “permanence” to objects only later on. Arendt, The Human Condition, 136– 37, cited by Markell, “Arendt’s Work,” 32. This may not be a shift, though, or not only one. It may also suggest recognition of something fundamental to object relations theory: durability teaches permanence. 11 Arendt, The Human Condition, 126. 12 Thus, although work is distinct and differentiated from labor and action, it also serves both of them, providing both with the permanent or durable objects that make the domains of labor and action stable enough for the world to be the object of care. Care for the world is Arendt’s most fundamental commitment. A war-tossed Jew forced out of Germany, then France, by the rise of Nazism, Arendt was mindful of the world’s fragility and was aware of its dependence on the attentive care of people. When Arendt wrote historically, as in The Origins of Totalitarianism, or theoretically, as in The Human Condition, she was very attuned to the dependence of the human world on objects. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1994). In Origins, depriving people of access to things is part of a European politics of minoritization and genocide. The road to the camps was filled by those who were first deprived by the Nazis of full

JUDAISM IN THE HUMAN CONDITION

 319

citizenship, then barred from employment and participation in the world of the national public, then unhoused, and then dispossessed of luggage, clothing and all the belongings that once betokened their belonging to humanity. 13 Arendt, The Human Condition, 22. 14 Ibid., 160. 15 Labor and action also house a range of moods, experiences, and tempos. The fact that work encompasses both sovereignty and mutuality is noted by Patchen Markell in his fine essay, “Arendt’s Work: On the Architecture of ‘The Human Condition.’” 16 Winnicott too worries about the alienating effects of the ability to leave the earth, writing in 1969, “The Pill and the Moon.” See D. W. Winnicott, “The Pill and the Moon,” in Home Is Where We Start From: Essays by a Psychoanalyst, ed. Clare Winnicott, Ray Shepherd, and Madeleine Davis (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1986), 195–209. (Thanks to George Shulman for this reference.) In a way, Sputnik inverts the Parisian fetish (noted by Arendt later in The Human Condition) for their tiny little bric-a-brac. Sputnik represents a world-escape that is too big, the Parisians’ escape is too small. Both are irrelevant, in Arendt’s terms, though only the latter charms. 17 Arendt, The Human Condition, 1. 18 Ibid. Arendt’s concern is not only the self-estrangement that is the likely result of all this, nor even primarily, as Arendt scholarship might lead us to expect, the misbegotten and dangerous commitment to human mastery that such innovation seems to evidence. “It was not pride or awe at the tremendousness of human power and mastery which filled the hearts of men” on this occasion. It was relief. 19 Ibid., 2–3. 20 Ibid., 170. 21 Ibid., 169. 22 Ibid., 170. 23 Here Arendt channels Heidegger, who prizes poetry’s power to gather people together. But Heidegger tethers that power to poetry’s orality. Arendt leaves this view behind when she picks out poetry’s writtenness as the trait that secures its world-making permanence. The orality of poetry may gather people together, as Heidegger says, but poetry’s world-building quality postulates something even more powerful on Arendt’s account: the permanence of writing. I note that my own view on the matter is closer to that of Derrida, who criticizes the assumption that writing postulates permanence, and argues that it postulates, rather, iterability. This is a tenet of deconstruction and can be found throughout his work, though his essay, “Signature Event Context” makes the point most clearly and forcefully. See Derrida, “Signature Event Context,” trans. Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman, in Limited Inc, ed. Gerald Graff (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 1–23. On this particular difference between Arendt and Derrida, see my “Declarations of Independence: Arendt and Derrida on the Problem of Founding,” further elaborated in Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics. Bonnie Honig, “Declarations of Independence: Arendt and Derrida on the Problem

320

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

of Founding a Republic,” The American Political Science Review 85, no. 1 (March 1991): 97–113, and in the chapter on Arendt in Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993). 24 I italicize Arendt’s term, “use object,” to highlight the proximity to D. W. Winnicott’s view of objects in his transition from object relations to object use. With reference to cultivated land’s dependence on perpetual recultivation for its object permanence, this is not, per se, a difference from writing; even a written poem requires for its object permanence a repeated use: it needs to be reproduced, distributed, interpreted, circulated, and so on. In this sense, a poem is biodegradable, as Derrida says, using a figure for circulation that unites land and poetry, environment and text. Jacques Derrida, “Biodegradables Seven Diary Fragments,” trans. Peggy Kamuf, Critical Inquiry 15, no. 4 (Summer 1989): 812–73. 25 It might be objected that land like this, when mapped, is better seen as “property” and that Arendt does see property as belonging to work. But mapped land is not reducible to property, and has its own distinct object permanence to offer. 26 Consider the maps circulating in the last two decades depicting which US states criminalize gay sex, ostensibly so as to plot how to get from point A to B without violating the law, but also to vivify the inequality-effects of such criminalization. After the 2015 Supreme Court decision in favor of gay marriage, the equality effects of decriminalization were similarly made vivid: blog posts asked, “Where can gay people marry?” and in response showed a US map with all the states colored blue. 27 To be clear, maps may do all of this even when they are not written down. I focus on the written map in order to stay close to Arendt’s treatment of poetry. If writing can grant permanence to poetry, why not to land, and what if we did grant that possibility? What new thoughts and practices might open up? I follow this out even while disagreeing with Arendt’s assumptions about writing and/as permanence, as the footnotes here and throughout make clear. 28 Arendt, The Human Condition, 250–51. James Scott also notes the connection between mapping and miniature: “The [cadastral] map was especially crucial to the new bourgeoisie owners of landed estates, for it allowed them to survey a large territory at a glance. Its miniaturization helped it to serve as an aidememoire when the property consisted of many small parcels or the owner was not familiar with the terrain.” James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 45. 29 Jeremy Crampton and John Krygier, “An Introduction to Critical Geography,” ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 4, no. 1 (2005): 11–33 and Denis Wood and John Krygier, “Cartography: Critical Cartography,” available at https​://ma​kingm​aps.o​wu.ed​u/els​evier​_geog​_ criticalcartography.pdf. 30 Wood and Krygier, “Cartography: Critical Cartography,” 9–10. Art mapping is perhaps an easy example. A more difficult one might be something like HarassMap, a popular mapping project meant to empower Egyptian women in public by sharing information about street harassment in cartographic form.

JUDAISM IN THE HUMAN CONDITION

 321

Nicole Sunday Grove cautions that “we should be wary of the idea that better, more total surveillance will produce accurate depictions of the environment of gendered sexual violence. We should also be critical of paradigms of risk management that seek to sort whole populations into ‘profiles and probabilities’ as part of a feminist internationalist organization of security governance in Egypt.” Nicole Sunday Grove, “The Cartographic Ambiguities of HarassMap: Crowdmapping Security and Sexual Violence in Egypt,” Security Dialogue 46, no. 4 (2015): 345–64, 360–1. Grove cites Tyler Wall and Torin Monahan, “Surveillance and Violence from Afar: The Politics of Drones and Liminal Security-scapes,” Theoretical Criminology 15, no. 3 (2011): 239–54, 251. 31 Hannah Arendt, “The Jew as Pariah,” in The Jewish Writings, ed. Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 275–98. 32 Franz Kafka, The Castle, trans. Anthea Bell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 33 Arendt may follow Max Brod, here. Agamben notes that K. is a surveyor but does not think about the fact that that is K.’s work. Giorgio Agamben, “K.,” trans. Nicholas Heron, in The Work of Giorgio Agamben: Law, Literature, Life, ed. Justin Clemens, Nicholas Heron, and Alex Murray (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), 13–27. It is a key detail, in my view. 34 Kafka, The Castle, 55. 35 His work is to make a map. As John Zilcosky says: “One cannot help but wonder whether critics, confronted by the opacity of K.’s profession, have missed the trees for the forest.” John Zilcosky, Kafka’s Travels: Exoticism, Colonialism, and the Traffic of Writing (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 124. Zilcosky proposes that we “reconsider Kafka’s novel as a response to turn-of-the-century colonial understandings of territory, language, and (technologized) vision. Kafka,” he says “attempts to ‘elude’ a colonial Vorschift with The Castle.” Zilcosky, Kafka’s Travels, 126. I will argue here, in a somewhat different vein, that Kafka depicts, perhaps inadvertently, the possibility of eluding it on the ground, exhibiting the agon between that Vorschift and anti-colonial efforts to counter it. 36 M. Keith Booker, Flann O’Brien, Bakhtin, and Menippean Satire (Syracus, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1995), 132, 131, 130. 37 This, he argues, contributes “very directly to the kinds of feelings of absurdity that so strongly inform both The Castle and [Flann O’Brien’s] Third Policeman.” Booker, Flann O’Brien, Bakhtin, and Menippean Satire, 130, 131. In his other readings, Booker calls to mind the traffic in women in Kafka’s The Castle: “One recalls here the recognition of Mr. Collopy in The Hard Life that he will be unable to communicate his grievances concerning the mistreatment of women in Dublin to the officials of Dublin Castle.” Booker, Flann O’Brien, Bakhtin, and Menippean Satire, 130. 38 Booker says “Prague in the days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was as much a colonial city as British Dublin.” Booker, Flann O’Brien, Bakhtin, and Menippean Satire, 130–32. And indeed Phiroze Vasunia has suggested to me that, taken as characteristics of Empire, the details in Kafka call to mind more the middle European practices of Austro-Hungary than the British

322

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

occupation of Ireland, and he is probably right about that. I am not claiming a referential connection, but an associative one, however. The pairing of The Castle and Translations does not depend on it, in any case, but it is surely buttressed a bit by associative possibilities like the following: “For centuries Ireland had been governed from . . . ‘The Castle.’ Members of the majority religion who co-operated with the British administration to their financial benefit were . . . ‘Castle Catholics.’ Everything British that moved and had its being in Ireland emanated from . . . the Castle.” Miles Dungan, “On This Day—Drivetime—Michael Collins takes Possession of Dublin Castle 16 January 1922,” Miles Dungan: Historian and Broadcaster (January 16, 2015), https://mylesdungan.com /2015​/01/1​6/on-​this-​day-d​rivet​ime-m​ichae​ l-col​lins-​takes​-poss​essio​n-of-​dubli​n-cas​tle-1​6-jan​uary-​1922/​. Kafka began his novel very soon after the Castle was ceremonially handed over by the English to Michael Collins. More Irish connections: Kafka was also a fan of George Bernard Shaw, and told his own parents about Shaw’s decision to leave Dublin for London and abnegate his responsibilities to his parents in order to pursue his writing. 39 Paddy Duffy, “Colonial Spaces and Sites of Resistance: Landed Estates in 19th Century Ireland,” in (Dis)placing Empire: Renegotiating British Colonial Geographies, ed. Lindsay J. Proudfoot and Michael M. Roche (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2005), 16. Although Friel has said his play is not political, but is only about language, it is hard to ignore the fact that Translations, which was published in 1980, was written in the aftermath of a 1972 event that replayed the nineteenth-century struggle when British Royal Mail decided that Townland names were “superfluous information” that should not be included in Irish addresses. Instead, people were told to restrict themselves to house numbers, road names, and postal codes. The “Townlands Campaign” arose in response, protested and won in an effort said to have unified Northern Irish Catholics and Protestants in the midst of “the Troubles.” Thus, Translations builds on an historical episode but may have been written in response to a contemporary one. 40 Meron Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape: The Buried History of the Holy Land since 1948, trans. Maxine Kaufman-Lacusta (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002), 14–15. See also James Scott’s Seeing Like a State, Part I, on the use of maps to develop sovereign states. 41 Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape, 23. 42 As Jordan Branch notes, surveying projects in the eighteenth century, which includes the British Ordnance Survey, “were often resisted by local populations and elites.” Jordan Branch, The Cartographic State: Maps, Territory, and the Origins of Sovereignty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 76, citing Peter Barber, “Maps and Monarchs in Europe, 1550-1800,” in Royal and Republican Sovereignty in Early Modern Europe, ed. Robert Oresko, G. C. Gibbs and H. M. Scott (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 87. Branch notes that the state cartographer for the “Prince-Bishopric of Augsburg was repeatedly sued by local villagers in the region he was supposed to map. Yet,” Branch argues, “this type of resistance proved to be futile, as even the rebellious parties often ended up making use of the same mapping techniques—and thus all sides ended up framing their interests in cartographic

JUDAISM IN THE HUMAN CONDITION

 323

terms. The narrow interests of one party were often contested by the other side, but the deep grammar of cartographic territoriality became fundamental to all claimants to authority.” Branch, The Cartographic State, 76, citing Philip D. Wolfart, “Mapping the Early Modern State: The Work of Ignaz Ambros Amman, 1782-1812,” Journal of Historical Geography 34, no. 1 (January 2008): 1–23. I note here that the judgment of futility is based on the aim being a resistance to cartographic representation as such rather than, as might be the case, the aim being the right to one’s own self-representation. Indeed, at the end of his fine book, Branch turns to digital practices of participatory mapping that have this aim, in fact. 43 This is a postcolonial or conspiratorial reading. On reading conspiratorially, see James Martel, Textual Conspiracies and my Antigone, Interrupted. James Martel, Textual Conspiracies: Walter Benjamin, Idolatry, & Political Theory (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 2011) and Bonnie Honig, Antigone, Interrupted (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 44 Zilcosky, Kafka’s Travels, 136. 45 Ibid., quoting Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988), 33. 46 Kafka, The Castle, 55. 47 “In fact, the dream of orderly, rectangular fields was approximated only on newly settled land, where the surveyors faced little geographical or social resistance.” Scott, Seeing Like a State, 44. 48 J. B. Harley, The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography, ed. Paul Laxton (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 57, quoted in Branch, The Cartographic State, 105. 49 James Scott: “Land maps in general and cadastral maps in particular are designed to make the local situation legible to an outsider.” Scott, Seeing Like a State, 45. 50 “For purely local purposes, a cadastral map was redundant. Everyone knew who held, say, the meadow by the river, the value of the fodder it yielded, and the feudal dues it carried; there was no need to know its precise dimensions. . . . a proper map seems to have come into use especially when a brisk market in land developed.” Scott, Seeing Like a State, 45. 51 Kafka, The Castle, 56. Later, as K. interrogates the mayor about the details of this episode and his own more recent hire the mayor responds with a colonial cliché: “Are there supervisory authorities? There are only supervisory authorities.” Kafka, The Castle, 57. Among the traits of imperial rule, which include enigma, is the quest for transparency and order, which is flouted by such enigmatic conditions, as John Zilcosky points out in his discussion of imperial aesthetics and the early twentieth-century bildungsroman. Zilcosky also makes the case for Kafka as critically engaged with colonialism (albeit not with the Irish battle to decolonize, per se). The Castle, where Kafka “appears to be postcolonial avant la lettre,” goes some way beyond even the minor literature project of deterritorialization to which Deleuze and Guattari assign the writer, Zilcosky says. Zilcosky, Kafka’s Travels, 47. Focusing on Kafka’s relationship to the Austro-Hungarian Empire in which he was

324

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

directly situated, while eschewing the referential claims of Brod on this score, Zilcosky notes Kafka’s subversion of imperial writing at the level of style (“resisting imperial aesthetics”), detailing his effort to escape the “monarchical perspective,” and his replacement of the “density of language” associated with imperial writing (by Edward Said and others) with a more parsimonious style. Zilcosky, Kafka’s Travels, 139, 142, and passim. 52 Franz Kafka, The Castle, trans. Mark Harman (New York: Schocken, 1966), 66, quoted in Zilcosky, Kafka’s Travels, 128. Cf. The Castle (Oxford World’s Classics), 62, for a different, also suggestive, translation: “a few [villagers] expressed distrust, saying that the question of land surveying concerns a farmer’s interests closely, and thinking that they detected secret deals of some kind and instances of injustice.” 53 Scott, Seeing Like a State, 49. 54 In an essay “Public Things” I found four characteristic ways of responding to oppression or occupation in Jonathan Lear’s Radical Hope. Bonnie Honig, “Public Things,” Political Research Quarterly 68, no. 3 (September 2015): 623–36 and Jonathan Lear, Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). They may correspond with some of the responses in this list. 55 This is what Scott endorses when he cautions against assuming “that local practice conforms with state theory” and calls attention to a variety of illicit (from the perspective of the state) landholding practices such as “Land invasions, squatting, and poaching,” all of which are “de facto property rights not represented on paper.” Scott, Seeing Like a State, 49. 56 This is what Branch, as I noted earlier, characterizes as a “futile resistance to mapping,” because it yields to the Ptolemaic demand. But if the refusal is not against mapping as such but against the aims of one sort of mapping (possession, displacement and so on) that is, if it is against being mapped in that way, by that party, then a counter-mapping is not a futile resistance. Or at least the question of its effectiveness or futility is open. 57 Historically, as Branch points out, what started as refusals to be mapped ultimately became partisan counter-mappings. Branch, The Cartographic State, 78. See also 134 and passim for examples of cartographic contest: “Maps, in short, were used by each side to try to secure or extend its opposing territorial claims.” 58 On the violence of mapping, land appropriation, and other settler colonial practices in Canada (“Indigenous presence is attacked in all geographies”), see Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, “Land as Pedagogy: Nishnaabeg Intelligence and Rebellious Transformation,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 3, no. 3 (2014): 23, http:​//dec​oloni​zatio​n.org​/inde​x.php​/des/​artic​le/ do​wnloa​d/ 22170/17985. In a section entitled “Nishnaabeg intelligence as resurgence,” Simpson says that “Being engaged in land as pedagogy as a life practice inevitably means coming face-to-face with settler colonial authority, surveillance and violence because, in practice, it places Indigenous bodies between settlers and their money. . . . Being a practitioner of land as pedagogy and learning in my community also means learning how to resist this imposition, it’s a process of learning how to be on the land anyway,” alongside,

JUDAISM IN THE HUMAN CONDITION

 325

in the interstices of, and in resistance to colonial settler law. Simpson, “Land as Pedagogy,” 19, citing Glen Sean Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 36. Through a series of stories, figures, and experiences, Simpson tries (as does one of her characters) to show “us land as pedagogy, without yelling ‘LAND AS PEDAGOGY,’ or typing land as pedagogy into a computer 50 times. Sometimes when I am teaching PhD students, I say . . . Nishnaabeg intelligence is for everyone, not just students, teachers and researchers. It’s not just pedagogy; it’s how to live life.” Simpson, “Land as Pedagogy,” 18. 59 Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape, 23. 60 For further details, see the chapter, “White Patches,” in Sacred Landscape. Here the ancient world is enlisted for purposes of occupation, and not, as with Friel’s hedge school Irish, for purposes of resistance. 61 Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape, 174. See also 159 for other details regarding the administrative managing of declared “fallow” land. Many Arab citrus groves and olive trees were replaced by the preferred, more efficient, agricultural crops of the kibbutzim. The “question” of land ownership was settled in myriad ways—ranging from force to law to the force of law. 62 Tocqueville famously discounts Native peoples’ land claims because they do not cultivate the land, he says, and he starts to take them more seriously when they do take up farming, though, as he notes, the white settlers do not share his willingness to reassess. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. George Lawrence, ed. J. P. Mayer (New York: Perennial Classics, 2000), especially “The Present State and the Probable Future of the Indian Tribes Inhabiting the Territory of the Union,” 321–39. This may be the right context in which to take note of the Crow people’s self-reinvention, after white conquest, as a people who were once—and therefore are always already— farmers (the claim is noted by Lear in Radical Hope). 63 For her, to quote from the iconic film, The Graduate, it is all about “plastics.” Nonbiodegradable plastics. 64 “The Jew as Pariah” was written in 1944 when Arendt was still hopeful about the future of a possible Zionism in Palestine. The Human Condition, however, is published in 1958, by which time the binational State of Israel for which Arendt had once hoped had yielded to the reality of the sovereign State of Israel as Jewish Homeland with an Arab “minority.” Three years later, she went public with what would become her best-known critique of the ethno-national state project of Israel in her articles for The New Yorker, later published as Eichmann in Jerusalem. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin Books, 2006). Arendt worried that Jews, who had been barred from real political engagement because of their historical, exilic restriction to pariah forms of politics, were accustomed only to para-political but never properly political activities and were faithful to forms of European nation-state building now discredited. Where Michael Walzer finds in such para-political activities a worthy premonition of properly political life, Arendt finds only distortions. The Jewish Political Tradition, Vol. 1: Authority, ed. Michael Walzer, Menachem Lorberbaum, and Noam J. Zohar, co-ed. Yair Lorberbaum (New Haven, CT:

326

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

Yale University Press, 2000). She was concerned that pariah habits would persist after the Holocaust (indeed she notes the temptation of the early Zionists to fall as pawns into the Great Game of geopolitics, a position that, though she does not quite say this, mimes that of their forebears who were players but always also pawns in European court intrigue). One of her concerns was about how the new State of Israel’s new citizens would relate— fetishistically or dissociatively?—to the land they claimed was claiming them. 65 Hannah Arendt, The Jewish Writings, ed. Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman (New York: Schocken Books, 2007). 66 See Amos Elon’s introduction to Eichmann in Jerusalem, xviii. Arendt’s comment about the “oriental mob,” noted by Elon, comes from a letter to Jaspers. See Hannah Arendt—Karl Jaspers Correspondence, 1926-1969, ed. Lotte Köhler and Hans Saner, trans. Robert Kimber and Rita Kimber (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992), 435. 67 Judith Butler makes the case in her most recent book on Jewish critiques of Zionism. See Butler, Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). 68 See Hegel, Early Theological Writings, trans. T. M. Knox (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1975), 197–98. Thanks to Miriam Leonard for calling this text to my attention. See my essay on Heine’s Sabbath poetry in UC Irvine Law Review for a longer discussion of the relevant passage. Bonnie Honig, “The Laws of the Sabbath (Poetry): Arendt, Heine, and the Politics of Debt,” UC Irvine Law Review 5, no. 2 (June 2015): 463–82. 69 Like what Nietzsche sometimes called “magnanimity,” as when he imagined the state foregoing punishment, declaring “what are my parasites to me?” Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 72. 70 The idea of Sabbath has recently been turned to by Giorgio Agamben, but I do not think Agamben has the three registers of Sabbath in mind when he calls man a “sabbatical animal.” Agamben does see the requirement to take a day of rest from instrumentality as a potentially powerful interruption of the neoliberal spell under which we labor, now, a restance, as it were, of inoperativity. Giorgio Agamben, “Elements for a Theory of Destituent Power,” trans. Stephanie Wakefield, 2013, http:​//www​.scri​bd.co​m/doc​/2364​ 09599​/AGAM​BEN-E​lemen​ts-fo​r-a-T​heory​-of-D​estit​uent-​Power​. I reserve for elsewhere a longer engagement with Agamben and the idea of sabbath. 71 There are other details worth savoring. For example, in the jubilee year, all sales of land were to be returned to the original owner. Thus, there were only leases of property for periods up to forty-nine years; there were no sales “in perpetuity” of parcels of land in the Land of Israel. “For the Land is Mine; you are only temporary residents and settlers together with me.” Lev. 25, 23. See also https​://ww​w.huf​fingt​onpos​t.com​/debr​a-nus​sbaum​-cohe​n/shm​ita-j​ewish​ -sust​ainab​ility​-_b_5​86544​4.htm​l on its adoption in modified forms by Nigel Savage of Hazon, a Jewish environmental group. 72 See Astra Taylor on the Debt Collective and the Rolling Jubilee project: Taylor, “A Strike Against Student Debt,” The New York Times, February 27, 2015,

JUDAISM IN THE HUMAN CONDITION

 327

A17, https​://ww​w.nyt​imes.​com/2​015/0​2/28/​opini​on/a-​strik​e-aga​inst-​stude​nt-de​ bt.ht​ml. 73 Thanks to Jenny Nedelsky on this point. 74 I have written about Ruth elsewhere in connection with the different topic of immigration politics. See Bonnie Honig, Democracy and the Foreigner (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), especially chapter three. Another recent example affiliated with the sabbath spirit, though not tethered to a named Sabbath practice, is the action of the new Municipal Court judge in Ferguson, Missouri: Judge Donald McCullin, appointed in June 2015, “ordered that all arrest warrants issued in the city before December 31, 2014 be withdrawn,” as Reuters reported in August 2015. See Carey Gillam, “Judge Overhauls Troubled Ferguson, Missouri, Court,” Reuters, August 24, 2015, https​://ww​w.reu​ters.​com/a​rticl​e/201​5/08/​24/us​-usa-​fergu​son-c​ourt-​idUSK​ CN0QT​29 720150824. Cancelled. This is a debt cancellation, For Project Share’s Gleaning Project, see http:​//www​.proj​ectsh​are.n​et/pr​ogram​s/gle​aning​ . For the Gleaning Project by EU’s gleaning network, see https​://fe​edbac​kglob​ al.or​g/cam​paign​s/gle​aning​-netw​ork/.​ I am grateful to Sharon Sliwinski for calling my attention to this example. 75 Civil Alliance, directed by Ariella Azoulay (2012), https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=lqi4X_ ptwWw. 76 For a detailed account of the materials and sources for the film, see Ariella Azoulay, “Civil Alliances—Palestine, 1947-1948,” Settler Colonial Studies 4, no. 4 (2014): 413–33. “The little that was known of efforts to promote civil treaties was presented in a negative light, in the ruling perspective through which civil partnership appears as ‘collaboration,’ namely an act of national treason,” says Azoulay, citing as an example, Benny Morris, who, she says, refers to the civil alliance of Deir Yassin/Giv’at Shaul as merely a neighborly agreement, as if it is something less than real politics. Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited 1947–1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). By contrast, Azoulay proposes a “civil reading of documents,” meaning a reading done from the perspective not of nation-states but of civil alliances, one that, “recording the mutual efforts, collected in the Haganah archive, yield[s] a complex, vital picture full of hope and faith in the power of shared life. This picture cannot be reduced to the national-sovereign narrative that began to be constructed from May1948 and projected hopeless polarity and hostility onto the past. I was not the first one to read these documents in the archive, but I was the first to understand that what is recorded in them is not a footnote within the existing narratives of this period, but the iceberg of a completely different narrative that cannot be grasped within the partitioning of history into Zionism/Nakba. . . . Thus, for example, a work of foregrounding was required in order to make clear that the civil agreement between the inhabitants of Deir Yassin and Giv’at Shaul was violated not by local Jewish residents who were party to the civil contract achieved with their neighbors, but rather by Jewish militiamen.” Azoulay, “Civil Alliances,” 416. 77 “I decided to make a film. I invited 25 Arabs and Jews of varying age groups, each of them speak Arabic and Hebrew, to gather around the reconstructed map and recite these encounters, agreements and promises made by our

328

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

ancestors in hundreds of localities in Palestine during this period. Each event is narrated shortly either in Hebrew or in Arabic while all the speakers speak both languages alternatively.” Azoulay, “Civil Alliances,” 415. 78 Azoulay reports: “The pile of documents I found in the Haganah archive, relating to the period between November 47 (the Partition Plan by the UN) and May 48 (the creation of the State of Israel), emerged slowly, not only as a missing chapter of local history but as a missing geography. I started to cover the map of Mandatory Palestine (issued in 1947) with points wherever Jews and Arabs got together, in urgent encounters or in others, planned in detail and in advance. Though until 1948, Jews and Palestinians shared Palestine and knew to find their ways between their mutual localities, such a map could not be found and I decided to reconstruct the propinquity of their localities from scattered information found here and there.” Azoulay, “Civil Alliances,” 415. 79 As she puts it in the abstract to “Civil Alliances,” “Between November 1947 (The UN Partition Plan for Palestine) and May 1948 (The creation of the State of Israel), many Jewish and Arab communities who cared for their country intensified the negotiations between themselves and initiated urgent encounters, some short and spontaneous, others planned meticulously to the last detail, during which the participants raised demands, sought compromises, set rules, formulated agreements, made promises, sought forgiveness, and made efforts to compensate and reconcile. Their shared purpose was to prevent the rising violence in the area from taking over their lives. They sought to protect the common world of their life in Palestine and to salvage it from those who wished to destroy it. In over 100 documented encounters—and probably many more whose records have yet to be found—they promised themselves and each other the continuation of their shared lives.” Azoulay, “Civil Alliances,” 413. 80 We can perhaps now see some irony in the fact that the film finds a way to recover-invent a past map for the purposes of a possible new future (“The film reconstructs this historical past for its potential for the future”) through the mediation of the colonial map. Azoulay, “Civil Alliances,” 415. Speaking of new futures, “A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias,” said another great Irish writer, Oscar Wilde (for whom Kafka is said to have had “no time”). See Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism (Portland, OR: Thomas B. Mosher, 1905), 40 and Robert Vilain, “Tragedy and the Apostle of Beauty: The Early Literary Reception of Oscar Wilde in Germany and Austria,” in The Reception of Oscar Wilde in Europe, ed. Stefano Evangelista (London: Continuum, 2010), 173–88. 81 In this sense, they are in the chicken and egg temporality of the paradox of politics. 82 Such neighborliness is a singularly Arendtian motif, and one that he saw as a promising alternative to the friend/enemy binary of Carl Schmitt, as John Wolfe Ackerman persuasively documents in his work. On Arendt’s politics of the neighbor, see Ackerman’s excellent contribution, The Politics of Political Theology: Rosenzweig, Schmitt, Arendt (Dissertation, Northwestern University, 2013).

JUDAISM IN THE HUMAN CONDITION

 329

83 Shmita and jubilee were, it must be noted, quickly rendered nugatory by a series of rabbinical rulings that protected the propertied from sabbatical egalitarianism. 84 Although one repair may follow from this argument: we may find reason to question the exceptionalism with which her writings on Israel are treated and see them, rather, as part of her critique of imperialism rather than as part of some separate foray into Jewish history. 85 Hannah Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess, trans. Richard Winston and Clara Winston, ed. Liliane Weissberg (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).

32 Life and Human Plurality Dianna Taylor

Arendt’s analysis of labor in chapters thirteen, “Labor and Life,” and fourteen, “Labor and Fertility,” of The Human Condition provides an entry point for considering how she conceives of the concept of life. Together, labor, work, and action constitute for Arendt the vita activa: three “fundamental human activities . . . that [correspond] to one of the basic conditions under which life on earth has been given to man.”1 Arendt identifies labor as corresponding “to the biological process of the human body”; she also contends, more fundamentally, that “the human condition of labor is life itself.”2 While Arendt’s assertion suggests that she conceives of life in purely biological terms, this is not the case. In “Labor and Life,” Arendt distinguishes between two forms of life, zōē and bios. Zōē refers to natural life, the cyclical processes of nature and the human body characterized by endless production and consumption. Appearing only fleetingly within the human-produced artifice of durable things (which Arendt refers to as “the world,” and to which the activity of work corresponds), that which gets produced and consumed in natural life ultimately “returns into the overall, gigantic circle of nature herself, where no beginning and no end exist and where all natural things swing in changeless, deathless repetition.”3 The cyclical natural processes of zōē are maintained and reproduced in the private realm by means of the activity of labor. Bios refers to human life, which spans the identifiable period between birth and death both collectively (human history) and individually (a single “lifetime”). For Arendt, in other words, “events which ultimately can be told as a story” or which “establish a biography” define bios.4 “Unique, distinct” human lives emerge and are recreated within the public realm through the activity of action.5 In sum, zōē refers to life; bios to a life.

LIFE AND HUMAN PLURALITY

 331

A hallmark of Arendt’s work is her insistence on the importance of maintaining the integrity of and distinction between, respectively, the three activities of the vita activa, the private realm of labor and the public realm of action, and zōē and bios. Her analysis of the vulnerability of this integrity and deterioration of these distinctions within the modern West illustrates the destructive effects of both developments. A breakdown of the distinction between the private and the public realms and, hence, between labor and action is apparent in the modern privileging of the activity of labor and the resulting incursion by the private realm into the public. In “Labor and Fertility,” Arendt argues that economic theorists such as John Locke and Adam Smith valorized labor as the highest human capacity because they identified within zōē’s cyclical and endless processes (process itself being a novel concept at the time) the possibility of continual wealth production. Appealing to the “fertility” of life—the perpetual processes of production and consumption that characterize zōē—Locke and Smith conceived of wealth production as itself a natural process. “The crudest superstition of the modern age—that money begets money—as well as its sharpest political insight—that power generates power,” Arendt writes, “owes its plausibility to the underlying metaphor of the natural fertility of life.”6 The realization of Locke’s and Smith’s perspectives within the context of Karl Marx’s work reveals their troubling implications. Marx takes the valorization of labor to a new level by recognizing it alone as a truly human activity, therefore conceiving of humanity solely in the biological terms of species being, and asserting zōē at the expense of bios. This narrow view clears the way for the private realm’s encroachment into the public and the subsequent diminishment of the latter, the combination of which Arendt refers to as “the social.” Encroachment here needs to be understood in terms of a reduced need for speech and action, the two activities that, when engaged collectively, create and sustain the public; this reduced need in turn diminishes conditions for their possibility. Arendt describes speech as the “actualization of the human condition of plurality,” where plurality entails “living as a distinct and unique being among equals.”7 It is by way of speech, then, that human beings distinguish themselves from one another. Private, laboring, species beings are not, and need not be, distinct; for them, “signs and sounds to communicate immediate, identical needs and wants” are perfectly adequate.8 Action, on the other hand, is the actualization of the human condition of natality, which Arendt refers to as a kind of “second birth.”9 Our first, biological birth brings a new human being into the world, and Arendt argues that the capacity for spontaneity, to create something new, that is, to act and not merely react, characterizes what it means to be human. “The fact that man is capable of action,” she writes, “means that the unexpected can be expected from him, that he is able to perform what is infinitely improbable.”10 Arendt conceives of human freedom specifically in terms of the “principle of beginning” that is inherent in natality: “Freedom

332

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

was created when man was created but not before.”11 Free action, for her, is characteristically spontaneous and, hence, as noted earlier, unexpected and unpredictable; it “must be free from motive on one side, from its intended goal as a predictable effect on the other.” While motives and goals are not irrelevant to freedom, neither are its “determining factors.”12 By inhibiting and potentially eliminating the need, and hence the conditions, for the possibility of human distinctiveness, Marx threatens not merely to subjugate bios to zōē, but to reduce the former to the latter. He effectively creates a situation in which the only distinction that matters is that among things—specifically “the abundance or scarcity of the goods to be fed into [a] process.”13 As Arendt sees it, Marx thus poses a threat not only to human plurality but also to natality, spontaneity, and freedom. Arendt’s concerns about the subjugation of zōē to bios and her trepidation about the reduction of the latter to the former are sometimes attributed to the valorization on her part of the public realm and action at the expense of the private realm and labor. Yet Arendt emphasizes the significance of the private, labor, and zōē when, for example, she identifies fertility as “the force of life,” and contends that whatever disrupts zōē’s cyclical processes of production and consumption (such as “poverty and misery,” for example) “ruins the elemental happiness that comes from being alive.”14 She does not, therefore, seek simply to reverse the stances of Locke, Smith, and Marx. Rather, as noted earlier, Arendt endeavors to maintain traditional distinctions between private and public or between labor and action, and to resist the reduction of bios to zōē or human life to natural life. Her analysis of the totalitarianism illustrates why this endeavor is not merely theoretical in nature. The modern threat to human spontaneity and freedom came to fruition in the camps where, Arendt argues, human plurality could be destroyed: “unique, distinct” human beings were reduced to “superfluous human material,” “whos” to mere “whats,”15 the human perspective to “the viewpoint of the life of the species.”16 Such destruction is necessary in order for a totalitarian regime to fulfill its fundamental objective that, according to Arendt, is the promotion of its ideology at any cost; whatever impedes such promotion must be eradicated. Insofar as plurality and the spontaneity of human freedom facilitate critical analysis, questioning, resistance, and counteraction, they pose the greatest possible impediments. Totalitarian regimes thus deploy terror, which reduces prisoners to mere bundles of reactions, thereby allowing totalitarian ideology to freely proliferate. “By pressing men against each other,” Arendt writes, “total terror destroys the space between them. . . . It destroys the one essential prerequisite of all freedom which is simply the capacity of motion which cannot exist without space.”17 Totalitarian terror thus aims to destroy plurality and totally reduce bios to zōē. Within “a perfect totalitarian government . . . all men have become One Man.”18 This total reduction, Arendt argues, is possible only within the camps, because it is only there that terror has free rein. As she describes it, the

LIFE AND HUMAN PLURALITY

 333

total, radical reduction of bios to zōē in turn creates a context within which it is possible to undermine the very concept of life itself. “The real horror of the concentration and extermination camps,” Arendt asserts, “lies in the fact that inmates, even if they happen to keep alive, are more effectively cut off from the world of the living than if they had died, because terror enforces oblivion.”19 The camps produced “living corpses.” As mere bundles of reactions, camp inmates were completely superfluous, possessing none of the distinguishing characteristics associated with bios. At the same time, insofar as there is nothing natural about the state in which they exist, they cannot be said to reflect zōē. Inmates were neither dead nor alive; they were treated not as if they were dead, but rather as if they had never existed.20 The unintelligibility of death in the camps underscores this negation of life. Normally, Arendt explains, death cultivates plurality by marking not merely the eradication of, as Judith Butler puts it, “something living,” but rather the end of an individual human life. For Butler, as for Arendt, in other words, recognition of death “is a presupposition for the life that matters.”21 In the camps, where it was “impossible to find out whether a prisoner is dead or alive,” death was merely “anonymous” and therefore unrecognized. The anonymity and unrecognizability that effectively deprive inmates of their own deaths reflect, and in turn reinforce, the negation of their lives. Rather than marking the end of a meaningful existence, as that which “set[s] a seal” on nonexistence, death, like life, is for all intents and purposes rendered a meaningless concept.22 In “Education After Auschwitz,” Theodor Adorno argues that conditions within Germany twenty-five years after the fall of Nazism were essentially the same as those from which it had emerged. “The societal pressure still bears down,” Adorno writes, “although the danger remains invisible nowadays.”23 The Human Condition reaches a similar conclusion about conditions within not merely a single state but, more broadly, a modern West characterized by the ascendance of the social realm. The Human Condition’s concluding chapter, “The Vita Activa and the Modern Age,” as well as Arendt’s essay, “The Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man,” both illustrate that within the postwar West, life continues to be valorized in ways that continue to (re) produce troubling, potentially harmful effects. It is neither zōē nor bios that is being valorized, however, but rather “extraterrestrial” life, or life that transcends not only the human-created world and human experience but the earth itself. In “The Vita Activa and the Modern Age,” Arendt refers to the eternal life promised by Christianity. The focus of “The Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man” is the transformation that life on earth undergoes once not religious faith, but scientific innovation enables human beings to leave the earth.24 Both otherworldly forms of life, Arendt argues, reflect the human desire to occupy the perspective of the Archimedean point—a purely objective, unencumbered, God’s-eye position. This desire reflects a characteristic of totalitarianism to which Arendt refers in her essay “Understanding and Politics” as “stringent logicality”—reason

334

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

that has been completely instrumentalized and directed toward merely theoretical, decontextualized, and means-end problem solving.25 Severed from reality in this way, reason ceases to be properly human. Just as the reduction of bios to zōē eliminates the need for speech and language, so does the non-worldliness of stringent logicality. Yet rather than mute, bodily signs and symbols, communication, which would ordinarily reflect and assert human plurality, in this instance is reduced to “meaningless formalism and mathematical signs.”26 The unhinging from human experience reflected in the desire to—and conviction that human beings are in fact able to—occupy the Archimedean point thus emulates in deeply disturbing ways the negation of plurality, and hence of humanity, that occurred in the camps: neither natural life nor human life, zōē nor bios, the Archimedean point objectifies and dehumanizes not only the world but also the human life within and the experience of that life. “The action of the scientists” to whom the Archimedean point beckons, Arendt writes, since it acts into nature from the standpoint of the universe and not into the web of human relationships, lacks the revelatory character of action as well as the ability to produce stories and become historical, which together form the very source from which meaningfulness springs into and illuminates human existence.27 As with Adorno, we can thus identify within Arendt’s work an appeal to our critical as well as our creative capacities as human beings. It is only through cultivating both that we can navigate our existence in ways that neither reduce human experience to the undifferentiated life of the species nor render it a mere object unrecognizable as fully human.

Notes 1 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1958), 7. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid., 96. 4 Ibid., 97. 5 Ibid., 7. 6 Ibid., 105. 7 Ibid., 178. 8 Ibid., 175–76. 9 Ibid., 176. 10 Ibid., 178.

LIFE AND HUMAN PLURALITY

 335

11 Ibid. 12 Hannah Arendt, “What Is Freedom?,” in Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin, 1968), 150. 13 Ibid., 108. 14 Ibid., 109. 15 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harvest Books, 1973), 443. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid., 466. 18 Ibid., 467. 19 Ibid., 443. 20 Ibid., 445. 21 Judith Butler, Frames of War (New York: Verso, 2010), 15. 22 Arendt, Origins, 452. 23 Theodor Adorno, “Education after Auschwitz,” in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 192. 24 Arendt opens The Human Condition with a discussion of the launching of Sputnik; she also discusses space exploration in Chapter IV, “The Vita Activa and the Modern Age.” 25 Hannah Arendt, “Understanding and Politics,” in Essays in Understanding: 1930-1954, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994), 317. 26 Hannah Arendt, “The Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man,” in Between Past and Future, 274. 27 Arendt, Human Condition, 324.

33 Natality and the Birth of Politics Anne O’Byrne

The thought of natality begins to take shape very early in Arendt’s work— as early as her doctoral dissertation, Love and Saint Augustine (1929). It appears there under the name “birth” and comes into its own only later as the condition of natality until The Human Condition (1958). “Birth” refers to the moment when we appear out of our mothers’ bodies, but for Arendt, natality is always something more: our being created, our emergence from the negative condition of not yet being, our first appearance in the world, the opening to new beginnings, our being between past and future, our shared plurality, and the signal of our capacity for action, responsibility, and revolution. If we think of Arendt as a phenomenologist, we see her encountering birth as something we witness and experience in the world. Approached as a phenomenon, from various points of view in various parts of her work, natality is eventually revealed as an ontological structure of human being and, controversially, the key to understanding political life. For Arendt, a thesis on Augustine was an occasion for working through, among other things, the questions of time and existence inherited from Heidegger, with whom she had studied in the years during which he wrote Being and Time. While Heidegger in that work devoted himself to the study of ours as a futural mode of being, Arendt retrieved his attention to both “not yet” and “having been” as ways of being in time, that is, both the “whence” and “whither” of our existence. In The Human Condition, natality is prominent from the start. When each of us is born, the world has never seen anyone quite like us before, and this natal newness is intimately linked to the human condition of plurality. The difference is what we share. Yet, so far, this is just first birth, the material condition for the possibility of being in the world, but, as such, just part of the cycle of life and death that Arendt identifies in terms of the Greek word zōē,

NATALITY AND THE BIRTH OF POLITICS

 337

or mere life. This is the life we share with animals, and it characterizes human life insofar as that life remains subject to the cyclical time of the natural world. We labor and consume, are born, give birth, die, endure hardships, and also enjoy the sheer bliss of being alive. If we hanker after something more here, something like immortality, the desire is fulfilled in the joy of having children and grandchildren grow up around us, and death comes in ripe old age in the midst of an enduring clan, as it did for the patriarchs of the Hebrew Bible. Yet, if the ancient Hebrews understood their lives in terms of their inherited traditions, and if the Romans saw themselves as being born in order to make themselves worthy of their ancestors, Arendt sees us moderns taking up a thought of second birth that has Christian and Greek roots. The structure is familiar as rebirth in Christ, the incarnate, crucified, and risen God, but, while this is ultimately a transcendent God, Arendtian natality is a matter of an essentially worldly second birth that takes more from Thucydides than from the Gospels. This second birth occurs when we enact our natality in the public realm, showing who we are by word and deed as Pericles famously did in delivering the Funeral Oration. It has been argued that this nostalgic example, among others, ties Arendt irredeemably to an ancient, un-usable model of political life. The argument has something to recommend it—she certainly tends to understand political action here in terms of appearance and even glory rather than deliberation and administration—but, thanks to the phenomenon of birth, her understanding of action includes novelty and spontaneity. Just as the world had never seen anyone quite like me before, I am capable of doing things the like of which have not been done before (novelty), and I can also perform actions that cannot be accounted for in a specific causal chain (spontaneity). This is the Kantian understanding of spontaneity, whereby a mental cause can produce an effect without itself having a prior cause.1 That is to say, we are capable of a practical creativity. This ability sets us beyond the cycles of nature, and makes possible—or imposes on us—a trajectory that carries us through the world from birth to death, or from not yet being to having been. So long as zōē keeps us in the swing of natural time, it offers an attenuated version of immortality but also a bulwark against anxiety in the face of oblivion. What is oblivion if we are all part of nature? In contrast, the life now understood as bios is lived between two darknesses. What is to become of the distinctive, natal me, or you, or any one of us? For Arendt, the answer is to be found in the world. This is not the Augustinian world of God’s Creation, but the specifically human world of things, institutions, and stories—that is, culture—that we create, and in which people might continue to know who we were, what we did and said, and what role we played. In Arendt’s breakdown of human activities into labor, work, and action, birth is most closely connected with labor, but the condition of natality is most fully expressed in action. Labor populates the earth and keeps us fed; work is the building and rebuilding that sustains the common, public world; and action is how we show who

338

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

we each are in that world, where actions are seen and where they will have their afterlife. Yet nothing is guaranteed. We send our actions into a plural world that is full of people who are themselves natal beings, all capable of newness, and all capable of receiving our actions with enthusiasm, resistance, or indifference, and of working to sustain them, adapt them, or bury them. The fate of action is essentially unpredictable because the condition of natality is also the condition of human plurality. Hence the vulnerability of our identities— our whoness—and our worldly existence, but hence too the relentless hope for a new beginning. The Origins of Totalitarianism as it had first appeared in 1951 contained no explicit development of the thought of birth or natality, though the erasure of spontaneity in the totalitarian system became a theme in that work in two ways. First, Nazism exploited a longing on the part of the masses for consistency and for a world that was wholly meaningful; spontaneity is a threat to all who cherish predictability and abhor uncertainty.2 Second, the camps were identified as the place where not just lives but human individuality itself was erased, and, she writes, “to destroy individuality is to destroy spontaneity, man’s power to begin something new out of his own resources, something that cannot be explained on the basis of reactions to environment and events.”3 When the second edition of Origins appeared in 1958, it had an epilogue, “Ideology and Terror: A Novel Form of Government,” written in 1953, where this thinking anticipates the thought of natality from The Human Condition. “With each new birth, a new beginning is born into the world, a new world has potentially come into being.”4 This is human freedom. Each of us is a new beginning and, in a sense, each of us begins the world anew.5 The book ends thus: Beginning, before it becomes a historical event, is the supreme capacity of man; politically, it is identical with man’s freedom. Initium ut esset homo creatus est—“that a beginning be made man was created” said Augustine. This beginning is guaranteed by each new birth; it is indeed every man.6 We are infinitely plural, and Arendt understands this realization as an exhortation to affirm the structure of plurality, the fact of natal difference in the person of each human individual, and the difference of cultures, understood as distinct modes of existence. In Eichmann in Jerusalem, this leads her to a new philosophical definition of genocide. She argues that when the Nazis took upon themselves the right to decide with whom they would share the world, they committed a crime against human plurality, and thereby against natality. This is the specific character of their crime against humanity. Yet she sees the challenge posed to identity and belonging by plurality and newness. It is the existential challenge each generation faces with the constant rise of new young people. Their new energy is necessary to

NATALITY AND THE BIRTH OF POLITICS

 339

sustain the world we bequeath to them, but what if they wreck it? What if they destroy what we have made? That possibility must not be eliminated because newness must always shelter the possibility not just of renewal but of revolution. Thus, natality, the signal of action, is also the sign of our capacity for radical political change. How are we to understand the relation between the phenomenon of birth and how we ought to live? Seyla Benhabib argues: “It is the step leading from the constituents of a philosophical anthropology (natality, worldliness, plurality, and forms of human activity) to [an] attitude of respect for the other that is missing from Arendt’s thought.”7 The criticism is fair if what we seek is the derivation of norms. However, what Arendt offers is better understood as the revelation of ontological structures that come with a call to responsibility for the world that is so structured. In her dissertation on Augustine, she speaks of the loving affirmation of another: amo: volo ut sis (“I love you: I will that you be”). By the time of “The Crisis in Education,” the same thought takes the form of an all-embracing challenge. Educators, parents, and all the older generation inevitably find themselves introducing the new ones to the world. They may do so in a way that shirks responsibility by acknowledging its cruelties and injustices, but at the same time noting that they did not make it that way, and telling the young that they have to deal with it as best they can. Or they may say, as they point out the details of the world to their charges: “This is our world. We must take joint responsibility for it.” Indeed, for Arendt, education is the preparation for our second birth as individuals capable of action, and it is the time when we decide if we love the world enough to take responsibility for it.

Notes 1 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), A445/B473. 2 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1976), 352. 3 Ibid., 455. 4 Ibid., 465. 5 Ibid., 466. 6 Ibid., 479. 7 Seyla Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1996), 196.

34 Place: The Familiar Table and Chair Peter F. Cannavò

Though Hannah Arendt is hardly recognized as a theorist of place,1 The Human Condition and Between Past and Future2 reveal her as such. A “place” is a physically, spatially distinct parcel of things, meanings, and relationships—human and nonhuman, social and ecological—defined by human beings and cohering with relative stability. People transform their surroundings—conceptually, physically, or both—into a map of delineated places in order to provide legibility, usefulness, meaning, and a sense of home and identity.3 Arendt does not explicitly identify “place” as a key concept. However, she shows how a stable, coherent geography and an enduring relationship with one’s physical surroundings, both built and natural, are critical in making the world a reliable, habitable human home.

Work and Action: Creating a Human Home on Earth In The Human Condition, Arendt explores how conditions for human life on Earth foster three central activities: labor, work, and action. Labor attends to basic biological necessities4 and produces goods for consumption, but not lasting objects. Biological nature is characterized by relentless cycles of birth, growth, and decay, without clear beginnings or endings; nature consumes its own creations: “Life is a process that everywhere uses up durability, wears it down, makes it disappear.”5 Labor itself does not resist these cycles but

PLACE

 341

participates in them.6 Yet human beings are in a “constant, unending fight against the processes of growth and decay”;7 to create enduring objects and culture, we must overcome mere biological existence through work and action. Through work, we create enduring physical objects from pre-given plans or designs. Such objects resist natural decay and furnish a durable, built world—the “human artifice.”8 Work “instrumentalizes” the material world: “during the work process, everything is judged in terms of suitability and usefulness for the desired end, and for nothing else,” and “the end justifies the violence done to nature to win the material, as the wood justifies killing the tree and the table justifies destroying the wood.”9 Action is the activity of words and deeds transpiring directly among persons.10 Action reflects human plurality, as it involves interaction among diverse perspectives. Words and deeds constitute a shared, complex, and lasting social reality—“the ‘web’ of human relationships.”11 Each individual’s actions and life story both shape this web and are shaped by it.12 This web defines individuals’ and communities’ interactions, characters, purposes, and identities. Action is fundamentally political,13 and it finds quintessential expression in deliberation over collective principles and ends.14 Unlike labor, action is not tied to biological sustenance, and unlike work, it does not execute pre-given plans or subordinate itself to further ends. Instead, action initiates new beginnings, through speech and deeds, in the web of relationships. For Arendt, action is thus the realm of freedom.15 Such freedom has limits: one initiates action but cannot control its outcome. That outcome is determined collectively, as action reverberates through the web of relationships and engages with others’ words and deeds.16 Together, action and work resist nature’s impermanence and fashion the human artifice. Words and deeds accord meaning to work’s creations: “Without being talked about . . . the world would” be “a heap of unrelated things.”17 Work in turn fashions objects that embody and preserve the social reality generated by action.18 Action and work create lasting conditions for human beings to be “at home on earth.”19 Arendt’s emphasis on human plurality suggests that this home is not free of conflict, difference, uncertainty, or change. To be at home in the world is not to have a static, quiescent existence. Rather, to be at home is to find enough familiarity, stability, legibility, and meaning in the world to confidently undertake long-term ends and projects, and to fashion coherent, enduring individual and collective life-stories rather than constantly negotiate a hostile, destructive environment20 or simply labor within nature’s cycles.

Arendt’s Human Artifice as a World of Places Arendt discusses the human artifice in spatial terms, implying that distinct, enduring places are essential to being at home in the world.21 The world created by work and action “relates and separates men at the same time.”

342

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

It “gathers us together and yet prevents our falling over each other.”22 Social relationships are spatially arranged through things and places: “To live together in the world means essentially that a world of things is between those who have it in common, as a table is located between those who sit around it.”23 This world is public, a collective creation and experience.24 Existing “between” individuals, the human artifice gives relationships spatial coherence and legibility.25 More than just a useful surface, Arendt’s aforementioned table is a shared place around which individuals orient themselves with respect to one another, perhaps through repeated meetings. The table and other things of the human artifice thus create, beyond our biological existence, a new set of conditions that shape human life.26 In fashioning and refashioning the human artifice, we fashion and refashion our individual and collective identities. Arendt suggests that because nature consumes all of its creations, only the human artifice can sustain enduring places. Though Arendt overemphasizes nature’s destructiveness—natural geography and topography persist for thousands or millions of years—the natural world does not present us with stable, predefined locales. Elements of the landscape blend into one another; organisms and natural forces traverse and alter terrain and ecosystems. The natural landscape is in some measure ever in flux. In trying to make sense of their surroundings, human beings must pick out elements to designate and maintain as more or less coherent, enduring places. Stable places qua places are human constructs.27 People must therefore build a world and found places.28 Place-founding is most obvious with physical construction. Here, placefounding seems akin to work. However, the creation of places involves not only physical effort but also descriptive words, including identification of distinctive features and boundaries. Identification and description fall under Arendtian action. Recall that without action, we have Arendt’s “heap of unrelated things.”29 We cannot have recognized places without describing and delineating them. By being described and named, places can be created entirely through action, without being physically changed through work. Thus “natural” places are human constructs, founded through description. Even though the preexisting terrain has not been physically altered, it has been given meaning and boundaries as a place. To designate certain areas as wetlands, for example, we must decide on the general characteristics of wetlands and determine the locations and bounds of particular wetlands.30 Again, the physical terrain precedes our naming and describing it.31 Yet nature does not present neat boundaries or delineations. We must interpret and map the natural world.32 In doing so, we attach meaning to natural locales and arguably bring them into the human artifice. In Arendt’s terms, they transition from Earth to world, that is, from nature to the human artifice. Anne Chapman argues,

PLACE

 343

All natural, non-human-created things that can appear in public (i.e. be experienced by different people, from a plurality of perspectives) have the potential to be part of our world and we make them part of our world by paying attention to them.33 Arendt herself says, “Whatever touches or enters into a sustained relationship with human life immediately assumes the character of a condition of human existence.”34 Similarly, she maintains that individual animals or plants, when recognized or marked out as individuals, can become part of the world.35 Once part of the human artifice, we might maintain “natural” places against certain forms of change or disturbance.36 Importantly, any description of a place, built or natural, reflects a particular perspective and can thus be contested.37 As with Arendtian action more generally, the description, delineation, and naming of places is enacted in the web of human relationships and is subject to challenge and amendment by others, who approach the same locations through different perspectives, relationships, and positions of power. Yet sharing a spatial environment—and at least agreeing that a recognizable set of places indeed exists—enables collective deliberation. Arendtian action and politics, as Dana Villa notes, “must be anchored in a shared world” that is the object of some minimum agreement. This does not entail a univocal perspective on the landscape, but some “palpable ‘inbetween’ [i.e., a shared world] that makes plurality—a genuine diversity of perspectives on the same phenomenon—possible.”38

The Mutual Constitution of Identity and Place In founding places and creating the human artifice, individuals and communities also fashion identities: “men, their ever-changing nature notwithstanding, can retrieve their sameness, that is, their identity, by being related to the same chair and the same table.”39 Arendt’s table creates a common location for those around it, a place that helps define not only their relationships but also their identities. Individuals interact with places through residence, work, play, politics, travel, shopping, worship, spiritual or aesthetic appreciation, and so on. These interactions shape biographies, goals, possibilities, constraints, relationships, routines, worldviews, and affiliations.40 And when things and places, like Arendt’s chair and table, are relatively stable, this helps stabilize human identities: “The things of the world,” Arendt says, “have the function of stabilizing human life.”41 Things and places stabilize different forms of identities, including unique individual identities, identities associated with societal roles, and identities involving membership in social and political communities. My kitchen table may help ground my identity as a particular person who reads the newspaper and eats there each day. The kitchen table may help ground my identity as a

344

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

spouse and parent who gathers there each evening for dinner with his family. And it may help ground my identity as an Italian-American inhabitant of a small, industrial city in the twenty-first century, late capitalist United States who participates in certain food-related consumption and cultural practices and traditions, as well as in a variety of local, regional, and global exchanges and political interactions. Additionally, one might argue that as a site of food preparation and consumption, the kitchen table facilitates a specific set of ongoing relationships with the natural world—relationships that help constitute me as both a human being and a particular individual inhabiting the biosphere. However, because different persons approach the same place through different perspectives and interactions, that very same place may shape and sustain a variety of different identities, whether in terms of persons, roles, or communities. Moreover, the stability of places and identities is never absolute; the human artifice stabilizes, but does not freeze, our existence. Places themselves change under social and ecological influences. As things and places change, they change those who interact with them. Over time, the world and its inhabitants constitute one another in an endless, open-ended process,42 just as Arendtian action is itself open-ended. Places and identities are always “unfinished.”43 Yet, even as some of its elements change, a place can still provide continuity for those interacting with it. Arendt’s human artifice thus constitutes a shared spatial environment relating individuals’ multiple identities and perspectives. Place-founding happens in a web of human relationships. How an act of founding turns out depends upon others’ responses. Place-founding is a collective activity, requiring some collective assent. Fundamental disagreements over the meaning or boundaries of places can spiral into divisive conflict or violence. Granted, one could despotically enforce agreement. Place-founding is frequently imposed by governments, planners, armies, developers, and corporations. Yet such place-founding does not qualify as action in the true Arendtian sense, but is more akin to work, whereby a powerful actor forcibly reshapes the world according to a pre-given plan.44 To be truer to action, place-founding should involve democratic deliberation, wherein parties offer competing conceptions of a place but seek a collective, everevolving vision.

The Preservation of Places Places are always in flux, but the concept of place also entails some stability. In resisting nature’s cycles, human beings seek to create an enduring world and to ground their identities in such a world. Founding must be accompanied by preservation.45 Yet preservation does not simply follow founding.46 Rather, the relationship between the two is ongoing.

PLACE

 345

In The Human Condition, Arendt highlights preservation when she urges limits on the activity of work. Work, as noted earlier, instrumentalizes nature in a means-ends relationship; Arendt worries that such instrumentalism will escape from “limited and productive” bounds and commandeer our whole relationship with both earthly nature and the human artifice,47 ultimately endangering both realms. Anticipating environmentalist critiques of crude anthropocentrism,48 she warns of a “generalization of the fabrication experience in which usefulness and utility are established as the ultimate standards for life and the world of men,”49 resulting in a “limitless devaluation of everything given, [a] process of growing meaninglessness in which every end is transformed into a means.”50 As I note further, Arendt warns of a crisis in which not only work but also labor overstep their bounds. The stability and integrity of the human artifice ultimately rests upon a stable, well-functioning biosphere.51 Moreover, as noted earlier, human beings bring the natural landscape into the human artifice. Care for the human artifice must include care for its more natural elements,52 including locations like rivers, mountains, forests, or wilderness. Arendtian placefounding is tempered by a preservationism that considers the ability of earthly nature as a whole, as well as individual “natural” and built places, to absorb change without being effaced or ruined. Arendt suggests an ongoing balance between founding and preservation when discussing care and cultivation.53 In Between Past and Future, Arendt considers the Latin origins of the word culture. Culture “derives from colere—to cultivate, to take care, tend and preserve—and it relates primarily to the intercourse of man with nature in the sense of cultivating and tending nature until it becomes fit for human habitation. As such, it indicates an attitude of loving care and stands in sharp contrast to all efforts to subject nature to the domination of man.”54 One might say that care allows the original qualities of a place to endure and flourish and to provide a stable context, while cultivation enables new possibilities to unfold smoothly. Care allows continuity with the past that enables human life to be a coherent story, or narrative.55 Cultivation facilitates incremental change and adaptation. By contrast, domineering, aggressive action abruptly destroys and replaces the existing environment and thus erases context. In short, Arendt urges the “building, preserving, and caring for a world that can survive us and remain a place fit to live in for those who come after us”;56 transformation of nature through work must be tempered by an overall attitude of care. Here, one might speak of adaptive reuse of historical buildings rather than wholesale redevelopment, of community revitalization without gentrification, of energy development through renewables, or of more sustainable forms of food production like local agriculture, organic farming, or permaculture. But how does preservation relate to action? Action involves initiating, through words and deeds, a new, open-ended set of interactions in the web of human relationships. From this standpoint, action is characterized by

346

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

founding—of places and other aspects of the world—while preservation seems to freeze action, for example through laws that accord permanent protected status to a place. One could arguably even class preservation with labor, in that it involves ongoing efforts to maintain the life of a place against decay or degradation, much as eating maintains the human body. On the other hand, preservation is also pursued through public words and deeds in a more deliberative sense, as when activists affirm the ecological and cultural significance of a place and participate in debate over its protection. Admittedly, the end-result of such activism is often permanent preservation, which narrows the scope of Arendtian politics with regard to protected parcels of land. Yet this is not necessarily a problem for Arendtian politics or action, as deliberation may be ongoing at a larger scale, where debates and decisions over degrees of founding and preservation in particular places feed into larger, continuing discussions about the social and ecological character of, say, a metropolitan area or watershed.57 Moreover, an act of preservation does not persist automatically and without future action—an initial preservationist decision ultimately depends on whether it is validated through the deliberative action of succeeding generations.58 Clearly, like founding, preservation of places and of earthly nature is also a public, collective enterprise. The world is public, and its preservation happens in the web of human relationships. In the end, though, preservation does restrain action. It limits the initiation of new ends, values, meanings, and their associated acts of change in the landscape. And as with an overemphasis on founding, an overemphasis on preservation is problematic. People dynamically interact with places, altering or refounding them in response to changing conditions. An overemphasis on preservation would radically curtail the freedom to initiate new beginnings that is the hallmark of Arendtian action. Human activity would be limited to carrying out a preordained plan of sustaining and reproducing the existing world. Nevertheless, ongoing attention to preservation enables the persistence of the world that makes action possible.59

Arendt’s Crisis of Place In large part, The Human Condition concerns a generalized crisis of alienation from both Earth and world, that is, from nature and the human artifice. Villa calls this a crisis “of homelessness, a lack of place.”60 Arendt, reflecting her concerns about rampant instrumentalization, partly blames this homelessness on utilitarian, consumerist values associated with modernity and capitalism. She indicts not just the pursuit of work without preservationist restraint but also the expansion of labor out of its proper realm and into a generalized ethos of consumption. Consumerism radically devalues our surroundings and the meanings accorded them by action, reducing both nature and the built world to “mere means”61 for

PLACE

 347

transient satisfaction and then disposal. We come to “look upon . . . every tree as potential wood.”62 This situation threatens “permanence, stability, and durability.”63 It “harbors the grave danger that eventually no object of the world will be safe from consumption and annihilation through consumption.”64 Arendt thus notes that “if . . . we were truly nothing but members of a consumers’ society, we would no longer live in a world at all but simply be driven by a process in whose ever-recurring cycles things appear and disappear, manifest themselves and vanish.”65 She warns that we face the dissolution of a meaningful, enduring human artifice. The result is a world that “has lost its power to gather [individuals] together, to relate and to separate them,”66 in which individuals are “deprived of an ‘objective’ relationship with them [i.e., one another] that comes from being related to and separated from them through the intermediary of a common world of things.”67 From an environmental standpoint, Arendt was quite prescient. Over a decade before the rise of modern environmentalism, she warned that a consumption-oriented economy was instrumentalizing and devouring the natural and built worlds. Today, readers can draw on Arendt to better appreciate the deep social impacts of land use issues like unregulated development, suburban sprawl, energy development, and the construction of pipelines through indigenous and other communities.

Notes 1 For exceptions, see the essay from which this chapter is adapted: Peter F. Cannavò, “Hannah Arendt: Place, World, and Earthly Nature,” in Engaging Nature: Environmentalism, Concepts of Nature, and the Study of the Political Theory Canon, ed. Peter F. Cannavò and Joseph H. Lane, Jr. (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2014, 253–69). See also Anne Chapman, “The Ways That Nature Matters: The World and the Earth in the Thought of Hannah Arendt,” Environmental Values 16, no. 4 (November 2007): 433–45; David Macauley, “Out of Place and Outer Space: Hannah Arendt and Earth Alienation: An Historical and Critical Perspective,” Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 3, no. 4 (1992): 19–45; Daniel Kemmis, Community and the Politics of Place (Norman: University of Oklahoma, 1990); Paul Ott, “World and Earth: Hannah Arendt and the Human Relationship to Nature,” Ethics, Place & Environment 12, no. 1 (2009): 1–16; and Kenneth Frampton, “The Status of Man and the Status of His Objects: A Reading of The Human Condition,” in Modern Architecture and the Critical Present, ed. Kenneth Frampton (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982), 6–19. Dana Villa acknowledges Arendt as a critic of placelessness. See Villa, Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of the Political (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 171. Other writers have explored the environmental implications of Arendt’s thought. See Kerry H. Whiteside, “Hannah Arendt and Ecological Politics,” Environmental Ethics 16, no. 4 (Winter 1994): 339–58, and “Worldliness and Respect

348

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

for Nature: An Ecological Application of Hannah Arendt’s Conception of Culture,” Environmental Values 7, no. 1 (February 1998): 25–40. Whiteside’s work is relevant to Arendt’s views on place. Douglas Torgerson draws on Arendt’s conception of action and political deliberation to model what he calls a “green public sphere.” See Torgerson, The Promise of Green Politics: Environmentalism and the Public Sphere (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999). But I am especially indebted to Macauley, “Out of Place,” for inspiring the ideas discussed in this chapter. 2 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1958), and Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Penguin Books, 1977). 3 See Peter F. Cannavò, The Working Landscape: Founding, Preservation, and the Politics of Place (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2007), esp. 20. 4 Arendt, The Human Condition, 118–26. 5 Ibid., 96. 6 Ibid., 7–8, 79–93. 7 Ibid., 100. 8 Ibid., 136. 9 Ibid., 153–54, 156. 10 Ibid., 7. 11 Ibid., 183. 12 Ibid., 184. 13 Ibid., 22–28, 196–98. 14 See also Villa, Arendt and Heidegger, 32–33. 15 Arendt, Human Condition, 177. 16 Ibid., 183–84, 191–92, 232–34. 17 Ibid., 204. 18 Ibid., 95. See also Seyla Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1996), 108. 19 Ibid., 134. 20 Cannavò, Working Landscape, 6. 21 See also Whiteside, “Hannah Arendt,” 353; Frampton, “Status of Man.” 22 Arendt, Human Condition, 52–53. 23 Ibid., 52-53; emphasis added. 24 Chapman, “The Ways That Nature Matters,” 435. 25 Hanna Fenichel Pitkin says, “This world of things in which we have interest is a tangible in-between (inter-esse).” See Pitkin, “Justice: On Relating Private and Public,” Political Theory 9 (1981): 327–352, 342. 26 Arendt, Human Condition, 9. 27 Martin Heidegger makes a similar point. See “Building Dwelling Thinking,” in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1977), 343–63. See also see Chapman, “The Ways That Nature Matters.”

PLACE

 349

28 On the founding and preservation of places, see Cannavò, Working Landscape. 29 Arendt, Human Condition, 204. 30 For a similar point, see Robert David Sack, Homo Geographicus: A Framework for Action, Awareness, and Moral Concern (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 66, 80. 31 And on the creation of places by nonhuman animals, see Mick Smith’s review of Cannavò, Working Landscape, in Environmental Ethics 31, no. 1 (2009): 97–100. 32 Though Macauley notes that Arendt overlooks how particular locales in nature, such as forests or rivers, already have a certain structure or coherence. See Macauley, “Out of Place,” 44. 33 Chapman, “The Ways That Nature Matters,” 437. 34 Arendt, Human Condition, 9. 35 Ibid., 98. 36 The management of wilderness areas against natural or anthropogenic change is of course paradoxical. See Roderick Frazier Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 4th ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 341. 37 See also David Harvey, Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996), 309–10, 316, 322. 38 Villa, Arendt and Heidegger, 34. 39 Arendt, Human Condition, 137. 40 See also Cannavò, Working Landscape, 33, and Allan Pred, “Place as Historically Contingent Process: Structuration and the Time-Geography of Becoming Places,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 74 (1984): 279–97. 41 Arendt, Human Condition, 137. 42 See Sack, Homo Geographicus, 2, 34. 43 Doreen Massey, “Spaces of Politics,” in Human Geography Today, ed. Doreen Massey, John Allen, and Philip Sarre (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999), 279–294. 44 Arendt, Human Condition, 220–30. 45 Cannavò, Working Landscape, 41; Chapman, “The Ways That Nature Matters,” 435–36. 46 On the interaction between founding and preservation, see also Iris Marion Young, Intersecting Voices: Dilemmas of Gender, Political Philosophy, and Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 134–64. 47 Arendt, Human Condition, 157. 48 See also Whiteside, “Hannah Arendt” and “Worldliness.” 49 Arendt, Human Condition, 157. 50 Ibid. 51 Chapman, “The Ways That Nature Matters,” 437–38. 52 See Whiteside, “Worldliness.”

350

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

53 This paragraph draws on Whiteside, “Worldliness,” and Cannavò, Working Landscape, 44. 54 Arendt, Between Past and Future, 211–12. 55 See also Young, Intersecting Voices, 153. 56 Arendt, Between Past and Future, 95. 57 On preservationist discourse as action, see also Ott, “World and Earth,” 16. 58 I am indebted to Scott Cameron for this insight. 59 See also Bonnie Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 118. 60 Villa, Arendt and Heidegger, 171. Macauley says that for Arendt, Earth and world alienation mean “a loss of roots and a common, shared sense of place, a realm of meaningful pursuits secured by tradition against the forces of change.” Macauley, “Out of Place,” 25. 61 Arendt, Human Condition, 156. 62 Ibid., 158. 63 Ibid., 125–26. 64 Ibid., 133. 65 Ibid., 132–34. 66 Ibid., 52–53. 67 Ibid., 58.

35 Plurality Catherine Kellogg

The question of cohabitation, of an association with others, and what it means to share the world with those whom one has not chosen is what Arendt meant by plurality, and it implicates all of her political philosophy, from her understanding of justice, to loneliness and isolation, and to the risks that she saw confronting her world, that continue to threaten today. It is clear that there is a renewed interest in Arendt’s work. Indeed, in response to the Trumpocaplyse, according to The Guardian, The Origins of Totalitarianism became a bestseller.1 And so I begin this chapter on the importance of plurality to Arendt’s thought given the renewed interest in Arendt’s analysis of totalitarianism and her great insights into thinking, action, and assembling in public. What Arendt set out to do in her 1951 The Origins of Totalitarianism was, among other things, to provide a phenomenological account of authoritarian totalitarianism, an account that puts front and center the experiences of dispossession, dislocation, and isolation, which she saw as both the origin of totalitarian rule and its necessary consequence. Arendt identifies dispossession, dislocation, and isolation as precursors to totalitarianism insofar as isolation leaves human beings dominated by a sense of worldlessness and superfluity, prepared to surrender their capacity for thinking to the compulsory force of logic that drives totalitarian terror. By isolation Arendt meant the profound experience of being cut apart from the social fabric of civil and political life that she associated with the experience of modernity generally, with its tendency to hyper-individualism and mass society. As she said: By pressing men against each other, total terror destroys the space between them. . . . While isolation concerns only the political realm of life, loneliness concerns human life as a whole. . . . Loneliness, the

352

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

common ground for terror . . . is closely connected with uprootedness and superfluousness which have been the curse of modern masses. . . . To be uprooted means to have no place in the world, recognized and guaranteed by others; to be superfluous means not to belong to the world at all.2 Arendt was particularly interested in its relationship to the remarkable ease with which some lives could lose their quality of being social and political and, in becoming stateless, also become rightless, because this experience of calamitous rightlessness was the result and the cause of totalitarian rule. Arendt’s methodological breakthrough, as original as it was breathtakingly obvious after she said it, was that the referent for the great Declarations of the Rights of Man and Citizen was not the presumed human subject full of dignity and firmly attached to inalienable rights, but rather the human being, stripped of the qualities of legal and social personhood, and so infinitely exposed to power in its rawest form: violence. As she says, “The conception of human rights, based upon the assumed existence of a human being as such, broke down at the very moment when those who professed to believe in it were for the first time confronted with people who had indeed lost all other qualities and specific relationships—except that they were still human.”3 As she goes on to say, “The survivors of extermination camps, the inmates of concentration and internment camps could see . . . that the abstract nakedness of being nothing but human was their greatest danger.”4 Patiently and often chillingly, Arendt shows the transparency of the process by which people were prepared for the concentration and internment camps. Talking of the people as first stripped of a place to belong and of others with whom to act, stripped of all of the social, civil, and political textures of life, she described the process of preparing “living corpses” as coolly rational.5 The calamity she saw was not that the stateless and therefore rightless were “not equal before law, but that no law existed for them.”6 The only way that stateless people could come into contact with the law was by breaking it. Her analysis shows the law in the way that only dystopian novels tend to do: as force without right or legitimacy to back it up. In liberal democracies, we tend to think of law as being made up of both senses of the German “recht”—which is not just law or rule, but also “right” as in just. When law is stripped of the second sense of what is just, it is simply force or violence, and this is one of her greatest insights into the functioning of law under conditions of totalitarianism: what she meant by being made “superfluous to the world” is being made the object of the law, but not its subject. So we become superfluous to the world when dislocated and dispossessed because then we are no longer of it. Her phrase “superfluous to the world” gets at the condition of being without all of what it means to be human; being deprived not just of a place or a home in the world, but also of something to do with others in that world and of having a voice to think and speak with as you do that work.

PLURALITY

 353

Being taken from the social texture and forms of life leaves us not just dislocated but lonely. As she says, Loneliness is not solitude. Solitude requires being alone whereas loneliness shows itself most sharply in company with others. . . . For the confirmation of my identity I depend entirely on other people; and it is the great saving grace of companionship for solitary men that it makes them “whole” again, saves them from the dialogue of thought in which one remains always equivocal, restores the identity which makes them speak with the single voice of one unexchangeable person.7 There are many examples we can use to speak about this experience: in this moment, perhaps the most apt is the experience of walking while black, or trans, or native. Being taken from the social texture, and from forms of life, is the very process that leaves us vulnerable to the law in its form as force without right. In 1945, directly following the end of the Second World War, Hannah Arendt declared that evil had become the defining political and philosophical problem of the age.8 Fifteen years later, writing about the trial of war criminal Adolph Eichmann for The New Yorker, she declared that he was, “like the pirate in traditional law, hostis, humani generis [enemy of the human species].”9 What she signaled with her declaration that Eichmann was an enemy of the human species, and not, for instance, an enemy of the Jews, or an enemy of the newly formed state of Israel, was that the nature of his crimes could not be contained by the distinction between criminal and political categories that the entire notion of war crimes depends upon. Eichmann’s actions exceeded criminal categories in the sense that, despite his famous defense that he was merely “following orders,” he was not a common criminal who had breached the laws of a particular jurisdiction. At the same time, his actions also exceeded political categories in the sense that the extermination of an entire people is not included in the actions of a lawful enmity. While he was formally tried and subsequently executed for “war crimes”—for having breached the laws of war, those laws which deem what kinds of actions are legal for enemies—Arendt’s claim was that his actions did not accord with an association with others with whom there might be peace as well as war, and thus, while his punishment was appropriate, he was tried on the wrong grounds. Thus, if in 1951, when she published The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt was still working with a Kantian understanding of radical evil, by the time she covered Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem in 1961, she had become convinced that only goodness could be radical: evil by way of contrast, was shallow; it spread like scum over a pond, as she said. As she famously claimed, Adolf Eichmann’s evil was banal because he just simply refused to think. He refused to understand the implications of his own actions. For Arendt, if you are thinking, you will have to come home to yourself at

354

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

midnight, like Richard the Third; you will find yourself confronted by your own thoughts and the consequences of your actions. Arendt’s coverage of the Eichmann trial was the focus of intense controversy, from the moment it was written, unabated to the current moment. For Arendt, the emptiness of Eichmann’s speech did not demonstrate evil: his use of clichés was simply a constant barrage of thoughtlessness. The shallowness of Eichmann’s evil could not be fixed or given depth by reason. Only through the experience of thinking, Arendt insisted, of being in dialogue with oneself, can conscience again be breathed into life. Thinking may be useless in itself; it may be a solitary activity, yet thinking is the precondition for the return of judgment, of knowing and saying: “This is not right.” By 1971, Arendt saw no evidence of a resurgence of thinking in the wake of atrocity and she believed that there had been a rupture in political thought after the Second World War. Indeed, Arendt did not find Eichmann terrifying, but rather laughable; his most straightforward motive seemed to have been building his career— working his way up the SS ladder. It’s not that Arendt thought that Eichmann shouldn’t be executed, but she disagreed with the reasons put forward by the trial as well as the trial itself. All of this meant that the trial was one that stood outside of the possibility of justice. And besides, execution is precisely what Eichmann wanted: to be hanged in public and to enjoy his own execution so that he could believe himself to be immortal. Indeed, at the foot of the gallows he defied his judges, telling them that “we shall meet again.” He forgot that it was his own funeral, prompting Arendt to write: “It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lesson that this long course in human wickedness has taught him—the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-defying banality of evil.”10 The controversy about the publication of The New Yorker article and then the book began immediately, and it has never abated. Arendt herself responded to the continuing controversy about her Eichmann book in Responsibility and Judgment. She says: To begin, I want to comment on the rather furious controversy touched off by my book Eichmann in Jerusalem. I deliberately use the words “touched off” rather than the word “caused” for the large part of the controversy was devoted to a book that was never written. . . . The controversy invariably raised all kinds of strictly moral issues, many of which had never occurred to me, whereas others had been mentioned by me only in passing.11 The tone of this text has been the source of furious controversy from the moment it first appeared in The New Yorker, until the present day. One such moment is when Eichmann claimed during the trial that, in implementing the Final Solution, he had derived this moral precept from his reading of Kant. He invoked “duty” to explain his own version of Kantianism. And Arendt

PLURALITY

 355

writes, “This was outrageous on the face of it, and also incomprehensible, since Kant’s moral philosophy is so closely bound up with man’s faculty of judgement, which rules out blind obedience.”12 As Arendt says, speaking (imaginatively) directly to Eichmann, “you and your superiors took as your own right the decision that they did not need to share the earth,” and so no member of the human race “can be expected to share the earth with you.”13 Indeed, the explicit attempt to annihilate some part of the population—Jews, Roma people, homosexuals, communists, and the disabled, among others—meant that the exercise of freedom Eichmann insisted on was genocidal. It was for this crime, the crime of not sharing the world that Arendt says, “this is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang.”14 For Arendt, thinking implicates each one of us in a “we.” Thinking is integrally related to the affirmation of plural cohabitation. We, as distinct I’s, are not sovereign; this is an illusion and a dangerous one. The “I” who thinks is part of a “we” and cohabitation with others we do not ever choose is a part of the human condition. To exercise a right to decide with whom to share the earth is to invoke a genocidal prerogative. For Arendt, those who fail to relate to themselves, to maintain a dialogue with themselves as one does in thinking and judging, fail to actualize as persons. A certain kind of speech is necessary for this actualization. It is silent but not without addressee. All thinking, no matter how solitary, carries the trace of social company. When, in 1945, Arendt said that refugees represent a “new historical consciousness,” in that they have no interest in gaining a new national identity, she meant that this new form of consciousness is especially important today as older concepts like those representing the political actor such as “man” or “citizen” are falling by the wayside as the nationstate slowly declines.15 As she put it in The Origins of Totalitarianism, the nation-state in the interwar period declined “from an instrument of law, to an instrument of the nation.”16 Thus, Arendt’s model of the individual meditating on their condition and living as a perpetual outsider of history means that the necessity of belonging to a nation-state has been the root of modern violence, and the origins of a modern kind of evil: the banal evil of thoughtlessness. Dispossession, dislocation, and isolation renders human subjects into objects; as she wrote in Origins: “The calamity of the rightless is not that they are deprived of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, or equality before the law and freedom of opinion . . . but that they no longer belong to any community whatsoever. . . . Only in the last phase of a rather lengthy process is their right to live threatened; only if they remain perfectly superfluous.”17

Notes 1 Zoe Williams, “Totalitarianism in the Age of Trump: Lessons from Hannah Arendt,” The Guardian. February 1, 2017, https​://ww​w.the​guard​ian.c​om/

356

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

us​-news​/2017​/feb/​01/to​talit​arian​ism-i​n-age​-dona​ld-tr​ump-l​esson​s-fro​m-han​ nah-a​rendt​-prot​ests.​ 2 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1970), 466, 474; emphasis mine. 3 Ibid., 299. 4 Ibid., 300. 5 Ibid., 447. 6 Ibid., 295–96. 7 Arendt, Origins, 476. 8 Hannah Arendt, “The Stateless People,” Contemporary Jewish Record, April 8, 1945: 137–53. 9 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (Penguin, 2006), 261. 10 Ibid., 252. 11 Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken, 2003), 17–18. 12 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 136. 13 Ibid., 279. 14 Ibid. 15 Hannah Arendt, “Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man,” from Origins, 275. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid., 295–96.

36 The Right to Have Rights Yasemin Sari

Simply following what she understands to be her method, that is, “to think what we are doing” in light of “our most recent fears,”1 the core of Hannah Arendt’s phenomenological approach to any concept that she deems to be ossified is her steadfast rethinking of such concepts. In doing so, Arendt focuses on how our moral and political conceptions not only are subject to change but also require a response to our human predicament in the world. This conviction may alleviate some of the enigma found in Arendt’s articulation of the “right to have rights” that she invokes in addressing the practical shortcomings and the theoretical futility of a so-called conception of universal human rights. Appearing first in her 1949 “Es gibt nur ein einziges Menschenrecht” and detailed at more length in her 1951 work The Origins of Totalitarianism, the phrase was published only three years after the United Nation’s adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Given the collective efforts of a postwar world to respond to the atrocities of the Shoah, as well as the precarity of human dignity and the protection thereof, Arendt’s term has been subject to extensive critical attention.2 While Arendt’s conception of the “right to have rights” was received as a breakthrough and was taken up by countless commentators, it still remains enigmatic. In articulating a moral foundation of the term which she deems lacking in Arendt’s own account, Seyla Benhabib argues that the “right to have rights” is based on a “moral imperative” that grounds the existence and enforcement of legal rights.3 Peg Birmingham offers an ontological foundation articulated in terms of the “event of natality” to show that it is a “political right” or a right to a political community.4 Sofia Näsström shifts the question of the justification of the right to have rights from an ontological-moral basis to that of a normative one—thereby showing that a right to have rights is grounded in a “principle of responsibility” that is linked to the democratic

358

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

form of government.5 The growing literature also addresses a more practical uptake of the term with respect to political events of late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.6 In actual effect, Chief Justice Warren’s proclamation (1957) that “the expatriate has lost the right to have rights”7 is not the only instance in which the phrase is cited in court (albeit without proper reference), as Judge Pinto de Albuquerque has also quoted Hannah Arendt in contending that “refugees have ‘the right to have rights.’”8 To be sure, this extensive attention attests to the fact that Arendt’s conception bears an inexhaustible richness by way of its theoretical underpinnings as well as its practical reflections. In the following, I will explicate the phrase through Arendt’s double-sided critique of “human rights” found in her The Origins of Totalitarianism as well as address the ontologico-political attitude of responsibility that it denotes in a manner that surpasses the context of its first appearance, namely, post–Second World War Europe. To unpack Arendt’s famous articulation of a “right to have rights,” I will turn to her double-sided critique of “human rights” in The Origins of Totalitarianism. The first side of this critique suggests that there is something bereft in the project of universal human rights that doesn’t seem to account for the lack of protection of these “inalienable” rights. The second side addresses a metaphysical principle of “humanity” that Arendt suggests cannot capture the plurality, and thus the freedom of human beings.

A Juridical Revolution Arendt’s criticism of universal human rights begins with her analysis of the emergence of the human being qua human being as the ground of its own dignity and equality that the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (and the subsequent French Constitution of 1793) aimed to demonstrate. The 1789 Declaration was unique in upending the political structure of the ancien régime of privilege and social hierarchy to put forth a system of rights belonging to a citizenry, and so is understood to be a juridical revolution of its own accord.9 Nevertheless, coupled with the Enlightenment ideals of the equality, liberty, and rationality of each individual, the 1789 Declaration paves the way to an ever-evolving system of political rights in order to emphasize not only the individual rights of the citizens belonging to a polity but also the right to self-determination for each nation-state. Arendt furthermore addresses the self-contradiction of the universality of human rights as granted by a nation-state in her 1963 work On Revolution. According to her analysis, this Declaration was meant to constitute the foundation of all political power, while the new body politic was supposed to rest upon man’s natural rights, upon his rights in so far as he is nothing but a natural being, upon his

THE RIGHT TO HAVE RIGHTS

 359

right to “food, dress, and the reproduction of the species,” that is upon his right to the necessities of life. And these rights were not understood as prepolitical rights that no government and no political power had the right to touch or violate, but as the very content as well as the ultimate end of government and power.10 Understood as such, the “Rights of Man” “were meant to spell out primary positive rights, inherent in man’s nature, as distinguished from political status, and as such they tried indeed to reduce politics to nature.”11 While it was neither nature nor history that granted the human being’s inalienable rights, it was the so-called nature of the human being that became the “source of Law.”12 What Arendt’s criticism demonstrates is that while the Declaration seemingly got its force from the nature of the human being—understood as concretely established—it nevertheless ended up overriding the plurality found in the togetherness of people by transforming the individual subject of these rights to a member of a nation-state, whereby the “will” of the people substituted the plural relations instituted by human action. To this end, Arendt’s criticism of human rights in the Origins is not merely a historical criticism; it takes on the historicity, naturality, and universality of human rights as such. This critical reception of the “rights of man” of course has been there from the moment of their inception.13 In conceiving of the “nation” as the legitimate source of authority and sovereignty, and thereby linking citizenship to one’s nationality, both iterations of the 1789 and 1948 declarations became inadequate sources for understanding and enforcing the universality of such rights in the absence of a nation-state to grant and guarantee such rights.14

The Contradictions of the Nation-State For Arendt, the upshot of the 1789 Declaration (concretized in the 1793 French Constitution) is that political rights such as “equality before [the] law, liberty, protection of property, and national sovereignty” are the rights of citizens, the loss of which does not (or should not) entail absolute rightlessness for the human being holding human rights. A right, understood as an entitlement or a claim to be able to perform certain social and political practices, generates a duty for respect by others, and an obligation on the part of the state to protect such a right mediates the relationship between the state and the citizens.15 According to Arendt, human rights “can be granted even under conditions of fundamental rightlessness,” understood in the political sense.16 Herein lies the perplexity inherent in the conception of human rights. The human being seems to have no claim to her human rights without an appropriate citizenship status. Where the rights of the citizens fail to concretize the so-called natural or inalienable rights of the human being, the otherwise unenforceable human rights should be put into place by revolution.17 In Arendt’s view, “revolution

360

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

happens [then], in a space where civil rights are not recognizing human beings qua individuals.”18 While this point summarizes the public and relational element of rights-bearing, that the human being can have rights only in community, it should be noted, still, that the ability to revolt lies in one’s being recognized to be able to do so in the first place. This is one way to understand freedom of association.19 Simply put, human beings have to be able to appear in a space where they can be recognized to have a “right to have rights,” not only where they do not anymore possess their so-called inalienable human rights but also under circumstances where mere “humanity” becomes justification for exclusionary practices, for instance, exemplified in practices of immigration policy enforcement, and refugee camps. Arendt takes up the import of nationality and hence the force of denationalization in demonstrating the absence of universal human rights in The Origins of Totalitarianism in the section entitled “The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man.” I quote her at length: Denationalization became a powerful weapon of totalitarian politics, and the constitutional inability of European nation-states to guarantee human rights to those who had lost nationally guaranteed rights, made it possible for the persecuting governments to impose their standard of values even upon their opponents. . . . The official SS newspaper, the Schwarze Korps, stated explicitly in 1938 that if the world was not yet convinced that the Jews were the scum of the earth, it soon would be when unidentifiable beggars, without nationality, without money, and without passports crossed their frontiers. And it is true that [this kind of] factual propaganda worked better than Goebbels’ rhetoric, not only because it established the Jews as scum of the earth, but also because the incredible plight of an evergrowing group of innocent people was like a practical demonstration of the totalitarian movements’ cynical claims that no such thing as inalienable human rights existed and that the affirmations of the democracies to the contrary were mere prejudice, hypocrisy, and cowardice in the face of the cruel majesty of a new world. The very phrase “human rights” became for all concerned—victims, prosecutors, and onlookers alike—the evidence of hopeless idealism or fumbling feeble-minded hypocrisy.20 Arendt’s point is simple, albeit prescient: (1) the weapon of denationalization coupled with mainstream propaganda promoted as a fact that the Jews were “the scum of the earth,” thereby dehumanizing them and (2) reinforced as a fact the nonexistence of these so-called human rights. Beginning in 1935, denationalization was put into effect by Hitler’s Nuremberg Laws, stripping German Jews of Reich citizenship, leaving members of the community without the protection of political rights and, most importantly, the right to belong to that community. The “loss of nationally guaranteed rights” left a population without any recourse to claim their rights, let alone any protection of such rights. The implicit premise regarding the second

THE RIGHT TO HAVE RIGHTS

 361

statement is that while human rights aimed at being agreed upon as facts of human existence—that the human being qua human being has natural rights—their becoming suspect pointed to the other extreme, where their unenforceability was seen as “evidence of hopeless idealism,” as practiced by the people who believed in them. Arendt’s argument in the Origins gets its driving force from the factual existence of not only the extermination and internment camps but also the growing phenomenon of statelessness that people (not only Jews but also homosexuals, Roma people, and so on) faced, which became the mark of the rising totalitarianism of the mid-twentieth century. The phenomenon of statelessness stressed the impotence of universal human rights that are supposed to belong to the human being regardless of nationality. Arendt articulates the process “on the road to total domination” that makes apparent the “nakedness of the human being” as threefold: (1) “to kill the juridical person in man,” that is, to strip people off of their political rights by which they are understood to be equal to one another; (2) “the preparation of living corpses” as “the murder of the moral person in man,” that is, to make impossible human solidarity by erasing human dignity; and (3) to do away with “the differentiation of the individual, his unique identity,” that is, to make impossible the possibility of meaningful appearance in the presence of others.21 This process culminates in the deprivation of a space where “opinions [are] significant and actions effective.”22 Therefore, this threefold process coincides with that of the human being’s denial of a place in the world: (1) “the loss of home” along with the “impossibility of finding a new one,” and (2) the “loss of government protection,” so that (3) these people became “superfluous.”23 Altogether, people were denied a place in the common world and put into camps where they were neither seen nor heard.

The Paradox of Humanity and the One Human Right The component of idealism that Arendt identifies as part of the human rights discourse stems from an idea of “humanity” that is supposed to accelerate the realization of such humanity, which should become its own ground. Such idealism on its own, however, cannot be the culprit of the unenforceability of such rights that are deemed inalienable to human existence.24 Notwithstanding, the curious point is that the loss of these individuals’ political rights went hand in hand with a loss of their “humanity” that was supposed to belong to the individual in her so-called natural state. According to the declarations of 1789 and 1948, the human being’s humanity (i.e., human dignity) is what motivates the existence of “human rights” in the first place, that is, the “rights of man,” which in turn translate into the “rights of the citizen.”25 Arendt’s argument clearly states

362

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

what she calls the “paradox” of human rights: the “abstract” human being whom these rights are supposed to protect does not exist.26 As Arendt puts it, “[This new situation], in which ‘humanity’ has in effect assumed the role formerly ascribed to nature or history, would mean in this context that the right to have rights, or the right of every individual to belong to humanity, should be guaranteed by humanity itself.”27 Arendt contends that humanity as a regulative idea could not and did not in fact do this work.28 The rights of man ground the rights of the citizen, and when the latter fails, the rights of man are supposed to be enforceable by way of humanity.29 What happened before and during the Second World War, however, was the obvious failure of such logic. Arendt concludes, thus, that these people were denied their “universal human rights” by first being denied their “human” status.30 The erasure of their individual human status, in turn, became a condition of possibility of erasing the condition of “plurality” of the common world. On this note, I turn to the well-known passage in The Origins of Totalitarianism, where Arendt’s conception of a “right to have rights” makes its appearance: We became aware of the existence of a right to have rights (and this means to live in a framework where one is judged by one’s actions and opinions), as well as the right to belong to some kind of organized community, only when millions of people emerged who had lost and could not regain these rights because of the new global political situation.31 To be clear, Arendt does not merely assert that this right to have rights exists (is in place)—but that “we became aware” of its existence through the loss of “the rights” of human beings afforded them by way of citizenship. It is central to her analysis of totalitarianism that with its rise, the “we” of modernity observed that “no such thing as inalienable human rights existed.”32 For Arendt, “the fundamental deprivation of human rights is manifested first and above all in the deprivation of a place in the world which makes opinions significant and actions effective.”33 This place is the space in which human beings can appear to one another and become equal. For Arendt, equality is artificially created in the performance of recognition of the plurality of existence in being in the presence of others. To be sure, “citizenship or membership to a commonwealth” can allow individuals to possess some rights and attain formal equality; nevertheless, such an abstraction involves a paradox as Arendt writes: The paradox involved in the loss of human rights is that such loss coincides with the instant when a person becomes a human being in general— without a profession, without a citizenship, without an opinion, without a deed by which to identify and specify himself—and different in general, representing nothing but his own absolutely unique individuality which, deprived of expression within and action upon the common world, loses all significance.34

THE RIGHT TO HAVE RIGHTS

 363

The paradox lies in the fact that human rights have only been understood to be equivalent to political (in this case, juridical) rights. Here, however, my claim is that Arendt only identifies a paradox, and that she does not endorse it as an all-embracing impasse to our thinking about rights: instead her articulation of a “right to have rights” shifts the human rights discourse in order to point to the “one human right” embodied in the performative aspect of an Arendtian politics. While Arendt further argues that the right to have rights can only be “guaranteed by humanity itself,” she does not endorse a metaphysical principle of humanity, but rather, understands humanity as the concrete appearance of human togetherness (in plurality and equality). On my view, this principle of humanity pertains to a decision of appearing together. Said in a different idiom, the “right to have rights” is a performative statement in that it does what it says and unconditionally so—not because it is absolute, but because it can be understood in an extra-institutional sense.35 Every attempt to exclude an individual from belonging to a community is the absence of recognition of a right to have rights, and this can be experienced by noncitizens and citizens alike.36 Humanity understood as a human condition demonstrates the material aspect of human plurality as a fact of human existence, which embraces “givenness” as valuable. Such singular (and plural) “givenness” in turn becomes a step in articulating the un-givenness of the individual, who appears in the political realm as a “who.” Contrary to the “artificial equality” constructed by human beings in their plurality, the givenness of the human being—the differences that individuals have—does not have the inherent force to equalize these differences. The recognition of one’s “right to have rights” is not necessitated by belonging to a political community in terms of membership based on “citizenship,” but on the condition of having the possibility to create such a community.37 One’s “right to have rights” in this sense allows for an extra legal articulation of this right, and therefore, the condition of citizenry— which is the means of belonging to a democratic discourse in current terms— does not restrict the recognition of one’s “right to have rights.” That is, one’s political identity, one’s whoness can only appear insofar as one is recognized to have a right to have rights. In turn, the force of a “right to have rights” resides not in its capacity to be constitutionalized but in its capacity to be universally performed anew in each instance.

Notes 1 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 5. 2 This chapter is adapted and repeats many of the same arguments as in my “An Arendtian Recognitive Politics: The Right to Have Rights as a Performance of Visibility,” Philosophy Today 61, no. 3 (2017): 709–35.

364

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

3 Seyla Benhabib, The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents, and Citizens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 4 Peg Birmingham, Hannah Arendt and Human Rights: The Predicament of Common Responsibility (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006). 5 Sofia Näsström, “The Right to have Rights: Democratic, not Political,” Political Theory 32, no. 5 (2014): 543–68. 6 See Alison Kesby, The Right to Have Rights: Citizenship, Humanity, and International Law (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Stefan Heuser, “Is There a Right to Have Rights? The Case of the Right of Asylum,” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 11, no. 1 (2008): 3–13; Asher Lazarus Hirsh and Nathan Bell, “The Right to Have Rights as a Right to Enter: Addressing a Lacuna in the International Refugee Protection Regime,” Human Rights Review 18, no. 4 (2017): 417–37. 7 Trop v. Dulles, n. 34: https​://ww​w.law​.corn​ell.e​du/su​preme​court​/text​/356/​86. 8 Hirsi Jamaa and Others v. Italy: https​://hu​doc.e​chr.c​oe.in​t/eng​#{%22​itemi​ d%22:​[%220​01-10​9231%​22]}.​ 9 See George Lefebvre’s The Coming of the French Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975). While the 1789 Declaration puts forth “men” to be “born equal in rights,” there is no right to equality that underlines the declaration, and intentionally so. The equality among citizens is also deceptively exclusive, perhaps as problematic as the Athenian democracy (by lot) that rested on a distinction between the citizen and the noncitizen premised upon slavery. 10 Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (Penguin Books, 1990), 109, my emphasis. 11 Ibid., 108–9. Arendt contrasts this to the US Bill of Rights, since the Bill “was meant to institute permanent restraining controls upon all political power, and hence presupposed the existence of a body politic and the functioning of political power” (Ibid.). 12 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Benediction Classics, 2009), 290. 13 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the French Revolution (Everyman’s Library, 1790). 14 This equivocation is pronounced in the 1793 Constitution which replaces Article 1 of the 1789 Declaration stating “men are born and remain free and equal in rights” with Article 122 stating, “The constitution guarantees to all Frenchmen equality, liberty, security, property, the public debt, free exercise of religion, general instruction, public assistance, absolute liberty of the press, the right of petition, the right to hold popular assemblies, and the enjoyment of all the rights of man.” (Retrieved https://oll.libertyfund.org/pages/1793-frenchrepublic-constitution-of-1793). In this sense, in the absence of a nation-state to grant, respect, and protect such rights, the claim to the rights proposed in the declarations does not find a proper addressee. This is especially poignant when we think of Article 28 of the UDHR: “Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized” (Retrieved from https​://ww​w.un.​org/e​n/uni​ versa​l-dec​larat​ion-h​uman-​right​s/). 15 As Benhabib explains the second usage of “right” in the “right to have rights,” “in this [juridico-civil] usage, “rights” suggests a triangular relationship

THE RIGHT TO HAVE RIGHTS

 365

between the person who is entitled to rights, others upon whom this obligation creates a duty, and the protection of this rights claim and its enforcement through some established legal organ, most commonly the state and its apparatus” (Benhabib, The Rights of Others, 57). 16 Arendt, Origins, 295. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid., 293. 19 If one is understood to be merely eliminable as soon as one decides to revolt, then the revolt would merely entail mass destruction through possible violence. Examples from mid-twentieth century involve camp and ghetto uprisings during the Holocaust, especially the Warsaw ghetto uprising which left few survivors. 20 Arendt, Origins, 269, my emphasis. 21 Ibid., 447–53. 22 Ibid., 296. 23 Ibid., 293–96. 24 Not unlike Hegel, Arendt is adamant in emphasizing the fecundity of the abstract universality of “concepts,” opting for a concrete articulation of what we understand to be abstract ideals. Unlike Hegel, however, she does not read such concretization as the teleological unfolding of history, but as a thoroughly human effort brought to fruition in human action altogether. 25 Ibid., 293. 26 Ibid., 291. 27 Ibid., 298. 28 Ibid. 29 Cf. Ibid., 300. 30 Ibid., 296. Cf. Dana R. Villa, Politics, Philosophy, Terror: Essays on the Thought of Hannah Arendt (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 186. 31 Ibid., 296–97, my emphasis. 32 Ibid., 269. 33 Ibid., 296. 34 Ibid., my emphasis. 35 See, for example, Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), Notes toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015); Bonnie Honig, “Declarations of Independence: Arendt and Derrida on the Problem of Founding a Republic,” The American Political Science Review 85, no. 1 (March 1991): 97–113. 36 As I have adumbrated in the article from which this analysis is drawn, the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States is an example of such absence of recognition of the right to have rights of black citizens. 37 See, for example Lida Maxwell, “. . . to Have . . . ,” Chapter 2 in The Right to Have Rights, ed. Stephanie DeGooyer et al. (London: Verso, 2018), 45–58.

37 Truth Ronald Beiner

Hannah Arendt’s most direct statement of her views concerning truth is her essay “Truth and Politics”; hence that will be the text upon which we’ll focus in what follows. She begins the essay by discussing the relationship between politics and truthfulness—that is, situations in which I have the truth in my possession, but withhold it for the sake of, say, considerations of reasons of state. There is, she suggests, an age-old conflict between power and truth because power-holders have typically been prompted by considerations of political expediency to lie, suppress inconvenient truths, and to deceive their subjects or fellow citizens. As Arendt sets up the discussion, the issue of temporality and the fleeting character of human affairs figures prominently in this contest between politics and truth. The basic reality is that human beings are “natal and mortal”—they are “beings who know they have appeared out of nonbeing and will, after a short while, again disappear into it.”1 How to respond to this basic reality? Arendt suggests that there are two conflicting ways to shelter ourselves in some measure from the flux of existence. Each of these two responses is compelling in its own fashion, but the crucial point is that they are rival responses, that they are existentially in conflict with each other. The first response is care for the public realm, or politics as an existential possibility. She also refers to this as political action understood noninstrumentally: understood not as a means to some other end but as an intrinsic end.2 The second response to our condition of fleeting existence between natal and mortal nonexistence is truth-telling, which Arendt divides into two modes of truth: factual truth (which is indeed relevant to any decent and desirable politics) and what she calls rational truth (the kind of truth of interest to scientists and philosophers). What is at stake is survival, the perseverance in existence . . . , and no human world destined to outlast the short life span of mortals within it

TRUTH

 367

will ever be able to survive without men willing to do what Herodotus was the first to undertake consciously—namely . . . to say what is. No permanence, no perseverance in existence, can even be conceived of without men willing to testify to what is and appears to them because it is.3 Arendt thereby guides us to the conclusion that politics and truth are in a state of mutual conflict because they offer alternative ways of securing a measure of existential stability in the face of the fleetingness or ephemerality of human existence. Putting aside the question of truth-telling with respect to factual truth, which, as she realizes, undermines her strict dichotomy between the realm of truth and the realm of politics—factual truth, as she later acknowledges, “is political by nature”4—Arendt focuses on so-called rational truth. The purpose of the next stage of her argument is to trace the conflict between politics and rational truth to a perennial tension between two ways of life: the life of the citizen and the life of the philosopher. She calls them “two diametrically opposed ways of life,”5 two “way[s] of human existence,”6 and cites Parmenides and Plato as the two archetypal historical thinkers who had defined the very meaning of the life of the philosopher.7 Again, the central issue is the flux of human affairs and the ever-mutable opinions they elicit. Philosophy is removed from this world of political and cognitive flux because it offers the prospect of rational principles that, once discovered, would “stabilize human affairs.”8 Philosophy as a way of life is defined by the quest for “everlasting” truths that would provide permanent remedy for the “state of constant flux” that characterizes the opinions of ordinary citizens.9 Thus depicted, philosophic life is the negation of civic life, for it strives for everlastingness, over against the constitutive mutability of the realm of human affairs. Arendt cites James Madison, for whom politics is based on opinion, not truth, as the civic antipode to Plato. As she puts it, “Every claim in the sphere of human affairs to an absolute truth, whose validity needs no support from the side of opinion, strikes at the very roots of all politics and all governments.”10 Next, Arendt turns back to the issue of factual truth and its relation to politics. Arendt concludes this discussion with an astonishingly radical thesis, namely, that “it may be in the nature of the political realm to be at war with truth in all its forms.”11 Although this is presented as a “suspicion,” not a confident affirmation of the nature of political life, one wonders why, to the extent that Arendt’s suspicion is warranted, it doesn’t lead to a profound indictment of political life, rather than the celebration of political life that pervades Arendt’s work as a whole. As she says herself, things would be utterly “desperate” (more desperate than the account of politics depicted by Plato) if one were unable to refute this suspicion “that it may be in the nature of the political realm to deny or pervert truth of every kind, as though men were unable to come to terms with its unyielding, blatant,

368

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

unpersuasive stubbornness.”12 Yet Arendt does nothing to remove this huge question-mark placed over political life as a whole. Factual truth “is political by nature” because, in contrast to rational truth, it belongs naturally to the realm of human affairs and doesn’t try to assert a transcendent realm more stable and less mutable than what transpires in the political realm: “Factual truth informs political thought just as rational truth informs philosophical speculation.”13 However, notwithstanding this claim of a natural affinity between facts and opinions, and therefore, in this limited sense, of an affinity between the domain of truth and the domain of politics, Arendt nonetheless declares that there’s something in the character of political existence as such that stamps “a commitment even to factual truth” as “an anti-political attitude.”14 The profound question raised here about how to vindicate political life if it implies such a hostility to truth in general and even factual truth in particular goes strangely unanswered in her reflection on truth and politics. An important part of Arendt’s campaign to restore dignity to opinion, over against Plato’s slanders against opinion, is her attempt to give a wellrounded account of the central role in political life of the capacity for reflective judgment. This is certainly the most helpful and illuminating part of Arendt’s argument. But here again, her account of judgment is undermined by her misleadingly extreme dichotomization of philosophy and politics. According to Arendt, the mark of valid judgment is impartiality, and we ascend to an impartial view by breaking free of our own narrow perspective and seeing the object of judgment from a liberating plurality of other points of view. Imagination is therefore intrinsic to the work of judgment. These ways of characterizing the process of judgment are genuinely illuminating, but it remains mysterious as to why Arendt thinks that in order to celebrate judgment, she needs to knock truth off the pedestal on which the history of philosophy from Plato onwards had placed it. It seems almost as if Arendt felt that one could only answer Plato’s slanders against opinion by matching them with equal slanders against truth as a philosophical ideal. In matters of opinion, but not in matters of truth, our thinking is truly discursive, running, as it were, from place to place, from one part of the world to another, through all kinds of conflicting views, until it finally ascends from these particularities to some impartial generality. Compared to this process . . . it is in [the] very nature [of rational truths and factual truths] to withstand further elucidation.15 It is, to say the least, not at all clear that it is coherent for Arendt to speak of the “validity” of opinions, as she does in this section of the essay,16 without allowing for a certain re-convergence between opinion and truth. Arendt speaks of “the persuasiveness inherent in opinion.”17 But what is the telos of persuasion? Surely, opinions persuade us when they offer grounds or at least intimate grounds for believing the truth of what is affirmed by those

TRUTH

 369

opinions as opposed to rival views. Thus, it is incoherent to speak of the persuasiveness of opinion in abstraction from that with respect to which opinion persuades, namely, truth. In many respects, politics fares quite poorly in Arendt’s account of the conflict between politics and truth. For instance, Arendt writes that “if the teller of factual truth wants to play a political role, and therefore to be persuasive, he will, more often than not, go to considerable lengths to explain why his particular truth serves the best interests of some group.”18 If this is what it takes to render truth politically relevant, this is certainly not to the credit of politics. Arendt also makes the argument (not any less damning for politics) that it is more natural for liars to be political actors than it is for truthtellers; the latter, but not the former, need to, as it were, refashion themselves so as to be effective in the domain of opinion.19 Arendt seems to anticipate these objections in her concluding paragraph, where she expresses her awareness that the image of politics that emerges from her essay is much less flattering than the view of political life that she actually holds. Since I have dealt here with politics from the perspective of truth, and hence from a viewpoint outside the political realm, I have failed to mention even in passing the greatness and the dignity of what goes on inside it. I have spoken as though the political realm were no more than a battlefield of partial, conflicting interests, where nothing counted but pleasure and profit, partisanship, and the lust for domination. In short, I have dealt with politics as though I, too, believed that all public affairs were ruled by interest and power.20 Arendt takes this opportunity to reaffirm her standard view of the glories of political life—“the joy and the gratification that arise out of being in company with our peers, out of acting together and appearing in public, out of inserting ourselves into the world by word and deed, thus acquiring and sustaining our personal identity and beginning something entirely new”21—and she insists that her purpose is not to qualify in any way her usual view, but simply to acknowledge “that this whole sphere, its greatness notwithstanding, is [nonetheless] limited”: It does not encompass the whole of man’s and the world’s existence. It is limited by those things which man cannot change at will. And it is only by respecting its own borders that this realm [of politics] can remain intact, preserving its integrity and keeping its promises. Conceptually, we may call truth what we cannot change; metaphorically, it is the ground on which we stand and the sky that stretches above us.22 What’s all-important is for politics to “respect its own borders,” and truth and truthfulness lie outside its borders rather than within them. The suggestion seems to be that truth-telling has its distinctive integrity and political action

370

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

has its distinctive integrity, but trying to bring the two together inevitably corrupts both, which is, again, a highly pessimistic thought for someone who wants to redeem the dignity of political life. If politics is in a natural state of tension with “the ground on which [it stands] and the sky that stretches above [it],” why does it have the high status that Arendt attributes to it? The idea that her argument appears to imply an unseemly conception of politics only because the essay offers a view of politics as seen from the perspective of truth lacks credibility, for much of the essay in fact reads as a harsh and implausible critique of truth. In particular, Arendt focuses, in an important section of the argument, on what she sees as the coercive aspect of truth. All truths [including factual truth] are opposed to opinion in their mode of asserting validity. Truth carries within itself an element of coercion. . . . [Various truths are arrived at in various ways,] but, once perceived as true and pronounced to be so, they have in common that they are beyond agreement, dispute, opinion, or consent. . . . [P] ersuasion or dissuasion is useless, for the content of the statement is not of a persuasive nature but of a coercive one.23 In the first paragraph of section III of her essay, Arendt aligns truth with tyranny three times: first by referring to “the frequently tyrannical tendencies so deplorably obvious among professional truthtellers,”24 next, by citing Mercier de la Rivière on the despotic character of Euclidean geometry,25 and finally by stating that politics naturally rebels against the prospect of being answerable to “something that arises from without, has its source outside the political realm, and is as independent of the wishes and desires of the citizens as is the will of the worst tyrant.”26 And she begins the next paragraph by stating that truth is “hated by tyrants,” not because truth is liberating but because “truth has a despotic character” and every tyrant hates facing competition from another tyrant.27 All three of these identifications of truth and tyranny are remarkable, but the last is especially so. If, as Arendt here suggests, citizens and statesman are so steadfastly resistant to deferring to an independent reality beyond the political realm and “independent of [their] wishes and desires,” and if this is one of the constitutive realities of political life, then this would, it seems, lead more readily to the conclusion that politics naturally lends itself to tyrannical impulses than to the conclusion that truth is a mode of tyranny. As we have noted, it seems intensely paradoxical that Arendt’s depiction of politics as naturally antithetical to truth could be compatible with the very elevated conception of politics to which she was committed, rather than leading her to a strong indictment of politics. Conversely, if she was prepared to see a closer link between politics and truth than the one expressed in her work, it would have given her a more solid foundation for her high estimation of the calling of the citizen. Hence, we come back

TRUTH

 371

finally to the question: Why, then, did Arendt, as a celebrator of politics as something sublime, present politics and truth as being at war with each other? The answer, it seems, is this. At the very core of Arendt’s theoretical work is the thesis that politics is generally undervalued because the Western philosophical tradition, stretching back to Plato, made it its purpose to deprecate the whole realm of human affairs, and the idea that politics and truth are essentially antithetical is simply another way of formulating this core thesis. Arendt fights back at truth because, as she sees it, truth is the banner under which philosophy had maligned politics. Plato, “the polis’s most determined and most influential opponent,”28 clearly occupies a privileged place in this rather perverse narrative. Truth, through the medium of philosophy, tries to force itself upon us, in contrast to the “free agreement and consent”29 that are essential to political life. Even if the philosophers don’t impose their truths by force—as Plato sought to do with the tyrant in Syracuse, in the form of a “tyranny of truth”—but instead win the free concurrence of fellow citizens, this would be, Arendt says, a Pyrrhic victory. For truth would then owe its prevalence not to its own compelling quality but to the agreement of the many, who might change their minds tomorrow and agree on something else; what had been philosophical truth would have become mere opinion.30 Here and elsewhere in the essay, Arendt accepts Plato’s opposition between doxa and truth, rather than challenging his account of the fickleness of nonphilosophical opinion by proposing a conception of opinion that is not “mere opinion” because it is grounded in good arguments, rational insights, or perspicuous judgment.31 She approaches this idea of a kind of opinion that is not mere opinion with her notion of disinterested or impartial judgment. But she wrongly and unnecessarily resists acknowledging that invoking a standard of truth is one crucial way of distinguishing judgments that satisfy her ideal from those that don’t. Arendt tended to elevate the meaning of politics to heroic proportions at the same time that she minimized the dialogical dimensions of philosophy. According to her dichotomized categories, philosophy concerns “man in the singular”32—what she calls “the solitude of philosophical thought”33— not human beings in the plural. It follows for her that truth, the object of philosophy, is also associated with the solitary or singular thinker, as opposed to the plurality and “interdependence” of opinion.34 “Since philosophical truth concerns man in his singularity, it is unpolitical by nature.”35 And she suggests in an earlier section of the essay that the truths of the philosopher are “found and actualized in solitude.”36 Given the “isolation” of the philosopher, she thinks it is not surprising that Plato “yields to the temptation to use his truth as a standard to be imposed upon human affairs.”37 All of this simply conjures away the dialogical character of Plato’s philosophy (to say nothing of the rest of the history of philosophy).

372

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

Contrary to what she suggests here, philosophy, like politics, doesn’t involve the assertion of “absolute truths”; it involves the hermeneutical pursuit of truth through rational dialogue. If philosophy and politics are both truthoriented human activities (to me it seems incontestable that they are), then Arendt’s categorical opposition between truth and politics is significantly attenuated. What’s most odd about Arendt’s analysis is that the kind of truth most relevant to political life gets completely left out of her account of truth. The consequence, I would suggest, is a defective phenomenology of political judgment. People engage in political debate with opposing views, not simply to add one more opinion to the wonderful diversity of opinions that are already circulating but in order to try to challenge mistaken judgments and try to help the truth to prevail. One fails to capture the authentic meaning of political judgment unless one understands sincerely intended judgment (leaving aside cynically intended political speech acts) as aimed at true judgment—not just true in the sense of faithful to the facts but morally and politically true: the expression of the best discernment that one can exercise. We strive for “phronetic insight,” that is, for practical wisdom. If Arendt were right that there is “an antagonism between truth and opinion,”38 it would be hard to make sense of what citizens are doing when they express political judgments and contest political judgments that they reject. In particular, it is impossible to make sense of what it means to render a political judgment in abstraction from caring about whether one’s judgment is a true one. One does one’s best to judge rightly, in the light of what one knows and what one has managed to teach oneself as well as in the light of the opposing arguments to which one has been exposed and the rival points of view one has made an effort to encounter, but the standard at which one aims is always a standard of truth, including truths of moral and political praxis. If the latter are not a presumptive standard when we issue judgments relevant to moral and political life, it becomes mysterious how anyone would be able to claim any normative privilege for their own judgments over against opposing judgments (for instance, my judgment that Donald Trump is dangerously unfit for the presidency, over against the judgments on the part of his fan base that he’s leading America back to greatness). If moral/ political truth is not the object of aspiration when we hazard opinions and strive to appraise the world rightly, we descend into a sinkhole of moral relativism. One should note that this notion of the aspired-to truth of one’s judgment—synthesizing one’s grasp of the relevant facts, one’s sense of what is politically realistic, and one’s sense of what is morally justifiable—does not plausibly fit into either of Arendt’s two categories, factual truth or rational truth. Yet it is a mode of truth that is constitutive of the totality of human politics, and it is what renders political judgment a human possibility. Arendt’s view was that one should oppose judgment to truth, since truth compels and judgment merely persuades, and she had a similar view concerning the relationship between opinion and truth. Arendt quotes Mercier

TRUTH

 373

de la Rivière—“Euclide est un véritable despote; et les vérités géométriques qu’il nous a transmises, sont des lois véritablement despotiques” (Euclid is a veritable despot; and the geometrical truths that he transmitted to us are laws that are truly despotic)—and she adds that this remark “applies to all kinds of truth.”39 For Arendt, truth concerns those matters where doubt and uncertainty have been banished, and therefore “opinion” is pushed aside. But this is a strange view of how truth impinges on politics. What does it mean to have an opinion? We form opinions about matters where, to be sure, we cannot be certain of being right, but we articulate and defend those opinions under the presumption of their validity—that is, opinion as it were aims at truth. An opinion that was indifferent to its truth or falsity, validity or invalidity, would be something less than an opinion. Arendt herself writes, “The more people’s standpoints I have present in my mind while I am pondering a given issue, and the better I can imagine how I would feel and think were I in their place . . . the more valid my final conclusion, my opinion.”40 What can “more valid” mean, if not “closer to the truth of the matter being judged”? To render an opinion or a judgment is always to take a stab at truth under conditions where truth is not quite within reach (but when are conditions ever otherwise?). Arendt cannot hope to vindicate opinion by divorcing it from truth. Opinions matter because they are part of a larger communicative and cooperative enterprise aimed at what is in principle a shareable truth. To be sure, Arendt is very enamored of Lessing’s dictum that we should content ourselves with our opinions, and as for ultimate truth, this should be “commended unto God.” That is, life would be utterly boring if we actually possessed the truth; things are considerably more interesting, left as we are to trade our diverse opinions without ever knowing definitively whether they are true.41 That may well be so. But there is also a problem with Lessing’s view. Opinions would be very boring if they didn’t assert truth claims—if they merely expressed cognitive diversity without aspiring to a shareable truth beyond that diversity. (It is the radicalization of this impulse, not just to express opinions but to vindicate them to the satisfaction of all who share an interest in the opinion’s truth or lack of truth, that constitutes philosophy.) Arendt’s gloss on Lessing is that “for men, living in company, the inexhaustible richness of human discourse is infinitely more significant and meaningful than any One Truth could ever be.”42 In fact, Lessing doesn’t speak of opinion divorced from truth; his injunction is, “Let each man say what he deems truth,” which is, of course, itself an invitation to posit truth claims. Arendt doesn’t accept that opinions involve truth claims, for she writes, “The Socratic proposition ‘It is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong’ is not an opinion but claims to be truth”43—stubbornly refusing to see that asserting a truth claim does not disqualify something as an opinion; on the contrary, the truth claim is constitutive of it qua opinion. Arendt was incontestably right to put the emphasis that she did upon the diversity of human opinions. But at the same time, we should be careful not

374

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

to fetishize cognitive diversity. As much as people differ in the content of their judgments, they are drawn together in political argument and rational debate because of what they share: a common aspiration to apprehend moral and political truth. Our opinions divide us, but we wouldn’t be motivated to formulate our opinions, articulate them, and thus share them with others unless we were participants at a deeper level in a shared quest for moral and political truth that draws us back together as a community of truth-seekers. Exercising political judgment means that holding differing opinions never separates us sufficiently to cancel out this community of shared aspiration. Arendt’s view that judgment and truth are opposed because truth compels whereas judgment merely persuades is problematical, for the following reason. Given the finitude of human experience, truth is not a human possession but a human aspiration. Judgments are not dictated by an already-possessed truth; rather, judgments aim at truth. This requires that our judgments appeal to and take account of the efforts of others to judge rightly: our truth-aspiring judgments unfold in dialogue with the truthaspiring judgments of others. In other words, human judgment can only make good on its aspiration toward a truthful grasp of the world that we share with others by means of a concerted exercise of imagination—trying to understand and appreciate how those differently situated others also bear the responsibility of truth-aspiring judgment. The interest in a common truth motivates us to participate in each other’s judgments, and never to cease imagining how and why others often see the world so differently.

Notes 1 Hannah Arendt, “Truth and Politics,” in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Penguin, 1977), 227–64, 228. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid., 229. 4 Ibid., 238. 5 Ibid., 232. 6 Ibid., 238. 7 Cf., 259–60. 8 Ibid., 233. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid., 239. 12 Ibid., 237. 13 Ibid., 238. 14 Ibid., 239. 15 Ibid., 242.

TRUTH

 375

16 Ibid., 241. 17 Ibid., 244. 18 Ibid., 250. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid., 263. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid., 263–64. 23 Ibid., 239–40. 24 Ibid., 239. 25 Ibid., 240. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid., 241. 28 Ibid., 260. 29 Ibid., 247. 30 Ibid., 246. 31 For an excellent critique of Arendt on this point, see Albrecht Wellmer, “Hannah Arendt on Judgment: The Unwritten Doctrine of Reason,” in Judgment, Imagination, and Politics: Themes from Kant and Arendt, ed. Ronald Beiner and Jennifer Nedelsky (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), 165–81. 32 Arendt, “Truth and Politics,” 245. 33 Ibid., 242. Arendt’s account of the “two-in-one” of Socratic thinking, in her final work The Life of the Mind, possibly complicates but ultimately reaffirms her thesis of the basic solitariness of philosophy. See Hannah Arendt, Thinking (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), Chapter 18. 34 Arendt, “Truth and Politics,” 242. 35 Ibid., 246. 36 Ibid., 237. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid., 233. 39 Ibid., 240. My italics. 40 Ibid., 241. 41 Ibid., 233–34. 42 Ibid., 234. 43 Ibid., 247.

38 Two-In-One Robert Burch

Arendt’s most focused discussion of the two-in-one is found in Volume One of The Life of the Mind, Thinking, section 18 in Part III, “What Makes Us Think?”1 An edited version is excerpted for Part Five of The Portable Arendt, “Banality and Conscience.”2 There are also close to a dozen scattered references to the topic throughout Volume Two, Willing.3 At one level Arendt’s discussion has to do with how in an individual the reflexivity of consciousness that accompanies all mental activity can become the dialogue of self with oneself that is the essence of conscience. At another level, it has to do with Arendt’s dismantling of the whole tradition of moral philosophy as such, wherein her thinking about the two-in-one serves as a decisive step in Arendt’s attempt to carve anew a path of moral thinking as fundamentally a political matter, rooted in human plurality as a basic existential condition. To read what Arendt says on this issue on its own terms, it would be prudent first of all to heed what she herself says about the Socratic statements she places at the center of her discussion. “It would be a serious mistake . . . to understand these statements as the results of some cogitation about morality; they are insights, to be sure, but insights of experience.”4 Likewise, it would be a mistake to read Arendt’s own claims about the two-in-one as the result of a deliberate search for knowledge on this topic, as if it were an established problem of philosophy that could in principle be solved once and for all in the form of truths generalized into a philosophical doctrine. Instead, Arendt’s own claims on the topic—indeed the very topic itself—are the expression of “insights won from the experience of thinking itself,”5 which she then weaves into the episodic narrative that constitutes the logic of The Life of the Mind as a whole. Yet, as avowedly committed to a life of thinking and understanding over acting,6 Arendt’s own experience of thinking is bound up inextricably

TWO-IN-ONE

 377

with her experience of reading texts from the history of past thinking. Moreover, she explicitly reads these texts “on the assumption that the thread of tradition has been broken and that we shall not be able to renew it.”7 What she appropriates from this reading are “thought fragments,” which as a consequence of the disruption of tradition “can probably be saved only as fragments.”8 In particular, she appropriates fragments that she reads as having been “crystallized” over time “into something rich and strange,” which she can then carefully salvage and polish to serve her own theoretical purposes, here and now, “in the world of the living.”9 It is from one such fragmented reading that Arendt identifies and makes sense of the two-inone itself, ascribing to the model of Socrates a “representative significance” abstracted from all questions of its actual historicity in order thereby to disclose in the essence of thinking itself the possibility of conscience.10 Whether that representative significance serves to disclose what Arendt calls an “everlasting Urphänomen,” or even what such phenomena could mean in Arendt’s terms, remains an open question.11 The two-in-one has to do in general with an essential duality in our mental capacities, such that we can in each case be properly both in and for ourselves. In thinking, as the paradigmatic case of this duality, there is an inner “dialogue,” a two-in-one between the self who questions itself and the self who answers.12 It is in this dialogue that the essential reflexivity of all mental activity is first properly realized. In the case of willing, the two-inone is an internal “contest” between the self who commands itself and the self who obeys.13 In the case of judgment, it is an “attunement” of the self who judges with the self as essentially “other,” that is, the self as essentially a being inter homines participating with others in the world, and yet who must judge for itself.14 In the course of her own thinking about the experience of thinking, what ostensibly leads Arendt to the topic of the two-in-one in general is her attempt to think through the “the possible interconnectedness of non-thought and evil.”15 Her consideration of this interconnectedness is occasioned by Arendt’s experience of reporting on the Eichmann trial, her unsettling recognition that although “the deeds were monstrous, the doer—at least the very effective one on trial—was quite ordinary, commonplace . . . with no sign in him of firm ideological convictions or of specific evil motives.”16 In Arendt’s view, Eichmann’s defining fault was “not stupidity but thoughtlessness.” At the time, she was “dimly aware” that this thesis “went counter to our tradition of thought,”17 not just in accounting for Eichmann’s evil deeds but in suggesting that the interconnectedness of non-thought and evil was more common than traditionally acknowledged, and indeed that “most evil is done by people who never made up their minds to be or do either evil or good.”18 “Reason itself,” Arendt once remarked, “the thinking ability that we have, has a need to actualize itself,” not exclusively or even principally in the need to know the truth of beings, but as the need to make sense for oneself of what has happened, to “put this story into shape,” where this “putting

378

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

in shape” is itself “a form of thought.”19 In this basic sense, one cannot but think “while one is living,” and one “does it constantly.” Strictly speaking then, what Arendt identifies as Eichmann’s “sheer thoughtlessness”20 is not a lack of thought simpliciter; for insofar as “thinking accompanies life and is itself the de-materialized quintessence of being alive,” we rational beings as we live in the world cannot but think.21 Arendt misleads us then when she claims that “a life without thinking is quite possible.” She means instead a life in which thinking fails “to develop its own essence.” Eichmann’s thoughtlessness is a deficiency in the way in which he thinks, distinguished by a lack of insight and judgment (an empörender Dummheit, as Arendt characterizes it), whose principal feature is a “reluctance [Unwille] ever to imagine [sich je vorzustellen] what is really going on with the other.”22 As a rational being in the world, Eichmann has inevitably to make some sense of his experience, telling himself some or other story about what is going on and what he himself is doing, simply in virtue of his being a human being alive in the world and having to navigate that condition. However narrow, self-serving, or perverse the story Eichmann tells himself might be, his sense-making is a form of thought. But it is a form of thought for him that leaves out of account an essential element of what calls for thought, that is, the experience of being in the world as essentially a being inter homines, “plurality” being “one of the basic existential conditions for human life on earth.”23 Eichmann seems virtually incapable of thinking through the reciprocal relation that obtains between himself and others, and thereby thinking through his responsibility for the world as such. His commitment to the Nazi cause is a responsibility of sorts, but a fundamentally narrowminded, contingent, and self-serving one, as opposed to a full-fledged respondeo that pledges back to the world in terms of the worldly conditions to which we are indebted for our being. Eichmann’s is a responsibility then that fails genuinely to respond. In showing no sign of being capable of thinking through “broad-mindedly” his essential relation to others in the world, Eichmann seems likewise incapable of “that silent intercourse in which we examine what we say and do.”24 As Arendt describes it, this twofold “thoughtlessness” constitutes a “remoteness from reality” that “can wreak more havoc than all the evil instincts taken together.”25 Eichmann imposes no “thoughtful” check on himself as a being inter homines, and thereby no thoughtful check upon what he says and does, because he does not thoughtfully recognize himself in principle as a being in the world with all others. Blithely contradicting the condition of plurality as an enabling limit of human being generally, Eichmann also does “not mind contradicting himself” in particular, “and this means he will never be either able or willing to account for what he says or does; nor will he mind committing any crime, since he can count on it being forgotten the next moment. Bad people— Aristotle to the contrary notwithstanding—are not full of regrets.”26 In considering theoretically “the possible interconnectedness of nonthought and evil,” the example of Eichmann serves Arendt simply as a

TWO-IN-ONE

 379

type of evil-doer, a type more common than we might wish to accept— although, one hopes, a type not as common in degree or in monstrous effect as was Eichmann himself. Against the background of this negative type, Arendt proceeds to consider the converse relation, that is, the possible interconnectedness of thoughtfulness and the prevention of evil. In doing so, she expressly denies that the kind of thinking involved in this relation is the “monopoly” of “philosophers and metaphysicians” looking to answer “ultimate questions.”27 It is not then the capacity to think as ascribed by Plato to those “noble natures” preoccupied with the intellection (noēsis) of the good beyond truth and being,28 nor some essentially new, true cognition remote from the supposed waywardness of mundane thinking. It may be the case among such lofty thinkers “that none ‘does evil voluntarily.’ Yet the implied and dangerous conclusion, ‘Everybody wants to do good,’ is not true even in their case.”29 By denying the exclusivity of authentic thinking to philosophy and philosophers, Arendt in effect rejects the terms of the classical model whereby the prevention of evil lies in the individual soul’s being informed by what it knows, reaching its fullness of being in speculative knowledge (scientia) of the divine order of things. For Arendt, it is an experiential fact that “every human being has the need to think, not to think abstractly . . . but to think while he is living.”30 Such thinking is a more or less mundane affair, preoccupied with making sense of experience, before any concern with the knowledge of universal and necessary truths, or the “eternal” state of one’s soul. Thus, “if there is anything in thinking that can prevent men from doing evil, it must be some property inherent in the activity itself, regardless of its objects.”31 In giving thought to this possible interconnectedness of thoughtfulness and the prevention of evil, Arendt turns from the negative type exemplified by Eichmann to the philosophical representation of what, for her, is a positive pre-philosophical type exemplified by Socrates. The sense of this turn has three hermeneutic conditions. First, it makes sense as a turn to the prephilosophical only insofar as, following Heidegger, one holds that “philosophy is metaphysics” and that “metaphysics is Platonism.”32 Second, the need for such a turn would lie in the need of reason itself, not specifically in the quest for truth but in its quest for meaning. Yet, third, insofar as the representative significance of the Socratic type is itself prized loose from a canonical text from the philosophical tradition, the assumption must be that the philosophical tradition itself is now broken beyond all possible recovery or renewal.33 The representative significance of the Socratic type is thus a “fragmented” model, and so a type abstracted from any consideration of the “logographic necessity” (anagkē logographikē) of the Platonic dialogues themselves wherein the Socratic model is first presented and, thus, from any attempt to provide a Plato-interpretation as part of a continuous history of philosophy.34 Arendt extracts the relevant fragments from Plato’s Gorgias. In doing so her purpose is to elucidate anew the essence of conscience as “that intercourse with oneself whose feasibility and importance Socrates first

380

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

discovered.”35 But insofar as that discovery is itself given voice, textually, in a Platonic dialogue, there must be a sense in which this discovery is at once revealed and yet concealed in that textual representation. It would seem that for Arendt the concealment has to do with Plato’s “furious denunciation of doxa, opinion, which not only runs like a red thread through all his political works, but became one of the cornerstones of his concept of truth,” a concept that in its sharp opposition of epistēmē and doxa served as a model for the whole philosophical tradition.36 On the one hand then, as Arendt sees it “the opposition of truth and opinion is the most anti-Socratic conclusion that Plato drew from Socrates’ trial.”37 On the other hand, “to interpret meaning on the model of truth” so as to absolve all essential meaning into knowledge of truth is for Arendt the “basic fallacy, taking precedence over all specific metaphysical fallacies.”38 However, on its own terms, such a fallacy cannot be a matter simply of faulty reasoning that mistakes an opinion for truth; instead, it must amount to a persistent self-deception in our thinking about thinking in the way it draws the truth/meaning, knowledge/opinion distinction, in the first place. Arendt indicates that the “intercourse with oneself” that both is in “itself and at the same time for itself” is “the two-in-one that Socrates discovered as the essence of thought.”39 It is a discovery, moreover, that “Plato translated into conceptual language as the soundless dialogue eme emautō—between me and myself.” Yet, in turning to the Socratic model as fragmented from its Platonic representation, Arendt does tacitly recognize that Plato’s conceptual “translation” of the Socratic “discovery” is not a mere tautology, but invests the essence of thought with a decisively metaphysical sense. The terms of the Platonic investment are too familiar to need a detailed reprise. Suffice it to recall two key tropes: it involves a fundamental reorientation of the self (periagogē holēs tes psuchēs) and a fundamental transport as the soul’s journey in thought ton noēton topon—“to the intelligible world.” In the event, the intercourse with oneself in which one engages by withdrawing from the common world of conflicting doxai becomes the “soundless dialogue between me and myself” in the realm of thought per se. In that dialogue, I am one with myself in thinking of myself (noēsis emautou) as a self-thinking purely of the intellect (noēsis noēseōs noēsis). With Arendt’s fragmented reading of the Socratic model, neither of these metaphysical tropes holds sway. The reorientation of the self is a withdrawal of the self, but a withdrawal from the public world in which one appears to others to the private world in which one is at home with oneself and can make sense of appearance. Likewise, the journey of the self is not a move in thought from the apparent worlds of shifting uncertain doxai to the unchanging and certain “true world,”40 but a matter of thinking whose task is “revealing doxa in its own truthfulness.”41 On this model then, “the role of the philosopher is not to rule the city but to be its ‘gadfly,’ not to tell philosophical truths but to make citizens more truthful,” including to make one more truthful to oneself in the “intercourse with oneself” as a being for whom plurality is

TWO-IN-ONE

 381

an existential condition. The movement of thought then is into the world of the dokei moi—how is seems to me—to garner a sense of how it seems to all others, and then back home into oneself “to bring out the inherent truth of [one’s own] opinion,” as belonging to “the truth which everyone potentially possesses.” There is a transcendence in such thinking, to be sure; but it is one that is, so to speak, horizontal rather than vertical, a comprehensive thinking of oneself with all others as a being in the world inter homines. In thus appropriating fragmentally the Socratic discovery of the two-in-one, Arendt’s interest is to think through the intercourse of the self with itself, nonmetaphysically, in order to show how consciousness as mere self-awareness in itself, the reflexivity presupposed in all mental activities, can become conscience as an awareness in and for itself, so as to elucidate how thoughtfulness and not doing evil might fit together. To that end, she saves as fragments two statements from Plato’s Gorgias. “The first: ‘It is better to be wronged than to do wrong.’ . . . The second: ‘It is better for me . . . that the multitudes of men should disagree with me rather than I, being one, should be out of harmony with myself and contradict me.’”42 As Arendt correctly points out, “the second statement . . . is the prerequisite for the first one.”43 Now, whether read from the individual perspective of the Socratic lover of wisdom or from the point of view of the political world, wrongdoing is at odds with an integral oneness and harmony—of the self with itself on the one hand, and of wrongdoing with the integrity of the “community as a whole” on the other, which wrongdoing “violates.”44 But in order for there to be harmony and disharmony at all, neither the self nor the community can be a sheer indifferent identity. “You always need at least two tones to produce a harmonious sound.”45 In the case of the lover of wisdom then, “I am not only for others but for myself,” and therefore “I clearly am not just one. A difference is inserted into my Oneness.” With this difference, I am a two-in-one. It is not Arendt’s theoretical concern to outline the structures of our being in the world as a whole, nor is it her concern to provide a complete fundamental ontology of the self. Nevertheless, her account of the two-inone is informed by three related ontological theses. The first thesis is that something is what it is in the world in virtue of its not being something else, which she offers as a variation upon Spinoza’s omnis determinatio est negatio.46 She draws from this thesis what in effect is an Eleatic lesson: that things cannot exist or be known purely “in themselves” but only in comparison with other things as being same or different. In ontological terms, “plurality . . . is the law of the earth.”47 Second, Arendt insists that all mental activities are reflexive: “Every cogitare, no matter what its object, is a cogito me cogitare, every volition, a volo me velle . . . and even judgement, the least reflexive of the three, . . . acts back upon itself.”48 Yet, she speculates that mere self-awareness may not be distinctive of human beings,49 and she rejects outright the Cartesian argument for the reflexive self-certainty of the self—the famous “cogito me cogitare ergo sum”—as being a “non sequitur.”50 Likewise, then, Arendt

382

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

considers “erroneous” the logic of all “constructions” that conceive identity in general on the model of the internally mediated identity of self-thinking thought.51 Thus, it is also not surprising that Arendt explicitly rejects as being “the last of the metaphysical fallacies,” the post-Kantian thesis that the reflexive self-certainty of the self lies in a self-making or self-constituting process.52 Reflexivity plays a role in all mental activity; but insofar as Arendt has said “final farewell” to philosophy in general,53 she has said farewell in particular to the epistemological preoccupation of modern philosophy as a search for truth in the self-certainty of the thinking subject. Arendt is concerned in general with the meaning of mental activities in and for our everyday worldly experience, which has neither an ontological nor an epistemological fundamentum in self-consciousness per se. Indeed, for Arendt “the need of reason inspired . . . by the quest for meaning” is to be distinguished from the epistemological/ontological “quest for truth” that gives and accounts for “grounds.”54 Third, Arendt insists that in the world of our experience, marked by birth and death, “being and appearing coincide.”55 Accordingly, “the fact that I am aware of myself” entails that “in a sense [that I] can appear to myself.” However, I can appear to myself only if my “cogitationes are made manifest in sounding-out or written-down speech, which is already meant for and presupposes auditors and readers as its recipients.”56 Self-awareness (ego sum mihi) is always already in some sense a being among others (esse inter homines). In the “intentionality” of everyday consciousness, self-awareness is tacit and liminal, absorbed in the matters with which one’s saying and doing deal. In that experience, I am in a sense “for myself” but I scarcely appear to myself and so my self-awareness is dispersed in the plurality of my shifting worldly concerns. In that regard, it is “when I appear and am seen by others” that “I am one; otherwise I would be unrecognizable.” But I am not “one” both in myself and for myself. “So long as I am together with others, barely conscious of myself, I am as I appear to others” and my appearance is the identity of my being.57 Yet “nothing can be itself and at the same time for itself but the two-in-one.” For it is in the solitude of thinking that one “actualizes” one’s “merely being conscious of oneself.”58 However, this solitude is not a mere aloneness, a being apart from any other whatsoever, but the reflexive solitude of my being with myself, a “duality . . . in which I am the one who asks and the one who answers.” The criterion of this thinking is not truth as the effective correspondence of thinking to some externally given object, but self-consistency or self-harmony (sumphonon), that is to say, it is a matter of myself agreeing with myself in that I speak as one (homologō) in and for myself (autos) to myself (heautō).59 The self of the two-in-one thinks “about something,” and “every thought is, strictly speaking, an after-thought.”60 Otherwise, homologein autos heautō would have no immediate content; since as Hegel shows, for a thinking that thinks only itself purely in the element of thought, being and nothing are the same. The duality of the two-in-one arises “when the time

TWO-IN-ONE

 383

has come to think about my words and deeds.”61 That thinking creates the two-in-one in and as a “soundless [mental] dialogue, eme emautō—between me and myself.”62 It is through the “dialogical” form of the self-questioning and answering itself about what it has said and done that the two-in-one, as the essence of thinking and the actualization of the ego in and for itself, can have critical force. Yet, as Arendt admits with coy understatement, “the dialogical structure” of this dialogue “is somewhat difficult to detect.”63 For the self that appears to itself in the two-in-one, and hence the self that answers to itself, is not exactly the same self as that which appears and acts, and thereby is recognizable as “one” to others in the public world of appearances.64 Rather, as a matter of thinking, the self that appears to itself in the two-in-one does so in virtue of “remembrance.”65 However, to remember what I have said and done is already to interpret my being in the world. In this regard, a Nietzschean caution comes to mind: “‘I have done that,’ says my memory. ‘I cannot have done that’—says my pride and remains inexorable. Finally—memory gives way.”66 The critical role played by the essence of thinking in the two-in-one has self-consistency as its ostensive necessary condition. Yet such selfconsistency is no mere tautological relation of the self to itself or the self-consistency of a particular narrow-minded, self-seeking self. Indeed, Eichmann’s administrative efficiency in the execution of the “Final Solution” was self-consistent in that merely formal sense, but selfconsistent within the horizon of a perverse mentality. As is the case with the maxims contained in Kant’s precept for reaching practical wisdom,67 self-consistency in the sense in which Arendt means it is the necessary and sufficient condition for critical self-thinking only when combined with the requirements of unprejudiced and broad-minded self-thinking.68 Arendt defines “conscience” as “the anticipation of the fellow who awaits you if and when you come home.”69 But in conscience, the fellow who awaits must be the broad-minded and enlightened self who questions the one who comes home in terms of the universal “stead” of every other, not in terms of that person’s narrowly perceived advantage. Likewise, it is the essence of thinking as the two-in-one that defines the standpoint of the self who in the act of willing commands itself to obey, and who in the act of judging finds the absent universal in the present particular. By contrast, the thoughtless ego acts and judges in the world, but never comes home to itself.

Notes 1 Hannah Arendt, Thinking (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 179–93. 2 Hannah Arendt, The Portable Hannah Arendt (London: Penguin Classics, 2000), 408–14.

384

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

3 Hannah Arendt, Willing (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 59, 64, 76, 82, 83, 141, 143, 162, 171, 179. 4 Arendt, Thinking, 181. 5 Ibid., 186. 6 Hannah Arendt, “On Hannah Arendt,” in Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the Public World, ed. Melvyn A. Hill (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979), 303. 7 Ibid., 212. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid.; Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times (New York: Harvest Books: 1970), 205–6. 10 Ibid., 212. Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2003), 167–68. 11 Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 206. 12 Arendt, Thinking, 185. 13 Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment, 121–22. 14 Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1982), 71–75. 15 Arendt, The Thinking, 179. 16 Ibid., 4. 17 Ibid., 3. 18 Ibid., 180. 19 Arendt, “On Hannah Arendt,” 303. 20 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (New York: Viking Press, 1963), 287. 21 Arendt, Thinking, 191. 22 Hannah Arendt and Joachim Fest, Eichmann war von empörender Dummheit (Munich and Zürich: Piper Verlag, 2011), 44. 23 Arendt, Thinking, 74. 24 Ibid., 191. 25 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 288. 26 Arendt, Thinking, 191, Arendt’s emphasis. 27 Arendt, “On Hannah Arendt,” 303. 28 Arendt, Thinking, 180. 29 Ibid., 180, my emphasis. 30 Arendt, “On Hannah Arendt,” 303. 31 Arendt, Thinking, 180. 32 Martin Heidegger, On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 55, 57; cf. Arendt, Thinking, 9–11. 33 Arendt, Thinking, 212. 34 Cf. Plato, Phaedrus, 264b–c. 35 Arendt, Thinking, 191.

TWO-IN-ONE

36 Hannah Arendt, The Promise of Politics, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2005), 7. Cf. Thinking, 9–11. 37 Ibid., 8. 38 Arendt, Thinking, 15. 39 Ibid., 185, my emphasis. 40 Cf., Arendt, Thinking, 10–11. 41 Arendt, The Promise of Politics, 15. 42 Ibid., 181, Arendt’s emphasis. Plato, Gorgias, 474c, 482c. 43 Ibid., 183. 44 Ibid., 182. 45 Ibid., 183. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid., 187. 48 Arendt, Willing, 69. 49 Ibid., 185. 50 Arendt, Thinking, 20. 51 Ibid., 184–85. 52 Ibid., 215. 53 Arendt, Portable Hannah Arendt, 3. 54 Arendt, Thinking, 15. 55 Ibid., 19 (Arendt’s emphasis). 56 Ibid., 20. 57 Ibid., 183. 58 Ibid., 185. 59 Ibid., 185–86. 60 Ibid., 187, 78, Arendt’s emphasis. 61 Ibid., 191. 62 Ibid., 185. 63 Ibid. 64 Ibid., 187. 65 Ibid., 78. 66 Friedrich Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Böse, Kritische Studienausgabe (Munich: de Gruyter, 1980), Bd. 5, 86, §68, my translation. 67 Immanuel Kant, Kants Gesammelte Schriften (Berlin: Prussian Academy, 1902–55), VII:200, 228–29. 68 Ibid., V:294–95. 69 Arendt, Thinking, 191.

 385

Politics

39 Artificial Equality: Procedural, Epistemic, and Performative Yasemin Sari

It is no mystery that equality is a relational term.1 If I were to say, “I am equal,” I would be uttering at best an incomplete statement, and at worst a meaningless one. However, if I were to say, “We are equal,” my statement could be broken up into its components to clarify the meaning of such equality depending on the “we” that is in question, and the condition upon which our equality is based. Minimally, I would be addressing a collection of individuals who understand themselves to be equal by a certain relation. What this relation amounts to has been subject to change—that is, natural equality, equality before God, equal dignity, and equality before the law— without changing the core element of relationality. In an early twenty-first-century setting, nevertheless, I contend that there is a responsibility to explain why we value equality and how we come to perform it in a setting divided by borders—visible and otherwise. For Arendt, equality is an artificial product of human action (including organization). Through this activity, we realize our capacity to recognize each other whereby equality becomes the normative foundation of affording each other equality where mere formal equality—as stated by all our declarations of human rights—falls short. To be sure, while Arendtian egalitarianism is not a misnomer, Arendt’s articulation of equality as both a precondition and the outcome of the creation of political space—but never from just nature itself—has been a

388

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

point of criticism, especially as it relates to the question of whether she has elitist inclinations.2 This chapter aims to unpack the puzzlement over Arendt’s understanding of equality that surpasses a formal or material understanding of equality without dismissing the import of either as exemplified in their political and social registers. Arendt’s contention that “man is apolitical,” and that “politics arises in what lies between men and is established as relationships”3 will be our starting point in understanding equality as an artificial condition that arises within politics. For her, “politics organizes those who are absolutely different with a view to their relative equality and in contradistinction to their relative differences.”4 The conditions of free political action—that is, plurality and equality—are indispensable for freedom, because neither when one is dominated nor when merely fed lies (or “the truth”) can one exercise true freedom. To be clear, the term equality appears infrequently in Arendt’s writing, but when it does, it does so forcefully. I will turn to several key passages to explore the development of what I understand to be the three interconnected levels of Arendt’s articulation of “artificial equality”: (1) procedural, (2) epistemic, and (3) performative.

Artificial Equality: Relational, not Natural In her 1951 work The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt emphasizes the fact that equality is not a norm that comes from nature, and hence does not have the property of universality. Equality is neither natural nor universal, but, rather, is a conventional, artificial phenomenon. In other words, it is spatial and performative. It is clear that her suspicion of a “universal equality” is rooted in her criticism of the regime of human rights that has been inadequate in response to the atrocities of mid-twentieth century that she explores in the Origins. She elaborates on the concept of equality as intimately linked with a principle of justice, which she leaves undeveloped: Equality, in contrast to all that is involved in mere existence, is not given us, but is the result of human organization insofar as it is guided by the principle of justice. We are not born equal; we become equal as members of a group on the strength of our decision to guarantee ourselves mutually equal rights. Our political life rests on the assumption that we can produce equality through organization, because man can act in and change and build a common world, together with his equals and only with his equals.5 As I wrote recently: Two conclusions follow from the above passage: (1) that equality is not natural, but is instead experienced spatially, and (2) that it rests on a

ARTIFICIAL EQUALITY

 389

mutual decision—understood as a response to our common existence in the world. . . . Arendt’s statement allows us to see the force of citizenship in her articulation of the condition of equality. Nevertheless, the emphasis on the “mutual decision” of becoming equal points to another possibility: While the law can give human beings certain rights that can be practiced in the presence of others—that is, in public—the participation in this public is first and foremost granted by an act of human beings themselves.6 In James Ingram’s words, “[This] equality is not given from above and does not consist principally in laws or institutions but is achieved through practice.”7 What Arendt offers us here is far from simple. To be sure, the emphasis is on a performance of “mutual decision”—hence it points to the performative level of equality, which nonetheless I contend stems from a procedural level where each is recognized, albeit artificially to have an equal say. Having an equal say—stemming from the mutual decision of different individuals who makes up a political organization—can be understood as having the ability to voice one’s opinion; the practical outcome of this is best understood as a right to due process and having the fundamental recognition of one’s civic rights in a polity. It is in this sense that justice emerges in human relations, and its lack causes an injury most pronounced in the lack of a principle of equal treatment in the eyes of law. The inability to be heard, to be given due process, is equivalent to being treated as unequal without warrant. The primacy of this capacity to have an equal say over formal equality is important in Arendt’s account. In her “Introduction into Politics,”8 Arendt identifies our misunderstanding of the Greek term for a free constitution, isonomia, to mean what equality before the law means for us. But isonomia does not mean that all men are equal before the law, or that the law is the same for all, but merely that all have the same claim to political activity, and in the polis this activity primarily took the form of speaking to one another. Isonomia is therefore essentially the equal right to speak. . . . To speak in the form of commanding and to hear in the form of obeying were not considered actual speech and hearing; they were not free because they were bound up with a process defined not by speaking but by doing and laboring.9 The equal right to speak does not equate with a universal egalitarianism, given the exclusion of women and slaves, among others, on which the city-state was built. Arendt’s account makes clear that she is aware of the limitations of this construct, without endorsing such separation by city “walls” in a twentieth-century political existence. For her, one import of the allusion to isonomia is not its exclusionary history, but the independence of its existence from an egalitarian constitution where each individual is formally equal to another. The equal right to speak brings into focus the ability to lay claim

390

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

to political activity, which for Arendt is the main locus of human freedom.10 As such, equality involves recognition in the act of treating and taking each other as equal in conversation and debate. Her point is to draw a contrast between the ancient Greek and the contemporary articulations of equality as the term relates to freedom. “Equality,” she asserts, existed only in this specifically political realm, where men met one another as citizens and not as private persons. The difference between this ancient concept of equality and our notion that men are born or created equal and become unequal by virtue of social and political, that is man-made, institutions can hardly be over-emphasized. The equality of the Greek polis, its isonomy, was an attribute of the polis and not of men, who received their equality by virtue of citizenship, not by virtue of birth.11 The ability to become equal among others, to exchange thoughts and opinions, is one of the important tenets of the experience of freedom. The artificial equality of isonomia in this sense is an antidote to “modern equality,” which is “based on the conformism inherent in society.”12 At this juncture, I have laid out what I deem to be the epistemic level of artificial equality, where each party has an equal right to speak and the ability to claim such a voice in political discussion to be heard. I deem this level epistemic in terms of the status of the validity claim of the parties in debate, where the account individuals afford are taken to be equal to one another so long as built on responsible justification.13 Building on procedural equality, this epistemic equality too rests on the condition of performative equality, where each individual’s claim to political activity is made possible by the arrangement of our political frame. For Arendt, this claim to political activity is connected with a “diversity of views”: The ability to see the same thing from various standpoints stays in the human world; it is simply the exchange of the standpoint given us by nature for that of someone else, with whom we share the same world, resulting in a true freedom of movement in our mental world that parallels our freedom of movement in the physical one.14 Central to Arendt’s thought is her articulation of equality as a political phenomenon, or a necessary condition that makes political action possible. “Wherever the equality of others and of their particular opinions are abrogated,” she states, “as, for instance, under tyranny, in which everything and everyone is sacrificed to the standpoint of the tyrant, no one is free and no one is capable of insight, not even the tyrant.”15 This articulation of equality surely helps us focus on the question of a pre-political equality that may ensure the equal participation of everyone in politics. In his article, “Arendt on the Foundations of Equality,” Jeremy Waldron articulates Arendt’s commitment to equality by defining how “equality

ARTIFICIAL EQUALITY

 391

operates in Arendt’s thought as a principle about political participation” embodying two positions: “1. The position that anyone might participate in the actions and discussions of a free republic, 2. The position that the actions and discussions of a free republic are possible only among equals.”16 Waldron understands the first position to be more “democratic in character,”17 namely, that everyone has the equal capacity to enter into politics (or the political realm), or the equal ability to participate. Inasmuch as there is no ground for a priori exclusion from politics,18 the hidden assumption behind this idea is that such equal ability to participate must have prior material conditions to make such participation possible, that is, there must be some understanding of equal access (call this pre-political equality) to practices that would allow for entry into political debate. I contend that this condition of equal access squares neatly with Arendt’s commitment to the import of a diversity of views, or plurality of opinions, in acknowledging the uniqueness of each perspective.19 The second position, laid out in terms of the equality of political agents that partake in a political endeavor, is closely linked with Arendt’s conception of freedom—which Waldron deems the more “republican” position: one can only be free among her equals. Underlying the aforementioned positions on equality as the modus operandi of politics is her insistence on the divorce of political action from self and group interest, where interests are not the proper register upon which rights can be premised. The stuff of politics is our shared world, and this is why and how we can relate to each other in equality. In her 1958 work The Human Condition, she starts section 24, “The Disclosure of the Agent in Speech and Action,” with the following words: Human plurality, the basic condition of both action and speech, has the twofold character of equality and distinction. If men were not equal, they could neither understand each other and those who came before them nor plan for the future and foresee the needs of those who will come after them.20 Arendt’s point is important in that equality and plurality are complementary conditions for speech and action. She demonstrates her caution against equality being reduced to sameness or uniformity by taking into account the phenomenological aspect of human existence, whereby each individual can and ought to be recognized as unique and distinct. In section 30, “The Labor Movement,” she elaborates further: The equality attending the public realm is necessarily an equality of unequals who stand in need of being “equalized” in certain respects and for specific purposes. As such, the equalizing factor arises not from human “nature” but from outside. . . . Political equality, therefore, is the very opposite of our equality before death, which as the common fate of all men arises out of the human condition, or of equality before God,

392

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

at least in its Christian interpretation, where we are confronted with an equality of sinfulness inherent in human nature.21 As I have noted at the beginning, the condition of equality Arendt identifies in human existence emerges through political organization (formal or informal), and thereby does not rest on a natural property we each possess. As such, equality is not rooted in nature, and differentiated from “sameness,” and “identity,” it gains its validity based on agreement and consent. In her “Truth and Politics,” she turns to Jefferson on this note: [In] the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson declared certain “truths to be self-evident,” because he wished to put the basic consent among the men of the Revolution beyond dispute and argument; like mathematical axioms, they should express “beliefs of men” that “depend no on their own will, but follow involuntarily the evidence proposed to their minds.” (See Jefferson’s “Draft Preamble to the Virginia Bill Establishing Religious Freedom.”) Yet by saying “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” he conceded, albeit without becoming aware of it that the statement “All men are created equal” is not self-evident but stands in need of agreement and consent—that equality, if it is to be politically relevant, is a matter of opinion, and not “the truth.” . . . We hold this opinion because freedom is possible only among equals, and we believe that the joys and gratifications of free company are to be preferred to the doubtful pleasures of holding dominion.22 In differentiating equality from a self-evident fact, Arendt emphasizes its validity as a norm to be dependent on an act of human beings, that is, consent or agreement. Coupled with her criticism of human rights discourse—as she neither endorses a natural rights doctrine nor a nationally endowed rights framework as sufficient for the status of equality—the possibility of being equal depends on the ability to belong to a political community. Recalling that membership to political community is neither a given nor a predetermined fact of human existence, but is linked to political action, it is not surprising that equality, once it presents itself as a necessary element of human plurality, is articulated within the realm of human action: the site of human freedom per se. This aligns with Arendt’s understanding and dismissal of sovereignty in political space, where individuals are not necessarily related to themselves or to each other as masters. As political action is action in concert with a view to a worldly principle23—justice, freedom, and equality—sovereignty as it pertains to mastery is dismissed from the realm of freedom and placed in the realm of production by homo faber (who uses instrumentality and violence). This point sums up the performative aspect of equality, that is, the recognition of equality in political agency. As political action is what creates any political space, the people who act together have to be articulated as equals, peers, to be able to accomplish

ARTIFICIAL EQUALITY

 393

such creation. In conclusion, perhaps it is important to heed Arendt’s remark in Origins: Whenever equality becomes a mundane fact itself, without any gauge by which it may be measured or explained, then there is one chance in a hundred that it will be recognized simply as a working principle of a political organization in which otherwise unequal people have equal rights; there are ninety-nine chances that it will be mistaken for an innate quality of every individual, who is “normal” if he is like everybody else and “abnormal” if he happens to be different.24 To be sure, equality is a political (hence, artificial) enterprise in Arendt’s thought. What I have shown in this chapter, however, is that Arendt has a nuanced account of equality that goes beyond our formal and material articulations of equality, thereby outlining the normative order in which it can be placed. Artificial equality is not just a theoretical underpinning of her ontological commitments to human plurality and freedom, but it also has the potential to remedy our practical shortcomings in articulating human existence based on a principle of justice.

Notes 1 Elizabeth Anderson explores the import of such relationality in her influential essay “What Is the Point of Equality?,” Ethics 109, no. 2 (January 1999): 287–337. 2 Hauke Brunkhorst, “Equality and Elitism in Arendt,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt, ed. Dana Villa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 178–98. In her On Revolution, Arendt allocates a lengthy discussion to the question of “the élite” or “élites” whereby she diagnoses the problem in the lack of public spaces from which an élite can spring from the people: “The trouble lies in the lack of public spaces to which people at large would have entrance and from which an élite could be selected, or rather, where it could select itself. The trouble, in other words, is that politics has become a profession and a career, and that the ‘élite’ therefore is being chosen according to standards and criteria which are themselves profoundly unpolitical” (Hannah Arendt, On Revolution, [Penguin Books, 1990], 277). 3 Hannah Arendt, “Introduction into Politics,” in Promise in Politics, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2005), 95. 4 Ibid., 96, *Denktagebuch, August 1950. 5 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Benediction Classics, 2009), 301, my emphasis. 6 See my “An Arendtian Recognitive Politics: The Right to Have Rights as a Performance of Visibility,” Philosophy Today 61, no. 3 (2017): 709–35.

394

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

7 James Ingram, “What Is a Right to Have Rights? Three Images of the Politics of Human Rights,” The American Political Science Review 102, no. 4 (2008): 401–16, 410. 8 Arendt, “Introduction into Politics.” 9 Ibid., 118. 10 As she concedes, “This equality has, of course, nothing to do with justice” (Arendt, “Introduction into Politics,” 118). 11 Arendt, On Revolution, 31. 12 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 41. 13 For a detailed account of a principle of epistemic responsibility I have developed, see my “Arendt, Truth, and Epistemic Responsibility,” Arendt Studies 2 (2018): 149–70. 14 Arendt, “Introduction into Politics,” 168. 15 Ibid., 169. 16 Jeremy Waldron, “Arendt on the Foundations of Equality,” in Politics in Dark Times, ed. Seyla Benhabib (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 17–38, 30. 17 Ibid. 18 Waldron points out that this possibility to participate “supervene[s] on something about all humans” (Ibid., 34), and that this is the condition of natality (Ibid., 36–37). 19 One other caveat here would be the institutional arrangements that makes such participation a real possibility, and perhaps this is where Arendt’s notion of a “right to have rights” would have some force in articulating the act of participating (or claiming such participatory capacity) even where one is denied a voice, that is, refugees not partaking in the discussions that affect their existence and life plans. 20 Arendt, Human Condition, 175. 21 She continues: “In these instances, no equalizer is needed because sameness prevails anyhow; by the same token, however, the actual experience of this sameness, the experience of life and death, occurs not only in isolation but in utter loneliness, where no true communication, let alone association and community, is possible. From the viewpoint of the world and public realm, life and death and everything attesting to sameness are non-worldly, antipolitical, truly transcendent experiences” (Ibid., 215). 22 Hannah Arendt, “Truth and Politics,” in Between Past and Future (Penguin Books, 2006), 242. 23 Cf. Arendt, “What Is Freedom?,” in Between Past and Future (Penguin Books, 2006); “Introduction into Politics.” 24 Arendt, Origins, 54.

40 Arendt and Ecological Politics Kerry H. Whiteside

I. Productivism in Green Political Thought It is odd that political ecologists almost universally ignore Hannah Arendt’s thought,1 for the arguments of her greatest work, The Human Condition, converge with the sensibility of ecological (“Green”) political movements in a remarkable variety of ways.2 Decades before the discovery of the greenhouse effect and ozone holes, Arendt warned of the power of contemporary science, which “imports cosmic processes into nature even at the obvious risk of destroying her and, with her, man’s mastership over her.”3 To ecologists, there is something familiar in her picture of a perpetually growing society that consumes voraciously because it is an extension of the life process. Green demands for a more authentic Basisdemokratie echo her desire to rehabilitate the value of political participation. But then, perhaps it is Arendt’s praise of strictly political action that puts off ecological thinkers. She denigrates any politics that takes its concerns from the private household, and ecological politics (from oikos, household, and logia, discourse) seems to do precisely that. Nonetheless, her conception of the human condition could deepen critiques of overconsumption current in the literature of ecological political movements. Those critiques usually target a phenomenon known variously as “productivism” or “industrialism.” Like “capitalism” for Marx, “productivism” for Greens identifies the inner mechanisms of a system that, even as it yields much-vaunted benefits of material abundance, ultimately devours the sources of its own vitality. However, just as Marx’s theory spawned subjective and objective interpretations of the crisis of capitalism

396

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

(the former emphasizing that the workers’ subjective awareness of their exploitation is a necessary condition of revolutionary action, the latter suggesting that objective, material conditions drive the exploited to revolt), so “productivism” threatens to dissolve into rival subjective and objective interpretations of the ecological crisis. Because Arendt strenuously avoids the subject-object dichotomy, her alternative understanding of productivism should be of particular interest to Green thinkers. Perhaps the most distinctive critical theme of Green thought is its contention that a growth-oriented society is destined to run up against insurmountable natural limits.4 Only fundamental changes in our modes of production and consumption can avert environmental catastrophe. Greens highlight the irrationality of pursuing unlimited growth in a finite world, a world whose finitude is conditioned not only by absolute quantities of vital materials, but by the need to respect the limited capacity for selfrenewal of many ecosystems. Greens insist that, no matter how much more “environmentally friendly” and efficient new technologies are made, it would simply overwhelm the planet if the growth required to bring the “developing countries” up to the living standards prevailing in the “developed countries” were attempted.5 Moreover, irrespective of the ability of further economic growth and technological innovation to respond to increasing human material needs, there are also spiritual needs for areas of pristine nature and respect for the diversity of species that are incompatible with unlimited development. Economic assumptions that regard nature only in utilitarian terms, as a resource to be exploited for mankind’s material benefit, are inimical to respect for nature.6 In an attempt to explain the persistence of contemporary societies’ commitment to growth, Greens point to “an adherence to the belief that human needs can only be met through the permanent expansion of the process of production and consumption.”7 This ideology is named “productivism,” and rejection of it distinguishes Green political thought from familiar ideologies of the Right and Left. Whatever their differences over the ethics of redistributing wealth, conservative and progressive parties of the West agree that we must spur investment, innovate technologically, and fine-tune the division of labor. These economic strategies allow us to turn out more products—and increase consumption to absorb them. It is essential to cajole consumers into always consuming more so that the system’s movement never ceases— so that investors (or the state, in more socialized economies) perceive new opportunities and invest more, create new jobs, push toward an ever-higher (material) standard of living. In the words of certain French Greens, the analysis of productivism is the guiding thread which allows us to go beyond the classic explanations of the crisis. . . . Productivism is a totality of phenomena which form a whole and which have the appearance of being necessary to one another. . . . It is a mechanism that . . . makes each

ARENDT AND ECOLOGICAL POLITICS

 397

collectivity and each individual always seek out the maximum (maximum efficiency, maximum production) under the threat of not getting even the minimum.8 Philosophically, this concept lends itself to two interpretations, one “subjectivist,” the other more “objectivist.” On the one hand, productivism appears to be a set of moral beliefs appealed to by all who demand more material consumption and fail to understand the need to respect natural limits. Green politics thus has a subjectivist side that orients it toward working to change attitudes. If it is the ethic of “always more” that threatens us, then we must learn to live in balance with nature, not to dominate it. That is why the leaders of the French Greens call for a “revolution of mentalités,” a change in our thinking such that we become aware of our interdependence with nature, value it non-instrumentally, and voluntarily change our expectations always to increase our material welfare.9 The party’s electoral literature claims: Our objective is to convince the majority that a radical cultural change is necessary. We must modify our modes of consumption, distribution, production and exchange, to go in the direction of a society of responsible individuals with needs which have been reasoned out [raisonnés].10 Greens do not naïvely believe that simply having better arguments will suffice to turn the productivist tide. Their repertory of direct political action (demonstrations, theatrical protest, civil disobedience) seeks by every imaginable nonviolent means to call people’s attention to ecologically unsound practices.11 Nonetheless, the project of calling people’s attention to the ecological crisis and giving them prudential reasons to restrain consumption does make a subjectivist presupposition. Changing the world is, above all, a matter of changing ideas. The more objectivist bent of Green thought shows through in references to the “totality of phenomena” and “necessity.” These expressions seem to indicate that human consciousness depends on a conditioning context of social practices. Certain institutions favor the perpetuation and development of a productivist social system. One segment of the French Greens argues that the productivist “mechanism has a material axis of development . . . the development of the division of labor. For two centuries, this has been the required point of passage for any search for maximal economic efficiency.”12 On this interpretation, lowering the costs of production has required simplifying tasks on production lines, introducing labor-saving machinery, seeking out new geographic locations where labor is cheap. Each enterprise becomes highly specialized and seeks to gain economies of scale by increasing production. Owners decide about the location of industries, their size, and their rate of production without regard for the ability of the local environment to support them. The need for efficient production trumps environmental

398

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

concerns. Firms that fail to make the necessary accommodations (i.e., changes necessary to increase their productivity) are competed out of existence. According to Alain Lipietz, the principal author of the French Greens’ pamphlet on the economy, in the absence of welfare state protections, such a system is fraught with social instability. Reduced to repeating mindless tasks, facing a constant threat of unemployment or lowered wages, workers have every incentive to throw the system into crisis by refusing to work—as they often did before World War II. The system stabilized only after the war, with what Lipietz calls the “Fordist compromise.” In return for accepting the division of labor and certain risks of economic change, workers won salary increases, a state dedicated to maintaining full employment, and a secure place in the welfare state. The compromise changed the workers into a “crowd of consumers.”13 Not only did they attenuate their challenges to the system, but by increasing demand for goods, they also played an essential role in keeping the economic machine running. This account of productivism treats mentalités as a function of incentives sustained in a particular model of development. Although all of the social and environmental changes take place for the sake of increasing material abundance, it is not simply the “more is better” ethic that has to be undone in order to reverse them. In this scenario, each of us is caught up in a mechanism that requires us to contribute to its workings. A productivist society gives the individual a terrible choice: produce (regardless of the ecological and social consequences) or risk “not having access to the minimum of other products that one needs.”14 The productivist system makes individuals serve its requirements by means of an often unsubtle structure of penalties and payoffs. This line of Green thought can make it seem that productivist choices do not come from autonomous subjects. We are objects responding to conditions set by a larger, ecologically irrational social system. That subjectivist and the objectivist interpretations of productivism mingle so casually in Green literature is troubling on two counts. First, it is a sign that Green thought has not yet advanced to the point of developing a consistent philosophy of the relationship of mind and world. Do the subjectivists’ hopes for a révolution des mentalités really mean that ecological destruction is primarily a function of ecological ignorance? Yet, powerful incentives of survival or profit, not just ecological ignorance, seem implicated in much environmentally destructive behavior. On the other hand, what “necessitated” the workers’ acceptance of the Fordist compromise? Doesn’t their willingness to trade off personal security and environmental interests for material consumption indicate a predisposition toward consumption, which itself needs explanation? Second, the unstable admixture of subjective and objective explanation portends political problems in bringing about the transformation to a sustainable society. We should recall that, in the history of revolutionary socialism, subjectivist and objectivist interpretations of Marx led to political splits, differences of party organization, and contradictory strategies.

ARENDT AND ECOLOGICAL POLITICS

 399

Subjectivists believed that the workers must first attain a revolutionary state of consciousness before the overthrow of capitalism could take place. When decades of organizing and agitating failed to produce the requisite radical mentalité, many either dropped out of politics or accommodated themselves to “bourgeois” institutions. The reforms they eventually brought about fell far short of the quest for social transformation that had originally inspired them. Objectivists, on the other hand, believed that certain objective social conditions would be necessary to spark revolution. Some, like the Bolsheviks, set about fostering such conditions through strikes and acceptance of military defeat. Confronted with groups that resisted the changes which they thought essential to human progress, objectivist Marxists sought to force the hand of history. They created hierarchical, authoritarian organizations to generate the power necessary to overcome the objective resistance of capital. This experience suggests that incipient divisions between subjectivists and objectivists within a single political movement should be viewed with concern. It does not mean that Greens who use objectivist language are closet Bolsheviks, ready to seize power and build ecotopia by force. Nor should we infer that those who use subjectivist language are on the verge of selling-out a sustainable society for a slice of political power in a productivist one. No doubt the philosophical divergences would play themselves out differently this time around—in part because Green thinkers have learned from the fate of other radical movements in the twentieth century. Still, the history alluded to above is sufficiently cautionary to suggest that ecological political theorists should heed alternative philosophical viewpoints capable of expressing their central insights about productivism while avoiding the subject-object split. While Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition is such an alternative, Greens easily overlook it because the ecological crisis does not directly motivate her argument. If one starts from her philosophical anthropology, however, it becomes evident that her account of the dynamics of “society” parallels Green critiques of “productivism,” and does so in a way that adds to our understanding of that phenomenon.

II. Arendt’s Understanding of the Vita Activa For Arendt, to speak of “the human condition” is to emphasize the partly given, partly mutable character of our existence.15 Neither man nor the world fits into the categories of subject and object because “everything [man] come[s] in contact with turns immediately into a condition of their existence.”16 We cannot be pictured as free, meaning-creating subjects because a world we experience as “given” inflects and lends structure to our thought. But conditioning does not make us into objects either, since “the world in which the vita activa spends itself consists of things produced by human activities” and these in turn “constantly condition their human makers.”17 Moreover, the world itself is no mere object. There is, Arendt

400

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

asserts, an epistemological dependence of the world on our presence: “Because human existence is conditioned existence,” she says, “it would be impossible without things, and things would be a heap of unrelated articles, a non-world, if they were not conditioners of human existence.”18 To have a world, in other words, is to be enveloped in a setting in which things have potential relationships to us (as a thing to stand on or as an obstacle, as something to use as a tool or as something to love.) Mind does not have to construct a world by stitching together units of sense impression (“a heap of unrelated articles”). Wholeness, continuity, and meaning are there in our world, and thus capable of giving form to (of conditioning) our existence. From the start, Arendt measures up to Robyn Eckersley’s demand that ecological political theory picture us as “relatively autonomous beings,” “constituted by . . . relations” with our environment.19 Such claims, however, are often unconvincing. Even saying “we” and “environment” seems to presuppose the existence of two distinct poles which have some “constitution” independently of their interaction. Sustaining a theory of relative autonomy demands a special philosophical move. Avoiding even implicit reference to subjects and objects requires seeking out a perspective that denies the necessity of those categories. This is what Arendt’s philosophical “understanding” does. She proposes to go back to the “preliminary, inarticulate” meaning that “precedes and succeeds knowledge.”20 Her argument is that subjectivistic and objectivistic theories are highly intellectualized systems of ideas that are parasitic on a more fundamental level of experience at which the subject-object distinction has not taken shape.21 They are one-sided developments of the experience of structures of meaning in what Arendt calls “common sense.” It is common sense, Arendt contends, that fits together our experiences to establish their significance. Thus, she intends to return to common-sense perceptions of the world, ones imbedded in ordinary language and preconceptual understandings of experience. She seeks to remain true to these fundamental meanings by making them intelligible through rational speech. Making experience intelligible means discerning its structure, discovering affinities in meaning, tracing patterns in conduct, finding functional relationships that tie together seemingly distinct attitudes and behaviors. Arendt’s study of the vita activa, the active life, rests on these methodological assumptions. She investigates three essential patterns of human involvement in the world: labor, work, and action. These patterns are not merely objectively describable sequences of motions; nor are they merely subjectively prescribed orientations toward the world. They are ways of relating to the world and to other people. Each activity has a characteristic structure and purpose, an inarticulate meaning, that inflects the way we treat everything that surrounds us. Corresponding to each activity, therefore, is a characteristic mode of thought, a mentalité. The mentalité “fits” the activity, giving it its purpose and guiding its approach to the material world it encounters. In describing the mentalité of each activity, I focus on four areas

ARENDT AND ECOLOGICAL POLITICS

 401

of greatest relevance to ecological politics: ideals, end points, conceptions of nature, and perceptions of time. Closest to our biological need to sustain life is the activity of laboring. As physical beings, we must replenish our bodily need for nourishment in order to survive and grow, and as mortal beings, we must replenish the species through procreation. Labor is the ever-repeated effort to secure food, shelter, security, longevity. Labor continually strives to reproduce the material conditions of human life. Our need for replenishment and repair integrates us into larger natural cycles of growth and deterioration. The preservation of human life itself requires that we synchronize ourselves with the seasons, combat the forms of decomposition that come with natural processes of erosion, death, and decay. Life requires that we continually incorporate substances external to us and wear out materials that protect us against the rigors of our environment.22 Consumption thus correlates to the activity of labor.23 A cycle of production and consumption—creating, using, and depleting—is the condition of life itself.24 Corresponding to labor are a conception of life as the highest good25 and an ideal of material abundance.26 As laboring beings, the point of our toil is to sustain life; our fear is the pain of hunger, the grief of sickness or death. Labor’s ideal—the original meaning that could be drawn out of inarticulate experience—would be the perfection of its primordial goal: facilitating life to the highest degree. Labor’s ideal is to generate an abundance that preserves us from the dangers of deprivation. It is to feed into the recurrent need for consumption that we, as mortals, cannot escape.27 Because consumption, replenishment, and exhaustion are ever-recurrent experiences, laboring is associated with no firm conception of end points. When we cultivate and harvest, clean and soil, there is no fixity, no final resting point. Labor involves us in a process, a cycle of endlessly repeated steps.28 With its attention fixed on supplying our recurrent needs, labor has little conception of permanence. It is not its concern to create something durable that cuts across the cycles of production and consumption. Insofar as we are under the sway of the urgent promptings of the life process, our time horizon is greatly restricted. The laboring mentalité is “worldless,” in the sense that it does not care to invest its energy in the construction of a lasting world of durable objects. Investment in a lasting world is tantamount to self-imposed deprivation, for durable objects are not available for consumption. What permanence the laboring mentalité recognizes is the permanence of processes, not of things. Much of labor’s toil, in fact, is devoted to the “constant, unending fight against the processes of growth and decay through which nature forever invades the human artifice.”29 From the perspective of labor, nature is “the great provider.”30 However, it is also the source of unwanted change and decay. That it engages in a “constant fight” with nature suggests that labor secretly aspires to victory. If only nature could be made infinitely provident without requiring man’s constant tendance, labor might finally be able to abandon its endlessly repeated struggle.

402

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

Arendt insists that labor be distinguished from a second fundamental activity with which it is often confused: work. Work is the human activity of constructing about us a more or less permanent world of artifacts: tools, buildings, instruments, books, works of art.31 Work is distinct from labor inasmuch as it aims not at consumption of vitally necessary goods but at construction of stable surroundings in which we can move, learn, relate, and seek distinction. The fabricated world shelters us from natural change. The tools of Homo faber and the durability of his products partially free us from sempiternal cycles of deterioration and restoration. Work products are to be used, not used up. The mentalité of work prizes permanence, durability, and stability.32 Insofar as we work, we take pride in the creation of goods which are, in a sense, greater than ourselves because they may outlast a human life. Homo faber is the builder of cities and monuments and memorials.33 In the perspective of work, materials must be assembled into a non-natural whole, according to a plan that guides the construction process. However, this process, unlike the natural process that impels the cycle of labor, comes to an end with the assembling of a finished product. These products are better in proportion as they resist natural processes of decay and growth. Thus, work is worldly in a way that labor is not. Work understands worth not as a function of something’s contribution to mere life, but as a function of its bringing us closer to a desired end point, the construction of some durable object. Characteristically, work involves thinking in terms of means and ends. Homo faber therefore tends to regard whatever falls within its field of perception as an instrument to be used in the fabrication of something else.34 There are two ways, then, in which work is in competition with nature. First, in the perspective of work, nature in itself is valueless. It is valuable only as a resource in the fabrication of a humanized world. Work is a destroyer of nature; it is a violent act bent on “reforming” the given forms of the natural world.35 Second, work “takes matter out of nature’s hands without giving it back to her in the swift metabolism of the living body.”36 The third category of the vita activa is action. Action comprises the words and deeds by which we initiate events in the realm of human plurality, as participants in a community. Tied neither to bodily necessity nor to the technical requirements of useful production, action is uniquely free. Our ability to act is identical with our ability to begin anew. With action we unleash chains of events that cut across the regularity of natural patterns. Action aims at self-disclosure. To act, says Arendt, is to seek remembrance in the eyes of one’s peers.37 The unique speeches and deeds that are seen from multiple perspectives establish the meaningful context for all human endeavor. Corresponding to action is “the conviction that the greatest that man can achieve is his own appearance and actualization.”38 In Ronald Beiner’s words,

ARENDT AND ECOLOGICAL POLITICS

 403

political action, alone among the worldly activities of man, offers a lasting source of meaning to human affairs, for the deeds and speeches of speaking and acting can be gathered into a story that, when retold, allows their human intelligibility to become visible.39 Where labor understands the good in terms of participating in a predictable process, and where work interprets the good instrumentally (seeing matter as “good for” some other end), action testifies to the human ability to posit intrinsic value. Action, and the storytelling that follows, creates meaning which gives a point to life and which establishes a final purpose for the world of Homo faber.40 According to Arendt, political action removes itself from both the futility of natural cycles and the comprehensive instrumentalization of existence. True action is free of all necessity, including the necessities imposed by our biological needs or by our natural environment.41 Action initiates an endless chain of events, which, remembered long after as a story, give man an earthly immortality. Nothing that Arendt says indicates that action is in itself hostile to nature.

III. Society, Production, and Consumption Arendt’s account of the vita activa strikes some commentators as quaintly antiquarian. In fact, her criticisms not only anticipated Green accounts of productivism by some two decades, but also suggested startling connections between labor, work, and consumption that have yet to be systematically pursued by contemporary thinkers. Unlike most Greens, Arendt does not rest satisfied with the observation that economic growth is the unquestionable value of every nation in today’s world. She sees our emphasis on growth as the result of a characteristically modern reduction of all values to the value of life itself. This value grows out of the primordial experience of laboring. Arendt begins by tracing a remarkable change in the valuation of private and public life between the times of ancient Greece and the modern world. For the Greeks, the household was the domain of labor. Household functions included reproduction, the procurement of food and shelter, and sanitation. Life in the household could not be free, because it had to be organized so as to assure that the organic needs of its members were met. Because the household did not aim at any of the higher human abilities of free action, thought, or remembrance, it necessarily occupied a limited place in the hearts of the Greeks. Dignity was reserved for the public realm, in which citizens employed great words of persuasion and memorializing as part of their deliberation on affairs of the city.42 So long as this understanding of the distinction between the public and private spheres remained intact, the recognized superiority of the public life checked the inherent fecundity of the life process. Life was subordinated to the good life that was possible only in the polis.

404

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

In the modern world, the erosion of this understanding of the public/ private distinction allowed concerns formerly confined to the household to enter the political arena. Christianity’s disdain for public glory, early capitalism’s creation of a deep pool of laborers without commitment to a particular place, and the nation-states’ attempt to create a substitute “family” for the dispossessed are only a few of the factors mentioned in Arendt’s complex historical account of the demise of the vita activa. For purposes of seeing the potential contribution of her ideas to Green thought, it is less this history than its contemporary result that must draw our attention. The result is that our collective life is dominated by an amalgam of public and private matters in a communal form called “society.” As “the public organization of the life process,”43 society gives primacy to the ideals of labor. Moreover, society, Arendt argues, is the phenomenon responsible for the rapacity of contemporary communities. In a relatively short time the new social realm transformed all modern communities into a society of laborers and jobholders. . . . The admission of labor to public stature . . . has . . . liberated this process from its circular, monotonous recurrence and transformed it into a swiftly progressing development whose results have in a few centuries totally changed the whole inhabited world. . . . It was as though the growth element inherent in all organic life had completely overcome and overgrown the processes of decay by which organic life is checked and balanced in nature’s household. The social realm . . . has let loose an unnatural growth, so to speak, of the natural.44 It is because Arendt sees contemporary communities organized as variations on “society” that her critique converges with Green politics. She argues, first, that placing preeminent value on life itself makes society devote its energy to assuring that all receive the material requisites of life: physical security and a parade of consumption goods. Labor’s ideal of limitless consumption displaces all other public ideals in a community that operates as a society. Understanding environmentally destructive desires for unfettered consumption requires seeing them in relation to the modern world’s reconfiguration of labor, work, and action. Yet, before a way of life could be constructed around the twin activities of production and consumption, three obstacles had to be overcome. The first was that most communities had assumed that human need was finite. Thus, it made sense to confine need-satisfying activities to a distinctly limited sector of life. Society erases such limits on consumption by encouraging our “appetites [to] become more sophisticated.”45 Life-valuing societies never lay back in happy satiation. They encourage new needs, tastes for luxury, and cravings for additional sources of pleasure.46 From the growth of appetite, Arendt draws the same conclusion as many ecological thinkers:

ARENDT AND ECOLOGICAL POLITICS

 405

that it “harbors the grave danger that eventually no object of the world will be safe from consumption and annihilation through consumption.”47 The second obstacle was the conviction of premodern communities that their surplus of available energy should be devoted not to the production of goods for immediate consumption, but to the construction and maintenance of relatively permanent structures (roads, great buildings, and furnishings). If material desire were to be given free rein, no respect for permanence would be allowed to hinder its advance. Objects that once were considered permanent would come to be seen as goods suitable for rapid consumption. This transformation is precisely what happens, according to Arendt, in a consumer society: A booming prosperity . . . feeds not on the abundance of material goods . .  . but on the process of production and consumption itself. Under modern conditions, not destruction but conservation spells ruin because the very durability of conserved objects is the greatest impediment to the turnover process.48 Thus, buildings are now designed to last for only thirty to fifty years, furniture for five or ten, hamburger containers for two minutes. This lack of durability, moreover, is seen not as a defect but as an essential part of the community’s well-being. In order for society to organize itself around consumption, it is not sufficient to stimulate desire; it must also be able to respond to the consumer expectations thus generated. In the past, communities were inhibited from doing so by the third obstacle: human susceptibility to exhaustion and the need for regeneration. In the modern period, innovations in the division of labor surmount this obstacle.49 Reducing productive activities to a sequence of tasks requiring minimal skill enables society to turn out enormous quantities of goods. There is no longer any need to interrupt the production process while waiting for trained workers to recuperate from their exhaustion. The division of labor breaks complex techniques down into simple tasks that an abundant supply of unskilled laborers can step in to complete. What Lipietz analyzes as a recent event—the “Fordist compromise” that ratified further separation of management and labor, and the application of Taylorist scientific management techniques to labor—Arendt regards as only an additional step in a long evolution of the phenomenon of “society.” Both thinkers understand, however, that the resulting increase in productivity completes the cycle of the system. Enhanced material productivity supplies more goods; more goods feed into increased material appetite; enlarged appetites stimulate further productivity. Having overcome these obstacles, contemporary communities take the form of a “society of laborers.”50 Now, Greens could, I think, rightly insist on one amendment to this assertion. Arendt believes that, in the nineteenth century, work and its accompanying ethic of conspicuous production gave

406

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

way to labor’s norm of conspicuous consumption. She views this development with particular alarm, because her primary complaint against the modern world is its destruction of the public realm. Work at least favors an exchange market in which people can gather and appraise the quality of products. The triumph of society, in contrast, signifies that every public space is turned to the service of sustaining life. However, if we regard the destruction of the natural world, and not just the absence of political action, as one of the contemporary phenomena that we are most in need of understanding, then we must ask whether “the victory of the animal laborans” was quite so total, for labor, in spite of its penchant for consumption, is not intrinsically hostile to nature. Indeed, insofar as we labor, we learn to live with nature, coordinating our activities to its cycles: planting and harvesting, giving birth and fostering maturity, setting aside time for recuperation to follow exhaustion.51 It is work, as Arendt recognizes, that harbors the desire to do violence to nature by mastering and reshaping it. The extent of the destruction that we wreak on the environment depends on the powerful tools—the workobjects of Homo faber—that we use to strip mine, deforest, generate power, and pave over. Moreover, the pervasive means-ends reasoning of economic efficiency is what drives production in the search for ever-more powerful means of extraction and fabrication. Thus, if the instrumentalization and destruction of nature are principal factors conditioning human existence in the twentieth century, the mentalité of work must share some blame with labor. This revision should not be hard to accommodate within Arendt’s theory. Although most of her critical remarks regarding the contemporary world target the mentalité of labor, her larger argument is that animal laborans and Homo faber are deficient in the same way. Although both lack a commitment to a public realm, both need one, for only through the multiplicity of perspectives of a plurality of human beings can they bestow meaning on their existence.52 Labor is so closely engaged with meeting physical needs that it fails to develop a full awareness of a world that transcends immediate sensation. Work instrumentalizes the world, to the extent that no goal becomes final, and in doing so undermines the notion that there is any value that might make the whole chain of means and ends worthwhile. Public deliberation, Arendt suggests, is the only feature of the vita activa that validates individual experience with common sense. Arendt’s defense of action might amount to the realization that the values that make life worthwhile are constituted publicly. Only if we scrutinize standards from a great variety of perspectives do we gain confidence that they are not arbitrary assertions of particular wills. Shared experience and public deliberation are necessary to build the sense of certainty that gives meaning to our life-preserving and world-creating activities. Standards of equity and justice, beauty and nobility, and risk and responsibility depend on our collective judgment. This judgment emerges from “the judicious

ARENDT AND ECOLOGICAL POLITICS

 407

exchange of opinion about the sphere of public life and the common world, and the decision about what manner of action is to be taken in it, as well as to how it is to look henceforth, what kinds of things are to appear in it.”53 Deliberative judgments are very different from decisions reached by toting up individual preferences. They entail an examination of problems from the other’s perspective, not merely the assertion of one’s own interest. They involve a recognition that the decisions of participants are helping to constitute the way of life of an entire community. Viewed in this way, it is pointless to repeat accusations that laws imposing standards of safety, equity, or beauty on civil society are unjustified intrusions on individual freedom. To the contrary, framing all choices as a matter of purely individual decision is what threatens to undermine every standard that could make anything in existence a thing to be valued. Green complaints that “free” markets create a world of clear-cut forests and strip malls are grounded in the same insight. Markets aggregate private choices, but ignore the community-shaping function of deliberative judgments.

IV. Human Fulfillment and the Green Community According to some interpreters, Arendt’s critique of society comes from a distinctly elitist perspective. For Arendt, Martin Jay argues, “action is the highest of the three [activities,] for here men are engaged in the activity which is most ennobling: the public interaction through speech which is the essence of freedom.”54 Although this kind of action has always interested only a minority, what that elite does is the best that man can do. Moreover, it is because “society” is the communal form least disposed to action that Arendt treats it so harshly. If this interpretation is the only possible account of Arendt’s views, it is hard to imagine how she could contribute to Green thought. In this perspective, ecological politics seems doubly suspect. First, rather than heroic action, it concerns the lowly question of how to keep “nature’s household” clean. Second, in some cases ecological politics demands that we face up to massive restraints on human freedom imposed by our dependence on natural systems. Arendt’s writings, however, support a more umweltfreundliche interpretation. Her critique of society presupposes that the components of the vita activa can fit together in an optimal configuration—one that bears a striking resemblance to some Green recommendations for an ecologically sound way of life. In a review of Green literature that speculates on the contours of a sustainable society, Andrew Dobson highlights such features as “a de-emphasis on material things” and “a code of behavior that seeks permanence and stability”; a recognition of “work [as] a necessity of the human condition”; and “some form of participatory democracy”

408

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

that “encourage[s] greater participation and accountability.”55 Similarly, the proper ordering of a human life, as Arendt sees it, values but limits production. It takes pride in durable works, but does not allow them to determine the ends of the community. It encourages political participation, but accepts its dependence on the processes and products of mankind’s more material activities. For Arendt, although labor is the most humble and least free of activities, it also is an essential part of the human condition. “The perfect elimination of the pain and effort of labor,” she contends, “would not only rob biological life of its most natural pleasures but deprive the specifically human life of its very liveliness and vitality.”56 As a response to the necessities of our biological existence, labor offers us the opportunity to “swing contentedly in nature’s prescribed cycle, toiling and resting, laboring and consuming.”57 Labor plays a vital role in the psychic equilibrium of each individual’s existence. It immerses us in the feeling of life itself and so connects us to the world. Still, Arendt does not callously ignore the misery, ignorance, and deformity that have usually accompanied a life spent in labor. Although she sees the easing of toil through the refinement of tools—and the consequent opportunity to reduce the amount of time devoted to labor—as genuine progress, she does not aspire to abolish labor. She stops short of calling for its abolishment not because such an eventuality is technologically unattainable, but because “for mortals, the ‘easy life of the gods’ would be a lifeless life.”58 Even though work needs labor to sustain life, labor without work would be imprisonment in the cycles of the life process. In order to have a sense of place and individuality, labor needs a durable world sustained by fabrication.59 Work creates a world that relates and separates the members of a community. This fabricated world cuts across the natural cycles to give a feeling of permanence, location, and belonging. To treat fabricated objects as objects for consumption thus undermines crucial features of a truly human community. Work, too, is an essential part of a balanced human existence. Nevertheless, if labor or work were to dominate action, a fully human existence would again be in jeopardy, for the ethic of life governs labor and the ethic of instrumentality governs work. Fabricators always see objects in the world as “good for” something else, as things to be made useful by building them into a larger whole—which in turn derives its value from its usefulness in the fabrication of something else. The mentalité of Homo faber threatens a “devaluation of all values,” an instrumentalization of the world that leads to a never-ending deferral of the attribution of value and meaning.60 As a result, Arendt argues, action and speech are necessary complements to labor and work. The common sense that emerges out of communal deliberation and out of the history of great deeds establishes the conditions in which labor and work become part of a larger enterprise. Action provides a sense of intrinsic value insofar as it allows one to participate in the production of meaningful stories and remembrance.

ARENDT AND ECOLOGICAL POLITICS

 409

Those who read Arendt as an elitist believe that her emphasis on the meaning-giving significance of action, purely and simply, places it at the top of a hierarchy of human activities. In accordance with this interpretation, action in Arendt’s philosophy is analogous to contemplation in Aristotle’s, in which the best human life is the one devoted most exclusively to our highest capacity. Such a philosophy would eventually banish work and labor from the best human life. In contrast, my reading brings out Arendt’s belief that her three categories are interdependent and that the suppression of any category diminishes a fully human existence. Arendt demands a respect for the distinctive role and limits of each activity. She denies that “the same central preoccupation must prevail in all activities of men.” Her “use of the term vita activa presupposes that the concern underlying all its activities is not the same.”61 An active life combines labor, work, and action in a unique configuration. Labor both produces and respects a worked-upon world of more permanent creations; this world, in turn, derives its significance from public deliberation and memorialization. Deliberation needs labor’s energies in order to maintain its sense of life; it needs work’s accomplishments in order to appear. Maintaining the proper ordering of human existence is a matter of correctly integrating the three activities. Life becomes distorted if it is given over exclusively to laboring and consumption or to work and instrumentalization, or to deliberation and public display. Thus, adhering to this irreducible pluralism of activities leads us away from a life dominated by labor and consumption that—as many ecological political thinkers have concluded—is incompatible with the welfare of all living things. There is, nevertheless, still an important difference between Arendt and the Greens. While Greens often derive their vision of a good life from some combination of ecological necessity and ethical duty, Arendt approaches such issues from the perspective of a unique structure of activities required for human fulfillment. Typically (but not universally) Greens argue that we must reduce consumption because of the planet’s limited carrying capacity or that we have a duty to share labor so that all may enjoy the dignity of earning their own livelihood. The first argument is objectivist: it threatens us with material circumstances that will force us to change our way of life. The second argument is subjectivist, appealing to a sense of fairness. Not coincidentally, the objectivist argument calls forth authoritarian political solutions, such as William Ophuls’ conclusion that our choice is between “Leviathan or oblivion.” Subjectivist ethical appeals, on the other hand, have yet to prove their efficacy on anything like the scale necessary to dismantle the productivist system. Small wonder that eco-socialists often dismiss as so much wishful thinking hopes that the currently privileged will voluntarily sacrifice their standard of living. Subjectivist and objectivist approaches are alike, however, at least in one respect: both assume that an effective response to the ecological crisis depends on the repression of people’s ecologically unsustainable preferences, whether voluntarily by moral reason or coercively by the state’s authority.

410

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

Arendt’s intriguing alternative to the objectivist and subjectivist paths is based neither on threats nor on calls to sacrifice. If there is any truth to her understanding of the vita activa, then there is reason to hope that a particular form of a non-productivist life may be uniquely desirable— and stable. Its components reinforce one another. Political participation, for example, is not just a means to advance a Green agenda. Nor is it simply a potentially fulfilling activity that would remain available in a world less given to material consumption. A community that takes pride in collective deliberation fosters a way of life that limits the appeal of labor and work. It does so even apart from the content of its debates, because action itself favors the assertion of intrinsic values. Intrinsic values, in turn, guard against vitalism and comprehensive instrumentalization. Working to furnish the world does more than immediately counter a waste economy. It imparts a sense of permanence conducive to caring for the world. Sharing labor is not just a subjective matter of social equity or an objective necessity limiting production. A world in which labor is seen as only one part of a meaningful life will find consumption less tempting. In other words, there is a potentially stable configuration of the activities of the vita activa that can foster a corresponding non-productivist mentalité. To the extent that this is true, repression can recede as a theme in Green thought.

V. Conclusion: Nature and Value in the Vita Activa Although surprising, the resemblances between Arendt’s theory and Green thought are not simply fortuitous. There is a deeper agreement that underlies both positions. Both understand the importance of a conception of an order beyond humans in the ordering of a truly human life. In his eloquent and disturbing essay on The End of Nature, Bill McKibben argues that the magnitude of the human-made changes in the environment must, quite aside from all effects on our physical well-being, bring about a disquieting alteration in our ability to value our own achievements. Before the twentieth century, humankind transformed the environment, to be sure, with agriculture and urbanization. Nevertheless, even the largest effects were limited in scope. There were still vast areas of the Earth of which it could be said that “the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man.”62 With the greenhouse effect, pollution of the oceans, holes in the ozone layer, and other global changes induced by human activity, however, it becomes increasingly difficult to believe that any pristine place still exists. For example, if humans have caused the greenhouse effect, and if it alters climatic patterns worldwide, then we will no longer be able to look at a forest anywhere and say that it exists as it would have existed in the absence of humankind. The deepest effect of the end of nature, McKibben argues,

ARENDT AND ECOLOGICAL POLITICS

 411

is spiritual: the day is coming when “we can no longer imagine that we are part of something larger than ourselves.”63 The primal importance of recognizing something that exists apart from humankind, something that is immortal, something that has its own harmony and permanence—that is what we lose as all our experience brings us into contact with only our own doings. The price of the end of nature is not only the loss of awe before what is natural, but also the devaluation of our own non-natural accomplishments. We have our “victory” of human power over nature, but it is not the kingly achievement we dreamed of: “it is a brutish, cloddish power. . . . We sit astride the world like some military dictator . . . able to wreak violence with great efficiency . . . but not to exercise power to any real end.”64 Of course, we may devise technological remedies for some of these problems. Nevertheless, that strategy too ignores spiritual costs. Where “nature” is understood to be only molecules and forces and lines of genetic code—all malleable under the impact of human will—we end by losing our respect for the way things are independent of humankind. In the view of modern science, organisms are seen as “a set of instructions on the computer program that is DNA,” remarks McKibben. Yet, “it is impossible to have respect for such a set of instructions: they can always be rewritten”—and, it will inevitably be argued, should be rewritten for “the pleasure of man.”65 Finally, the end of nature erodes our confidence that the bounty of nature is assured, that its cycles have not been disrupted. We are left to our own devices to cope with the results of our activities, but with no certainty that a larger order assures our existence. McKibben concludes that “The certainty of nature . . . is what frees us to be fully human, to be more than simply gatherers of food.”66 According to Arendt, philosophy started in the apprehension of such an order, and keeping alive our primal sense of amazement before nature is the condition of retaining the optimal, non-productivist configuration of the vita activa. She recalls Plato’s comment “that thaumazein, the shocked wonder at the miracle of Being, is the beginning of all philosophy.”67 Philosophy is originally the rapture that humans feel before “the miracle of Being as a whole”: a Being that has an order and endurance and beauty that humans can only admire, never adequately recreate. Like the nature whose end McKibben laments, the philosopher’s Being invites contemplation of its beauty.68 Arendt draws much the same conclusion as McKibben when it comes to foreseeing the effects of turning our wondering gaze away from this order. It is only when modern science finally overturned the contemplative ideal (its discoveries by means of instruments belying any claims to truth based on contemplation) that the balance of the vita activa is lost. Arendt’s account of that consequence is worth quoting at length: The coincidence of the reversal of doing and contemplating with the earlier reversal of life and world became the point of departure for the

412

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

whole modern development. Only when the vita activa had lost its point of reference in the vita contemplativa could it become active life in the full sense of the word; and only because this active life remained bound to life as its only point of reference could life as such, the laboring metabolism of man with nature, become active and unfold its entire fertility.69 Her argument is that maintaining the balance of the active life depends on the existence of a “point of reference” outside of action. The distinct values of human activity threaten to collapse in on themselves if we lose the elevating reference to an order more wondrous than man’s. Plato made philosophy into that point of reference. But before him, thaumazein was superior because it was pure wonder at the miracle of Being, unmediated by categories drawn from the active life. The purity of this primordial marvelling assures us that there is something besides human life that incontrovertibly presents itself for our apprehension and admiration. In the absence of that wonder, we are driven to consider human life itself as the highest good. In doing so, we vindicate the mentalité of labor. As a consequence, the other human capacities of work and action falter. Like McKibben, Arendt could have written that “the certainty of nature . . . is what frees us to be fully human.” This discussion suggests a vital insight for Green political thought. Andrew Dobson writes: If there is one word that underpins the whole range of Green objections to current forms of human behavior in the world, it is probably “anthropocentrism.” Concern for ourselves at the expense of concern for the nonhuman world is held to be the basic cause of environmental degradation.70 It has become a common feature of debate in ecological politics for one theorist to charge another with anthropocentrism as soon as any concession is made to specifically human values and desires for a humanely built world. Certainly, any ecological politics that took inspiration from Arendt would soon run up against this criticism. Nevertheless, Arendt’s understanding of the active life suggests that our most distinctively human values—our desire for a stable material world based on a respect for beauty, our desire for participation in a community of peers based on a respect for justice— demand the presence of nature in order for them to hold their place in a fully human life. This insight is not the common (and accurate) observation that human beings are part of complex ecosystems and that they ignore their dependence on them at their peril. Nor is it simply an assertion that we must add the appreciation of nature to some lengthy list of human psychological needs. Rather, it is the contention that humankind’s “center” is off-center, eccentric, world-seeking. Arendt and McKibben show that a complete account of

ARENDT AND ECOLOGICAL POLITICS

 413

what it means to be human throws us back toward nature. The temptation to treat the natural world merely as an instrument for human purposes ends up ruining not only the natural world, but also human purposes themselves. Or rather, nature and human purposes are not distinct principles, the one in competition with the other. They are, from the start, existentially interdependent. Arendt’s study of productivism just might contribute something important to the discussion of these issues: not an ecological politics based on a biocentric egalitarianism that drives us to value equally human beings and fruit flies, but rather one based on a deeper understanding of how humanity needs a nature-respecting sense of “the miracle of Being” in order to attain the worthiest forms of existence.

Notes 1 This essay originally appeared as “Arendt and Ecological Politics,” Environmental Ethics 16, no. 4 (1994): 339–58. Published with kind permission of the author. 2 I know of a single exception: Joel Jay Kassiola, The Death of Industrial Civilization (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1990), esp. 113. 3 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, Anchor Books, 1959), 244. 4 Andrew Dobson, Green Political Thought (London: Unwin, Hyman, 1990), 15–19; Guillaume Saintény, Les Verts (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France), 53–55. 5 René Dumont, Les Raisons de la colère ou L’utopie des Verts (Paris: Éditions Entente, 1986), 55. 6 Robyn Eckersley, Environmentalism and Political Theory: Toward an Ecocentric Approach (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1992), 53–55. 7 Jonathan Porritt, quoted in Edward Goldsmith and Nicholas Hildyard, Green Britain or Industrial Wasteland? (Oxford: Polity Press, 1986), 343–44. See also Jean-Jacques Gouget, “Environnement et productivisme: L’impossible alliance,” Reflets et perspectives de la vie économique 24, no. 4 (1985): 239. 8 This statement comes from a motion proposed at the 1990 Assemblée Générale des Verts in Strasbourg, France. Tribune des Verts, no. 9 (1990): 5. 9 Brodhag, Objectif terre: Les Verts, de l’écologie à la politique (Paris: Éditions de Félin, 1990), 84. Dobson also notes that “most members of the Green Party in Britain . . . are serious about political power, but see their role principally in educative terms” (Dobson, Green Political Thought, 134). 10 “Les Verts et l’économie: Responsabilité, Autonomie, Solidarité,” 1992 electoral pamphlet. 11 See Kerry H. Whiteside, “The Political Practice of the Verts,” Modern and Contemporary France 48 (January 1992): 18–21.

414

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

12 Tribune des Verts, no. 9 (1990): 5. 13 Alain Lipietz, Choisir l’audace (Paris: Éditions la Découverte, 1989), 18–23. 14 “Les Verts et l’économie,” 3. 15 Arendt, Human Condition, 11. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid. 19 Eckersley, Environmentalism and Political Theory, 53. 20 Hannah Arendt, “Understanding and Politics,” Partisan Review 20, no. 4 (July–August 1953): 380. 21 See Bhikhu Parekh, Hannah Arendt and the Search for a New Political Philosophy (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1981), 66–68. 22 Arendt, Human Condition, 84. 23 Ibid., 76. 24 Ibid., 9. 25 Ibid., 186. 26 Ibid., 110. 27 Ibid., 86. 28 Ibid., 84. 29 Ibid., 87. 30 Ibid., 116. 31 Ibid., 80. 32 Ibid., 110. 33 Ibid., 153. 34 Ibid., 279. 35 Ibid., 122. 36 Ibid., 87. 37 Ibid., 10. 38 Ibid., 186. 39 Ronald Beiner, Political Judgment (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1983), 13. 40 Arendt, Human Condition, 171. 41 Ibid., 14. 42 Ibid., 25. 43 Ibid., 42. 44 Ibid., 42–43. 45 Ibid., 115. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid.

ARENDT AND ECOLOGICAL POLITICS

 415

48 Ibid., 229–30, emphasis added. 49 Ibid., 44. 50 Ibid., 42. 51 Ibid., 92. 52 Ibid., 212. 53 Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future (New York: Viking Press, 1961), 223. 54 Martin Jay, “Hannah Arendt: Opposing Views,” Partisan Review 45, no. 3 (February 1978): 352. 55 Dobson, Green Political Thought, 85, 109, 125. 56 Arendt, Human Condition, 103–4. 57 Ibid., 92. 58 Ibid., 103–4. 59 Ibid., 212. 60 Ibid. 61 Ibid., 17–18. 62 Bill McKibben, The End of Nature (New York: Doubleday, Anchor Books, 1989), 55. 63 Ibid., 83. 64 Ibid., 84. 65 Ibid., 167. 66 Ibid. 67 Arendt, Human Condition, 275. 68 Ibid., 14. 69 Ibid., 292. 70 Dobson, Green Political Thought, 63.

41 Evil James Bernauer

There was wisdom in the decision to give the name “Hannah Arendt Strasse” to the road that runs alongside Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. No one has done more than Arendt to focus attention on that evil and, in a way analogous to the memorial’s abstract design itself, on its resistance to easy description, let alone facile analysis. In 1945, she had predicted that the “problem of evil will be the fundamental question of postwar intellectual life in Europe—as death became the fundamental problem after the last war.”1 Unfortunately, philosophical discussion has found numerous exits from that road. Arendt would not have been surprised by this because few thinkers have been as disdainful of the insight to which German intellectuals laid claim. She refused to ignore or excuse Bertolt Brecht’s poetic praise of Stalin, just as she had earlier analyzed the fraternity of mob and elite in the period before the Nazi years. She had separated her own effort at political thinking from the anesthetizing impact of a traditional political philosophy debate that has all too often buried her historical approaches under a mountain of irrelevant, abstract philosophical refinements. She operates as a political thinker, probing the historically contingent action of the present. The question of evil all too often gets smothered by eminently forgettable commentary, but even with that tendency, the extreme character of the twentieth century’s atrocities often breaks through the discourse that sanitizes the language of evil. If the force of tragic events situated her thought to confront raw historical challenges, her early engagement with religious thinking gave her the spiritual category of “evil.” Her attendance at the lectures of Romano Guardini, her study of Søren Kierkegaard, and her dissertation on Saint Augustine forged a freedom for her from strictly naïve, secular analysis, and that liberty gives her work depth and originality. She had recognized that Augustine was the

EVIL

 417

“great thinker who lived in a period which in some respects resembled our own more than any other in recorded history, and who in any case wrote under the full impact of a catastrophic end, which perhaps resembles the end to which we have come.”2 She was tutored in appreciation of “radical evil” far less by Kant than by Augustine’s struggle with the Manichean conviction of evil’s primordial status. And Augustine’s later recognition of evil as privation certainly foreshadowed Arendt’s understanding of the “thoughtlessness” of Eichmann, of his inability to think. Her grasp of evil in the conduct of bureaucrats has shaped the contemporary perception of modern institutions and their contribution to a “banality of evil,” that is, their fostering of an interdependence of thoughtlessness and evil activity.3 The field of evil is very wide for religious consciousness, and that range is reflected in her sensitivity to different forms of wickedness throughout her writings. For example, in her comments on the post-Eichmann trials of those who had worked at Auschwitz, she claimed that the “chief human factor in Auschwitz was sadism, and sadism is basically sexual.”4 She goes on to say that the “smiling reminiscences of the defendants . . . and their unusually high spirits throughout . . . reflects the sweet remembrance of great sexual pleasure, as well as indicating blatant insolence.”5 Over sixty years ago, Philip Rieff had the insight that Arendt’s writings possessed their power in large part because they organized historical explanations within a religious or spiritual horizon of meaning.6 In The Origins of Totalitarianism, for example, the focus of her portrayal is not the wicked deeds perpetrated by individual men but rather a fallen state, a sinful condition, which is a feature of our age or, as the book’s original British title had it, the burden of our time. This fallen condition is described as an “absolute evil,” by which she means that it is not comprehensible in terms of wicked motives of “self-interest, greed, covetousness, resentment, lust for power, and cowardice.”7 It is the human person’s rebellion against the human condition itself, the determination to create a new man according to technologies justified by ideological claims to absolute knowledge of the laws of life and history. Cecil Rhodes’s wish—“I would annex the planets if I could”—expresses the desire of excess and expansion that is the passion of our epoch. Running through much of her work is a sense of universal responsibility for crime that has often been misinterpreted as a moral condemnation not only of victimizers but also of victims. In fact, she is describing a fallen state that makes revolt against the human condition a universal temptation. She will later pay tribute to the American Revolution’s awareness of a Christian realism that prevented its leaders from sharing the “absurd hope” that man “might still be revealed to be an angel.”8 She will praise this realism in a number of other contexts, a praise that is in some tension with her tendency to see images of unworldly innocence as also having their source in Christianity. This realism is beyond the horizon of a strictly narrow secular perspective committed to a universal innocence that is only lost by the evil actions of specific individuals. Totalitarian evil operated on a different terrain, and Arendt had recourse to a religious geography in

418

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

order to capture it. For her, concentration camps represented “basic western conceptions of a life after death.”9 Purgatory is represented by the Soviet Union’s labor camps, where neglect is combined with chaotic forced labor. Hell in the most literal sense was embodied by those types of camp perfected by the Nazis, in which the whole of life was thoroughly and systematically organized with a view to the greatest possible torment.10 National Socialism declared the “superfluousness” of human beings and thus created those “living corpses” who inhabited death camps after the demolition of their moral status and individual identity.11 The evildoers were not the Satanic figures one might have expected as capable of inflicting such ruin and torment, but rather bureaucrats such as Adolf Eichmann. Her portrait of him still registers with students of mass murderers, even as she has been correctly faulted for downplaying his ideological passions. A dramatic example of her superior grasp of his inner life, though, is on display in a response he makes to his Israeli police interrogator on why he abandoned the ideas that guided him during the war: “I have to confess it frankly: I wasn’t able to chuck the whole thing overboard overnight. I shifted to a different stage only gradually. . . . To tell the truth, it took a rocket landing on the moon. From then on, a radical change went on inside me.”12 On the first page of The Human Condition, Arendt had reflected on reactions to the first journeys into space, and she was troubled by the initial reaction of some who applauded them as the first “step toward escape from men’s imprisonment to the earth.”13 She went on to claim how this statement reflected the dangerous worldlessness of our age—a worldlessness that prepared for mass murder by destroying bonds of fellow feeling.14 It is as though Arendt, writing several years before the capture of Eichmann, had already entered into the essential mentality of the man she was later to confront in Jerusalem. While Arendt’s name will always be associated with that of Eichmann, there are others whom she called to our attention that are far more worthy of remembrance: her mentor, Karl Jaspers; her friend Waldemar Gurian; and the benevolent Dr. Franz Lucas of the Auschwitz death camp. Probably most memorable for Arendt, however, was the German sergeant, Anton Schmidt, who rescued Jews and who paid for it with his life, executed by his own nation. Reacting to the hush that had settled over the Eichmann courtroom with the account of Schmidt’s heroism, Arendt wrote, And in those two minutes, which were like a sudden burst of light in the midst of impenetrable darkness, a single thought stood out clearly, irrefutably, beyond question—how utterly different everything would be today in this courtroom, in Israel, in Germany, in all of Europe, and perhaps in all countries of the world, if only more such stories could have been told.15

EVIL

 419

The lesson that evil’s triumphs teach is that they result from failures of personal judgment, for example, the willingness of people who argued that it was better to stay on their jobs in order to prevent worse things from happening. That rationalization covers over the fact that it was these people who were needed to keep the system operating. And then there was the argument of the lesser evil, but, in Arendt’s view, as time passed, people would forget that their choices were being guided by that “lesser evil” and not by a superior good. The lesson for how evil might fail? One’s willingness to live together explicitly in conversation with oneself is the key commitment of a life that has challenged the movement of evil.

Notes 1 Hannah Arendt, “Nightmare and Flight,” in Essays in Understanding 19301954 (New York: Schocken Books, 2005), 134. 2 Arendt, “Understanding and Politics,” Partisan Review 20 (1953): 390. 3 Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind I: Thinking (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 3–16. 4 Arendt, “Introduction” to Bernd Naumann, Auschwitz: A Report on the Proceedings Against Karl Ludwig Mulka and Others Before the Court at Frankfurt (New York: Prager, 1966), xxvii–xxviii. 5 Ibid. 6 Philip Rieff, “Theology of Politics: Reflections on Totalitarianism as the Burden of Our Time,” Journal of Religion 32 (April 1952): 119–26. 7 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1968), viii–ix, 459. 8 Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Viking Press, 1963), 90. 9 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 445. 10 Ibid., 445. 11 Ibid., 451, 453. 12 Jochen von Lang and Claus Sibyll, eds., Eichmann Interrogated: Transcripts from the Archives of the Israeli Police (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1983), 281. 13 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd ed. (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1958), 1. 14 The Origins of Totalitarianism shows how anti-Semitism, imperialism, and totalitarianism are forces committed to the replacement of worldly experience: an historical people, a defined nation-state, and a pluralism of human associations. 15 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company), 231.

42 Freedom Catherine Kellogg

In one of her most demanding and philosophically dense texts, Hannah Arendt argued that understanding freedom is crucial to politics, notwithstanding the fact that this “seems to be a hopeless enterprise.”1 This seeming hopelessness stems from the fact that freedom’s meaning derives from Western philosophical and metaphysical traditions; traditions that inadequately take into account the social and political determinants of its appearance. Specifically, as she argues, in antiquity, freedom was first understood as a status and in that sense, a kind of property of persons, only to be transformed by Christian doctrine where that property came to be understood as an inner realm that was synonymous with free will. In the modern era, freedom came to be understood, especially by the social contract theorists, as the capacity to overcome a first nature in order to partake in a second, social and political nature, accomplished by becoming both individually and collectively indivisible. Freedom thus came to be conceived on analogy with sovereignty, a position with which she vigorously disagrees. However, Arendt gives us a way to think our way out of the seeming hopelessness of thinking freedom when she says: The possible advantage of our situation following the demise of metaphysics and philosophy would be two-fold. It would permit us to look at the past with new eyes, unburdened and unguided by any traditions, and thus dispose of a tremendous wealth of raw experiences without being bound by any prescriptions as to how to deal with those treasures.2 For Arendt, the demise of metaphysics does not mean that we should forget it, leave it behind and search for something completely new. The  break

FREEDOM

 421

from tradition is not a break from the past. Rather, it is a break from the prescriptions of how to read the past. We remain the inheritors of a tremendous wealth of values and ideas, but they come with no instructions as to how best make use of them. This perspective allows her to provide a genealogy of Western philosophical and metaphysical understandings of freedom, making note of the fundamental mistakes we inherit from that history. Despite Arendt’s admiration for Kant’s “insight that freedom is no more ascertainable to the inner sense and within the field of inner experience than it is to the senses with which we know and understand the world,”3 the Kantian idea that freedom is the ability to provide a law for oneself is clearly inadequate for thinking political freedom. For Arendt, insofar as freedom is thought in terms of subjective autonomy, which is to say, a subject able to move freely, unimpeded by all inner and outer obstacles, we have entered into a reductio ad absurdum, insofar as this necessarily means the impossibility of entering into relation with anyone else. Freedom thought as subjective autonomy eviscerates the entire political inflection of freedom. As she says, The freedom which we take for granted in all political theory and which even those who praise tyranny must still take into account is the very opposite of “inner freedom,” conceived as the inward space into which men may escape from external coercion and feel free. This inner feeling remains without outer manifestations and hence is by definition, politically irrelevant.4 As long as freedom is understood to be a property of the mind or will, it is posited, crudely, as the freedom from other wills, and thus loses its active and practical dimensions. Indeed, Arendt said that the “obscure wood” into which philosophy has lost its way owes its greatest debt to Kant who established freedom as a phenomenon of thought itself. For Arendt, “freedom turns out to be a mirage the moment psychology looks into what is supposedly its innermost domain.”5 As she describes it, Kant inherits this point of view from ancient philosophers and then Christians, for whom freedom was conceptualized as an interior “place” of absolute freedom, by those who had no place of their own in the world, and in this sense, as a kind of property for those deprived of property, place or home. This is to say, before it came to be understood as an attribute of thought or will, freedom was understood to designate the status of men who were free to meet and act with others who shared it. As she says: Before it became an attribute of thought or a quality of the will, freedom was understood to be the free man’s status, which enabled him to move, to get away from home, to go out into the world and meet other people in deed and word. This freedom clearly was preceded by liberation: in order to be free, man must have liberated himself from the necessities of life.6

422

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

Thought in this way, Hannah Arendt’s infamous denunciation of what she called, “the social” is based on what she identifies as politicizing what is necessarily normatively anterior to political freedom: necessity, or the private or privative dimensions of biological life that were the purview of those without property. Here she is referencing (inter alia) an infamous passage from The Politics in which Aristotle suggests that politics is not an attribute of the living being, but rather the specific difference between animals and humans that defines the human species as such. For Aristotle, it is peculiar to the human species to be capable of speech, notwithstanding the mysteries of biological life that resist human representation and thus overwhelm human understanding. On Aristotle’s account, life in the classical Athenian polis was a life worth living because it depended upon the performance of simple living—biological existence—by those who were not free and were consequently excluded from the good life: slaves and women. On Arendt’s view, the dividing line between the household and politics axiomatic to the Greek city-state became blurred in the modern era, so that political communities, like nation-states, came to be understood on analogy with families, whose everyday affairs had to be taken care of by an enormous nationwide administration of housekeeping.7 The form of knowledge emerging from this administration was, on Arendt’s view, thus no longer political science but rather national or social economy. And Arendt attributed the decadence and conformism of the political realm in modern societies to the primacy of necessity over freedom as political action.8 For Arendt, this means that in the modern era, political communities deserving of legal recognition came to be understood on analogy with elements from “the social,” for example, families and cultural communities: “Where men live together but do not form a body politic—as for example in tribal societies or the privacy of the household—the factors ruling their actions and conduct are not freedom, but the necessities of life and concern for its preservation.”9 Under these conditions, freedom came to be associated less with a set of structuring principles and more with a capacity of the individual will. The difficulty here is that will “follows judgement”— or those principles for action—which is to say, it follows from the ability to discern the “right aim” and it is only then that it “commands its execution.” Thus, “the power to command, to dictate action, is not a matter of freedom but a question of strength and weakness.”10 As we will see, will implicates judgment but not power, which like freedom, is inexhaustible. Indeed, “for the history of the problem of freedom, Christian tradition has indeed become a decisive factor” insofar as we automatically equate freedom with “free will.”11 As she says, it was with the early Christians, and particularly Paul, who discovered “a kind of freedom which had no relation to politics” that the concept of freedom entered into the “history of philosophy.”12 For Arendt, freedom has nothing to do with the will at all. But since the whole problem of freedom arises for us in the horizon of Christian traditions on the one hand, and of an originally anti-political

FREEDOM

 423

philosophic tradition on the other, we find it difficult to realize that there may exist another freedom which is not an attribute of the will but an accessory of doing and acting.13 With the Augustinian interpretation in particular, we see the rise of freedom thought as a kind of self-control, because on his account, it appears that there are two wills fighting in the heart of every man, particularly the will of the mind, and that of the body. Historically, this means that the ideal of freedom continued from late antiquity and early Christianity, well into the eighteenth century, with such thinkers as Thomas Paine and Jean-Jacques Rousseau grappling with how to conceive of freedom in terms of a will no longer at war with itself. Seen in terms of this genealogy, the capacity of the individual will has come to be understood, specifically, as the capacity to rule over oneself in a sovereign or king-like fashion. Particularly for the social contract theorists, freedom is understood to be the ability to master certain “natural” desires— the desire to take or do anything we like—in order that the political collectivity “we” might become is finally, indivisible.14 Freedom is thus understood to be identical to sovereignty, which is to say, it entails becoming sovereign over our “first natures” in order to partake of the benefits of sociality, including the benefit of participating “freely” with others who are similarly sovereign over themselves. This is such an egregious error that Arendt said: This identification of freedom with sovereignty is perhaps the most pernicious and dangerous consequence of the philosophical equation of freedom and free will. . . . The famous sovereignty of political bodies has always been an illusion, which, moreover, can be maintained only by the instruments of violence, that is, with essentially non-political means. . . . If men wish to be free, it is precisely sovereignty they must renounce.15 Against the fantasy of freedom thought either as an inward domain or as sovereignty, Arendt invites us to think freedom as action. As she says, “the appearance of freedom . . . coincides with the performing act. . . . To be free and to act are the same.”16 Freedom, then, is not a quality or a property of persons, but a verb, and for her, this action is helpfully illustrated by Machiavelli’s concept of virtu, which implies the capacity to perform in public in an improvisational manner. For a performing art to be virtuosic, “the accomplishment lies in the performance itself and not in the end product.”17 Free action is always improvised in public, and it does not outlive its own performance. The virtuosity of our action, the improvisation we make collectively in the public sphere, she says, “is actually the reason that men live together in political organization at all.”18 For Arendt then, the true exercise of freedom does not follow from our individual personhood; it is not the beloved liberal dream of choosing freely among alternatives, nor is it a quality having to do with the will. It is a

424

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

completely political notion insofar as it follows from and relies upon such social conditions as place, time, and political belonging. This is because any action takes place in a certain time, under certain conditions. And any political action takes place with others. Freedom is rare because it is limited to the very moment of its being put into action, and without a public realm, “freedom lacks the worldly space to make its appearance.”19 The subtlety of Arendt’s position means understanding the human person as a social being—one who requires place, belonging, and a community to be free. This assertion makes sense of the particular frustration she reserves for Rousseau since he argued that “a divided will would be inconceivable,” and that in order to create true solidarity, “each citizen should think only his own thoughts.”20 This would mean that any meaningful social intercourse would be subverted, a point made by Rousseau who argued that “it is absurd for the will to bind itself for the future.” As Arendt puts it, any community built on a sovereign will would be built on “quicksand.”21 Any action worthy of the name free is political, and that means it requires a political community for its appearance. But that also means that that the moment of the founding of a political society—a founding that makes the appearance of freedom possible—is utterly fragile. It’s not surprising that Arendt’s thought has become a critical reference for debates about sovereignty because on her account, the conception of freedom on analogy with sovereignty obscures the key advantages to political life, which is the possibility of making something new happen. Thinking freedom in terms of sovereignty—in terms of the ability to rule over oneself (either as an individual or as a collectivity)—misses this most important dimension of what freedom really means, which has nothing to do with autonomy (or authority) at all, but with the capacity to act. Thus, to press the point that her conception of freedom marks a radical departure from the social contract theorists, Arendt’s notion of free action as the potential to produce something new does not assume a state of anarchy prior to law but rather is made possible by the demarcation of political and social realms, between freedom and necessity. Arendt insisted on noticing the ways that the Greek archein—translated as “rule”—is vitally related to the Greek archē, or beginning. Thus, while the sovereign models of power she attacks understand “rule” as what comes after anarchy, Arendt’s attack on sovereignty and rejection of theories of freedom based on the sovereign will of the private subject is illuminated by the way that she insists that sovereign models of law and power posit anarchy or unruliness as having been overcome or settled as a consequence of the rule of law. As she says, Whatever ancient literature, Greek as well as Latin, has to tell us about these matters is ultimately rooted in the curious fact that both the Greek and the Latin languages possess two verbs to designate what we uniformly call “to act.” The Greek words [mean] to begin, to lead, and finally, to rule; and [also] to carry something through. The corresponding Latin

FREEDOM

 425

verbs are agree: to set something in motion; and gerere, which is hard to translate and somehow means the enduring and supporting continuation of past acts whose results are the res gestae, the deeds and events we call historical. In both instances action occurs in two different stages; its first stage is a beginning by which something new comes into the world. The Greek word . . . which covers beginning, leading, ruling, that is the outstanding qualities of the free man, bears witness to an experience in which being free and the capacity to begin something new coincided. Freedom, as we would say today, was experienced in spontaneity.22 Arendt’s notion of free action, as that with the potential to reconfigure or disrupt the public and produce the new does not assume a state of anarchy prior to action, but rather is actually made possible by the demarcation between political and social realms, the very rules that free action paradoxically threatens to defy or exceed. Thus, Arendt’s understanding of freedom, tied as it is to concepts of action and natality has much in common with Walter Benjamin’s conception of divine violence, which is to say, it relates directly to the potential for being politically interruptive structurally rather than normatively. Further, it implies that in the political, these events will always necessarily be “out of time.” Arendt’s theory of free action, then, entails as a kind of secular “miracle” in that it brings something completely new into the world: “Our whole existence rests, after all, on a chain of miracles, as it were—the coming into being of the earth, the development of organic life on it the evolution of mankind out of the animal species.”23 Arendt tells us that the problem of the “new” confronts us with the difficulty of imagining an event that would not be what Kant called the “continuation of a preceding series.”24 Here, she is following Aristotle, for whom time (as all things) is assumed to be a thing with parts; it is made up of a past, a present or a now, and a future.25 For Aristotle, however, only the now can, strictly speaking, be said to exist. In other words, a thing can only be said to have an existence insofar as it has a presence, an existence in the present. From this it follows that those things that are in the past (already), or in the future (not yet), cannot be said to be. This criterion for existence, as Heidegger points out, leads immediately to a paradoxical problem with the “being of time.” If a thing with parts is to be at all, all or some of its parts must also be. Since its parts, past and future, are not, time does not show itself capable of substantial being. Any time span is assumed to be divisible into past and future, so that any “now” that is presumed to be extended in the sense that “now it is 6 o’clock” falls prey to such division. Given the non-being of past and future, only that which is instantaneously present deserves to be addressed by “is.” Thus, on one hand, Aristotle describes the “now” as the present and as the instant, and on the other hand the “now” as both identical and different. The present and instant are dual characteristics of the “now.” The present is continual

426

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

freshness, its ever-changing position between past and future, while the instantaneous character of the “now” is its indivisibility, the result of the operation of dividing time into past and future. Considered as an instant, the “now” does not seem to be a part of time, for following the image of time as a line, the now does not go to make up time as a line any more than a point goes to make up a line. This is why the “new now” presents us with the problem of freedom: no word or deed that can be accounted for by “a reliable chain of cause and effect.” In a precise sense, this is what Hannah Arendt means by “natality”: it is the capacity to bring something new into the world that “breaks into the world like an infinite improbability.”26 Arendt’s arresting prose is punctuated by this kind of description of moments out of time that splits into the historical world. A particularly good example is the opening paragraphs of the section of The Origins of Totalitarianism called “Decline of the Nation State and the End of the Rights of Man.” There she says: It is almost impossible, even now, to describe what actually happened in Europe on August 4, 1914. The days before and the days after the first World War are separated not like the end of an old and the beginning of a new period, but like the day before and the day after an explosion.27 Of course, this “splitting” or breaking of history requires that some future remains; some political formation must endure. Thus, while Arendt’s political theory is, in a nutshell, a theory of freedom, deeply indebted to her understanding of time as radically open to new possibilities, political freedom is clearly not just a matter of the new “moment” between past and future. It also requires a political structure or political organization that can hold or endure as the space of freedom’s appearance. This worldly political space is rare enough: “Power is what keeps the public realm, the potential space of appearance between acting and speaking men, in existence” but “power is actualized only where the word and deed have not parted company, where words are not empty and deeds not brutal.”28 And again “what keeps people together after the fleeting moment of action has passed (what we would today call ‘organization’) and what, at the same time, they keep alive through remaining together, is power.”29 But even though this political organization is rare, it is all important: “To be deprived of it means to be deprived of reality, which humanly and politically speaking is the same as appearance. To men, the reality of the world is guaranteed by the presence of others, by its appearance at all.”30 Among the most difficult thoughts entailed in Arendt’s understanding of the freedom to begin something new, is that we are entangled in a chain of events whose effects are unknowable, but for which, at the same time, we are also responsible. This is why Arendt’s theory of freedom as the capacity to bring something new into the world, a capacity to break history in two,

FREEDOM

 427

is also a theory at bottom, a theory of responsibility. We are born in such a way that we are always responding to others and so to be undertaking deeds and words that we didn’t begin, and send them along through more words and deeds whose results are limitless. “The reason why we are never able to foretell with certainty the outcome and end of any action,” Arendt explains, “is simply that action has no end.”31 And, because our action is necessarily plural in the sense that it requires the assistance of others to be completed, we face having to accept the burden of freedom in a network of uncertain relationships, and the burden of being carried to unknown and unknowable destinations, while at the same time being responsible for those actions. The result is that whoever acts never quite knows what they are doing, and so can become “guilty” of consequences they never intended or even foresaw. It means that no matter how unexpected the consequences of our deeds and words, we can never undo them. Even more perilously, the processes we start are never finished unequivocally in one single deed or event. And the meaning of those words or deeds is never disclosed to the actor(s) but is left to the “backward-directed glance of the historian and the analytical zeal of the political scientist” who do not act. The fact of this “simultaneous presence of freedom and non-sovereignty, of being able to begin something new and of not being able to control or even foretell its consequences”32 means that freedom, as a matter of possibility, contra Rousseau, requires the presence and interaction of others and thus a common space of appearance and action. Arendt says about that common space of appearance and action that it “does not always exist, and although all men are capable of deed and word, most of them . . . do not live in it. No man, moreover, can live in it all the time.”33 This is one of the many reasons Arendt is so compelled by the virtue of courage, because with freedom and responsibility comes sorrow. Arendt begins her chapter on “Action” in The Human Condition with an epigram from Isak Dinesen: “All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them” opens the chapter on Action from The Human Condition.34 And as she says in the preface to Part Three of The Origins of Totalitarianism: “With the defeat of Nazi Germany, part of the story [of the Second World War] had come to an end. This seemed the first appropriate time . . . to try to tell and to understand what had happened, not yet sine ira et studio, still in grief and sorrow and hence, with a tendency to lament, but no longer in speechless outrage and impotent horror.”35 For Arendt, human beings and not a human being inhabit the earth and this plurality is a specific mark of what is peculiarly human. At the same time, action always produces a “who” found in the narration of events, a “who” that is judged, found responsible for those actions by those who write and tell the story of what happened, always after the fact. The question of the meaning of those new events—narrated by the historian and the political scientist—is taken up most carefully in The Life of the Mind. There (and elsewhere) Arendt proposes that thought is marked

428

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

by duality. (And again, with her remarkable position on thinking, we can see again why she found Rousseau’s conception of an undivided General Will so distasteful.) Thinking is a conversation between I and myself, an activity of asking and answering.36 The criterion for action is “whether I shall be able to live with myself in peace when the time has come to think about my deeds and words.”37 For Arendt, this two-in-one of thought points to the infinite plurality which is the law of the earth and “explains the futility of the fashionable search for identity.”38 And so long as I am together with others, barely conscious of myself, I am as I appear to others. We call consciousness (literally, as we have seen, “to know with myself”) the curious fact that in a sense I also am for myself, though I hardly appear to me, which indicates that the Socratic “being one” is not so unproblematic as it seems; I am not only for others but for myself, and in this latter case, I clearly am not just one. A difference is inserted into my Oneness.39 For Arendt, thinking has no political relevance, and does not appear in the public world of appearances. It is judging that makes thinking manifest in the world of appearances. This judging is a public disclosure of who has acted, and what it has meant, by way of the opinion of spectators—historians and political analysts—who judge its meaning, and by the world situation to which it responds.

Notes 1 Hannah Arendt, “What Is Freedom?,” in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Viking, 1968), 145, 143. 2 Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (London: Harcourt Press, 1978), 12. 3 Arendt, “What Is Freedom?,” 144. 4 Ibid., 146. 5 Ibid., 144. 6 Ibid., 148. 7 See, in particular, Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1998). 8 The feminist debates about Arendt’s delineation of the family and private life from the political or public life are important here. 9 Arendt, “What Is Freedom?,” 148. 10 Ibid., 152. 11 Ibid., 157. 12 Ibid., 158. 13 Ibid., 165.

FREEDOM

 429

14 Ibid., 163. 15 Ibid., 164, 5. 16 Ibid., 152–53. 17 Ibid., 153. 18 Ibid., 146. 19 Ibid., 149. 20 Ibid., 163. 21 Ibid., 163–64. 22 Ibid., 165, 166. 23 Ibid., 169. 24 Arendt, The Human Condition, 205. 25 Aristotle, Physics, 217b33-18a6. 26 Arendt, “What Is Freedom?,” 169. 27 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Press, 1976), 267. 28 Arendt, Human Condition, 200. 29 Ibid., 201. 30 Ibid., 199. 31 Ibid., 233. 32 Ibid., 235. 33 Ibid., 199. 34 Ibid., 175. 35 Arendt, Origins, xiii. 36 Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (London: A Harvest Book Harcourt Brace & Company, 1971), 185. 37 Ibid., 191. 38 Ibid., 187. 39 Ibid., 183.

43 Imperialism Jennifer Gaffney

Hannah Arendt’s discourse on the European imperial period between 1884 and 1914 is indispensable for her broader analysis of totalitarianism. Indeed, following her discussion of modern anti-Semitism in The Origins of Totalitarianism, she devotes the second part of this work to European imperialism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, maintaining that “it may be justifiable to consider the whole period a preparatory stage for the coming catastrophes.”1 Whereas Europe’s earlier colonial enterprises had treated expansion as a means to conquering new territories and establishing new settlements that could absorb the law of the mother country, expansion became an end in itself during the imperial period, one that furthered Europe’s rapid economic development but that was fundamentally at odds with the structure of the nation-state.2 The nation-state, in conceiving of its law as an outgrowth of a unique national substance, loses its legitimacy when it is expanded beyond the consent of its people and territorial boundaries.3 Yet by the end of the nineteenth century, when capital had reached further into foreign markets than ever before, national governments realized that the export of government power would have to follow the export of money to prevent the loss of a major part of the national wealth.4 These governments thus extended a new kind of power into the colonies, one that served not to establish political bodies but to protect the limitless growth of capital development. As Arendt explains, such aimless power, “when left to itself, can achieve nothing but more power, and violence administered for power’s (and not for law’s) sake turns into a destructive principle that will stop at nothing until there is nothing left to violate.”5 Hence, it was during this period, when business had been transformed into a political issue and power had been cut free from any political goal, that a new form of politics emerged.6 Far from establishing

IMPERIALISM

 431

political bodies, imperial politics reached its logical consequence in “the destruction of all living communities, those of the conquered people as well as of the people at home.”7 With this, Arendt argues, came a new form of nationalism that no longer needed the law or state to sustain itself, but that relied instead on a principle of racial superiority that was able to transcended class distinctions and national borders. In Arendt’s view, this brand of racism coupled with the lawless and aimless power of imperial governments had real and immediate “boomerang effects” on the European continent, creating fertile ground for the rise of totalitarianism in the period between the World Wars.8 Arendt’s analysis of the European imperial experience, and particularly, her “boomerang thesis,” has proven to be as contentious as it is complex. On the one hand, Arendt was among the first of her generation in Europe to suggest that European imperial expansion and the racist, proto-genocidal political strategies that drove it played a decisive role in producing the political culture necessary for the rise of totalitarianism after the First World War.9 In exposing this relation, her political project bears greater resemblance to the work of her contemporaries such as W. E. B. Dubois, Aimé Césaire, and Frantz Fanon than it does to many of her European counterparts. In view of this, scholars have suggested that Arendt has an important contribution to make to discourses in postcolonialism, critical race theory, and African studies that has yet to be fully appreciated within these fields.10 On the other hand, this aspect of Arendt’s work has also been heavily criticized in two regards. First, scholars have challenged the viability of Arendt’s boomerang thesis, arguing that the connection she establishes between European imperialism abroad and the rise of totalitarianism at home is tenuous at best, failing to provide a theoretical framework to establish a clear relationship between the two. Second, and more recently, scholars have suggested that Arendt employs a rhetoric to describe the subjects of European imperial and colonial rule that seems to reaffirm the very racism that she attempts to challenge in her discourse on Europe’s imperial experience.11 The question thus arises as to how to understand Arendt’s contribution to discourses concerning the global impact of Europe’s imperial and colonial enterprises, no less than her broader concerns for human plurality and political belonging, in light of these critical receptions of her project. While Arendt’s analysis of European imperialism has received less attention than other aspects of her work, it nevertheless constitutes an important part of the interpretative frame she uses in her enduring effort throughout her career to comprehend the phenomenon of totalitarianism. As such, Arendt’s discourse on imperialism provides a decisive point of departure for understanding the scope and limits of her broader political project and, especially, her analysis of the experience of alienation, domination, and exclusion in modern political life.

432

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

From Imperialism to Totalitarianism: The Boomerang Thesis and Its Critics The first line of criticism that has emerged in response to Arendt’s discourse on imperialism concerns her “boomerang thesis,” which she introduces in The Origins of Totalitarianism to establish a dynamic link between the European imperial experience in Africa between 1884 and 1914 and the rise of totalitarianism on the continent after the First World War.12 It was during this period of European expansion, Arendt argues, that “the race principle” became a fully functioning mechanism for transforming “stranger and alien others” into superfluous, nonhuman entities in order to justify their domination, exploitation, and extermination.13 Such justification depended on the development of a structure of government that could reinforce and reproduce this superfluity. Two new political devices were thus discovered during the imperial period in the service of this end—namely, racism as a principle of the body politic and bureaucracy as a principle of foreign domination.14 Arendt explains that while racism has always attracted the worst parts of European civilization, bureaucracy has attracted those who view themselves as fulfilling the highest ideals of the nation and who are willing to travel abroad to assume responsibility for these ideals in the context of those thought to be primitive and inferior.15 In this, she says, “Race . . . was an escape into an irresponsibility where nothing human could any longer exist, and bureaucracy was the result of a responsibility that no man can bear for his fellow man and no people for another people.”16 During the imperial period, Arendt argues, race became a substitute for the nation, allowing national unity to expand beyond the territorial boundaries of the nation-state, while bureaucracy became a substitute for the state, enabling colonial administrators to suspend the law through temporary and changing decrees in order to accelerate the unending process of expansion.17 Taken together, racism and bureaucracy became the organizing principles of imperial politics, creating a mechanism for the suspension of the law and the total domination of the subjected races. In Arendt’s view, the political culture that this bureaucratic racism produced had real and immediate “boomerang effects” on the behaviors of European peoples.18 She says: The full impact of the African experience was first realized by leaders of the mob like Carl Peters, who decided that they too had to belong to a master race. African colonial possessions became the most fertile soil for the flowering of what later was to become the Nazi elite. Here they had seen with their own eyes how peoples could be converted into races and how, simply by taking the initiative in the process, one might push one’s own people into the position of the master race.19 Likewise, she argues that the use of bureaucracy to dominate foreign peoples led officials in the colonies to become increasingly indifferent to the law, declaring that “‘no ethical considerations such as the rights of man will be allowed

IMPERIALISM

 433

to stand in the way’ of white rule.”20 In light of this, Arendt maintains that Europe’s imperial experience abroad provided the crucial ingredients for the rise of totalitarianism at home, making possible the dissolution of the classes into the masses by means of a principle of race unity and the transformation of the state into a secretive and lawless instrument of total domination.21 While the novelty of Arendt’s “boomerang thesis” has been widely acknowledged, scholars have nevertheless suggested that the link she attempts to establish between European imperial practices in the colonies and the rise of totalitarianism on the continent lacks explanatory power. Margaret Canovan set the stage for this line of criticism in her 1974 work The Political Thought of Hannah Arendt. There, Canovan argues that while Arendt offers some of her most brilliant insights in this part of The Origins of Totalitarianism, she only succeeds in establishing a “quasi-link” between the ideologies that Europe’s imperial practices produced in the colonies and the emergence of ideologies in Europe, such as pan-Germanism and pan-Slavism, which provided a foothold for the rise totalitarianism in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.22 Even in the more compelling case of Germany, Canovan argues, the boomerang thesis is neither obvious nor necessary to explain the rise of totalitarianism.23 Likewise, L. H. Gann and Peter Duignan have argued that while “Arendt sees colonialism abroad as a source of fascism at home,” the German colonial experience in Africa was too short-lived to have a significant impact on the political or intellectual climate of Germany.24 In their view, it was the First World War that gave rise to totalitarianism, not colonialism, and while Germany’s involvement in the scramble for Africa might have played some role in the formation of the totalitarian ideologies of Nazi Germany, the leaders of National Socialism had little interest in overseas colonialism.25 More recently, Seyla Benhabib has reiterated Canovan’s claim that Arendt fails to provide adequate support for her boomerang thesis and its implications for liberalism.26 Like Canovan, Benhabib challenges Arendt’s view that imperial racism and bureaucracy had a destructive impact on the political and cultural values of Europe, suggesting that Arendt’s discussion is based on hunches and intuitions rather than sound historical evidence.27 Hence, while these scholars agree that Arendt’s boomerang thesis is intriguing, they nevertheless believe that she stops short of transforming this insight into a theory that has explanatory force, failing to demonstrate how European imperialism and colonialism corrupted the democratic structures and liberal values of the West.28

Overlooked Legacies of Exclusion: Arendt on Sub-Saharan Africa The second line of criticism that has emerged in response to Arendt’s discourse on imperialism focuses on a conflict between her insights into

434

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

the proto-genocidal racism that drove this period of colonial expansion in Europe and her problematic characterization of non-European indigenous populations.29 Shiraz Dossa initiated this line of criticism in his 1980 essay, “Human Status and Politics: Hannah Arendt on the Holocaust.” Here, Dossa argues that Arendt employs a notion of the human being throughout her work that is ethnocentric, privileging the values and traditions of the European over the colonized other, and especially the sub-Saharan African.30 According to Dossa, Arendt acknowledges throughout much of her work that the political practices of the West have, since antiquity, been accompanied by genocidal massacre and the violent domination of foreign peoples.31 In spite of this, however, Arendt believes that the Holocaust, in particular, was a novel and unprecedented moment in the history of the West, revealing, for the first time, the way in which this violence can be thrown back on itself, resulting not only in mass murder but also in an assault on the culture and civilization that gave birth to the idea of human freedom. It is here that Dossa locates Arendt’s ethnocentrism. He explains that Arendt took the rise of totalitarianism in Europe to reveal that “freedom can be used to eliminate its own conditions of existence: plurality and individuality. Totalitarianism is an exercise in the liquidation of freedom and restraint, and the arbitrary mastery of men.”32 In Dossa’s view, Arendt assumes that those colonized others whose fate had been similar to the Jewish people in Nazi Germany lacked a culture, history, and civilization that was expressly human. He suggests that for Arendt, similar events of extermination in the colonies did not reveal the same horrifying possibility of human freedom. This, Dossa thinks, comes into view most clearly in Arendt’s characterization of the sub-Saharan African in The Origins of Totalitarianism. He says: Inability to master nature sufficiently, to fabricate an artifice beyond the one naturally given, to establish public bodies—that is the combined political human failure of the Africans. In broader and related terms the blacks testify, in Arendt’s view, to a general lack of human culture and morality: people who had “escaped the reality of civilization.” For Arendt, although their murder is clearly unjust it is somehow not immoral.33 On the basis of this, Dossa argues that the European moral and cultural context in which Arendt was writing produced an ethnocentric strain in her thought that framed her claims regarding the uniqueness of the Holocaust. This ethnocentric strain, Dossa says, is explicit in Arendt’s characterization of sub-Saharan Africans in The Origins of Totalitarianism and implicit in her broader project.34 He argues that Arendt repeats this characterization of non-European peoples in subsequent works concerning race and racism in the African Diaspora and thus calls for the interrogation of Arendt’s racial attitudes and the role they play in shaping her political assumptions.35

IMPERIALISM

 435

More recently, scholars, including Robert Bernasconi and Kathryn Gines, have given further contour to this criticism, drawing attention to Arendt’s blindness to non-European peoples in The Origins of Totalitarianism while highlighting an analogous problem in her later works concerning race and racism, particularly in the United States. Bernasconi, for instance, challenges Arendt’s boomerang thesis from the perspective of her racial attitudes and her commitment to the heritage of Western thought. He argues that Arendt hesitated to go as far as other non-European thinkers in establishing a clear connection between European imperialism and the rise of totalitarianism for fear of undermining the dignity of the Western tradition altogether. Bernasconi thus maintains that Arendt’s insights into the question of imperialism not only lack the novelty that is often ascribed to them but also perpetuate the racist assumptions inherent in Western political thought.36 With this, he suggests that Arendt’s concern for undermining the dignity of the Western tradition colors other aspects of her work such as her appeal to the distinction between the social and the political realms. This, he argues, blinds her to the distinctive forms of exclusion that have been produced by anti-black racism, particularly in the United States.37 Bernasconi notes that Arendt acknowledges in On Revolution as well as in “Civil Disobedience” the original crime of slavery and the tacit exclusion of African descended people from the American Constitution. In spite of this, however, he argues that she nevertheless favors a mythical reading of the original spirit of the American Revolution in her criticism of the civil rights movement in her 1959 essay, “Reflections on Little Rock.” In this essay, Arendt criticizes NAACP leaders for focusing on social issues concerning discrimination in employment, housing, and education rather than political goals that sought to open a space of freedom.38 Bernasconi argues that Arendt fails to appreciate in her criticism of school desegregation that a white racial hierarchy is bound up with the American political tradition, creating conditions in American social life that keep nonwhite Americans from appearing in the space of politics.39 For this reason, Bernasconi says, “She has provided an account of political community that lacks the resources necessary to address the divisions sustained by racism.”40 Arendt’s attachment to the Western tradition, he suggests, thus leads her to neglect the distinctive forms of exclusion that have been produced by the global impact of European empire building.41 Similarly, Gines has argued in her recent work, Hannah Arendt and the Negro Question, that Arendt has a fundamentally flawed orientation to what Gines calls “the Negro question.” Specifically, Gines maintains that Arendt frames issues of slavery, colonialism, and imperialism in ways that neglect the role that white institutions and political practices play in perpetuating anti-black racism. Gines argues, too, that while Arendt’s discourse on the Jewish question has direct bearing on the Negro question, Arendt overlooks these implications of her own analysis.42 While Arendt is

436

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

able to see the Jewish experience of exclusion as a political phenomenon, Gines explains that she is unable to do the same in the case of anti-black racism, leading Arendt to represent African descended people in a distorted manner throughout her work.43 In Gines’s view, Arendt demonstrates this not only in texts such as “Reflections on Little Rock” and “On Violence” but also in The Origins of Totalitarianism, where she recognizes the impact of imperial ideology on European culture, but nevertheless assumes the perspective of the European in her representation of Africans.44 Arendt, Gines argues, correctly identifies racism as a tool used by Europeans to exploit and oppress non-Europeans. Yet in focusing solely on the imperial period between 1884 and 1914 to develop her boomerang thesis, Gines argues, Arendt overlooks the European legacy of slavery and colonization in the Americas that became a powerful force in European politics as early as the seventeenth century.45 In so doing, Gines argues, Arendt fails to see the broader impact of this legacy on European political and intellectual culture, leading Arendt to overlook the racist assumptions that might have been at work in her own representation of African descended people.46 On the basis of this, Gines maintains that while she is “not attempting to dismiss Arendt’s thought altogether and label her as a racist,” we should not dismiss these aspects of Arendt’s thought as mere idiosyncrasies, or else we run the risk of missing the role that her broader political philosophy plays in perpetuating Eurocentric assumptions and anti-black racism in political thought today.47

Conclusion In light of these two lines of criticism, we may wonder whether there is anything to glean from Arendt’s discourse on the European imperial experience, and, moreover, if the limits of this aspect of Arendt’s work undermine the viability of her larger political framework. While this is certainly one way to proceed, other scholars, including Richard H. King, Christopher Lee, Pascal Grosse, David Scott, and Nick Nesbitt, have taken a different angle of approach in their responses to these criticisms. To this end, they have expanded Arendt’s thought beyond the European nation-state to those regions and peoples most impacted by the European legacy of imperialism and the forms of exclusion that it has produced.48 In so doing, they complicate and challenge Arendt’s project, while also reimagining her thought within these contexts in order to open new paths for addressing pressing issues in fields such as de-colonial and postcolonial theory, European imperial history, and diasporic studies. In view of this, we find that while Arendt certainly does not go far enough, there is still much work to be done to deepen, challenge, and shed new light on this aspect of her thought in order to address the global impact of the European imperial experience on contemporary political life.

IMPERIALISM

 437

Notes 1 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1973), 127. 2 Ibid., 123, 126. 3 Ibid., 127. 4 Ibid., 135. 5 Ibid., 137. 6 Ibid., xvii. 7 Ibid., 137. 8 Ibid., 206. 9 I have borrowed the term “proto-genocidal” from Richard H. King’s introduction to Hannah Arendt and the Uses of History: Imperialism, Nation, Race and Genocide, ed. Richard H. King and Dan Stone (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007), 3. 10 See for instance Christopher J. Lee, “Locating Arendt within Post-colonial Thought: A Prospectus,” College Literature 38, no. 1 (2011): 95–114, and “Race and Bureaucracy Revisited: Hannah Arendt’s Recent Reemergence in African Studies,” in Hannah Arendt and the Uses of History: Imperialism, Nation, Race and Genocide, ed. Richard H. King and Dan Stone (New York: Bergahan Books, 2007), 68–86. See also, Pascal Grosse, “From Colonialism to National Socialism to Post-colonialism: Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism,” Postcolonial Studies 9, no. 1 (2006): 35–52, Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, “Colonial Discourse and Post-colonial Theory: An Introduction,” in Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 1–20, and Norma Claire Moruzzi, “Re-placing the Margin: (Non)Representations of Colonialism in Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 10, no. 1 (1991): 109–20. 11 See Kathryn T. Gines, “Race Thinking and Racism in Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism,” in Hannah Arendt and the Uses of History: Imperialism, Nation, Race and Genocide, ed. Richard H. King and Dan Stone (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007), 49. 12 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 3. 13 Ibid., 206. 14 Ibid., 185. 15 Ibid., 207. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid., 215. 18 Ibid., 206. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid., 221. 21 King, Hannah Arendt and the Uses of History, 3. While Arendt’s specific claims regarding bureaucratic racism are indeed novel, other non-European

438

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

scholars in the Americas and the Caribbean had been engaged in a similar effort to establish a link between European imperialism and fascism. Perhaps the most notable articulation of this appears in Amié Césaire’s 1955 work Discourse on Colonialism, where Césaire argues that the ascendance of National Socialism in Germany cannot be thought apart from Europe’s legacy of empire, colonialism, and slavery. In this, Césaire attempts to challenge the view that Hitler’s rise to power was an aberration in the progression of Europe’s enlightenment. Instead, he argues that this impulse toward totalitarian terror was already deeply engrained in the European psyche, a product, he suggests, of the colonial violence that Europeans had been committing against non-European peoples across the globe for centuries. See Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1955). 22 Margaret Canovan, The Political Thought of Hannah Arendt (Slingsby: Methuen, 1977), 38. See also, King, Hannah Arendt and the Uses of History, 9. 23 Ibid. 24 L. H. Gann and Peter Duignan, The Rulers of German Africa, 1884-1914 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1977), 215, n. 4. 25 Ibid., 213–15. 26 Seyla Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (New York: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2000), 83. 27 King, Hannah Arendt and the Uses of History, 12. 28 Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt, 83. 29 King, Hannah Arendt and the Uses of History, 10. 30 Shiraz Dossa, “Human Status and Politics: Hannah Arendt on the Holocaust,” The Canadian Journal of Political Science 13, no. 2 (1980): 309–23, 310. 31 Ibid., 317. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid., 319. 34 Ibid., 320. 35 Ibid. 36 See Robert Bernasconi, “When the Real Crime Began: Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism and the Dignity of the Western Philosophical Tradition,” in Hannah Arendt and the Uses of History: Imperialism, Nation, Race and Genocide, ed. Richard King and Dan Stone (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007), 55–67. 37 Robert Bernasconi, “The Double Face of the Political and the Social: Hannah Arendt and America’s Racial Divisions,” in Research in Phenomenology 26, no. 1 (1996): 3–24, 4. 38 Ibid., 16. 39 Ibid., 18. 40 Ibid., 4. 41 Ibid.

IMPERIALISM

 439

42 Kathryn T. Gines, Hannah Arendt and the Negro Question (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2014), 123. 43 For instance, Gines argues that Arendt fails to connect her own childhood experience of anti-Semitism to the experience of anti-black racism and the challenges it poses for black parents attempting to raise their children to be political agents in a world that refuses to allow them to appear. Moreover, Gines maintains that while Arendt advocates for the political importance of a Jewish army in the context of the Warsaw ghetto and is keenly aware of analogous forms of violent oppression that have been carried out against African descended people through the colonial system, she nevertheless arrives at the opposite conclusion in her analysis of the violence that figures like Sartre and Fanon call for in response to colonial oppression. See Gines, Hannah Arendt and the Negro Question, 123. 44 Ibid. 45 Gines, “Race Thinking and Racism in Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism,” 39. 46 Gines turns specifically to Arendt’s use of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in The Origins of Totalitarianism, arguing that “Heart of Darkness is a thoroughly racist text, even if it also functions to expose and possibly condemn imperialism. . . . The fact that Arendt accepts and embraces this racist image of Africa undermines her efforts to position herself against racism.” See Gines, “Race Thinking and Racism in Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism,” 50. 47 Gines, Hannah Arendt and the Negro Question, 1. 48 See, for instance, Richard H. King, “Hannah Arendt and the Concept of Revolution,” New Formations 71, no. 03 (2011): 30–45, 30, Christopher Lee, “Locating Hannah Arendt within Postcolonial Thought: A Prospectus,” College Literature 38, no. 1 (2011): 95–114, Nick Nesbitt, Universal Emancipation (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2008), and David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).

44 International Law: Its Promise and Limits Natasha Saunders

Hannah Arendt never wrote extensively on international law, and her scattered engagements with it betray no simple or encompassing view on international law’s place in global politics or in her wider thought. Indeed, rather than engaging with “international law” as a single, coherent body of law, she engages with distinct and developing aspects of it at specific points in time, and she engages with human rights law and international criminal law in particular. The particularities of Arendt’s analyses of statelessness and of the trial of Adolf Eichmann are addressed in other chapters in this volume, and so I will not rehearse them here. In this chapter, I outline how Arendt’s engagements with international law are revelatory not of a view on the place of international law per se in global politics but of evidence of an attempt to work through what different branches of international law could potentially do, and not do, for international communal life after totalitarianism.

International Human Rights Law Arendt had no simple view on the role to be played by international law in the realm of human rights. On the one hand, she was critical of human rights law as it existed at the time—it was, of course, in its infancy. On the other hand, her reflections on the flaws in international legal attempts to secure human rights also indicated a potential role that could be played by international law in the future, provided we paid due attention to the

INTERNATIONAL LAW

 441

paradox revealed by the experiences of the interwar period. However, this potential role for international human rights law should not be understood as a panacea for the challenges posed to making human rights a reality of lived experience. In short, while Arendt left open the possibility that international human rights law could develop in the needed direction in the future, her analysis also indicates that we must be wary of overstating what international law could do and must refrain from seeing international law as the solution to the fundamentally political problem of mutually guaranteeing human rights for each other in political communities. A fundamental paradox of human rights was revealed in the interwar period when millions of people appeared who, in losing their legal status— their nationality—had genuinely become nothing but human, and yet they were unable to rely upon their supposedly inalienable human rights, when arguably they needed them most. The nation-state appeared incapable of guaranteeing human rights for those who had lost nationally guaranteed rights, leading Arendt to posit that there existed only one truly human right, the right to have rights: the right to belong to a political community that is willing and able to guarantee all of one’s other rights. Not only was this the one right that was never recognized in the various declarations of rights, but even if it had been, such declarations were, in Arendt’s view, politically ineffective. Declarations of rights, grounded in the dignity or nature of man, deal with man in the abstract. But for Arendt, neither man nor rights make sense in the abstract. What the experience of the stateless demonstrated was that rights can only truly exist, can only be experienced, in a community. Enumerating rights is not sufficient to ensure the meaningful and effective enjoyment of those rights, as this can only come when they are mutually recognized by the members of a political community. The nation-state had failed to be or to remain such a community, and so it was necessary, in Arendt’s view, to reimagine the nature of the communities to which the right to have rights would correspond, while the right to have rights should itself be guaranteed by—guaranteed, not grounded or founded upon—humanity itself. Arendt, however, was skeptical about the prospects for international human rights law developing such a new guarantee: Contrary to the best-intentioned humanitarian attempts to obtain new declarations of human rights from international organizations, it should be understood that this idea transcends the present sphere of international law which still operates in terms of reciprocal agreements and treaties between sovereign states; and, for the time being, a sphere that is above the nations does not exist.1 This statement should not, however, be interpreted as completely pessimistic. Just because “a sphere . . . above the nations” did not exist “at present” does not mean that such a sphere was completely beyond the realm of possibility. Arendt’s words of caution about the most obvious candidate for

442

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

such a sphere, a “world government,” do, however, indicate an important limitation to any such project of development of international human rights law. A world government, she cautions, is just as open to the exclusionary logic of “insiders” and “outsiders” as the nation-state turned out to be, It is quite conceivable, and even within the realm of practical political possibilities, that one fine day a highly organized and mechanized humanity will conclude quite democratically—namely by majority decision—that for humanity as a whole it would be better to liquidate certain parts thereof.2 Arendt’s cautions about the desirability of a world government as a solution to the problem of guaranteeing the right to have rights bring into relief the fundamentally political, rather than legal, predicament of human rights. The development of international human rights law in the direction of institutional guarantees of the right to have rights in a “sphere above the nations” could only ever provide partial protection. Since rights are neither natural nor pre-political, they can only be recognized in a political community and be guaranteed through reciprocal recognition of equality and freedom by one’s co-members. In short, human rights must be mutually guaranteed as a matter of political practice, and not merely legal declaration. Law has an important role to play in the protection of human rights: mutual guarantees of political equality needed man-made laws to give them a degree of permanence.3 However, as Arendt states in “What is Freedom?,” no institutional structure—no matter how perfectly designed—can be immune from its own potential erosion and decay: political institutions depend for their survival on the continued actions of men and women.4 The historical decline of the nation-state analyzed by Arendt demonstrates that institutions established to protect rights can always decay and be turned against them. If the fundamental flaw with international human rights law lies in its attempt to ensure with declarations what can only be guaranteed by continued political practice, then there are many ways in which Arendt’s reflections are still relevant today. While human rights have formally been decoupled from citizenship, and human rights treaties are now transposed into positive law in signatory states, the experience of refugees and stateless people today indicates that we still have a long way to go in mutually guaranteeing to each other the right to belong to a political community willing and able to guarantee all our other rights. Arendt’s analysis thus not only highlights the flaws with our understanding of human rights but also indicates that more law cannot solve this problem by itself.

International Criminal Law Writing to her former mentor, Karl Jaspers, in 1946, Arendt stated that the crimes committed by the Nazis “explode the limits of the law; and that

INTERNATIONAL LAW

 443

is precisely what constitutes their monstrousness. For these crimes, no punishment is severe enough. . . . That is, this guilt, in contrast to all criminal guilt, oversteps and shatters any and all legal systems.”5 Fourteen years later, prior to attending the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt wrote, again to Jaspers, that “it seems to me that we have no tools to hand except legal ones with which we have to judge and pass sentence on something that cannot even be adequately represented either in legal terms or in political terms.”6 She ends the letter with a preliminary view of the importance of the case that would be confirmed by watching the trial unfold: “the Eichmann case has shown that we need a court for criminal cases in The Hague.” While Arendt was fiercely critical of attempts to turn the Eichmann trial into a historical or political lesson,7 she nevertheless saw, in the way the trial unfolded, a missed opportunity for establishing an “international penal law” that could play a part in defending humanity against the recurrence of such monstrous crimes. The trial, ultimately, failed to understand the nature of the crimes and failed to understand the new type of criminal that Eichmann represented. The development of the International Criminal Court forty years later has gone some way to addressing the first, but is perhaps by its nature not capable of addressing the second. The nature of the deeds of which Eichmann stood accused necessitated, in Arendt’s view, the development of a body of international criminal law and a permanent court up to the task of adequately prosecuting them. Eichmann had not simply facilitated the murder of millions of Jews; he had committed a monstrous crime against the human status as such. The Eichmann trial did succeed in clarifying the difference between war crimes, “inhuman acts,” and crimes against humanity “with sufficient clarity to become part of a future international penal code.”8 However, the trial had failed to recognize that the extermination of which Eichmann was accused was more than a crime against the Jewish people; that such crimes had injured and endangered the whole of humanity. And so, while according to the precedents set by previous tribunals, Israel had the right to sit in judgment of Eichmann, Arendt felt that “the very monstrousness of the events is ‘minimized’ before a tribunal that represents one nation only,”9 and so an international criminal court was required to do justice to it. Recognizing the nature of these crimes, developing the required body of criminal law and creating an institution appropriate to pass judgment and punishment on them was a vital step to take if we wished to deter future would-be perpetrators from engaging in these crimes: “if genocide is an actual possibility of the future, then no people on earth . . . can feel reasonably sure of its continued existence without the help and the protection of international criminal law.”10 Crimes committed against humanity as such cannot adequately be dealt with in national courts applying national laws. Over forty years later, such a court has finally been established, the International Criminal Court, which does indeed have jurisdiction over these new crimes, although it must defer to national courts when they are willing and able to prosecute them. There is one important

444

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

aspect, however, of these new crimes that even subsequent developments of international criminal law have failed adequately to come to terms with: the new type of criminal that Eichmann represented. It is entirely possible, however, that this is beyond the capacity of the law as such. In addition to Eichmann’s pleas that he had been merely a cog in a machine, he also maintained his innocence on the basis that he had obeyed not only orders but also the law. While Arendt felt that this was no defense, she did think that it highlighted a vitally important issue with our understanding of criminal liability. What seemed to elude the Jerusalem court was an understanding of the importance of the legal and moral context of the Third Reich. In her reflections on the functioning of Eichmann’s conscience, Arendt identified in Eichmann a person who “equates right with normal and wrong with exceptional.”11 In ordinary circumstances, this is not particularly problematic, although Arendt certainly thought that it was confused. But the Third Reich was anything but ordinary. It was a society in which ordinary morality had been completely turned upside down, and legal rules and exceptions had been inverted:12 rather than “Thou shalt not kill,” the law now required “Thou shalt kill.” The criminal nature of the state itself needed to be understood as this was an environment in which it became “well-nigh impossible”13 for a person like Eichmann, a person who lacked “an unequivocal voice of conscience,”14 to recognize that he was doing wrong. Arendt draws out the importance of this when she examines the issue of obedience to orders. An obedience-to-orders defense would only be considered valid when the orders to be obeyed are not “manifestly unlawful.” Such unlawfulness “should fly like a black flag above [it], as a warning reading, ‘Prohibited.’ In other words, the order, to be recognized by the soldier as ‘manifestly unlawful,’ must violate by its unusualness the canons of the legal system to which he is accustomed.”15 The problem was, for Arendt, that in the Third Reich, the black flag reading “prohibited” flies over orders such as the one Eichmann received from Himmler to stop the deportations to the death camps and not, as the court presumed, over the order to ship millions of people to their deaths.16 Obedience to orders is similarly addressed in The Rome Statute of The International Criminal Court. A defendant can be relieved of criminal responsibility if the order that he/she is under a legal obligation to obey is not known to him/her as a being unlawful, and that the order itself was not manifestly unlawful. Rome Statute, Art. 33(1), Section 2 of Article 33 of the statute does state that “orders to commit genocide or crimes against humanity are manifestly unlawful,” but while that may help us prosecute these crimes in the future—undoubtedly an important task— it does not help us develop our understanding or recognition of the new type of criminal: an individual who commits such monstrous crimes in the absence of mens rea, in the absence of intention to commit a crime. But, perhaps, this is what international criminal law could not do. International criminal law can help turn cogs back into men and punish them for their deeds. We perhaps should not expect international criminal law to assist in

INTERNATIONAL LAW

 445

the development of our capacities to make moral judgments for ourselves,17 and it was understanding this capacity to which Arendt turned in the last years of her life.

Conclusion Arendt clearly felt that in order for humanity to move forward in the shadow of totalitarianism and its crimes, we have serious political and legal work to do. The development of international law—in relation to both human rights and criminal law—had an important role to play in rebuilding communal life after the Holocaust. But Arendt felt it would be a mistake to rely on international law to solve political problems. International criminal law, by turning a cog back into a person, could render justice—to the extent that this was even possible—for crimes against humanity, but the law cannot ensure that we develop capacities to think that could help us to do the right thing when the chips are down. And, while the protection of human rights should not be abandoned solely to the nation-state, new international institutions will be no surer guarantee for the right to have rights, as this right can only be guaranteed as a matter of political practice.

Notes 1 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1973), 298. 2 Ibid., 299. 3 Ayten Gündoğdu, “Perplexities of the Rights of Man: Arendt on the Aporias of Human Rights,” European Journal of Political Theory 11, no. 1 (2011): 4–24, 11. 4 Hannah Arendt, “What Is Freedom?” in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (London: Penguin, 2006): 142–69, 152. 5 Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers, Correspondence: 1926-1969, ed. Lotte Kohler and Hans Saner (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1992), August 17, 1946. 6 Ibid., December 23, 1960. 7 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (London: Penguin, 2006), 286–89. 8 Ibid., 275. 9 Ibid., 270. 10 Ibid., 273. 11 David Luban, “Hannah Arendt as a Theorist of International Criminal Law,” Georgetown Public Law and Legal Theory Research Paper No. 11-30 (2011): 26. 12 Ibid.

446

13 Ibid., 276. 14 Ibid., 148. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid., 148–49. 17 Ibid., 159–89.

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

45 Justice: Arendt in Jerusalem and the Problem of Judgment Vincent Lefebve Translated by Zachary Fouchard

Eichmann in Jerusalem is not just a book about the problem of evil, but it also contains a profound reflection on the meaning of human justice. This dimension is not always recognized, most notably because Arendt herself is ambivalent about providing a full-throated account of it. The considerations on justice that she proposes are mingled with more critical remarks on certain aspects of the judgment rendered in 1961 by the Jerusalem District Court1 charged with judging the crimes committed by Adolf Eichmann, one of the main architects of the Holocaust.2 This ambiguous praise of justice is the object of the considerations that follow. I will show that the “shock,” as she called it, of the Eichmann trial led Arendt to develop a theory of justice that can be qualified as monist. In effect, Arendt believes that a trial is not intended to serve general historical and political purposes but that it should only focus on determining the responsibility of the individual. In this theoretical framework, Arendt underlines the greatness of the judiciary, which results from the fact that even in the age of mass society, there exists an institutional place in which human actions are judged as singular actions. The Arendtian praise of justice is based on a theory of judgment as a political faculty of the highest importance, allowing the subject to take root in the world and in the plurality that

448

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

constitutes it, as well as rehabilitating the autonomy of the individual in the face of historical processes. The idea of personal responsibility, established through judicial means and by means of legal notions, procedures, and legal reasoning, therefore constitutes a possible response to the challenge addressed to our categories of thought and judgment by the advent of totalitarian crimes. However, according to Arendt, the Jerusalem judges were not able to fully meet this challenge, which explains the critical tone that permeates certain passages of Eichmann in Jerusalem.

Justice in Jerusalem Arendt’s reflections on justice, far from being situated at a purely theoretical level, were activated by an actual judicial event, namely, the Eichmann trial. While she did not attend the entirety of the high-profile trial, she did go to Jerusalem, sent by The New Yorker magazine. She then proposed a report that took the form, first, of several articles published in the magazine, then a book in its own right. The book led to an immense set of polemics of international scope, the details of which I cannot attend to here.3 I merely insist on the fact that this controversy masks one of the central subjects of this work, namely, justice. From the first pages of Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt traces a frontal opposition among the protagonists of the trial: on one side the prosecutor Gideon Hausner and on the other, the three judges, and especially the president, Moshe Landau. In addition to his “cheap rhetoric,”4 she reproaches Hausner for substituting the authentic objective of the trial with a more general objective: inserting the Holocaust and the creation of the state of Israel into the millennial history of anti-Semitism. Yet, according to Arendt, the purpose of a trial, however exceptional, is not to serve the national interest or to write history but to the interpret law and bring about justice. The task of the Jerusalem Court was therefore the following: to weigh the charges against the accused, listen to the arguments of the prosecution and the defense as well as the witnesses, evaluate the documents produced by the parties, and, finally, render a verdict. A verdict concerns a singular person, not a political system, an abstract idea, or a historical trend. In this sense, Arendt believes that the Jerusalem judges, whose human qualities she strives to underline (they are good, show restraint, are above the fray, etc.), perfectly understood their role. They tried “to prevent this trial from becoming a show trial under the influence of the prosecutor’s love of showmanship”5 and also refused to judge, through the Eichmann case, anti-Semitism or the Third Reich. One can criticize Arendt for developing a narrow conception of the role of law and justice,6 conservative even, according to some,7 that relegated witnesses and victims to somewhat of a secondary role.8 The general point of view concerning the idea of justice that emerges from Eichmann in Jerusalem is in effect characterized by its uncompromising monism.

JUSTICE

 449

A single task is assigned to the Jerusalem judges: it is not a question of playing politics—as Ben Gurion would have it, who saw the trial as an opportunity for an edifying justification of the creation of the State of Israel—nor is it a question of writing history, as attorney general Hausner would have it, who tried to confer upon the Holocaust the status of the ultimate stage in the millennial history of anti-Semitism, but rather to “render justice.”9 However, in a more positive light, Arendt’s position has the merit of not making justice a mere tool for external and allegedly higher political purposes. With respect to international criminal justice in particular, the fact that Arendt insists so much on the theme of justice makes it possible to distinguish the philosopher from contemporary authors who see international criminal justice above all else as an instrument serving other objectives (reconciliation, pacification, education of populations involved in conflict, etc.). Such a conception of justice, moreover, remains relevant today when contrasted with the increasingly important place given to victims in criminal, national, or international proceedings.10

The Greatness of the Judiciary Within the scope of a single trial, Arendt endeavors to highlight the greatness of the judicial process, the dignity of justice as such. At a time when we would want to make every individual a simple cog in a complex machinery, there is an institution in which behavior is assessed on an individual basis, an institution in which a person cannot escape his or her responsibility on the pretext of an unavoidable historical trend or a momentary paralysis of his or her faculty of judgment due to exceptional political circumstances. Totalitarianism strives to transform each individual into a mere cog in a machinery that surpasses it. However, once the totalitarian enemy has been defeated, it is possible to treat its most faithful servants, those who claimed an “obedience of corpses”—as was the case with Eichmann11—as responsible human beings. It is in fact a common humanity that enables professional judges to assume the task at hand, by postulating that the persons who appear before them also belong to the human race and that it is in this respect that they will be judged.12 Emphasizing the benefits of individual responsibility when mass crimes have been committed13 is also a way of guarding against a line of defense often used in such trials that dilute the responsibility of the individual in the name of so-called collective guilt. If every member of a group is found guilty, no one truly is, warns Arendt, referring to the necessary distinction between “moral or legal” guilt and responsibility, which can be political.14 Arendt thus does not adhere to a theory of “small cogs”; she does not consider that Eichmann would only have been a passive element in the complex machinery of Nazi totalitarianism, a circumstance that, in a certain way, would deny him any responsibility. Arendt admits that this “cog-theory,”15 as she calls it,

450

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

can to some extent explain the functioning of a system, whether totalitarian or simply bureaucratic. However, the great advantage of the judicial process, which offers the greatness of the mechanisms of legal proceedings, is that it does not attach any importance or only an extremely marginal importance to such cog-theories. The accused at the center of a trial is considered to be responsible for his or her actions and is to be held accountable; before a court, the “cog” is understood to be a “person.”16

A Philosophy of Judgment The theme of judgment is central to Eichmann in Jerusalem and the controversy that the book provoked. In an epistolary exchange with Arendt that treated the question of the responsibility of Jewish leaders in the implementation of the Holocaust, Gershom Scholem was critical of what he saw as an unjustified questioning of decisions taken at the time by some of these leaders. He addressed Arendt with the following warning: “I do not know whether they were right or wrong. Nor do I presume to judge. I was not there.”17 This objection haunted Arendt unrelentingly: “Finally, and in a way most surprisingly, since after all we dealt with a trial whose result invariably was the passing of a judgment, I was told that judging itself is wrong: no one can judge who had not been there.”18 In order to refute Scholem’s objection, Arendt proposed a kind of reductio ad absurdum: if the question “Can we judge past events or occurrences at which we were not present?”19 must be answered in the negative, it would imply that no historical or juridicial work could ever be possible. What do historians and judges do if not judge factual situations in which they have not participated? We must, Arendt proposes, question and overcome this “fear of judging,” which fosters a reluctance evident everywhere to make judgments in terms of individual moral responsibility.”20 Here, we see Arendt’s preference for a particular kind of judgment that, following Kant, she qualifies as reflective.21 In the Critique of Judgment,22 Kant distinguishes two types of judgments. On the one hand, determining judgments assume that the general rule and the particular object of judgment are both given. In such cases, the particular object is simply judged according to the rule that is at our disposal. Such determining judgments can take the form of a syllogism of the kind: all men are mortal (major); Socrates is a man (minor); Socrates is mortal (conclusion). On the other hand, reflective judgments imply that a particular object is given, but without reference to any general rule. In such cases, we must therefore reflect upon the universal on the basis of the particular. The model of reflective judgment developed by Kant in the context of an aesthetic reflection on taste is thus applied by Arendt to the political sphere. In politics, Arendt thinks that judging consists of “making judgments directly and without any standards.”23 This position is contrary to the traditional

JUSTICE

 451

assumption that affects the very notion of judgment, according to which it is believed that people are actually incapable of judging things per se, that their faculty of judgment is inadequate for making original judgments, and that the most we can demand of it is the correct application of familiar rules derived from already established standards.24 Arendt also grasped that the fallibility of judgment, which was so obviously manifest during the years that saw the Nazis ascend to power, was not all encompassing. In spite of the reversal or destruction of established criteria of judgment (“thou shall not kill” having been transformed into “thou shall kill”), some people were nevertheless able to judge for themselves, to oppose the verdict of history with an autonomous judgment. This prompted Arendt to conclude that there exists within the human spirit a faculty that “enables us to judge rationally without being carried away by either emotion or self-interest,” and is spontaneous in the sense that it “is not bound by standards and rules under which particular cases are simply subsumed, but on the contrary, produces its own principles by virtue of the judging activity itself.”25

The Failures of the Jerusalem Verdict These considerations help to explain Arendt’s ambivalent conclusions about the extent to which justice was rendered in Jerusalem. She oscillates between a positive evaluation of the verdict, which had clarified certain notions, and a critique of the judgment. Arendt in effect believes that the Jerusalem judges were not able to face the challenge posed to them and, in particular, that they were not able to give the interconnected notions of genocide and crimes against humanity a valid definition.26 While it was only occasionally mentioned during the Nuremberg trial, the fact that the Holocaust was contrary to military necessity was at the center of the Jerusalem trial: “Eichmann stood accused of a crime against the Jewish people, a crime that could not be explained by any utilitarian purpose.”27 Compared to their predecessors in Nuremberg, the Jerusalem judges thus gained a better understanding of the unprecedented character not only of the motives but also of the purposes of the crimes they were to judge.28 They confirmed that the “unheard-of-atrocities” committed by the Hitler regime, the operations of ethnic cleansing he ordered, and the policy of extermination that he implemented at an industrial level, “were in fact independent of the war” to the extent that it “announced a policy of systematic murder to be continued in time of peace.”29 However, according to Arendt, these same judges failed to make it clear in their judgment that the “extermination of whole ethnic groups,” Jews, Poles,

452

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

or Roma people, resulted in “more than a crime against the Jewish or the Polish or the Gipsy people, that the international order, and mankind in its entirety [was] grievously hurt and endangered.”30 Arendt in effect believes that the particularity of the crime of genocide, which in her mind is the crime against humanity par excellence, is that it enacts a radical refusal to share the world with other individuals and other groups of people, thereby undermining the plural structure of humanity.31 Arendt’s criticism also concerns the inability of the Jerusalem judges to perceive that not only a crime but also an entirely new kind of criminal was brought before them. Arendt’s thinking here is partly linked with the muchmaligned expression the “banality of evil,” which provides the subtitle of her book. Eichmann’s novelty was due to the fact that he was not a new Bluebeard, that he did not look like a devil with a human face, that he did not appear to be perverse or sadistic, but was on the contrary distinguished by his appalling normality.32 This was, in Arendt’s opinion, “much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.”33 The accused had only applied the new law of the country, that is to say the law of murder that resulted from Hitler’s orders, and he would have felt guilty “only if he had not done what he had been ordered to—to ship millions of men, women, and children to their death with great zeal and the most meticulous care.”34 What struck Arendt by attending the Jerusalem trial was our inability to simply perceive a fact, which she designated with the expression of the banality of evil, the simple fact that the evil committed by Eichmann, far from being the work of a demon, had been committed by someone who had renounced the decision whether to do good or evil. Eichmann, incapable of thought and judgment, who constantly took refuge in bureaucratic language to protect himself from the outside world, had committed his appalling “crimes under circumstances that [made] it well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel that he [was] doing wrong.”35 To confront this novelty, it would have been necessary to admit that this type of trial destabilized one of the essential presuppositions of our legal systems: “that intent to do wrong is necessary for the commission of a crime.”36 As the aphorism goes, justice must not only be done, it must also be seen to be done. Arendt believes consequently that the judges should have taken in account in their decision these difficulties. She proposes to solve these herself in the following way: since Eichmann had acted so as to assume to the end the “duties of a law-abiding citizen,”37 since he was obviously incapable of judging his own actions for himself, the basis for his punishment ought to have its source not in an internal disposition, but in his actions themselves. He should be punished for the sole reason that “he had been implicated and had played a central role in an enterprise whose open purpose was to eliminate forever certain ‘races’ from the surface of the earth.”38 He should be punished because he had “supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations.” According to Arendt, this was

JUSTICE

 453

the true basis for his condemnation: as soon as Eichmann had attacked the human condition of plurality, “no one, that is, no member of the human race, [could] be expected to want to share the earth with [him],” and in such a case, Arendt goes so far as to justify the application of the death penalty.39 If crimes against humanity, in the general sense of the term, and in particular the crime of genocide, can be defined, it is because they aim at destroying human plurality and attack one of the primordial conditions upon which rest the lives of human beings on earth. The idea of plurality implies two things: that human beings only exist in a plural dimension, but also that many people, and not just a single people endowed with a singular history, share the world: “the earth is inhabited by many peoples . . . ruled by many different laws,” Arendt writes in Eichmann in Jerusalem,40 or as she puts it later in The Life of the Mind, “plurality is the law of the earth.”41 Arendt could initially consider that the crimes committed by totalitarian regimes had the peculiarity of transcending the human power to punish and forgive.42 On the basis of the Eichmann trial, she endeavors to reconsider positively the political potential inherent in the ability to judge. By means of procedures employed by those political bodies charged with rendering justice, it is possible to restore—at least to a certain extent—the primordial political link when it is broken, and to return to the condition of cohabitation to which human beings are subject. Living in a world free of these “most serious crimes of concern to the international community as a whole,”43 genocide and crimes against humanity, is probably more of a dream than the product of cold lucidity. Adequate judging of mass crimes, as well as of any other fact arising out of our common world, is by contrast a human possibility. It is in fact by judging, by giving meaning to events that occur in the world, that human beings can make the world habitable and regain their dignity, by refusing history, “the pseudo-divinity,” and the “right to being the ultimate judge.”44

Notes 1 The trial proceedings were held in the Jerusalem District Court from April 11, 1961, to August 14, 1961. They resulted in a sentence of the death penalty. An appeal of the judgment was brought before the Supreme Court of Israel, which served as the appellate court from March 29 to May 29, 1962, that resulted in confirmation of the sentence. A petition for clemency was then introduced and rejected. The death penalty, by hanging, was executed on May 31, 1962. 2 During the war, Eichmann was particularly responsible for the organization, at the logistical level, of the deportation of the victims of the Holocaust to the concentration and extermination camps: David Cesarani, Eichmann: His Life and Crimes (London: Heinemann, 2004). 3 See R. I. Cohen, “Breaking the Code: Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem and the Public Polemic: Myth, Memory and Historical Imagination,” Michael:

454

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

On the History of the Jews in the Diaspora 13 (1993): 46–60; A. Rabinbach, “Eichmann in New York: The New York Intellectuals and the Hannah Arendt Controversy,” October 108 (2004): 9–111; and M.-I. Brudny and J.-M. Winkler, eds., Destins de “la banalité du mal” (Paris: Éditions de l’Éclat, 2011). 4 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 19. 5 Ibid., 4. 6 C. Klein, Le Cas Eichmann. Vu de Jérusalem (Paris: Gallimard, 2012), 223. 7 S. Felman, “Theatres of Justice: Arendt in Jerusalem, the Eichmann Trial, and the Redefinition of Legal Meaning in the Wake of the Holocaust,” Critical Inquiry 27 (2001): 201–38, 222; M. Leibovici, “Les finalités de la justice en tension. Une lecture d’Eichmann à Jérusalem,” in La Justice pénale internationale face aux crimes de masse: approches critiques, ed. R. NollezGoldbach and J. Saada (Paris: Pédone, 2014), 29–43, 32 and 38. 8 Leibovici, “Les finalités,” 38. 9 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 253; Leora Bilsky, “Between Justice and Politics: The Competition of Storytellers in the Eichmann Trial,” in Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem, ed. S. E. Aschheim (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001), 232–52. 10 For a discussion of such questions, see D. Luban, “Hannah Arendt as a Theorist of International Criminal Law,” International Criminal Law Review 11 (2011): 621–41; V. Lefebve, “Hannah Arendt et le problème de la justice pénale internationale. Une pensée toujours actuelle?,” Revue interdisciplinaire d’Études juridiques 75 (2015): 27–58. 11 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 135. 12 Ibid., 251–52. 13 On such questions, see M. Osiel, Making Sense of Mass Atrocity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 14 Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment, ed. J. Kohn (New York: Schocken, 2003), 147. 15 Ibid., 29. 16 Ibid., 148. 17 Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem, “Eichmann in Jerusalem: An Exchange of Letters between Gershom Scholem and Hannah Arendt,” Encounter 22 (1964): 51–54, 52. 18 Arendt, Responsibility, 18. 19 Ibid., 19. 20 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 297. 21 R. S. Beiner and J. Nedelsky, Judgment, Imagination, and Politics: Themes from Kant and Arendt (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001). 22 Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. P. Guyer, trans. P. Guyer and E. Mathews (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

JUSTICE

 455

23 Hannah Arendt, The Promise of Politics, ed. J. Kohn (New York: Schocken, 2005), 103. 24 Ibid. 25 Arendt, Responsibility, 27. 26 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 274; Lefebve, “Hannah Arendt,” 43–44. 27 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 275: “Jews had been murdered all over Europe, not only in the East, and their annihilation was not due to any desire to gain territory.” 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid., 257. 30 Ibid., 276. 31 Judith Butler, Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). 32 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 276. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid., 25. 35 Ibid., 276. 36 Ibid., 277: “On nothing, perhaps, has civilized jurisprudence prided itself more than on this taking into account of the subjective factor. Where this intent is absent, where, for whatever reasons, even reasons of moral insanity, the ability to distinguish between right and wrong is impaired, we feel no crime has been committed.” 37 Such is the title of one of the chapters of Eichmann in Jerusalem (Ibid., 135). It should be noted that under the conditions of the Third Reich, the “law” was a matter of the will of the Führer (O. Jouanjan, “Prendre le discours juridique nazi au sérieux?,” Revue interdisciplinaire d’études juridiques 70 [2013]: 1–23, 13). 38 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 277. 39 Ibid., 279; Judith Butler, “Hannah Arendt’s Death Sentences,” Comparative Literature Studies 48 (2011): 280–95, 285. 40 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 264. 41 Hannah Arendt, “Thinking,” in The Life of the Mind (Orlando, FL: Harcourt and Brace, 1978), 19. 42 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 241: “The alternative to forgiveness, but by no means its opposite, is punishment, and both have in common that they attempt to put an end to something that without interference could go on endlessly. It is therefore quite significant, a structural element in the realm of human affairs, that men are unable to forgive what they cannot punish and that they are unable to punish what has turned out to be unforgivable. This is the true hallmark of those offenses which, since Kant, we call a ‘radical evil’ and about whose nature so little is known, even to us who have been exposed to one of their rare outbursts on the public scene. All we know is that we can neither

456

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

punish nor forgive such offenses and that they therefore transcend the realm of human affairs and the potentialities of human power, both of which they radically destroy wherever they make their appearance.” 43 The Rome Statute establishing the International Criminal Court, which entered into force on July 1, 2002, preamble and article 1. 44 Arendt, “Thinking,” 216.

46 Law: Nomos and Lex, Constitutionalism and Totalitarianism in Arendt’s Thought Vincent Lefebve Translated by Zachary Fouchard

Addressing the question of law in Hannah Arendt’s thought requires an initial point of clarification, since it is often argued that Arendt’s discussions of the law are superficial or anecdotal. On the contrary, considerations of the law and legal institutions are often present in Arendt’s work, and the Arendtian manner of considering these phenomena is itself original. She in fact re-appropriates explicitly legal objects in a decentralized manner. It is not so much a matter of capturing the essence of law as one of seeing law and politics as separate but interconnected spheres of human activity. For Arendt, the link between law and politics is always considered in a nuanced way, without postulating a strict separation between these two spheres of human activity or the subordination of the one to the other.1 In order to discuss the phenomenon of legislation, Arendt had to propose a coherent theory that recognizes the fundamentally political nature of constitutions and laws that marks the intertwining of the spheres of law and politics. Interested in two paradigms of law in Greek and Roman antiquity, Arendt places a particularly human faculty at the center of her thought:

458

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

the faculty of making promises and keeping them. Arendt’s interest in legal phenomena is also expressed in her concept of revolution, the latter being inseparable, as I will show, from her theory of the constitution. Finally, one cannot ignore the centrality of the theory of totalitarianism in Arendt’s political—and legal—thought: the concept of totalitarian law that she brings to light in The Origins of Totalitarianism in effect allows her to establish, in depth, innovative avenues for thinking about law.

Legislation: The Paradigms of Antiquity Greco-Roman antiquity, as reconstructed by Arendt, is subdivided into two great paradigms of law: the Greek nomos and the Roman lex.2 Arendt uses these models to highlight two contradictory conceptions of the relationship between law and politics. On the one hand, the Greek model of nomos signals a strict separation between the spheres of law and politics. In the Greek conception, the law is pre-political, providing a stable framework within which the actions of men occur. On the other hand, the Roman model of lex introduces legislative activities into the political field. Law is no longer pre-political, but is the very content of political action. These two models refer to a demarcation between different modes of human activity upon which the political thought of Arendt rests.3 In order “to think what we are doing,”4 Arendt proposes in The Human Condition to distinguish the domains of labor, work, and action. Following Aristotle, she insists on the elements that enable us to differentiate between poiēsis and praxis, and although she does not in any way devalue the category of work, she accords to action a very special dignity. Thus, Arendt sheds light on the fact that in the Greek conception, law (nomos) is related not to the sphere of action but to that of fabrication.5 In the Greek world, law is the work of a skilled craftsman, the nomethete; it is not the result of deliberation. In so doing, the Greeks deny legislation any direct political significance. They nevertheless recognize it to be a determining factor for the emergence of politics, and it is an instrument for constituting and maintaining a sustainable political space. According to Arendt’s interpretation, which is questionable from a strictly historical point of view,6 the eminent function of nomos is to offer a permanent structure in which political action can be housed.7 The nomoi provide the “walls” of the polis, allowing men to appear in their singularity and to accomplish great acts accompanied by eloquent words without immediately falling into the oblivion within which all things human naturally fall. But this does not imply that we find in the Greeks, even if only in a germinal state8 what constitutes, for Arendt, the genius of Roman politics, which was to invent a new concept of specifically political (and not pre-political) legislation, the lex as well as the experience of foundation.9 With the notion of lex was born a conception of law that was above all

LAW

 459

relational. The comparison between lex and nomos emphasizes this aspect of law in its Roman version. Lex presupposes a close link, an alliance, a bridge between various partners.10 Reflections on war and the origins of our Western conception of international relations, as proposed by Arendt in her “Introduction into Politics,” is decisive for grasping the stakes of this opposition:11 whereas an alliance with the defeated enemy was not within the realm of possibilities for the Greeks, the Romans on the contrary succeeded in overcoming wars of annihilation and the absolute sterility that they imply for the political field. By means of pacts reached with the defeated enemy, the no-man’s land that before the hostilities kept belligerent groups isolated from one another was transformed by the Romans into a relational space that at once separated and connected old enemies.12 A world was thus created. This concept of politics, which originated in the form of foreign politics, and which is inseparable from an eminently relational conception of law, still governs our way of thinking about what is strictly speaking a legal relationship, both in private and in public law. The difference in Arendt between the Greeks and the Romans regarding this problem of the law thus turns to the advantage of Rome rather than Athens. The precedence given to the concept of lex is in reality a result of the place that the faculty of making promises and keeping them plays in politics. Indeed, although both the Greek nomos and the Roman lex have the effect of stabilizing human affairs, the superiority of lex stems from the fact that it makes it possible to secure the field of action in an internal and immanent way.13 This is possible because it rests on a faculty—the promise—that belongs to the field of action and that consequently absolutely depends on the human condition of plurality, that is to say, on the political condition par excellence.14 This internal character of promise-making is decisive since it allows for the possibility of confronting the frailty of human affairs,15 the various infirmities of action, and especially its fundamental unpredictability, using a faculty that is situated at the heart of the field of action and obeys the various “laws” that govern and structure it. In a word, it is a question of saving human freedom without misrepresenting it, that is to say, without making it depend on some allegedly higher faculty. Indeed, by basing the integrity of the political domain on an activity outside of it, work, the Greeks introduced into human freedom the figure of violence intrinsic to all fabrication.16 Rehabilitating the central role played by the promise in our legal system is, for Arendt, indissociable from another theoretical positioning. Arendt constantly thinks against the tradition, a tradition that according to her is at the origin of a series of fatal equivalences between politics and domination, power and violence, law and command. These equivalences constitute at once the legacy of certain inaugural gestures laid down by the Socratic school—especially by Plato17—and a Judeo-Christian heritage in which

460

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

law has always been conceived in the image of a command demanding obedience.18 Arendt contrasts this tradition with another tradition, suggesting that we look not to philosophers and their theories but rather to our most fundamental political experiences. Making regular use of the model of the polis to shape her new conception of politics, it would seem that the problem of law, and especially that of legislation, is what prompts her to favor the Roman paradigm rather than the Greek paradigm.

On Revolution: Arendt’s Constitutionalism Arendt’s interest in legal phenomena is also expressed in the concept of revolution that she developed, which constitutes a veritable constitutional theory.19 In On Revolution, Arendt compares the two great revolutions of the eighteenth century, the French and American Revolutions, and attempts to develop a republican model of revolution notably characterized by the place occupied by the law and its institutions. The core of Arendt’s constitutional theory rests on several conceptual pillars: first, an original understanding of the principle of the separation of powers; second, a rehabilitation of the Roman notion of authority as an indispensable complement to power; and finally, a conception of foundation as the historical discovery, in the course of revolutionary action itself, of a set of principles destined to give consistency to and regulate the newly founded political body. For the first, Arendt offers a new interpretation of Montesquieu and his conception of the separation of powers. She insists on what in contemporary constitutional law is called the vertical dimension of the separation of powers.20 Her argument is twofold: of course, the separation of powers must play itself out on a horizontal plane, and legislative, executive, and judicial powers must be arranged in such a way that they control each other, but second, this was not the primary problem preoccupying the founders of the American republic. Their concern was not to limit power, but rather to find a way to combine thirteen “sovereign” republics into a single federal republic.21 The American revolutionaries were not drawn to the principle of the separation of powers, as we are often told, because of its limiting ability. The goal was not to limit—in the sense of diminishing— the powers of the union and its parts, but rather to introduce a mechanism at the heart of government that strengthens the different power centers.22 In other words, for Arendt, the constitution of the United States and the federal idea upon which it rests created the institutional conditions for a non-sovereign politics.23 As to the second pillar, in her discussion of the notion of law, Arendt again appeals to the Romans when evoking the capital distinction in their eyes between power and authority. The vivid experience of power that rests

LAW

 461

on pacts and promises—an experience of Roman origin but rediscovered in America during the colonial and even precolonial period (e.g., Mayflower Compact)—could certainly lead to revolution since it was directly able to ground the constitution in the power of the people. But this new concept of power could not at the same time provide a source of legitimation for the constitution of the republic: How could the constitution and newly adopted laws bind minorities as well as future generations? To the power that arises among human beings engaged in action, it was therefore necessary to add a complement. To face this task, the American founding fathers took judicious inspiration from the Roman precedent and from the concept of authority upon which it rests. Roman authority presupposed a concrete institution charged with prolonging or increasing the moment of foundation (Arendt, here, draws on the etymology of the word auctoritas, which is augere, that is to say, to increase, or grow24). One of the major innovations of the founding fathers, aside from their reinterpretation of the concept of the separation of powers inherited from Montesquieu, was to transfer the authority of the Roman Senate, whose function was political, to the Supreme Court of the United States, which assumes a legal and nonpolitical function and intervenes by means of interpretations, not opinions.25 The role of the Supreme Court in interpreting the Constitution and its amendments is thus to connect the present of the republic with its founding past, thus prolonging and increasing the moment of foundation, hearkening back to the Roman ideal. For the third pillar, Arendt notes that, despite the considerable differences that separate them, the two great modern revolutions, French and American, have both faced the difficult problem of an absolute or ground for the political sphere.26 This demonstrates that this problem is inherent to the Western concept of law, a concept of Judeo-Christian origin that equates law with the expression of a command (an equivalence that is found neither in Greek nomos nor in Roman lex). For Arendt, it is unnecessary to introduce an absolute to break the vicious cycle in which everything new seems to be caught. In fact, what saves the beginning is that it brings its own principle with it into the world. Beginning and principle are more than intimately linked; they are contemporaneous: The absolute from which the beginning is to derive its own validity and which must save it, as it were, from its inherent arbitrariness is the principle which, together with it, makes its appearance in the world. The way the beginner starts whatever he intends to do lays down the law of action for those who have joined him in order to partake in the enterprise and bring about its accomplishment. As such, the principle inspires the deeds that are to follow and remains apparent as long as the action lasts.27 What Arendt wishes to point out here, in an extremely condensed manner, is that action, at the same time as it unfolds, reveals its own principle. Many

462

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

languages suggest such a solution by deriving the word “principle” from the Latin principium, which means “beginning”: “In principio creavit Deus caelum et terram” (In the beginning God created heaven and earth), as one reads in the Vulgate Bible.28 Arendt endeavors to identify the principle, or rather the double principle, that made its appearance at the same time as the American Revolution, namely, “the interconnected principle of mutual promise and common deliberation.”29 Therein lies the “unforgettable story” and the “unique lesson” of the American Revolution: it did not “break out” but, on the contrary, was conducted by men and women after careful reflection and deliberation “on the strength of mutual pledges”; the political energy necessary for its accomplishment came not from the “strength of one architect” but from the “power of the many.”30 Learning the lessons from the American Revolution, Alexander Hamilton was able to affirm that men were “capable . . . of establishing good government from reflection and choice.” He knew—not theoretically but because he had lived it—that they were not “forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.”31 This leads us to the theme of foundation central to Arendt’s arguments. A foundation rests on the human capacity to bring new ideas into the world and, moreover, echoes their desire to keep these novelties alive over time as well as to build, by means of the law, a world that will survive them and welcome future generations.

Totalitarianism: The Law of Movement Arendt’s interpretation of totalitarianism is also decisive for grasping the originality of her legal thought. Her theory of action, as well as the republican model that her work establishes—not to mention, to a certain degree, her powerful critique of human rights, which lies outside the scope of present considerations32—must in fact be understood as responses to the major political challenge of the twentieth century: the challenge addressed to our common political concepts and categories in the face of the advent of totalitarianism. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt theorized what in her view constituted the central political phenomenon of her time, namely, the emergence of unprecedented political regimes, Nazi and Stalinist, which she qualifies as totalitarian. In her work on totalitarianism, the notion of law is almost always present.33 Totalitarianism does not merely defy the essential legal values on which constitutional regimes rest, but it develops a concurrent conception of legality that prompts Arendt to see in totalitarianism not another arbitrary regime like tyranny or despotism, but a regime of a new type that, in its relation to legality, can be defined by reference to two complementary tendencies. On the one hand, totalitarianism is not a regime devoid of any reference to the notion of law. On the contrary, it claims to realize on earth a certain

LAW

 463

form of very specific legality identified with the fulfillment on earth of the so-called laws of history or of nature. On the other hand, totalitarianism presupposes a challenge to the secular conception of law understood as a stabilizing factor of human affairs, totalitarian “law” being above all a law of movement: When the Nazis talked about the law of nature or when the Bolsheviks talked about the law of history, neither nature nor history is any longer the stabilizing source of authority for the actions of mortal men; they are movements in themselves.34 The totalitarian system thus constitutes the negation of a usual conception of law—immersed in historical realities as different as the Greek nomos, the Roman lex, or even the Hebraic Torah—in which laws are conceived as means for stabilizing human societies. Indeed, civilization, which Arendt defines as “the man-made artifact to house successive generations,” cannot survive without a stable framework that can account for change.35 Far from opposing the themes of novelty and permanence—an opposition that on the political chessboard refers back to the confrontation between conservatives and progressives—Arendt seeks to highlight their affinities. In other words, Arendt never treats stability as a value in and of itself. On the contrary, she insists on the supportive role that laws, as conceived within constitutional regimes, assume in terms of acting as a prerequisite for the occurrence of novelty, in terms of the firm ground supporting the miracle of human freedom. The omnipresent character of the idea of movement at the heart of totalitarianism is a symptom of its rejection of the very idea of novelty. Under totalitarian regimes, this idea is completely forbidden on two fronts: on the one hand, totalitarian law, the law of movement, of history or of nature, is not a new law, the fruit of the concerted action of men, but is rather identified with an eternal law that has always and will always govern human becoming; on the other hand, in order to allow for free deployment of the forces that they support, totalitarian regimes must paralyze the action of men and annihilate the source of their freedom, their spontaneity, which is achieved at the highest and most fatal degree in concentration camps.36 In order to respond to the chaos and destruction of the world caused by the advent of totalitarian regimes, which made terror the essence of government and sought to combat human freedom in all its forms, Arendt investigates the conditions that make the beginning and the perpetuation of a non-totalitarian world possible. Among these conditions, it is certainly necessary to include law, or at least a certain conception of law as a relational space, as an intermediary at once connecting and separating human beings, peoples, and generations. Arendt invites us to consider the world of law and legal institutions as a stabilizing element of the first order, without which our political societies

464

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

could neither establish nor sustain themselves. For Arendt, law is never a simple exterior constraint on politics, but rather the condition of its existence. The law contains political freedom in two ways: on the one hand, it constitutes a boundary that limits freedom; on the other hand, it offers a stable framework for human action within which freedom can become a living reality.

Notes 1 Christian Volk, Arendtian Constitutionalism: Law, Politics and the Order of Freedom (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2015), 173; Vincent Lefebve, “La théorie constitutionnelle de Hannah Arendt ou l’articulation entre droit et politique à l’épreuve du phénomène révolutionnaire,” Jurisdoctoria: Revue doctorale de droit public comparé et de théorie juridique 12 (2015): 46–70, 46; Vincent Lefebve, Politique des limites, limites de la politique. La place du droit dans la pensée de Hannah Arendt (Brussels: Éditions de l’Université de Bruxelles, 2016), 261. 2 Hannah Arendt, The Promise of Politics, ed. J. Kohn (New York: Schocken, 2005), 178–91; R. T. Tsao, “Arendt against Athens: Rereading the Human Condition,” Political Theory 30 (2002): 97–123; T. Hol, “Citizenship, Public Realm and Adjudication in the Horizontal Society. An Analysis Based on the Work of Hannah Arendt,” in Multilevel Governance in Enforcement and Adjudication, ed. A. Van Hoek et al. (Oxford: Intersentia, 2006), 241–61; D. Klusmeyer, “Hannah Arendt’s Case for Federalism,” Publius: The Journal of Federalism 40, no. 1 (2010): 31–58; M. A. Wilkinson, “Between Freedom and Law: Hannah Arendt on the Promise of Modern Revolution and the Burden of ‘The Tradition,’” in Hannah Arendt and the Law, ed. M. Goldoni and C. McCorkindale (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2012), 35–61, 53; P. Owens, “‘How Dangerous It Can Be to Be Innocent’: War and the Law in the Thought of Hannah Arendt,” in Hannah Arendt and the Law, 251–69, 257; F. Ciaramelli, “Hannah Arendt et la portée politique de la loi,” Cités 67 (2016): 53–64. 3 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1998). 4 Ibid., 5. 5 Ibid., 194–95. 6 Keith Breen, “Law Beyond Command? An Evaluation of Arendt’s Understanding of Law,” in Hannah Arendt and the Law, 15–34, 24: “It is better to understand her discussion on Greek and Roman law less as an accurate historical account and more as an extended reflection on the nature of law.” 7 Ibid.: “The laws, like the wall around the city, were not results of action but products of making. Before men begin to act a definite space had to be secured and a structure built where all subsequent actions could take place, the space being the public realm of the polis and its structure the law; legislator and architect belonged in the same category.”

LAW

 465

8 Cornelius Castoriadis, Ce qui fait la Grèce, 1. D’Homère à Héraclite. Séminaires 1982-1983. La création humaine II (Paris: Seuil, 2004); C. Castoriadis, Ce qui fait la Grèce, 2. La cité et les lois. Séminaires 1983-1984. La création humaine III (Paris: Seuil, 2008). 9 Arendt, Human Condition, 195. 10 Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 179. 11 Owens, “‘How Dangerous,” M. Revault d’Allonnes, “Hannah Arendt, le mal banal, la guerre totale,” Espaces Temps 71 (1999): 69–83. 12 Arendt, Promise of Politics, 178. 13 Arendt, Human Condition, 236–37; Jacques Taminiaux, “Performativité et grécomanie?,” Revue internationale de philosophie 53 (1999): 191–205, 196–98; A. Kalyvas, Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary: Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, and Hannah Arendt (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 238. 14 Arendt, Human Condition, 7–8. 15 Ibid., 188. 16 Arendt, Promise of Politics, 181; Arendt, Between Past and Future, 111–12. 17 Arendt, Promise of Politics, 220. 18 Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin, 2006), 181–82. 19 Robert Burns, “Hannah Arendt’s Constitutional Thought,” in Amor Mundi. Explorations in the Faith and Thought of Hannah Arendt, ed. J. W. Bernauer (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1987), 157–85; P. W. Kahn, The Reign of Law: Marbury v. Madison and the Construction of America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 52–59; Jeremy Waldron, “Arendt’s Constitutional Politics,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt, ed. D. R. Villa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 201–19; Wilkinson, “Between Freedom and Law”; Volk, Arendtian Constitutionalism. 20 O. Beaud, “La doctrine constitutionnelle américaine connaît-elle une théorie de la fédération?,” in Le droit dans la culture américaine, ed. P. Raynaud and E. Zoller (Paris: Panthéon Assas, 2001), 21–39, 35. 21 Arendt, On Revolution, 143. 22 Ibid., 141–45. 23 Ibid., 144; A. Arato and J. Cohen, “Banishing the Sovereign? Internal and External Sovereignty in Arendt,” Constellations 16 (2009): 307–30; J.C. Poizat, “L’invention d’une politique non souveraine: Arendt et l’espoir européen,” in Hannah Arendt. Crises de l’État-nation, ed. A. Kupiec, et al. (Paris: Sens & Tonka, 2007), 254–61. 24 Arendt, On Revolution, 111–12. 25 Ibid., 192. 26 Ibid., 174. 27 Ibid., 205. 28 Genesis, 1:1.

466

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

29 Arendt, On Revolution, 206. 30 Ibid. 31 The Federalist Papers, n° 1. 32 I refer the reader to developments I have proposed in a book published in 2016 entirely devoted to the legal thinking of Arendt: Lefebve, Politique des limites, limites de la politique, (Brussels: Université Bruxelles, 2016): 131–64. 33 Claude Lefort, La complication. Retour sur le communism (Paris: Fayard, 1999), 193; Jacques Taminiaux, “The Philosophical Stakes in Arendt’s Genealogy of Totalitarianism,” Social Research 69 (2002): 423–46, 440; P. Nemo, Histoire des idées politiques aux Temps modernes et contemporains (Paris: PUF, 2002), 1349–59; E. Pisier (with F. Châtelet, O. Duhamel et al.), Histoire des idées politiques (Paris: PUF, 2004), 482–88; Ciaramelli, “Hannah Arendt.” 34 Arendt, Human Condition, 463. 35 Hannah Arendt, “Civil Disobedience,” in Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1972), 49–102, 79. 36 Arendt, Human Condition, 465–68.

47 On the Lost Spirit of Revolution Samantha Rose Hill

At the end of On Revolution, Hannah Arendt turns to the French poet and resistance fighter René Char to describe what she calls “the lost treasure of revolution.” What was this treasure? “The treasure, he thought, was that he had ‘found himself,’ that he no longer suspected himself of ‘insincerity,’ that he needed no mask and no make-believe to appear, that wherever he went he appeared as he was to others and to himself, he could afford ‘to go naked.’”1 In order to capture the lost spirit of revolution, Arendt turns Char’s poetic aphorism into a metaphor for authentic appearance and action in the public realm. Char’s revelation was not otherworldly; it came to him in the midst of fighting for the Resistance. In action, he was able to strip off his mask of appearance, and appear to himself and others as he was. He found himself. Char’s work plays an important role in Arendt’s work on the lost spirit of revolution, action, the public realm, the break between past and future, and the activity of thinking.2 The experience of public freedom that Arendt describes through Char’s language depicts a way of being in the world that is more authentic and sincere. The men of the revolution in America and the men of the Resistance in France came together in public to begin something new, and in their action, they were released from the demands of everyday life to live fuller, more authentic lives. Arendt ends On Revolution with the same aphorism from Char that she begins Between Past and Future with and quotes in The Life of the Mind: Thinking: Notre heritage n’est precede d’aucun testament—“our inheritance was left to us by no testament.”3 The absence of testament represents the loss of authority in modernity for Arendt, and this loss of authority was accompanied by a turn toward metaphysics, which attempted to provide a common ground of understanding at the expense of worldly experience and plurality. We see this in Arendt’s reading of Char in her preface “The

468

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

Gap between Past and Future” where she extrapolates from Char in order to think about solidarity, plurality, and public freedom. Allow me to quote this at some length: Notre heritage n’est précédé d’aucun testament—“our inheritance was left to us by no testament”—this is perhaps the strangest of the strangely abrupt aphorisms into which René Char, French poet and writer, compressed the gist of what four years in the résistance had come to mean to a whole generation of European writers and men of letters. The collapse of France, to them a totally unexpected event, had emptied from one day to the next the political scene of their country, leaving it to the puppet-like antics of knaves or fools, and they who as a matter of course had never participated in the official business of the Third Republic were sucked into politics as though with the force of a vacuum. Thus, without premonition and probably against their conscious inclinations, they had come to constitute willy-nilly a public realm where—without the paraphernalia of officialdom and hidden from the eyes of friend and foe—all relevant business in the affairs of the country was transacted in deed and word. It did not last long. After a few short years they were liberated from what they originally had thought to be a “burden” and thrown back into what they now knew to be the weightless irrelevance of their personal affairs, once more separated from “the world of reality” by an épaisseur triste, the “sad opaqueness” of a private life centered about nothing but itself. And if they refused “to go back to [their] very beginnings, to [their] most indigent behavior,” they could only return to the old empty strife of conflicting ideologies which after the defeat of the common enemy once more occupied the political arena to split the former comrades-in-arms into innumerable cliques which were not even factions and to engage them in the endless polemics and intrigues of a paper war. What Char had foreseen, clearly anticipated, while the real fight was still on—“If I survive, I know that I shall have to break with the aroma of these essential years, silently reject (not repress) my treasure”—had happened. They had lost their treasure. What was this treasure? As they themselves understood it, it seems to have consisted, as it were, of two interconnected parts: they had discovered that he who “joined the Resistance, found himself,” that he ceased to be “in quest of [himself] without mastery, in naked unsatisfaction,” that he no longer suspected himself of “insincerity,” of being “a carping, suspicious actor of life,” that he could afford “to go naked.” In this nakedness, stripped of all masks—of those which society assigns to its members as well as those which the individual fabricates for himself in his psychological reactions against society—they had been visited for the first time in their lives by an apparition of freedom, not, to be sure, because they acted against tyranny and things worse than

ON THE LOST SPIRIT OF REVOLUTION

 469

tyranny—this was true for every soldier in the Allied armies—but because they had become “challengers,” had taken the initiative upon themselves and therefore, without knowing or even noticing it, had begun to create that public space between themselves where freedom could appear. “At every meal we eat together, freedom is invited to sit down. The chair remains vacant, but the place is set.”4 The men of the Resistance found themselves and peeled back the masks that society had imposed on them and they had created for themselves, not because they were fighting against tyranny but because “they had become challengers.” They had a fight to win, and could no longer passively exist in the world; they had to act, and in acting they created a public space where freedom could appear. Arendt is talking about the world of public appearances, and appealing to the language of mysticism, alluding to the prophet Elijah who might enter at any moment and sit down at the table. Here, the experience of freedom is described as a visitation, as otherworldly, as more real and genuine. At the same time, Arendt positions Char between past and future, in order to escape the transcendental claim of metaphysics that a truer, better world exists. What allows Char to have this moment of revelation is his recognition that it “cannot last forever.” It appears and disappears, much like man himself. The possibility of the future, which remains unseen, is felt against the past that appears before him. He is caught between the temporal forces of linear time, and in this “gap space” between past and future, he finds a form of freedom—a form of being where he is at once in the world and removed from the world. In order to root firmly this conception of freedom and genuine appearance in the realm of human affairs, Arendt weaves Char’s aphorism together with Kafka’s parable “He” across several texts, conceptualizing the lost treasure of revolution in relation to what she calls the old metaphysical dichotomy between “true” Being and “mere Appearance.”5 This dichotomy is illustrated by the figures of Char and “He,” who are released from the demands of ordinary dayto-day life and thrown into a gap space between past and future.6 In this space, a form of freedom is possible where they are not hindered by the breakdown of tradition or loss of authority, but liberated philosophically and metaphysically to begin and think anew. In Between Past and Future, Arendt argues that “He” picks up where Char’s aphorism leaves off, and offers an “exact description of this predicament.” She writes, “It begins, in fact, at precisely the point where our opening aphorism left the sequence of events hanging, as it were, in mid-air.”7 Arendt emphasizes the spatial element in Kafka’s parable and the in-between position occupied by Char, who was writing at the end of the Resistance with liberation on the horizon, in order to locate “He” and Char in the world of appearances. In this space, the past presses forward and the future presses back—and the war between them is caused by the presence of man who disrupts the flow of time. Arendt argues:

470

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

Only because man is inserted into time and only to the extent that he stands his ground does the flow of indifferent time break up into tenses; it is this insertion—the beginning of a beginning, to put it into Augustinian terms—which splits up the time continuum into forces which then, because they are focused on the particle or body that gives them their direction, begin fighting with each other and acting upon man in the way Kafka describes.8 It is the insertion of man that breaks up the endless and indifferent flow of ordinary time. That is, it is the birth of man into the world of things that existed before him and will remain after him that contains the possibility of the new. His appearance and presence in the world fights time by being, and the battleground for this fight is the thinking ego, which reflects upon the activity of thinking and has the ability to engage with itself. In Arendt’s reading of “He” in The Life of the Mind, where she unfolds her understanding of the thinking ego, time and thinking are emphasized in relation to space.9 In a chapter titled “Where Are We When We Think?,” Arendt argues that Kafka’s parable moves from the world of appearances to the realm of thinking, and describes what she calls the time sensation of the thinking ego. “It analyzes poetically our ‘inner state’ in regard to time, of which we are aware when we have withdrawn from the appearances and find our mental activities recoiling characteristically upon themselves— cogito me cogitare, vole me velle, and so on.” This form of reflective thinking exists in the gap space where past and future are equally present in their absence from our sense. Here the protagonist “He” is withdrawn from the world of appearances, and can direct his attention to the thinking activity itself; “He” is not given over to the free flow of thoughts in the mind, what Arendt calls “absent-mindedness.” She writes: The advantage of this image lies in that the region of thought would no longer have to be situated beyond and above the world and human time; the fighter would no longer have to jump out of the fighting line in order to find the quiet and the stillness necessary for thinking. “He” would recognize that “His” fighting has not been in vain; the battleground itself originates the region where “He” can rest when “He” is exhausted. In other words, the location of the thinking ego in time would be the inbetween of past and future, the present, this mysterious and slippery now, a mere gap in time.10 In his suspension from the realm of worldly affairs, Arendt argues that Kafka’s “He” is “the old dream Western metaphysics has dreamed from Parmenides to Hegel of a timeless, spaceless, suprasensuous realm.” In order to dismantle this dream, Arendt reworks Kafka’s parable and situates “He” within the realm of worldly affairs. She writes, “The trouble with Kafka’s metaphor is that by jumping out of the fighting line ‘he’ jumps out of this

ON THE LOST SPIRIT OF REVOLUTION

 471

world altogether and judges from outside though not necessarily from above.”11 Arendt takes the “timeless, spaceless, suprasensuous realm,” and replaces it with her conceptualization of the gap space, which retains the spirit of worldly plurality while affirming one’s own existence as a sensual being in the world. “He” can escape the realm of appearances, to think in the gap space, but “He” never actually leaves the world. Arendt uses Kafka in Thinking, the first volume of The Life of the Mind, to address the metaphysical fallacy that conflates being with meaning. The battleground for Kafka’s “He” is man’s home on earth, and in Arendt’s reading, the physical battleground gives way to the metaphysical battleground for being itself: “Seen from the viewpoint of man, of each moment of his life inserted and caught in the middle between his past and his future, both directed at him who creates his present, the battleground is an in-between, an extended Now on which he spends his life.”12 Through a reading of an allegory in Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Arendt reworks Kafka’s parable again to bring it to bear more directly on the question of thinking in the world.13 She argues with Nietzsche that the eternal recurrence, the sempiternal, is actually a string of nows. The time construct of the thinking ego is different from the time sequence of ordinary life, which is structured by the linear temporality of past, present, and future, and fixed by the calendar, which recurs endlessly. This recurrent time, which Arendt calls historical time, structures everyday life and provides one with a sense of stability and durability in the world. Arendt argues, “That we can shape the everlasting stream of sheer change into a time continuum we owe not to time itself but to the continuity of our business and our activities in the world, in which we continue what we started yesterday and hope to finish tomorrow.”14 Char’s treasure and Kafka’s parable do not apply to everyday life though, only to the activity of the thinking ego, to the extent that the thinking ego has withdrawn from the activities of everyday life, from the ordinary realm of appearances. “The gap between past and future opens only in reflection, whose subject matter is what is absent—either what has already disappeared or what has not yet appeared.” It is reflection that draws the absences before the presence of the mind. For Arendt, this means that thinking is a fight against time itself. The time sensation of the thinking ego runs parallel to Arendt’s conception of revolution in On Revolution and her understanding of thinking as a mental activity. Arendt describes the thinking ego like the revolutionary, as withdrawn from the realm of appearances and daily life, suspended in a present moment, consciously engaged in the activity of thinking. “It is only because ‘He’ thinks, and therefore is no longer carried along by the continuity of everyday life in a world of appearances, that past and future manifest themselves as pure entities, so that ‘He’ can become aware of a nolonger that pushes him forward and a not-yet that drives him back.”15 As a conceptual metaphor, the lost treasure of revolution points us toward new beginnings and authentic appearance in the world, which requires us to rise

472

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

above the realm of appearances, not withdraw from the world altogether, which for Arendt is not possible. The sempiternal recurrence of foundings and re-foundings gives way to the ability to found something new, the nowtime, and our ability to think anew conceptually. *** Arendt’s reading of Kafka as an extension of Char offers us a portrait of an individual who is able to rise above of the realm of appearances and find a more authentic self. This seems like a paradox. In Thinking, Arendt appears to be arguing against the primacy of a true being over a being that merely appears in the world, but the language she uses to describe Char implies that there is a truer being that is liberated by acting in the world. In Arendt’s conception of the lost treasure of revolution, she is making a metaphysical claim about authentic being and mere appearance, but the authentic being that is revealed for Arendt is not removed from the realm of appearances; he is simply liberated from mere appearance. The lost treasure of revolution, as she describes it in On Revolution and Between Past and Future, is a way of being without the mask of appearance. Arendt’s claim, reading Char, is that he was “able to go free,” that he had “found himself.” At the same time, revolution presents an opportunity for true being, for stepping outside the realm of appearances, not leaving it. We can appear in our true being before others and find solidarity in that being, but for Arendt, that is not an appeal to another realm beyond the realm of worldly affairs. Arendt wants the metaphysical claim of true being without the “dream of Western metaphysics.” For her, experience is the ground of being, and metaphysical experience is a moment caught between past and future. In this reading of Char and Kafka, we see Arendt orienting us toward a metaphysics of being that moves from sensual experiences in the world. Arendt rejects the flattening tendency of ontology here in favor of experience, where being is grounded in plurality and retains a form of openness to otherness. Whereas traditionally metaphysics has attempted to provide a common ground for being ontologically, Arendt understands being as necessarily worldly and plural. Notably, this is a turn against Heidegger’s ontological grounding of Being. At the end of her exposition on Kafka in The Life of the Mind, Arendt begins concluding her remarks by saying, I have clearly joined the ranks of those who for some time now attempt to dismantle metaphysics and philosophy with all its categories as we have known them from its beginning in Greece until today. Such dismantling is possible only on the assumption that the thread of tradition is broken and that we shall not be able to renew it.16 Arendt is not trying to do away with the concept of metaphysics; she is reworking it in the contemporary era in order to address the loss of authority,

ON THE LOST SPIRIT OF REVOLUTION

 473

and the phenomenal appearance of totalitarianism in the middle of the twentieth century, which broke the Western tradition of philosophy. Like Char in his aphorisms and Kafka with “He,” Arendt finds herself caught in a gap space, where the old concepts and categories of Western philosophy can no longer help us to understand the contemporary world, and so come face to face with it. Arendt understood herself to be doing this work of dismantling, and devising new conceptual metaphors for understanding, like the lost treasure of revolution. As the figures of Char and Kafka’s “He” illustrate, withdrawal from the world of appearances is necessary for mental activities; and it is in this withdrawal—this rising above, not stepping out of—that we can devise new metaphors to bridge over the gap space between the invisible realm of thinking and the visible realm of appearances.

Notes 1 Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin Books, 1990), 280. 2 Given the length of this essay, I do not have space to delve into each of these ideas that Arendt conceptually devises throughout her work, and am focusing on the lost treasure of revolution here. 3 Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), 3. This fragment from Char appears in his wartime diary Hypnos Waking, which he kept while fighting for the French Resistance. Char was a friend and student of Martin Heidegger and he and Arendt travelled in similar circles, but there is no evidence that they met or corresponded. It is clear that Arendt read his work with great interest; there are several volumes in her library, Heidegger dedicated his small collection of poems Pensivement to Char, which he sent to Arendt in 1971, and there is coedited volume for Jean Beaufret titled L’endurance de la pensée from 1968. 4 Arendt, Between Past and Future, 3–4. 5 In The Life of the Mind Arendt calls this the “two-world theory.” See, for example, Arendt, The Life of the Mind (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 23. 6 The “HE” parable in Arendt’s Thinking reads, “He has two antagonists; the first presses him from behind, from his origin. The second blocks the road in front of him. He gives battle to both. Actually, the first supports him in his fight with the second, for he wants to push him forward, and in the same way the second supports him in his fight with the first, since he drives him back. But it is only theoretically so. For it is not only the two antagonists who are there but he himself as well, and who really knows his intentions? His dream, though, is that some time in an unguarded moment—and this, it must be admitted, would require a night darker than any night has ever been yet—he will jump out of the fighting line and be promoted, on account of his experience in fighting, to the position of umpire over his antagonists in their fight with each other.” Arendt, Life of the Mind, 202. 7 Arendt, Between Past and Future, 8.

474

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

8 Ibid., 11. 9 Because we appear in the world, space belongs to the realm of appearances, but time is an inner sensation that shifts with consciousness. 10 Ibid., 208. 11 Ibid., 207. 12 Ibid., 205. 13 This is Nietzsche’s allegory: “Two paths meet here; no one has yet followed either to its end. This long path back, it lasts an eternity. And the other path out there, that is another eternity. They contradict each other, these roads; they offend each other face to face—and it is here, at this gateway that they come together. The name of the gateway is inscribed above: (‘Augenblick’) ‘Now.’ . . . Behold this Now! From this gateway Now, a long eternal lane leads backward, behind us lies an eternity, and another lane leads forward into an eternal future.” Ibid., 204. 14 Ibid., 205. 15 In Thinking Arendt writes, “The gap between past and future opens only in reflection, whose subject matter is what is absent—either what has already disappeared or what has not yet appeared. Reflection draws these absent ‘regions’ into the mind’s presence; from that perspective the activity of thinking can be understood as a fight against time itself. It is only because “he” thinks, and therefore is no longer carried along by the continuity of everyday life in a world of appearances, that past and future manifest themselves as pure entities, so that “he” can become aware of a no-longer that pushes him forward and a not-yet that drives him back.” Ibid. 16 Ibid., 187.

48 Power Patrick Hayden

In conventional discourse, the term “power” is often used with negative connotations. Only the ambitious, the devious, the corrupt, or the wholly selfinterested, it is thought, concern themselves with power, which is perceived as a means to attain status and command the weak. Reversing this received wisdom, Hannah Arendt locates the phenomenon of power at the heart of her attempt to reinvigorate politics as “sheer human togetherness.”1 Arendt’s analysis of power counters three widely held views. First, she argues against the view that power is a product of individual wills. Herein, power is seen as the ability of one person to impose his or her will on another. The chief exponent of this view is Max Weber, who defines power as “the probability that one actor within a social relationship will be in a position to carry out his will despite resistance.”2 The Weberian model is expressed as “power over”: A has power over B to the extent to which A can get B to do something which B would not otherwise do. Second, Arendt also argues against the notion that power is a “thing” that one can possess. This understanding, developed most notably by C. Wright Mills, portrays power as a given capacity or substance sought and held by agents, lending it the character of a known property that is competed for and possessed in the same way as material objects.3 Within this vision, power is conceived as a zero-sum: the more that one person gets, the less another can have. Finally, Arendt opposes the Marxist view that power is a manifestation of socioeconomic class antagonisms. In this vein, power is located in the structure of asymmetrical economic relations and embodied in the struggle to control the instruments of state and modes of production. Here, the practice of power entails the ability of one class to advance and reproduce its own interests, thereby securing class domination.4 What, then, are the features of power as envisaged by Arendt? Power, Arendt argues, corresponds to the human ability not just to act but to act

476

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

in concert. Power is never the property of an individual; it belongs to a group and remains in existence only so long as the group keeps together. When we say of somebody that he is “in power” we actually refer to his being empowered by a certain number of people to act in their name.5 Arendt’s approach here is more phenomenologically descriptive than definitional, tracing how power exists through its contingent appearance rather than positing its essential nature. Her consideration of power pivots around four inextricably connected elements: first, power is a relational activity within the condition of plurality rather than a singular possession or structure; second, power is irreducibly collective and exists only in and through the fabric of joint interactions; third, power is an immanent potential that never materializes completely insofar as it arises when people come together as a group and “vanishes the moment they disperse”;6 and fourth, the aspect of power understood as empowerment or the generalized “power to” make something happen on behalf of others is established by the support of that group and disestablished when support is withdrawn. In the space of politics, these interlinked elements constitute two broad modalities of power. On the one hand, power is generated and transmitted through the spontaneous process of people coming together at specific moments to pursue specific shared interests; this constituent enactment of power characterizes a performative modality of initiating something new that Arendt identifies as “living power.”7 On the other hand, power is itself vested in concrete political orders that play a role in constituting the bodies and rules through which public sites for politics are built and preserved. Arendt refers to this historically constituted modality as “organized and institutionalized power” that composes a durable world.8 For Arendt, “living” and “organized” power are always intertwined within a lasting political community. This point leads us to the normative dimension of Arendt’s analysis. For Arendt, power is not merely “action in concert”; it is collective action that establishes and sustains a free, equitable, and inclusive political community through participatory processes. The collective action that establishes the political community as a founding event thereby initiates the beginning of the public space through which agreement and consent, as well as disagreement and dissent, can make their appearance. For this reason Arendt contends that power and the public realm must be regarded as concomitant, insofar as the public realm is the space where it is possible for interaction to occur on the basis of the free exchange of diverse beliefs and opinions between individuals as equal political actors. Indeed, it is the initial foundational act of creating the public realm—in which people freely act with one another as equals—that gives power its legitimacy.9 Arendt suggests that power does not require justification, since the very act of bringing a political community into existence confirms the consent of a group of people. Yet it does require legitimation, and for this reason the institutions, laws, and policies of the political order must demonstrate

POWER

 477

continuously their fidelity to the practice of political freedom at the heart of popular empowerment. Arendt believes, then, that power gives rise to the principles of free participation, dialogue, and debate among political equals according to which authority is to be recognized and legitimately exercised. While power appears with the event of a new beginning or founding of community initiated through collective action, without being institutionalized in the law that the community gives itself, power cannot guarantee that the free political order will endure. According to Arendt, the role of political authority is to provide the stability and order needed for the continued existence of a public realm within which people meet to speak and act together. For Arendt, the authority of government is vested in persons or offices by those “who are asked to obey.”10 In other words, authority has a political, rather than a natural or divine source, insofar as it rests upon the collective endeavor of a people to perpetuate their founding principles and institutions through time. While the key trait of political authority is the recognition of the right to govern, it is also the case that this recognition is freely given by the members of the polity as a sign of “respect for the person or office.”11 Legitimate authority thus helps to maintain the public space within which the exchange of differing political opinions and views can continue to flourish. Without the legitimacy bestowed by the normative regard of the people, authority and political continuity cannot be sustained. Consequently, respect for authority resides in the power that underlies it—making this respect quite different from obedience that is compelled or coerced—and legitimate authority helps to renew and preserve power in an enduring body politic. Moreover, as envisioned by Arendt, legitimate authority can be considered as the stabilization of power and action in the (constitutional) rule of law. According to this formulation, “the rule of law, resting on the power of the people, would put an end to the rule of man over man.”12 Here Arendt’s definition of an “antiauthoritarian” conception of authority is expressed in the idea of “no-rule” (isonomy), where all are equal before the law such that there is no “division between ruler and ruled” and the “principle of rulership,” of domination and submission, is precluded.13 Importantly, if a sufficient degree of public support is lost or respect erodes due to abuses of authority, then the transient vitality of “living” power is redirected from consent into dissent, as happens in times of civil disobedience and revolution.14 Two critical implications arise from Arendt’s depiction of power. First, she asserts, power and violence are distinct. As we have seen, Arendt believes that power is created by individuals coming together to establish a shared public realm dedicated to free debate and interaction among political equals. Power is actualized in the relationship of speaking and acting with other people, and is sustained through continuing engagement with and inclusion of others in their plurality. Violence, however, is precisely what the Weberian tradition defined as power “over,” that is, it consists in imposing one’s “own will against the resistance of others.” Arendt claims that one of the great

478

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

errors of modern political thought is the belief that violence is the essence of political power, while the normative and empirical distinction between the two has become lost. In the Weberian paradigm, for example, state power exists as a legitimate form of violence: while the state functions to shield individuals from nonstate sources of violence, the state itself is not exempt since the capacity for violence must remain at its disposal.15 In the Weberian logic, power is conceived as a hegemonic relation of command-obedience, and political authority is understood simply as domination, that is, “the power of man over man” or the capacity to compel others to submit.16 On this conception, the power of the state compels submission to its rule because of the fear aroused by threat of direct or indirect sanctions. Arendt wryly points out though that if “the essence of power is the effectiveness of command, then there is no greater power than that which grows out of the barrel of a gun.”17 The conflation of violence with power assumes not only that violence is an extreme form of power but also that political power is, in the end, based strictly on the capacity for violence. In the political realm, violence often is viewed as an effective means for the realization of desired objectives, through the use of instruments for the purpose of physically dominating, violating, or killing individuals or groups.18 Instrumentality is essential to violence; weapons technology, for instance, allows one or a few individuals to increase their force exponentially and use it against others. Yet just as domination depends upon instruments that make violence against others possible, at the same time, it diminishes reliance upon support provided by inclusive and equal forms of voluntary collective action. The net result is that violence divides and destroys the ability of people to freely constitute their manner of living together through political participation as an end in itself. Human togetherness and public freedom are lost where violence reigns; it is thus decidedly anti-political. Arendt concludes, in short, that power and violence “are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent.”19 A second implication to note about violence in Arendt’s analysis is a seeming contradiction. While Arendt believes that power and violence are opposites, she does not believe that all power is positive or that all violence is negative. On the one hand, Arendt acknowledges that power relationships can assume the form of “power over” that implies domination and coercion. In a democratic state without a constitution, for instance, the hegemonic power of a majority may pose a threat to the rights and dissenting opinions of minority groups.20 Similarly, totalitarian and repressive regimes always depend on at least some degree of support from segments of the population, since the repressive power wielded by such systems would never materialize without a “power basis,” no matter how restricted.21 On the other hand, the fact that repressive regimes routinely resort to violence as a means to achieve their political goals indicates their relative powerlessness. If they enjoy little public support and violence is needed to reinforce compliance, then their assertion of authority is in fact undermined. Such regimes may

POWER

 479

be dismantled if enough people are willing to act in concert, first in popular revolt against repressive power and then in joint creation of a free political realm. In this respect Arendt opens the door, if only slightly, to the entry of violence in transformative resistance. Although Arendt’s primary emphasis is on the living power of nonviolent civil disobedience, she nonetheless concedes that resorting to violence may be the “only appropriate remedy” when a defenseless individual or group is confronted with destruction.22 Arendt, then, is no pacifist, since violence may be justifiable in certain circumstances. Yet because its consequences can never be reliably predicted and its devastating effects can easily spiral out of control, she insists that violence can be neither glorified nor legitimized in advance. What seems to be a contradiction, therefore, is really a paradox: power is imbricated in violence, and violence marks the limits of power. In sum, the experience of power at the heart of Arendt’s understanding of politics not only presupposes the conditions of freedom and plurality but can also foster freedom and plurality within the framework of an inclusive political community. Politics, she argues, consists of open-ended interactions between distinct people, the discussion and questioning of different viewpoints and opinions that empowers interlocutors as political equals. The more freedom and plurality there is, the more power that can be potentially actualized when acting in concert. Yet she makes clear that participatory politics is a fragile activity; violence annuls action and speech as the bases of free political interaction, just as it banishes plurality from the political space of appearance. Arendt’s point is that power is kept alive in the boundless potential for acting together rather than in having power over another. For this reason, political power both enables ways of speaking and acting together that enhance freedom and plurality, and protects freedom and plurality from the threat of erasure by violence.

Notes 1 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1958), 180. 2 Max Weber, Economy and Society, ed. G. Roth and C. Wittich (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1978), 53. 3 C. W. Mills, The Power Elite (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956). 4 Jeffrey C. Isaac, Power and Marxist Theory: A Realist Approach (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987). 5 Hannah Arendt, On Violence (New York: Harcourt Brace & World, 1970), 44. 6 Arendt, Human Condition, 200. 7 Arendt, On Violence, 41. 8 Ibid., 51. 9 Ibid., 52.

480

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

10 Ibid., 45. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid., 40. 13 Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin Books, 1965), 30. 14 Hannah Arendt, “Civil Disobedience,” in Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1972), 49–102. 15 Max Weber, Political Writings, ed. P. Lassman and R. Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 311. 16 Arendt, On Violence, 37. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid., 46. 19 Ibid., 56. 20 Ibid., 42. 21 Ibid., 50. 22 Ibid., 63.

49 Radical Democracy within Limits Andrew Schaap

While Hannah Arendt hardly mentions democracy explicitly throughout most of her work, when she does, her comments about it are often disparaging. This has led even her most sympathetic interpreters to take issue with an apparently elitist and anti-democratic streak within her political thought. With her apparently reactionary critique of the rise of the social (the reduction of politics to collective housekeeping) and her aristocratic celebration of self-selected elites (striving for distinction within the public sphere), Arendt seems to share philosophy’s traditional “hatred of democracy.”1 Like Plato, Arendt appears to loathe the poor who enter politics driven by their appetites and to dread the arbitrary will of the masses who do not appreciate the joys of public life. When read in this light, Arendt is better understood as a conservative republican who fears democracy in the form of mob rule, rather than a democratic theorist. Despite this, Arendt has had an extraordinary influence on democratic theory over the past thirty years. In particular, she has inspired radical democrats who are dissatisfied with the liberal view of democracy as an institutional arrangement that is justified insofar as it enables individuals to protect their private interests. Against the liberal view, radical democrats value collective selfdetermination as a good intrinsic to a democratic way of life. Arendt implicitly articulates this ideal in her account of the achievement of political action as the constitution of a world in common. Following Arendt, a democratic polity can be understood as “the organization of the people as it arises out of acting and speaking together.”2 With this famous image of the portable polis, Arendt offers an arresting image of democracy as constituent power: the potential of a people to produce its own world through an emancipatory praxis. The apparent contradiction between the democratic and elitist tendencies in Arendt’s political thought3 can be clarified in terms of three dimensions

482

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

of democracy outlined by John Dryzek.4 On the one hand, Arendt’s image of politics as an activity through which we constitute a world in common expands our understanding of democratic politics in terms of its authenticity (the meaningfulness of control exercised by a people). On the other hand, however, Arendt’s insistence that social issues are not properly political limits the scope of democratic control (those areas of social life that should be subject to democratic processes). Furthermore, her stipulation that political actors should be animated by a care for the world and a desire to distinguish themselves before their equals seems to limit the franchise (who is able to participate in democratic deliberation and decision-making). This tension is apparent in her celebration of the council system, which can be understood as the “concentrated expression of her political philosophy.”5 The council system promises to expand democracy in terms of its authenticity (enabling its members to participate directly in public affairs). Yet it also limits democracy in terms of its franchise (since it is composed of a selfselected elite) and scope (since it properly excludes social matters such as the organization of the workplace). By focusing on her depiction of the council system, I will examine how Arendt addresses a distinction relevant to each dimension of democracy: representation and participation (authenticity), masses and elites (franchise), and social and political (scope). In order to highlight the distinctiveness of Arendt’s political thought, I will situate her treatment of each dimension of democracy in relation to the tradition of radical democracy. Radical democrats, such as Sheldon Wolin and Jacques Rancière, point out that Arendt does not acknowledge how social inequality conditions political action. Nor does she recognize the legitimacy of democratic politics as a struggle to abolish social inequality. However, Arendt draws attention to an aspect of democratic politics that is often occluded by radical democrats. Democratic politics, on this account, is not entirely reducible to an emancipatory and transformative politics, but it also involves self-limitation: a struggle to constitute and preserve a space for politics against the possibility of extreme violence that produces superfluous human beings.

Authenticity: Representation and Participation Radical democrats understand democracy primarily in terms of popular sovereignty. They privilege the constituent power of the people over the constituted power of the state. Democratic politics is thus authentic to the extent that the people constitute for themselves the terms of their own political association. Democratic politics is less authentic when the state represents the people through the constituted offices of government. In her advocacy of council democracy, Arendt seems to share radical democrats’ antipathy to representation in favor of direct participation.6 Indeed, she claims, the issue of representation presents a “decision on the very dignity

RADICAL DEMOCRACY WITHIN LIMITS

 483

of the political realm itself,” since political freedom “means the right ‘to be a participator in government,’ or it means nothing.”7 Arendt certainly is a critic of representative government, which she identifies with competitive elitism, political parties, and the welfare state. Such a system, she says, is democratic insofar as “popular welfare and private happiness are its chief goals.”8 Yet it is fundamentally oligarchic insofar as “public happiness and public freedom” are the “privilege of the few.”9 Within this system, parties function as “organs of representation,” nominating candidates for elective office while most citizens only participate by voting out of concern with their private lives.10 Such a system is nominally democratic in terms of scope (concern with social welfare) and franchise (anyone can vote for their private interest). However, it lacks authenticity, since only an entrenched political class participates in public affairs. Consequently, according to Arendt, within this system of government, parties are the “instruments through which the power of the people is curtailed and controlled.”11 For Arendt, the point of (democratic) politics is to constitute a world in common through the inter-action of a plurality of actors. This plurality is expressed through opinion (doxa), which is unique to the perspective that an individual brings to bear on the public realm. In contrast to interests, which are always only relevant as group interests and might be judged objectively, opinions may be held only by individuals and are inherently subjective.12 The meaningfulness of an opinion depends upon it being “one’s own,” an articulation of the way the world dokei mei (or “seems to me”).13 Moreover, it is from the manifold expression of these opinions that we experience the world we share as “our own” since, as Arendt puts it, “our sense of unequivocal reality is so bound up with the presence of others.”14 This image of politics can be understood to be more authentically democratic precisely because it presupposes an equality among citizens in terms of both plurality (that each unique perspective brought to bear within the public realm is a democratic gain) and isonomia (that equality consists in non-sovereign freedom, not self-rule but the absence of rule).15 Arendt celebrates council democracy insofar as it provides a space within which citizens can exchange opinions. The councils, she says, “sprang up as the spontaneous organs of the people” in every genuine revolution, from the Parisian commune of 1871 to the Hungarian Revolution in 1956.16 The council system was a “new form of government” that “owed its existence to nothing but the organizational impulses of the people themselves.”17 As “organs of action,” rather than representation, the councils were spontaneous, and enabled all citizens to participate directly in public affairs.18 The councils were “undoubtedly democratic,” says Arendt, but “in a sense never seen before and never thought about.”19 In fact, she describes the democratic character of the council system as the inverse of the party system. The councils were authentically democratic since they were the “only tangible place” in which ordinary citizens (and not just party elites)

484

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

could enjoy freedom by sharing in public power.20 Yet they limited the scope of democracy to political (rather than social) issues and restricted the franchise to those concerned with the public (rather than their own private) interest. If Arendt insists on the importance of participation insofar as it provides a basis for the people to reclaim and enact their constituent power, she does not reject representation entirely.21 In fact, Arendt recognizes how representative systems might mediate and filter opinions in contrast to the “chaos of unrepresented and unpurified opinions” that she feared in the case of plebiscitary democracy.22 She points out how both the trustee model of representation (favored by liberal democrats) and the delegate model (favored by radical democrats) might diminish the authenticity of democratic politics. On the one hand, if the representative is a trustee, representing the interests of her constituents without regard to their preferences, she effectively has become an elected ruler. On the other hand, if the representative is a delegate, acting on the instructions of her constituents without forming and expressing her own opinion, she ceases to act politically.23 That Arendt does not oppose representation per se but only insofar as it threatens the dignity of politics becomes clear when we consider a further contrast that she draws: whereas the council system is based on a federal structure and division of powers, the party system presupposes a centralized sovereign power.24 The party system is essentially “autocratic and oligarchic.”25 This is reinforced by the trustee model of representation, which divides the polity between active and passive citizens, between representatives who “know” and decide and the represented whose opinion has limited political significance.26 The “voters surrender their own power,” and the representatives become “for a limited time the appointed rulers of those who elected them.”27 Any justification for such a system, she says, must therefore “insist that politics is a burden and that its end is itself not political” since the value of democracy is reduced to protecting the interests of the governed.28 With the council system, in contrast, Arendt presents an alternative representational form in which everyone would be free to become “participators in government,” to “act and form their own opinion.”29 The councils would institutionalize “spaces of freedom” in which (in principle at least) anyone could participate and therefore enjoy their freedom among equals.30 Yet in advocating the council system, Arendt does not endorse a simple delegate system of representation since she insists that participants in the councils should be free to form their own opinion by “expressing, discussing, and deciding.”31 While anyone would be free to participate in the lower levels of the council, the federal system would mean that the upper levels would be comprised of delegates from the lower levels.32 While she is vague about specific institutional design, Arendt imagined that while remaining free to form and express their own opinions, the delegates would also reflect the plurality of opinions formed and expressed at the lower level,

RADICAL DEMOCRACY WITHIN LIMITS

 485

influencing decision-making at the upper levels in such a way that each council retained its own “original power to constitute.”33 Arendt’s interest in the council form of democracy, therefore, was not based on a celebration of direct participation as an unmediated exercise of constituent power.34 Rather, the councils exemplify for her an institutional form within which the space of appearances might be preserved.

Franchise: Masses and Elites If radical democrats find much to admire in Arendt’s understanding of politics as a collective enterprise through which we constitute a world in common, they tend to scorn her various depictions of democratic masses as driven by the needs of their bodies and as people who fall short of the aristocratic ideal of citizens striving for excellence (aretē) in the public sphere.35 While recognizing that politics always concerns everyone, Arendt observes that “the political way of life has never been and will never be the way of life of the many.”36 Similar to Plato, she suggests that the problem of the many is that they are concerned with their immediate self-interest and gratification. As a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, one can well understand why Arendt might regard the “democratic” masses with suspicion.37 If Arendt advocates council democracy because it makes available spaces of freedom, which are in principle open to all, she also insists that those who participate should do so in a properly political way. On Arendt’s account, this means that they should not be motivated by the concerns and attitudes of labor, which she associates with consumer society.38 Fundamentally, the problem with mass society, based on the values of labor, is that it involves a way of being together that is anti-political. For it mistakes shared suffering for oneness, involving a form of unity based on an identity of needs rather than a plurality of opinions.39 This was apparent, she thinks, in the role of the people during the French Revolution whom she characterizes as “raging masses,”40 “driven by the needs of their bodies”41 who “streamed” into the public sphere.42 In this context, Arendt seems to agree with the disparaging view of democracy held by the American Founding Fathers as “a government devoid of public spirit and swayed by unanimous passions” within which there is no genuine exchange of opinion but only fickle and unreliable moods.43 Indeed, they associated democracy with a tyranny based on unreflective and unanimous public opinion.44 The problem with this way of being together is not only that the reduction of plurality leads to a loss of common sense of the world. It is also that the form of togetherness is based on the sameness of isolated individuals rather than a plurality acting in concert, which opens the way for the emergence of despotic and even totalitarian forms of rule.45 Arendt seems not to share the faith of radical democrats in the educative effects of political participation, accepting the “obvious inability and

486

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

conspicuous lack of interest of large parts of the population in political matters as such.”46 If Arendt feared the corrosive effect of mass society on the public realm, however, she did not oppose democratic politics with the rule of reason. As Jeffrey Isaac rightly emphasizes, Arendt saw the councils as “oases” of authentic political action within a “desert” of mass society.47 The councils would not be constituted by experts but by self-selecting elites animated by “courage, the pursuit of public happiness, the taste of public freedom, an ambition that strives for excellence.”48 Indeed, she insists that “only those who as voluntary members of an ‘elementary republic’ have demonstrated that they care for more than their private happiness and are concerned about the state of the world” would “have the right to be heard.”49 Yet Arendt thinks that this self-selected elite would be more democratic than those associated with the party system precisely because they are not preselected by a centralized party bureaucracy according to “standards and criteria which are themselves profoundly unpolitical.”50 Rather, they would self-select according to their “passion for distinction.”51 They would be motivated not by the desire to make life easier and longer but to “endow life with splendour.”52 As Jeffrey Isaac explains, Arendt is no elitist in the sense that she wants to protect a “privileged few” against an “incapable many.”53 Rather she emphasizes that political action should be undertaken with the “proper” attitude exemplified by self-selecting elites, namely, care for the world and a desire for distinction as opposed to the conformity of mass society. Indeed, the value of the councils, in Arendt’s view, is that they help to break up mass society by providing spaces for plurality and the exchange of opinion at the grassroots level.54 By participating in these spaces, “those who revolt against the conformity of modern society constitute themselves, through their action, as citizens of an elementary republic.”55 The self-selecting elites of the council system “were those who cared and those who took the initiative; they were the political elite of the people brought into the open by the revolution.”56 In contrast to the masses who could only acclaim yes or no, these self-selected elites value plurality since they recognize that the public realm is “constituted by an exchange of opinion between equals.”57 The self-selected elites of the councils, then, are fundamentally different than the party-selected elites since they are “distinguished by their insulation from the many, not by their rule over them.”58 While these self-selected elites who are drawn from the people might be more democratically constituted than those selected within party system, radical democrats are quick to point out that structural inequality creates barriers that prevent people from participating in politics “whether they want to or not.”59 Disadvantaged groups often lack time, capacities, and resources. Moreover, as Arendt recognized, councils may only be able to stimulate mass participation during revolutionary moments. Moreover, opinions and perspectives are often marginalized even when the members of different groups do participate.

RADICAL DEMOCRACY WITHIN LIMITS

 487

Without a welfare state to enable citizens to develop their capacities to participate, council democracy is as likely to reproduce structural inequalities as the party system that Arendt criticizes.60

Scope: Social and Political Like Arendt, radical democrats are less interested in democracy as a form of government than as a mode of action. Unlike Arendt, however, they endorse a view of democratic politics as a struggle to democratize society.61 For radical democrats, collective self-determination should extend to fundamental structures of society, such as the workplace, market, and family. Since Arendt’s concept of the political is opposed to precisely this conception of politics, it is not surprising that most radical democrats balk at her insistence that the scope of democratic politics should be limited to what she views as properly political concerns. Against a view of democratic politics as a process of equalization, Arendt presents an image of politics as concerned with constituting a public space of appearances that should be free from private, economic, and social concerns. Arendt can be viewed as an anti-democratic thinker to the extent that she wants to arrest and turn back the process of democratization that most radical democrats valorize and that she characterizes as “the invasion of the public realm by society.”62 In her view, the “rise of the social” comes about in modernity when life itself is treated as the highest good in politics and the “life process of society is the very centre of human endeavour.”63 Arendt’s concerns about making the preservation of life the main business of the public realm are that it is intractable, infinite, and destructive. She insists that it is a “political mistake to try to solve the social question with political means.”64 For claims based on necessity are immediate and urgent and, therefore, intractable within political practices of deliberation and persuasion.65 Moreover, because they are endless, the cares and worries associated with sustaining life cannot be completely satisfied and thus tend to overwhelm public life.66 The destructive aspect of making the preservation of life itself the highest good is that, when confronted with populations of superfluous people, even nominally “democratic” governments will be tempted to resort to totalitarian means to solve the problem, such as the use of border controls and camps. If the elevation of life to the highest good is, in Arendt’s view, the “politically most pernicious doctrine of the modern age,”67 she associates it as equally with liberalism as she does socialism. Indeed, in her view, liberal democracy creates the conditions in which totalitarianism becomes possible as much as the socialist valorization of labor.68 Although council democracy emerged in the context of the labor movement and within the workplace, Arendt insists that the councils “were infinitely more interested in the political than in the social revolution” than the revolutionary parties.69 Yet the “fateful mistake” the councils

488

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

made was when they “did not distinguish clearly between participation in public affairs and administration or management of things in the public interest,” seeking to take control of the management of factories.70 On this point, Arendt’s characterization of the councils is historically inaccurate. In fact, the councils did not separate political from social concerns and were preoccupied with economic questions and the organization of the workplace.71 Indeed, it is often pointed out that Arendt’s exclusion of social concerns from the proper scope of politics actually undermines her argument in favor of council democracy more generally. For what would participants deliberate about if not the social conditions of their political existence? If we are to retrieve a democratic impetus in Arendt’s insistence on limiting the scope of democratic action, then we would need to consider this as a form of collective self-limitation. Arendt suggests that just as the masses produced a new form of government with totalitarianism, so the people produced the council system. In “rare and decisive moments,” people “had their own ideas about the possibilities of democratic government under modern conditions.”72 The democratic character of the councils, on her interpretation, is different in kind from that of mass society in terms of both the mode of comportment with which participants engaged in politics (limitation of franchise) and the demands that they made (limitation of scope). What distinguished the councils was a concern to constitute and preserve a world in common and within which their lives could be meaningful. Yet rather than the political theorist determining dogmatically what counts as part of the proper scope of democratic action, as Arendt is often tempted to do, we would need to follow Arendt’s own insight that there is no higher faculty that can redeem the world from the predicaments that action creates, except action itself.73 In other words, like the activities of promising and forgiving, we might view democratic politics as also entailing a practice of self-limitation in order to preserve a space for democracy against, for instance, the emergence of populism. Such a retrieval of a democratic impulse in Arendt’s political thought seems true to the spirit if not the letter of her writings. If Arendt shares Plato’s fear of the masses as a “large and powerful animal,” she rejects his solution to the threat they pose, since she instead advocates a way of doing political theory that is fundamentally democratic. Rather than offering a philosophy of rights based on truths that are independent of the contingent opinions of citizens, she advocates a form of political reflection that begins with wonder at our human plurality. From this perspective, she aims to interpret and articulate the significance of events for the world the philosopher shares in common with her fellow citizens. Like the Greek polis, the council system that she romanticized provides a provocative if also sometimes inchoate image of a democratic politics predicated on the recognition of plurality as its own condition of possibility.

RADICAL DEMOCRACY WITHIN LIMITS

 489

Notes 1 Jacques Rancière, Hatred of Democracy (London: Verso, 2009). 2 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1998) 198. 3 Margaret Canovan, “The Contradictions of Hannah Arendt’s Political Thought,” Political Theory 6, no. 1 (1978): 5–26. 4 John Dryzek, Democracy in Capitalist Times: Ideals, Limits and Struggles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 4–9. 5 John F. Sitton, “Hannah Arendt’s Argument for Council Democracy,” Polity 20, no. 1 (1987): 80–100, 84. 6 George Kateb, “Arendt and Representative Democracy,” Salmagundi 60 (1983): 20–59; Ferdinando G. Menga, “The Seduction of Radical Democracy: Deconstructing Hannah Arendt’s Political Discourse,” Constellations 21, no. 3 (2014): 313–26. 7 Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 237, 218. 8 Ibid., 269. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid., 273. 11 Ibid., 269. 12 Ibid., 227. 13 Hannah Arendt, “Philosophy and Politics,” Social Research 57, no. 1 (1990): 73–103, 80. 14 Arendt, On Revolution, 96. 15 Patchen Markell, “The Rule of the People: Arendt, Archē, and Democracy,” American Political Science Review 100, no. 1 (2006): 1–14. 16 Arendt, On Revolution, 262. 17 Ibid., 249, 256, 257. 18 Ibid., 273, 262–63, 271. 19 Arendt, Human Condition, 119. 20 Arendt, On Revolution, 255. 21 Andreas Kalyvas, Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary: Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, and Hannah Arendt (New York: Cambridge University Press 2008), 280–83; Lisa Disch, “How could Hannah Arendt Glorify the American Revolution and Revile the French? Placing On Revolution in the Historiography of the French and American Revolutions,” European Journal of Political Theory 10, no. 3 (2011): 350–271, 352f. 22 Arendt, On Revolution, 228. 23 Ibid., 237. 24 Ibid., 266. 25 Ibid. 26 Arendt, On Revolution, 264, 277; Arendt, Human Condition, 220–32.

490

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

27 Ibid., 237. 28 Ibid., 269. 29 Ibid., 264. 30 Ibid., 275. 31 Ibid., 235. 32 Ibid., 190. 33 Ibid., 266. 34 Jeffrey C. Isaac, “Oases in the Desert: Hannah Arendt on Democratic Politics,” American Political Science Review 88, no. 1 (1994): 156–68, 161. 35 Jean-Philippe Deranty and Emmanuel Renault, “Democratic Agon: Striving for Distinction or Struggle against Injustice and Domination?” in Law and Agonistic Politics, ed. Andrew Schaap (London: Ashgate, 2009), 43–56. 36 Arendt, On Revolution, 275. 37 See Canovan, “The Contradictions,” 9–13; Isaac, “Oases,” 160–62. 38 Arendt, Human Condition, 79-135. 39 Arendt, On Revolution, 94; Arendt, Human Condition, 212-213. 40 Arendt, On Revolution, 110. 41 Ibid., 60. 42 Ibid., 113. 43 Ibid., 228. 44 Ibid., 93. 45 Ibid., 270. 46 Ibid., 277. 47 Ibid., 275, see Isaac “Oases,” 157. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid., 279. 50 Ibid., 277. 51 Ibid., 238. 52 Ibid., 281. 53 Isaac, “Oases,” 159. 54 Arendt, On Revolution, 279. 55 Isaac, “Oases,” 159. 56 Arendt, On Revolution, 278. 57 Ibid., 93. 58 Isaac, “Oases,” 158. 59 John F. Sitton, “Hannah Arendt’s Argument,” Polity 20, no. 1 (Autumn 1987): 80–100, 84. 60 James Muldoon, “The Lost Treasure of Arendt’s Council System,” Critical Horizons 12, no. 3 (2011): 396–417, 407.

RADICAL DEMOCRACY WITHIN LIMITS

 491

61 Sheldon Wolin, “Hannah Arendt: Democracy and the Political,” Salmagundi 60 (1983): 3–19, 3. 62 Arendt, On Revolution, 221. 63 Ibid., 64. 64 Ibid., 112. 65 Ibid., 91. 66 Ibid., 94. 67 Ibid., 64. 68 See Andreas Kalyvas, Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 271. 69 Arendt, On Revolution, 266, 274; Arendt, Human Condition, 212–20. 70 Arendt, On Revolution, 273. 71 Sitton, “Hannah Arendt’s Argument,” 98. 72 Arendt, Human Condition, 216. 73 Ibid., 236–37.

50 Reconciliation Roger Berkowitz

Reconciliation is seemingly a minor theme in Arendt’s published writing. But the prominence of reconciliation as a major theme within Arendt’s Denktagebuch suggests that reconciliation plays a flexible and important role underlying much of Arendt’s political thinking. The Denktagebuch begins with a polished opening reflection arguing that reconciliation is the only truly political way to respond to evil. And the discussion of reconciliation continues. Over dozens of further entries, Arendt develops the idea of reconciliation in connection with her ideas of action, thinking, understanding, comprehension, forgiveness, politics, and the love of the world. And in conversation with her readings of Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, Arendt reworks the question of reconciliation into one of the fundamental, if at-times hidden, questions of her work. For Arendt, reconciliation is the political question of our time: Can we commit ourselves to love and engage in a public world that, after the break of tradition, cannot be cleansed of evil? Arendt first develops her understanding of reconciliation in the opening entry of the Denktagebuch by setting reconciliation against forgiveness and revenge as one of the three possible responses to wrongdoing. When confronted with a wrongdoer who has done evil, forgiveness and revenge both are incapable of political judgment. Forgiveness proceeds on the Christian assumption that what the wrongdoer has done is something that anyone could have done. “Forgiveness is perhaps possible insofar as it is only the express recognition that we are all sinners, thus it claims that everyone could have done anything, and in this way it produces an equality—not of rights, but of nature.”1 In order to forgive, we assume that “but for the grace of God” we could have committed similar wrongs. Forgiveness erases the difference between the one who forgives and the wrongdoer; thus,

RECONCILIATION

 493

forgiveness erases the distance necessary to judge and makes judgment impossible. Revenge similarly follows the Christian precept of a natural equality, but in the reverse direction. If forgiveness assumes we are all equally sinful and fallen and thus might have committed a wrong, revenge presumes we all have the right to do wrong. Revenge proceeds from out of a concept that “we are all born poisoned” by our vengeful lusts.2 The avenger asserts his equal right as a human animal to take the law into his hands instinctively and without reflection, just as the wrongdoer has done. To avenge a wrong is to claim the same passionate right as the wrongdoer. Acting on unthinking passions, revenge also negates judgment. Both revenge and forgiveness, Arendt writes, “spring from the Christian solidarity between mankind, that all are equally sinners and all are capable of everything just as their fellow man, even the greatest evil.”3 For Arendt, this Christian solidarity with all men is “grounded on the fundamental mistrust in the human substance.”4 Since revenge and forgiveness imagine all people to be equally sinful, both erase human plurality and difference. Christian solidarity is a “negative solidarity, which springs out of the idea of original sin.”5 If everyone is the same, no one can judge another. Neither forgiveness nor revenge allow for political judgment that could articulate a positive ideal of a common world that might gather a plurality of persons into a political world. Reconciliation is different from forgiveness and revenge in two ways that are crucial for politics. First, the political power of reconciliation proceeds from its ability to create and affirm solidarity in the face of a wrong that threatens to dissolve that common sense of belonging to a single world. By affirming one’s acceptance of the world with the wrong in it, reconciliation accepts the wrong in its difference. It is not an accident that Arendt develops her idea of reconciliation in 1950, just weeks after returning from her meeting with Martin Heidegger. And we know from their letters that Arendt and Heidegger discussed reconciliation during their walks in the Black Forest. For Arendt to reconcile with Martin Heidegger meant to accept that what he did was wrong and yet still affirm that the world is better with him and his wrongdoing in it than without them. Reconciliation is politically radical because it affirms the reality of and the love for people whose acts we consider to be fundamentally wrong. Arendt can disagree with anti-Semites and racists as well as communists and laissez-faire capitalists, and yet affirm that they and their opinions are part of the common world. Reconciliation is thus open to radical plurality in a way that forgiveness and revenge are not. Second, reconciliation has a specifically political judgment at its core. Reconciliation is an act of solidarity; unlike the presumptive solidarity of Christian forgiveness and vengeance, however, reconciliation is a political judgment that first brings solidarity to be. The “solidarity of reconciliation is firstly not the foundation of reconciliation (as the solidarity of being sinful is the foundation of forgiveness), but rather the product [of reconciliation].”6

494

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

When I decide to reconcile with the world as it is, I affirm my love for the world, and thus my solidarity with the world and those who live in it. In this sense, reconciliation is the precondition for the being of a polis: it is the judgment that in spite of our plurality and differences, we share a common world. To reconcile with a wrong is to affirm one’s solidarity with the world as it is and is, therefore, to help bring into being a common world. Arendt thus turns to reconciliation as “a new concept of solidarity.”7 The fact that solidarity is connected to political judgment means that it includes a judgment about the constitution of a people, a “we.” The “we” appealed to in solidarity is not a pre-given essence but is the result of a judgment that finds something common among a plurality. Solidarity, for Arendt, offers a unity that emerges not out of sympathy or pity, both of which develop togetherness based upon a feeling for depersonalized others, the poor. In the judgment to reconcile with others out of solidarity, people “establish deliberately, and, as it were, dispassionately a community of interest with the oppressed and exploited.”8 Solidarity, therefore, is a conceptual judgment of reconciliation that is open to uniqueness and meaningful differences (of opinion, status, religion, and race)—a judgment that as Arendt writes in On Revolution appeals to a “common interest” not in majority opinion, but in “the grandeur of man,” or “the honor of the human race,” or the dignity of man. Political solidarity is the outcome of reconciliation insofar as we reconcile ourselves to faction, disagreement, and plurality. Arendt’s most famous example of a judgment of reconciliation is her judgment not to reconcile with Adolf Eichmann. Faced with an epic wrong and a wrongdoer who refuses to repent, reconciliation would affirm a world in which something like the Holocaust could happen. Reconciliation, therefore, would be powerless to remake the human community shattered by the Holocaust. For Arendt, reconciliation with Eichmann is impossible. In cases such as Eichmann’s, there is another choice beyond reconciliation— one can choose to deny reconciliation. This is the choice that Arendt makes in her own judgment of Eichmann: to act beyond the boundary of reconciliation’s power to inaugurate a common world. “Reconciliation has a merciless boundary,” Arendt writes, a boundary that “forgiveness and revenge don’t recognize—namely, at that about which one must say: This ought not to have happened.”9 Arendt explains what she means by reference to Kant’s discussion of the rules of war, where Kant says that actions in war that might make a subsequent peace impossible are not permitted. Such acts, like pogroms and genocides, whether in war or peace, are examples of “radical evil”; they are “what ought not to have come to pass.” Such acts are also those that cannot be reconciled, “what cannot be accepted under any circumstances as our fate.”10 Nor can one simply silently pass by in the face of radical evil. That is the meaning of her final judgment offered in the epilogue, the one she says the judges in Jerusalem should have “dared” to offer: “We find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be

RECONCILIATION

 495

expected to want to share the earth with you. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang.”11 Eichmann must hang because his crimes are irreconcilable with a pluralist world. When Arendt turns to reconciliation in her published work beginning in the 1950s, her touchstone is Hegel. In the “Preface” to Between Past and Future, Arendt writes: “The task of the mind is to understand what happened, and this understanding, according to Hegel, is man’s way of reconciling himself with reality; its actual end is to be at peace with the world.”12 In “Truth and Politics,” Arendt again raises the problem of a thoughtful reconciliation to reality alongside a reference to Hegel: “Who says what is always tells a story. To the extent that the teller of factual truth is also a storyteller, he brings about that ‘reconciliation with reality’ which Hegel, the philosopher of history par excellence, understood as the ultimate goal of all philosophical thought.”13 Reconciliation, for Hegel—she writes in The Life of the Mind— affirms that “the course of history would no longer be haphazard and the realm of human affairs no longer devoid of meaning.”14 There is a basic truth to Hegel’s idealism: that the real world only is for humans insofar as we humans understand that world and reconcile ourselves to it. Even as she founds her approach to reconciliation on Hegel’s thinking, Arendt finds Hegel’s view of reconciliation in need of revision. After citing Hegel to argue that reconciliation allows us to make peace with the world as it is, Arendt adds: “The trouble is that if the mind is unable to bring peace and to induce reconciliation, it finds itself immediately engaged in its own kind of warfare.”15 While reconciliation is necessary to be at peace with the world, we today may no longer be in position to seek peace in the world. Arendt questions whether reconciliation and the peace it would bring are possible. Against Hegel, Arendt asks: What happens when reconciliation fails? The problem Arendt grasps hold of under the title of reconciliation is that the “break in tradition” and the “death of God” disrupt the traditional philosophical effort to rationalize politics. The Marxian response—to force reality into a new progressive reason guided by science—goes down the path of totalitarianism. Instead, Arendt councils a new idea of reconciliation: reconciliation to a world without political truths, one in which politics is closer to a kind of unwinnable warfare—one specifically suited to the human mind. Arendt reiterates her rejection of the Hegelian understanding reconciliation in a passage from The Human Condition: “Hegel’s gigantic enterprise to reconcile spirit with reality (den Geist mit der Wirklichkeit zu versöhnen), a reconciliation that is the deepest concern of all modern theories of history, rested on the insight that modern reason foundered on the rock of reality.”16 The political philosophy of the modern age “founders on the perplexity” that reconciliation—the effort to prove and sustain the rationality of the world—has finally been shown to be impossible. Hegel’s “gigantic enterprise,” Hobbes’s scientific reconceptualization of reason as interest, and Marx’s scientific materialism are all heroic yet futile efforts to

496

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

submit reality to rationality and thought. They represent a striving to have the political world make sense—to institute peace. In rejecting Hegel’s project of reconciliation, however, Arendt does not abandon reconciliation. Rather, she reimagines reconciliation as a facing up to the basic fact of the modern world: that Hegelian reconciliation fails to institute peace and that politics in the age of the death of God is necessarily a battle. Arendt insists we reconcile ourselves to the fact that there is no truth in politics, and that all politics is a struggle among opposing opinions, or doxai. This does not mean there are no political facts or that truth is politically irrelevant, but there are fewer political facts than most people think. Further, such facts as there may be are themselves cemented only by persuasion and opinion. They are settled political facts that come, by weight of overwhelming persuasiveness, to be part of the shared common world. Political truth, in Arendt’s poetic formulation, is “the ground on which we stand and the sky that stretches above us.”17 We must reconcile ourselves, she argues, to a world of plurality absent authority and absent all but the most foundational truths. Arendt’s rethinking of reconciliation follows her conviction that sometime in the early part of the twentieth century, philosophy and thinking ceased to be able “to perform the task assigned to it by Hegel and the philosophy of history, that is, to understand and grasp conceptually historical reality and the events that made the modern world what it is.”18 For Arendt, somehow, the “human mind had ceased, for some mysterious reasons, to function properly.”19 In other words, what happens in the twentieth century is that a gap emerges between reality and thinking. This gap between thinking and reality itself, Arendt writes, is not new. It may be, she supposes, “coeval with the existence of man on earth.” But for centuries and millennia, the gap was “bridged over by tradition.” At a time when our efforts to understand the real world forever fall short, reconciliation assumes a different and distinctly non-Hegelian sense. Reconciliation demands that we forgo the will to absolute knowledge or scientific mastery of the world. We must instead reconcile ourselves to the reality of the gap between thinking and acting. We must, in other words, reconcile ourselves to our irreconcilability to the world. Thinking today requires accepting the irreconcilability of the world that Arendt names “settling down in the gap between past and future.” It demands that we continually recommit ourselves to the loss of a knowable and hospitable world and instead commit ourselves to the struggle of thinking and acting in a world without banisters. Only if we think and reconcile ourselves to the reality of our irreconcilable world can we hope to resist the ever-present possibility of totalitarianism. In the end, reconciliation for Arendt is a political judgment to love the world in spite of its evil and inclusive of its irreconcilability. Reconciliation is Arendt’s necessary political response to the alienation and resentment that mark our times. The grave danger of the modern world is that we humans

RECONCILIATION

 497

will resent our finitude—our moral, political, and personal limitations and weaknesses—and will strive to cure ourselves of human weakness with the aid of science and technology. The dream to perfect the earth and ourselves is, as Arendt writes in The Human Condition, “the wish to escape the human condition.”

Notes 1 Hannah Arendt, Denktagebuch (Munich: Piper Taschenbuch, 2016), I.1.4. 2 Ibid., I.1.5. 3 Ibid., I.1.6. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid. 8 Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin, 1965), 89. 9 Arendt, Denktagebuch, I.1.7. 10 Ibid. 11 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (Penguin, 2006), 279. 12 Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin, 1968), 7. 13 Ibid. 14 Hannah Arendt, Life of the Mind (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 2, 46. 15 Arendt, Between Past and Future, 7, italics added. 16 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 300–1. 17 Arendt, “Truth and Politics,” in Between Past and Future, 223–59; 259. 18 Arendt, Between Past and Future, 8. 19 Ibid.

51 Responsibility Phillip Nelson

It is impossible to develop a categorical definition of responsibility as Arendt understands it. She gathers a group of concepts under this heading, which are best understood in terms of two intersecting axes, one running between past and future and the other between the public and the private realms. Arendt gives the following names to the resulting four types of responsibilities falling into four separate quadrants: collective (public/past), legal or moral (private/past), personal (private/future), and political (public/future). Throughout these various descriptions, the reader should keep in mind that the concept of responsibility for Arendt is not to be understood as some sort of “feeling” whereby I am struck with a “sensation” of responsibility. Any kind of psychological state of responsibility would fall among other emotional attitudes such as disgrace, regret, remorse, or shame, but this is not what she has in mind for responsibility. For her, responsibility is a metaphysical status, something I possess socially, politically, and temporally, but never a sensation I possess psychologically. As we will see, Arendt makes a strong distinction between guilt and responsibility, but in neither case is it something that I “feel.”1

Collective Responsibility2 In Arendt’s writing on responsibility, the most prominent and consistent distinction she makes is the insistence that guilt is not the same as responsibility. As she defines it, guilt is primarily individualistic. A community or large group cannot be guilty for its sins in any sense of that word because guilt must single out an action and an agent. Even in a case where a gang robs a bank, each individual, from the getaway driver to

RESPONSIBILITY

 499

the point man, is singly accountable for his or her role in the execution. As Arendt puts this in her 1968 essay on “Collective Responsibility,” the fault for the robbery is not a matter of vicariousness but rather of “various degrees of guilt.”3 Significantly, Arendt does not draw a strong distinction between “responsibility” and “accountability” (at least not in terms of collective, moral, and legal responsibility, which are oriented toward the past; we will see that personal and political responsibility are a separate matter because of their future orientation), and she actually believes these concepts are at the very heart and origin of Western philosophy. In her Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, Arendt notes that the pre-Socratic philosophers never felt the need to explain or account for their great insights. It was not until Plato that accountability and responsibility helped to shape our philosophical practices. Arendt explains, Logon didonai, “to give an account”—not to prove, but to be able to say how one came to an opinion and for what reasons one formed it—is actually what separates Plato from all of his predecessors. . . . And this— holding oneself and everyone else responsible and answerable for what he thought and taught—was what transformed into philosophy and that search for knowledge and for truth that had sprung up in Ionia.4 Responsibility as accountability is always oriented toward the past because we must “be able to give an account” or “hold someone to account” for deeds committed in the past.5 Keeping this definition of accountability in mind, Arendt gives two conditions for collective responsibility: “I must be held responsible for something I have not done, and the reason for my responsibility must be my membership in a group (a collective) which no voluntary act of mine can dissolve.”6 Arendt calls this kind of responsibility political since it deals with the community, either when the community takes on the responsibility for deeds done by one of its members or when the whole community is responsible for actions done in its name. In either case, the importance of distinguishing guilt from responsibility is crucial. Conflating guilt and collective responsibility has the potential to incite xenophobic sentiment as well as nonspecific acts of hate. By keeping these two phenomena separate, an individual can be held responsible for something he or she did not do without being condemned as guilty of those actions. Arendt’s example par excellence is the leadership exhibited by Napoleon Bonaparte after becoming the ruler or France. She explains this leadership in the following way: He said: I assume responsibility for everything France has done from the time of Charlemagne to the terror of Robespierre. In other words, he said, all this was done in my name to the extent that I am a member of this nation and the representative of this body politic.7

500

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

Napoleon is held to account for the sins of his predecessors without assuming their guilt.8 Collective responsibility always orients away from the individual and toward the community or group—its concern remains with the accountability of that which is greater than the self. Insofar as the deeds of the state to which I belong are not carried out by me personally, I cannot be held guilty of these deeds. However, insofar as I am disadvantaged by (or benefit from) those actions, and insofar as I continue to belong to the state that carried them out, I am accountable for them, which implies that I have a responsibility to set the record straight, as it were, for the good of the collective to which I belong.

Legal/Moral Responsibility Legal responsibility is also a matter of what has already happened, but it concerns the private individual rather than a public collectivity. Observe how courts of law individualize or single out one person and his or her relationship to a specific crime committed. Arendt writes: “If the person happens to be involved in a common undertaking as in the case of organized crime, what is to be judged is still this very person, the degree of his participation, his specific role, and so on, and not the group.”9 In terms of morality, Arendt herself admits that such considerations are less distinct, and moral responsibility, while concerned with the past, is less firmly fixed in the private realm. For the Greeks, moral considerations had to do with the individual, but always insofar as the conduct of the individual was good for the surrounding world. She writes: “In the center of interest is the world and not the self.”10 This shift in orientation began with the rise of Christianity where moral matters come to concern the well-being of the soul and have little to do with the goodness of the world. However, Arendt does acknowledge a kind of inward concern in Greek antiquity in the Socratic proposition, “It is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong.” After all, I am forever forced to live with myself: doing wrong will always be worse than suffering wrong.11 But when coupled with the fact that I cannot live only with myself, but am forever living with others as well, it becomes my duty to prevent any and all suffering. Arendt therefore modifies the Socratic proposition into a moral-political maxim: “What is important in the world is that there be no wrong; suffering wrong and doing wrong are equally bad.”12 Moral responsibility for Arendt is a hybrid between the private and the public: in both cases it relies on togetherness—privately, I am always with myself, but publicly I must live with others. Yet this moral responsibility does not implicate me politically in the same manner as does collective responsibility. Even though I am together in the world with others, this does not mean I am necessarily part of the same collectivity. And unlike collective responsibility, moral responsibility

RESPONSIBILITY

 501

concerns my own specific conduct; that is, my own moral responsibility does not concern the actions of others whatsoever. This individualizing aspect of moral responsibility is what makes it similar to legal responsibility in that it concerns the conduct of a single person who can be accountable or morally praised for such conduct.13 Thus, collective responsibility can be distinguished from moral and legal responsibility in that the latter must deal solely with the behavior of an individual, whereas the former must account for deeds committed in the name of a group. Even though these two kinds of responsibility differ with respect to the public/private distinction, both are directed temporally in the direction of past conduct—collective, moral, and legal responsibility all come to be defined by what has already taken place.

Personal Responsibility In a world where the public realm would naturally stand apart from private matters, and freedom would be possible through political action, Arendt would perhaps have little need for a responsibility that is personal in nature. In actuality, Arendt’s meaning of “personal” doesn’t exactly indicate a sole concern for matters that are private or distinctively singular in nature. The commonly employed phrase “personal responsibility” often indicates a kind of standard one strives to uphold without the assistance (financial or otherwise) of others, but Arendt’s meaning has more to do with the overall absence of a state’s public sphere. It might be more helpful to think of her usage of “personal” as indicating the bare life to which one is reduced in certain extreme situations. Even though someone is reduced to singularity in such circumstances, Arendt’s personal responsibility should not necessarily be understood as apolitical or absent of political concern. Arendt’s notion of political responsibility, which I will describe in more detail momentarily, shares with this personal responsibility two key features: (1) both types look forward toward the future, unlike collective and legal/moral responsibility, which focus primarily on accountability; and (2) both types require the use of the faculty of judgment as a tool for ethical discernment. In certain extreme situations, it can be difficult to continuously reduce an individual’s actions to his or her moral or legal conduct, since these usual ways of characterizing behavior can themselves become utterly reversed and confused. In her essay “Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship,” Arendt explains that the inhabitants of Nazi Germany “acted under conditions in which every moral act was illegal and every legal act was a crime.”14 Yet the Arendtian point about responsibility is more aptly captured by saying that “every moral act was illegal and every legal act was immoral.” The Nazis had so perverted the environment/world during the Third Reich that legality, defined as what was sanctioned by the state, had nothing whatsoever to do with moral action. The primary question in “Personal Responsibility” is “How am I to tell right from wrong, if the majority of my whole environment

502

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

has prejudged the issue? Who am I to judge?”15 The Arendtian concept of personal responsibility is key to answering this question. Many who chose to remain in Germany during the war years, and even some who participated in the state-sanctioned activities of the Holocaust, invoked the argument that another ought not be able to judge what happened if he or she was not present during such events. Arendt recounts this argument as something she was personally told after the Eichmann trial: “Most surprisingly, since after all we dealt with a trial whose result invariably was the passing of judgment, I was told that judging itself is wrong: no one can judge who had not been there.”16 Besides the fact that criminal trials would be very difficult to maintain if judgment could only come from eyewitnesses or solely those involved in criminal acts, there is something dishonest about attempts to exclude the activity of judgment altogether. Arendt summarizes this kind of bad faith in the following way: “Behind the unwillingness to judge lurks the suspicion that no one is a free agent, and hence the doubt that anyone is responsible or could be expected to answer for what he has done.”17 In other words, through the unwillingness to judge, the attempt is made to absolve everyone of responsibility since everyone is alike. Either all are imperfect and flawed, and hence all would perform exactly as I did given similar circumstances, or, conversely, no one could ever know what it is like to be in my shoes, so my perspective is all that matters in cases of judgment. Yet there were people who refused to participate in the same way as those around them; that is to say, it was possible to break from the automatism apparently required by their environment. This is the sort of personal responsibility Arendt wants to highlight in this essay. The environment in Nazi Germany was such that one had to judge within a context where neither moral nor legal code could help. Neither the former, understood in terms of a moral formula or outcome calculus, nor the latter, understood as appealing to established rules or laws, is helpful when one’s whole environment has been corrupted. One is on the “front lines,” so to speak—“abandoned” in the existential sense— and, thus, left to decide alone, without legal or moral guidance. What made some people capable of right action? According to Arendt they possessed an ability to think in solitude, which means that they were not completely alone.18 She writes: Their criterion, I think, was a different one: they asked themselves to what extent they would still be able to live in peace with themselves after having committed certain deeds; and they decided that it would be better to do nothing, not because the world would then be changed for the better, but simply because only on this condition could they go on living with themselves at all.19 This, for Arendt, is the human ability to think and judge: the ability not to allow one’s conscience to be drowned out by clichéd phrases or whatever

RESPONSIBILITY

 503

other categories, rules, standards, norms, and so on tend to take the place of thinking. Arendt is clear that this notion of personal responsibility cannot be concerned with political affairs due to the lack of a public realm. She notes, “I think we shall have to admit that there exist extreme situations in which responsibility for the world, which is primarily political, cannot be assumed because political responsibility always presupposes at least a minimum of political power.”20 Without a public realm where citizens have the freedom to appear and act before a plurality, political power is impossible. Yet there is still a kind of political concern that comes with personal responsibility: its interest is in the revival of the public realm, which would allow individuals to once again have that freedom to speak and to act among their peers, to appear before a plurality of witness, and to assume responsibility for the world—in other words, to assume political responsibility.

Political Responsibility Personal responsibility’s forward-looking aspect, as well as the requirement to judge, is what it shares with political responsibility, the most distinctively Arendtian of these types. Like personal responsibility, political responsibility is about being responsible rather than holding accountable or giving an account of some past conduct. Also important is the scope of this responsibility and the authority that comes with its assumption: political responsibility must assume authority for the world by making worldly concerns (the public sphere) central, over and above self-interest. If there were a hybrid between personal and collective responsibility, that hybrid would be political. In “The Crisis in Education,” Arendt explains that it is the task of the parent and teacher to assume responsibility for the world, to be a kind of “stand-in” or mediator between the child and the world. By assuming such responsibility, the educator joins herself with something that exceeds her own unique circumstance regardless of her personal feelings or reservations about it. Arendt explains the tension here, “The educators . . . stand in relation to the young as representatives of a world for which they must assume responsibility although they themselves did not make it, and even though they may, secretly or openly, wish it were other than it is.”21 Our own thoughts and wishes about the current or future status of the world are always somewhat out of sync with the world we actually inhabit, so taking responsibility for the world is a process of accepting our existence within it—admitting that we belong to it and that we must deal with it—while at the same time putting its welfare before our own self-interests. How do I accomplish an assumption of responsibility for a “continuously changing world” that I did not make, yet find myself within? Arendt’s answer is to employ the faculty of judgment while exercising the virtue of courage.

504

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

In other words, Arendt’s sense of political responsibility is a combination of contentious thinking—that is, the ability to listen to one’s own conscience and have a dialogue with one’s self—while simultaneously turning away from private self-interested concerns for the sake of making the world a better place, which is her definition of courage. To understand courage in its Arendtian sense, it would be helpful to understand what is so fantastically wrong with the character that comes to be known as the “family man” in Arendt’s early 1945 essay, “Organized Guilt and Universal Responsibility.” She uses this figure to make the distinction between, on the one hand, a self-involved responsibility that orients inward (though this is not to be confused with the personal responsibility described earlier), and on the other hand, a politically involved responsibility that orients outward, toward the other. The “family man” is the caricature Eichmann comes to embody during Arendt’s time writing about his trial. Arendt argues that Heinrich Himmler was the mastermind behind Nazi Germany’s manipulation of the “family man,” the man concerned mostly with his own outward reputation, which could be maintained by keeping a good home life. Arendt calls Himmler a “bourgeois” who has “all the habits of a good paterfamilias who does not betray his wife and anxiously seeks to secure a decent future for his children.”22 As she sees it, Himmler was able to recognize that a population of ordinary citizens, just like himself, would be much too concerned with their own reputations and families (and the reproduction of themselves through those families) to notice or care that they were being turned into very efficient and effective mass murderers. Their concern was directed toward the private realm; they had absolutely no need to look beyond themselves, or to attempt the prevention of suffering beyond their immediate families. It was not that these ordinary German citizens were bloodthirsty or adventurous; on the contrary, they were as mundane and regular as the rest of us. For Arendt, what they lacked was an ability to reorient their concern away from the protection and maintenance of the life process. This shift in perspective might seem unimportant on the surface, yet it is absolutely crucial: “For this world of ours,” Arendt explains, “because it existed before us and is meant to outlast our lives in it, simply cannot afford to give primary concern to individual lives and the interests connected with them.”23 Political courage, which is lacking in the “family man,” is the virtue by which one is able to reorient one’s perspective from a concern for individual life and self-involved responsibilities toward a concern for the world.24 Taking into consideration the “minimum of political power” that Arendt mentions in her 1964 essay, one could certainly imagine a combination where the citizen becomes both part of a collective, that is, by taking responsibility for the world, while at the same time attending to the voice of conscience that allows an individual to have a dialogue with herself, that is, by exercising judgment. In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt provides examples of precisely those who do possess this kind of conscience and those who took personal

RESPONSIBILITY

 505

responsibility. She remarks, “No one knows how many there were of them—perhaps a hundred thousand, perhaps many more, perhaps many fewer—for their voices were never heard.”25 But she also gives the example of the Scholls, “two students at Munich University, brother and sister, under the influence of their teacher Kurt Huber distributed the famous leaflets in which Hitler was finally called what he was—a ‘mass murderer.’”26 I agree with Iris Marion Young that this example is key to understanding Arendt’s thought of political responsibility: through the exercise of judgment, these students took responsibility for the world by appealing to, and appearing before, what was left of the public realm. And perhaps in least dispute is the courage they exhibited in their act of public defiance in the face of totalitarian circumstances. As Young would say, the example of the Scholls is representative of political responsibility because “it is public, and it is aimed at inciting others to join the actors in public opposition to Hitler.”27 Or, we might say, its aim was to recover and ameliorate the public realm. In a desperate situation where there was little in the way of moral guidance and where the legal code had been thoroughly corrupted, they proved capable of exercising judgment. But perhaps even in less desperate times, the comfort provided by ready-made categories or prescribed rules—what Arendt would call “automatic processes”—also require constant criticism and challenge. The public realm requires constant maintenance. Taking political responsibility requires not only that we have courage to interrupt automatisms28 and exercise judgment but also that we orient our concern—at least from time to time—away from our own personal matters and toward the world. Arendt says, “Courage liberates men from their worry about life for the freedom of the world. Courage is indispensable because in politics not life but the world is at stake.”29 In this respect, courage, as a publicly oriented concern, along with judgment, as a forward-looking ability to think and criticize, comes to define the most Arendtian responsibility: political responsibility.

Notes 1 Arendt mainly deals with the concept of responsibility in three essays from 1945, 1964, and 1968, listed respectively: “Organized Guilt and Universal Responsibility,” in Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism (New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2011), 121–32; “Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship,” in Responsibility and Judgment (New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2009), 17–48; “Collective Responsibility,” in Responsibility and Judgment (New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2009), 147–58. She also explores the concept throughout her writings from the Eichmann trial, see Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (Penguin, 2006). Arendt deals with the notion of “responsibility for the world” in “The Crisis in Education,” in Between Past and Future; Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York:

506

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

Viking Press, 1968), 170–93. Iris Marion Young has also explored Arendt’s concept of responsibility in her chapter “Guilt Versus Responsibility: A Reading and Partial Critique of Hannah Arendt,” in Responsibility for Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 75–94. However, Young does not engage with the 1964 “Personal Responsibility” essay, which is certainly key to understanding both Arendt’s notion of personal responsibility and her notion of political responsibility. 2 A word of caution: Arendt, despite numerous seemingly clear distinctions, is sometimes frustratingly inconsistent in her association of various terms. The problem is that sometimes Arendt will use the phrase “collective responsibility” interchangeably with “political responsibility.” But as I will argue in this essay, these concepts are very different. 3 Arendt, “Collective Responsibility,” 149. 4 Hannah Arendt and Ronald Beiner, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1989), 41. 5 Arendt never draws a sharp distinction between accountability and responsibility, yet there is a distinction to be made. Arendt usually speaks in terms of accountability when she is referring to a temporally pastoriented metaphysical status. We can still think of responsibility in terms of accountability, but then it is always the kind of responsibility that looks backward, toward what has already taken place. Therefore, the term accountability is helpful when considering definitions of collective, legal, and moral responsibility, but not so helpful when describing more future-oriented kinds such as personal and political responsibility. 6 Arendt, “Collective Responsibility,” 149. 7 Ibid., 150. 8 Also see The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1973), 235–36, where Arendt makes an observation, then a claim: “The appeal of tribal isolation and master race ambitions was partly due to an instinctive feeling that mankind, whether a religious or humanistic ideal, implies a common sharing of responsibility . . . men must assume responsibility for all crimes committed by men, and . . . eventually all nations will be forced to answer for the evil committed by all others. Tribalism and racism are the very realistic, if very destructive, ways of escaping this predicament of common responsibility.” In other words, Arendt is claiming that if mankind cannot acknowledge any distinction between guilt and responsibility—and refuses to recognize the collective to which it belongs—tribalism and racism become natural and logical havens where xenophobic sentiments become customary and destructive. 9 Arendt, “Collective Responsibility,” 148. 10 Ibid., 151. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid., 153. 13 Arendt explicitly draws the comparison when she says, “Legal and moral standards have one very important thing in common—they always relate to the person and what the person has done.” Ibid., 148.

RESPONSIBILITY

 507

14 Arendt, “Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship,” 41. 15 Ibid., 18. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid., 19. 18 See, for example, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 476. Where Arendt makes the distinction between solitude and loneliness. The ability to “keep myself company” happens when I am in solitude, whereas loneliness describes a situation of utter singularity, when I am completely alone. Also see The Life of the Mind (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 185. 19 Arendt, “Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship,” 44. 20 Ibid., 45. Arendt is no doubt also thinking about stateless persons in this passage. She also remarks in Origins, “They were and appeared to be nothing but human beings whose very innocence—from every point of view, and especially that of the persecuting governments—was their greatest misfortune. Innocence, in the sense of complete lack of responsibility, was the mark of their rightlessness as it was the seal of their loss of political status” Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 295. 21 Arendt, “The Crisis in Education,” 186. 22 Arendt, “Organized Guilt and Universal Responsibility,” 128. 23 Arendt, “What Is Freedom?,” in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought, 155. 24 In The Human Condition, while speaking of the ancient Greek notion of this virtue, Arendt notes, “To leave the household, originally in order to embark upon some adventure and glorious enterprise and later simply to devote one’s life to the affairs of the city, demanded courage because only in the household was one primarily concerned with one’s own life and survival. Whoever entered the political realm had first to be ready to risk his life, and too great a love for life obstructed freedom, was a sure sign of slavishness. Courage therefore became the political virtue par excellence, and only those men who possessed it could be admitted to a fellowship that was political in content and purpose and thereby transcended the mere togetherness imposed on all— slaves, barbarians, and Greeks alike—through the urgencies of life.” Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd ed. (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2013), 36. 25 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 103. 26 Ibid., 104. 27 Young, “Guilt versus Responsibility,” 90. 28 See Arendt, “What Is Freedom?,” 166–69. 29 Ibid., 155.

52 The Sensus Communis and Common Sense: The Worldly, Affective Sense of Judging Spectators Peg Birmingham

It is well known that Arendt died before undertaking what was to be the third part of Life of the Mind on judging. Although two epigraphs left in her typewriter indicate she had just started her systematic work on judgment, she was in fact well underway on her thinking through the question of judgment, most notably in her lectures on Kant’s political philosophy given at the New School for Social Research in 1974. I suggest, however, that we not be tempted to turn immediately to these lectures in an attempt to understand her theory of judgment and, more precisely, her notion of the sensus communis, but instead, linger with her stated project of the The Life of the Mind as this will more clearly indicate why judging and the sensus communis are the anticipated denouement of Life of the Mind, holding equal importance to action in Arendt’s rethinking of the concept of the political after its twentieth-century failures, most notably the event of totalitarianism. I will begin with two striking aspects of Arendt’s Introduction to Life of the Mind, Thinking. First, referring to Eichmann and her coined phrase “the banality of evil,” Arendt remarks that her reflections in Life of the Mind are provoked by confronting something that was “utterly different and still undeniably factual,” namely, that while the deeds were monstrous, the doer “was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous.”1

THE SENSUS COMMUNIS AND COMMON SENSE

 509

As she puts it, “Having been struck by a fact, that willy-nilly ‘put me in possession of a concept’. . . . I could not help raising the quaestio juris, ‘by what right I possessed and used it.’”2 She goes on to say that the moral questions “arising from factual experience, and going counter to the wisdom of the ages,” prompted her to raise the larger questions of thinking and judging that emerged from the trial. Strikingly, Arendt begins a reflection on the life of the mind by referring to factual experience no less than three times in the first three pages. The second striking aspect of the Introduction is Arendt’s discussion of the death of metaphysics and her critique of metaphysical leave-taking from the realm of appearance. She points out that that however much philosophers might have disagreed on the concept of being, one point was “taken for granted,” namely, metaphysics “dealt with matters that were not given to sense-perception and that their understanding transcended common-sense reasoning.”3 Arendt puts herself on the side of Kant, harboring no regret that the “age-old distinction” between the many and the “professional thinkers” had fallen into disrepute. While Arendt makes a distinction between common sense, on the one hand, and thinking and judging, on the other, nevertheless, thinking and judging are for her rooted in the earthly condition of appearance, which she argues is characterized by a “perceptual faith” in an “objective reality” that depends “entirely on the object’s also appearing as such to others and being acknowledged by them. Without this tacit acknowledgement by others we would not even to be able to put faith in the way we appear to ourselves.”4 Her critique of Descartes is instructive as she argues that had he actually “been born in a desert, without a body and its senses to perceive ‘material’ things and without fellow-creatures to assure him that what he perceived was perceived by them too,” he would never have been able to think at all. The condition of thinking and judging is appearing, which “carries with it a prior indication of realness.”5 This feeling of reality, she argues, emerges from the “sensorily given.”6 Common sense is for her this feeling of worldly reality as it is given to the senses. To prevent drawing the conclusion that Arendt’s concern with common sense is something unique to Life of the Mind, we must recall that the problem of common sense preoccupied her from the very first pages of The Origins of Totalitarianism. The first chapter of the book, titled “Anti-Semitism as an Outrage to Common Sense,” raises the question of how a seemingly small question, namely, the Jewish question, could lead to Nazism, a World War, and the death camps. Arendt uses “outrage” in the double sense of barbarity and fury: not only is common sense outraged by the turn anti-Semitism took in the twentieth century (from religious to political anti-Semitism), at the same time, the barbarism of twentieth century anti-Semitism is a crime against common sense. She elaborates on one of the key elements of the crime a few pages into Origins when she claims that totalitarianism’s key condition is replacing reality with the radical lie: “The most striking difference between the ancient and the modern sophists is that the ancients were satisfied with a passing victory of the argument at the expense of

510

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

truth, whereas the moderns want a more lasting victory at the expense of reality.”7 In the final chapter of Origins, “Ideology and Terror,” Arendt provides a bookend for the beginning, claiming that common sense—the sense of worldly reality—has been replaced with ideology’s hellish fantasies, characterized by a “strident logicality,” a logic through which the whole of reality is rationally and systematically organized with a view toward domination. This logicality, she argues, permits the fabrication of a “literally senseless world” in which everything is possible.8 In her essay “Understanding and Politics,” written two years after the completion of Origins, Arendt takes up again to the issue of common sense, defining it as “traditionally a body of pre-understandings which are shared by members of a shared tradition and unites them as such. . . . [It is] a kind of common language whose roots is a common culture, a concrete collective life.”9 She goes on to say that this preliminary understanding is “an implicitly shared language out of which judgment arises. It is true that any proposal for action which does not strike roots in this common ground necessarily falls on deaf ears—it is literally beyond comprehension.”10 Still further, she claims that the disappearance of common sense, which reveals itself as the incapacity to judge, is rooted in “the downfall of customs, the weakness of the laws, [and] a society that could no longer give an account of its categories of understanding and standards of judgment when they were seriously challenged.”11 With the disappearance of common sense, which she defines as “the common world into which we all fit,”12 logicality and “strident consistency” take its place, pointing out that it is no surprise from out of this bankruptcy of common sense arose “the new logical movement in philosophy.”13 Important to this essay are the footnotes in which she connects the loss of common sense with the destruction of factual reality: “[totalitarianism] has lost the earlier Marxist respect for facts . . . assuming only the validity of the law of a moving History or Nature. Whoever acts in accordance with this law no longer needs particular experiences.”14 Lest we jump to the conclusion that Arendt’s references to factual reality indicate some residual positivism in her thinking, she is clear that attention to “factual reality” requires a concept of history that not only illuminates the unprecedented event of totalitarianism but at the same time also recognizes the bankruptcy of traditional categories of judgment and understanding that has occurred with the destruction of common sense. As we will see further, in her discussion of appearance, she is not positing the existence of an independent objective reality; instead she is thinking a common sense of the real—a primordial sensus communis—that emerges in a plurality of perspectives and provides the basis for judging and what might be called a second-order sensus communis. Finally, returning to the immediate context of The Life of Mind, namely, Eichmann’s thoughtlessness, Arendt does not understand “thoughtless” to mean that Eichmann lacked motives such as career advancement. In “Collective Guilt and Organized Responsibility,” she is clear that Eichmann and those like him were “good family men,” whose paramount concern was

THE SENSUS COMMUNIS AND COMMON SENSE

 511

their regular paychecks and health insurance policies. At the same time, while Eichmann may not have held “firm ideological convictions,”15 nevertheless, in her trial report she points out that Eichmann was an “ideas” man, someone who was caught up in the idea of the Third Reich and a new millennial regime, and as a result often found himself “elated” with Himmler’s “winged words.”16 This is all to say, Eichmann was certainly not a realist. Thus by “thoughtlessness,” Arendt means neither an absence of private motives nor being devoid of ideas. Again, Eichmann had both motives and ideas. Instead, Eichmann’s thoughtlessness lay in his utter lack of common sense, that is, his utter lack of engagement with reality. As Arendt puts it in the context of Eichmann’s use of clichés right up to the moment of his death: Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality, that is, against the claim on our thinking attention that all events and facts make by virtue of their existence.17 She notes that while we would be exhausted if we recognized this claim all of the time, Eichmann’s thoughtlessness lay in recognizing “no such claim of reality at all.”18 My point here is that Arendt’s abiding concern throughout her writings is the loss of common sense in the modern age.19 Lacking common sense, Eichmann had no sense of reality, and it was this lack that rendered him incapable of thinking or judging. Significantly, Arendt sees Eichmann’s flight into the world of ideas as contributing to this lack. Thus, her turn to the death of God, and with it the demise of the distinction between the supersensory and the sensory worlds, a turn that follows on the heels of her reflections on Eichmann’s banality of evil, is more than simply setting the stage for a reconsideration of what it might mean to think, will, and judge after the death of metaphysics. The end of metaphysics with the twin deaths of the sensory and the supersensory worlds provides the opening to carry out a rehabilitation of appearance that will allow her to recover a notion of common sense without relying on traditional categories of thought or judgment (an exercise in nostalgia), or rehabilitating a notion of the common world rooted in a common culture or tradition (an impossibility given the rupture in tradition and the plurality of cultures). This in turn will allow her to address the banality of evil, which for her, is Eichmann’s complete loss of the ability to judge, a loss rooted in the double loss of common sense and the sensus communis.

Appearance and Common Sense Arendt’s discussion of appearance in Life of the Mind develops a point that she had made in The Human Condition in a section titled, “The Public Realm: The Common,” where she distinguishes between two senses of the “public,”

512

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

which she argues “are closely inter-related but not altogether identical phenomenon.”20 As Arendt puts it, the public means “first, that everything that appears in public can be seen and heard by everybody and has the widest possible publicity. For us, appearance—something that is being seen and heard by others as well as ourselves—constitutes reality.”21 She develops this point in Life of the Mind, claiming that being and appearing are coincident, and as such appearance requires a spectator: “Nothing and nobody exists in this world whose very being does not presuppose a spectator. In other words, nothing that is, insofar as it appears exists in the singular; everything that is is meant to be perceived by somebody.”22 Hence, she claims, “plurality is the law of the earth.”23 The law of plurality indicates that the “common” cannot be unified or given some kind of essential definition. Instead, Arendt thinks the common as being-in-common: All sense-endowed creatures have appearance as such in common, first an appearing world and second, and perhaps even more important the fact that they themselves are appearing and disappearing creatures, that there always was a world before their arrival and there always will be a world after their departure.24 In this later work, Arendt indicates that appearance and disappearance are more fundamental than natality and mortality, which in The Human Condition she reserves for the human being whose unique life, marked by birth and death, cuts a rectilinear path across the time of species life. Strikingly, Arendt suggests that all living beings as distinct beings in a plurality with others appear and disappear, and as appearances are always more than simply species life. This last is supported by Arendt’s claim in Life of the Mind: Thinking that living beings are not mere appearances. As she puts it, Seen from the perspective of the world, every creature born into it arrives well equipped to deal with a world in which Being and Appearing coincide; they are fit for worldly existence. Living beings, men and animals, are not just in the world, they are of the world and this precisely because they are subjects and objects—perceiving and being perceived— at the same time.25 Again, living beings are not “mere appearances,” reducible to bare life. Instead, living beings have the desire to appear and this is something far different than the Hobbesian conatus for self-preservation. As Arendt puts it, “To be alive means to be possessed by an urge toward self-display which answers the fact of one’s own appearingness.”26 Here again she alters her account of species life in The Human Condition: “It is indeed as though everything that is alive—in addition to the fact that its surface is made for appearance, fit to be seen and meant to appear to others—has an urge to appear, to fit itself into

THE SENSUS COMMUNIS AND COMMON SENSE

 513

the world of appearances by displaying and showing, not its ‘inner self’ but itself as an individual.”27 Living beings as individual beings appear, and this appearance is marked by a desire to appear as an individual. Looking to the research of the Swiss biologist and zoologist Adolph Portman, Arendt argues that this “desire to appear” cannot be explained in functional terms; instead, she suggests, it is gratuitous, having to do with the sheer pleasure of self-display. Human beings, who have a concern with an enduring image, transform this urge to self-display into a desire for selfpresentation that she argues involves a “promise to the world, to those to whom I appear, to act in accordance with my pleasure.”28 Moreover, this urge to self-display cannot be understood in terms of something “inner” wanting to express oneself. The self is given in its appearance, in its selfdisplay. Again, this is not “expressiveness” in the sense that the expression reveals something “inside” the expression. Common sense therefore is a worldly sense that fits living beings into a common world with others. As Arendt puts it, this worldly sense is given by the “senses playing together, kept in turn by common sense and guaranteed by the fact of plurality.”29 Critiquing the distinction between depth and surface, as if the surface owes its appearance to something hidden, Arendt argues that the self makes it appearance on the surface in its sentient, embodied relation with the world. As Kimberly Curtis beautifully puts it, We find [in Arendt] an ontology of display that suggests that reality in an appearing world such as ours is something born out of a highly charged mutual sensuous provocation between actors and spectators that is essentially aesthetic in nature. A universe alive with yearning to sense and be sensed, a universe that perpetually gives birth to its own plurality and profusion.30 Prior to the sensus communis that emerges through a plurality of judging spectators, Arendt claims a more primordial sensus communis of sensuous spectators: “To appear always means to seem to others and this seeming varies according to the standpoint and the perspective of the spectators.”31 As we shall see, the sensus communis of judgment is not rooted in a transcendental condition, but rather has its origins in the common worldly sense of appearance. Our sense of reality therefore depends upon this sensuous world of appearances shared in common with a plurality of other beings. Indeed, as Curtis points out, our capacity to experience a world in common is “utterly dependent upon the aesthetic provocation of multiple, distinct appearing beings. If we can locate the common world at all, therefore, it is paradoxically to be found only where this provocation flourishes.”32 In other words, our capacity to sense the real depends upon a mutual provocation between and among appearing beings and this provocation is aesthetic, both sensuous and affective.

514

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

Arendt’s account of a primordial sensus communis at the level of appearance itself demonstrates the centrality of embodied life in her understanding of common sense and the sensus communis of judging spectators. The plurality of perspectives that marks the Arendtian public space is inseparable from the plurality of embodied and sensual perspectives. Appearing beings, human and animal alike, are living organisms enmeshed in a matrix of material, embodied, and interdependent relationships, and the human capacity for action is inseparable from this earthly appearance. As Arendt claims in The Human Condition, “Action . . . corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world.”33 As just seen in her later work Life of the Mind: Thinking, Arendt claims that living on the earth is already to inhabit a world. Again, the life of action (vita activa) is inseparable from the sensuous and affective habitation that marks its earthly condition. This is also true of the judging sensus communis; it too has its origin in sensuous, embodied appearance on the earth and in the world. As Cecilia Sjöholm puts it, Arendt relocates the question of judgment from the transcendental subject to the plurality of the public sphere. To Arendt, a community is always coming into being through the time-space of its conditioning, a time-space that is itself affected by its inhabitants. Rather than being erected through transcendental laws of apprehension that forever remain the same, a community of taste is affected by the bodies that inhabit it.34

From Common Sense to the Sensus Communis: The Cosmopolitan, Historical Sense While Arendt does not ground the sensus communis in a Kantian transcendental subject, it is, nevertheless, marked by a dislocation from the space of appearances, a dislocation in marked contrast to withdrawal of thinking. At the same time, the imagination works differently in the two activities. The thinking imagination “transforms a visible object into an invisible image . . . in these operations the mind learns how to deal with things that are absent and prepares itself to ‘go further,’ toward the understanding of things that are always absent, that cannot be remembered because they were never present to sense-experience.”35 The thinking imagination reproduces in thought what was once given in experience: “Imagination prepares the objects of our thought. Before we raise such questions as what is happiness, what is justice what is knowledge, and so on, we must have seen happy and unhappy people, witnessed just and unjust deeds, experienced the desire to know and its fulfillment or frustration.”36 Every thought is an afterthought. “By repeating in imagination, we de-sense whatever had been given to our senses . . . only logical reasoning has cut all strings to living experience.”37

THE SENSUS COMMUNIS AND COMMON SENSE

 515

Moreover, thinking’s withdrawal from the realm of appearances is “unlocatable and indeterminate.” Reading Kafka’s parable “He,” Arendt describes thinking as standing in the diagonal or deflected force of the present, a deflection that emerges in the clash between the forces of the past and those of the future. While thinking has a definite temporal origin in the present, its end is indefinite: “For this diagonal, though pointing to some infinity, is limited, enclosed, as it were, by the forces of past and future, and thus protected against the void; it remains bound to and is rooted in the present.”38 Arendt characterizes the solitary stance in the gap between past and future as the “quiet in the center of the storm.”39 The judging spectators of the sensus communis know no such quiet. When thinking returns to the realm of appearance, it frees judging, “the most political of all our faculties.” As Arendt goes on to claim, “When it [thinking] emerges from its withdrawal and returns to the world of particular appearances, it turns out that the mind needs a new ‘gift’ to deal with them.”40 The gift of evaluating the “world of particular appearances” is that of judgment, a gift given only a plurality of judging spectators: Hence the spectator’s verdict, while impartial and freed from the interests of gain or fame, is not independent of the views of others—on the contrary, according to Kant, “an enlarged mentality” has to take them into account. The spectators, although disengaged from the particularity characteristic of the actor, are not solitary. Nor are they self-sufficient.41 Moreover, unlike the solitary thinker, spectators are locatable in time and space, their judgments limited to “their validity to human beings on earth.”42 Recalling that Arendt claims a primordial sensus communis at the level of common sense, formed through a plurality of appearing, sensual spectators, this second-order sensus communis is formed through a plurality of judging spectators, dislocated from appearance and common sense, yet still earthbound and embodied. As Arendt puts it in her Kant lectures, the faculty of judgment “is the very essence of what we are as we are of this world only.”43 These judgments are judgments of taste; they evaluate how the world ought to look and who and what is fit to appear in it. Moreover, the criterion for judgments of taste is the enlargement of one’s humanity and sociability. Agreeing with Kant that sociality is “the very origin, not the goal, of man’s humanity,”44 Arendt argues that it is the interest of judgment, the interest of the sensus communis with furthering this worldly condition of sociability and ensuring its endurance. Hence the enlarged mentality of the judging spectators is not merely judging from the standpoint of another, but also the enlargement of humanity and the shared condition of sociability. The enlarged mentality for Arendt is not empathic, nor does it involve the actual standpoints of others. Not empathic, the enlarged mentality does not indulge the fiction that I can assimilate or appropriate the other’s standpoint

516

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

as if it were possible to make myself at home elsewhere. At the same time, emphasizing the possible standpoints of others, Arendt understands the worldly space of the sensus communis as one that is always “potentially public, open to all sides”;45 she thereby avoids thinking the sensus communis along the lines of a communitarian model, in which the judging spectators are rooted in a shared history, common beliefs, or unified identity. Indeed, Arendt insists that the enlarged mentality is representative in the precise sense of “making present absent standpoints.” Neither empathic nor bound to the actual, the enlarged mentality adopts the “general standpoint,” which Arendt argues “is not the generality of the concept—it is, on the contrary closely connected with the particular conditions of the standpoints one has to go through in order to arrive at one’s own ‘general standpoint.’”46 Again, the enlarged mentality is not engaged in a direct perception of reality as in the primordial sensus communis of common sense; instead, it is the imaginative capacity to produce a more encompassing or enlarged sense of the real by going through the particular conditions of a plurality of standpoints to arrive at the general standpoint. Again, the general standpoint is the enlarged standpoint of humanity and our shared worldly sociability. Following from this, the enlarged mentality judges from the perspective of the world and not as a citizen of a particular political space. Arendt claims, “When one judges and when one acts in political matters, one is supposed to take one’s bearings from the idea, not the actuality, of being a world citizen and therefore, also a Weltbetrachter, a world spectator.”47 Reflecting on Kant’s notion of hospitality, Arendt clarifies this point: “One judges always as a member of a community, guided by one’s community sense, one’s sensus communis, but in the last analysis, one is a member of a world community by the sheer fact of being human; this is one’s cosmopolitan existence.”48 If the space of the sensus communis is global and cosmopolitan, its time is what we might call the “historical present.” For Arendt, the sensus communis has a common present and a plurality of pasts. She clarifies this in her essay on Jaspers in Men in Dark Times: For the first time in history all peoples on earth have a common present: no event of any importance in the history of one country can remain a marginal accident in the history of any other. . . . But this common factual present is not based on a common past and does not in the least guarantee a common future.49 The judging spectators share a common present, while at the same time being situated in a plurality of histories. The judging spectator is then also a historian, sitting in judgment of both the present and the past: If judgment is our faculty for dealing with the past, the historian is the inquiring man who by relating it sits in judgment over it. If that is so, we may reclaim our human dignity, win it back, as it were, from the

THE SENSUS COMMUNIS AND COMMON SENSE

 517

pseudo-divinity named History of the modern age, without denying history’s importance but denying its right to being the ultimate judge.50 Given the break in tradition, the site of the historical present is a site of discontinuity that requires the activity of collecting and assembling the plural narratives that together make up the conjunctions of histories in the present. Arendt argues that the spectator as historian works in the light of the events that bring their pasts into being in the crystallization of the present. Following Benjamin, this crystallization must be understood as a suspension between past and future, a break in the time continuum, a break with all notions of progress. For Arendt, the present is not a transition to another future point, but always a singular moment in which the failures and possibilities of the past are contracted and evaluated by the judging spectators. Here again we must recall that the interest of judging is the enlargement and endurance of our worldly sociability. Thus, Arendt ends her essay “Understanding and Politics,” by citing King Solomon’s prayer for an “understanding heart.”51 Arendt defines “understanding” as the ability to judge, that is, to see things in their proper perspective, to be strong enough to put that which is too close at a certain distance so that we can see and understand it without bias and prejudice, to be generous enough to bridge abysses of remoteness until we can see and understand everything that is too far away from us as though it were our own affair.52 Again, the judging imagination of the sensus communis is productive; it brings distances closer, and that gives some distance to what is still too close; it gathers and assembles a plurality of histories and counter-histories in order to enlarge our sense of the real whose “dark density” is illuminated by the productive imagination that animates the sensus communis. Still further, Arendt claims, the judging imagination allows us “to take our bearings in the world . . . [it] makes it bearable for us to live with other people, strangers forever, in the same world, and makes it possible for them to bear with us.”53 Contrary to David Ingram’s claim that “Arendt hopes to show how judgment can redeem the past,”54 her reference to Solomon’s prayer suggests that the sensus communis is not redemptive, but rather one that bears the shock of reality and through that bearing enlarges the sense of our common worldly sociability. I will return to this at the conclusion of the essay.

A Judging Heart: The Affective Sensus Communis As just seen, Arendt’s appeal to Solomon, the exemplary figure of judgment, is for an understanding heart. How does Arendt understand the “heart” in this prayer for understanding? How does the heart allow for judging,

518

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

and in judging bear and enlarge the world? While the affective dimension of the sensus communis is not systematically developed in Arendt’s work, it is central to her account. In what follows and as a conclusion, I want to outline briefly the affects that for Arendt ought to animate the heart of the sensus communis, and this because they provide a sense of reality, that is, they provoke a “shock of reality,” the condition for judging in the sensus communis. For Arendt, proper political affects are those that are “worlddisclosing” rather than concealing reality through sentimentality or feeling. World-disclosing passions and affects, she writes, “are not found in the force of the passion affecting the soul, but instead, by the amount of reality the passion transmits to it.”55 World-disclosing affections must have two additional characteristics, namely, openness to others and the disclosure of the fundamental plurality that marks being-in-the-world. With these characteristics in mind, four affects are fundamental to a sensus communis rooted in an enlarged sense of the real: shame, anger, lamentation, and joy. But, first, a word of caution. Arendt’s notion of an affective sensus communis bears none of the traits of Carl Schmitt’s notion of an affective or intensive community that unites the citizenry and for which they are willing to sacrifice with blood in the face of a concrete existential threat. Here we must recall that for Arendt, following Kant, the sensus communis is comprised of dislocated spectators who possess the faculty of reflective judgment. As Kant puts it, the sensus communis is a sense common to all, of a faculty of judgment which in its reflection takes account a priori of the mode of representation of all other men in thought, in order, as it were, to compare its judgment with the collective reason of humanity, and thus to escape illusion arising from the private conditions that could be so easily taken for objective, which would injuriously affect the judgment.56 As we have seen, Arendt’s reflective judgment is rooted in the common sense of dwelling on the earth and inhabiting the world rather than in Kant’s a priori transcendental realm. Nevertheless, for Arendt the sensus communis of judgment is a reflective communis wherein no immediate sharing of feelings, no shared empathy is possible. As seen earlier, for her, the “collective reason of humanity,” is the reflective idea of humanity and a worldly sociability for which there is no corresponding empirical reality. As Lyotard puts it, entirely in keeping with Arendt’s position, “there is no assignable community of feeling, no affective consensus in fact.”57 As we have seen, the judging sensus communis is dislocated from the space and time of the empirical world of common sense. Thus, there is no empirical experience of the sensus communis, no actual historical or social community. As noted earlier, the sensus communis is animated by the cosmopolitan idea and comprised of world spectators. The animating affect of the cosmopolitan communis is international solidarity, which Arendt claims

THE SENSUS COMMUNIS AND COMMON SENSE

 519

arises out of an “elemental shame, which many people of various nationalities share with one another today, [and] is what is finally left of our international solidarity.”58 Arendt indicates that shame and the accompanying horror are the foundational affects of a sensus communis animated by a sense of the real. While the Greeks were provoked to think out of a sense of wonder (thaumazein) at the beauty of the world, wonder today, she claims, is provoked by the twin senses of horror and shame at what human beings are capable of doing. Only those who are provoked to think and judge out of shame and horror can be “relied upon when it comes to fighting fearlessly, uncompromisingly, everywhere against the incalculable evil that men are capable of bringing about.”59 Shame and horror, she argues, are the “prepolitical affects and in need of political expression.”60 While Arendt does not explicitly elaborate upon the political affects that allow for the political expression of shame and horror, I submit that she does provide insight into what these might be.61 Chief among them is anger or outrage. In her reply to Eric Voegelin, who criticized The Origins of Totalitarianism for being too passionate, too angry, and thereby lacking the objectivity and dispassionateness required for historical judgment, Arendt asks whether it is possible or even desirable to write sine ira et studio (without hate or anger) when writing of this event. As Arendt puts it, referencing Marx, whose writings she argues emerge from outrage at the immense poverty of the British working classes during the Industrial Revolution: If I describe these conditions without permitting my indignation to interfere, I have lifted this particular phenomenon out of its context in human society and have thereby robbed it of part of its nature, deprived it of one of its important inherent qualities. For to arouse indignation is one of the qualities of excessive poverty insofar as poverty occurs among human beings.62 Anger emerges from the worldly event of poverty, and is thereby worlddisclosing, affecting actors and thinkers, who in turn ought to respond, either on streets or in libraries. Anger discloses a particular worldly event, in this case poverty, opening the self to the world and to the plurality of being with others in the world. As noted earlier, Arendt also counts lamentation as one of the chief political affects of the sensus communis insofar as it is an affect infusing the memory of violence, both the memory of oppression and the violence used to resist it. Rosa Luxemburg is the exemplary figure whose revolutionary struggle was animated by lamentation rather than celebration for the unavoidable violence of resistance. Arendt’s profound admiration of Luxemburg lies in her lamentation at the death and violence of revolutionary action and her steadfast refusal to transform this death and violence into a form of benediction. Strikingly, Arendt suggests that political lamentation allows for the overcoming of the sacralization of violence that presently

520

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

animates the nation-state, which continues to think of its citizens as martyrs, sacrificing their lives on the altar of the nation in order for the nation to live. Lamentation refuses this sacralization. Again, Arendt’s sensus communis is not redemptive. Refusing a transcendent meaning that would provide a glorious redemption for violence and destruction, lamentation allows for earthly and worldly endurance by bearing what has happened, the latter the work of judging’s production imagination. Lamentation and outrage are tempered by joy and praise, political affects that offer reconciliation with a world gone terribly awry. Arendt turns again to Brecht who “understood what Nietzsche first understood, namely, that with the death of god and with the absence of hell, there can be now jubilation, liberation from fear rather than despair or nihilism.” Earthly joy liberates from fear that Arendt, following Lessing, counts as one of two “political evils,” the other being hope. Hope, she argues, leaps over reality while fear shrinks back from it. Joy, accompanied by earthly praise, is an “intensified awareness of reality” emerging from a “passionate openness to the world and love of it.”63 Again, the sensus communis is not a redemptive communis. At the end of his essay on Arendt, addressing the question of the banality of evil, Lyotard asks, “Who can pardon it? Who can set it right?”64 Arendt would answer: There is no pardon, no setting it right. As Horkheimer points out, the murdered are dead, no redemption is possible. Arendt would agree. There is instead only the imperative of retaining a fierce sense of reality, of judging from a common and enlarged sense of inhabiting the earth and world, animated by shame and horror, outrage, lamentation, and the improbable joy and earthly praise emerging from the passionate engagement with the world and the common sense of the real that it carries with it.

Notes 1 Hannah Arendt, Life of the Mind (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 5. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid., 12–13. 4 Ibid., 46. 5 Ibid., 49. 6 Ibid., 52. 7 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harvest, 1975), 9. 8 See Hannah Arendt, “Religion and Politics,” in Essays in Understanding, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1994), 379. 9 Hannah Arendt, “Understanding and Politics,” in Essays in Understanding, 310. 10 Ibid.

THE SENSUS COMMUNIS AND COMMON SENSE

 521

11 Ibid. 12 Ibid., 318. 13 Ibid., 319. 14 Ibid., n. 12. 15 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (New York: Penguin, 1963), 53. 16 Ibid., 53. 17 Hannah Arendt, “Thinking and Moral Considerations,” in Responsibility and Judgment, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2003), 160. 18 Ibid. 19 In chapter six of The Human Condition, “Vita Activa and the Modern Age,” Arendt has already begun to show how the modern age is characterized by a loss of common sense. See especially her discussion of Descartes and the modern sense of “world alienation.” 20 Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1958), 50. 21 Ibid. 22 Arendt, Life of the Mind, 15. 23 Ibid., 19. 24 Ibid., 20. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid., 21. 27 Ibid., 29. 28 Ibid., 36. 29 Ibid., 64. 30 Kimberley F. Curtis, “Aesthetic Foundations of Democratic Politics in the Work of Hannah Arendt,” in Hannah Arendt and the Meaning of Politics, ed. Calhoun and McGowan (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 39. 31 Arendt, Life of the Mind, 21. 32 Curtis, “Aesthetic Foundations of Democratic Politics in the Work of Hannah Arendt,” 44. 33 Arendt, Human Condition, 7. 34 Cecilia Sjöholm, Doing Aesthetics with Arendt (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 81. 35 Arendt, Life of the Mind, 77. 36 Ibid., 87. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid., 209. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid., 215. 41 Ibid., 94.

522

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

42 Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1982), 13. 43 Ibid., 74. 44 Ibid. 45 Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, 43. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid., 76. 48 Ibid., 75. 49 Hannah Arendt, “Karl Jaspers: Citizen of the World?,” in Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt Brace 1993), 83. 50 Arendt, Life of the Mind, 216. 51 Arendt, “Understanding and Politics,” 322. 52 Ibid., 323. 53 Ibid. 54 David Ingram, “The Postmodern Kantianism of Arendt and Lyotard,” in Judging Lyotard, ed. Andrew Benjamin (London: Routledge, 1992), 126. Ingram claims in this same essay that Arendt is positing “an ideal community of speakers capable of agreeing with one another” (ibid.). I disagree, arguing that the common of the sensus communis must be understood as a common sense of humanity and common worldly sociability. As I have tried to show, Arendt’s understanding of the common is made up of a plurality of perspectives that are neither with or against, neither in agreement nor in disagreement with one another. Again, the common of the sensus communis is the world and not an agreement or consensus among the spectators. 55 Hannah Arendt, “On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts on Lessing,” in Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1968), 6. 56 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner J. Pluhar (New York: Hackett, 1998), Section 40. 57 Jean-Francois Lyotard, “Sensus Communis,” in Judging Lyotard, ed. Andrew Benjamin (London: Routledge, 1992), 24. 58 Hannah Arendt, “Organized Guilt and Universal Responsibility,” in Essays in Understanding, 131. 59 Ibid. 60 Ibid. 61 For a much longer discussion of the political affects of anger, lamentation, and joy in Hannah Arendt’s thought, please see my essay, “Recovering the Sensus Communis: Arendt’s Phenomenology of Political Affects,” in Phenomenology and the Political, ed. S. West Gurley and Geoff Pfeifer (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016), especially 9–16. 62 Hannah Arendt, “A Reply to Eric Voegelin,” in Essays in Understanding, 403. 63 Arendt, “On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts on Lessing.” 64 Jean-Francois Lyotard, “The Survivor,” in Toward the Post-Modern, ed. Robert Harvey and Mark S. Roberts (Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1995), 155.

53 Sovereignty Christian Volk

Hannah Arendt is a critic of sovereignty on all vital political and philosophical axes of her thought. Apart from a short passage in her The Human Condition where Arendt seems to imagine an alternative notion of sovereignty, based on the idea of mutual promise1—a conceptualization of sovereignty she never again revived—the conclusion of her thought is that a sovereign-centered political world perception is compatible neither with “the very condition of plurality”2 nor with the idea of freedom. A political community founded on the idea of sovereignty is not only “built on quicksand,”3 but built in a world of (alleged) sovereign nation-states: “a guaranteed peace on earth is as utopian as the squaring of the circle.”4 In principle, her critique of sovereignty materializes in three forms of critique and all are central to Arendt’s work. The first critique is of political-historical kind and is marked by her critical engagement with the European nation-state’s claim to sovereignty. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt takes up this claim and deconstructs it with respect to the refugee and minority crisis of the early twentieth century. This crisis discloses not only the “internal disintegration”5 of an order of nation-states but also the impracticality of the concept of sovereignty in a globalized world.6 Arendt states three reasons for this assessment: First, the common belief that the will of the nation should be the “sole legitimate criterion”7 for any political order stirred up ethnical hatred that was prevalent in the 1920s and the 1930s. As a consequence, this hatred destroyed the “spirit of unorganized solidarity and agreement”8 among the nation-states and made communication among the political entities difficult, if not impossible. Second, the need for homogeneity in order to form such a sovereign will started de-assimilation

524

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

processes among minority groups within the nation-states that not only fired political conflicts but also diminished a state’s sovereignty on issues such as “emigration, naturalization, nationality, and expulsion.”9 Finally, unilateralism in questions of security and public safety, as an expression of state sovereignty, led to an inability of the state to solve emerging problems and, at the same time, to act on its self-given constitutional foundation. Due to the enormous loss of authority and power, many European states had relinquished their constitutional order and abandoned the rule of law before the Second World War. These states either turned into totalitarian, fascist, or authoritarian regimes, or replaced parliamentarian democracy with a party dictatorship. For Arendt, the minority and refugee crisis, therefore, does not show the sovereignty of the nation-state but its inappropriateness as a form of government leading to the concurrent fall of a Europe composed of nation-states. She elaborates a historical situation in which governmental action “undermine[s] legality in the internal affairs of the affected states and its international relations.”10 While the state practices of nonlegal deportation steadily increased, she diagnoses a spread of illegality in society and a “defiance of the authority of laws,” which she identifies as an “explicit sign of the inner instability and vulnerability of existing governments and legal systems.”11 Arendt’s second anti-sovereignty critique is the one against Rousseau’s volonté générale and Sieyès’s pouvoir constituant. Her critique is raised from the perspective of political and constitutional theory, mainly in On Revolution. Arendt argues that popular sovereignty not only endangers the rule of law but also undermines any stable free political order. Although Rousseau explicitly stresses that “object of laws is always general,”12 the decisive problem of his understanding of law is that he identifies the law with the “public interest”: “I therefore give the name ‘Republic’ to every State that is governed by laws . . . : for only in such a case does the public interest govern.”13 If one indeed wishes to make the public interest the sole criterion of the law, that is, allow it to govern, then the consequence for a specific legal implementation is that one must set general clauses instead of a law with a clearly defined content. Why and to what extent, according to Arendt, is the sovereignty of the general will accompanied by general clauses? If, as for Rousseau, the general political will is always what it ought to be, or if, as for Sieyès, it does not matter “what a nation’s will is, it suffices that it has a will. All forms are good and its will is always the highest law,”14 then no law can or may be enforced against it.15 Such a claim of the primacy of the general will, however, can be implemented in a legal system only with the help of general clauses. If this is the case and if crucial parts of the legal system are based on general clauses, then the legal definiteness of a legal rule is undermined, judicial power is given to the general will, and, finally, the legal order loses its reliability.

SOVEREIGNTY

 525

Popular sovereignty can be integrated in the legal system only by infiltrating the postulate of the determinateness of legal provisions. In practice, such an infiltration is made by incorporating into a law—for example a law of residency for foreigners—along with a number of definite criteria (such as safeguarding the quality of life, no prior convictions, and language skills) and a completely undefined provision, such as “reasons of public safety and order.” This is exactly Arendt’s critique of the nationalization of law in the European interwar period. She highlights the fact that in the case of key juristic problems and legal decisions, “legally intangible formulations” were used, such as a “grave infringement of obligations as a Belgian citizen,” “behavior that is unworthy of Italian citizenship,” or “interests . . . that are detrimental to France and its security.”16 With the help of such general clauses, both the indefiniteness and the national will’s claim to sovereignty are translatable into legal codes. By these means, the general will also gains exclusive access to the very place where justice is administered. If no such general clause is built in, then, where all other criteria are proven to be fulfilled, legal claims must also be asserted against the supposed “public interest.” As this is not reconcilable with the general will’s claim to sovereignty, but at the same time a legal order is naturally indispensable, general clauses are incorporated. The law thus becomes the plaything of political interests, and legal justice becomes the command of the sovereign. Arendt’s third critique, important in this context, is of politicalphilosophical kind and targets will-centered political theorizing. In The Human Condition, but also in other publications, she argues against a tradition of political thought that constitutes the will as the energetic core of the political. However, it is important to realize that Arendt’s criticism is not one of the will as a mental capability as such. What she criticizes is the transfer of its ideational and conceptual pattern to the field of politics where it triggers a sovereign-centered worldview and replaces “acting with making” as the supposed core of the political.17 This can be illuminated with respect to two observations: First, Arendt considers the misleading idea of sovereign action, which replaces acting with making, to have originated with Plato, although with Plato there was no such thing as a “will” in the proper sense of the word, that is, a faculty by which a person decides or initiates action, due to the concept of time in antiquity.18 According to Arendt, the problem of a free will was discovered much later with Paul the Apostle and Christianity. From there, the metaphor of the will found its way into political vocabulary, and from then on it denoted a sovereign and self-determined unit that arranges the world according to its ideas. Second, in “On Willing” in The Life of the Mind, Arendt argues that Rousseau’s volonté générale and Kant’s idea of the will are “truly irrelevant to our context.” The same way as Arendt doesn’t regard Kant’s will “a special mental capability distinct from thinking, but practical reason,”19 Rousseau’s volonté générale isn’t

526

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

seen as a will in the proper sense either. In “On Willing,” neither the name Rousseau nor the term volonté générale is mentioned even once. For Arendt, the volonté générale is an “emotional will,” a “subjective, ephemeral state of mind”20 that is the result of its affective formation; it does not describe a mental capability. However, if one applies the will metaphor to a political community, one is always suspected, according to Arendt, of wanting to invoke a unity that does not exist at all. In addition, one pretends to be able to describe a unanimous impulse for action, which can serve as an alleged Archimedean point and marks an end of plurality—at least for a short time. Finally, yet importantly, one also claims to have knowledge of oneself, the others, and the consequences of political action that one can never dispose of.

Notes 1 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 245. 2 Ibid., 234. 3 Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Viking Press, 1963), 162. 4 Hannah Arendt, “Thoughts on Politics and Revolution: A Commentary,” in Crises of the Republic (New York: Harvest Books, 1972), 199–234, 229. 5 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harvest Books, 1994), 270. 6 For greater detail, see Christian Volk, Arendtian Constitutionalism: Law, Politics, and the Order of Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 14–44. 7 Ernest Renan, Was ist eine Nation? Rede am 11. März 1882 an der Sorbonne (Hamburg: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1996), 36. 8 Arendt, Origins, 278. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid., 284. 11 Hannah Arendt, “Civil Disobedience,” 49–102, 69. 12 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, trans. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 67. 13 Ibid. 14 E. J. Sieyès, Was ist der dritte Stand?, ed. O. Dann (Essen: Hobbing, 1987), 83. 15 See Rousseau, Social Contract, 52.

SOVEREIGNTY

 527

16 Arendt, Origins, 279. 17 Arendt, Human Condition, 220. 18 See The Life of the Mind, Vol. II, Willing (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1978), 11–19) 19 Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1978), 149. 20 Arendt, On Revolution, 156.

54 Violence: Illuminating Its Political Meaning and Limits Maša Mrovlje

Hannah Arendt explicitly addressed the topic of violence as such only later in her life. She published On Violence in 1970, following the turbulent events of the 1960s, which included the “wholly unexpected” student rebellion and the rise of the Black Power movements, the arms race between the superpowers, and the Vietnam War.1 These phenomena were all marked by the double bind of the pervasiveness of violence and the awareness of its uncertain potential, which served as the starting point to her ruminations. At the same time, Arendt’s reflections importantly speak to her earlier attempts to come to terms with the twentieth-century specter of totalitarianism, and to reinvigorate the human capacities of understanding and responding to worldly events without reliance on traditional standards of thought. Due to her stark distinction between violence and political power, Arendt’s thoughts on violence have often been dismissed as of little real-world relevance. Her characterization of violence as anti-political, critics claim, represents yet another casualty of her overly narrow understanding of politics that must remain untainted by material concerns or any other instrumental considerations.2 Contrary to these interpretations, this chapter pays heed to Arendt’s formulation of her purpose in On Violence: “to raise the question of violence in the political realm.”3 In this light, as I shall argue, Arendt’s understanding of the relationship between political power and violence reflects her abiding concern with upholding the distinctly human character

VIOLENCE

 529

and promise of political action. Her aim is to shed light on the human reality and political meaning of violence so as to understand the ways of thinking that abandon politics to the rule of violence and unearth the human powers of resisting its necessity and its destructive effects. Arendt’s reflections on violence are framed as a response to the growing “glorification of violence” in the public realm, to what she saw to be the increasing faith in violence as the most effective means of achieving progressive change.4 These experiences lead her to an interrogation of the traditional ways of thinking about violence, tracing the practical fascination with violence to a host of troubling theoretical presuppositions about the relationship between violence and politics. For Arendt, violence is distinct for its instrumental character: it “always stands in need of guidance or justification through the end it pursues.”5 By this she means that the use of violence as a political means relies on a mentality of making or fabrication, assuming that the plurality and complexity of the world can be ordered, mastered, and transformed in accordance with a pre-given end.6 The problem is that this assumption is underlain by a conception of political power as rule over others.7 In the prevalent understandings, as in Max Weber or C. Wright Mills, power is conceived as an instrument or a possession whose essence is command or domination; it corresponds to an ability “to assert my own will against the resistance of others,” and to compel them to “act as I choose.”8 But if political power is construed in terms of “the effectiveness of command,” then violence becomes merely “the most flagrant manifestation of power.”9 What this conflation of politics with violence neglects is the alternative notion of power as “living power,” which is a manifestation of “the human ability not just to act but to act in concert.”10 For Arendt, the world of politics is grounded upon the fundamental existential condition of human plurality, consisting of individuals engaging in action and speech in the company of their peers, beginning anew and appearing to each other. On this account, power only arises and is sustained when people interact with each other, exchange opinions on matters of shared concern, and thereby bring into existence a common world as a public space for free participation and discussion between plural equals.11 Given the phenomenal nature and the attendant unpredictability of political affairs, the use of violence always carries within itself the danger that “the means overwhelm the end.”12 This is because, as an embodiment of a desire to “produce” results, violence destroys “the sheer human togetherness” that undergirds the human character and import of political power as “an end in itself.”13 Just as any violent act denies human plurality, a systematic resort to violence tears apart the fabric of the shared world within which human words and deeds could appear. As Arendt writes, violence “can destroy power,” but “it is utterly incapable of creating it.”14 This danger is clearly evident in the modern revolutionary tradition, dominated as it is by teleological interpretations of political action and history as instantiations of the processual, progressive self-realization of humankind.15

530

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

Within this framework, any “regress” can be justified as a necessary step toward the eventual triumph of universal human freedom, while destroying along the way all stable yardsticks by which to orient our actions.16 From here, it took but a step to claims, found in writers like Sartre, Sorel, and Fanon, that violence itself is “a life promoting force,” a means of “man recreating himself.”17 For Arendt, the belief in violence as an embodiment of life’s creativity ultimately exposed the troubling political implications of the traditional concept of power as rule and the means-ends thinking underlying it. In identifying power and violence with natural drives subject to a selfreinforcing movement of growth and decay, this “biological” justification of violence in effect expunges humans from meaningful intersubjective interaction in the public realm, and reduces them to mere automata, borne thoughtlessly along the stream of larger historical or biological forces.18 Arendt’s insights into the anti-political character of violence, however, do not amount to a simplistic banishment of violence from the realm of politics proper. In fact, she explicitly acknowledges that the dichotomy does not correspond to “watertight compartments in the real world,” and that we can hardly find the two phenomena “in their pure and therefore extreme form.”19 Her distinction between violence and power, instead, works to question the view of violence as an inevitable aspect of politics and to examine their complex interrelationship. Arendt was too attuned to the (constraining) worldly conditions and ambiguity of political action to embrace a pacifist stance. Recognizing the limits of nonviolent resistance, she asserts that in some cases, violence is justifiable as “the only way to set the scales of justice right again.”20 Yet she seeks to ensure that a decision to resort to violence is tied to human freedom and concomitant responsibility, rather than any conceived “necessity,” and hence is attentive to the limits that ensue from acting in a plural world. Her efforts to negotiate a limit to violence can be well demonstrated through her distinction between liberation and (political) freedom. While violence may be required to achieve liberation from oppression as a precondition for politics among plural equals, it is a dangerous mistake to think that a resort to violent means could realize public freedom or constitute a political community. Arendt was especially wary of attempts to put violence in the service of grand revolutionary causes, such as happiness or a classless society.21 In this case, violent means easily assume the form of a systematic practice, imposing upon a plurality of perspectives the validity of a single truth, eliminating dissent and threatening a lapse into terror.22 Arendt also rejected as untenable the proposition that “the strong fraternal sentiments” engendered by collective violence could provide a source of a new form of political relationship.23 Because the fraternity of violence comes into being in circumstances of “immediate danger to life and limb,” she held, it is too “transitory” to form the foundation of a body politic.24 Moreover, Arendt was focused on the political cost of violence, aware that any violent act risks entrenching new cycles of violence and introducing “the practice of

VIOLENCE

 531

violence into the whole body politic.”25 The “very high” price of violence, as she emphasizes, relates not merely to “the vanquished,” to those individuals or perspectives whose freedom has been denied, but to the loss of power suffered by the victors as well, to the atrophy of the political world as a meaningful human world.26 Any use of violent means, then, must be willing to assume the burden of responsibility and tackle the question of how to reinvigorate a space for properly political interaction among former enemies. Arendt’s outright rejection of any predetermined instrumentalist justifications of violent means prompted commentators to maintain that her account disregards the deeply embodied and structural workings of violence—overestimating the human capacities to transcend or break the entrenched cycles of destructiveness.27 Arguably, however, Arendt was hardly oblivious of the recalcitrant structures of violence, but was determined to face up to these structures by foregrounding the issue of justifying violence as a human, political affair, subject to an exchange and negotiation within a plurality of different perspectives.28 As she recognized, rage or indignation (and the violence that may follow in their wake) constitute “natural,” human responses to injustice, rather than mere irrational or pathological reactions.29 What Arendt feared was the temptation to rationalize these human responses into “pseudo-scientific theories” in the form of either sociobiological interpretations of human aggressiveness or life philosophies’ attempts to unearth the emancipatory potential inherent in human libidinal drives.30 Both tendencies risk transforming any concrete grievance into a boundless emotion that is no longer tied to any particular context and that evinces a manifest insensibility to the plural and complex character of political reality.31 In this vein, Arendt cautioned against the “murderousness” of violence employed in interracial struggle. For based on “organic metaphors,” such as black or white skin, racial violence would preclude in advance the possibility of speech and persuasion, proceeding in line with the unyielding “rational” logic of “an explicit ideological system.”32 Arendt’s affirmation of limits, in contrast, translated into an insistence that violence can only be undertaken for the sake of human plurality and the world, for the sake of opening or protecting a space for politics, rather than in order to produce or create a desired state of affairs. Violence can be justified, for instance, to “dramatize grievances” and so to give voice to previously disregarded perspectives, to protect the innocent, or in a struggle for freedom against foreign occupation.33 In this way, violence remains a response to particular situations, limited to the pursuit of “short-term” goals, while retaining a sense of its unpredictable consequences and preventing “a glorification or justification of violence as such.”34 The relevance of this distinction emerges in Arendt’s Second-World-War-era call for the formation of a Jewish army to join the fight against Hitler as “the beginning of Jewish politics.”35 The willingness to fight for their freedom would allow the Jews to defend themselves as Jews, as they were attacked, and so refuse to be reduced to passive objects or eternal victims of persecution.36 Nonetheless,

532

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

this fight would not be wedded to the achievement of political community understood as gradual emancipation of a given oppressed identity, but limited to the Jews’ affirming themselves as part of Europe’s common struggle for freedom and equality.37 As Arendt made clear, a body politic could only be established through the free confrontation of differences among individual Jews, across various groupings and divisions, and within Palestine and worldwide.38 This political limitation on the use of violence also helps dispense with the tendency “to play the oppressor as soon as one is liberated.”39 After the liberation, for example, Arendt warned against the Zionist aspiration to redeem a Jewish identity through the establishment of an autonomous national state that remained isolated from the surrounding Arab world and reliant on the protection of great powers.40 The sovereign attempt to institute a political community outside of the existing web of political relationships—in “a vacuum,” as it were—missed “the simple fact that Palestine is being inhabited by two different peoples.”41 This attempt to establish a community without regard for the given political reality could only breed the necessity of war.42 Attentive to the political cost of violence, Arendt’s perspective also highlights the importance of confronting those worldly conditions that make a resort to violence seem the “only” possible way left of affirming the human ability to change the world.43 She draws attention to “the disastrous shrinkage of the public realm” in modern times.44 The reduction of politics to a realm of bureaucratic administration led to the increasing atrophy of a space where individuals could appear to each other, present their grievances, and engage in discussion about forms of living together.45 Yet, just as she observes that “every decrease in power is an open invitation to violence,” Arendt praises the immense potential of (nonviolent) political power to dissolve ossified forces of oppression.46 In her reflections on the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, she recounts how the people’s coming together in public to articulate their demands, without leadership, party program, or ideology “imposed from above,” could bring down the power structures of the dictatorship “in a couple of days.”47 This event substantiated Arendt’s broader observation that systemic violence (of the state) ultimately is powerless once popular support dwindles and “commands are no longer obeyed.”48 But what was even more remarkable was the way the Hungarian “revolutionary spirit” of public freedom was immediately institutionalized in the spontaneous creation of councils. Lacking a theoretical grounding, this form of political organization was based on the power of opinion, discussion, and persuasion, rather than the force of faction or ideology, and thereby managed to prevent the revolution disintegrating into mob rule and violence.49 Arendt’s faith in the political potential of acting-together similarly surfaces in her argument for the right of civil disobedience as the best “remedy” for the “failure of institutions” and the conspicuous loss of power suffered by political systems around the world.50 An institutional “home” for free association would provide a space where the legitimacy of laws could be

VIOLENCE

 533

constantly augmented by the “living power” of human plurality, the public articulation of both consent and dissent.51 To be sure, Arendt was aware that freedom of assembly represents one of the “most dangerous” rights, carrying with itself the “danger of violence, inherent in the disaffection of a whole generation.”52 This danger cannot be warded off by eliminating freedom of assembly under sovereign rule, which, as we have seen, renders violence a necessary course of political action as such. It must be confronted by remaining loyal to power’s inspiring principle, the mutual interaction of citizens around worldly matters of shared concern rather than ideological commitments.53 The purpose is thus to minimize the possibility of violence by nurturing the web of human relationships as the mainspring of living power and endeavoring to provide the conditions for a properly human existence for a plurality of perspectives inhabiting the common world. To conclude, it is Arendt’s distinct contribution to think violence as a political affair and not as a necessity that could be rationalized in advance and subject to a self-evident processual movement. Her insights into the political meaning of violence contain an appeal to affirm the limits of violence inhering in the intersubjective character of the world, and to foster the conditions for action-in-concert that make a resort to violence less likely. In this respect, Arendt’s reflections articulate her general distrust of approaching the dilemmas of politics in the mode of so-called professional “problemsolvers,” bent on designing hypothetical, self-contained theoretical formulas or predictions of future events, only to eliminate their contingency.54 For the confrontation with the perplexities at stake then assumes the form of reckoning with consequences, of developing adequate solutions based on logical deduction from the given premises, while rendering irrelevant the public practices of discussion, persuasion, and judgment. And the greater the aspiration toward controlling the flow of events that we have not had an opportunity to understand—that is, irrespective of their human import and implications—the greater the possibility that our power will end in “impotence” and that violence will “have the last word.”55

Acknowledgments My thanks to Patrick Hayden, Peter Gratton, and Yasemin Sari for their helpful comments.

Notes 1 Hannah Arendt, “On Violence,” in Crises of the Republic (London: Harcourt Publishers, 1972), 105–84. 2 See e.g., Jürgen Habermas, “Hannah Arendt’s Communications Concept of Power,” Social Research 44, no. 1 (1977): 13–24.

534

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

3 Arendt, “Violence,” 134. 4 Ibid., 121, 132. 5 Ibid., 150. 6 Ibid., 150, 176–77. 7 Ibid., 134–39, 151. 8 Ibid., 135–36. 9 Ibid., 136, 134. 10 Ibid., 140, 143. 11 Ibid., 139–40, 143. 12 Ibid., 177, 106. 13 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 180; Arendt, “Violence,” 150. 14 Arendt, “Violence,” 155. 15 Ibid., 113–15. 16 Ibid., 128, 155. 17 Ibid., 170–71, 114. 18 Ibid., 172–73. 19 Ibid., 145–46. 20 Ibid., 161. 21 Ibid., 150–51, 176; see also Hannah Arendt, “The Freedom to Be Free,” New England Review 38, no. 2 (2017): 56–69. 22 Arendt, “Violence,” 153–55. 23 Ibid., 166. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid., 177. 26 Ibid., 152–53. 27 See Elizabeth Frazer and Kimberly Hutchings, “On Politics and Violence: Arendt contra Fanon,” Contemporary Political Theory 7, no. 1 (2008): 90–108, 103–7. 28 Arendt, “Violence,” 179. 29 Ibid., 160–61. 30 Ibid., 173, 156–72. 31 Ibid., 161–63; see also Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 80. 32 Arendt, “Violence,” 172–73. 33 Ibid., 176; Hannah Arendt, The Jewish Writings (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 166–67. 34 Ibid., 176; Arendt, Revolution, 9. 35 Arendt, The Jewish Writings, 136–39. 36 Ibid., 137.

VIOLENCE

 535

37 Ibid., 141–42. 38 Ibid., 143–44, 333, 171, 175. 39 Ibid., 170. 40 Ibid., 336. 41 Arendt, The Jewish Writings, 44, 412. 42 Ibid., 44, 412. 43 Arendt, “Violence,” 178–80. 44 Ibid., 178. 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid., 184. 47 Hannah Arendt, “Totalitarian Imperialism: Reflections on the Hungarian Revolution,” The Journal of Politics 20, no. 1 (1958): 5–43; 26–28. 48 Arendt, “Violence,” 146–48. 49 Arendt, “Totalitarian Imperialism,” 28–32. 50 Hannah Arendt, “Civil Disobedience,” in Crises of the Republic, 51–102; 101–2. 51 Ibid., 101, 94–95. 52 Hannah Arendt, “Is America By Nature A Violent Society?: ‘Lawlessness Is Inherent In the Uprooted,’” New York Times, April 28, 1968, SM24. 53 Arendt, “Civil Disobedience,” 97–98. 54 Hannah Arendt, “Lying in Politics: Reflections on the Pentagon Papers,” in Crises of the Republic, 9; Arendt, “Violence,” 108, 130–31. 55 Arendt, “Violence,” 109, 183–84, 172.

Society

55 Arendt’s Alteration of Tone Susannah Gottlieb

“Total self-indulgence in tone [das totale Sich-Vergreifen im Ton]”— so pronounces the esteemed Kabbalah scholar Gershom Scholem on the work of Hannah Arendt.1 Scholem is responding specifically to Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, but he clearly means to indict all of Arendt’s writing, which, from his perspective, diverges from the tone appropriate to either scholarship or journalism. Scholem’s exasperated condemnation of Arendt’s tonal peculiarities and her deviation from generic norms is not unique among readers of Arendt, many of whom might have no patience with the other accusations Scholem levels against his erstwhile friend, but who nevertheless find themselves similarly confounded both by Arendt’s immoderate—occasionally inflammatory—tone, and by the heterogeneous, even promiscuous assortment of “genres” she pursued in her writing (from biography and historical portraits to historical analysis and political theory to the elements of what Aristotle would call “first philosophy”). Many readers have considered these fluctuations as failures, either of character or of training. But these complaints about tone and genre, which take many forms—and register at different pitches—all seem to miss what they otherwise see. Instead of understanding these persistent and intimately connected facets of her work as failings, I want to suggest we think of them as a version of what Friedrich Hölderlin called “the alteration of tone.”2 For Hölderlin—who was also accused of self-indulgence by the two pillars of German classical culture, Goethe and Schiller—the intricately devised doctrine of tonal alteration is an essential feature of his attempt to defend the art of poetry without recourse to any dubious idea of Bildung (understood as “high culture” and “self-formation”). Something similar is true of Arendt: the two aspects of her work that give rise to censorious judgments like Scholem’s are inevitable facets of a surprising, yet powerfully

538

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

convincing and politically saturated, defense of poetry that runs like a red thread through all of her voluminous writings and gives them their specific, idiosyncratic character. What, after all, draws Arendt to literature in general—and to poetry in particular, and how does this help us understand the peculiarities and provocations of her writing? One answer is clear enough: it is definitely not Bildung. As she emphasizes in a wide variety of writings, beginning with her biography of Rahel Varnhagen and culminating in her stinging assessment of Stefan Zweig, the embrace of the ideal of Bildung was one of the principal missteps of German Jews from the Goethezeit to the Nazi seizure of power. Acculturation is no protection from catastrophe, and those who bind themselves to monuments of Bildung are imperiled by their own delusion of security. Despite her radical critique of those who indulged in fantasies of Bildung, Arendt nevertheless finds in poetry something indispensable—she even uses the word “essential”—to the human condition: as the “expression of loss itself,”3 as that which “pitches itself against all that is most unsatisfactory in man’s condition on this earth and sucks its own strength from the wound,”4 and as that which “frames a cosmos out of all kinds of words.”5 None of this, however, gets us closer to understanding the characteristic provocations of Arendt’s own writings—and thus to her “alteration of tones.” An oblique approach to this question can be found in a brief passage from Arendt’s last and longest essay on Bertolt Brecht, where, with little preparation—as though she wished to jar her readers out of a certain complacency concerning what they already know about the alternately famous and infamous writer—she provides a revealing gloss on his expressed rationale for abstaining from suicide. Here is Brecht’s explanation: “It shouldn’t look as though one had too high an opinion of oneself.”6 To this, without any further comment, Arendt simply adds, “Above all, therefore, no pompous self-importance! [Wichtigtuerei].”7 This pithy maxim doubtless captures something of Brecht’s mordant humor, but it serves more importantly as a powerful and illuminating constraint on Arendt’s own writing. Although she imputes this understated yet trenchant imperative to a poet rather than claiming it as her own, the force with which this imperative constrains her own work is clear. Arendt avoids autobiography and generally refrains from speaking of herself in her published writings. And what makes this even more striking is that she refrains from speaking of herself despite the obvious ways in which her life clearly intersects with the topics she discusses: from her early reflections on “the doom” of acculturated (“gebildeten”) German Jews in the Berlin salons of Rahel Varnhagen, through her outrage that anti-Semitism could play such a decisive role in the machinery and ideology of Nazi power in The Origins of Totalitarianism, to her melancholic remembrances of the friends she lost and to whom she paid such moving tribute in essay after essay in Men in Dark Times and other late writings.

ARENDT’S ALTERATION OF TONE

 539

A subtle yet commanding tension thus emerges in her work. Even as she feels compelled to write about experiences that directly touch her life, Arendt suppresses any explicit autobiographical content. Arendt’s summary comment on this quote from Brecht’s “Epistle on Suicide” is at first, perhaps, amusing, but also jarring, and is also a minor example of a characteristic element of her writing that has troubled readers in different ways and to varying degrees throughout her career, from Rachel to Eichmann, namely, the outburst of an apparently inappropriate tone. The sometimes startling, often unclassifiable, strangeness that characterizes her writing (in tenor, style, and attitude) in both of these works, to take only these two examples, and her determined refusal of autobiographical writing, even where the subject of inquiry intersects so decidedly with her own life—these two elements of her work have perplexed, exasperated, and infuriated readers, and have often set the terms for assessments of her work and even her character: shoddy historian, haughty guardian of high German culture, and heartless and self-hating Jew. And there is a third element that is intimately connected to these other two: her sense—and consequent defense—of what she calls the “poetic essence” of everyday experience.8 The “essence” is poetic, above all, because it is poetry that captures it. Other modes of writing, which includes all of her published work, obscure this “essence.” For Arendt, it is only in poetry that experience enters into speech and the public sphere without violating the imperative against “pompous self-importance.” At the same time, this imperative leaves Arendt’s own experiences unvoiced. In short, the lack of restraint in her tone is a paradoxical function of the constraints imposed by the imperative against pompous self-importance. Despite its bold intellectual strokes, her thought betrays an absolutely persistent and characteristic reticence about those matters that touch her most deeply. In light of this paradox, the two other elements of Arendt’s writings become comprehensible as a single trait: she boldly alters genres and gives the impression of indulging in tone because each of these is a function of the constraints necessary to preserving life’s “poetic essence.” The passage in Arendt’s essay on Brecht where she presents the absence of “pompous self-importance” as a new form of the categorical imperative reveals the elements of her writing in miniature. This terse, seemingly tossed-off denunciation of both embittered self-pity and desperate selfaggrandizement (who but Arendt would describe suicide as pompous?) is saturated with her own lived experiences of friendship, internment, and suicide. In 1938, Arendt’s friend and cousin through marriage, Walter Benjamin, visited Brecht in Denmark and when he returned to Paris, he gave Arendt Brecht’s unpublished poem on “The Legend of the Origin of the Tao-te-Ching on Lao Tsu’s Way into Exile,” which she learned by heart and described as “a rumor of good tidings”: “It travelled by word of mouth—a source of consolation and patience and endurance.”9 Benjamin would later write about this poem in a commentary on Brecht in terms of friendship “in the darkest and bloodiest times,”10 and Arendt’s soon-to-be husband,

540

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

Heinrich Blücher, carried their copy with him when he was interned as an enemy alien in Villemalard, France. In one of the letters that survives from Blücher to Arendt from the camp, he writes, as if in a rough draft of Arendt’s later Brecht essay, “Above all, one shouldn’t make too much of a fuss about oneself.”11 And in a letter to Kurt Blumenfeld, written years later, Arendt describes this brusquely mocking response to the question of suicide with reference to her own internment in Gurs, France: “At least, that was my opinion in Gurs, where I posed the question [of suicide] to myself in earnest and answered myself somewhat jokingly.”12 Blücher’s letter to Arendt continues, “As you can imagine, there are quite a few people here who think of nothing but their own personal destiny— and in response, I have gone a little to the other extreme.”13 This rejection of self-pity and aversion to self-disclosure marks all of Arendt’s work. Instead of writing about herself, she undertakes investigations into a series of topics that traverse the course of her life. The intersection is perhaps most evident in her first book, Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewish Woman, where Arendt so thoroughly adopts Rahel’s voice and perspective (famously presuming to “narrate the story of Rahel’s life as she herself might have told it”)14 that the distinction between biographer and the subject of biography tends to collapse. Much of Arendt’s subsequent work is characterized by a similar— and similarly unsettling, if less clearly discernible—set of methodologies and tonal modulations, which evoke her own experiences without explicitly revealing anything about them. Traces of the course of Arendt’s life—from her early years in Königsberg to her experience of exile and statelessness—can be found in everything she wrote. But whereas her friend Walter Benjamin wrote such autobiographical texts as “Hashish in Marseilles” and A Berlin Childhood around 1900, Arendt wrote only obliquely about her youth, invoking, for example, Königsberg nursery rhymes in a number of her works. And whereas her onetime friend Gershom Scholem wrote volumes about his friendship with Benjamin and his own journey “from Berlin to Jerusalem,” Arendt never wrote of her equally eventful passage from Königsberg to New York City and never published the poem she wrote upon learning of Benjamin’s suicide. None of the details of their friendship is directly reflected in the portrait she wrote of Benjamin as one of her Men in Dark Times, nor in any of the other places where she quotes from or writes about his work. Another index of Arendt’s reticence is one of the few public remarks she made about her internment: “At the camp of Gurs, for instance, where I had the opportunity of spending some time, I heard only once about suicide.”15 The concentration camp as “opportunity” is not only bitter sarcasm but also expressive of precisely that tension in which the need to speak of her own experience is instantly checked by a demand that nothing of her life should be mentioned, partly, perhaps, because it would divert attention away from the enormity of the events under discussion, and partly for the reasons she outlines in the essay from which this quote is drawn. “One shouldn’t make

ARENDT’S ALTERATION OF TONE

 541

too much of a fuss about oneself” could stand as the epigraph to Arendt’s pained and reproachful account of suicide as the last desperate attempt of the Jewish refugees who “fight like madmen for private existences with individual destinies”: Our suicides are no mad rebels who hurl defiance at life and the world, who try to kill in themselves the whole universe. . . . In their opinion, generally, political events had nothing to do with their individual fate; in good or bad times they would believe solely in their personality. . . . Finally they die of a kind of selfishness.16 Gurs appears by name in a few other places among Arendt’s writings, including twice in Eichmann in Jerusalem: first, where she relates a German minister’s description of the conditions of the Jews at Gurs as worse than the conditions of those deported to Poland, and again, when she refers to the “notorious concentration camp at Gurs,” adding—in a remarkable parenthesis—“When the Final Solution was put into effect in France, the inmates of the Gurs camp were all shipped to Auschwitz.”17 Arendt’s experience during the war is thus suppressed and quietly inscribed into Eichmann in Jerusalem, and so, too, is a generalized version of the demand that there be “no pompous self-importance.” Not only does Arendt provide no eyewitness account of Gurs, she declines to mention that she was herself an inmate there. And she famously, or perhaps infamously, looks upon those who speak of their experiences during the trial with undeniable distance, suspicious at all times of self-dramatizing gestures. It is in giving voice to the angry indignation that Eichmann in Jerusalem has never ceased to elicit among some of its readers, that Scholem accuses Arendt of an “indulging [herself] tone.” There is doubtless something to this accusation, but it altogether misses the source of the perplexing tone that no careful reader of the book can fail to notice. She is responding to an unresolvable tension: the demand that the atrocities not be forgotten, which means that they must be spoken about, and the equally important counter-demand that she say nothing—or more exactly, that she keep her voice low, so that she may avoid the suggestion that her experiences are of the same order of significance as the catastrophic events that prompt her investigations, and so that withdrawal into private experience not obscure political conditions and imperatives— which are neglected to catastrophic consequences. And here we can locate at least one dimension of the shadow that eclipses the public sphere, as politics is absorbed by the social, and the ironic—or hyper-ironic—reversal in which insistence on private existence yields not individuality, but the loss of whatever would make individuality possible: the limitless and shapeless subject-matter of a monstrous experiment conducted on specimens. Arendt’s sense of poetry’s significance and her reticence about her private life come together in a particularly illuminating manner in her littlediscussed essay about another of her friends, the poet Robert Gilbert. She

542

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

writes, “Every moment of this, our only life, demands to be recorded, but only if the recording is done in verse, for otherwise its poetic essence would be lost.”18 Despite the use of the Heidegger-sounding term “poetic essence,” Arendt’s remark is a complete departure from the concept of poetry that can be found in Heidegger’s work. To begin with, Gilbert is no Hölderlin or Goethe, and Arendt’s preface to his “Berlin street poems” makes no effort to equate him with these great poets. In Gilbert, beyond his friendship, she found a poet who enacted, as it were, the injunction against pompous selfimportance and yet—or perhaps more accurately, and therefore—was able to allow a term such as “poetic essence” to be relieved of the grandiloquent or monumentalizing tendencies with which it would otherwise be associated. What Arendt identifies in this remark, and indeed throughout her reflections on Gilbert’s collection of poems, is a vulnerability of life that goes beyond its exposure to death. Not only can life be lost, so, too, can its “poetic essence.” Allowing a life to disappear without a trace into the annihilating “holes of oblivion” intended by totalitarian regimes is a shameful outrage. But speaking of one’s life in a way that fails to capture its “poetic essence” corresponds to other dangers Arendt sought strenuously to avoid, above all, the reduction of the free individual to the bare biological life of a species being. Arendt understood this danger through at least two coordinated experiences of her lifetime: the manufacture of living corpses accomplished in the concentration camps and the nihilistic “recognition” that all humans are beasts after all. This double vulnerability of life—and the sometimes competing imperatives to record it faithfully and to preserve its poetic essence—are at the heart of Arendt’s career and provide the animating impulse of all her work. We may be able to begin to understand what she means by “poetic essence” with reference again to what Arendt writes about Walter Benjamin, especially in the following passage, which expresses in a subtle and subdued manner the “indulgence in tone” that Scholem sensed but did not have the patience or loyalty to think through. She writes of her friend after his suicide in flight from the Nazis: Metaphors are the means by which the oneness of the world is poetically brought about. What is so hard to understand about Benjamin is that without being a poet, he thought poetically and therefore was bound to regard the metaphor as the greatest gift of language. Linguistic “transference” enables us to give material form to the invisible—“A mighty fortress is our God”—and thus to render it capable of being experienced.19 The quotation between the dashes (“A mighty fortress is our God”) refers, of course, to Luther’s 1529 hymn, “Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott,” which may draw its inspiration from the Psalms but is nevertheless Luther’s own words and melody—as thoroughly Lutheran, one might say, as the tract he wrote some twenty years later, “The Jews and Their Lies.” And in Benjamin’s

ARENDT’S ALTERATION OF TONE

 543

case, it is perhaps fair to say that Luther’s promise of protection is a lie: there was none. Even as she speaks of oneness, which would be accomplished through metaphor, she inscribes the mark of a divisiveness—here marked by the names “Benjamin” and “Luther”—that, in broad terms, has to do with poetry. One can think poetically without being a poet. This is a dimension of “poetic essence.” And this “poetic essence” is altogether unified with the living of one’s life, and yet, despite this, can be lost. Arendt’s “self-indulgence in tone” can be seen as one manifestation of her loyalty, as it were, to both poles of this incalculable relation between unity and divisiveness, the first associated with metaphor, the second enacted in the very metaphor she chooses to express the essence of poetic thinking.

Notes 1 Letter from Scholem to Hans Paeschke, March 24, 1968 in Arendt und Benjamin, ed. Detley Schöttker and Erdmut Wizisla (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2006), 189. 2 For an authoritative and informative exposition of Hölderlin’s theory and practice of tonal alteration, see Lawrence Ryan, Hölderlins Wechsel der Töne (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1960). 3 Hannah Arendt, Reflections on Literature and Culture, ed. Susannah Gottlieb (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 23. 4 Ibid., 300. 5 Ibid., 331. 6 Ibid., 235. 7 Ibid., 339. 8 Ibid., 292. 9 Ibid., 252. 10 Walter Benjamin, Understanding Brecht, trans. A. Bostock (London: Verso, 1998), 73. 11 Blücher to Arendt, September 29, 1939 in Within Four Walls: The Correspondence between Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Blücher, 1936-1968, ed. L Kohler, trans. P. Constantine (New York: Harcourt, 1996), 48. 12 Arendt to Kurt Blumenfeld, August 6, 1952 in In Keinem Besitz Verwurzelt: Die Korrespondenz, ed. Ingeborg Nordmann and Iris Pilling (Hamburg: Rotbuch, 1995), 62. 13 Blücher to Arendt, 48. 14 Hannah Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess, ed. L. Weissberg, trans. R. and C. Winston (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), xv. 15 Hannah Arendt, The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age, ed. Ron H. Feldman (New York: Grove Press, 1978), 59.

544

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

16 Ibid., 59–60. 17 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (New York: Penguin Books, 2016), 156. 18 Arendt, Reflections, 292. 19 Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968), 166.

56 Art and Performance Cecilia Sjöholm

The Art World and the World of Arendt In New York of the 1960s, Hannah Arendt lived and worked amid an emerging scene of avant-garde art, literature, and performance. Although she demonstrated little interest in that scene in her writings, the politicization of art that it represented was in many ways matched by her own political ontology. Arendt’s occultation of the public sphere as well as her critique of capitalism, objectification, and commodification are features that can be used to elucidate the way modern and contemporary art was, and still is, conceived, produced, and shown. Although Arendt never formulated a philosophy of aesthetics, she evoked agency, freedom of action, and a sense of realness as qualities of the political and the aesthetic sphere alike. In this way, Arendt pointed to the way in which art intersects with politics beyond the frame of content, evoking the singularity of appearance as well the durability of the work of art as inalienable aspects of public life. Arendt has described the political potency of appearances not only through the speech and action of living beings but also through works of art in the broad sense, with particular regards to literature.1 In The Life of the Mind, she makes clear that she finds the philosophic ignorance of art as scandalous as the ignorance of politics.2 Her phenomenological and political understanding of the “urge to appear” forwarded in The Life of the Mind challenges an understanding of aesthetics that relies on a specific category of objects.3 She points to the way in which appearances as well as actions are inherently political categories, creating new relations between time and space, subject and object, and perceiving and enacting. Her lectures on Kant’s Critique on Judgment may well reverse a traditional reading of

546

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

the aesthetic implications of that work to political ones, but her concept of critique elaborated from that work remains applicable to art and aesthetics.4 To Arendt, plurality is not merely a gathering of individuals representing various points of view, or diversity in its most literal sense. Plurality is the very appearance of differentiation. It is the production of differentiation among agencies, perceptions, and perspectives that comes to the fore through action and speech. To plurality belongs also the capacity to imagine the world as different; therefore, plurality conditions the way we see things. The diversity of things and the variety of perspectives are all embedded in the make-up of a world. Only through plurality, when differentiation is continuously produced, can a world appear.5 The institution and safeguarding of the public sphere is essential to this. Arendt’s sometimes idealistic notion of public space as a sufficient condition for political life to realize itself does not address the social, economic, racial, and gendered exclusionary mechanisms that have followed in the path of its history.6 However, she points to the way in which open spaces, whether they are construed for political purposes or not, allow for political actions and forms of agencies to appear. It is not by chance therefore, that Arendt holds politics and theater to be similar. Both work with gestures and appearances, and create worlds of contestation and debate.7 The political implications of the potentiality of plurality have been widely commented upon.8 The aesthetic implications less so, but they are equally essential. Not only human appearances but also works of art are implicated in Arendt’s concept of world-making. Plurality to Arendt does not merely entail endless possibilities, although her concept of natality has sometimes been interpreted that way. In a world of plurality, my perception is always impinged on. Such an impinging does not occur through direct interference. Traces of actions, gestures, words, movements, and bodies of other people underlie our perceptions and experiences. Such traces, often mediated through the work of art, contribute to the make-up of the world. Works of art will present stories, perspectives, and values that are possible to repeat and communicate. The agency of the artwork cannot quite be equated to the political life of bios politikos, but they are not to be destroyed in the cyclical machine of animal laborans either. The ontological trademark of the work of art is its permanence, which in turn can be used to shield against the destruction of the public sphere by commercial, political, and social forces.

The Aesthetics of Arendt Arendt did not strive to free art from institutionalized forms, but she contested its commodification and spoke for its inherent protection of the public sphere. Like representatives of the Frankfurt School such as Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, Arendt was deeply critical of industrial forms of art that appeared to be made for consumption. She regarded the disappearance of values such as permanence, freedom, and agency of a

ART AND PERFORMANCE

 547

work of art as modes of destruction. The industrial approach to art and the capitalist ideology of consumption was, to Arendt, as ruinous to culture as the ravages of war. Art’s function is immediately put in relation to the public sphere in The Human Condition, and modernism’s flight into intimacy is explored as resistance against the degeneration of the public sphere in Men in Dark Times. In “The Crisis in Culture,” Arendt argues that art provides sustenance, specifically in the resistance against consumer society.9 This entails a critique against the kind of art that Arendt refers to as “kitsch,” art that is “rewritten, condensed, digested, reduced to kitsch in reproduction, or in preparation for the movies.”10 The result is a kind of destruction. Many artists survive the oblivion that may come with death, “but it is still an open question whether they will be able to survive an entertaining version of what they have to say.”11 But this critique against kitsch and popular culture is not in itself a sign of conservative values. In fact, to Arendt, the hierarchization of taste inflicted by class society is as much a threat against culture as kitsch, and is one of the antagonisms that are brought into her reflections on actual works. Overall, Arendt’s aesthetics comes across as modernist and potentially postmodernist; she not only celebrates the elliptic blueprint of Kafka’s stories but also makes the silence of Brecht into a form of expression. When art belies the sense of realness in a society governed by ideology, then silence may help erect the faith in the real. Her return to Proust’s novels in The Origins of Totalitarianism as well as her celebration of Charlie Chaplin in The Jew as Pariah can also be seen in this vein. Modernism, represented by these authors, gives proof of an aesthetic in which the antagonistic relation to bourgeois values is already integrated. William Faulkner, Karen Blixen, and Joseph Conrad weave the story of colonialism with shadows and flesh. All of these would have in common, at least for Arendt, if not a resistance to cultural norms then at least a mark of alterity. Rather than departing from a universalist frame of identity and ethics, they use the Jew, the homosexual, and the female heroine in a colonial context, and the flaneur as focal points of the narrative. The creation of marginalized characters helps resist the commodification of art. These are writers and artists that follow Arendt on her philosophical path, companions that not only illuminate but also add to and displace her philosophical arguments. Arendt speaks for a kind of modernism that negotiates the antagonism between consumerism and bourgeois ideals on the one hand, and the open spaces of the public sphere and the intimacy of the place of production and writing on the other. The things that belong to our “inner life” and the life of the senses may prevail in the life of shadows. When they are de-individualized and deprivatized, they are transformed for show.12 Action, thought, and speech are transposed into books, music, and visual images. Through these transformations, art helps re-erect and relocate public space at the same time. Artworks and books imply the existence of a space that belongs to individual and private experiences, without being reduced to privacy.

548

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

In The Human Condition, Arendt makes it clear that the common sense is what brings the other senses together: “It is by virtue of common sense that the other sense perceptions are known to disclose reality and are not merely felt as irritations of our nerves or resistance sensations of our bodies.”13 This, in turn, is to account for the withering sense of unreality that comes with alienation and the meaningless cycle of animal laborans.14 The most important contribution of the work of art in a political sense, therefore, is its adding to the sense of realness. Realness, in Arendt, is a sense, and does not refer to a fact. Realness is an aesthetic quality of plurality, a sense prevailing as we perceive things in and through the perspectives of others.15 Aesthetic objects and phenomena, rather than being concerned with enjoyment, can contribute to a sense of realness, which unravels in and through the encroachment of our perception. This is a paradox: what we perceive as real is created in the imagination of the artist, and in Arendt’s examples are sketched in a manner that has nothing to do with realism. The sense of the real crosses the limits between what Plato would consider the difference between appearance and truth; it is neither appearance nor truth, but an interweaving of differences.

Art and Agency A work of art represents a form of agency in at least three senses: through its maker, its mimicry of action, and its insertion in a political context. In the first sense, a work of art may unravel an answer to the question of “who” produced it. Every work of art reveals a maker in some way: the “who” that can only be understood as unique.16 In the second sense, Arendt lifts the case of ancient tragedy, claiming that the function of mimesis is to unravel not a story or a character, but specific agents. This is also why tragedy is a pivotal form of art to Arendt: it shows not so much a universal meaning of action but rather the singular “who” of the agent.17 Tragedy mimics the place of art in public space; as such, it is a mimesis of the singular event that emerges with action, unable to fully assess thought, the “other” that appears in the chorus. In the third and final sense, a work is agency through its occupying, safeguarding, or creating a place in the public sphere. The work is not simply to be regarded as a remnant from the world of manufacturing. Its unique quality lies in its direction toward public space through the very beginning. It calls for a space of politics, beyond its capitalist perversion. Arendt herself gives the example of art constituting communities of public space even in totalitarian regimes, in the Soviet Union, for instance.18 In these multiple forms, art represents agency.19 No object of art, therefore, can fully be reduced to a commodity.20 It is not simply a dead thing, or an object of decoration, available on a market. All art is turned toward the public sphere. The political impact of art is then less about the trajectory

ART AND PERFORMANCE

 549

of modernity or emancipation of the subject. It must be seen in connection with concepts of the real and of freedom in the particular sense that Arendt gives to that concept: freedom not as a freedom of choice, but as a sphere distinct from the life in which we are shaped according to our professional or social roles, gender, nationality or ethnicity, and so forth.21 In this sense, the intertwinement between the political and the aesthetic is complete.

Notes 1 Consult Arendt’s writings on this topic gathered in Reflections on Literature and Culture, ed. Susannah Young-Ah Gottlieb (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007). 2 Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, vol. 2: Willing (London: Secker & Warburg, 1978), 184. 3 Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, vol. 1: Thinking (London: Secker & Warburg, 1978), 23. 4 Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 23. 5 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 57. 6 Rosalyn Deutsche is quoting Arendt in showing that plurality helps keep the “real” nature of the world. Evictions, Art and Spatial Politics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 310. 7 Arendt, Human Condition, 187–90. 8 See, for instance, Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt, ed. Bonnie Honig (Penn State: Penn State University Press, 1995), 316, and Dana Villa, Public Freedom (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 253. 9 Hannah Arendt, “The Crisis in Culture,” in Between Past and Future (New York: Viking, 1961), 210. 10 Ibid., 207. 11 Ibid., 208. 12 Arendt, Human Condition, 55; “The Crisis in Culture,” 216–18. 13 Arendt, Human Condition, 209. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid., 150. 16 Ibid., 186, 210. 17 Ibid., 187–88. 18 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harvest, 1979), xxxvi–xxxvii. 19 Arendt, Human Condition, 168.

550

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

20 As argued by Arjun Appadurai, commodities are primarily defined by their exchange value, and to be distinguished from products, objects and other things. See “Commodities and the Politics of Value,” in The Social Life of Things, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 3–62. 21 Arendt, Human Condition, 30–31.

57 Biopolitics: Racing and “Managing” Human Populations Dianna Taylor

Arendt’s work figures prominently within contemporary thinking on biopolitics. Broadly construed as the implementation of state policies intended to promote the overall health of a population, biopolitics is best understood as a manifestation of what Michel Foucault terms “biopower.” According to Foucault, this specifically modern form of power emerges during the latter part of the eighteenth century in response to particular structural changes within Western societies, including secularization, industrialization, and changing population demographics. In contrast to sovereign power, which asserts itself through the taking of life, biopower asserts itself specifically through the proliferation of life at the biological level of the human species. Whereas sovereign power is the power to “take life or let live,” biopower is the power to “foster life or disallow it to the point of death.”1 Biopower fosters life by intervening within, managing, and protecting it. Techniques of biopower, according to Foucault, “administer, optimize, and multiply [life], subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations.”2 The concept of “population” is key to the emergence and function of biopower. Foucault describes how what was a “global mass” of human life—“man as species”3—comes to be conceptualized specifically as a population, “a multiplicity of individuals who are and fundamentally and essentially only exist biologically bound to the materiality of where they live.”4 The population provides an identifiable entity that needs to and can

552

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

be managed and regulated. Management and regulation occurs through the collection of statistics (birth rates, mortality rates, rates of infectious disease, and longevity) that are used to generate data: “forecasts, statistical estimates, and overall measures.”5 States use this data in order to craft policy that “regularizes” the population in ways that protect it from internal and external threats, and in doing so promote life.6 “Regulatory mechanisms,” according to Foucault, “establish an equilibrium, maintain an average, establish a sort of homeostasis . . . security mechanisms have to be installed around the random elements inherent in a population of living beings so as to optimize a state of life.”7 Foucault shows that the state’s interest in promoting life does not prevent it from taking life. The health of a population can only be effectively maximized through fostering its biological strength; weak elements therefore can, and indeed must, be monitored and either allowed to simply die out or eliminated. The modern biological conceptualization of race, Foucault contends, is key in providing the necessary justification for such dying out or elimination. Construed in terms of a set of heritable, biological traits, the concept of race provides a way of conceptualizing and identifying a population’s strong and weak elements—of creating a racial hierarchy that in turn opens onto the emergence of modern racism. It is racism specifically, Foucault argues, that introduced into the population a “break between what must live and what must die.”8 Under biopower, weak races (where race is broadly construed to include, for example, criminals, the mad, and individuals possessing “various anomalies”) present a biological threat to the population that the state must contain.9 Racism, Foucault explains, “is bound up with the working of a State that is obliged to use race, the elimination of races and the purification of race, to exercise its power to take life.”10 Foucault identifies Nazism as a regime that aimed to expose its own population to the “absolute and universal threat of death.”11 Taken to its extreme, the biopolitics to which biopower lends itself is, he argues, suicidal as well as genocidal.12 Arendt’s own analysis of Nazism in The Origins of Totalitarianism illustrates the workings of biopower as well as the at least harmful and at worst suicidal and genocidal potential of biopolitics. Two aspects of that analysis in particular make clear the extent to which the emergence and proliferation of biopower and, hence, biopolitics revolves around the concept of the population. First, the concept is interconnected with the roots of European racism that characterize Nazism. Second, the unplanned movement of populations was a key condition for the possibility of the emergence of a Nazism within which population management figured prominently within a project of racial purification aimed at promoting overall social health. The origins of Nazism, Arendt shows, can be traced back to nineteenthcentury “pan-Germanism,” a movement that reflects what she refers to as “race thinking.” While it manifested itself in different ways within different contexts, in the case of Germany, race thinking “was invented in an effort

BIOPOLITICS

 553

to unite the people against foreign domination. Its authors . . . wanted to awaken in the people a consciousness of common origin.”13 According to pan-Germanism, Germans were a distinct as well as distinctive “people” who, regardless of their geographical dispersion, were bound together by a common set of inherent characteristics. In other words, Germans were posited as a select group set apart from and superior to the rest of the population. Although pan-Germanism did not appeal to biology in making its claims to distinctiveness and “chosenness,” it can be seen to presage in important respects the modern conceptualization of race as a set of inherent biological traits, and the modern racism that emerges from that conceptualization. According to Arendt, racism proper did not emerge in Europe until the colonization of Africa. Europeans’ encounters with Africans, she argues, produced the notion of radical otherness upon which racism hinges. Henceforth it would be possible to view not only “primitive” non-Europeans who looked very different from themselves as less than (fully) human Others but fellow Europeans as well.14 Nazi racism introduced a break within the European population between biologically strong elements to be cultivated and weak elements to be culled. The Nazis explicitly appealed to science in their depiction of Jews as a biologically inferior race of sub-humans who posed a threat to the superior Aryan race and, hence, the Reich. Anti-Jewish ideology and propaganda were laced with a “language of prophetic scientificality”15 that lent them a sense of inevitability and “infallib[ility].”16 “In Nazi Germany,” Arendt writes, “questioning the validity of racism and antisemitism when nothing mattered but race origin, when a career depended upon an ‘Aryan’ physiognomy . . . and the amount of food upon the number of one’s Jewish grandparents, was the like questioning the existence of the world.”17 While encountering radical Others in Africa contributed an important experiential component in the development of European racism, sociopolitical conditions had to exist within which it could take hold and flourish. Arendt identifies the period between the two World Wars as crucial in producing such conditions.18 A number of formative developments took place during that time, including the dismantling of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires, the subsequent creation of new nation-states, and the establishment within those states of permanent minority populations whose rights were protected not by the state itself but instead by an external international body, the League of Nations. These developments, to say nothing of the devastation wrought by the First World War, displaced large numbers of people, which in turn resulted in the mass movement of human populations. Either by choice so as not to be repatriated to a country where they a were minority and with which they neither identified nor within which felt they belonged, or by virtue of states’ refusal to accept refugees and displaced persons, unprecedented numbers of persons became stateless. Arendt sees statelessness giving concrete form to the radical otherness necessary for the coalescing of racism. While minorities may have chafed

554

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

at their situation generally and the new identity imposed upon them more specifically, recourse to (albeit limited and atypical) legal protection and (albeit externally generated) rights enabled them to retain some sense of human dignity and worth. Stateless people, by contrast, were not only denied citizenship of a particular state but were deprived of “a place in the world” altogether.19 From an Arendtian perspective, membership in a community, “which makes opinions significant and actions effective,” provides the condition for the possibility of intelligibility not only as a citizen but more fundamentally as a human being.20 Freedom and justice matter only within a shared context that is “willing and able to guarantee” the right to freedom and justice; meaningful speech and action are possible only within a space where it is possible to come together with others in order to deliberate and act.21 “Only the loss of a polity,” Arendt writes, “expels [persons] from humanity.”22 Lacking a community, stateless people were “thrown back . . . on their natural givenness.”23 For Arendt, being able to come together with others for the purposes of action and speech is the condition for the possibility of a meaningful human existence, for it is through these two activities that persons are able to distinguish themselves from others and therefore come into existence as “unique, distinct” individuals. Excluded from a common world of shared experiences within which they can come together with others, stateless people are different from the non-stateless but lack differences— distinguishing characteristics such as a “profession . . . a citizenship . . . an opinion . . . a deed.”24 The stateless person “represent[s] nothing but his own absolutely unique individuality which, deprived of expression within and action upon a common world, loses all significance.”25 By reducing human beings to such a level, Arendt argues, statelessness denies personhood, and in doing so, reduces human beings to “the ‘scum of the earth.’”26 They were so far beyond the pale of normal society that they were incapable of any degree of assimilation, rather than being addressed through diplomatic or juridical means; thus the stateless were deemed a security issue to be contained by the police or, worse, a threat that had to be eliminated. While the threat posed by statelessness was not framed as biological, the fact that Jews were among the first groups who were “unable or unwilling to place themselves under the new minority protection of their homelands,” and thus among the first to become stateless, facilitated the conceptualization of radical otherness (construed as in- or at least sub-humanity) in terms of race and, hence, biology.27 As the ultimate sub-race, Jews had to be eliminated, and Arendt shows that this elimination was embedded within a broader Nazi policy of population management aimed at purging biologically impure elements from and thereby strengthening the Reich. In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt describes how, after stripping Jews of their citizenship in order to expel them from Germany, the Nazis proceeded to “gather them back from everywhere in order to ship them to extermination camps.”28 Initially, the Nazis cooperated with Zionist organizations in order

BIOPOLITICS

 555

to “encourage” Jewish relocation to Palestine. “Voluntary emigration” was followed by “forced emigration,” which was, Arendt argues, effectively “expulsion.” “The concentration” of Jews in ghettos took place between the fall of 1939 and the invasion of Russia in the summer of 1941. All three of these policies constitute what Foucault refers to as the “indirect murder” enacted by biopower: “the fact of exposing someone to death, increasing the risk of death for some people, or, quite simply, political death, expulsion, rejection, and so on.”29 Jews were stripped of their homes, property, money, and rights and left to fend for themselves in squalid conditions devoid of adequate food, shelter, sanitation, and medical care.30 The final stage of Nazi population policy was, of course, the direct killing of biologically inferior elements within society. Such killing was performed in the name of promoting biologically superior elements and, therefore, ultimately fostering life. Arendt’s work is thus consistent with Foucault’s in illustrating that the destructive potential of biopolitics achieves its apotheosis in Nazism. She shows that the suicidal as well as the genocidal character of Nazi biopolitics is apparent in, for example, its idealization of Aryanism, as well as the deprivation and suffering to which it exposed the German people, especially at the end of the War. “The Nazis,” Arendt writes, “did not think that the Germans were a master race, to whom the world belonged, but that they should be led by a master race, as should all other nations, and that this master race was still being born.”31 At the same time, Arendt’s later work illustrates that she considers the biopolitical promoting of life, insofar as it both predates the war and prevails into the postwar period, to be characteristic of Western modernity in general. In The Human Condition, Arendt sees this concern being reflected in the modern attitude toward the human activity of labor. Modern societies, Arendt asserts, have endeavored to extricate themselves from the necessity inherent in labor, which keeps human beings bound to the cyclical repetition of biological processes. At the same time, these societies also endeavor to maximize (even exploit) labor’s productive function. What results from this simultaneous deprecation and valorization is a “society of laborers which is about to be liberated from the fetters of labor,” but which “no longer know[s] of those higher and more meaningful activities for the sake of which this freedom would deserve to be won.”32 For Arendt, then, a modern attitude that presents itself as promoting human emancipation ultimately undermines the very conditions for the possibility of freedom: it reasserts and even bolsters conditions that reduce human plurality to the superfluousness of the species being. Key among the “higher and more meaningful activities” such a move threatens to eclipse thinking—a mental activity with the potential to identify and even function in the service of countering the modern developments Arendt describes. Despite her protestations that it is not her concern in The Human Condition, Arendt nonetheless appeals to it in the book’s final paragraph as a possible means of countering what she sees as a potential resurgence of the conditions for the possibility of

556

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

something like the biopolitics of totalitarianism, which of course emerged from and in turn promoted thoughtlessness. “Thought,” Arendt writes, “is still possible, and no doubt actual, wherever men live under the condition of political freedom. Unfortunately . . . no human capacity is so vulnerable.”33

Notes 1 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I (New York: Vintage, 1990), 138, original emphasis. 2 Ibid., 137. 3 Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College de France, 1975-76 (New York: Palgrave, 2003), 242. 4 Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France: 1977-78 (New York: Palgrave, 2007), 21. 5 Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 246. 6 Ibid., 247. 7 Ibid., 246. 8 Ibid., 254. 9 Ibid., 259. 10 Ibid., 258. 11 Ibid., 259. 12 Ibid., 260. 13 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harvest Books, 1973), 165. 14 See Origins, chapter seven, “Race and Bureaucracy.” 15 Ibid., 350. 16 Ibid., 349. 17 Ibid., 363. 18 For Arendt’s analysis of this period, see Origins, chapter nine, “The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man.” 19 Ibid., 296. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid., 297. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid., 302. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid., 289. 28 Ibid., 290.

BIOPOLITICS

29 Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 256. 30 Arendt, Origins, 95. 31 Ibid., 412. 32 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1958), 4–5. 33 Ibid., 324.

 557

58 The “Conscious Pariah”: Beyond Identity and Difference Samir Gandesha

On one reading, the very possibility of Platonic political philosophy is a contradictio in adjecto insofar as in his dialogues Plato does not use the adjective “political” to describe the noun “philosophy” but, rather, places the two terms in an antagonistic relationship with one another. And, as dramatized in dialogues such as Phaedo, Crito, and Apology, such antagonism has roots in traumatic event: Athenian democracy’s tragic treatment of Plato’s teacher, Socrates, which offered him the choice of either exile or death (he, of course, chose the latter) for insulting its gods. So, Platonism embodies the aspiration to “make the world safe” for philosophy by mastering the inherent contingency, novelty, and sheer plurality of political life. Platonism can never forget the dangers that confront the philosopher, in particular that quintessential philosopher of the agora, Socrates, who, acting as a gadfly, irritates his interlocutors with questions they are unable to answer, with a recognition that the beliefs they confidently profess do not stand up to reasoned scrutiny. One can see this, for example, in the late-period dialogue, the Laws, in which Plato seeks to outline with detailed precision the good city as a kind of “ideocracy.” Nowhere else is the precarious position of the philosopher more dramatically expressed, however, than in the Republic’s cave allegory.1 After having returned from the arduous journey up beyond the cave and having glimpsed the Form of the Good, the philosopher takes upon himself the thankless and perilous task of returning to the cave to convince its inhabitants that what they take for reality is, in actual fact, appearance, mere play of the shadows cast on

THE “CONSCIOUS PARIAH”

 559

the walls in front of them and from which shackles they need to be freed by way of an arduous dialectic. Of course, this characterization of Plato’s mobilization of philosophy in a kind of “tyranny of truth” against politics is the interpretation that Hannah Arendt, herself, offers.2 It is an interpretation that is of particular importance for her understanding of the political as the realm of contingency, plurality, and, above all, appearances. Were Plato’s account of politics as the shadowy realm of the cave correct, then political judgment would entail subsuming particulars beneath pre-given rules or Eidos (forms), accessible through an act of anamnesis or unforgetting. But politics is not to be understood in such terms; rather, it is rooted in temporal particulars from which one then must, through an act of imagination—a making of that which is absent present— generate a general rule or a universal concept. Politics, in other words, does not have to do with the unum verum understood in opposition to doxa or opinion but, rather, starts with an understanding of doxa as the articulation of the dokei moi, “what appears to me”3—the assumption that the shared world opens up to me differently than it does to others. Plato’s attempt to remember and honor Socrates can be seen as an act of forgetting insofar as he replaces the latter’s maieutics that aims at bringing forth the citizen’s truth from doxa with an account of dialegesthai that aims at destroying doxa.4 For Plato, construing the cave as the space of politics, the realm of shadow play, showed dramatically that the only proper way to address the realm of the political realm was by way of an exit strategy. In this sense, the allegory is to be taken with utmost seriousness. The philosopher in leaving the cave exits the political and enters into the light cast by the form of the Good. And such an exit from the political, at least on this nonironic reading, entailed its re-creation as a mirroring or mimesis of divine logos accessible only by virtue of the conceptual journey of dialectic that retraced the philosopher’s haptic ascent upward toward the sunlight. The highest good, in this account, was the vita contemplativa—the life spent in agitationless contemplation. Plato’s anti-political bias provides the context necessary to fully grasp the key importance of the concepts “pariah” and parvenu to Arendt’s political theory. If philosophy seeks to take its leave of the political, then, in Arendt’s view, the pariah can only find a home within this space in which difference is permitted to appear as such. Pariah and parvenu denote social difference and identity, respectively. The word “pariah,” according to the OED, derives from the South Indian language Tamil. When capitalized it refers to “a member of a scheduled tribe of South India concentrated in southern Kerala and Tamil Nadu, originally functioning notably as sorcerers and ceremonial drummers and also as labourers and servants, but later increasingly as ‘untouchables’ in insanitary occupations.” It has come to mean lower caste, outcaste and, more recently, “a member of a despised class of any kind; someone or something shunned or avoided; a social outcast.”5 Parvenu, in contrast, designates newly acquired wealth and/or social status; it designates the social climber.

560

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

These two categories represent the two options for members of minority groups in the midst of a majority with a different culture, religion, or ethnic identity. Of course, for Arendt, the daughter of Jewish parents, although not necessarily a “dutiful” one as Gershom Scholem suggested in his pointed criticism of Eichmann in Jerusalem, her example was the unique position of Jews in Germany. Of course, pariah also referred to refugees and stateless persons more generally. Before what Max Weber refers to as the original European “pariah people,”6 the Jews, lay two options. The first was to remain separate and apart from the larger gentile society and maintain their own language, Yiddish, religious and cultural practices, and face, from time to time, the occasional pogrom and restrictions on their political liberties. The second, of course, was to assimilate, often by conversion to Christianity and its attendant change of name, into the norms, values, and, ultimately, identity of the dominant society. As becomes clear in her biography of Rahel Varnhagen, the pariah was to be understood specifically in terms of European Jewish experience in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Out of experiences of social exclusion, marginalization, and anti-semitism, the figure of the pariah constituted a “hidden tradition.”7 This hidden tradition emphasized “all vaunted Jewish qualities—the ‘Jewish heart,’ humanity, humour, disinterested intelligence— [are] pariah qualities.”8 Above all, the pariah was clear about the importance of thinking as a prelude to speech and action—central categories for understanding Arendt’s political theory. This tradition manifests what for Arendt constitutes a third option, adopted from Bernard Lazare, and this is the idea of a “conscious pariah,” one who is aware of and embraces as a matter of political decision his position as someone “never quite at home in this world.”9 Such an awareness made possible a solidarity with other such outcastes. For Arendt, thinking through the fraught and shifting relations between these two categories, again as initially applied to Jews, enabled her to clarify the relation that is central to her mature political theory as set forth in her 1958 book, The Human Condition. This is the relation between the “social” and the “political.” As she puts it in the The Origins of Totalitarianism: “During the 150 years when Jews truly lived amid, and not just in the neighborhood of, Western European peoples, they always had to pay with political misery for social glory and with social insult for political success.”10 The pariah in this sense, perched as he was on the boundary between the social and the political, being simultaneously insider and outsider, embodies a central political virtue as expressed by both Socrates and Kant—namely, the capacity to view things from an “enlarged mentality,” which, interestingly, in Arendt’s gloss on Kant entails training “one’s imagination to go visiting.”11 For Arendt, Platonism establishes the dominance of identity over difference insofar as it establishes the real Idea over and against the particular understood as appearance. By formulating a third alternative, that of the “conscious pariah,” the outsider capable of acting with other

THE “CONSCIOUS PARIAH”

 561

such outsiders, Arendt is able to articulate a nuanced relation between difference and identity. Such a relation becomes central to Arendt’s notion of the political as the realm of appearances comprised by the being together of those who are different. If totalitarian space is constituted by the “squeezing of individuals together as if by a band of iron,” then the space of the genuinely public realm is one which, far from being reduced or minimized, is opened up between subjects. Such an openness is precisely, then, the space of appearances. The conscious pariah was he whose pariahdom was, as it were, a free act, and in such a free act was grounded the capability of acting together with others who had also freely embraced their pariah status. In such capacity for collective action Arendt located an alternative source of power to the conventional Hobbesian-Weberian definition understood as domination, as “power over.” The pariah-parvenu opposition highlighted the paradoxical relation between what would come to be with the publication of The Human Condition, two key concepts lying at the center of her work: the social and the political. The social denoted three related but differentiated things: universal commodity exchange, mass society, and the realm of sociability as when we speak of “high society.” Significantly, while the logic of the social was inherently assimilative, that of the political was based on a recognition of difference and plurality. The predominant sense it had for Arendt, however, was what Marx referred to as the “metabolism with nature” via labor and the increasing coordination of production relations under modern condition via the modern bureaucratic state or the rule of “nobody.” The social implied, in other words, the realm of necessity. The political, in contrast, was the realm of free speech and action that was separated from the realm of infinite, boundless metabolic processes by virtue of its worldhood. The political was, in other words, constituted by the web of meaning comprised of past words and deeds in narrative form. The rectilinear time of the political stood in contrast to the cyclical time of labor processes and made possible new beginnings or a new temporal sequence. As I have argued elsewhere, A central moment in the genealogy of the concept of the social in Arendt’s thinking is a characterization of the social as embodying an exclusionary logic. The relation between parvenu and “pariah” is to be understood in terms of their differential relations vis-a-vis society. While the pariah is excluded because of her difference—in the case of Varnhagen, because she was a Jewish woman—the parvenu is one who does whatever is required in order to gain acceptance in the very society that excludes those “like” her, including, of course, sacrificing a crucial aspect of her own identity. The pariah can only gain entry to the social, that is, become a parvenu, by accepting and internalizing society’s exclusionary logic. As against the perspective of the conformism and self-loathing of the parvenu, Arendt advocates the perspective of what she calls that of the “conscious pariah”—the individual who, far from seeking to gain admittance to and

562

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

acceptance in a society that would exclude the other, takes a stand of solidarity against the exclusions that constitute that society with those others similarly excluded. The standpoint of the conscious pariah is what Arendt comes to understand as the political. The political itself embodies the tension comprised of, on the one hand, a recognition of differences between individuals, that is, plurality, and the possibility of sharing and acting together in a shared world. The political, then, can be said to involve a kind of non-reductive being-together of difference.12 Arendt’s had two models for the conscious pariah. The first was Rahel Varnhagen and the second, Rosa Luxemburg. Arendt wrote a biography subtitled “The Life of a Jewess,” about Varnhagen, and an important essay based on the biography by Nettl of Rosa Luxemburg included in the volume Men in Dark Times. According to one of her American biographers, Elizabeth Young-Bruehl, Arendt identified with both women, especially the first. Varnhagen, who, according to her own admission, was blessed with neither extraordinary beauty nor intelligence and was from a “pariah” people, nonetheless played a key role in the Berlin salon culture of the late eighteenth century, was intimate with some of the leading lights of the German Enlightenment, German romanticism and, herself, participated in the “Goethe cult.” Rahel Varnhagen is particularly important for Hannah Arendt because she journeys from marginalized pariah to assimilating and striving parvenu who sacrifices those aspects of herself that matter the most in order to meet the dominant expectations of German society. In the end, though, on her deathbed, Varnhagen reverts to speaking Yiddish and therefore reinvents herself a second time, this time as a conscious pariah. In this, she affirms Arendt’s answer to Günther Gaus’s question, “What remains?” Language remains, Arendt answers. Arendt, herself, much like Heinrich Heine, whom she greatly admired, adopted the position of the “conscious pariah” in her very approach to political theory. On the one hand, her embrace of figures like Bertoldt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, and, of course, Rosa Luxemburg, and the Council Communist movement placed her at odds with the political Right. Yet, her invocation of the ancients, Athenian democracy in particular, her contro­ versial assessment of the integration of the Little Rock school system, her less-than-favorable interpretation of the French Revolution as compared with the American Revolution, not to mention her critique of Marx in The Human Condition based on the differentiation of the social and the political, placed her deeply at odds with the political Left as well. But nowhere was Arendt’s own status as a conscious pariah made clearer than in the aftermath of Eichmann in Jerusalem in which she shows the complicity of some of the Jewish leaders with the Final Solution. As Scholem’s infamous response shows, Arendt was made into a pariah of the pariah people par excellence.13 The supreme political virtue, for Arendt, then was reflective judgment. Insofar as political space is comprised by plurality and therefore

THE “CONSCIOUS PARIAH”

 563

cannot be reduced to an overarching identity, political phenomena are characterized by particularity. Hence, reflective judgment must begin with such particularity and generate universals out of them. In the political realm that constitutes a fundamentally open temporality between natality and mortality—as opposed to the unending metabolic processes that, for Arendt, characterize labor located within the realm of the social—only reflective judgment can adequately contend with the emergence of the new or the unprecedented. The opposition between pariah and parvenu is one that continues to shape Arendt as a distinctive thinker of the Jewish experience in the twentieth century. For example, Leon Botstein argues that the opposition is key to understanding Arendt’s support of both a secular, progressive Zionism, on the one hand, and, on the other, a Jewish Diaspora that had its center of gravity in the as it were adopted political tradition of Jeffersonian America whose revolution, in contrast to that of France, emphasized not the social but the political question.14 Botstein argues, in fact, that Arendt’s political theory only makes sense within this particular force field that begins to come apart at the seams twenty years after the Eichmann trial. He sees in this tension an extraordinary form of nationhood in Israel that took its bearings not from the standpoint of the parvenu or their identification with the aggressor but from that of the pariah and their identification with the “underdog.” It is also apparent in the work of Giorgio Agamben and Judith Butler. The former argues that peace between Israelis and Palestinians might be possible if each nation can understand itself in a condition of “exodus” vis-à-vis the other and therefore extend a measure of hospitality to the other.15 In a similar way, Judith Butler argues that Israel can learn to establish an ethical relation to its neighbors, namely the Palestinians, by learning from the important emphasis on living together with others in the Diaspora.16 One wonders, finally, whether the opposition itself is necessarily restricted to the Jewish experience and intra-Jewish debates. For example, Edward Said’s notion of exilic experience is another way of understanding the pariah: as someone who is compelled to see phenomenon simultaneously from the inside and the outside, he who thinks and writes in a “contrapuntal” and “nomadic” way.17 Or, as Theodor W. Adorno puts it in his brilliant essay on “Heine the Wound,” Now that the destiny which Heine sensed has been fulfilled literally, however, the homelessness has also become everyone’s homelessness; all human beings have been as badly injured in their beings and their language as Heine the outcast was. His words stand in for their words: there is no longer any homeland other than a world in which no one would be cast out any more, the world of a genuinely emancipated humanity. The wound that is Heine will heal only in a society that has achieved reconciliation.18

564

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

Notes 1 Plato, “Republic,” in Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1945), 514A–521B. 2 Hannah Arendt, “Philosophy and Politics,” Social Research 57, no. 1 (Spring 1990): 78. See also Alan Ryan’s interpretation in his On Politics Vol. I: A History of Political Thought: Herodotus to Machiavelli (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2012), 31–70. 3 Ibid., 80. 4 Ibid., 90–91. 5 “pariah, n. and adj.” OED Online. July 2018. Oxford University Press. http:​// www​.oed.​com.p​roxy.​lib.s​fu.ca​/view​/Entr​y/137​889?r​edire​ctedF​rom=P​ariah​& (accessed November 29, 2018). 6 Hannah Arendt, The Jewish Writings, ed. Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 276. 7 Hannah Arendt, “The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition,” The Jewish Writings, 275–97. 8 Hannah Arendt, “We Refugees,” in The Jewish Writings, 274. 9 Arendt, “The Jew as Pariah,” 283. 10 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Inc., 1976), 56. 11 Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 43. 12 Samir Gandesha, “Homeless Philosophy: The Exile Philosophy and the Philosophy of Exile,” in Arendt and Adorno: Political and Philosophical Investigations, ed. Lars Rensmann and Samir Gandesha (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012), 247–80. 13 See Arendt, The Jewish Writings, 465–511. 14 Leon Botstein, “The Jew as Pariah: Hannah Arendt’s Political Philosophy,” Dialectical Anthropology 8, nos. 1/2 (1983): 47–73. 15 Giorgio Agamben, Means without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Cesare Casarino and Vincenzo Binetti (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 24–26. 16 See Judith Butler, Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). 17 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), xxv. 18 Theodor W. Adorno, “Heine the Wound,” in Notes to Literature, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 85.

59 Education: Arendt against the Politicization of the University Peter Baehr

Introduction True to her vocation, Hannah Arendt approached the world of teaching and learning from the standpoint of politics. But that very stance harbored a paradox. It was a mistake, Arendt believed, to politicize education because politics and education are contrasting realms of human action. For Arendt, education is a sphere created to protect children from the demands of the adult world while incrementally introducing them to it. Moreover, the education of children requires something more than teaching prowess and a mastery of the subjects taught. It requires authority: the responsibility of adults to instruct the young, establishing limits and formulating guidelines that will enable them to grow securely into the world. Politics, by contrast, is a sphere of freedom, risk, and uncertainty fit only for adults. It requires not authority but rather the equality of citizens to be seen and heard in public and, thereby, to participate in shaping the commonwealth. As she puts it: “Education can play no part in politics, because in politics we always have to deal with those who are already educated. Whoever wants to educate adults really wants to act as their guardian.”1

566

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

Beginning with birth, the original emergence of newness that Arendt calls natality, learning is a lifelong process, active so long as persons retain their curiosity and wits. Education, on the other hand, “must have a predictable end” and in “our civilization this end probably coincides with graduation from college rather than with graduation from high school.”2 College students and all others in institutions of higher learning are not children. However, they are already fellow citizens. Arendt agrees while re-stating her view that mixing politics and education corrupts both activities. I return to this point below in the section on “The School and the ‘Social.’” First let us look at the situation of children at school and the location of the school in Arendt’s triadic topography of political, social and private realms.

The Child at School In “The Crisis in Education,” Arendt lists three “ruinous” assumptions of modern pedagogy.3 The first is the notion that children should be encouraged to occupy and manage a domain free of adult interference. Animated by a “progressive,” romantic spirit, such lofty laissez-faire approaches aim to liberate the young from fusty constraints. Instead, they abandon them to a new kind of social tyranny. In a contest between a child and adults, the child can at least rely on the understanding and solidarity of other children. Not so in relation to a group of peers where the majority or leader of the majority rules. The result is “either conformism or juvenile delinquency, and . . . frequently a mixture of both.”4 If the first pernicious idea about education concerns children, the second has to do with teachers. Modern pedagogy increasingly assumes that mastery of any particular discipline—math, languages, the various sciences, and so forth—is secondary to the method of teaching per se, a method that can be applied to all subjects willy-nilly. But where teachers are generalists frantically trying to keep one step ahead of their students in any particular area, the child’s education is bound to suffer, bereft of the authoritative guidance of teachers who really know their stuff. Such negligence is aggravated by a simplistic view of learning, the third damaging idea undermining the relationship between adults and children. In this view, the “basic assumption is that you can know and understand only what you have done yourself.” By substituting doing for learning, academic study is downgraded to vocational proficiency and specialization.5 The effect is to narrow intellectual horizons just at the stage when they should be expanded, and to buttress the misconception that education must be a pleasurable, playful activity to facilitate the natural spontaneity and exuberance of the child. That view, apparently so caring, is in fact deleterious to the child’s growth as a person and as a citizen because it fails to prepare juveniles for the adult world of work that, far from being playful, is characterized by hard graft, diligence, stamina, and all manner of restraint.

EDUCATION

 567

In this nexus, parents have important duties to discharge. They must shelter children from the storms of the world and from the klieg lights of political exposure; such protection is what the privacy of the family home, in principle, affords. Equally, parents have an obligation to shield the world from children, channeling their raw energy into civilized habits of respect and self-control. Natality is, doubtless, a thing of wonder, but the new beginning that is the child is just as capable of unleashing chaos into the world as it is of revitalizing it. Parents are further required by the state to send their children to school and this typically means a public institution. States assume this right of compulsion because while parents are already citizens, children are citizens of the future. Distilling “the essence of the educational activity,” we can say it is the adult responsibility “to cherish and protect something—the child against the world, the world against the child, the new against the old, the old against the new.”6 Education is conservative or, rather, conservationist in these respects. But it is not, any more than parental authority, the model for the realm of politics. Politics is an activity that takes place between formally equal adult citizens who are able to bear the burdens of being seen and heard in public. In politics, conservation alone, were it even possible, would lead to entropy and annihilation. For the frail human artifact that Arendt calls “the world” to persist, it requires actions that constantly recreate it, and thus transform it, under unforeseeable conditions. Some commentators, like Stacey Smith (2001), argue that Arendt’s severance of education from politics is implausible. If one of the purposes of education is to prepare children for the common world they will renew as adults, and if that common world is one in which citizenship is a prominent feature, then educators would seem duty bound to prepare students for citizenship. And nothing can facilitate that more than nurturing “capacities with which to judge and, consequently, to speak and to act in a public manner that approximates fullness rather than partiality of perspectives.”7 It is one thing—a bad thing—to subject students to the partisan attitudes of their teachers. It is quite another thing to expose the young to a variety of standpoints that, by osmosis even more than by instruction, communicate the plenitude of the public world. By bringing the young into contact with multiple kinds of life and experience, by cultivating their imagination and reflection, and by affording them opportunities of embryonic practice in citizenship through “school governance, community service and broader political forums,” the school is well placed to create the conditions of representative thinking and an enlarged mentality that Arendt saw as the bedrock of political judgment.8 Stacey Smith’s argument, I suggest, is less a refutation of Arendt than it is an intelligent fleshing out of her contention—somewhat cryptic as stated— that educators are obliged to prepare youth in their transition to a world of joint responsibility where citizenship is at the core of that obligation. We can grant that while still recognizing the limits of political education in schools.

568

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

Participants in the mature public space are subject to onerous tensions: active citizens must, among other things, “be willing to risk disclosing their unique perspectives while restraining themselves from expressing their full singularity;” they must make judgments, sometimes “taking controversial positions” while avoiding “attempts to coerce others through assertions or logical demonstrations of incontestable truth and certainty.”9 These tensile balances, rare enough in adults, are hardly to be expected of school students.

The School and the “Social” Around the time that “The Crisis in Education” was published, Arendt became embroiled in a major controversy over school integration in the American south. In “Reflections on Little Rock” (1959) and in answers to critics, Arendt agreed that judicially mandated segregation was wrong and that the American government was right to “abolish laws enforcing discrimination.”10 On the other hand, she opposed any law, federal or state, that forced school integration onto parents. Such coercion impinged on their social and private rights to choose which school was best for their children. As always, when children are the issue, Arendt repeats her demand that adults protect them from obligations the young are simply not ready to assume. Watching scenes on television of frightened children thrown into the midst of violent protests prompted her to ask indignantly: “Have we now come to the point where it is the children who are being asked to change or improve the world? And do we intend to have our political battles fought out in the school yards?”11 “Reflections on Little Rock” adapts a distinction formulated in The Human Condition (1958) among three realms of human action: the public, social, and private spaces. Politics, we saw previously, takes place in that sphere of public participation governed by the principle of equality, a status that comes with being a member, a citizen, of a polity. The social sphere is animated by a contrasting principle: discrimination; it is the space of “free association and group formation,”12 in which we choose our friends, our occupations, and, according to our means and preferences, our neighborhoods. Generally speaking, like mixes with like. We associate with people of a similar class, manner, educational, ethnic, and linguistic background—in short, with people who share our interests, employment, and inclinations. Think of a women’s reading group, a law office’s annual dinner, a house of worship, or a trade union meeting. The private realm is different again, “ruled neither by equality, nor by discrimination,” but by intimacy:13 the affection we feel for friends, our families, those we love and care for prompts us to give them special consideration. And such affection, and the action that flows from it, turns not on people’s social function or their political standing but on the uniqueness they have in our eyes. For this reason and others, the prohibition against marrying a person of a different

EDUCATION

 569

race—miscegenation—was, for Arendt, an outrage that dwarfed the matter of school segregation. Arendt acknowledges that public institutions are a broader domain than strictly political ones. A bus, train, theater, museum, and many other things that people need to pursue their lives and conduct their business all fulfill a public function; they are thus subject to the principle of equal treatment. A public service that discriminates against American citizens is subverting its very rationale. Schools are a more complex case, and not only because they draw on federal subventions; schools straddle public, social, and private dimensions. The federal state has a right to “prescribe minimum requirements for future citizenship” and to “support the teaching of subjects and professions which are felt to be desirable and necessary to the nation as a whole.”14 But this prescription concerns only the content of education “not the context of association and social life which invariably develops out of [the child’s] attendance at school.”15 These social contexts are diverse.16 Private as well as public schools exist. Some schools cater only to girls, others just to boys. Some schools proclaim a specific religious affiliation. Parents also have rights and these derive from the private and social realms. As Arendt puts it: To force parents to send their children to an integrated school against their will means to deprive them of rights which clearly belong to them in all free societies—the private right over their children and the social right to free association. As for children, forced integration means a very serious conflict between home and school, between their private and social life, and while such conflicts are common in adult life, children cannot be expected to handle them and therefore should not be exposed to them.17 Were Arendt a “Negro mother,” she would never put her child into a school where it was expressly unwanted, subjecting the child to aggression and humiliation. She would further be appalled at a federal government that turned children into a siege engine of reform. And if Arendt were a “white mother,” aside from also seeking to protect her child, she would assert her right as a parent to decide “in whose company my children received its instruction,” a right that is “challenged only by dictatorships.”

University Students, Faculty, and Administration Ideas about primary and secondary schooling did not exhaust Arendt’s thoughts on education. During the 1960s and the early 1970s, she wrote about the university. The catalyst was campus radicalism, part of a broader social movement of civil rights and anti-war protest sweeping across America and Europe. Arendt also touched, if far more briefly, on a process

570

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

that had been gathering pace ever since the end of the Second World War: the tendency of universities to adopt a research-intensive model of education and to apply it across all modes of scholarship. Its fruits were a proliferation of privately and publicly funded research institutes, a demand for academic “relevance” and a related expectation of enhanced academic productivity (papers, books, and grants). Arendt’s appraisal of student radicalism was ambivalent. She praised the students’ moral seriousness and sense of urgency. Their “sheer courage” and “appetite for action” to bring about social and political change were nothing less than “astounding.”18 So, too, was the international dimension of student protest; conditioning it, she surmised, was the fear of nuclear destruction and a widespread revulsion against the “anonymous power of administrators,”19 the bureaucratic “rule of nobody,” that infuses the institutions of mass society. Arendt also defended the student movement and the ’68ers especially against charges of “fascism.” That incendiary accusation said more about the critics’ loss of nerve and their annoyance at having their work disrupted than it did about the current scene. No mass parties backed the students, nor did the latter possess paramilitary organizations or leaders of the appeal of Hitler and Mussolini.20 The detractors’ emotional spasm reminded Arendt of another grand failure of political judgment: the “enthusiastic welcome” of the outbreak of the First World War from 1914 to 1918 received from European intellectuals.21 Now, Arendt hinted, many intellectuals were gripped by another kind of hysteria, this time of fear rather than bellicose rapture. Yet if the student movement displayed a wild grandeur, it also incubated reflexes that Arendt found disturbing. A fascination with theorists of violence was bad enough; far worse was the eruption of real violence, a development she attributed to the arrival of Black Power on campus. Black students, unprepared for university study, had an interest in lowering academic standards; supine administrations too readily acceded to their demands.22 A weird, nihilistic strand of despair was evident, too, especially in Europe; it was as if students, sensing impending defeat, actually wished to provoke it so they would still be seen as actors of sorts. “The conviction that everything deserves to be destroyed, that everybody deserves to go to hell—this sort of desperation can be detected everywhere, though it is less pronounced in America.”23 No surprise, then, that the ideas of the students were often confused and that the “theoretical sterility and analytical dullness of this movement are just as striking and depressing as its joy in action is welcome.”24 Anticolonial rhetoric combined Frantz Fanon, Jean-Paul Sartre, and bowdlerized Marxism in an incoherent hodgepodge. Slogans invoking the “Unity of the Third World” were absurd. “The Third World is not a reality but an ideology,” Arendt stated baldly.25 When asked to explain that provocation, she declared, “Asia, Africa, South America—those are realities” and each is internally heterogeneous in its history and culture. Lumping together a

EDUCATION

 571

Chinese worker and a Bantu tribesman, and telling them that they lived in the same Third World, would be met with incredulity by both.26 Victims of European dictatorships would be similarly surprised to hear of something called “bourgeois freedom,” a linguistic conflation persuasive only to people—“innocent children in the West”—who have never experienced serious oppression. “From the fact that communist governments today do not respect civil rights and do not guarantee freedom of speech and association it does not follow that such rights and freedoms are ‘bourgeois.’”27 The students’ attitude to their own habitats—colleges and universities— was no less problematic. Arendt declared repeatedly that the student revolt was a reflex of much that it criticized. Students objected to the politicization of the university by government, but they were busy politicizing it themselves: for them, knowledge was valuable to the extent that it was useful, capable of empowering the downtrodden or liberating the self. The demand for practical relevance from university courses, the febrile mission to “change the world,” mirrored the instrumentality of business corporations and governments; it also legitimated the desire of university administrations to take knowledge out of the ivory tower, apply it to society at large, and channel more resources into professional schools. Student protests thus contributed to the growing marginalization of the humanities, perceived as antiquated and irrelevant when contrasted to the youthful, activist social sciences. Young people in revolt thought that they were the enemies of a crass and commercial society. Yet the consumer society, like the students themselves, had little time for durable things; fashion and obsolescence lie in the very nature of commodity production. In contrast, the assumption behind the humanities is that they deal with “thought-things” of perennial or at least lasting importance. Arendt even asserted that student “demands to have instruction in civil warfare [was] the answer to the social sciences’ ‘manipulation,’ the social engineering.” She concluded that the students were actually “a product of the social sciences; they only have a different goal.”28 A political theorist who objects to politicization is an oddity only if we forget one vital fact about Arendt: her belief that the conflation of ideas, principles, and spheres of conduct is the cause of much contemporary confusion. For that reason, Arendt went to great efforts to distinguish totalitarianism from dictatorship, labor from work, earth from world, education from learning, and so forth. Politics, too, requires a sense of discrimination. For Arendt, political activity outside the university by students was in principle legitimate. For instance, taking time off classes to participate in a general election. But politicization of the university itself was doubly destructive. The disruption of classes obviously impedes learning. It is also self-defeating: [Universities] make it possible for young people over a number of years to stand outside all social groups and obligations, to be truly free. If the

572

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

students destroy the universities, then nothing of the sort will any longer exist; consequently there will be no rebellion against society either.29 Education would, of course, continue, but outside the universities, in research institutes dominated by government and private interests. Vocational and professional training would be left untouched. Is this what the students wanted? Arendt doubted it. Her reflections on student revolt prompted Arendt to delineate a “twofold task” of universities: first, “to educate” students and take on the role of “a functional part of society”; second, to carry out research where knowledge for its own sake is pursued—for no other reason than that we want truth. (And not values. To create values for society and play “the conscience of society”—what arrogance. Society either has a conscience or it does not. . . . We can examine values, conscience, etc. but not provide it.)30 Enquiry that is oriented to truthfulness is not a political matter; on the contrary, it is one that occurs “outside the political realm . . . [and is] one of the various modes of being alone.”31 Arendt glosses: Outstanding among the existential modes of truth telling are the solitude of the philosopher, the isolation of the scientist and the artist, the impartiality of the historian and the judge, and the independence of the fact-finder, the witness and the reporter. . . . These modes of being alone differ in many respects, but they have in common that as long as any of them lasts, no political commitments, no adherence to a cause, is possible.32 It transpires that to tell “the truth . . . is the only responsibility of intellectuals, insofar as they are intellectuals.” Once they step out of the role of truthtellers, and engage the world as opinion-shapers or partisans of particular interests, they act as citizens rather than intellectuals. Then they can claim no legitimate authority for their views and actions other than being a member of a polity. They certainly have “no right to claim” that because they are intellectuals, they are the “conscience of society.”33 She recalled that when American scientists convened to discuss the whys, hows, and wherefores of making the hydrogen bomb, they met as a small scientific club concerned with scientific questions. Yet shortly after their discussion began, differences appeared of a highly political kind, concerning the weapon’s potential for deterrence or destruction. “And the moment responsibility appeared, the political man prevailed.” The “special responsibility” of intellectuals, “lies in giving the facts of the matter, after which they resume their roles as judging citizens like everybody else.”34 Alas, university education was not only being politicized by students and by governments. Faculty research was becoming ever more banal.

EDUCATION

 573

She observed tersely in her notebook, “The masses of papers suffocate scholarship and originality. The ‘public or perish’ device was first only comical and vulgar; today it is a clear danger to all serious effort.”35 Today, we think of authors in terms of creativity and productivity; we understand their function from the point of the subjects themselves. But Arendt reminded her students that an auctor in the Roman era was a person who initiated a project, for instance the construction of a building, as distinct from the architect and craftsmen who carried it out. From the Roman perspective, then, the criterion of authorship was not simple productivity; it was the contribution a person had made imaginatively to “the world.” Authors, in that sense, “enriched, enlarged the world we live in.”36 Unfortunately, few modern academics make a similar contribution.

Notes 1 Hannah Arendt, “The Crisis in Education,” in Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin Books, 1968), 173. 2 Ibid., 192. 3 Ibid., 172. 4 Arendt, “Crisis,” 178. See also Arendt, “Reflections on Little Rock,” in The Portable Hannah Arendt, ed. P. Baehr (New York: Penguin, 2000), 231–46, 242–43. 5 Ibid., 179. 6 Ibid., 188. 7 Stacey Smith, “Education for Judgment: An Arendtian Oxymoron?,” in Hannah Arendt and Education, ed. M. Gordon (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2001), 67–91, 79. 8 Ibid., 88. 9 A. Schutz, “Contesting Utopianism: Hannah Arendt and the Tensions of Democratic Education,” in Hannah Arendt and Education, ed. M. Gordon (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2001), 93–125, 101. 10 “The real issue is equality before the law of the country, and equality is violated by segregation laws, that is, by laws enforcing segregation, not by social customs and the manners of educating children,” Arendt, “Reflections,” 244. On Arendt, education, and the Little Rock imbroglio, see Anya Topolski, “Creating Citizens in the Classroom: Hannah Arendt’s Political Critique of Education,” Ethical Perspectives, 15, no. 2 (2008): 259–82, 272–74. 11 Arendt, “Reflections,” 236. 12 Ibid., 239. See also 240, 242–43. 13 Arendt says “exclusiveness” (she also says affection) but this is misleading because all three realms—political/public, social and private—are exclusive in different ways. A women’s reading group by definition excludes men. States (mostly!) exclude noncitizens from voting in local and general elections.

574

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

14 Arendt, “Reflections,” 242. 15 Ibid. 16 Arendt says that the school is a public and a social world simultaneously. As such “the school is to the child what a job is to an adult” but with this decisive difference: while the choice of jobs and their related associations is a matter for adults, the choice of school is made by parents for children (Arendt, “Reflections,” 242). 17 Ibid. 18 Hannah Arendt, “On Violence,” in Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1972), 104–98, 188; “Thoughts on Politics and Revolution: A Commentary,” in Crises of the Republic, 201–33, 202–3. 19 Ibid., 178–80. 20 Hannah Arendt, Denktagebuch 1950-1973, Vols. 1 and 2, ed. Ursula Ludz and Ingeborg Nordmann (Munich: Piper: 2002), 714. 21 See “Political Experiences in the Twentieth Century,” in Hannah Arendt Papers at the Library of Congress: Essays and Lectures (Series: Subject File, 19491975, n.d), Image 26. She added: “Fond memories of this moment. (Marianne Weber),” possibly an ironic allusion to Max Weber’s impassioned support of the war. 22 Arendt, “Violence,” 120–21. 23 Ibid., 207. 24 Ibid., 206. 25 Ibid., 123. 26 Arendt, “Thoughts,” 210. “Countries of the South,” the favored contemporary expression for postcolonial societies, is no better on this score, according to Albert Memmi. In lieu of more plausible alternatives, however, Memmi resigned himself to “Third World” because “the mechanisms governing decolonization, like those governing colonization, are, aside from local differences, relatively uniform” (Albert Memmi, Decolonization and the Decolonized, trans. R. Bononno [Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008]), xxi. 27 Arendt, “Thoughts,” 221. 28 Arendt, Denktagebuch, 702. 29 Arendt, “Thoughts,” 208, emphasis in the original. See also Arendt, “Violence,” 189–90. 30 Hannah Arendt, “Intellectuals and Responsibility,” in Hannah Arendt Papers at the Library of Congress. Essays and Lectures (Series: Speeches and Writings File, 1923–1975, 1967, n.d.), Image 1. 31 Arendt, “Truth and Politics,” in Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin, 2006), 223–59, 255. 32 Ibid. 33 Arendt, “Intellectuals and Responsibility,” Image 2. 34 Ibid., Image 1. It is worth noting that while truth-telling—the job of academics and intellectuals—is different from political judgment—something that all

EDUCATION

 575

citizens are capable of exercising—both activities are nullified by ideological or formulaic thinking. Scholarship is destroyed by it because ideology is interested only in facts that perform a political service; it is not interested in truth itself. Ideology is also inimical to “representative thinking,” the ability, evoked by Kant, to “think in the place of everyone else” and thus to “enlarge” one’s mind and imagination (Arendt, “Crisis in Culture,” in Between Past and Future [New York: Penguin Books, 2006], 237). Such comprehensiveness requires impartiality, a commitment that is not the same as objectivity; for whereas “impartiality rests on our ability to see the world from different points of view that are themselves partial in the double sense of being incomplete and self-serving, objectivity presumes we could stand outside the world as if we were not part of it” (Peter Euben, “Hannah Arendt on Politicizing the University and Other Clichés,” in Hannah Arendt and Education, ed. M. Gordon [Boulder CO: Westview Press, 2001]), 175–99, 193. 35 Arendt, Denktagebuch, 703. 36 Arendt, “From Machiavelli to Marx,” in Hannah Arendt Papers at the Library of Congress: Essays and Lectures (Series: Speeches and Writings File, 1923– 1975, 1965, n.d.), Image 2.

60 Expropriation: The Loss of Land and Place in the World James Barry, Jr.

Expropriation, or loss of place in the world, is one of the central themes of Arendt’s work from The Origins of Totalitarianism to the end of her life. In fact, an even earlier text, the 1943 essay “We Refugees,” represents a personal anthem to the transformation through which Arendt’s own life is forever altered by her loss of place in her mother nation. The question of expropriation that begins as a reflection on her own status as a refugee serves as a basic pivot for most, if not all, of her texts for the next three decades. Whether she is discussing the dislocation of the stateless, the problem of freedom in modern mass society, or the dangers of ideological thinking, the question of expropriation lurks as a fundamental concern. This is not to say that Arendt’s preoccupation with expropriation is always focused on the same issue. In some cases, she addresses it as an historical event, focusing on the rise of a certain socioeconomic body, while in others she takes up expropriation as a political problem. However, in all these different approaches, Arendt is concerned, in one way or another, with the problem of expropriation as the loss of place in the world. Arendt’s most explicit account of expropriation is found in the second and sixth chapters of The Human Condition. In section eight, “The Private Realm: Property,” she describes the original modern expropriative event in terms of the displacement of the peasants or common people from what had been traditionally common land following the Reformation:

EXPROPRIATION

 577

For the enormous and still proceeding accumulation of wealth in modern society, which was started by expropriation—the expropriation of the peasant classes which in turn was the almost accidental consequence of the expropriation of Church and monastic property after the Reformation—has never shown much consideration for private property but has sacrificed it whenever it came into conflict with the accumulation of wealth.1 A full consideration of this extraordinarily dense sentence tells us much about Arendt’s reading of the dramatic changes that define the modern age. Arendt grounds the rise of the wealth-centered society, a society dedicated to the conversion of land into more mobile forms of wealth, in this rich and challenging story of modern expropriation. Expropriation is the event that sets this new society in motion. All the terms and principles that we commonly associate with the modern age, for example, private property, capitalism, and the rise of the merchant class, derive much of their specific meaning from the triggering event of the Reformation and the corresponding dislocation of large numbers of people from the lands on which they had traditionally resided. Arendt connects the liberation of land as a new form of wealth to the liberation of these people from their long-term locality. Arendt returns to the question of expropriation in even greater detail at the beginning of the last chapter of The Human Condition. Here again she refers to the Reformation, now defining it as one of the three events that open up the modern age. The characterization of expropriation is essentially the same, but Arendt unpacks the far-reaching significance of this event in much greater detail: Expropriation, the deprivation for certain groups of their place in the world and their naked exposure to the exigencies of life, created both the original accumulation of wealth and the possibility of transforming this wealth into capital through labor. These together constituted the conditions for the rise of a capitalist economy. That this development, started by expropriation and fed upon it, would result in an enormous increase in human productivity was manifest from the beginning, centuries before the industrial revolution.2 Again, Arendt links expropriation to the modern project of wealth accumulation, but now she explicitly connects it to the rise of modern capitalist economy as well. The fact that she prefaces this linkage with her most elaborate definition of expropriation, namely, the loss of place in the world and exposure to the winds of mere life, makes this passage all the more compelling. It is no accident that this extensive account of expropriation occurs in a section entitled “World Alienation,” for Arendt explicitly identifies the modern expropriation of the landless poor as the event that initiates world alienation. She draws a line of heritage between

578

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

nineteenth-century industrialization and the expropriative events triggered by the Reformation. Arendt sums up the connection in comments she makes some fifteen years after the publication of The Human Condition: “The whole modern production process is actually a process of gradual expropriation.”3 The rise of industrial labor represents a new chapter in the story of expropriation and world alienation. It is, of course, no accident that Marx figures centrally in this discussion, for Arendt’s exploration of expropriation owes a significant debt to Marx’s critique of capitalist industrial society and the sort of individual that inhabits this society. Indeed, one had only to read the opening paragraphs of Chapter 27 of the first volume of Capital to see the depth of connection between Arendt and Marx on the subject of expropriation. However, Arendt will ultimately argue that Marx focused on the problem of self-alienation when the real problem is world alienation: “World alienation, and not selfalienation as Marx thought, has been the hallmark of the modern age.”4 In short, it is not the loss of self that defines the modern age but the loss of world that is sparked by expropriation. If anything, Arendt argues, the world alienation launched by the event of expropriation will produce a self that is stronger and more real than ever. The problem is, where exactly does this self reside, or more properly put, where does this self belong? Even more accurately, if we are to follow Arendt’s aforementioned definition as carefully as possible, where does the group to which this self belongs belong? What we find in this question of the price and effect of expropriation, namely, the loss of the very possibility of belonging to a place as a group or community, is that it serves as a basic link between the end of The Human Condition and the beginning of Arendt’s first major work, The Origins of Totalitarianism. The first paragraph of the 1950 “Preface” ends with these lines: “Under the most diverse conditions and disparate circumstances, we watch the development of the same phenomena—homelessness on an unprecedented scale, rootlessness to an unprecedented depth.”5 With this double theme of loss of home and loss of a specific place in the world in which this home is grounded Arendt explicitly marks her first major project as a study of the perplexity of expropriation as a fundamental political question. One can trace this theme of loss of place in the world throughout the text, but her account of the loss of rights in the last chapter of the Imperialism section, “The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man” offers a sustained reflection on the consequences of expropriation.6 The problem of rightlessness dominates the last section of this chapter, “The Perplexities of the Rights of Man,” and yet the language Arendt uses there shows the direct link to her account of expropriation in the last chapter of The Human Condition. The first loss she associates with rightlessness is the loss of home, “the loss of the entire social texture into which they were born and in which they established for themselves a distinct place in the world.”7 As Arendt points out, the danger the refugee faces is that this loss of place will become permanent, “that they no longer belong to any

EXPROPRIATION

 579

community whatsoever.”8 Clearly, Arendt is focused on the relationship between the problems of the loss of place as home and political loss of place as loss of community. Without this double right to place all other rights are compromised, because the capacity of the individual, the family, and the group to act in the world is for Arendt grounded in belonging to a place by having a concrete place in the world of one’s own. However, the connection with her explicit definition of expropriation in the last chapter of The Human Condition goes further than this. The second half of the definition of expropriation she offers there refers to the “naked exposure to the exigencies of life.” In her account of rightlessness in “The Perplexities of the Rights of Man,” Arendt refers repeatedly to the problem of the “abstract nakedness of being human and nothing but human.”9 The use of the term “naked” refers to the stripping away of the protections afforded by belonging to a place and to a community, both of which are related to Arendt’s understanding of identity. The difference between her account in the Totalitarianism book and The Human Condition is that in the earlier text, she is concerned with refugees (and camp inmates) of the earlyto mid-twentieth century, while in the latter text she offers a much wider historical account (i.e., from the Reformation to the Industrial Revolution and beyond). Thus, it is her meditation on the plight of refugees and camp inmates who experience the dangers posed by the “abstract nakedness of being human and nothing but human” that sets the stage for her more fullscale account of the dangers of expropriation in The Human Condition and subsequent projects.10 The third term of loss that Arendt refers to on the first page of the 1950 “Preface” to the Totalitarianism book, powerlessness, reveals what is at stake in this double problem of a loss of place and naked exposure to the necessities of life. Stripped of the protections inherent in having a home and belonging to a political community, the refugee finds herself bereft of all but the most basic capacities to respond to the demands of life. The protection of herself and her family is no longer a joint project, but depends solely on her innate capacities. Power, Arendt tells us, is always a collective endeavor, and the refugee is by definition without a viable community. Thus, the dislocation inherent in the refugee’s condition cuts her off from all capacities beyond her own strength. The fact that such a condition is replicated thousands of times in the provisional space of a refugee camp does not change the underlying experience of powerlessness; in fact, the replication only further confirms and aggravates this condition. However, it is not in the name of the plight of the refugee or the camp inmate that Arendt summons the specters of homelessness, rootlessness, and powerlessness in the 1950 preface to her Totalitarianism book. Her comments operate on a more contemporary plane. She is concerned with the new political reality in which we are all caught, one which seeks to organize the masses who must live in the world born out of the events of the first two World Wars, as well as the imperialist and industrial events

580

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

that preceded them. Her concerns are directly bound to her efforts not to understand the totalitarian event but rather to understand how the world that existed prior to totalitarianism continues to shape the world after totalitarianism has come and perhaps gone. Thus, it is not life under totalitarianism but life after totalitarianism that concerns her most. In this way, the totalitarian event can be read as a terrible revelation, one that shows us that in many ways and many forms the loss of place in the world is a legacy much older than totalitarianism itself. The direct bridge to her recurrent discussion of expropriation in The Human Condition is built on this concern with how we can live in a world that no longer seems to make a place for all those who dwell on the earth. Modern mass society represents a global phenomenon of expropriation, one that was already underway in the early industrial period but has reached its fuller implications only in the wake of the totalitarian event. It is as if the basic problems of the refugee have become the problem, albeit in a much less drastic form, of billions of people.11 In a text written just after the publication of The Human Condition, Arendt still seems to have the fruits of expropriation clearly in mind: “The fact that contemporary politics is concerned with the naked existence of us all is itself the clearest sign of the disastrous state in which the world finds itself—a disaster that, along with all the rest, threatens to rid the world of politics.”12 To borrow from the last lines of Arendt’s “We Refugees,” and thinking in terms of all the problems Arendt connects with the expropriative events and forces that define the modern world (e.g., loss of community, political impotence, social loneliness, industrialization, etc.), one might argue that those groups who have most violently lost their own place in the world have become the vanguard of all people. In the age of expanding expropriation, would such a loss of place make the refugee’s plight a warning to us all? Given the grave and essential dangers posed by expropriation, perhaps it is not surprising that Arendt actually offers a solution to this loss of place in the world. Arendt rarely made such suggestions to any of the problems that plague contemporary political life, but in the case of the problem of expropriation, she makes an exception. Her solution is offered in very general terms, but it is consistent with the essence of the problem: “To make a decent amount of property available to every human being—not to expropriate but to spread property—then you will have some possibilities for freedom even under the rather inhuman conditions of modern production.”13 The fact that Arendt ventures to offer a solution says much about the core issue that expropriation represents. Although her solution to the problem of expropriation may seem an obvious proposal (and offered in offhand comments at a conference), the fact remains that she offers a direct and concrete solution. “Propriation” is the appropriate response to expropriation; the loss of peoples’ places in the world can only be remedied by a recovery of their places in the world. With this recovery of place, political freedom is

EXPROPRIATION

 581

given new possibilities. Only in those places where people belong together can the power to act consistently appear. Of course, the implications of this recovery of place are vast. It would require a radical overhaul of the political and social structures in which we live—structures that Arendt argues have been greatly compromised by various forms of expropriation.14 The nation-state that once served to guarantee the right of place for its citizens no longer proves viable in this regard. Arendt returns again and again to the problem of the decline of the nation-state as an instrument for the protection from the loss of place and other rights. She leaves us with a problem which only we can solve: the problem of creating a “new political principle . . . whose validity this time must comprehend the whole of humanity while its power must remain strictly limited, rooted in and controlled by newly defined territorial entities.”15 The forces of expropriation that are our complicated and long-term modern inheritance can only be held at bay by the creation of effective structures that ensure the right to place and right to belong in a conscious and ongoing manner. In all of its forms, the modern story of expropriation has never been a predestined fate but rather a series of events activated by worldly human intent. As Arendt might say, we must begin by acknowledging this long saga of expropriation as an undeniable fact, but a fact that can serve as a launching point from which we can create a new political community, a new place to belong together in the world.

Notes 1 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 66–67. 2 Ibid., 254–55. 3 Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the Public World, ed. Melvyn A. Hill (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979), 335. 4 Arendt, The Human Condition, 254. 5 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Schocken, 2004), xxv. 6 Of course, the boldest examples of expropriation in The Origins of Totalitarianism relate to the expulsions of the millions of people sent to the Nazi concentration and death camps. One could argue that the Nazi event is the purest expression of worldlessness. Perhaps it is the very purity of this expropriation, that is, the total loss of place in the world, which leads her to describe the totalitarian event as incomprehensible and unprecedented. 7 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 372. 8 Ibid., 375. 9 Ibid., 377. It is worth noting that Arendt credits this idea of the dangerous quality of being stripped of one’s protections to Edmund Burke. See Burke’s Reflections on the French Revolution in which he describes the legal

582

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

protections the state provides to clothe the “defects of our naked, shivering nature.” 10 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 380. Note that Arendt is working backward from more or less contemporary forms of expropriation to those somewhat more muted forms of expropriation she finds in earlier phases of the modern age. It is the extreme quality of loss of place in the world in the twentieth century that seems to have alerted her to expropriation as a longer term historical legacy. 11 See the last lines of Chapter 12 of the Totalitarianism book where Arendt warns of the temptation of using totalitarian techniques to deal with problems which are intimately bound up with expropriation, namely overpopulation and economic superfluity. 12 Arendt, The Promise of Politics (New York: Schocken, 2005), 145. 13 Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the Public World, 320. 14 Here again Arendt seems to draw on Marx. However, where Marx argues for the elimination of private property, Arendt argues that it is only by each individual having a private place in the world of their own that each person can belong to a common public world. 15 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, xxvii.

61 Arendt and Feminism Julian Honkasalo

Hannah Arendt did not theorize gender as a political question. None of her major works deal with women’s liberation, women’s rights, feminism, or with gendered aspects of power. In her public life, she neither participated nor spoke up in favor of any feminist group. In fact, the single published text where Arendt explicitly reflects on the women’s movement of her time is a brief review of Alice Rühle-Gerstel’s 1932 book Das Frauenproblem in der Gegenwart.1 Although Arendt found the book “instructive” and “stimulating,” she did not see a women’s political party or a women’s movement as the solution to women’s economic, social, and political oppression. Instead, she proposed that women should unite with movements of other oppressed groups, such as the workers’ movement, in their plight for the realization of equal political rights.2 Despite the absence of a theorization of gender in Arendt’s philosophy, and despite her reluctance to support any of the numerous women’s rights groups of her time, Arendt’s voluminous work has generated an entire philosophical and political tradition of feminist responses. Ranging from Adrienne Rich’s famous lamentation that Arendt’s The Human Condition exemplifies the “tragedy of a female mind nourished on male ideology” to Julia Kristeva’s characterization of Arendt as a “female genius” to Mario Feit’s claim that “The Human Condition offers a thorough critique of heteronormativity,” for four decades, scholars have debated and further developed Arendt’s thinking for feminist purposes. Arendt’s silence on gender constitutes a riddle that continues to perplex both her most passionate critics and her most enthusiastic followers. Although Arendt scholarship has undergone a renaissance during the past two decades, there have been only a few attempts to interpret, contextualize, and arrange feminist Arendt receptions. Mary G. Dietz,

584

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

Bonnie Honig, Elizabeth Young-Bruehl, and Kimberly Maslin are among the few contributors to this field of inquiry.3 Although they all discuss only the Anglophone feminist receptions and offer a debriefed and limited perspective to the complexity and polyphony within feminist debates over Arendt, they are the most widely read and frequently cited texts on the relationship between Arendt and feminism.4 In Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (1982), by far still the most extensive biography of Arendt to date, Elizabeth Young-Bruehl illuminates Arendt’s personal and political motivations for her distancing from feminist politics. Understanding Arendt’s reluctance toward identity politics as derivative from her parting with the Zionist movement, Young-Bruehl presents Arendt as a thinker who resisted all types of ideologies and mass movements, including the American women’s liberation movement.5 In “Hannah Arendt among Feminists” (1996), Young-Bruehl moves away from biography and presents a twofold historical categorization of feminist responses to Arendt. According to Young-Bruehl, during the first phase, which lasted from roughly 1975 until the late 1980s, “liberationist,” “cultural,” and “gynocentric” feminist theorists targeted and rejected Arendt’s distinctions between the “public” and the “private” as well as the “social” and the “political” in multiple ways. Then, a second generation of feminist interpretations of Arendt emerged in the mid-1980s. This “younger generation” problematized the previous generation’s interpretative framework, which rested on a strict binary conception of gender.6 In her essays, such as “Hannah Arendt and Feminist Politics” (1991), “Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt” (1995), “The Woman Question in Arendt” (2002), and “The Arendt Question in Feminism” (2002), Mary G. Dietz categorizes feminist responses to Arendt by presenting a typology of various types of feminisms, such as “radical-feminism,” “differencefeminism,” and “diversity-feminism.” Dietz contextualizes the emergence of these types of feminist stances on Arendt by appeal to the history of the women’s movement and feminist theorizing. Dietz’s approach is reiterated by Kimberly Maslin (2013).7 Taken together, Dietz, Honig, Young-Bruehl, and Maslin present the history of feminist Arendt receptions as taking place in two distinct historical phases and as occurring exclusively within the Anglophone academic context. The first phase includes second-wave readings from the 1970s and the 1980s. These readings are presented as being characterized by an interest to examine what Arendt had to contribute to the women’s movement. Second, after the 1980s and the early 1990s, a new generation of readers shifted the focus of inquiry and asked how might feminist theorizing look like through an Arendtian conceptual framework and could feminist theorists learn something from Arendt. In Bonnie Honig’s 1995 editorial introduction to the anthology Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt, these two phases are characterized as answering one of the two problems: the “Woman Question in Arendt” and the “Arendt Question in Feminism.”

ARENDT AND FEMINISM

 585

Yet as over twenty years have passed since the publication of Honig’s anthology, feminist theorizing has grown and evolved in multiple new directions. Greater nuance and deeper theoretical reflection on the rich, polyphonic feminist debates over Arendt can be given by posing the question concerning Arendt and feminism somewhat differently. I argue that the most important question that all feminist interpretations, regardless of their historical context, geographical location, or theoretical commitments target is this: How should Arendt’s complete silence on gender and feminist issues be understood?8 By the same token, how and for what purposes have feminist interpreters of Arendt singled out concepts and topics for scrutiny and debate in their efforts to understand the absence of a theory of gender in Arendt’s oeuvre? Why has Hannah Arendt been so widely and passionately read by feminist theorists, despite the fact that she did not engage in this field of inquiry at all? Through these questions, the rich and internally polyphonic feminist scholarship on Arendt can be understood by examining how each theorist interprets the absence of a theory of gender in Arendt’s philosophy and the conceptual clusters the interpreters with which they operate. Three distinguishable feminist positions emerge from this way of framing feminist interpretations on Arendt’s silence on gender. First, Anglophone, early second-wave feminist responses to Arendt generally approach her work through a “sisterhood framework.” For scholars such as Adrienne Rich (1979), Mary O’ Brien (1981), Hanna Pitkin (1981), and Wendy Brown (1988), Arendt’s silence on gender signifies a disappointing, elitist arrogance, even a hostility, toward the women’s movement and feminist politics of the time.9 The sisterhood-readings argue that despite the fact that Arendt was a woman in a male-dominated occupation, she did not express interest or solidarity toward the women’s movements of her time. Worse, through her rigid conceptual distinctions, such as “the public vs. the private,” “the political vs. the social,” and “action vs. labor,” early second-wave interpreters conclude that Arendt succumbed to a male bias in her thinking. Framing “the human” in The Human Condition as a universal category, Arendt, much like male thinkers throughout the Western tradition, failed to see this category as an abstraction that excludes women’s perspectives. Furthermore, in their analyses, early second-wave readers conceive Arendt herself as a masculine woman and an anti-feminist. The readings that frame Arendt as a masculine thinker draw primarily from the second chapter of The Human Condition, which is titled “The Public and the Private Realm.” Within the interpretative and methodological sisterhood framework, Arendt’s distinction between the public and the private appears to be neglecting the fundamental demand that women be freed from traditional, stereotypical roles and occupations assigned to them by the male, white, heterosexist, supremacist patriarchal order. Also, contrary to the emancipatory goal of early second-wave feminist consciousness-raising, Arendt’s demarcations appear in this framework to exclude the personal from the political.

586

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

A different way of appropriating Arendt emerges in the context of the Continental tradition of feminist theorizing. According to these scholars, such as Adriana Cavarero and Julia Kristeva most notably, the theoretical implications of Arendt’s silence on gender should not be exaggerated. Instead, both Cavarero and Kristeva perceive Arendt’s contribution to feminist theorizing as evident in her work because her texts derive from a particularly feminine position. In other words, since Arendt is a woman, her writing inevitably reflects this experience, and the interpreter’s task is to elaborate on the feminine, textual style.10 Major French and Italian receptions within the Continental, phenomenological, and psychoanalytic feminist traditions focus on vocabulary in Arendt’s texts that is taken to reflect feminine experiences, such as “natality,” “birth,” and “life.” The notion of “natality,” in particular, is seen as Arendt’s most important and revolutionary contribution to the feminist theorizing of sexual difference. In French and Italian readings, the fifth chapter of The Human Condition, which deals with action, natality, and new beginnings, functions as the background for concluding that Arendt is a feminine writer and, even more importantly, a female genius. For both Cavarero and Kristeva, there is an urgent ethical need to rethink the Western tradition in order to articulate a feminine language that appropriates the maternal Other. Whereas Cavarero’s ethical task consists in articulating a maternal ontology through Arendt and Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva carries out this ethical project by undoing the totalitarian kernels of Western rationality with Arendt. Hence, for Kristeva, feminist theorizing cannot be carried out in isolation from a serious reflection and critique of totalitarian strands of thought. Despite the seeming similarities in their projects, as well as in their responses to Arendt’s silence on gender, Cavarero and Kristeva come to very different conclusions regarding the meaning of Arendt’s notion of natality. Whereas Cavarero’s project is normative and seeks to establish natality as the concept through which the tradition of Western philosophy can be reframed into a feminine and maternal path of thinking and speaking, Kristeva’s psychoanalytical framework establishes natality as an inherently violent concept. For Kristeva, “abjection” and “matricide” are needed to complement Arendt’s theory of natality if we want to correctly understand the logic of totalitarianism as an inherently masculinist, gendered form of violence. In contrast to these two opposing ways of appropriating Arendt, a third feminist perspective on Arendt’s silence concerning gender builds on postmodern theorizing. Despite the fact that Arendt did not say much about women’s issues or gender inequality in her written work, these theorists nevertheless view her work as highly valuable for feminist theorizing because Arendt is claimed to anticipate major questions and conceptualizations within postmodern feminist theorizing and emerging queer thought. Bonnie Honig, Mary G. Dietz, Linda Zerilli, and Amy Allen, most notably, focus on Arendt’s formulations such as the disclosure of the agent in speech and action, “unique distinctness,” “spontaneity,” “indeterminacy,” “freedom,” and “solidarity”

ARENDT AND FEMINISM

 587

in order to critique identity politics through Arendt.11 This reading strategy operates also in texts by feminist theorists who defend Arendt’s perceived postmodern leaning by examining “Jewishness” and “gender” as analogous, culturally constructed identity categories in Arendt’s texts.12 By the 1990s, feminist interpreters in Anglophone academia had begun to explore French, poststructuralist readings of Arendt. Aligning Arendt with Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, and Judith Butler, Honig was the first theorist to frame Arendt as an agonistic rebel and a theorist of performativity. Through Honig’s Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (1993), Arendt became widely recognized as an agonistic thinker who highlights pluralist perspectives, unique distinctness, and the performativity of speech and action as well as constituent power and contingent political foundations. This new paradigm was influenced by Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble and is visible in Honig’s editorial introduction to Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt (1995), which was the first essay anthology on Arendt’s complex relation to feminist theorizing. Rather than treat male and female or masculine and feminine as categories that organize uniformed and already gendered artifacts, new theorists of gender argue that the categories themselves help to produce and reinforce the very uniformities they claim to describe. These developments have prompted a reconsideration of Arendt that includes a critical reevaluation of earlier feminist judgments of her work. From feminist perspectives that interrogate, politicize, and historicize—rather than simply redeploy— categories like “woman,” “identity” or “experience” Arendt’s hostility to feminism and her critical stance towards identitarian and essentialist definitions of “woman” begin to look more like an advantage than a liability.13 In this historical context, Mary Dietz, Lisa Disch, Linda Zerilli, and Amy Allen among others claimed that feminist theorists from the 1970s and the 1980s, who had framed Arendt through a binary gender order, had missed the complex processes of meaning-formation, change of meaning, and even failure of meaning, that characterize all forms of discourse. For theorists such as Honig and Allen, non-foundationalism constitutes the leitmotif of Arendt’s political oeuvre. Both argue that even if Arendt was not a feminist and did not explicitly deal with questions such as the political significance of the body and gender in her writings, her persistent and noncompromising reflections on the importance of contingency, openness, and solidarity for democratic politics are crucial elements for feminist attempts to theorize the political. The efforts to formulate various directions for postmodern “Arendtian feminism” have also influenced and inspired a number of queer theorists for whom Arendt emerges as a protagonist and spokesperson for marginalized and persecuted groups, homosexual men in particular.14 The main textual

588

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

resources for postmodern and queer interpretations include the fifth chapter of The Human Condition, a number of Arendt’s essays on the Jewish “pariah” and Jewish politics, as well as The Origins of Totalitarianism. Since the late 1980s, gay- and queer-studies scholars have used Arendt as an ally for theorizing lesbian and gay rights as well as for understanding how the “closet” operates in the production of myths about sexuality, race, and gender.15 Gay studies and queer theoretical approaches have pointed out that in Arendt’s early Jewish writings as well as in The Origins of Totalitarianism, her ideal citizen and hero turns out to be the underdog, and this figure takes numerous different identities both in Arendt’s writings and in interpretations of her work, depending on the historical and political context of oppression. Queer interpretations, such as Morris B. Kaplan’s Sexual Justice, Democratic Citizenship and the Politics of Desire, open a path toward theorizing the meaning of Arendt’s silence on gender from a perspective that problematizes conventional and normative conceptions of not only gender and sexuality but also race. Didier Eribon contends that Arendt’s characterization of the racialization of homosexuals and Jews is strikingly close to that of Foucault. So much so that Foucault may have used The Origins as his influence in the first volume of The History of Sexuality.16 It does not come as a surprise that precisely queer interpretations of Arendt have embraced her ambiguity and ambivalence concerning the politics of gender. What is notable on the other hand is the absence of a systematic examination of gay- and queer-studies voices within scholarly, feminist interpretations of Arendt. Although Arendt is today widely credited as one of the most distinguished political thinkers of the twentieth century, this recognition was given to her only fairly recently. When scholars such as Margareth Canovan, Adrienne Rich, Richard J. Bernstein, Jürgen Habermas, Bhikhu Parekh, Sheldon Wolin, and George Kateb, for example, began to publish chapters and whole books on Arendt’s political theory in the 1970s and the 1980s, she was by no means regarded as an equal by male academics, and her status as a philosopher was disputed. This is partly because during her lifetime, a large community of mostly male Jewish intellectuals attacked and discredited Arendt after the 1963 publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem. The “Eichmann controversy” cast a shadow on Arendt’s credibility as a serious and rigorous scholar that lasted for decades. Thus, the dispute over Arendt’s status as a serious philosopher has been an ongoing issue.17 In addition to the “Eichmann controversy,” Arendt’s personal relationship and friendship with her former teacher, Martin Heidegger, has been a persistent source for sexist comments and critique.18 In 1983 Ann M. Lane commented on the reception of Arendt from a feminist perspective in the following way: The “tough” male critics of Arendt accuse her of political irrelevancy—a victim—of “revolutionary nostalgia,” living a “hopeless, helpless, vicarious life” and “grossly overrated.” For them, she is too soft, too

ARENDT AND FEMINISM

 589

“tender,” unable to live up to their rhetoric of political action and unable to distinguish fact and fantasy.19 Lane refers to texts by scholars such as Martin Jay, as well as to public literature reviews in media such as The New York Times and Harper magazine. In the tradition of feminist interpretations of Arendt, The Human Condition (1958) is by far the most widely read and frequently cited text. Published seven years after The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), the work outlines the philosophical groundwork for Arendt’s political theory, articulated more concretely in essay collections, such as Between Past and Future (1961 and 1968) and Crises of the Republic (1972). In the beginning of The Human Condition, Arendt says that her approach consists in a philosophical and historical analysis of the conditions that constitute and shape human existence. Clarifying her position as non-essentialist, Arendt writes that “the human condition is not the same as human nature, and the sum total of human activities and capabilities which correspond to the human condition does not constitute anything like human nature.”20 One aspect that the rich, complex, and multifaceted The Human Condition clearly does not contain is a reflection on gendered aspects of human existence. Unlike her contemporary, Simone de Beauvoir, who had theorized gender and sexuality through an existentialist framework in Le Deuxième Sexe (The Second Sex) almost ten years before the publication of The Human Condition, Arendt shows no interest in analyzing women’s condition as separate from that of men. Instead she writes, “‘What we are doing’ is indeed the central theme of this book. It deals only with the most elementary articulations of the human condition, with those activities that traditionally, as well as according to current opinion, are within the range of every human being.”21 In order to understand early feminist responses to Arendt’s works, it is important to highlight the specific historical context in which feminist scholars first discovered The Human Condition. By the time of Arendt’s death in 1975, the second wave of American feminist organizing was undergoing a rapid and explosive growth. The National Organization for Women and the Women’s Liberation movement had gained wide institutional and political victories through, for instance, Betty Friedan’s and the American women’s national strike in 1970, the running of African American Shirley Chisholm as a nominee for the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate (1972), the passing of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) in Congress (1972), the formation of the National Black Feminist Organization (1973), and the Supreme Court ruling in favor of the constitutional right to abortion in Roe v. Wade (1973). Not only did various women’s grassroots movements and feminist activist organizations achieve wide media attention, they had also reached the academic world. Texts by Friedan, Shulamith Firestone, Angela Y. Davis, Ti-Grace Atkinson, Kate Millett, Adrienne Rich, and others were read and circulated on university campuses. As a result of the nationwide, revolutionary student movement as well as feminist consciousness-raising

590

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

activism, San Diego State University and the State University of New York at Buffalo established the first Women’s Studies programs in 1970, and Feminist Studies, the first academic journal in Women’s Studies, began publishing in 1972.22 As Baxandall and Gordon recall about this time: The women’s liberation movement, as it was called in the sixties and seventies, was the largest social movement in the history of the United States—and probably the world. Its impact had been felt in every home, school and workplace, in every form of art, entertainment, sport, in all aspects of personal and public life in the United States.23 The question is, then, how could the women’s liberation movement escape Arendt’s attention? During the late 1960s and the early 1970s, Arendt was teaching at the New School for Social Research in Manhattan and was conducting research on authoritarian elements in American governance. She published several critical essays on the Nixon Administration, such as “Lying and Politics: Reflections on the Pentagon Papers” (1971) and “Washington’s ‘Problem-Solvers’: Where They Went Wrong” (1972). Although other texts from this time-period, such as “Reflections on Violence” (1970) and “Civil Disobedience” (1970), for instance, are sympathetic with the radical and worldwide student movement, Arendt remains curiously silent on the ongoing feminist revolutionizing of academia. During the height of the American women’s liberation movement, Arendt had shifted her focus on the vita contemplativa while working on thinking, willing, and judging for the trilogy The Life of the Mind. Nevertheless, Arendt’s works did catch the attention of feminist scholars of her time. In the historical and academic setting of early second-wave feminist organizing, attempts to contextualize Arendt as a serious scholar emphasized her notably dense commentary on ancient Greek thinkers in particular. Arendt’s wide knowledge in Greek and Roman texts was used by women scholars to legitimize her as a political philosopher comparable to male philosophers in the canon of Western thought. In this historical context, Arendt’s works were approached with similar excitement and expectations as the works of Simone de Beauvoir.24 As a woman, Arendt was a notable exception in her numerous achievements. She was the first woman to receive a full professorship at Princeton University, to give the highly respected Christian Gauss lectures, and the first woman ever awarded with prizes such as the Sonning Prize, Lessing Prize, and the Sigmund Freud Prize. She had written voluminously on historically remarkable women, such as Rahel Varnhagen, Rosa Luxemburg, and Karen Blixen. In addition, by being a woman and a Jew, Arendt stood out from the twentieth-century elite of predominately male political thinkers and academics. Arendt, as the outspoken and bravely confrontational thinker of revolution, political action, civil disobedience, and public freedom, seemed to speak right to the causes that evolved during the second wave of American, feminist political organizing.

ARENDT AND FEMINISM

 591

Conclusion By analyzing and contextualizing how various texts in feminist secondary literature constitute distinct responses to Arendt’s silence on gender, feminist responses can be summarized as the following: (a) Arendt was a rigorous female scholar, working in a male-dominated occupation, but she was an anti-feminist; (b) Arendt was reluctant toward theorizing feminist politics, but her writing as a whole is nevertheless an expression of femininity, and even of a female genius; and (c) Arendt remained silent on gender as a political question, but her writings on Jewish resistance for instance contain parallels to feminist critiques of identity politics. Hence, Arendt can be theorized as a precursor to postmodern feminist and queer theorizing. The three feminist responses identified here do not relate strictly to a chronological, historical, or even thematic order. Instead, versions of each response can be found throughout four decades of feminist secondary literature, and contrasting interpretative shifts appear parallel to each other. This implies that feminist theorists respond to Arendt’s silence on gender with a rich polyphony. Precisely because Arendt did not theorize gender as a political question and did not reflect on the women’s movements of her time, her theoretical conceptions and reflections on other topics, such as “action,” “power,” “violence,” “natality,” “unique distinctness,” “plurality,” “spontaneity,” “revolution,” “pariahdom,” and “freedom,” have been extensively explored by feminist theorists. Arendt’s silence on gender implies that her account on questions such as gender and sexuality must be constructed by drawing from her philosophy at large. Very often, feminist theorists focus on a particular concept, theme, or distinction in Arendt’s thinking, and argue for the importance of precisely this angle of entering Arendt’s works. The polyphony appears when theorists engage in critical debates and dialogue by rejecting or elaborating on each other’s interpretations. It indicates, on one hand, that Arendt’s account on gender and sexuality can only be grasped through multiple perspectives and, on the other hand, that this same holds for feminist interpretations themselves. There is no single, univocal feminist theory or feminism that can be applied to Arendt’s texts in order to answer the question of how and why she left questions related to gender largely untheorized. Instead, there are several feminisms and many feminist voices that relate to each other in differing ways.

Notes 1 A. Rühle-Gerstel, Das Frauenproblem in der Gegenwart: Eine psychologische Bilanz (Stuttgart: S. Hirzel Verlag, 1932). Arendt’s review was first published in the German journal (Die Gesellschaft 10 [1932]: 177–79), a journal of the Weimar socialists. The review was translated into English by Elizabeth YoungBruehl and published as “On the Emancipation of Women,” in Arendt’s Essays in Understanding 1930-1954 (New York: Shocken Books, 1994). In her review

592

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

Arendt acknowledges the achievements of the women’s liberation movement, such as “the right to vote” and the “right to run for office,” and laments the fact that “although today’s women have the same rights legally as men, they are not valued equally by society. Economically, their inequality is reflected in the fact that in many cases they work for considerably lower wages than men” (Hannah Arendt, Essays in Understanding, 66). Anticipating Betty Friedan, Arendt also expresses criticism toward women’s position in the marriage institution. 2 Arendt, Essays in Understanding, 67–68. 3 See Mary Dietz, “Hannah Arendt and Feminist Politics,” in Feminist Interpretations and Political Theory (London: Polity Press, 1991), 232–52; Dietz, “Feminist Receptions of Hannah Arendt,” in Feminist Receptions of Hannah Arendt, ed. Bonnie Honig (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1995), 17–50; Dietz, Turning Operations: Feminism, Arendt and Politics (New York: Routledge, 2002); Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt; For Love of the World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004, second edition); Kimberly Maslin, “The Gender-Neutral Feminism of Hannah Arendt,” Hypatia 28, no. 3 (2013): 417–693. For a systematic interpretation of feminist readings of Arendt, see Julian Honkasalo, Sisterhood, Natality, Queer: Reframing Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt. Doctoral dissertation, University of Helsinki, Helsinki: Unigrafia, 2016. https​://he​lda.h​elsin​ki.fi​/hand​le/10​138/1​59340​. 4 For a more thorough, philosophical, and historical examination of feminist responses to Arendt over the past four decades, see my “Arendt as an Ally for Queer Politics?,” Redescriptions: Political Thought, Conceptual History, Feminist Theory 17, no. 2 (2014): 180–200. 5 Young-Bruehl, For Love of the World, 97. 6 Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, “Hannah Arendt among Feminists,” in Hannah Arendt: Twenty Years Later, ed. L. May and J. Kohn (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1996), 307–25. 7 See Dietz and Maslin’s works cited above. 8 See Honkasalo, Sisterhood, Natality, Queer. 9 Adrienne Rich, “Conditions for Work: The Common World of Women,” in Lies, Secrets and Silence (New York: Norton, 1979); Mary O’Brien, The Politics of Reproduction (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul), 1981; H. F. Pitkin, “Justice: On Relating Private and Public,” Political Theory 9, no. 3 (1981): 327–52; Wendy Brown, Manhood and Politics: A Feminist Reading in Political Theory (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998). 10 See particularly Adriana Cavarero, In Spite of Plato: A Feminist Rewriting of Ancient Philosophy (London: Polity, 1995); first published as Nonostante Platone: figure femminili nella filosofia antica (Roma: Editioni Riuniti, 1990); and Julia Kristeva, Hannah Arendt, trans. R. Guberman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001). First published as Le génie féminin: la vie, la folie, les mots. Hannah Arendt, Melanie Klein, Colette (Paris: Fayard, 1992–2002). 11 See Bonnie Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993); Dietz, “Feminist Receptions of Hannah Arendt”; Linda Zerilli, “The Arendtian Body,” in Feminist Receptions of

ARENDT AND FEMINISM

 593

Hannah Arendt, 167–93; Zerilli, Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2005); and Amy Allen, The Power of Feminist Theory: Domination, Resistance, Solidarity (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999). 12 See particularly Jennifer Ring, The Political Consequences of Thinking: Gender and Judaism in the Work of Hannah Arendt (New York: SUNY Press, 1997); Bat-Ami Bar On, The Subject of Violence: Arendtian Exercises in Understanding (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002); M. B. Hull, The Hidden Philosophy of Hannah Arendt (London: Routledge, 2002); and Judith Butler, Parting Ways. Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). 13 Honig, Feminist Receptions, 2–3. 14 See Morris Kaplan, Sexual Justice, Democratic Citizenship and the Politics of Desire (London: Routledge, 1997); Larry Kramer, Reports from the Holocaust: The Making of an AIDS Activist (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982); Didier Eribon, Insult and the Making of the Gay Self, trans. M. Lucey (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), first published as Réflexions sur la question gay (Paris: Fayard, 1999); Michael Warner, The Trouble With Normal. Sex, Politics and the Ethics of Queer Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); Mario Feit, Democratic Anxieties: Same-Sex Marriage, Death and Citizenship (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011); Honkasalo, “Arendt as an Ally for Queer Politics?” 15 One of the first theorists on Arendt’s relevance for gay rights is Larry Kramer, the founder of ACT UP, who in his highly controversial and deliberately confrontational Reports from the Holocaust: The Story of an AIDS-activist (1989) accuses certain groups of gay men for selfish sexual hedonism and lack of responsibility during the early AIDS pandemic in the United States. Drawing from Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, Kramer compares gay community leaders—who collaborated with what Kramer takes to be the heterosexual mainstream society—to Jewish leaders who collaborated with the Nazis. Kramer defines the AIDS pandemic as a Holocaust. 16 For more on the parallels between Arendt and Foucault’s notions of race, see Julian Honkasalo, Superfluous Lives–An Arendtian Critique of Biopolitics. Doctoral dissertation, The New School for Social Research, 2018. 17 The doubt over Arendt’s intellectual credibility has been a persistent element of secondary scholarship and the public reception of Arendt. As Seyla Benhabib points out, Isaiah Berlin for instance has publicly claimed that he does “not greatly respect the lady’s ideas . . . she produces no arguments, no evidence of serious philosophical or historical thought. It’s all a stream of metaphysical associations” (R. Jahanbegloo, Conversations With Isaiah Berlin [New York: Schribner Maxmillan International, 1992], 82–83). In his Introduction to Phenomenology, Dermot Moran sympathizes with Berlin and claims that “Arendt’s practice of phenomenology is original and idiosyncratic; she exhibited no particular interest in the phenomenological method and contributed nothing to the theory of phenomenology” (Dermot Moran, Introduction to Phenomenology [London: Routledge, 2000], 289). “In large measure, her overall framework is heavily dependent on the

594

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

philosophies of Heidegger and Jaspers and their concerns for human existence and being-in-the-world” (ibid., 318). Moran further states that: “Benhabib, I believe, incorrectly characterizes [Isaiah] Berlin’s view of Arendt as ‘gender stereotyping’” (ibid., 508, n. 56). 18 On the Eichmann controversy, see Ring, The Political Consequences of Thinking; Dana Villa, Public Freedom (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 304; and D. Maier-Katkin, “How Hannah Arendt Was Labeled an ‘Enemy of Israel,’” Tikkun, November 1, 2010. http:​//www​.tikk​un.or​g/nex​ tgen/​how-h​annah​-aren​dt-wa​s-lab​eled-​an-en​emy-o​f-isr​ael-e​mail-​artic​le-to​-a-fr​ iend (accessed July 15, 2017). On the Heidegger controversy, see Jacques Taminiaux, The Thracian Maid and the Professional Thinker: Arendt and Heidegger, ed. and trans. M. Gendre (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1997), first published as La fille de Thrace et le penseur professionel: Arendt et Heidegger (Paris: Payot, 1997); Seyla Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt, 2nd ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003); and Villa, Public Freedom. 19 Ann Lane, “The Feminism of Hannah Arendt,” Democracy 3, no. 3 (1983): 107–17. 20 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 9–10. 21 Ibid., 5, my emphasis. Secondary and biographical literature rarely mention the fact that Arendt was once asked to write a review of de Beuvoir’s The Second Sex. However, in a letter to William Cole, dated December 16, 1952, Arendt resigned from submitting the book review for publication. Arendt wrote, “The objective problem of the book is to treat sex as a social phenomenon. The problem itself is of course entirely legitimate. But it so happens that [in the book] sex as proactive force is the fundament of society while, in another sense, it always has been an anti-social power. The two saving graces in a discussion of sex as a social phenomenon would be a sense of humour and reverential awe for love. Discussion which move beyond love and humor have a tendency to become plain ridiculous. . . . I have the impression that this book does not always succeed in avoiding this danger and that its author is curiously unaware of it” (quoted in U. Ludz, “Hannah Arendt: Femini Generis,” trans. G. Williams, in Hannah Arendt—Critical Assessments, Volume III: The Human Condition [London and New York: Routledge, 2006], 348–57; 350–51). 22 Ginette Castro, American Feminism: A Contemporary History, trans. E. Loverde-Bagwell (New York: New York University Press, 1990), first published as Radioscopie du féminisme américain (Paris: Presses de la Fondation nationale des sciences politiques, 1984); N. F. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987). 23 R. Baxandall and L. Gordon, “Second-Wave Soundings,” The Nation, July 3, 2000. Retrieved from: http:​//www​.then​ation​.com/​artic​le/se​cond-​wave-​sound​ ings.​ 24 Young-Bruehl, For the Love of the World, 310; Dietz, “Feminist Receptions of Hannah Arendt,” 17–20.

62 Labor: The Liberation and the Rise of the Life Society James Barry, Jr.

In The Human Condition, Arendt identifies three fundamental forms of human activity: labor, work, and action. Each of these forms of activity is related to one or more conditions of human life. Labor is the active human capacity to respond to the demands of life and the needs of the biological frame of existence each of us has been given. Work corresponds to the fact that we are born into an artificial human world—one built by the efforts of those who came before us, but which is augmented by each generation in one way or another. Action also depends on the existence of the human world, but as a place where we can be together directly through word and deed. This being together of action depends on our ability to speak and act in relation to one another and derives from the condition of human plurality, namely, the fact that no two people are ever exactly the same. Thus, work and action are responses to the ongoing existence of a world that I share with other people. Labor, on the other hand, represents an unavoidable and all-but-automatic response to the repetitious forces bound up in the necessities of life. Where worldliness and plurality, bound up with work and action, respectively, provide for a considerable latitude or diversity of response, the demands of life give labor an almost universal face. Each of us must engage in certain fundamental and recurrent cycles of behavior if our life and the lives of our dependents are to continue. These cyclical efforts to support our biological frame represent a direct reflection of the metabolic

596

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

demands of life that must be met regardless of whether they take place in a human world or not. Arendt connects these three basic forms of human activity to the distinction between the private and public realms. She uses the ancient Greek polis or city-state as a way of exploring the connection between the traditional distinction of the public and private and the three basic human activities of labor, work, and action. Arendt argues that labor is an inherently private concern because the purpose of labor is to support the lives of oneself and one’s family alone. The private realm, or home and related areas, is the space in which one labors in the name of one’s own self and family. This realm is defined by necessity, the need to labor to meet the needs of life. The public realm, in contrast, is defined by freedom, for outside the home the citizen is able to engage in speech and action that is not bound by the necessities of biological life. Thus, the public realm is directly tied to the capacity of action, but also to the ability to work, since the space in which we meet to talk and act must be built and maintained as a lasting place for us and those who will follow us. Arendt asserts that traditionally and up to the modern age, labor has taken place almost exclusively in the private realm. Whether in the ancient Greek city-state, Roman society, or medieval kingdom, those who labored were confined to the private life. Accordingly, those who labored were viewed, either nominally or officially, as slaves, because their activities were confined to meeting the needs of life. However, Arendt argues that the status and site of the laboring activity undergoes a fundamental shift in the modern age when “from now on labor as a human activity no longer belonged to the strictly private realm of life; it became a public political fact of the first order.”1 This claim regarding the historical migration of labor from the means by which each individual or family met the needs of life to labor as the chief public preoccupation of modern mass society appears as a red thread throughout The Human Condition. It is directly tied to many of Arendt’s most provocative claims, including her account of the rise of the social realm and the problem of world alienation because the rise of the laboring society represents for her a fundamental realignment of the conditions that had heretofore grounded human life and the world in which it dwells. This elevation of the activity of labor is necessarily accompanied by the subordination of action and work, and as a result, “we have become excellent in the laboring we perform in public,” but “our capacity for action and speech has lost much of its former quality.”2 In short, the gains we have made as a laboring society have come at the expense of our ability to act and speak politically, both individually and collectively. The claim that the nature of labor has undergone a fundamental mutation in the modern age has much to do with Arendt’s prolonged reading of Karl Marx in the early 1950s. In fact, while her work on the question of labor in The Human Condition begins with an acknowledgment of her special debt to Marx’s approach, Arendt ultimately departs from Marx in her assessment

LABOR

 597

of the consequences of the rise of the new laboring society. This divergence begins with her distinction between labor and work—a distinction she argues Marx does not embrace because he was “overwhelmed as it were by the unprecedented actual productivity of Western mankind.”3 The unparalleled productivity of the Industrial Revolution, Arendt argues, gives Marx his special understanding of labor as the “supreme world-building capacity” but also limits his ability to see the fundamental contradiction inherent in identifying labor in this fashion because “labor actually is the most natural and least worldly” of human activities.4 Thus, where Marx argues that productivity is a basic human quality that makes world building possible, Arendt worries that Marx has pursued a materialist reading of labor that overlooks the limits of labor in this regard. Arendt agrees with Marx that the industrial rise of labor represents a key moment in human history, but she does not agree with him on the meaning of this event. For Marx, industrial labor serves as a historical engine that will ultimately redefine what it means to be human by making a drastic revision of public and private life. For Arendt, the rise of the laboring society represents a fundamental perplexity, one which involves “changes of the world, and not changes in the basic conditions of human life on earth.”5 Thus, the rise of the laboring society has much to do with Arendt’s concern with what she calls “world alienation.” To emphasize the specific and confining qualities of the human as a laboring figure, Arendt uses the term animal laborans repeatedly in the “Labor” chapter of The Human Condition. Her use of this Latin term derives from her reading of both Aristotle and Marx. For Aristotle, to be subject totally to the laws of necessity involved in labor is to be trapped in mere life and therefore not fully deserving of the term “human.” For Marx, on the other hand, to be human is to labor, both to gain the things necessary for life and to establish one’s existence as part of the human species-being.6 In Marx’s account, labor in both forms gives us our objective identity, both as individuals and as part of a larger social reality. According to Arendt, the public appearance of the figure of animal laborans in the modern age indicates a fundamental reversal in the modern understanding of what it means to be human. Now that part of us that is most animal, most bound by necessity (both inside and out), has been elevated to a position of prominence. The animal laborans is best suited to thrive in the new order of the modern world, a world that Arendt, following Marx, refers to as a society of laborers and consumers. The “Labor” chapter ends with an account of consumer society, the necessary corollary to the laboring society that Marx announced and embraced a century before. Arendt describes what it would mean to live in a purely consumer society in very dire terms, for “we would no longer live in a world at all but simply be driven by a process in whose ever-recurring cycles things appear and disappear . . . never to last long enough to surround the life process in their midst.”7 These are the same “ever-recurrent cycles” that define the necessity of labor because consumption is the other side of

598

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

labor. More than this, consumer society is the other side of the society of labor: both spring from the metabolic cycles that define biological life. The irony is that although this society built exclusively on the cycles of labor and consumption would seem a perfect habitat for the human as animal laborans, Arendt argues that this expansion of natural forces into the human world is a futile project. The very worldliness that the rise of animal laborans seems to shun is essential to human life and without it even the human as animal laborans could not survive. As Arendt states on the last page of the “Labor” chapter, “without being at home in the midst of things whose durability makes them fit for use and for erecting a world whose very permanence stands in direct contrast to life, this life would never be human.”8 In short, left to its own metabolic processes, animal laborans would lose itself as well as the human world that made its laboring and consuming activities meaningful. The final two sections of The Human Condition offer a short but dense account of the rise of the society that holds life as the highest good. Defined by an unparalleled expansion of labor, this society threatens to engulf and pervert virtually every traditional virtue and activity. These last two sections of the book are in some ways a concluding elaboration of what Arendt had already discussed much earlier, in what may be the most famous (or infamous) section of the book, “The Rise of the Social.” The social realm is defined in terms of a nation run as a single household that seeks to level and equalize all members by way of economic and behavioral norms. Even more essentially, “the social realm, where the life process has established its own public domain, has let loose the unnatural growth, so to speak, of the natural.”9 This famous phrase, “the unnatural growth of the natural” refers directly to the rise of labor as the highest public activity. Labor, once bound up in the private realm, that is, in the realm in which life’s necessities were traditionally met, has become the first principle of the life society. The natural and private needs of the individual and her family have now become the blueprint for the chief activities of society: labor is the new public norm and the realm of necessity has expanded into what had traditionally been the space of freedom, the public world. Indeed, freedom is the chief virtue threatened by the rise of the new society of life and labor. The life society involves an embrace of necessity, in both its biological and its social forms, and as such sees liberation rather than active freedom as its goal. For Arendt, the tension between the activities dedicated to necessity and those carved out by a free life never ends. As she puts it, “Man cannot be free if he does not know that he is subject to necessity, because his freedom is always won in his never wholly successful attempts to liberate himself from necessity.”10 Arendt’s concern with the question of the relationship between political freedom and the unavoidable role that necessity plays in human life is not confined to The Human Condition, but continues to serve as a basic concern in her work for the rest of her life. In On Revolution, written a few years later, she reflects on the ambiguous

LABOR

 599

emancipation of the industrial working class, who had been liberated from “their masters only to put them under a stronger taskmaster, their daily needs and wants, the force, in other words with which necessity drives compels men and which is more compelling than violence.”11 Ironically, the rise of the society of free labor does not mean that we are more free, but less so, for not only are we still obliged to meet the needs of ourselves and our kin but we also now conduct ourselves as if we do so as a free choice, a choice we make collectively with all the other members of the society of labors and consumers. This misunderstanding of freedom, namely, that the freedom to consume is the same as the freedom to act politically, is made possible by the urgency with which life is felt. However, the rise of labor as the chief activity of politics in the modern age still depends on a freedom that is not felt but shared with others. Or as Arendt puts it, we are granted a sort of second life, one not bound by necessity as much as by the shared aspirations of a community. In the society dedicated to labor, the goals of the second life have become united with the goals of our biological existence. In short, we have freed ourselves to labor, but in such a way, we are also freed from labor insofar as we are offered the chance to embrace a “sheer automatic functioning, as though individual life had actually been submerged in the overall life process of the species.”12 Thus, in a world where labor has become the main activity we pursue in public, the once-insoluble problem of labor as the necessary activity derived from our individual biological lives seems finally resolved in a curious new freedom. A community dedicated entirely to the processes of labor and consumption has finally emerged to liberate its members from the basic struggles required by being alive, though only by concealing the needs of individual life behind the pleasant but futile processes driven by a second realm of necessity, the needs of society itself.

Notes 1 Hannah Arendt, “Karl Marx and the Tradition of Western Political Thought,” Social Research 69, no. 2 (Summer 2002): 284. This long text is a fragment of a much larger body of research that Arendt pursued under the working title of “The Totalitarian Elements of Marxism.” 2 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago, 1998), 49. 3 Ibid., 87. In the pages just before this quotation Arendt argues that despite the fact that labor is viewed more and more as encompassing all forms of productive activity, one nonetheless finds different words for labor and work in various European languages. The increasing erosion of the distinction between labor and work in the languages and practices of the modern age is for her a clue that can help us to see the dramatic changes at play in the shape of world in the last 200 years.

600

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

4 Ibid., 101. In her 1954 “Understanding and Politics,” Arendt describes the Industrial Revolution as the “radical change in the world . . . certainly the greatest revolution in the shortest span of time mankind has ever witnessed; in a few decades it changed our whole globe more radically than all the three thousand years of recorded history before it.” Arendt, Essays in Understanding (New York: Schocken, 1994), 315–16. 5 Arendt, The Human Condition, 121. 6 Marx’s most direct comparison of human and animal life is found in the early text “Estranged Labor.” See 72–76 of The Marx-Engels Reader ed. Robert Tucker (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1978). Arendt seems to be directly responding to Marx’s account in this passage of “Estranged Labor” when she writes that “animal laborans is indeed only one, at best the highest, of the animal species which populate the earth” (The Human Condition, 84). In fact, one can read any number of Arendt’s claims about labor as a response, sometimes affirmatively and sometimes critically, to Marx’s writings. This includes his writings on freedom. See, for example, Capital, Vol. 3, Chapter 48, where Marx writes, “the realm of freedom actually begins only where labor which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases; thus in the very nature of things it lies beyond the sphere of actual material production.” Arendt’s views on the perplexities of freedom and necessity are clearly indebted to her careful reading of Marx. 7 Arendt, The Human Condition, 134. 8 Ibid., 135. 9 Ibid., 47. 10 Ibid., 121. 11 Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin, 2006), 53. 12 Ibid., 322.

63 Narrative Adriana Cavarero

Storytelling and Action Taken from The Human Condition, the following paragraph has the merit of illustrating in a few words the fundamental elements of Hannah Arendt’s original approach to the issue of narrative. That every individual life between birth and death can eventually be told as a story with beginning and end is the prepolitical and prehistorical condition of history, the great story without beginning and end. But the reason why each human life tells its story and why history ultimately becomes the storybook of mankind with many actors and speakers and yet without any tangible authors, is that both are the outcome of action.1 On the one hand, by calling on the difference between story and history, she binds them together in a crucial knot: each individual life can be told as a story and. the web of these biographical narratives results in history intended as the storybook of humankind. On the other hand, she claims that both story and history, and therefore the narrative substance they consist of, are the outcome of action. In order to understand Arendt’s conception of narrative, it is thus necessary to briefly focus on her idea of action. A central category in Arendt’s political thought, action reflects and reveals “the paradoxical plurality of unique beings” that characterizes the human condition. By interacting with others with words and deeds, “men show who they are, reveal actively their unique personal identity and thus make their appearance in the human world.”2 Through action, “we insert ourselves into the human world, and this insertion is like a second birth, in which we confirm and take upon ourselves the naked fact of our

602

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

original physical appearance.”3 Action is ontologically rooted in the human condition of natality, and it reactivates the two crucial characteristics framing the event of birth: uniqueness and beginning of the newborn. By acting among others, actors and spectators in turn, we actively reappear as unique beings and beginners, thereby performing a distinctive activity “from which no human being can refrain and still be human”: a life without action, Arendt insists, is literally dead to the world and “it has ceased to be a human life because it is no longer lived among men.”4 The emphasis on the link between action and the human is conspicuous. One must not forget that the category of uniqueness on which Arendt focuses in The Human Condition and elsewhere is a direct and confrontational response— in political, ontological, and ethical terms—to what she describes in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism as an unprecedented experiment to turn human plurality into a mass of superfluous beings “whose murder is as impersonal as the killing of a gnat.”5 The infernal laboratory of the extermination Lager was precisely aimed at the “killing of uniqueness,”6 she claims. Actually, the post-totalitarian perspective of Arendt’s political thought works as a premise to the way she reinterprets the main issues of Western tradition, narrative included. As far as story and history, in her view, are the outcome of action, they inherit and share the revelatory function of acting, that is, its power of displaying who the actor is, namely, his or her uniqueness related to the fact of human plurality. Significantly, this uniqueness does not correspond at all to the autonomous and self-consistent individual belonging to the modern tradition. The incarnated uniqueness Arendt speaks of is constitutively relational and totally exposed to others. Others are necessary in order for each human being to appear and reveal, express, and even exhibit his or her uniqueness by acting among them. “This disclosure of ‘who’ in contradistinction to ‘what’ somebody is—his qualities, gifts, talents, and shortcomings, which he may display or hide—is implicit” in action as interaction, Arendt argues. She crucially observes that, although “the unique and distinct identity of the agent” “is plainly visible” and disclosed to others in the actual event of its manifestation, it “retains a curious intangibility that confounds all effort toward unequivocal verbal expression.”7 In point of fact, “the moment we want to say who somebody is, our very vocabulary leads us astray into saying what he is,” with the result that “his specific uniqueness escapes us.”8 It is precisely here that the special function of narrative comes to the fore and corroborates its structural bond with the sphere of action and therefore, in Arendtian terms, of politics as the shared space opened up by interacting. Contrary to other discursive registers that focus on what somebody is, narrative provides verbal expression to the who disclosed by the agent by telling his or her life story. Although Socrates did not write a single line and left no work behind, Arendt pointedly notices, “we know much better and more intimately who he was, because we know his story, than we know who Aristotle was, about whose opinions we are so much better informed.”9

NARRATIVE

 603

The archetypical form of narrative as distinctive modality of discourse is biography, according to Arendt, and succeeds in two essential and concurrent tasks: on the one hand, it gives meaning to the various acts of self-disclosure of a unique life that “would otherwise remain an intolerable sequence of events,”10 and, on the other hand, it turns the unique and distinct identity that the agent, by acting among others, momentarily reveals, into a tangible—narratable, memorable, and lasting— life story. Arendt gives particular attention to the long-lasting effect of biographical narrative. Action is indispensable for the human to be human, but it is fragile, contingent, and ephemeral. The disclosure of “the living essence of the person as it shows itself in the flux of action”11 doesn’t last: it lasts as long as the actual event of its manifestation. Conversely, because of its being tangible and transmittable, the story that narrates this very person’s unique identity does last. It even survives the doer. Not by chance do we still know who Achilles or Odysseus were: Homer, the first storyteller and historian of the Greeks, according to Arendt, bears witness to the power of narrative that contrasts the frailty of action by turning its revelatory but ephemeral character into long-lasting and even immortal stories. “Who somebody is or was we can know only by knowing the story of which he is himself the hero—the biography, in other words,” Arendt notices, and she makes clear that, however, “the hero the story discloses needs no heroic qualities”: even in Homer the word “hero” “was no more than a name given to each free man who participated in the Trojan enterprise and about whom a story could be told.”12 The Homeric heroes are exemplary not because of their courageous behavior, but because they intentionally performed “great deeds”—memorable actions—worth of an immortal story, a story worth remembering and lasting among posterity. In fact, and in tune with the Greek view of human life’s ephemeral dimension, the immortality longed for by ancient heroes is totally immanent to the world and doesn’t transcend it: epic narrative belongs to a culture in which human beings are essentially concerned with fame in this world, a fame enduring among posterity, provided by the telling and retelling of stories that save them from oblivion. Tangible and transmittable stories immortalize in the human world the meaning of unique lives whose earthly sojourn is brief. They provide, so to say, a mundane and terrestrial form of redemption. In a world that exists before our appearance and lasts after our death, we are on stage for a short time. The transitory nature of existence or its awareness—which for the Homeric heroes resulted in a concept of action “highly individualistic, as we would say today”13—is a common concern of human beings. If this is true, the heroic disposition toward immortal fame, although linked to a distinct age of Western tradition, could thus be taken as the emphatic expression of a “narratable self” that applies to each of us as unique and transient beings in search of a story.14 This means, in strict Arendtian terms, that a narrator is necessary in order for our personal story to be told.

604

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

Stories Have No Author Everybody is the hero of his or her story, according to Arendt, and every life story has a hero, a protagonist. However, just like in the case of the Homeric heroes, it is not the hero that “makes” his story. Stories have no author— neither the protagonist nor the narrator: intentionally or unintentionally, they result from action and are what, by acting, we leave behind. To quote Arendt’s words, “the real story in which we are engaged as long as we live has no visible or invisible maker because it is not made,” and “the distinction between a real and a fictional story is precisely that the latter was ‘made up’ and the former not made at all.”15 Homer did not make up the stories of the heroes he recounted. He told the stories “produced” by their actions, specifically by their “great deeds” intentionally aimed at memorability. There is a substantially realistic vein in Arendt’s conception of narrative: stories are the direct outcome of action and they need storytellers to be told. The world is full of stories, she once said, that are just waiting to be told. This principle transcends the exemplary universe of ancient epic and strengthens the central clue of Arendt’s original thought: for both action and story, the others are necessary. This is why she thinks of life stories always in terms of biography and never in terms of autobiography. Nobody ever knows who he or she is, even less so while in the midst of acting. Intermittent and contingent, action discloses the actor’s unique identity not to himself or herself but only to others, the spectators. In order to know who I am, I always need others: whether spectators, to whom I actively, though occasionally, reveal my distinctive uniqueness through action, or the narrator, who, by telling my life story, gives shape to my personal identity through words and makes it tangible and long-lasting. The passage from the embodied uniqueness’ momentary disclosure within the flux of action and its tangible permanence in narrative form is crucial to Arendt. “The unchangeable identity of the person, though disclosing itself intangibly in act and speech, becomes tangible only in the story of the actor’s and speaker’s life,” she asserts, and, by paying perhaps an excessive tribute to the ancient Greeks and their concern with mortality, she argues that “the essence of who somebody is can come into being only when life departs, leaving behind nothing but a story”16 that is only after the hero’s death. This last sentence is noteworthy for several reasons. First, because it casts an insightful light on the story’s intriguing double link with two categories that play a different if not opposite role in Arendt’s speculation: natality and mortality. A new and unusual category within the history of philosophy, natality is featured by Arendt as the fundamental human condition from which action, and therefore stories and history as the outcome of action, originate. A central and notorious category within the Western philosophical tradition, mortality instead doesn’t serve at all the realm of action as Arendt intends it; actually, defined by her as “a second birth,” an active re-appearance

NARRATIVE

 605

in the human world, action contrasts precisely the disappearance from this world of which death consists. Yet as we read in the sentence quoted earlier, the event of death is deemed by Arendt necessary for the coming into being of the essence of the departed, by now definitely consigned to his or her story. Death, essence, and narrative, in her argument, have a special link. Arendt purposely makes clear that the essence of who somebody is corresponds to “the unchangeable identity of the person,” and it ought not be confounded with “the human nature in general (which does not exist) or the sum total of qualities and shortcomings in the individual.”17 The key word in her logical construction is “unchangeability”: like in the case of the Greek daimon, there is something unique and distinctive in our personal identity—in our who-ness—that does not change and, notwithstanding the diverse circumstances and the unpredictability of events, keeps revealing itself in the flux of action. Death provides this unchangeable identity with a definitive permanent status or, in other words, an eventual completeness and unity which results in a definitive story.

Achilles and Odysseus Interestingly enough, by continuing to call on the Homeric universe she strategically engages in order to test her concept of narrative, Arendt observes that Achilles and Odysseus enter this picture in meaningfully different ways. The exceptional case of a man “consciously aiming at being ‘essential,’ at leaving behind a story and an identity which will win ‘immortal fame,’” Achilles chooses a short life and a premature death because he knows that only he “who does not survive his supreme act remains the indisputable master of his identity.”18 In this sense, even if Achilles also remains dependent on the storyteller for his story to be recounted and saved from oblivion, he is the only hero “who delivers into the narrator’s hands the full significance of his deeds, so that it is as though he had not merely enacted the story of his life but at the same time also ‘made’ it.”19 Odysseus represents a different case, perhaps even more intriguing for delving into the Arendtian conception of narrative and trying to disentangle it from its bond with death. In her last work, The Life of the Mind, focusing on a famous episode of the Odyssey, Arendt reflects on the scene where Odysseus, during a dinner at the court of the Phaeacians, listens to a blind bard who recounts the war of Troy and tells Odysseus’s story. The hero weeps, Homer says. He had never wept before, Arendt notices, not while he was immersed in the actions narrated by the bard. Only now that Odysseus comes to hear his story and therefore know his identity as its protagonist, he feels a distinctive emotion and weeps. The unexpected discovery of who he is, received by Odysseus like a gift from the bard’s song crafting his identity in a tangible form, results for the hero in an emotional turmoil. His “tears of remembrance,”20 however, do not

606

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

manifest in the hero’s melancholia or sadness for the time gone but rather spring from an experience of narrative disclosure that, according to Arendt, is upsettingly unusual: “What the storyteller narrates must necessarily be hidden from the actor himself, at least as long as he is in the act or caught in its consequences, because to him the meaningfulness of his act is not the story that follows,” she writes.21 Odysseus was not supposed to listen to his story and be confronted with the meaning of who he is. This is why his particular experience is extraordinary and relevant. On a regular basis, in the epic universe of Homer, the heroes whom he sings of are already dead: they do not have the opportunity to listen to the narration of their own stories. Certainly, in this respect, Odysseus is a remarkable exception. Yet if we frame the same narrative setting within an ordinary scenario that escapes the grasp of ancient epic—a dislocation that Arendt seems to authorize when she claims that every individual life can eventually be told as a story and no heroic qualities are needed—this very exceptionality tends to fade. Namely, the occurrence of having our story, or parts of this story, told by friends, lovers, relatives, and other persons we are in touch with, is not an exceptional experience. Friendship, love, and family are ordinary narrative scenarios in which emotions come easily to the fore. From this perspective, Odysseus’s tears, although heroically remarkable, may hint at the very source of this common narrative experience. Perhaps, his emotional turmoil in receiving his own story directly from the mouth of the bard simply unveils his hidden but deep desire for having his story told. The unexpected discovery of who he is, received like a gift from the bard’s song, is, at the same time, the discovery of this very desire. As a matter of fact, the various heroes of the Trojan War did not have the opportunity of enjoying a significant experience such as this one. Put differently, they missed the chance of discovering their own narratable selves that, in the Odyssey, manifests itself through a strong emotion. In this light, we may conclude that, contrary to Achilles who counts on the link between narrative and death, the Odysseus “in tears” points to the more essential and, in Arendtian terms, structural link between narrative and birth. Arendt’s original conception of narrative suggests that “a story is a memory of an action that is itself a birth,” a plural interacting “whose ontological possibilities are established in the initial fact of our birth.”22 Narrative and action, therefore, remind us that we are beginners, and Odysseus’s tears are the immediate reaction to the force of this reminiscence. Pondering on “the birth of new man and new beginning, the action they are capable of by virtue of being born” in The Human Condition, Arendt calls it a miracle.23 Birth is the inauguration of a path not yet identified, the event of a pure possibility. Like a miracle, it breaks the regularity of nature’s cyclical movement and stresses the condition of human life as a unique life characterized by contingency and unpredictability. Action, the second birth, actualizes precisely these aspects of contingency and unpredictability and of narrative, as the outcome of action, and turns them into a story. This means that the story recounted

NARRATIVE

 607

by an other, as happens to Odysseus, confronts the narratable self with the tangible disclosure of his or her existential contingency—made up of deliberate choices and uncontrollable events, chances, incidents, and blows of fortune—a contingency that, however, results in a meaningful personal identity or, at least, responds to the narratable self’s desire for a personal identity which has a meaning. Arendt’s approach to the topic of narrative, far from engaging with literary or formal issues, focuses primarily on the ontological connection between human life and story: The chief characteristic of this specifically human life, whose appearance and disappearance constitute worldly events, is that it is itself always full of events which ultimately can be told as a story, establish a biography.24 As Odysseus knew only too well, the meaningfulness provided by biography includes having a coherence among its narrative effects or, at least, addressing the desire of a self who longs for a coherent identity eventually displayed by one’s life story. Action and speech, the two political attributes through which human life manifests its specificity, Arendt claims, “are activities whose end result will always be a story with enough coherence to be told, no matter how accidental or haphazard the single events and their causation may appear to be.”25 Unsurprisingly, this is true not only for individual stories but also for history, the storybook of humankind. And even less surprisingly, the model on which Arendt constructs her conception of historiographical narrative is Homer together with Herodotus and Thucydides.

History In her essay “The Concept of History: Ancient and Modern,” Arendt remarks that “the modern concept of process pervading history and nature alike separates the modern age from the past more profoundly than any other single idea.”26 Basically, modern theorists conceive history as a process developing according to its own laws of motion and degrading individuals and their deeds into functions of its overall encompassing rational progress. “The central concept of Hegelian metaphysics is history,” Arendt argues, and “to think, with Hegel, that truth resides and reveals itself in the timeprocess itself is characteristic of all modern historical consciousness, however it expresses itself, in specifically Hegelian terms or not.”27 Development, progress, and continuity are the conceptual clues of this notion of history the narration of which, to say the least, is indebted to metaphysical rhetoric. The case is completely different with ancient historians, according to Arendt. Homer and Herodotus, far from considering the deeds and achievements of each human being as part of a wider and encompassing process, narrate history as a web of life stories rooted in contingency; far from singing

608

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

of an epoch as the distinctive manifestation of the Spirit’s uninterrupted development, they sing of words and deeds and of events that occurred to human beings sharing the unpredictable outcome of their interacting; far from turning individual performances into unconscious instruments of the Zeitgeist, they maintain that “actions are meaningful regardless of their historical location.”28 “Impartiality, and with it all true historiography, came into the world when Homer decided to sing the deeds of the Trojans no less than those of the Achaeans,” Arendt writes; this impartiality, which “is still the highest type of objectivity we know,”29 rested upon the assumption that great deeds shine by themselves, no matter if performed by the winner or the defeated, and that in order to understand the facts they recount, historians ought to look upon the actual plurality of actors the human world consists of. All human deeds, in their mutual appearance within the public realm—be it in the polis or the Trojan war—deserve a narrative in order to become “the common heritage of which history is built.”30 Facts matter, and, confirming her realist vein, Arendt is convinced that historical narrative has to cope with “the solid objectivity of the given.”31 Contingency and unpredictability of human actions are part of this objectivity. Herodotus wanted to “say what it is” because narration stabilizes the futile and perishable, and it “fabricates a memory” for it and saves from oblivion the meaning that deeds and events carry within themselves: “the flux of his narrative is sufficiently loose to leave room for many stories, but there is nothing in this flux indicative that the general bestows meaning and significance on the particular.”32 Differently told, contrary to the modern conception of history that calls on the necessity of the process, ancient historiography allows human freedom to enter the narrative plot, even the plot that the historian’s posthumous gaze reframes into a meaningful coherence. Although she was a political thinker and not a professional historian, Arendt engaged directly with history when she worked on her monumental book on The Origins of Totalitarianism and addressed the questions her generation was confronted with: “What happened? Why did it happen? How could it have happened?”33 For Arendt, writing about totalitarian regimes and the concentration camps, which she saw as the most unprecedented form of human domination, “presented profound historiographical dilemmas,” among them, as Arendt confesses, the dilemma of saving from oblivion something that she felt “engaged to destroy rather than conserve.”34 At the time, in the aftermath of a catastrophe that even challenged human imagination, she was primarily concerned with the modern version of the historical narrative’s preserving effect, that is, the fact that the narration of modern historians, by insisting on chronological sequence and the logic of precedence and succession within the continuity of the process, ends with producing a justification of whatever happened, no matter its ferocious and unprecedented novelty, in terms of necessity and inevitability. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt fiercely opposes this kind of historiographical

NARRATIVE

 609

model, and she makes clear that “comprehension does not mean denying the outrageous, deducing the unprecedented from precedence,” thus neutralizing the shocking impact of phenomena that exceeds our categories of understanding and of our power of imagination; comprehension rather “means the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality— whatever it may be.”35 By endorsing this principle that contrasts any possible justification for what happened, in the book on totalitarianism, Arendt develops a profound and multilayered analysis of the distinctive aspects of total domination, constructing her investigation as a narrative that traces the complex constellation of historical movements—first and foremost antiSemitism, colonialism, and imperialism—flowing into the twentieth-century invention of the totalitarian regime. Significantly enough, she inserts into her narrative biographical accounts of the protagonists of these movements, like Benjamin Disraeli and T. E. Lawrence, and she even resorts to fictional novels such as Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, “the most illuminating work on actual race experience in Africa,”36 according to Arendt. As a matter of fact, to engage in biographical writing was not a new experience for Arendt: in her youth, she had worked on a book whose title, Rahel Varhagen: The Life of a Jewess, speaks for itself. Moreover, in the course of her life, she continued to be interested in biographies, producing insightful portraits of Karl Jaspers, Rosa Luxemburg, Pope John XXIII, Isak Dinesen, Bertolt Brecht, and others, collected in Men in Dark Times, not to mention the intense biographical accounts of G. E. Lessing and Walter Benjamin that can be found in her philosophical essays. Not only did Arendt believe in biography but she also maintained that certain lives are exemplary, and they are all the more so if their “heroes” live in dark times tragically contrasting the public light of Homer’s world. In the final analysis, Arendt’s Homer is precisely the screen on which she projects this contrast.

Narrative and the Shoah Homer and the ancient Greeks in general are, for Arendt, a resourceful topos of the Western imaginary, the ground for rethinking the human condition within a political framework after the horror of Auschwitz injured its ontological dignity. This is true also for the issue of narrative and, even more so, for the constitutive link between stories and history that Arendt attributes to the Homeric poetics but which, in her thinking strategy, works especially as a response to the totalitarian will to eliminate life stories along with lives themselves. Arendt’s legacy helps us focus on the redemptive power of narrative in the presence of forms of extreme violence that outrage the human and challenge our capacity for conceptualizing evil. It is the very violence that targets the inmates of the Lager, whose existence, starting with the erasure of their name and personal data, was obliterated, so that their having lived in the world would neither become part of a story nor become

610

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

a part of history. “The status of the inmates in the world of the living, where nobody is supposed to know if they are alive or dead, is such that it is as though they have never been born,” Arendt underlines; in totalitarian regimes “all places of detention ruled by the police are made to be veritable holes of oblivion into which people stumble by accident and without leaving behind them such ordinary traces of former existence as a body and a grave.”37 Plausibly, it is precisely this outrageous scenario, entrenched in the inexplicable violence of the present, that frame Arendt’s enthusiastic interest in ancient Greece and the Homeric universe of storytelling, a modality of narrating that aims at saving the meaning of unique lives from oblivion by preserving their memory among posterity. In this sense, Arendt belongs together with a variety of authors who, faced with the fact of the extermination camps, have been able to identify the crucial relationship between destruction and narration, between the dismantling of the human being perpetrated by the totalitarian machine and the saving power of life stories that restore the human status of uniqueness to the victims. The exemplary accounts by Primo Levi, Jean Améry, and David Rousset as well as the now immense biographical and autobiographical literature of the Shoah belong to the same problematic horizon that Arendt helps open up. As if Arendt, while seemingly speaking of Homer and of ancient heroes, already could see, on the one hand, the necessity of a new literary genre to narrate the lives lost in the horror of extermination and, on the other hand, the need to tell them so that the story book of humankind recovers meaning. Narrative, then, in Arendt’s poetics, is essentially a question of ontology and politics.

Notes 1 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1958), 184. 2 Ibid., 179. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid., 176. 5 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich, 1966), 443. 6 Ibid., 454. 7 Arendt, Human Condition, 179–81. 8 Ibid., 181. 9 Ibid., 186. 10 Hannah Arendt, foreword to Isak Dinesen, Daguerreotypes and Other Essays (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1979), xx. 11 Arendt, Human Condition, 181.

NARRATIVE

 611

12 Ibid., 186. 13 Ibid., 194. 14 On the issue of “narratable self” in light of Arendt’s conception of narrative see Adriana Cavarero, Relating Narrative: Storytelling and Selfhood (New York: Routledge, 2000). 15 Arendt, Human Condition, 186. 16 Ibid., 193. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid., 193. 19 Ibid., 194. 20 Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin, 1968), 45. 21 Arendt, Human Condition, 193. 22 Julia Kristeva, Hannah Arendt: Life is a Narrative (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 25. 23 Arendt, Human Condition, 247. 24 Ibid., 97. 25 Ibid. 26 Arendt, Between Past and Future, 63. 27 Ibid., 68. 28 Ibid., 81. 29 Ibid., 51. 30 Olivia Guaraldo, Storylines: Politics, History and Narrative from an Arendtian Perspective (Sophi: Jyvaskyla, 2001), 47. 31 Arendt, Between Past and Future, 89. 32 Ibid., 64. 33 Arendt, Origins, xxiv. 34 See Seyla Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2003), 87. 35 Arendt, Origins, viii. 36 Ibid., 185. 37 Ibid., 444, 434.

64 Political Philosophy of Science: From Cosmos to Power Eve Seguin

* * *

In loving memory of Professor André Corten, who initiated me to the thought of Hannah Arendt and to so much more. * * * Discussions of science and technology are found in a range of Arendt’s writings, including unpublished and uncollected materials, as well as in her correspondence with various interlocutors, most notably Karl Jaspers.1 That said, the bulk of her reflections on science are found in three key texts:2 her 1963 article “The Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man,” her 1961 article “The Concept of History: Ancient and Modern,” and mostly her 1958 book The Human Condition, which qualifies, even more than The Origins of Totalitarianism, as her magnum opus. Had Arendt’s interest in science been expressed in more or less confidential writings, commentators’ widespread ignorance of it might be forgivable. But since it lies at the forefront of The Human Condition, such neglect is truly incomprehensible. To begin with, the 1998 edition contains an outstanding introduction by British political theorist Margaret Canovan, which gives Arendt’s analysis of science its fair share. What is more, the architecture of the book is patterned according to the role and impact of science in modernity. As Coeckelbergh points out, the book opens with a Prologue devoted not to some conventional political deed but to a technoscientific one: the 1957 launch of the Sputnik satellite

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

 613

by the Soviet Union, an event Arendt immediately connects to another feat, the splitting of the atom.3 Finally, the book closes with a chapter devoted to her diagnosis of the profound transformation the vita activa went through in the modern age. Her analysis of science is mostly spelled out in this final chapter. For her, the scientific revolution symbolized by Galileo’s telescope has opened up a new historical era.4 It was pivotal in the formation of the modern age, and more significant than the two other events that gave birth to it, namely, the discovery of America and the Reformation. From its inception, modern science was driven by a quest to escape the Earth and our earthly condition. The launch of Sputnik and the conquest of space are the ultimate embodiment of this pursuit.

Cosmos To encapsulate the spirit of modern science, Arendt uses an encompassing category, the Archimedean point. Greek mathematician and astronomer Archimedes is famous for saying, “Give me a lever and a place to stand and I will move the earth.”5 According to Arendt, modern science draws its unique character from the discovery of the Archimedean point, materialized in three major evolutions: the heliocentric view of our planetary system, the mathematization of physics, and the telescopic observation of the sky. The first evolution, Copernicus’s heliocentric view of the solar system, shattered the age-old differentiation between the Earth and the sky. In the Ptolemaic geocentric system dominant since ancient times, the planets and the Sun circled the Earth. Arendt contends that the quest for simplicity and beauty led Copernicus to use the Sun rather than the Earth as the standpoint to conceive of the planets’ orbits. In the heliocentric view of the planetary system, all planets, including the Earth, circle the Sun, a fixed star, and the apparent movement of the Sun is due to the Earth’s rotation around its axis. Arendt praises “the great boldness of Copernicus’ imagination, which lifted him from the earth and enabled him to look down upon her as though he actually were an inhabitant of the sun.”6 Thus, Copernicus literally displaced the center of our experience from the Earth to the Sun.7 Arendt argues that the Archimedean point also materialized in the mathematization of physics, that is, the replacement of geometry by algebra. This is the second evolution that gave modern science its distinctive style. Whereas geometry was a spatial language dealing with terrestrial movements and forms, Descartes’s analytical geometry, which combined geometry with algebra, converted a curve into an equation, and an equation back into a curve. This had two major implications. First, the validity of this new method was secured by this back and forth movement, and scientists could thus dispense with any other approach. Second, since terrestrial sense data and movements were reduced to mathematical symbols, scientific reasoning no longer started with empirical observation of nature but became an

614

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

abstract process. Hence the new mathematics provided a universal vantage point disconnected from phenomena. Arendt argues that “with the rise of modernity, mathematics does not simply enlarge its content or reach out into the infinite to become applicable to the immensity of an infinite and infinitely growing, expanding universe, but ceases to be concerned with appearances at all.”8 She contends that the “new mathematics” allowed Newton to fuse astronomy and physics. When he devised a single equation that explains the motion of objects on the Earth and the movement of celestial bodies, the law of gravitation gave its full power to heliocenterism. The universe was born. However, the Archimedean point would not have been reached without a third evolution: Galileo’s use of the telescope for astronomical observation. Of the three facets of modern science, this is the most important one in Arendt’s view, and we will see why. Arendt reminds us that Copernicus was not the first astronomer who believed the Earth was circling the Sun. Such a hypothesis was put forward as early as the third century bce by Aristarchus of Samos. As long as it remained a hypothesis, the cultural impact of the heliocentric view was limited, as shown by the Catholic Church agreeing for it to be taught. Unlike Galileo, Copernicus was not tried by the Inquisition. This is because, as Arendt puts it, ideas are not events. The speculations and calculations of Copernicus and Kepler could not have achieved the unification of the universe on their own. In contrast, the telescopic observation of the sky was an event in the true sense of the word. Galileo introduced a radical shift in the social order, since his telescope provided empirical proof that the heliocentric view was correct. The telescope brought to light phenomena that contradicted the Aristotelian and Ptolemaic views of nature. Whereas celestial bodies were held to be perfectly smooth spheres, the telescope pointed to the mountains of the Moon. It also revealed the phases of Venus, which could be explained only if the planet circled the Sun rather than the Earth. Arendt states, “What Galileo did and what nobody had done before was to use the telescope in such a way that the secrets of the universe were delivered to human cognition ‘with the certainty of senseperception.’”9 Arendt contends that the universalization of science initiated by Copernicus was brought to completion at the beginning of the twentieth century with Einstein’s theory of relativity. She argues that the Archimedean point was then pushed farther since this theory no longer uses the Sun as its point of reference. Reality can be contemplated from any point so that we may hold indistinguishably that the Earth revolves around the Sun or that the Sun revolves around the Earth: Only we, and we only for hardly more than a few decades, have come to live in a world thoroughly determined by a science and a technology whose objective truth and practical know-how are derived from cosmic and universal, as distinguished from terrestrial and “natural,” laws.10

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

 615

Humans have thus become truly universal beings, completely detached from a specific location in the cosmos, “moving freely in the universe,” as she puts it. On the surface, Arendt’s interpretation of the discovery of the Archimedean point looks gloomy. It indicates that modern science is alienated from the Earth: “Earth alienation became and has remained the hallmark of modern science.”11 Scientists no longer think and work with the Earth as their reference point. Rather, they look at things from a universal standpoint and aim at uncovering the laws of the universe. To give a measure of this attitude, Arendt emphasizes that these laws were valid before the appearance of the human species and even before the formation of the Earth. Against this backdrop, earthly nature is a mere instance of something much bigger, something actually infinite. Humans themselves are just one case of organic life. This points to another dimension of earth alienation, which Arendt develops mostly in “The Conquest of Space.” Not only has science ceased to be geocentric, it is no longer anthropocentric. It is characterized by a refusal of human’ finitude and biological condition. The two aspects go hand in hand since humans are Earth-bound creatures. As Berkowitz nicely argues, for Arendt, earthly nature and human finitude are inextricably connected, to the extent that the two notions are almost synonyms.12 The demise of anthropocentrism in science is first noticeable through the relinquishment of human perception. Science endeavors to unveil a reality that is not perceptible by the human senses and even contradicts their testimony. The rising and setting of the Sun is the textbook example. Arendt stresses, “The data with which modern physical research is concerned . . . are not phenomena, appearances, strictly speaking, for we meet them nowhere, neither in our everyday world nor in the laboratory; we know of their presence only because they affect our measuring instruments.”13 The abandonment of sensory perception has led to the relinquishing of the common sense shared by all, which she defines as the awareness of reality obtained through the coordination of information provided by the five senses. This, in turn, is accompanied by the uselessness of everyday language to communicate reality. Expressed in mathematical language, the universe is “unthinkable,” says Arendt. We are thus facing a highly paradoxical situation: “Man can do, and successfully do, what he cannot comprehend and cannot express in everyday human language.”14 The overall consequence is that lay people are “out of touch with reality.” According to commentators, Arendt’s depiction of earth alienation has far-reaching implications for our public life. Rita Koganzon stresses that science and politics no longer speak the same language.15 Patrick Deneen argues that science is a threat to human dignity and to democracy, which is being overthrown by technocracy.16 Since modern science has been stripped of all geocentric and anthropocentric contents, Arendt even contemplates, in a manner reminiscent of Hans Jonas, the possibility that scientific practice may result in the destruction of the Earth and humans:

616

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

The simple fact that physicists split the atom without any hesitations the very moment they knew how to do it, although they realized full well the enormous destructive potentialities of their operation, demonstrates that the scientist qua scientist does not even care about the survival of the human race on earth or, for that matter, about the survival of the planet itself.17 Nevertheless, catastrophism, defined as the philosophical strand developed by authors such as Hans Jonas18 and Jean-Pierre Dupuy,19 is not the ground she chooses to occupy. Much more significant to her is science’s routine attempt to escape earthly nature and the limitations of human life: Whatever we do today in physics—whether we release energy processes that ordinarily go on only in the sun, or attempt to initiate in a test tube the processes of cosmic evolution, or penetrate with the help of telescopes the cosmic space to a limit of two and even six billion light years, or build machines for the production and control of energies unknown in the household of earthly nature, or attain speeds in atomic accelerators which approach the speed of light, or produce elements not to be found in nature, or disperse radioactive particles, created by us through the use of cosmic radiation, on the earth—we always handle nature from a point in the universe outside the earth.20 One could argue that for her, modern science is estranged from anything located at the human scale, which leads Berkowitz to speak of the “inhumanity of science.”21 Earth alienation is undoubtedly the main aspect of Arendt’s writings on science that has drawn the attention of commentators. It has given rise to various interpretations. For instance, Melis Bas argues that it is reminiscent of Heidegger’s analysis of the essence of modern technology, which is to treat nature as a standing reserve.22 In a very different fashion, Pieter Tijmes claims that she wrongly ascribes to modern science an anthropological feature, that is, humans’ ability to step outside and consider themselves.23 This small body of literature creates the impression that nothing more is to be found in her work with respect to science. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Power Earth alienation by no means encompasses the whole of her reflections on science and technology. In fact, her analysis is far more complex and her positioning toward science turns out to be deeply ambivalent. As Yaqoob rightly notes, “She portrayed contemporary physics in an almost positive light.”24 The reason why she supplements her gloomy depiction of science with a more positive, even admirative, gaze is the performative view of

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

 617

science she holds, which undeniably anticipates the contemporary notion of technoscience. Yaqoob argues that her philosophy of science is characterized by a typical German focus on technē. A more idiosyncratic interpretation can be drawn from Patchen Markell’s claim that “work,” not “action,” is the central category of the typology of human activities she sketches in The Human Condition.25 Rejecting the rationalist view underlying most twentiethcentury philosophy of science, whose main concern is science’s formulation of theories and laws, her analysis anticipates contemporary philosophers of science such as Gérard Fourez, Ian Hacking, and Gilbert Hottois, who focus on the pivotal role of instrumentation and experimentation in modern science. Arendt understood decades before them that modern science was radically different from the previous pursuit of knowledge because it turned knowing into making: “It was not . . . contemplation, observation, and speculation which led to the new knowledge, but the active stepping in of homo faber, of making and fabricating.”26 Indeed, she boldly stresses that reason alone could not have revolutionized the worldview prevailing before the modern age: “It had been an instrument and therefore man in so far as he is a toolmaker . . . led to the modern revolution.”27 Her performative view of science explains why she gives prominence to the telescope over the two other sites where the Archimedean point was discovered and enacted. The significance she ascribes to instruments even leads her to label algebra a “mental instrument.” She openly states that science is made with the hands, a statement that encompasses not only the fabrication of scientific instruments but also the setting up of experiments: “Even more decisive was the element of making and fabricating present in the experiment itself, which produces its own phenomena of observation and therefore depends from the very outset upon man’s productive capacities.”28 Experimentation is to her an original and unprecedented way to approach reality because it dispenses with the constraints of earthly nature. In other words, it enacts the Archimedean point by creating phenomena from the cosmic angle imagined by the human mind. To emphasize the potency of such a method, Arendt reminds us of Kant’s phrase that the human mind “prescribes its laws to nature.” Modern science does not seek to understand the “what” and the “why” but merely the “how” and is extremely powerful at that. Because of this “how” concern, the objects of scientific enquiry are no longer things or motions but rather processes. This testifies to the influence Whitehead’s claim that nature is a process had on her. In the same vein, she remarks that “development” has become the main concept in every scientific discipline. She is adamant that success, the imperative that the handling of the experimental object should “work,” is the prevailing criterion of basic science and quite independent from any search for technological application. Truth is no longer equivalent to theory but to the practical success of a hypothesis whereby nature is put under conditions devised by the human mind and materialized in the experimental setting.

618

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

Arendt contends that the experimental attitude toward nature eventually resulted in scientists’ ever-increasing ability to “unchain elemental processes.”29 When exactly this happened is open to discussion, first because she fails to expand on decisive aspects of her argument, and second, due to apparent discrepancies between different texts. In what follows, we draw upon Bronislaw Szerszynski,30 who argues this ability has evolved in two stages, each symbolized by a milestone technology. The first stage is the “electric age,” which she contrasts to the first industrial revolution. Despite the many changes it brought in nineteenth-century way of living, the steam engine was nothing new as a technology. It did not break with the labor carried out by animal laborans, that is, it produced the same type of energy as the human body and, later, water and windmills: it performed mechanical work. Things changed with the experimentations that gave rise to the mastery of electricity. Arendt claims the electric age was entirely different from the earlier period of the steam engine because natural processes were then “unchained” by us. What she presumably means is although it naturally occurs on the Earth, most obviously during lightning, electricity is a rare and fickle phenomenon. Hence our ability to initiate an electron flux at will departs from the traditional production of energy and blurs the boundary between nature and the human world. It “consists of channelling natural forces into the world of the human artifice.”31 The second and most decisive stage in scientists’ ability to unchain elemental processes is the “nuclear age.” Arendt remarks that although nuclear technology has not yet replaced electricity in the automation process, it has brought about a qualitative shift in science. Whereas experimentation had turned knowing into making since the seventeenth century, nuclear fission and fusion have turned knowing into acting. Thus, Arendt writes: The very fact that natural sciences have become exclusively sciences of process and, in their last stage, sciences of potentially irreversible, irremediable “processes of no return” is a clear indication that . . . the actual underlying human capacity which alone could bring about this development is no “theoretical” capacity, neither contemplation nor reason, but the human ability to act. Science as “action into nature” is so significant for Arendt that she does not address it in the final chapter of The Human Condition, where much of her discussion of science is located. Rather, she tackles it in the chapter devoted to action, especially in section 32, “The Process Character of Action,” where she seemingly treats nuclear science as the epitome of action. This certainly pleads for broadening Arendtian studies and for acknowledging the politicity of science in mainstream political theory.32 Nuclear physicists “act into nature” because they initiate on the Earth novel processes that would never occur on their own, either because nature is incapable to produce them or because they occur only in the universe,

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

 619

for instance in the Sun. For Arendt, in the nuclear age science no longer masters nature, it makes it: “We know today that . . . we are quite capable of starting new natural processes, and that in a sense therefore we ‘make nature.’”33 Science initiates artificial processes such as the chain reaction, nuclear fusion, and new chemical reactions, and, as she writes, is even attempting to create life in a test tube, a feat Craig Venter now claims to have accomplished with Mycoplasma mycoides JCVI-syn1.0. Just as she is a forerunner of analyses of “technoscience,” Arendt also anticipates the contemporary notion of “technonature.” In the nuclear age, the frontier between nature and the human world is not only blurred, it disappears altogether: “the capacity for action . . . has become the exclusive prerogative of the scientists, who have enlarged the realm of human affairs to the point of extinguishing the time-honoured protective dividing line between nature and the human world.”34 Nature is no longer a stable and separate setting for human work and action, and the best proof of it is scientists’ capacity to destroy the Earth. However, we will see in a moment that this extraordinary capacity should not be read as a sign of sovereignty. Action into nature is akin to action traditionally performed in the web of human relations in two different ways. First and foremost, contemporary scientists set in motion processes that constitute radical new beginnings. The reaction spurred among witnesses of the Trinity test carried out a few weeks before the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki testifies to this radical novelty. Robert Oppenheimer, scientific father of the bomb, was flabbergasted by his own creature, as shown by the following Hindu verse that came to his mind: “If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendour of the mighty one.”35 Second, as is well known, Arendt breaks with the brand of modern political philosophy initiated by Bodin and Hobbes. She is adamant that freedom, the enabling capacity for action, should not be equated with sovereignty. Actors do not control the outcome of their actions. Just as with the deeds performed by Homeric heroes, the cosmic processes initiated on the Earth by scientists are irreversible and unpredictable. The most salient manifestation of irreversibility is without a doubt the extremely long half-life of some radioactive isotopes, 703 million years in the case of uranium-235. As to the unpredictability, one can cite doubts aired by many stakeholders about nuclear waste in deep geological repositories. The many unintended consequences of technoscientific endeavors such as the environmental crisis, world population explosion, chronic diseases, biodiversity loss, and so on, all demonstrate that scientists set off processes but do not rule them. Action is widely regarded as the core element of politics in the Arendtian framework.36 In view of the earlier discussion on scientists’ action, the following question becomes mandatory: Is science the new form that politics has been taking since the beginning of the twentieth century? The only scholar we know of who has addressed this question head on is Beltrán Undurraga in his 2016 doctoral thesis.37 In order to provide an answer, his

620

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

first move is to perform a contextual lexicometric analysis of what Arendt explicitly calls “political” in The Human Condition. His study reveals that over fifty nouns are qualified with the adjective “political,” but that science and technology are not part of them. From these data, Undurraga infers that, for Arendt, science certainly has political implications but is not a political phenomenon, an alleged conclusion he enthusiastically endorses: “the agency of technoscience is politically significant, and not necessarily political in and of itself, because it is a form of action that does not need a public space of appearance in order to do the things it does.”38 This claim relies on the distinction he makes between two aspects of action, which do not necessarily go hand in hand. The “processual” aspect obviously designates “the process character of action,” the fact that the deeds of actors are suffered by other actors who, in turn, perform new, unpredictable, deeds. Every act starts a narrative sequence made up of boundless and unintended consequences. For its part, the “existential” aspect points to the revelatory capacity of action, the fact that actors reveal who they are through their acting and speaking in a public space of appearance. It is this component of action that produces stories and creates meaning in the realm of human affairs, which ends up as history recorded in artifacts and historiography. For him, “when we turn our attention to technoscience, the difference between these two dimensions of action becomes pronounced because the deeds of technoscientists partake of the processual side of action, but lack its existential aspect.”39 This assertion is entirely in keeping with Arendt’s claim that “the action of the scientists, since it acts into nature from the standpoint of the universe and not into the web of human relationships, lacks the revelatory character of action as well as the ability to produce stories and become historical.”40 Unfortunately, Undurraga’s conclusion that science is not political in itself rests on two problematic factors. First, Arendt’s claim that science is an impoverished form of action is unconvincing, and even looks selfcontradictory in the light of other vital observations she makes. Equally unpersuasive is the related claim that scientific action is performed outside of human relations. Second, whether she genuinely believes that science is not in itself political appears rather dubious if we leave aside the existential aspect and turn to other notions, such as acting in concert and power, that belong to the conceptual cluster of action, but are surprisingly overlooked by Undurraga. In what follows, we will tackle these two sets of problems in turn. Several factors cast doubt on the idea that science has retained only the processual aspect of action. The first one is the status of the scientific community. Arendt claims it has been performing in “the unseen quiet of the laboratories” for centuries. However, by drawing a parallel with her analysis of monastic orders, could we not hypothesize that it is a space of appearance? For Arendt the historic achievement of Christianity was to make people live in a wordless condition. The world and the public realm

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

 621

were replaced by the principle of charity as the only bond between people, turning the Christian community into a family, arguably the antithesis of the public. And yet, she points out that because monks’ activities were carried out in the presence of others, monastic orders carried the potential for the emergence of a public space in the midst of Christianity: We know from the history and the rules of the monastic orders . . . the danger that the activities undertaken under “the necessity of present life” . . . would lead by themselves, because they were performed in the presence of others, to the establishment of a kind of counterworld, a public realm within the orders themselves, was great enough to require additional rules and regulations, the most relevant one in our context being the prohibition of excellence.41 Peer-reviewed scientific journals, the practice of citation, and regular meetings of scientific societies all show that science necessitates and is performed in the presence of others. The pursuit of excellence and the desire to surpass colleagues and distinguish themselves definitely fuel researchers. Indeed, their main reward is not something tangible such as money but scientific prizes and accolades. Following Latour,42 it can be argued that the experiments carried out at the Royal Society were so disturbing to Hobbes precisely because he perceived in this community of natural philosophers a public space dangerously lying outside of, and parallel to, the Leviathan.43 Beyond the space of appearance within the scientific community, many aspects of the integration of science in the wider society indicate that it is not, or no longer, performed in a space hidden from view. This was already noticeable in Arendt’s lifetime, and is even more striking today. What makes these factors significant is they are all connected to the main elements of the existential side of action: speech, meaning, and history. First, since the eighteenth century, and even more so in the wake of the 1960s and the 1970s protest movements, public scientific controversies regularly disrupt the smooth progression of science, hit the press, and dictate the political agenda.44 Such controversies involve several social groups who question, challenge, or oppose current technoscientific advances. On the scientific level, they are fuelled by existing disputes between experts.45 On the political level, they are ignited by the many political, cultural, and economic implications of science that, as a rule, are ignored or even intentionally concealed by official experts’ scientific framings. The genetically modifiedorganism controversy that stirred up the European Union in the 1990s and the 2000s is a textbook case. We know that Arendt took part in debates about the risk of nuclear war and the cultural meaning of atomic weapons, and she most probably witnessed a number of public controversies brought about by various aspects of nuclear physics, for instance the Cayuga Lake controversy.46

622

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

Second, if scientific language has been traditionally considered far too technical to be understood by people outside communities of peers, recent research, notably on public scientific controversies, has shown that lay people can develop high levels of proficiency in various scientific disciplines and specialties. This ability has been theorized by means of different concepts. The two most prominent are probably Collins and Evans’ “interactional expertise,” which designates non-experts’ capacity to interact with experts, and Callon’s “hybrid forums,” which refers to groupings of scientists and lay people discussing and orienting together the research needed to solve the latter’s problems.47 Third, science communication has undergone profound changes in the past decades. Whereas it was traditionally targeted primarily at peers, nowadays, the general public has become its main receiver. This is shown by several developments such as the hiring of science journalists in generalist medias, the inclusion of science and technology pages and columns in daily newspapers, and press conferences regularly organized by laboratories to announce research results and discoveries, even prior to publication in peer-reviewed journals. This evolution has been encapsulated in the notion of “mediatization of scientific communication,”48 and this was well underway in Arendt’s lifetime. As a matter of fact, she collected press cuttings on technoscientific achievements, now gathered in a file of “The Hannah Arendt Papers” collection at the Library of Congress.49 Besides, she was clearly aware of the increased public presence and meaningfulness of science when she wrote, “It seems only proper that their [scientists’] deeds should eventually have turned out to have greater news value . . . than the administrative and diplomatic doings of most so-called statesmen.”50 Finally, Arendt’s contention that science lacks the ability to become historical is truly incomprehensible in the light of her analysis of the “new science” as one of the three events that gave rise to the modern age. Science has led to a novel historical epoch and is, for that matter, one that stands apart from all previous eras. Hence, it is no surprise that Western culture casts protagonists of the scientific revolution as heroes, with their experiments and discoveries recorded in paintings, sculptures, and a plethora of history books and theses. Every museum hangs portraits of kings and queens alongside those of natural philosophers. Among them, Galileo stands apart. His use of the telescope has indeed changed the course of Western history, and this explains why he has achieved the status of a superstar whose story is recounted in numerous biographies, movies, and even a theater play by Bertolt Brecht. Recall that for Arendt, “the theatre is the political art par excellence; only there is the political sphere of human life transposed into art.”51 The cultural treatment of scientists as historical figures who perform heroic deeds that change the body politic is by no means restricted to the seventeenth century. The best proof of it is no doubt Louis Pasteur, nineteenth-century leader of the war on microbes. The celebration of his

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

 623

glory clearly parallels that of Charles de Gaulle, leader of the resistance against the Nazi occupation of France. Such a similarity is particularly significant from an Arendtian perspective for “the resistance experience was arguably the model of modern politics for Arendt.”52 If historiography and works of art are two means to reify action, toponymy is a third means of remembrance, as physical spaces are given the names of people who have performed great deeds. Pasteur is a case in point. It can jokingly be said that half the streets of French cities are called “rue Pasteur,” whereas the other half are called, of course, “rue du Général de Gaulle.” To explain why scientific action allegedly lacks the revelatory dimension, Arendt puts forward that it is not performed “into the web of human relationships.” This claim too is questionable, and seemingly contradicts a crucial conclusion of her analysis, namely, that science has abolished the protective divide between nature and the human world. If science has introduced human unpredictability in the natural domain, should we not conclude that nature has entered the web of human relations? Indeed, Arendt acknowledges the serious implications scientific action has for human affairs. In the first section of “The Concept of History,” largely devoted to a discussion of the natural sciences, she points out in relation to acting into nature: “It is beyond doubt that the capacity to act is the most dangerous of all human abilities and possibilities, and it is also beyond doubt that the selfcreated risks mankind faces today have never been faced before.”53 However, she fails to take this observation to the logical conclusion that acting into nature amounts to acting in the web of human relations. Still, with this implicit conclusion, Arendt proves once more the visionary character of her analysis. She clearly anticipates developments that were to happen years later, such as the emergence of the environmental movement, the theory of risk society and its claim that science plays a pivotal role in the ecological crisis, and green political theory. The earlier discussion casts serious doubt on the idea that science only has political implications. A complementary way to ascertain whether it is a political endeavor “in and of itself” is to stop concentrating on the public space and self-revelation. Such an exclusive focus has negative consequences. Chief among them is the charge that Arendt wrongly depicts politics as a theatrical performance. For our purpose though, the main shortcoming of this revelatory approach is its individualistic overtone. True, Arendt pays a great deal of attention to the individual root of action through her analysis of natality. Yet even though she does not deny that individuals can act alone,54 for her, nowhere is action more glorious than when performed in a cooperative fashion by several people together, what she calls “acting in concert.” Herein lays the reason why she so admires the Greek polis and sees in it the archetype of the body politic. It provides an enduring space for acting in concert and, accordingly, the status of citizen allows individuals to partake in politics, to act in concert with others. Action is the most futile activity of mankind, and the polis was the Greek solution for ensuring

624

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

its regular occurrence: “The wall of the polis and the boundaries of the law were drawn around an already existing public space which, however, without such stabilizing protection could not endure, could not survive the moment of action and speech itself.”55 The emphasis Arendt places on acting in concert is in large part due to its being the source of power: “Power springs up between men when they act together.”56 Power is a notion sometimes overlooked by commentators who tend to view her conception of politics as essentially theatrical. Actually, power is of the utmost importance for her because it is the only way for the artificial world to be maintained.57 In more practical terms, power designates the capacity to innovate,58 that is, the possibility of setting original ends and of pursuing them.59 This linkage of action and end-setting is noteworthy for it dispels the mistaken interpretation of “end” as a category that strictly belongs to homo faber and to work, and allegedly stands opposite to action. As Leslie Paul Thiele reminds us, “Arendt did not believe that political actors were all whimsy and spontaneity or that instrumental effort was foreign to their nature. Actors without purposes do not exist: intentionality is intrinsic to action.”60 This is crucial for properly addressing the politics/science interface. But before turning to science, a final observation must be made. Since the polis provides humans with a stable structure for acting in concert, by definition, it also constitutes an enduring space for breeding power. Arendt is crystal clear about it: “Bodies politic generate power.”61 Power and the body politic shed a different light on action. These notions allow us to break away from the sanitized interpretation that pervades many exegetical works on Arendt’s thought and makes it almost impossible to understand the political nature of scientists’ action. Traditionally, political theory has been indifferent to science.62 Arendt is to be commended for going against the grain and putting science at the core of her political reflections. What is equally remarkable is that the importance she ascribes to science testifies to the coherence of her conceptual framework. In effect, we find in her writings an exact, albeit embryonic, parallel between action officially labeled political and scientists’ action. First and foremost, she fully acknowledges that science is a form of acting in concert: “the scientists found it necessary from the beginning to organize themselves into a society [the Royal Society] . . . to act together and in concert in order to conquer nature.”63 We have seen earlier that end-setting, dubbed “instrumental reason” in the case of science, is not incompatible with action. On the contrary, it is part of it. Like all actors, scientists pursue a goal, albeit one that is historically unprecedented and thus entirely different from any other: the conquest of nature. Scientists’ acting in concert to conquer nature is no small affair for it has put action center-stage in our era. Arendt argues that acting into nature signals “that for the first time in our history the human capacity for action has begun to dominate all others”64 Contemporary scientists’ enormous

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

 625

capacity for action has even led to yet another reversal in the hierarchy of vita activa: In the initial stages of the modern age, man was thought of primarily as homo faber, until, in the nineteenth century, man was interpreted as an animal laborans whose metabolism with nature would yield the highest productivity of which human life is capable. Against the background of these schematic definitions, it would be adequate for the world we have come to live in to define man as a being capable of action; for this capacity seems to have become the center of all other human capabilities.65 In this context, it is difficult to see how science could evade being political “in and of itself.” As a matter of fact, and although this may be anathema to positivist ears, for Arendt, scientific action is intrinsically connected to power, like other forms of action. From the early days of the scientific revolution, power was part of scientists’ scheme “where men organize they intend to act and to acquire power.”66 Thus, it was a search for power that prompted the founding of the Royal Society. This search eventually proved to be extraordinarily successful and scientists have outshined politicians and other political actors: “For their early organizations . . . have become one of the most potent power-generating groups in all history.”67 For Arendt, scientific institutions generate power in much the same way as bodies politic do. Can it be inferred that they are political? Certainly and she does not shy away from spelling it out: “An organization, whether of scientists who have abjured politics or of politicians, is always a political institution.”68

Notes 1 Waseem Yaqoob, “The Archimedean Point: Science and Technology in the Thought of Hannah Arendt,” Journal of European Studies 44, no. 3 (2014): 1–26. 2 I sincerely thank Peter Gratton for the confidence he has placed in me by asking me to contribute a piece on Arendt and science. I extend my thanks to Yasemin Sari for her diligent editorial work and support. 3 Mark Coeckelbergh, “The Public Thing: On the Idea of a Politics of Artefacts,” Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology 13, no. 3 (2009). Available at https​://re​searc​h.utw​ente.​nl/en​/publ​icati​ons/t​he-pu​blic-​thing​-on-t​he-id​ea-of​ -a-po​litic​s-of-​artef​acts (accessed February 24, 2018). 4 The scope and nature of the scientific revolution have been revisited in recent years. See Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1996); John Tresch, “Cosmologies Materialized: The History of Science and History of Ideas,” in Rethinking Modern European Intellectual History, ed. D. McMahon and S. Moyn (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 153–72. 5 In 1983, Bruno Latour published a paper titled “Give Me a Laboratory and I Will Move the Earth,” which offers a genuine political theory of science. The

626

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

similarities between his work and Arendt’s are numerous. See Eve Seguin, “The Common World of Hannah Arendt and Bruno Latour,” Symposium 22, no. 2 (2018): 1–26. 6 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 259. 7 Giordano Bruno went even further in 1584 when he postulated the existence of innumerable suns with planets orbiting them. In this respect, he can be regarded as the forerunner of exoplanetology. See Eve Seguin, “Why Are Exoplanets Political? Pragmatism and the Politicity of Science in the Work of Bruno Latour,” Revue française de science politique 65, no. 2 (2015): 279– 302, and Eve Seguin, “What Sense Should We Make of Astronomy’s Sensing Devices?.” Paper delivered at the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Social Studies of Science, Panel 244, Boston, September 1, 2017. 8 Arendt, Human Condition, 266. 9 Ibid., 259–60. 10 Ibid., 268. 11 Ibid., 264. 12 Roger Berkowitz, “Earth Alienation from Galileo to Google,” Paper delivered at Bard College’s Language and Thinking Rostrum Series, August 2010. Available at https​://la​nguag​eandt​hinki​ng.ba​rd.ed​u/201​4/06/​roger​-berk​owitz​ -eart​h-ali​enati​on-fr​om-ga​lileo​-to-g​oogle​/ (accessed February 24, 2019). 13 Hannah Arendt, “The Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man,” New Atlantis (Fall 2007): 43–55, 44. 14 Ibid., 46. 15 Rita Koganzon, “Science and Totalitarianism,” New Atlantis (Fall 2007): 60–66. 16 Patrick Deneen, “Nature, Man, and Common Sense,” New Atlantis (Fall 2007): 56–60. 17 Arendt, “The Conquest of Space,” 51. 18 Hans Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1984). 19 Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Pour un catastrophisme éclairé. Quand l’impossible est certain (Paris: Seuil 2004). 20 Arendt, Human Condition, 262. 21 Berkowitz, “Earth Alienation,” 15. 22 Melis Bas, A Reinterpretation of Hannah Arendt as a Philosopher of Technology. M.A. Thesis, University of Twente (2013). Available at http:​//ess​ ay.ut​wente​.nl/6​4574/​1/Bas​%CC%A​7%2C%​20Mel​is%20​-%20S​12321​50%20​ -%20M​aster​%20Th​esis.​pdf (accessed February 24, 2019). 23 Pieter Tijmes, “The Archimedean Point and Eccentricity: Hannah Arendt’s Philosophy of Science and Technology,” Inquiry 35, nos. 3–4 (1992): 389–406. 24 Yaqoob, “The Archimedean Point,” 17. 25 Patchen Markell, “Arendt’s Work: on the Architecture of the Human Condition,” College Literature 38, no. 1 (2011): 15–44. 26 Arendt, Human Condition, 274.

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

 627

27 Ibid., 295. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid., 231. 30 Bronislaw Szerszynski, “Technology, Performance and Life Itself: Hannah Arendt and the Fate of Nature,” Sociological Review 51, supp. 2 (2003): 203–18. 31 Ibid., 150. 32 The amazing neologism « politicité » was coined by French political scientist Nicolas Tenzer (La politique [Paris: PUF, 1991], 108). It is modeled on “scientificity” and denotes the intrinsic political character of the phenomenon it is applied to, here science. 33 Hannah Arendt, “The Concept of History: Ancient and Modern,” in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Viking Press, 1968), 58. 34 Arendt, Human Condition, 323–24. 35 Available at http:​//sus​anskr​it.or​g/qoq​-for-​oppen​heime​r.htm​l (accessed June 1, 2019). 36 See Margaret Canovan, “Introduction,” in Human Condition (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), vii–xx, and Phillip Birger Hansen, Hannah Arendt: Politics, History, and Citizenship (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993). 37 Beltrán Undurraga, Amor Mundi: Politics, Democracy, and TechnoScience. Ph.D. Thesis, UCLA. Available at https​://es​chola​rship​.org/​conte​nt/qt​3rh22​6m9/ q​t3rh2​26m9.​pdf (2016) (accessed February 24, 2018). 38 Ibid., 10. 39 Ibid., 38. 40 Arendt, Human Condition, 324. 41 Ibid., 54. 42 Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). 43 For an analysis of Hobbes’s dissatisfaction with the experiments of the Royal Society and his debate with Robert Boyle, see Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985). 44 Dorothy Nelkin, Controversy: Politics of Technical Decisions (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1979). 45 Allan Mazur, “Disputes between Experts,” Minerva 11, no. 2 (1973): 243–62. 46 Dorothy Nelkin, Nuclear Power and Its Critics: The Cayuga Lake Controversy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1971). 47 See Michel Callon et al., Acting in an Uncertain World: An Essay on Technical Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009); and Harry Collins and Robert Evans, Rethinking Expertise (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2007). 48 Pierre Fayard, La communication scientifique publique. De la vulgarisation à la médiatisation (Lyon: Chronique sociale, 1988).

628

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

49 Yaqoob, “The Archimedean Point.” 50 Arendt, Human Condition, 324. 51 Ibid., 188. 52 Jeffrey Isaac, “Situating Hannah Arendt on Action and Politics,” Political Theory 21, no. 3 (1993): 534–40, 537. 53 Arendt, “Concept of History,” 63. 54 Guido Parietti, “Arendt on Power and Violence,” in The Anthem Companion to Hannah Arendt, ed. P. Baehr and P. Walsh (London: Anthem, 2017), 197–220. 55 Arendt, Human Condition, 198. 56 Ibid., 200. 57 Elizabeth Frazer, “Power and Violence,” in Hannah Arendt: Key Concepts, ed. P. Hayden (London: Routledge, 2014), 155–66; Parietti, “Arendt on Power and Violence.” 58 Hauke Brunkhorst, “The Productivity of Power: Hannah Arendt’s Renewal of the Classical Concept of Politics,” Revista de Ciencia Política 26, no. 2 (2006): 125–36. 59 Guido Parietti, “On the Concept of Power,” IPSA Concepts and Methods Working Paper Series 63 (2015): 1–29. Available at https​://ww​w.scr​ibd.c​om/ do​cumen​t/282​64053​3/Gui​do-Pa​riett​i-On-​the-C​oncep​t-of-​Power​ (accessed February 24, 2018). 60 Leslie Paul Thiele, “The Ontology of Action. Arendt and the Role of Narrative,” Theory & Event 12, no. 4 (2009): 1–21, 15. 61 Arendt, Human Condition, 202. This assertion should be read with caution. First, the body politic can be anti-political. This is most obvious with tyranny, which breeds impotence rather than power, as she puts it. Second, political action is not necessarily performed within the polis, as shown by all manners of civil disobedience. Arendt qualifies the French resistance as “a kind of citizenship that was defined against the state” (Isaac, “Situating Hannah Arendt on Action and Politics,” 536). 62 Eve Seguin, “Review of Graham Harman’s Bruno Latour: Reassembling the Political,” Political Theory, November 24, 2016: 1–4. 63 Arendt, Human Condition, 271, n. 26. 64 Arendt, “Concept of History,” 62. 65 Ibid., 63. 66 Arendt, Human Condition, 271, n. 26. 67 Ibid., 324. A quarter of a century later, Bruno Latour would make the same observation: “it is in laboratories that most new sources of power are generated” (We Have Never Been Modern, 160). 68 Arendt, Human Condition, 271, n. 26.

65 Arendt on Race and Racism Grayson Hunt

Hannah Arendt’s controversial 1959 essay, “Reflections on Little Rock,” is often used to illustrate Arendt’s misguided understanding of race and racism. In it, she describes race as “natural, physical characteristics”1 and black people as “visibly, and by nature unlike the others.”2 This phenotypic view of race marks blackness as a visible difference. Moreover, Arendt describes black parents and NAACP activists as social climbers who expose black children to the indignities of racism by insisting on sending them to federally mandated desegregated schools alongside racist white segregationists.3 Oppressed minorities, Arendt claims, have never been good judges of political priorities, and school desegregationists have chosen to fight for “social opportunity rather than for basic human or political rights.”4 Prior to her reflections on race in the context of federal desegregation policies in the American south, a context with which she was admittedly unfamiliar, Arendt had written on the imperialist origins of racism in European and colonial contexts in her 1951 The Origins of Totalitarianism. It is helpful to situate her analysis of US racism in relation to her understanding of race thinking, an ideological mechanism that helped mobilize imperialism and colonialism. Even with an understanding of her worries about the spread of mass complacency and totalitarianism in mind, however, her views on race in “Reflections” reveal an anti-black bias that is evident in Origins. Some philosophers have attributed this bias to the infamous distinctions that underwrite her political philosophy, that is, the distinctions developed in The Human Condition among the political, social, and private realms, which also are the very distinctions through which the manifestations of racism in the United States (economic and educational) are rendered social patterns rather than political injustices deserving rectification via equal rights. Other philosophers attribute this anti-black bias to a willful

630

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

ignorance that was expressed through her “Olympian authority,” despite the fact she had never visited the south.5 Others yet see her bias as a direct manifestation of her philosophy of understanding, specifically her view that the space of appearance does not require the actual presence of all voices, but that plurality can be secured by representing absent others, a move that leaves her exposed to racial bias. In this chapter, I will evaluate Arendt’s thinking on race, particularly her thinking of black people in the United States, but also in Africa, by paying special attention to works by Anne Norton, Robert Bernasconi, and Kathryn Gines, who argue that her attitudes on race cannot be separated from the rest of her political and moral thinking. This chapter engages notable evidence not only that Arendt had a poor understanding of race in the United States, but that her poor understanding was informed by her own philosophy.

Race, Race Thinking, and Racism Arendt’s groundbreaking analysis of nationalism, colonialism, imperialism, and totalitarianism in The Origins of Totalitarianism offers many insights into how race thinking led to racism in Africa and Europe. In the chapter “Race-Thinking before Racism,” Arendt explains that racism was popular long before the Germans made it a national policy in the 1930s, but that previously, racism was actually only race opinion. Race opinions were among what Arendt called “free opinions,” beliefs that people would argue in favor of in hopes of winning public consent. These opinions were without ideology and as such could still be judged and critiqued by reason.6 Racism did, however, become ideology in Germany and elsewhere when the singular race opinion morphed into a system “strong enough to attract and persuade a majority of people and broad enough to lead them through the various experiences and situations of an average modern life.”7 Racism as ideology was able to lead people in their lives because it claimed to possess the key to history, by which Arendt meant that people were compelled by the Darwinian-inspired view of history as the natural fight of races.8 When these race opinions and race thinking developed into obligatory patterns of thought, racism became understood as fact. And although Arendt thinks that racism was strengthened as a political weapon, she does not claim that nationalism is responsible for the rise of racism. Rather, she sees imperialism as the guiding force of the rise of racism.9 Arendt’s sophisticated understanding of the rise of racism as an imperialist ideology helped illuminate the international appeal of racism, which otherwise remained obscured by the belief that Nazism was simply German nationalism. Her conceptual distinction between the political and the social, however, effectively rendered racist imperialism a problem for the wrong reasons. Part of Arendt’s critique of imperialism is that its expansionist goals

ARENDT ON RACE AND RACISM

 631

brought issues of the private realm, such as economics and labor, into the social realm. It is this expanded social realm that Arendt critiques time and time again in her most famous works, including The Human Condition. Arendt makes the strict social/political distinction in order to restrict the expansion of the social after it had already come to threaten the political in modern times. The social includes economics or “housekeeping” as a public concern, which used to be a private concern. Now money is managed in a public, social manner, but it shouldn’t be considered political. She uses the Greek separation of these realms to critique modern mass society, complacency, and equality as conformism of all rather than the individualism of a few.10 But what Arendt fails to take seriously is that, as Bernasconi makes clear, the evident problem with this conception of political freedom is, not only that it has historically been confined to the few, but also that, of its nature, it is bought at the expense of others. So, in ancient Greece, slaves, women, and, for much of the time, craftsmen were excluded from the political realm. They were denied the opportunity to realize their humanity so that others could do so.11 That racism became ideological through imperialism is unsavory to be sure, but it’s also not a properly political problem for Arendt. Racism remains a social issue of labor and economics even when it is used as a political weapon.

Arendt on Totalitarian Exceptionalism In a move that several philosophers would later criticize and hold up as the shining example of how Arendt’s social/political distinction facilitates an anti-black bias, Arendt maintains that only with the “new global political situation” of totalitarianism could the denial of the right to have rights, the right to action, be taken away. In other words, it wasn’t until the rise of totalitarianism in the 1930s that citizens could be rendered stateless and robbed of personhood. But where does slavery fit into this account? In her section on imperialism in The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt explains that to be rightless is to be stateless, the calamity of which is “not that they are deprived of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness . . . but that they no longer belong to any community whatsoever.”12 For Arendt, not belonging to any community means several things: not that a group is oppressed, but that no one wants to oppress them, and that they are deprived not of the right to freedom, but the right to action and opinion.13 Before Jewish people became stateless under totalitarianism, Arendt claims that human rights were a “general characteristic of the human condition which no tyrant could take away” and that even in slavery, slaves still belonged

632

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

to some kind of human community because their labor was needed, and this fact kept slaves within the pale of humanity.14 But what exactly does community mean in the context of slavery? Did such communities have the right to action and opinion? Certainly not, if a condition for being human and subsequently being political requires that one be free from the necessities of life. As Bernasconi makes clear, Arendt prizes ancient Greek political life, a life in which philosophy and politics are dependent on the enslavement of others: If to be human is to disclose oneself in the public sphere, and if that possibility is itself dependent on one’s being liberated from the necessities imposed by the life-cycle, then it would seem that one of the preconditions of being human is the inhumanity of exploiting the labor of others. In Greece this primarily took the form of slavery. It is no surprise, therefore, to find that the question of slavery underlies all political thought deriving from the Greeks, and that the practice of slavery—or its surrogates—has dominated the practice of politics insofar as it provides the condition of the possibility of politics.15 If slaves weren’t able to enter the space of appearance and were permitted neither to act nor to have opinions, it’s unclear on what grounds these slaves can be thought to have rights. What Bernasconi makes clear is that Arendt believed that the plight of Jewish people under totalitarianism was a novel political harm. In On Revolution, Arendt admits that “abject and degrading misery was present everywhere in the form of slavery and Negro labor,” but again, because poverty for Arendt is not a properly political issue since the distribution of goods is an extension of oikos, the home, and the private sphere, and when done publicly only becomes social, not political.16 She also believes the United States never suffered from poverty in the way Europe did (central claims made throughout On Revolution), and she does not consider slavery as an event that amounts to the loss of community, the space of appearance, and the capacity for self-disclosure through action and opinion. Arendt believes that it is sheer coincidence that the United States struggles with the “color problem” because she believes that racism is a global ideology resulting from imperialism, “the great crime in which America was never involved.”17 Why does Arendt believe that the United States, a country founded by settler colonialism and by the abduction and enslavement of Africans, was never involved in imperialism, rather than a direct product of it? In any case, it is not clear that Arendt would have had a more sympathetic understanding of black people even if she did believe that racism in the United States was a product of imperialist expansion. When Arendt analyzed imperialist racism in Africa (e.g., Boer settlements and the enslavement of black Africans), she demonstrated sympathy for the white Boers and described the enslaved black people as savages.18 While some

ARENDT ON RACE AND RACISM

 633

philosophers have defended Arendt as merely representing (not avowing) the racist attitudes of the Boers, others have criticized her apparent sympathy with the white racists while ignoring the humanity of black Africans and their communities. Bernasconi, referring to Arendt’s refusal to see slavery as a political issue, remarks: It is far from clear that she was right to think that the modern experience of statelessness revealed something entirely new. What could be more contrary to the idea of human rights, the idea of rights due to one by virtue of nothing else than the fact of one’s birth, than the institution of slavery, whereby one is born the property of one’s mother’s master? Was it because in her terms statelessness was a purely political issue, whereas slavery had a connection with the private realm? Or was it also in part because she went too far in trying to make sense of European racial prejudices, as she did in her account of the role of anti-Black racism in establishing the imperialist policies adopted by Whites in Africa?19 Bernasconi suggests that Arendt’s failure to recognize slavery as a form of political statelessness may be the result of not only her problematic conceptual distinctions of private, social, and political but also her inability to see the political harm of slavery may result from a sympathy she developed with the Boers that prevented her from seeing the plight of black people in Africa and the United States.

Anti-black Bias in “Reflections on Little Rock” Arendt’s remarks in “Reflections on Little Rock” shouldn’t be surprising given her conceptual distinctions that place education, poverty, and the economy with the realm of the social, rather than the political realm of equality. For Arendt, the issue more important than school integration relates to anti-miscegenation laws because the right to marry whomever one chooses is a more basic right than the right to attend school wherever one wishes. The right to marry who[m]ever one wishes is an elementary human right compared to which “the right to attend an integrated school, the right to sit where one pleases on a bus, the right to go into any hotel or recreation area or place of amusement, regardless of one’s skin or color or race” are minor indeed.20 Why would Arendt critique anti-miscegenation laws, but not desegregation laws? Because the right to marry whomever one pleases is a basic private right to love whomever one loves (according to the private principle of exclusion). Education is a social matter for Arendt and therefore governed

634

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

by the right to free association (a right which in this case she seems only to afford to racist white parents). To be sure, Arendt does think that political equality for citizens matters, but she has a somewhat libertarian view of how it should be attained, and what institutions and rights should be included in political equality. Political equality for all American citizens should not be secured by overriding the social right to freely associate with whomever one wishes. As people leave their private homes in order to work and pursue happiness, they enter the social realm in which we find the right to free association is governed by the so-called law of “like attracts like.”21 She writes, seemingly without thinking of the consequences for oppressed people, “If as a Jew I wish to spend my vacations only in the company of Jews, I cannot see how anyone can reasonably prevent my doing so; just as I see no reason why other resorts not cater to a clientele that wishes not to see Jews while on a holiday.”22 Of course, some services are public, and as such they need to be made equally available to all citizens, as is the case with buses, train cars, and train stations, as well as hotels and restaurants in business districts. She writes, “Whether privately or publicly owned, [these] are in fact public services that everyone needs in order to pursue his business and lead his life.”23 It may seem odd that Arendt did not include public education as a public service needed to lead one’s life. But the political right to education (the federal law that requires all children to attend school) is guided by equality only in the sense that all students are equally obliged to attend; it does not include the right to attend whatever school one chooses. The right to freely associate is a social right to discriminate, not a political right to equality. Why does Arendt defend the social right to discriminate as a way to protect a parent’s right to send his or her child to a segregated school? There are two reasons provided in her “Little Rock” essay. The first is because her distinctions between political and social are motivated by her fear of mass conformism. For plurality to exist in the public sphere, social conformism needs to be avoided. The second reason has to do with the rights she assigns to the private realm. Generally mandated within the four walls of the home, the private realm is governed by the principle of exclusion: parents can choose whom to allow into their home and what values to teach their children. This realm also seems to protect the parents’ right to send their children to segregated schools. But again, notice that these social and private rights provide an advantage for white parents because the “separate but equal” segregation policies left white schools with better schools than poor black school zones. As I mentioned in the introduction, even emancipated black people, the very subject of “Reflections on Little Rock,” have trouble appearing in public as political actors. Arendt attributes this difficulty to skin color, an attribute that is in fact phenotypically varied and diverse, but which for Arendt is fixed and apparent as different. Arendt believes that skin color appears prior to any speech or action:

ARENDT ON RACE AND RACISM

 635

The Negroes’ visibility is unalterable and permanent. This is not a trivial matter. In the public realm, where nothing counts that cannot make itself seen and heard, visibility and audibility are of prime importance. To argue that they are merely exterior is to beg the question. For it is precisely appearances that “appear” in “public” and inner qualities, gifts of heart or mind are political only to the extent that their owner wishes to expose them in public, to place them in the limelight of the market place.24 But does a person make their outwardly visible characteristics appear? A black person’s race, which for Arendt is synonymous with skin color, appears in public as an unalterable fact, as a mere givenness that cannot be ignored or overlooked. It is surprising that Arendt viewed race as a “natural, physical characteristic” when we consider that she believed racism as ideology was based on the faulty view that the races were naturally separate.25 She seems to understand that viewing a person as mere givenness is dangerous and harmful. She writes, If a Negro in a white community is considered Negro and nothing else, he loses along with his right to equality that freedom of action which is specifically human; all his deeds are now explained as “necessary” consequences of some “Negro” qualities; he has become some specimen of an animal species, called man.26 She continues, “The great danger arising from the existence of people forced to live outside the common world is that they are thrown back, in the midst of civilization, on their natural givenness, on their mere differentiation.”27 Reducing people to an immutable, natural characteristic robs them of their particularity and personality. But this is exactly how Arendt describes Africans in Origins.

Civil Disobedience as a Social Right But what about Arendt’s “Reflections on Civil Disobedience”? Gines’s work focuses on “Reflections on Little Rock,” but also finds problematic discussions of race across all her major works. It is worth examining an article that Arendt published in The New Yorker on September 12, 1970, in contrast to her views expressed eleven years earlier in “Reflections on Little Rock.” Unlike “Reflections on Little Rock,” Arendt appears to champion black leaders who used civil disobedience as a way toward a stronger democracy. Arendt begins her reflections by distinguishing civil disobedience as something public, not private like one’s individual moral conscience. Arendt believed that conscientious objection was an individual, and therefore subjective, judgment brought about through a conversation (or intercourse, as she calls it) between myself and me. Our conscience has

636

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

to do with what we can live with, and it functions to set up negative, rather than positive, freedoms. My conscience tells me not to do something because I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I did something. Conscience is not, therefore, robustly moral. It’s not about making the world better or more just. Conscience is about washing one’s hands of the injustice. She uses Henry David Thoreau’s defiance to make the point. Thoreau, an abolitionist and philosopher, spent a night in jail for refusing to pay a poll tax to a government that permitted slavery. One may see Thoreau’s act as one of civil disobedience, since he broke what he considered an unjust law and paid the price. But Arendt’s distinction between individual conscience and group actions such as civil disobedience is crucial. Her reflection on civil disobedience ends with the view that civil disobedience is the newest iteration of voluntary association, a social right that had not yet found a home within the American legal system, even though it was already certainly in the spirit of American law. Whereas Arendt sees civil disobedience as a new action different from past iterations of conscientious objection, Martin Luther King, Jr., of course, made no such distinction, and furthermore, King undoubtedly saw civil disobedience as an essentially political act, not a social one. But can this distinction undo the harm done in “Reflections on Little Rock” where she calls black parents and desegregationists social climbers who aren’t the best judges of what the black liberation movement needs? By the end of her 1970 article, it’s clear that even civil disobedience, the kind practiced, popularized, and defended by Martin Luther King, Jr., remains a social, not a political act. In fact, it has become the newest form of free association, a social right not easily protected within the American legal system, even though it’s in “in the spirit of American Law,” Arendt writes.28 Again, the organizing efforts of black activists to appear in the political realm is relegated to the realm of the social.

Arendt’s Misrepresentational Thinking Thus far I have discussed how Arendt’s political philosophy can be seen as responsible in part for an anti-black bias that permeates her work on race. But feminist philosophers have argued that Arendt’s moral philosophy, notably her concept of understanding, is to blame. These philosophers argue that Arendt espouses a lack of imagination when it comes to the actual humanity of black people. She cannot imagine herself as a person of color, and people of color are depicted as more bodily and therefore less political, that is, as social animals, than their white counterparts. Although critiques of Arendt’s analysis of black Africans and African Americans is not new, her treatment of anti-black racism and African Americans has come under renewed scrutiny in the work of Gines. Her Hannah Arendt and the Negro Question takes up a different approach that, for the first time, attempts to understand Arendt’s problematic claims

ARENDT ON RACE AND RACISM

 637

about race and racism in the United States as emblematic of her theory of understanding. To posit the origin of what some call Arendt’s antiblack racism on her theory of understanding, rather than on her lack of understanding, as Norton does, or on her problematic distinction between the social and political, as Bernasconi does, Gines effectively doubles-down on the charge that Arendt held anti-black views. Gines argues that Arendt’s Kantian philosophy of understanding supports, and indeed enables, her anti-black views. This unexplored territory of critique, initiated by Gines, centers around a passage in Arendt’s Between Past and Future. It is worth quoting at length in order to capture the spirit of Arendt’s political theory and its underlying theory of judgment. It is here that Gines locates Arendt’s erasure of black experience and the theoretical framework that enables that erasure. Arendt writes: Political thought is representative. I form an opinion by considering a given issue from different viewpoints, by making present to my mind the standpoints of those who are absent; that is, I represent them. This process of representation does not blindly adopt the actual views of those who stand somewhere else, and hence look upon the world from a different perspective; this is a question neither of empathy, as though I tried to be or to feel like somebody else, nor of counting noses and joining a majority but of being and thinking in my own identity where actually I am not. The more people’s standpoints I have present in mind while I am pondering a given issue, and the better I can imagine how I would feel and think if I were in their place, the stronger will be my capacity for representative thinking and the more valid my final conclusion, my opinion. (It is this capacity for an “enlarged mentality” that enables [people] to judge; as such, it was discovered by Kant in the first part of his Critique of Judgment, though he did not recognize the political and moral implications of his discovery.) The very process of opinion formation is determined by those in whose places somebody thinks and uses his own mind, and the only condition for this exertion of the imagination is disinterestedness, the liberation from one’s own private interests. . . . I remain in this world of universal interdependence, where I can make myself the representative of everybody else.29 There are several things to note in this passage, especially including the unsavory implications for being included and appearing in politics. (1) Political thinking represents those who are absent; (2) representative thinking does not adopt a different perspective, but of thinking where one is not; (3) representative thinking engages how one would “feel and think” if one were in another position; (4) this enlarged mentality authorizes judgment; and (5) it is based on a disinterested imagination (the liberation from one’s own private interests) that enables one to be a representative of everyone else.

638

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

Arendt is silent about those whose standpoints are absent and why. But certainly Arendt was aware that race thinking has historically rendered some points of view more salient than others (see her work on race thinking and racism discussed earlier). Moreover, this tendency to make salient the values and ideas of those in political power in the age of imperialism also seems to have a feedback effect on Arendt herself. Although she understands how racial ideologies get established (and disavows their credibility), she nonetheless privileges the dominant standpoint in her own analyses of racism in Africa and the United States. In “Heart of Darkness: Africa and African Americans in the Writings of Hannah Arendt,” Anne Norton calls Arendt to task for rendering the actions and attitudes of a black desegregationist mother politically unintelligible: In asking “What would I do if I were a Negro mother?” Arendt ignores the constitutional power not only of material circumstances, but of cultural constructions of race. She takes the body as a site, a vessel, a set of circumstances, into which she can inject a mind that will be unaltered by this moral metempsychosis. Because she regards the body as natural, and thus beyond the reach of politics, she fails to consider how the political construction of race can reach in to touch the mind. . . . The question “What would I do if I were a Negro mother?” makes a public question a private one.30 The black mother’s decisions, thoughts, and feelings are never engaged. This is in part due to Arendt’s reading of black people as a part of nature, a view developed in Origins, but also due to the fact that she considers much of the civil rights movement to be about social, and not political access. Simply put, Arendt has difficulty attributing political thoughts and motivations to African Americans. Norton’s essay also analyses Arendt’s empathy for white settlers in Africa. Norton argues that Arendt’s account of the Boer settlers in Africa in Origins as a paradigm of imperialist racism leading to a program of slavery shows sympathy with the white racists in their fear of “Black savages.”31 Arendt uncritically adopts Joseph Conrad’s racist novel Heart of Darkness as a representation of Africans, while doing extraordinary work to understand the inner thoughts and feelings of Boer settlers who enslaved black Africans. As Norton puts it, “Arendt put herself in the minds and circumstances of the Boer. She did not attempt to put herself in the minds and circumstances of the African. Arendt gave voice to the Boer. She left the African silent.”32 Arendt is aware that a person can refuse to engage in this “enlarged mentality,” and can instead form an opinion that only takes into account the interests of the group to which that person belongs. Nothing is more common than this refusal to engage in disinterested representative thinking when forming a political opinion. Nonetheless, Arendt ensures us that the “very quality of opinion, as of a judgment, depends upon the

ARENDT ON RACE AND RACISM

 639

degree of its impartiality.”33 But this impartiality is skewed in the case of “Reflections on Little Rock” and elsewhere by the fact that Arendt represents the “Negro question” as a Negro problem instead of a white problem. Racism, while first critiqued by Arendt as an ideology based on opinions that had become understood as fact, seems to have slipped into her own misunderstanding of black people, as evidenced by her adoption of the Boers’ and white segregationists’ attitudes in Origins and “Reflections on Little Rock,” respectively. In Hannah Arendt and the Negro Question, Kathryn Gines notes, “Although Arendt assumes that she is writing from the position of a disinterested or unbiased outsider representing standpoints that are absent, the position she occupies and represents in the Little Rock essay is actually the position of white racists.”34 Arendt’s theory of understanding and its representational thinking appears to require a type of epistemic arrogance that effectively erases plurality, the very condition of politics. For this reason, Gines holds up Arendt’s analysis in “Reflections on Little Rock” as an example of “exclusive representative thinking.”35 Gines concludes by saying, “Arendt’s representation of the Negro question as a Negro problem rather than a white problem is an indication of her poor judgment.”36 Gines’s work reveals not only that Arendt practiced poor judgment but also how her concept of judgment is misguided on its own terms. Only those included within the political are represented, and only those imagining have representative power. Black activism cannot enter into the space of appearance, the space of politics.

Notes 1 Arendt waivers on whether race is synonymous with phenotype. It seems clear that in “Reflections” Arendt believes that the “Color Problem” is caused by the inability of American equality to equalize “what by nature and origin is different.” And yet, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, is less clear on whether she thinks racism is a natural effect of race. Seven years before she wrote her “Reflections,” she analyzed the shift from what she called race thinking to racism in The Origins of Totalitarianism. There, she claims that racism based on the view that race is organic is a fabrication of race thinking that had become ideology (Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism [New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1973], 166). She says that “the organic doctrine of a history for which ‘every race is a separate, complete whole’ was invented by men who needed ideological definitions of national unity as a substitute for political nationhood” (Ibid.). These views lend themselves to a view of race that is politically and socially constructed. Not only that, Arendt is able to see that this view of race as natural is dangerous, for when people are understood as only being this so-called natural characteristic, they are seen as mere givenness and can subsequently be denied the right to action (Ibid., 296). All of this would suggest that Arendt understood all too well how racism as

640

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

ideology operated in the oppression of black people in the United States under slavery. For Arendt, racism vacillates between being a politically produced ideology and a natural effect of biological fact. 2 Hannah Arendt, “Reflections on Little Rock,” Dissent 6, no. 1 (1959): 48. 3 Ibid., 46, 50. 4 Ibid., 46. 5 For her admission that she avoided visiting the US south, see the Preliminary Remarks in “Reflections on Little Rock.” Ralph Ellison referred to Arendt’s “Olympian Authority” in “The World and Jug,” a reference brought to my attention by Kathryn Gines’s Introduction in Hannah Arendt and the Negro Question (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2014), 5. 6 Arendt, Origins, 158. 7 Ibid., 159. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid., 160–61. 10 Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1972), 41. 11 Robert Bernasconi, “The Double Face of the Political and the Social: Hannah Arendt and America’s Racial Divisions,” Research in Phenomenology 26, no. 1 (1996): 6. 12 Arendt, Origins, 295. 13 Ibid., 296. 14 Ibid., 297. 15 Bernasconi, “The Double Face,” 6. 16 Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin Publishing, 2006), 65. 17 Ibid., 46. 18 See “Race and Bureaucracy,” notably the section one, “The Phantom World of the Dark Continent,” in Origins. 19 Bernasconi, “The Double Face,” 6. 20 Arendt, “Reflections,” 49. 21 Ibid., 51. 22 Ibid., 52. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid., 47. 25 Ibid., 48. 26 Arendt, Origins, 301–2. 27 Ibid., 302. 28 Hannah Arendt, “Civil Disobedience,” in Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1970), 49–102, 99. 29 Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 107.

ARENDT ON RACE AND RACISM

 641

30 Anne Norton, “Heart of Darkness: Africa and African Americans in the Writings of Hannah Arendt,” in Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt, ed. Bonnie Honig (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University, 1995), 258. 31 Ibid., 253; Arendt, Origins, 191. 32 Norton, “Heart of Darkness,” 253. 33 Hannah Arendt, “Truth and Politics,” in Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin Publishing, 2006), 223–59, 237. 34 Gines, Hannah Arendt and the Negro Question, 127. 35 Ibid., 126. 36 Ibid., 129.

66 The Stateless: The Logic of the Camp Samir Gandesha

While Arendt touches upon the question of statelessness in many of her occasional writings,1 it is in The Origins of Totalitarianism that she addresses this key problem systematically. So important is this concept that Arendt argues that it is synonymous with the coming into being of a new type of human being: “the kind that are put in concentration camps by their foes and in internment camps by their friends.”2 As she states in the opening sentences of the Preface to the first edition of Origins: “Under the most diverse conditions and disparate circumstances, we watch the development of the same phenomena—homelessness on an unprecedented scale, rootlessness to an unprecedented depth.”3 That the problem of statelessness goes beyond the geopolitical field is indicated by the two synonyms “rootlessness” and, especially, “homelessness.” The latter, in particular, is a key concept of Arendt’s political theory indicating the centrality of the concept of “worldhood” that she draws from the phenomenological tradition. It is through the meaning-constituting activity of work—as distinguished from labor—that we make a home on earth. The human condition of plurality is defined by virtue of its location in the meaningful fabric of the world. Statelessness is the end point of the driving processes inherent in the “social” understood in terms of commodity exchange, mass society, and sociability that contribute to a de-worlding of the world or the process by which the fragile fabric of human meaning is increasingly torn asunder. Statelessness is, therefore, the expression of a much deeper and more profound crisis that lies at the heart of modernity.

THE STATELESS

 643

The methodological challenge of Origins, as Arendt explains, has to do with the fact that in twentieth-century totalitarianism, we are confronted with a novel type of political regime. In the face of such a regime, traditional political categories reveal their shortcomings. The “shock of the new”— and the middle of the twentieth century was nothing if not shocking— must be borne as a kind of “burden” with a kind of methodological, and philosophical courage. Hence, she argues, The conviction that everything that happens on earth must be comprehensible to man can lead to interpreting history by commonplaces. Comprehension  does not mean denying the outrageous, deducing the unprecedented  from precedents, or explaining phenomena by such analogies and generalities  that the impact of reality and the shock of experience are no longer  felt. It means, rather, examining and bearing consciously the burden which  our century has placed on us-neither denying its existence nor submitting meekly to its weight. Comprehension, in short, means the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality-whatever it may be.4 While it may be tempting to understand totalitarianism via the ancient concept of tyranny or the modern concepts of Caesarism or Bonapartism, comprehension, however, entailed a refusal to subsume either case, Hitlerism or Stalinism, beneath already existing political or civilizational categories. Rather, it was necessary to begin the activity of understanding with particulars and not generalities. Arendt would later reflect on the distinctive nature of the logic of political theory in one of her last works, namely, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, which she, surprisingly, located neither in historical works such as “Perpetual Peace,” nor in “Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View” or “What Is Enlightenment?” his architectonic contributions to practical philosophy Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, nor in Critique of Practical Reason, as one might have expected. Rather, she locates it, surprisingly, in his Critique of the Power of Judgment. More specifically, she roots Kant’s political philosophy in his account of reflective as opposed to determinative judgment—rooted in sensus communis or “common sense” that moves from particulars to universals rather than from universals to particulars.5 Reflective judgment can be understood as aiming at universality insofar as it takes into account the shared sense embodied in human understanding itself located in a distinct form of life (bios). It is tied, therefore, to imagination, in making the absent viewpoints of others present in precisely in such judgment. Nowhere was the challenge to confront the new of the unprecedented greater than in the phenomenon of “statelessness”: Much more stubborn in fact and much more far-reaching in consequence has been statelessness, the newest mass phenomenon in contemporary

644

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

history,  and the existence of an ever-growing new people comprised of stateless  persons, the most symptomatic group in contemporary politics. Their existence can hardly be blamed on one factor alone, but if we consider the different groups among the stateless it appears that every political event since the end of the first World War inevitably added a new category to those who lived outside the pale of the law, while none of the categories, no matter how the original constellation changed, could ever be renormalized.6 Origins seeks to provide an account of “totalitarianism” by constructing a historical constellation of elements of which statelessness played a key role, with the Jews as the quintessential “pariah” (Max Weber) and therefore also the stateless people, so “anti-Semitism” as it played out from Germany, with the distinction between the assimilated and “Shtetl” Jew or the parvenu and pariah, to the French Dreyfus affair. In the latter, the nation was constituted explicitly in opposition to the rootless, cosmopolitan, and “traitorous” figure of the Jew personified by the falsely accused Captain Alfred Dreyfus. To anti-Semitism, Arendt adds, in the second section of the book, the role of imperialism in which racism comes to play an ever more pronounced role. Indeed, totalitarianism in its National Socialist form entails the application of colonial techniques of domination and control to Europe itself.7 The third section on “totalitarianism” proper, which is grounded in the loneliness of deracinated, “homeless,” subjects that comprise the “mass,” the alliance between elite and mob, totalitarian propaganda and organization within the connect of quasi-Darwinian philosophies of history, emphasizing the planetary struggle between races (Nazism) and classes (Stalinism). There are at least three ways in which the concept of statelessness—a concept that, it goes without saying, has only gained in importance in our own time—plays a key role in Arendt’s thinking: the transformation of the distinctive nature of human life in to naked life; the opposition between pariah and parvenu; finally, the phenomenon of statelessness pushes the discourse of human rights to its limits. It does so insofar as those reduced to a condition of naked life—those, in other words, with the most legitimate claim to human rights—are those who paradoxically have the least “right” to it because they are members of no political community or state. Statelessness plays a key role in the logic by which human beings are reduced to a condition of animality suspended between life and death. The nature of this logic is exterminationist, which is to say, its telos or end lies in genocide. This is the logic stretching, as it were, from Nuremburg to Wannsee, from the discriminatory laws passed in 1935 to the Wannsee Conference of early 1942 at which the Final Solution to the “Jewish Question” was decided. For Arendt, this was a logic whereby human life, understood as belonging to a specific fabric of meaningfulness constituted by what she calls “the world,” was reduced to the baseline of naked life that humans shared with other living beings. This logic represented a kind of reification

THE STATELESS

 645

or thingification of the human being, a reduction of the inherently temporal human existence, poised between birth and death, natality and mortality, to mere animal existence. In other words, the condition of statelessness constituted a crucial waystation in the transformation of human life from bios to zōē. As Arendt explains in her magnum opus The Human Condition:  “The chief characteristic of this specifically human life, whose appearance and disappearance constitute worldly events, is that it is itself always full of events which ultimately can be told as a story, establish a biography; it is of this life, bios as distinguished from mere zōē, that Aristotle said that it ‘somehow is a kind of praxis.’”8 In the concentration camp (Lager)— that space where “everything was possible”—we witness an acceleration and crystallization of this logic whereby inmates are increasingly stripped of what it is about them that makes them human. The inmates’ capacity for personhood, to be able to narrate the temporal shape of their lives in the form of a biography, which means to be differentiated from others, already undermined by discriminatory Nuremburg Laws, was progressively and decisively destroyed in the camp. This is, incidentally, why, as Primo Levi showed in his arresting writings on the camp, what often separated the “drowned” from the “saved,”9 the so-called “Musalmänner” from the survivors, was the unwavering attachment to the individualized rituals of everyday life.10 It was through her account of the camp that Arendt was able to depict the manner in which totalitarianism represents the deepening hold of the metabolic logic of the social that violently liquidates differences. In Agamben’s view, the Musalman is a biopolitical figure par excellence insofar as he is understood as “Homo Sacer,” that is, he who can be put to death by sovereign power.11 While Arendt’s intention was to criticize Marx’s conception of the “metabolization of nature”12 in her account of the social, she was actually much closer to him than she thought. This becomes clearer with the socalled “neue Lekture der Marx” from the late 1960s onwards. These new readings emphasized the centrality of Marx’s critique of the value-form. Figures like Postone emphasize the way in which that far from articulated from the normative position of concrete labor, Marx’s critique was in fact primarily directed against “abstract labour” that corresponds to the general equivalent, law of value and to the compulsive and reductive assimilation of difference by identity.13 In other words, for Marx, the assimilation of difference was not to be celebrated but to be criticized. Communism could, in fact, be understood as a community of “conscious pariahs” insofar as it was a form of society in which the freedom of each was premised upon the freedom of all and vice versa.14 Totalitarianism doesn’t so much represent the logic of Marx’s account of the social as it does the value-form which was the object of his critique. The second way in which statelessness figures in Arendt’s work is that it highlights the intensification of the opposition between pariah

646

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

and parvenu. Reflecting her own experience as a “stateless person” after the Second World War, Arendt showed the way in which settled refugees were forced to choose between two options: between resisting assimilation to the host country by embracing a kind of social-death or by engaging in a kind of self-directed violence and subordinating herself to it its normative order. Man is a social animal and life is not easy for him when social ties are cut off. Moral standards are much easier kept in the texture of a society. Very few individuals have the strength to conserve their own integrity if their social, political and legal status is completely confused. Lacking the courage to fight for a change of our social and legal status, we have decided instead, so many of us, to try a change of identity. And this curious behavior makes matters much worse. The confusion in which we live is partly our own work.15 Arendt goes on to tell the proverbial story of a certain Mr. Cohn, the exemplary parvenu, who, in a fruitless effort to forget (and make the world forget) his own Jewishness becomes  first a German, then a Czech, an Austrian and finally a French “patriot.” But, ultimately, assimilation was no answer insofar as he was never permitted to properly belong to these nations. On the other hand, Jews faced persecution from other Jews. Arendt was aware of the particular animus reserved by German Jews from those Jews who hailed from the East or the so-called Shtetl Jews. French Jewry was absolutely convinced that all Jews coming from beyond the Rhine were what they called  Polaks—what German Jewry called  Ostjuden. But those Jews who really came from eastern Europe could not agree with their French brethren and called us  Jaeckes. The sons of these  Jaecke-haters—the second generation born in France and already duly assimilated—shared the opinion of the French Jewish upper class. Thus, in the very same family, you could be called a Jaecke by the father and a Polak by the son. This “strength to conserve one’s own integrity” in the face of this points back to the problem of political judgment and informs Arendt’s conception of the political, which I will return to shortly. The third aspect of statelessness that plays a significant role in Arendt’s work is the way in which it dramatically illuminated the limits of human rights. Critics of the French Revolution, such as Edmund Burke, were skeptical of the very premise of universal human rights, as, for example, set forth in the revolution’s “Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen,” that one could in fact speak of the “rights” of the “human being” in the abstract rather than the rights of members of particular historically situated nations.16 Arendt shows the historical truth of this intuition insofar as those

THE STATELESS

 647

most in need of the protections of “human rights,” namely, the stateless, were the least able to call upon them. Not only did loss of national rights in all instances entail the loss of human rights; the restoration of human rights, as the recent example of the State of Israel proves, has been achieved so  far only through the restoration or the establishment of national rights. The conception of human rights, based upon the assumed existence of a human being as such, broke down at the very moment when those who professed to believe in it were for the first time confronted with people who had indeed lost all other qualities and specific relationships-except that they were still human. The world found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human.17 What the stateless revealed was the hidden premise that Burke indicated and to which Arendt’s own analysis also pointed, namely, that it was necessary “to have a right to rights.”18 The idea that one required a “right to rights” indicated the supreme irony of human rights: the supposed bearer of human rights, the human being as such, the “man without qualities,” was precisely unable to claim them. What Arendt pointed to was precisely the contradiction inherent in the idea of the “rights of man and citizen,” that, on the one hand, it asserted the undeniable and inalienable rights of the human being, yet on the other, made clear that there simply were no rights other than those granted by nations. How are we to relate these three dimensions of the condition of statelessness: its generation of a historically new type of human being, crystallization of the opposition between the parvenu and the pariah, and the way it makes explicit the implicit crisis inherent in the doctrine of human rights? All three dimensions of statelessness could be said to culminate, negatively, in Arendt’s conception of the political space as constituted, indeed, bounded by the world comprised of past meaningful speech and action. This shared world, which elaborated a temporal barrier between new instances of speech and action, on the one hand, and the atemporal processes of metabolism with nature, allowed for the human condition of plurality to come to full fruition. In marked contrast to the disappearing totalitarian space in which subjects are bound together, the political space is the space that opens between subjects, that preserves their differences. Within such political space, subjects can act in concert without subordinating themselves to a dominating, overarching identity. In this conception, one could truly say, the refugee isn’t simply the “vanguard of his people” insofar as for him history is no longer a closed book but also the avant-garde of political understanding insofar as he adopts the position of the “conscious pariah.” It is the conscious pariah, the new type of human being, figures like Rahel Varhagen, Rosa Luxemburg and, indeed, Hannah Arendt, herself,  who are the least able to rely on existing concepts within which to subsume the particulars of political life,

648

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

who must find the “strength to conserve their own integrity,” and think for themselves by generating new concepts with which to understand the world. Two decades into to the twenty-first century, the problem of statelessness has begun to rival that from the period from the end of the First World War to the immediate postwar period. Hannah Arendt’s thoughts on this phenomenon are being enthusiastically revisited by journalists and philosophers. The stateless appear not only in familiar guises such as the refugee fleeing ethnic or communal persecution, for example, but also as second-class citizens who are one step away from having their citizenship revoked because of real or perceived transgressions. However, here it is important to heed Arendt’s own strictures against a complacent form of comprehension and on her insistence on the importance of coming to terms with what is distinctive about the historically unprecedented condition of statelessness.

Notes 1 See for example the essays collected in Hannah Arendt, The Jewish Writings, ed. Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman (New York: Schocken Books, 2007). 2 Hannah Arendt, “We Refugees,” The Jewish Writings, ed. Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 265. 3 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Brace Inc, 1976), vii. 4 Ibid., viii. 5 Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 83–84.  6 Arendt, Origins, 276–77. 7 See also Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 2005) and Enzo Traverso, Origins of Nazi Violence (New York: The New Press, 2003) for similar arguments. 8 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 97. 9 Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2017). 10 This leads to the paradox identified by Giorgio Agamben in Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (New York: Zone Books, 2002) that ultimately the true horror of the camps was unknowable: Those who experienced the worst didn’t survive and those who survived didn’t experience the worst. 11 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). 12 Arendt, Human Condition, 79–135.

THE STATELESS

 649

13 Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 14 Such a reading, of course, flies in the face of his argument for the liberation of Jews from Judaism as part of the project of human liberation in his 1843 “On the Jewish Question.” 15 Arendt, “We Refugees,” 271. 16 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (London: Penguin, 1982). 17 Arendt, Origins, 299. 18 Ibid., 296.

67 World Alienation and the Search for Home in Arendt’s Philosophy David Macauley

Introduction With original, wide-ranging, and unconventional thinkers, it is often possible to find striking diagnoses of and useful philosophical tools for grasping complex social problems and political questions. Their work appears at times to embrace a kind of theoretical midwifery, facilitating and bearing new ideas, novel concepts, and unique perspectives into public discourse and intellectual dialogue. Such is the case with Hannah Arendt. Among many valuable insights, she provides a thoughtful framework for engaging the related phenomena that she identifies as world alienation and earth alienation, including our attempts to transcend or escape our given home and the human condition, a notion that she develops and defends and which stands in contrast to a more traditional and essentialist conception of human nature. In articulating these ideas, Arendt builds upon a distinction between earth and world, and directs our attention to the estrangement that she claims individuals in modern society encounter in or from both realms. In the process, she reveals a broad and robust concern with human dwelling— both on the Earth and in the world—an activity she characterizes as well in terms of the emergence of homelessness and rootlessness. Arendt thereby seeks to “trace back modern world alienation, its twofold flight from the Earth into the universe and from the world into the self, to its origins.”1 The resulting discussion is one that helps to inform her understanding of the public sphere, modernity, and the political community.

WORLD ALIENATION AND THE SEARCH FOR HOME

 651

World Alienation and Earth Alienation For Arendt, world alienation implies a loss of shared experiences, intersubjective reality, and commonality. This alienation involves a “distance which man puts between himself and the world,” threatening the very integrity of the political sphere.2 The “world” consists of human artifacts and objects, but it is much more than that because it is also potentially a durable sphere and a symbolic space of shared action and plurality. By extension, “worldliness” is essential for the well-being of the human condition since it furnishes a space between people and provides for the possibility of a viable public realm (a deeper and more defined dimension of the world), where we can gather, disclose ourselves, and act in concert. By contrast, “worldlessness” entails instability, abolishes human identity, and contributes to consumerism, the transformation of work into labor, and the rise of humans as animal laborans. Arendt employs the term “alienation” in a decidedly distinct manner. She does not use the concept in a Hegelian sense (false consciousness), an explicitly Marxian way (alienated labor; economic factors), or in a strictly existentialist manner (inauthenticity and uncanniness), though there are some occasional similarities in its invocation.3 In The Origins of Totalitarianism—where themes of rootlessness and homelessness occur in the analysis of imperialism and totalitarianism—she observes that the “alien” is “a frightening symbol of the fact of difference as such, of individuality as such, and indicates those realms in which man cannot change and cannot act and in which, therefore, he has a distinct tendency to destroy.”4 For Arendt, alienation is not simply a feeling, a matter of the conscious or unconscious mind, or merely an aspect of the self or physical body. Rather, it is more generally a modern condition grounded phenomenologically in historical events and circumstances. Furthermore, her conception of alienation seems to entail the presumption of being at home in the world and on the Earth, a deep and basic human need that arguably even becomes a kind of quasi “religious commitment” for her.5 Alienation thus implies the loss of a common sense of place and belonging or the absence of a sphere where meaningful activity can be pursued together with others and secured by the bonds of tradition, language, or culture. Arendt maintains that while world alienation has determined the very course of development for modern society, it is actually of relatively “minor significance” compared with earth alienation, which is the distinguishing feature of modern science. Nevertheless, it turns out that the sources of earth and world alienation are closely connected to each other. Earth alienation is the phenomenon and process whereby the takinghold, conquest, and transformation of Earth through modern geographic explorations, political expropriations, and technological inventions—and then later the flight from Earth into space—have resulted in a collapse

652

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

of spatial distances, a shrinkage and alteration of public places, and an estrangement from the planet. Earth alienation is symbolized by the launching in 1957 of a satellite into outer space and stands in relation, though not complete opposition, to world alienation, which involves the ongoing loss of a secure home in the world for many groups of people, as well as the increasing abolition of otherness. Such alienation begins historically with events in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including, first, the discovery of America and the mapping and charting of the Earth; second, the Reformation, which expropriated land and uprooted millions of homes; third, the invention of the telescope, which encouraged a departure into space and a new universal relation to the cosmos; and finally, the triumph of Cartesian doubt and geometry, which freed humans from geocentric notions of space.6 In The Human Condition and other writings Arendt examines these events and themes connected with them in an attempt to understand our heightening estrangement from Earth and the dangerous tendency to escape earth-bound inhabitancy and to carry the unpredictability and irreversibility of human actions into the natural world. In so doing, Arendt locates an intimate and important link between the concepts of nature and history, especially for the ancient Greeks. At the beginning of Western history, a distinction was made between the mortality of humans and the immortality of nature, and this difference was the basic assumption of historiography. The chore of history, as she puts it, was “to save human deeds from the futility that comes from oblivion.”7 Through history, humans can attempt to achieve greatness and immortality and to transcend our own earthly mortality. We can “almost” become equals with nature through great deeds, words, or events. Nature achieves such immortality without effort, she asserts, while humans must strive consciously for it. According to Arendt’s account, it was in late antiquity when history was re-integrated into nature and viewed in the same terms as biological life (as having circular movement) that the possibility of greatness for humans was lost. With this occurrence, “immortality has fled the world,” and such a condition is tantamount for Arendt to a kind of homelessness.8 Immortal things “have lost their home in the world; since the world, since nature is perishable” and these objects and events, too, start to perish as soon as they come into being.9 In this regard, Arendt introduces a strong distinction between culture (or history) and nature. As in The Human Condition, she upholds the former realm of the artificially permanent (culture, history, and world) over the latter realm of the naturally changing and fleeting (nature, biology, and the Earth), drawing a sharp contrast between them that cannot always be adequately supported. This desire for immortality and the lamentation at its loss can be seen not only as an attempt to secure a more or less stable place in the world but also as a desire to escape nature and to avoid the very natural phenomenon of death. It too is a rebellion against the human condition, no less than the desire to literally flee the Earth’s atmosphere

WORLD ALIENATION AND THE SEARCH FOR HOME

 653

that Arendt finds as an unfortunate hallmark of the modern age. It leads Arendt in turn to locate in art, as opposed to nature, one of the few realms of permanence, objectivity, stability, and value because art offers redemptive power potentially for society.

Arendt’s Influences There are several influences upon Arendt’s thinking about earth and world alienation. First, Arendt holds with confidence that the Greeks “dreaded” the devaluation of the world and nature with its “inherent anthropocentrism” and so she looks toward the ancients for recovering, or at least rethinking, a conception of politics and the natural world that preserves their original meaning and that fosters a sense of greatness and immortality.10 Second, in her discussions of world and earth alienation, Arendt adverts frequently to the philosophical positions of Alfred North Whitehead and Alexandre Koyré. With Whitehead, she critiques the foundations of modern science, borrows his views on the telescope and Cartesian thought, and discovers with him that the “complexity of nature is inexhaustible.”11 She also draws upon Koyré’s milestone work, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe, which explores the process through which humans have lost their place in the world as we have transitioned from a finite, closed, value-laden, and hierarchical conception of the world to one marked by indefiniteness, infinity, value-free aspects, and ontological parity. Finally and most significantly, Arendt adopts and then creatively adapts Heideggerian notions related to both the Earth and the world. Heidegger’s conceptions of “worldhood” and “being-in-the-world” are, for example, enlarged to include a sense of being-with-others. Heidegger also spoke of the shrinkage or abolition of distances brought about through modern technology, showed a concern with the problem of homelessness, and used the language of “world-withdrawal” and “world-decay.”12 Heidegger, too, underscored the fact that something of vital and animating importance has been lost in the translation of Greek words into Latin and other Roman languages, processes whereby we have severed and alienated ourselves from the original Greek thinking.13 According to him, the “rootlessness of Western thought begins with this translation,” a theme which becomes very important to Arendt.14

Significance and Criticisms Arendt’s ideas on earth and world alienation as well as her related views on technology, nature, and the public realm have become of interest to contemporary environmental thinkers. Her analyses and warnings about the transformation of the planet and human world have been engaged, applied,

654

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO ARENDT

and critiqued by recent philosophers and political theorists in constructive ways. Kerry Whiteside argues that Arendt’s conceptions of worldliness and culture provide a working ethic for the treatment of nonhuman things.15 Anne Chapman and Paul Ott both explore Arendt’s conceptions of the world and the Earth, with Ott developing a view of environmental ethics visà-vis a notion of “world mediation” and Chapman applying interpretations of the world and earth distinction to a controversy regarding wind farms in the UK.16 Finn Bowring in turn uses Arendt’s theory of worldliness to argue for a “conservationist” reading of her work that encourages care for the world in a way that is close to the view of nature held by the Romans and compatible in some respects with Marx.17 Paul Voice looks at the links between the political conditions of freedom and the material or biological conditions of existence in Arendt and the constraints she develops against “consuming” the world.18 And David Macauley examines Arendt’s work on earth and world alienation in terms of an ecological politics of place, focusing on her views of nature, science, and technology along with the practice of agriculture.19 There are, of course, questions that can be raised about Arendt’s accounts, especially the ambiguity or ambivalence they show with respect to the status of the “natural” and “artificial” in relation to the modern world and to each other, the diminished role of inner-worldly alienation (or what Weber termed “inner-worldly asceticism”) in her narrative, and more broadly, her “reluctant” or critical modernism. Despite these and other challenges to or limitations of her thought, Arendt presciently alerts us to the estrangement many experience in the modern world and to our risky attempts to flee, fly from, or free ourselves from the physical earth. In so doing, she offers us a deep and nuanced account of political theory, recovering insights from ancient Greek thought, history, and phenomenology that are relevant to contemporary society, even if her particular positions are at times problematic.

Notes 1 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1958), 6. 2 Ibid., 252, fn 2. 3 Marx identified four different kinds of alienation involved in the labor process: (1) alienation from nature and the sensuous external world expressed the relation with the product of one’s labor; (2) estrangement from self and one’s activity; (3) alienation from the human species-being and; (4) estrangement from other humans. Arendt’s thought cuts across some of these distinctions, though she would not likely acknowledge Marx’s third sense because she is critical of essentialist conceptions of human nature. 4 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Meridian Books, 1958), 301.

WORLD ALIENATION AND THE SEARCH FOR HOME

 655

5 George Kateb, Hannah Arendt: Politics, Conscience, Evil (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Allanheld, 1983), 158. Even if Arendt is generally un-theological, a commitment that is religiously held does not necessarily entail reference to the transcendental. It can include issues or articles of faith, passion, and even unidentified assumptions to which one subscribes. The theologian Paul Tillich, for example, identified faith as one’s “ultimate concern,” construed in a broad sense. 6 Arendt challenges modern mathematics and Cartesian geometry in particular because they can reduce all that is not human into numerical formulas and truths. They free us potentially from finitude, terrestrial life and geocentric notions of space. They remove the geo (the Earth) out of geometry, in effect. The transition from natural science to universal science and the creation of a new Archimedean point (a metaphor Descartes uses in his Second Meditation) in the human mind, where it can be moved about, is at the center of her view of earth alienation and a distinguishing characteristic of the modern world. 7 Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Six Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Penguin Books, 1966), 41. 8 Ibid: 44. 9 Ibid. 10 Arendt, The Human Condition, 157. Arendt defines anthropocentrism as “the ‘absurd’ opinion that man is the highest being and that everything else is subject to the exigencies of human life” (ibid.). 11 Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (New York: Free Press, 1969), 126. 12 Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 41. 13 Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Co., 1961), 13. See also Heidegger, Early Greek Thinking (San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row, 1984). 14 Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 23. 15 K. H. Whiteside, “Worldliness and Respect for Nature: An Ecological Appreciation of Hannah Arendt’s Conception of Culture,” Environmental Values 7, no. 1(1998): 25–40 and Whiteside, “Hannah Arendt and Ecological Politics,” Environmental Ethics 16, no. 4 (1994): 339–58. 16 Anne Chapman, “The Ways That Nature Matters: The World and the Earth in the Thought of Hannah Arendt,” Environmental Values 16, no. 4 (2007): 433– 45. Paul Ott, “World and Earth: Hannah Arendt and the Human Relationship to Nature,” Ethics, Place & Environment 12, no. 1 (2009): 1–16. 17 Finn Bowring, “Arendt after Marx: Rethinking the Dualism of Nature and World,” Rethinking Marxism 26, no. 2 (2014): 278–90. 18 Paul Voice, “Consuming the World: Hannah Arendt on Politics and the Environment,” Journal of International Political Theory 9, no. 2 (2013): 178–93. 19 David Macauley, “Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Place: From Earth Alienation to Oikos,” in Minding Nature: The Philosophers of Ecology, ed. David Macauley (New York: Guilford Press, 1996).

CONTRIBUTORS

Peter Baehr is Research Professor of Social Theory at Lingnan University, Hong Kong. He writes on European and American social and political thought. Baehr is the editor of The Portable Hannah Arendt (2002), the co-editor (with Philip Walsh) of the Anthem Companion to Hannah Arendt (2016; 2019), and the author of Hannah Arendt, Totalitarianism, and the Social Sciences (2010). His latest book is The Unmasking Style in Social Theory (2019). James Barry, Jr., is Professor of Philosophy at Indiana University Southeast. He is the author of Measures of Science (1997) and the co-editor of MerleauPonty: Texts and Dialogues (1996). He is the editor of the journal Arendt Studies published by the Philosophy Documentation Center. He is the cofounder and a member of the Board of Advisors of the Hannah Arendt Circle. His most recent articles include “The Growth of the Social Realm in Arendt’s Post-Mortem of the Modern Nation-State” and “The Risk of Total Divergence: Politicized Intelligence and Defactualization in the Age of Imminent War.” He is currently completing a book-length study on the legacies of expropriation and the rise of modern poverty at play in Arendt’s work. Ronald Beiner is Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. His recent books include Civil Religion: A Dialogue in the History of Political Philosophy (2011), Political Philosophy: What It Is and Why It Matters (2014), and Dangerous Minds: Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the Return of the Far Right (2018). He is also the editor of Hannah Arendt’s Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy (1982). Andrew Benjamin is Distinguished Professor of Architectural Theory at the University of Technology, Sydney (and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Monash University Melbourne). His recent publications include Towards a Relational Ontology: Philosophy’s Other Possibility (2015), Art’s Philosophical Work (2015), and Virtue in Being (2016). Roger Berkowitz is the founder and Academic Director of the Hannah Arendt Center and Professor of Political Studies and Human Rights at Bard

658

CONTRIBUTORS

College. He is the author of The Gift of Science: Leibniz and the Modern Legal Tradition (2005), co-editor of Artifacts of Thinking: Reading Hannah Arendt’s Denktagebuch (2017) and Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics (2010), and the editor of the journal HA: The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center. James Bernauer is the Kraft Family Professor of Philosophy at Boston College. He is the author of Michel Foucault’s Force of Flight: Toward an Ethics for Thought (1990). Among other collections, he is the editor of Amor Mundi: Explorations in the Faith and Thought of Hannah Arendt (1987) and the co-editor (with Robert Maryks) of The Tragic Couple: Encounters between Jews and Jesuits (2013). Richard Bernstein is an American philosopher who teaches at the New School for Social Research. He has written extensively about a broad array of issues and philosophical traditions including American pragmatism, neopragmatism, critical theory, deconstruction, social philosophy, political philosophy, and hermeneutics. His most recent books include Violence: Thinking without Banisters (2013), Pragmatic Encounters (2016), Ironic Life (2016), and Why Read Hannah Arendt Now? (2018). Leora Bilsky is the Benno Gitter Chair in Human Rights and Holocaust Research at the Tel Aviv University faculty of law and Director of the Minerva Center for Human Rights. She has served as Editor-in-Chief of the political theory journal Theory and Criticism, and as the editor of law journals Mishpatim, Iyunei Mispat, and Theoretical Inquiries in Law. She is the author of Transformative Justice: Israeli Identity on Trial (2004) and The Holocaust, Corporations, and the Law: Unfinished Business (2017). Her main areas of research are law and the Holocaust, political trials, transitional justice, international criminal law, feminist legal theory, and the relationship between law, history, and memory. Her current research focuses on restitution and cultural genocide. Peg Birmingham is Professor of Philosophy at DePaul University. She is the author of Hannah Arendt and Human Rights: The Predicament of Common Responsibility (2006) and the co-editor (with Philippe van Haute) of Dissensus Communis: Between Ethics and Politics (1996) and (with Anna Yeatman) of Aporia of Rights: Citizenship in an Era of Human Rights (2014). She is the editor of Philosophy Today. Robert Burch is Professor Emeritus, Philosophy, University of Alberta. In addition to work on Arendt, he has published articles on hermeneutics, philosophy of education, philosophy of technology, phenomenology, aesthetics, and history of philosophy, including on Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Croce, Hegel, and Kant. He co-edited (with Massimo Verdicchio) Between

CONTRIBUTORS

 659

Philosophy and Poetry: Writing, Rhythm, History (2002). In retirement he is working on a translation of the Iliad for fun, and a reading of Kant’s moral philosophy and the primacy practical reason for edification. Lucy Cane is Visiting Assistant Teaching Professor at the University of Denver, where she teaches political theory and US constitutional law. Her first book, Sheldon Wolin and Democracy: Seeing Through Loss (Routledge) is forthcoming in 2020. She has published in European Journal of Political Theory, Political Theory, New Political Science, The Oxford Handbook of Classics in Contemporary Political Theory, and Oxford Bibliographies Online. Peter F. Cannavò is Professor of Government and Environmental Studies at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York. He is the author of The Working Landscape: Founding, Preservation, and the Politics of Place (2007), the co-editor (with Joseph Lane) of Engaging Nature: Environmentalism and the Political Theory Canon (2014), and the author of various articles and book chapters on the relationship between environmentalism and civic republicanism. He is currently writing a book on the green civic republican tradition in the United States. Adriana Cavarero is an Italian philosopher and feminist thinker. She holds the title of Professor of Political Philosophy at the Università degli studi di Verona. She has also held visiting appointments at the University of California, Berkeley, and Santa Barbara, at the New York University and Harvard. She focuses on natality, narration, vocality, embodied subjectivities, and sexual difference. Her books include In Spite of Plato: A Feminist Rewriting of Ancient Philosophy (1995), Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood (2000), Stately Bodies: Literature, Philosophy and the Question of Gender (2002), For More Than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression (2005), Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence (2009), and Inclinations: A Critique of Rectitude (2016). William W. Clohesy is Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at the University of Northern Iowa. He has written extensively on Kant’s ethics and political thought, on the US Constitution, and on Hannah Arendt. Papers delivered at recent International Kant Congresses are “Kant’s Opposition to Lying from Expediency” (2005) and “The Objectivity of the Categorical Imperative in the Foundations” (2015). His essay, “Altruism and the Endurance of the Good,” published in Voluntas (2001), studies the political importance of the independent sector drawing crucially upon Hannah Arendt’s political thought. Clohesy holds a PhD in Philosophy from the New School. Wout Cornelissen recently held a position as Research Assistant Professor at Vanderbilt University and is currently appointed as Wissenschaftlicher

660

CONTRIBUTORS

Mitarbeiter in the Institute for Philosophy of the Free University Berlin. He holds a PhD in Philosophy from Leiden University and specializes in political and social philosophy and twentieth-century continental philosophy. His first monograph, a critical interpretation of the relation between political acting and thinking in the writing of Karl Popper, Leo Strauss, and Hannah Arendt, is under contract with Fordham UP. He is co-editing the new and critical edition of Arendt’s The Life of the Mind, as part of the critical edition of her Complete Works, published by Wallstein, Göttingen. Jeremy Elkins is Associate Professor of Political Science at Bryn Mawr College. He has written on a wide variety of topics, including truth and democracy; sacrifice, identity, and law; constitutional founding; declaration of rights; the model of war as social policy; and law and globalization. His current research draws on psychoanalytic ideas to examine the role of movement and aggression in human desire and the implications for social organization. He is currently an advanced psychoanalytic clinical candidate at the Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia. Rick Elmore is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Appalachian State University. He earned his PhD in Philosophy from DePaul University in 2012. He researches and teaches on twentieth-century French philosophy, critical theory, ethics, social political philosophy, environmental philosophy, and new realisms. His articles and essays have appeared in Politics & Policy, Symplokē, Symposium, The Cormac McCarthy Journal, Edinburgh Companion to Animal Studies, and The Aesthetic Ground of Critical Theory. Robert Fine was a British sociologist. He was a leading European scholar on the history of social and political thought, cosmopolitan social theory, the social theory of Karl Marx and Hannah Arendt, the Holocaust and contemporary anti-semitism, crimes against humanity and human rights. Jennifer Gaffney is an assistant professor of philosophy in the Department of Philosophy at at Loyola University Chicago. Her interests are in social and political philosophy with emphases on continental philosophy, philosophy of race, ethics, and the history of philosophy. Gaffney is the author of Political Loneliness: Modern Liberal Subjects in Hiding (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2020) and has published in such journals as Philosophy and Social Criticism, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, and Philosophy Today. She is also the co-founder and associate editor of Arendt Studies: A Journal for Research on the Life, Work, and Legacy of Hannah Arendt. Samir Gandesha is Associate Professor in the Department of the Humanities and Director of the Institute for the Humanities at Simon Fraser University in

CONTRIBUTORS

 661

Vancouver, Canada. His work has appeared in Political Theory, New German Critique, Constellations Logos, Kant-Studien, Philosophy and Social Criticism, the European Legacy, the European Journal of Social Theory, as well as in several edited books. He is the co-editor (with Lars Rensmann) of Arendt and Adorno: Political and Philosophical Investigations (2012), (with Johan Hartle) of Spell of Capital: Reification and Spectacle (2017), and (with Johan Hartle) of Aesthetic Marx (2017). He has been Liu Boming Visiting Scholar in Philosophy at the University of Nanjing and Visiting Lecturer at Suzhou University of Science and Technology in China, Visiting Scholar at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Karlsruhe, and Visiting Lecturer at the University of São Paulo, and is a Visiting Faculty Member at the Paris Institute for Critical Thinking. Susannah Gottlieb is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern University. She is the author of Regions of Sorrow: Anxiety and Messianism in Hannah Arendt and W.H. Auden (2003) and the editor of Hannah Arendt: Reflections on Literature and Culture (2007). Her forthcoming book is entitled Auden and the Muse of History. Peter Gratton is Assistant Professor of Philosophy in the Department of History and Political Science at Southeastern Louisiana University, where he specializes in the history of ideas and contemporary European philosophy, and is a board member of the Association for Philosophy and Literature. He is the series co-editor of New Perspectives in Ontology and Textures and has published such works as The State of Sovereignty (2012) and Speculative Realism: Problems and Prospects (2014). The editor of seven books, including co-editing two on Jean-Luc Nancy, he has also published dozens of articles and chapters in such journals as Angelaki, Philosophy Today, and Telos. Dean Hammer is the John W. Wetzel Professor of Classics and Professor of Government at Franklin and Marshall College (USA). He has written on ancient political thought and Hannah Arendt. His works include Roman Political Thought: From Cicero to Augustine, Roman Political Thought and the Modern Theoretical Imagination, The Iliad as Politics; The Performance of Political Thought, The Puritans in Revolutionary, Federalist, and Whig Political Thought: The Rhetoric of Origins, and an edited volume, A Companion to Greek Democracy and the Roman Republic. Patrick Hayden is Professor of Political Theory and International Relations at the University of St Andrews, UK. His publications include Political Evil in a Global Age: Hannah Arendt and International Theory (2009), and Hannah Arendt: Key Concepts (2014). Samantha Rose Hill is the assistant director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities, visiting assistant professor of Political Studies at Bard College, and associate faculty at the Brooklyn Institute for

662

CONTRIBUTORS

Social Research in New York City. She is the author of two forthcoming books: Hannah Arendt, a biography, and Hannah Arendt’s Poems. You can find her writing in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Seminar, OpenDemocracy, Theory & Event, Contemporary Political Theory, and The South Atlantic Quarterly. For more information please visit her website: www.samantharosehill.com. Kei Hiruta is Research Fellow in Philosophy at Wolfson College, University of Oxford. He received his DPhil from Oxford, was previously a Fellow at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, and is currently a Eurias Fellow at the Paris Institute for Advanced Study (2018–19). He is a co-founder and Associate Editor of Arendt Studies and the editor of Arendt on Freedom, Liberation, and Revolution (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, forthcoming). He is currently completing a monograph entitled “Berlin’s Bête Noire: Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin on Freedom, Politics, and Humanity.” Bonnie Honig Bonnie Honig is Nancy Duke Lewis Professor in the departments of Modern Culture and Media (MCM) and Political Science at Brown University. She is author of the Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (1993), Democracy and the Foreigner (2001), Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, Democracy (2009), Antigone, Interrupted (2013), and Public Things: Democracy in Disrepair (Thinking Out Loud series, 2017). She is currently finishing a book version of her Flexner Lectures, titled A Feminist Theory of Refusal (forthcoming Harvard, 2021). Julian Honkasalo is an Academy of Finland postdoctoral research scholar in gender studies, University of Helsinki. Honkasalo obtained their PhD in gender studies at the University of Helsinki in 2016, with a dissertation on feminist interpretations of Hannah Arendt. Honkasalo obtained a second PhD in political science at the New School for Social Research in 2018, with a dissertation on Hannah Arendt and biopolitics. The dissertation was awarded with the New School's Hannah Arendt Award in Politics. Honkasalo's current, postdoctoral research focuses on contemporary offshoots of twentieth-century race hygiene and eugenic discourse from a Foucaultian perspective. Grayson Hunt is the Associate Director of LGBTQ Studies and lecturer in the Center for Women’s & Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He received his PhD in philosophy from the New School for Social Research in 2013. He specializes in transgender studies, queer theory, and continental philosophy, especially Arendt and Nietzsche. His work has been published in New Nietzsche Studies, American Dialectic, The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, and Hypatia Reviews Online. Hunt is the editor of the American Philosophical Association Newsletter on Issues in LGBTQ and PhilPapers’ “Feminism: Rape and Sexual Violence” category.

CONTRIBUTORS

 663

Catherine Kellogg is Professor of Political Science at the University of Alberta. She specializes in contemporary political theory, and is the author of Law’s Trace: From Hegel to Derrida (2010). She has also published numerous articles and book chapters on Arendt, Hegel, Derrida, Malabou, Benjamin, Nancy, and Agamben. Her work has appeared in such journals as Law, Culture and the Humanities, Philosophy & Social Criticism, Law and Critique, Cultural Values, and Theory and Event. Her current project is a book-length study tentatively entitled “Sovereignty and Cruel Treatment.” Richard H. King is Professor Emeritus of US Intellectual History at the University of Nottingham, UK. He is the editor of Obama and Race: History, Culture, Politics (2012), co-editor of Hannah Arendt and the Uses of History: Imperialism, Race, Nation, Genocide (2007), and the author of Race, Culture, and the Intellectuals, 1940-1970 (2004), among other books. Vincent Lefebve is Researcher at the Centre de recherche et d’information socio-politiques (CRISP), Brussels. He is also Associate Researcher at the Free University of Brussels and at the Institut des hautes études sur la justice (IHEJ), Paris. In his doctoral dissertation, in the field of legal philosophy, he strived to unveil the legal dimension of Hannah Arendt’s thought. This research received two scientific awards: in 2014, the Alice Seghers Prize of the Free University of Brussels’ Faculty of Law and, in 2015, the Auschwitz Foundation International Prize. A book resulting from this PhD thesis was published in 2016. Currently, Vincent Lefebve is conducting his postdoctoral research on representations of judges and justice in films. David Macauley is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Environmental Studies at Penn State University, Brandywine. He has taught at Oberlin College, Emerson College, and New York University and was a Mellon Fellow at University of Pennsylvania. David is the author of Elemental Philosophy: Earth, Air, Fire, and Water as Environmental Ideas (2010), editor of Minding Nature: The Philosophers of Ecology (1996), and the co-editor of The Seasons: Philosophical and Environmental Perspectives (2011). He has published articles on environmental philosophy, aesthetics, political theory, and Continental thought. He is completing a book entitled “Walking: Philosophical and Environmental Foot Notes.” Maša Mrovlje is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Edinburgh, working on the ERC-funded project “Illuminating the Grey Zone.” Her research interests are oriented by the rubric of international political theory and the history of political thought, with a specific focus on twentieth-century philosophies of existence, poststructuralist and critical theories, and their significance to issues of political judgment, responsibility, violence, resistance and transitional justice. In addition, she is interested in the relatively recently emergent field of the ethics and politics of

664

CONTRIBUTORS

narrative. She is the author of Rethinking Political Judgement: Arendt and Existentialism (2018). Phillip Nelson is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at Stony Brook University and an American military veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan who served in the active Army from 2003 to 2008. He earned his MA in Philosophy at the University of Oregon in 2013. His work is in political philosophy and phenomenology, with particular interests in responsibility, warfare, embodiment, deconstruction and gender; he has written on Arendt, Merleau-Ponty, and Derrida. His dissertation, “War and Responsibility: A Political Phenomenology,” seeks to define the relation between political responsibility and a state’s engagement in war. Anne O’Byrne is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Stony Brook University. Her work is in political philosophy and ontology, and engages twentiethcentury and contemporary European thinkers on issues of identity, natality, embodiment, education, history, gender, race, and genocide. She is the author of Natality and Finitude (2010) and the co-editor (with Martin Shuster) of Logics of Genocide: The Structures of Violence and the Contemporary World (2020). She has also published various articles and book chapters, and translations of Jean-Luc Nancy’s Being Singular Plural (translated with Robert Richardson, Stanford University Press, 1996) and other works. Her current project is entitled “The Genocide Paradox,” a book that asks why democracies fail to stand up to genocidal violence. Yasemin Sari is Assistant Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy and World Religions at the University of Northern Iowa. Sari completed her PhD in Philosophy at the University of Alberta in September 2015. She was a DAAD Postdoctoral Researcher at Goethe University, Frankfurt, in 2016. As a political philosopher, her work mainly focuses on democratic political theory, especially as it relates to human rights, extrainstitutional recognition, and the borders between citizen and noncitizen. Her current research takes up the global refugee crisis. She has published in such journals as Philosophy Today, Arendt Studies, and Symposium: The Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy. Natasha Saunders is Lecturer of International Relations and International Political Theory at the University of St Andrews. Her research sits at the intersection of global politics and political theory, focusing on contemporary political thought as a framework for analyzing global issues, with a particular interest in forced migration, human rights, and citizenship. She is the author of International Political Theory and the Refugee Problem (2017) and has published on the history of refugee protection, on asylum seeker protest movements, and on the political thought of Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault as they relate to forced migration and political action.

CONTRIBUTORS

 665

Andrew Schaap is Associate Professor of Political Thought at the University of Exeter's Cornwall campus. Andrew has published articles on Hannah Arendt in Political Studies, European Journal of Political Theory and Political Theory. He is the author of Political Reconciliation (2005) and co-editor (with Danielle Celer and Vrasidas Karalis) of Power, Judgment and Political Evil: In Conversation with Hannah Arendt (2010). Andrew is currently working on a book on Hannah Arendt and Jacques Rancière, provisionally entitled “Civility and Emancipation.” Eve Seguin is Professor lectures in political theory, political science, and STS, at Université du Québec à Montréal. Her current work mainly focuses on the political organization of modernity, new materialism, political theories of science and technology, and the thought of Bruno Latour, Harold Lasswell, and Hannah Arendt. She has published in such journals as Theory, Culture & Society; Science and Public Policy; Symposium: The Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy; Studies in History and Philosophy of Science; Discourse & Society; Science as Culture; British Journal for the History of Science; Revue française d’administration publique; Politix; Langage et société; Mots. Les langages du politique; Revue française de science politique. She is the editor of Infectious Processes. Knowledge, Discourse, and the Politics of Prions. Kascha Semonovitch has edited two collections of philosophical essays on phenomenology; her work focuses on early twentieth-century thought, most recently in “Attention and Expression,” in Simone Weil and Continental Philosophy (2018). She holds a doctorate in philosophy from Boston College and an MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson College, and has received fellowships at the MacDowell Colony and the Ucross Foundation. She has taught philosophy at Boston College, Seattle University, and the Hugo House in Seattle. Cecilia Sjöholm is Professor of Aesthetics at Södertörn University. Her research is particularly focused on the relation between art and politics in contemporary culture. She has published extensively on art, psychoanalysis, and critical theory. Her latest book, Doing Aesthetics with Arendt; How to See Things (2015), looks at the way in which Hannah Arendt’s reflections on art and aesthetics invite us to rethink her political concepts. Charles E. Snyder is Associate Fellow at Bard College, the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities. His research concerns the history of ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, in particular the Socratic revival in the early Hellenistic period and the Academy’s confrontation with the metaphysical foundations of Stoic and Epicurean ethics. In the spring of 2014, Charles earned his PhD in Philosophy from the New School for Social Research. In 2014–15, he was Postdoctoral Fellow at the Hannah Arendt

666

CONTRIBUTORS

Center and Teaching Fellow at the Bard Prison Initiative. He has served as Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the American University in Bulgaria and as Junior Research Fellow at the University of Hamburg, Maimonides Centre for Advanced Studies, Jewish Skepticism. Ian Storey is the co-editor (with Roger Berkowitz) of Archives of Thinking and the author of the forthcoming Hungers on Sugar Hill: Hannah Arendt, the New York Poets, and the Remaking of Metropolis, which examines postwar changes in the urban politics of race, class, and representation through the lens of Arendt’s first experiences of the United States. He also produces contemporary adaptations of German theater, including Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, Antigone des Sophokles, and St. Joan of the Stockyards. Having received his PhD in Political Science from the University of Chicago, Storey’s work centers on urban politics, the politics of aesthetics, and democratic theory. Dianna Taylor is Professor of Philosophy at John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio, USA. Her research focuses on twentieth-century continental philosophy and contemporary feminist philosophy. She is the co-editor of Feminism and the Final Foucault (2004) and Feminist Politics: Identity, Difference, Agency (2007), and is the editor of Michel Foucault: Key Concepts (2010). Her current book project brings into conversation the work of Michel Foucault and contemporary feminist philosophers in order to theorize new ways of conceptualizing and countering the harm of sexual violence against women. Christian Volk is Professor of Political Science, with a special focus on political theory and law at the Otto-Suhr-Institute of the Free University of Berlin. His research interests include democratic and constitutional theory, critical theory, state theory, transnationalization, and social and political protest movements. He is the author of Arendtian Constitutionalism: Law, Politics, and the Order of Freedom (2015). Some of his other recent publications have appeared in Leiden Journal of International Law; Constellations; Philosophy and Social Criticism; Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie; and Politische Vierteljahresschrift. Philip Walsh is Associate Professor of Sociology at York University in Toronto. He is the author of Arendt Contra Sociology (Routledge, 2015) and co-editor (with Peter Baehr) of The Anthem Companion to Hannah Arendt (Anthem, 2017), together with several articles addressing the significance of Arendt’s theories for the social sciences. His most recent writings are focused on the links between Arendt’s insights and the sociological theory of her contemporary Norbert Elias. Tama Weisman is Professor of Philosophy at Dominican University. She is the author of Hannah Arendt and Karl Marx: On Totalitarianism and the Tradition of Western Political Thought. Her most recent work focuses on

CONTRIBUTORS

 667

understanding narratives surrounding environmental technologies in light of neoliberal politics. Matthew Wester received his PhD from Texas A&M University, where he serves as Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy. His research centers on the importance of judgment to Arendt’s work. His interests are social and political philosophy, nineteenth-century German philosophy, and twentiethcentury continental philosophy. Kerry H. Whiteside is Clair R. McCollough Professor of Government at Franklin & Marshall College. Among his many books, he is the author of Divided Natures: French Contributions to Political Ecology (2002). Emily Zakin is Professor of Philosophy at Miami University. Her areas of specialization include political philosophy, psychoanalysis, feminist theory, and nineteenth- and twentieth-century continental philosophy. Her current research focuses on the limits and possibilities of political community. She is the co-editor (with Ellen Feder and Mary C. Rawlinson) of Derrida and Feminism: Recasting the Question of Woman (1997) and (with Denise Eileen McCoskey) of Bound by the City: Greek Tragedy, Sexual Difference, and the Formation of the Polis (2009). She was a founding co-editor of philoSOPHIA: A Journal of Continental Feminism, and has published numerous book chapters and articles in journals such as Journal of Speculative Philosophy, The Southern Journal of Philosophy, and Telos.

INDEX

Action (praxis) as concerted  216, 218, 240, 285, 287, 303, 331, 337–8, 341–3, 345–6, 387–8, 390–1, 402, 421, 424, 427, 459, 475–9, 483, 514, 529, 533, 561–2, 601–2, 647, 651 and identity  196–7, 287–8, 338–9, 343–4, 353, 361, 381–2, 579, 586–7, 601–7 and its so-called privileging  19, 45, 47, 205, 395, 407 and speech  118, 174, 256, 341, 402–3, 426, 477, 529, 554 as substituted by making  20–1, 86, 214–18, 239, 240, 242, 293–4, 379, 412, 558–9 as sui generis  12, 16, 40, 44–5, 47–8, 216, 331–2, 337–9, 423, 425, 586, 602 Adams, John  131 Adorno, Theodor W.  169–75, 194, 333–4, 546, 563 aesthetics, see art; judgment Agamben, Giorgio  315, 321 n.33, 326 n.70, 563, 645 Aleichem, Sholom  194 alienation  141, 221, 654 n.3 earth alienation  214–15, 232–5, 615–16, 651–3, 655 n.6 world alienation  17, 19–20, 110, 219–22, 224–5, 239–40, 305, 346–7, 351–3, 361–2, 418, 531, 554, 576–81, 582 n.10, 596–8, 642–5, 650–4 Allen, Amy  586–7 American Revolution  44, 132, 163, 249–51, 417, 460–2

amor mundi  109, 115, 492 animal laborans  84–5, 87 n.4, 215–17, 303, 406, 548, 597–600, 618, see also labor anti-Semitism  200, 232, 448–9, 509, 560 appearance and being  98–9, 154, 166 n.22, 243, 281–9, 382, 509, 559–60 space of  99, 102, 110, 116, 160–1, 241, 287–9, 361, 363, 426–7, 469–72, 511–15, 620–1, 632, 634–5 archē  68, 217–18, 424–5 Aristotle  14, 20–1, 32, 105, 129, 204, 217, 293, 297, 378, 409, 422, 425, 458, 597, 645 Aron, Raymond  91, 128 art  18, 154–5, 259, 303–4, 306–7, 513, 545–50, 622, 653 Auden, W. H.  126, 133, 180 Augustine, St.  15, 29–33, 55–6, 78, 96, 101, 107, 185–90, 417 authenticity  53, 110, 269, 467, 472, 482–5 authority and education  565–7 and its loss  45, 150–3, 460–1, 467, 477–9 and Rome  16–20, 23 Bailyn, Bernard  131 Barrett, William  189 Bas, Melis  616 Beauvoir, Simone de  98, 589, 590 beginnings  13–17, 45–8, 78, 100–1, 210, 241, 250, 331–2, 338, 434–5, 461–2, 477, 566–7, 602, see also action; natality

Index

being-with (Mitsein)  220, 269, 653 Bell, Daniel  178, 181 Bellow, Saul  132, 181 Benhabib, Seyla  196, 339, 357, 433, 593–4 n.17 Benjamin, Walter  5, 138, 143–4, 149–58, 192, 250, 296, 425, 517, 539–40, 542–3 Berkowitz, Roger  109, 615–16 Berlin, Isaiah  126–30, 181, 593 n.17 Bernasconi, Robert  435, 630–3 Bettelheim, Bruno  181 biography  151, 192–4, 540, 601–9, 645 biopolitics, see life bios theōrētikos, see life Birmingham, Peg  357 birth, see natality Black Power  182, 528, 570 Blixen, Karen  547 Blücher, Heinrich  5–6, 114, 132, 189, 207, 540 Blumenfeld, Kurt  4, 540 body  161–5, 215–16, 284, 330, 401, 513–15, 587–8, 638 Botstein, Leon  563 bourgeoisie political emancipation of  34–40, 42, 52–3, 118 Bowring, Finn  654 Brecht, Bertolt  57, 139, 520, 538–40, 547, 622 Breen, Keith  171 Brown, Wendy  585 bureaucracy and Eichmann  417–18, 452 and Kafka  139–43, 206, 309 as “rule of nobody”  9, 219, 432–3, 561, 570 Burke, Edmund  251, 646–7 Butler, Judith  163, 333, 563, 587 camps, see concentration camps Camus, Albert  253–4 Canovan, Margaret  205, 210, 433, 612 capitalism, see also expropriation and animal laborans  87 n.4, 412

 669

and imperialism  35–8, 41–2, 52, 430 Marxist critique of  85–6, 174, 395–6, 578 and Weber, Max  90–1 care for the world  17–20, 106, 110, 116–19, 304–5, 311, 318–19 n.12, 345, 366, 482, 486 categorical imperative Eichmann’s perversion of  67, 231–2, 292 and Kant  61–5, 72–81, 298 Cato the Elder  273–5, 293 Cavarero, Adriana  586 Césaire, Aimé  438 n.21 Chaplin, Charlie  308, 547 Chapman, Anne  342–3, 654 Char, René  467–8 Chiba, Shin  114–15 Christianity  31–3, 185–6, 214, 333, 404, 422–3, 493, 620–1 Cicero  14, 17, 20–2, 185, 273–4 civil disobedience  135, 477, 479, 532, 635–6 Coeckelbergh, Mark  612 collective guilt  449, 498–500 colonialism, see imperialism common sense (sensus communis)  220, 234, 258, 274, 283, 287–8, 295, 400, 408, 508–9, 548, 615, 643 concentration camps  133, 203–7, 332–4, 338, 352, 418, 552–5, 581 n.6, 589, 592, 609–10, 642–5 conformism  40–1, 43, 57, 133, 219–20, 486, 631, 634 Conrad, Joseph  547, 609, 638 conscience and inner dialogue  376–83, 635–6 and Kant  68, 297–8 and Rousseau  55 totalitarian corruption of  204, 230–3, 444, 502–4 constitutionalism  16, 22, 46–9, 251–3, 460–3, 534 consumerism  346–7, 396, 398, 405, 547, 597–9, 651

670

contemplation, see thinking; vita contemplativa cosmopolitanism  514–19 council system  249–53, 482–8 crimes against humanity  120, 228–30, 443–5, 451, 453 Curtis, Kimberly  513 Darwinian views of history  630, 644 death  31–2, 106–8, 333, 551–2, 605 death of God  99, 166 n.22, 214, 217, 495–6, 511, 520 democracy  36, 249–53, 481–91 Deneen, Patrick  615 Denktagebuch  60, 119, 187, 256–7, 492 D’Entrèves, Maurizio Passerin  259 Derrida, Jacques  163–4, 319 n.23, 320 n.24 Descartes, René  161, 233, 239, 381, 509, 613, 652 Dewey, John  133, 189 dialectics  86, 169–73 dictatorship  46–7, 215, 350–1, 462, 502, 532, 561 Dietz, Mary G.  584 dignity  37, 218, 265, 361–2 Dinesen, Isak  427 disclosure and Heidegger  153–4, 267, 269 and politics  286, 402, 518–19, 602–4, 632 Dobson, Andrew  407, 412 Dossa, Shiraz  434 Dreyfus, Alfred  644 Dryzek, John  482 Duignan, Peter  433 Dupuy, Jean-Pierre  616 ecology  395–415, 619, 653 education  55–7, 245 n.8, 339, 565–75, 633–4 Eichmann, Adolf his guilt  230–2, 355, 379, 444, 451–2, 494–5, 502 his sense of duty  60, 67, 229–31, 272, 353, 383, 444 his thoughtlessness  273, 282, 377–8, 417, 452, 510–11

Index

his trial  7–8, 119–22, 140, 228–44, 272, 353–4, 377, 443, 447–53, 518 his use of language and cliches  151, 234–5, 272, 354, 452, 511 elite and elitism  203, 219, 388, 393 n.2, 407, 432, 481–3, 485–6 Ellison, Ralph  7, 134, 181 embodiment, see body Emerson, Ralph Waldo  133, 252 enlarged mentality  68, 73, 75–6, 79–80, 232–4, 258, 263, 272–3, 515–16, 637–8 Enlightenment  75, 195, 197 n.1, 210, 251 equality artificial  45–6, 172, 214, 218, 331–2, 352, 362–3, 388–93, 476, 483–4, 587 and Christianity  32–3, 391–2, 493 isonomia  250, 389–90, 483 legal  207, 355, 358–9, 364 n.9, 442, 477–8, 634 and the social  57, 363, 388, 598, 631 Eribon, Didier  588 ethics  61–8, 72–80, 163–5, 204–5, 231–5, 297–8, 353–5, 357–8, 500–5 evil  135–6, 140, 172, 201–3, 234, 273, 294, 353–5, 377–9, 417–19, 452, 511, 520 Augustine’s account of  417 radical (Kant)  353, 494 existentialism  105–6, 155, 160–2, 589 expropriation  36, 42, 221, 576–81, see also alienation; capitalism Fanon, Frantz  431, 530, 570 Faulkner, William  132, 189 Feit, Mario  583 feminism  135, 179, 583–94, 636 Feurbach’s 11th Thesis  86 forgiveness  109, 315, 453, 492–4, 520, see also reconciliation Foucault, Michel  38, 551–5, 588

Index

foundation philosophical  54, 144, 281, 587 political  14–17, 35–6, 48, 253, 319–20 n.23, 342–6, 458–62, 476–7 Frank, Hans  67, 231 freedom and action  205–6, 210, 220, 243, 303, 331–2, 338, 341, 392, 424–8, 463–4, 483–4, 580–1 and equality  133, 218, 388–93, 442, 484 vs. liberation  152, 240, 251–2, 421, 530, 532, 598 and plurality  21, 55, 240–2, 252, 467–9, 478–9, 482–3, 555, 598–9 French Revolution  51–4, 134, 249–51, 475, 646 friendship  114–15, 286 Gann, L. H.  433 genocide  229–30, 338, 443–4, 451–3 Gines, Katherine  435–6, 439 n.43, 635–9 Glazer, Nathan  181–2 God  30–3, 62–3, 337, see also death of God Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von  154, 193, 262, 275, 562 goodness  286, 353 Grecophilia  13–14, 610, 632, 653 Guardini, Romano  400 Habermas, Jürgen  92, 171, 196 happiness  31, 45, 131, 251–3, 483, 486 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich  86, 98, 128, 152, 267, 275, 314, 365 n.24, 382, 495–6, 607, 651 Heidegger, Martin and his relationship with Arendt  4, 6, 102–13, 150–1, 181, 187, 493, 588 and Nazism  4, 104, 108, 170 and ontology  86–7, 102, 105–6, 109–10, 127, 153–57, 160, 165 n.4, 214, 219, 223, 267–9, 336, 379, 425, 472, 616, 653 and poetry  319 n.23, 473 n.3, 542

 671

Heine, Heinrich  194, 308, 314, 316, 562–3 Herodotus  107–8, 367 Himmler, Heinrich  232–3, 235, 444, 504, 511 Hitler, Adolf  4, 67, 89, 107, 292, 452, 505, 531, 570 Hobbes, Thomas  34–43, 52–3, 495, 512, 561, 619, 621, 627 n.43 Hobson, J. A.  128 Hölderlin, Friedrich  537, 542 Holocaust  365 n.19, 434, 448–9, 502, 593 n.15, 598–9, see also death camps; genocide Homer  246 n.43, 503–4, 619 homo faber  20–1, 216–17, 222, 224, 286, 293–4, 313–15, 392, 402–3, 406, 408, see also work Honig, Bonnie  584–5, 587 Hook, Sidney  189 Horkheimer, Max  520 household (oikos) as model for politics  220, 402, 422, 598, 631 as private realm  21, 34, 41, 43 n.32, 52, 170, 215–16, 219–21, 246 n.46, 252–3, 287–8, 330–2, 393–5, 567, 585, 596–8, 634 and the social  39–40, 42, 53, 174, 214, 404, 568–9, 630–2 human rights  140, 160, 165, 207, 352, 357–63, 388, 392, 440–2, 445, 631–3, 644, 646–7, see also the right to have rights Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen  207–8, 250–1, 352, 358–9, 361–2, 364 n.14, 646–7 Hume, David  268 Hungarian Revolution (1956)  532 Husserl, Edmund  96–7, 105, 159–60, 162–3 ideology and Nazism  172, 200, 231–2, 292, 338, 418, 433, 437–8 n.21, 463, 501, 504, 538, 552–5, 630 and Stalinism  6, 83–5, 292, 417–18, 643

672

as “worldview”  99–101, 133, 172–4, 203–5, 292, 332, 433, 531, 574–5 n.34, 630–1 imagination  135, 195, 233–5, 272, 295, 368, 374, 514–17, 637, 643, see also enlarged mentality immortality earthly  18, 21, 216–17, 303–4, 403, 603–5 and metaphysics  31–2, 62–3 imperialism and capitalist expansion  35–6, 41–2, 128 and Hobbes  34–42, 52 and its boomerang effect on Europe  431–6, 644 and racism  308, 323–4 n.51, 431, 435–6, 437–8 n.21, 630–3 Ingram, David  517, 532 n.54 Ingram, James  389 International Criminal Court  433–4 Irigaray, Luce  162, 586 Isaac, Jeffrey  486 isolation, see also solitude and political atomism  108, 110, 220, 351–2 and thinking  31, 64, 76–7, 371, 572 Jarrell, Randall  132, 180 Jaspers, Karl  4–5, 65, 88, 106–7, 114–25, 187, 198, 201, 257, 442–3 Jay, Martin  407, 589 Jefferson, Thomas  131, 392, 563 Jewish councils (Judenräte), controversy over  7, 181, 213 Jewishness as identity  154–7, 209–11, 324–5, 327, 330–2 Jonas, Hans  71 n.57, 177, 179, 615–6 Judaism  194, 314–17 judgment  18, 63–4, 73, 146, 193–5, 205, 229–35, 256–60, 261 n.14, 272–3, 368, 372–5, 428, 447–53, 493–4, 501–5, 511–20, 562–3, 637, 643 justice  388–9, 447–56, 530

Index

Kafka, Franz  138–51, 179, 199, 206, 210, 274, 298, 308–11, 314, 321–2 n.38, 323–4 n.51, 469–73, 515, 547 Kant, Immanuel and ethics  60–81, 231–2, 272, 288, 292, 353–5, 383, 417, 560 and judgment  73, 146, 195, 230, 232–3, 262, 275, 297, 450, 516, 518, 637, 643 and metaphysics  78, 155, 161–2, 187, 224, 266, 268–70, 337, 421, 425, 514–15, 525, 617 and political philosophy  129, 234, 237 n.29, 255–61, 494, 509 Kaplan, Morris B.  588 Kateb, George  48, 133 Kazin, Alfred  180–1 Kierkegaard, Søren  416 King, Richard H.  128 Klemperer, Victor  204 knowledge  67–8, 296, 380–2, 400, 571–2, 617 Koganzon, Rita  615 Kohn, Jerome  238 Koyré, Alexandre  653 Kraft, Werner  152 Kraus, Karl  143, 144, 151–2 Kristeva, Julia  147 n.14, 163, 583, 586 labor (ponos), see also animal laborans and its cyclical process  224, 332, 337, 340–1, 408, 548, 561, 592 in Marxism  83–4, 173–4, 221, 331, 561, 597–8, 600 n.6, 645, 654 n.3 and the necessities of life  88–9, 215–16, 303–4, 318 n.10, 341, 401–3, 406, 412, 595–6 and the social  48, 214, 404, 485, 555, 596–9, 651 Lane, Ann M.  588–9 Latour, Bruno  621, 625 n.5 law criminal  228–32, 443–5, 500–2 Greek paradigm (nomos)  246 n.46, 458–60 international  41, 440–5

Index

Roman paradigm (lex)  458–60 rule of  128, 229–30, 389, 424, 477, 524 and totalitarian regimes  99, 432–3, 443–5, 462–4 Lazare, Bernard  193–4, 308, 560 Lessing, G. E.  373, 610 Levertov, Denise  133 Levi, Primo  610, 645 Levinas, Emmanuel  163–4 liberalism  126–8, 240, 423–4, 481, 487 life and biopolitics  304–5, 551–7, 645 bios theōrētikos or vita contemplativa  165, 216–17, 223–5, 259, 272, 274, 293–5, 559 bios vs. zōē  214, 330–7, 645 cyclical nature of bare life  48, 94, 215–16, 303–4, 330–2, 336–7, 340–1, 401–3, 408, 501, 548, 555, 561, 597–8 vita activa  121, 165, 215–17, 224–5, 272, 293, 304, 330–1, 399–406, 410–12, 625 Locke, John  58–9 n.18, 312, 331, 332 loneliness  84–5, 101, 225, 351–2, 507 n.18 love  29–33, 97, 114–16, 118, 123–4, 125 n.46, 187–8, 286, see also amor mundi Lowell, Robert  133, 179, 181 Luxemburg, Rosa  179, 519, 562, 590 Lyotard, Jean-François  518, 520 Macauley, David  350 n.60, 654 McCarthy, Mary  7, 123, 138, 178–80 Macdonald, Dwight  177, 180, 181 Machiavelli, Niccolo  423 McKibben, Bill  410–11, 412–13 Madison, James  131, 367 Mannheim, Karl  88–9 Markell, Patchen  318 n.10, 319 n.15, 617

 673

Marx, Karl and communism  36, 169, 182, 562, 582 n.14, 654 and economics  173, 221, 395, 475, 519, 578, 645 and history  85–6, 210, 239, 299, 495 and labor  82–7, 331–2, 561, 596–7, 600 n.6, 654 n.3 and scientific materialism  88–9, 91, 398, 495, 645 Maslin, Kimberly  584 Melville, Herman  132, 189 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice  159–68 Mill, John Stuart  187 Mills, C. Wright  475, 529 minorities  316, 478, 523–4, 553–4, 560, 629–31 Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, Baron de  44–50, 460–1 Moran, Dermot  97, 159, 166 n.9, 573–8 n.17 Morgenthau, Hans  181 narrative  102, 193, 242, 263–5, 601–11 Näsström, Sofia  357 natality  15, 107, 112 n.21, 186–9, 205, 216, 331–2, 336–94, 567, 586, 606–7, see also beginnings nationalism  129, 208–9, 220–1, 431, 630 Nazism, see ideology necessity, see labor Nietzsche, Friedrich  13, 214, 245 n.16, 326 n.69, 471, 520, 587 nihilism  98, 102, 297–8, 520, 542, 570 Norton, Anne  630, 637–8 obedience  68, 231–3, 236 n.17, 355, 444 O’ Brien, Mary  585 O’Connor, Flannery  133 Oliver, Kelly  224 opinion (doxa)  1–2, 56, 67–8, 99–101, 242–3, 246 n.46, 367–74, 380–1, 483–6, 559, 637–8 Ott, Paul  654

674

Paine, Thomas  423 Palestine  311–14, 316, 327 n.76, 532, 563 pan-movements, see nationalism Parekh, Serena  97, 160 pariah  138–45, 192–7, 308, 314, 316–17, 325–6 n.64, 558–63, 644–7 Parsons, Talcott  89, 91 parvenu  192–7, 316–17, 559–63, 644–7 Pericles  337 persuasion  1–2, 100–1, 217, 222, 368–70, 496 Pettit, Philip  128 phenomenology  96–103, 105, 159–65, 169–71, 593 n.17, 642 phronēsis  105–6, 372 Pitkin, Hanna  39–40, 48, 302, 313, 318 n.10 place-founding  342–4, see also foundation Plato on democracy  2, 217, 368, 481, 485, 488 on ethics  381, 499 metaphysics  32, 65, 99, 105–6, 161, 296, 367, 411 and truth  371, 380, 548–9 Platonism  32, 101, 185, 379, 558, 560 Plotinus  32 plurality  66, 100, 161, 187, 216–17, 241, 259, 269–70, 282–3, 296–7, 331–4, 338–9, 341–3, 351–6, 363, 381–2, 391, 452–3, 479, 483–4, 512–16, 529–33, 546, 601–2 Pocock, J. G. A.  131 polis  13–14, 21–2, 23–4 n.1, 44, 47–8, 196, 217, 297, 371, 422, 458, 460, 481, 494, 596, 623–4 political activity, see action Popper, Karl  128 Portmann, Adolf  161–2, 167 n.26 poverty  57, 134, 250–2, 481, 519, 577–8, 632 power  34–42, 52–3, 93–4, 135, 150–1, 170–5, 217, 243, 426,

Index

460–1, 475–80, 528–33, 561, 579, 616–25 principle (principium)  16–17, 44–7, 357–8, 422, 461–2, 477, 581 private realm, see household (oikos) promises  149–50, 210, 457–9, 461–2 propaganda  99, 242–4, 360–1, 553 psychoanalysis     285, 303–4, 317–18 n.8, 319 n.16, 320 n.24, 586 public realm  45, 131–2, 196, 216–20, 241, 243–4, 285–9, 391–2, 403–4, 426, 476–7, 483, 596 loss of  20, 135, 240, 331, 405–6, 424, 485–8, 530, 532, 620–1 racism  41, 208, 221, 431–7, 437–8 n.21, 439 n.43, 532–4, 552–4, 629–31, 633–9, see also antiSemitism race-thinking  552–3, 639–40 n.1 Rancière, Jacques  482 reason  38, 63–5, 75–6, 94, 224, 264, 266, 268–74, 296, 333–4, 377, 379, 495–6, 617 recognition  362–3, 365 n.36, 390, 392, 442 reconciliation  8, 109, 492–7 refugees  194, 206–7, 352, 355, 360–1, 394 n.19, 441–2, 507 n.20, 540–1, 553–4, 560, 576, 578–80, 631, 633, 642–9 remembrance  16, 18–19, 22, 48, 274, 295, 383, 402, 408, 608–10, 622–3 responsibility  9, 63–5, 110–11, 116, 118–19, 122–3, 204, 210, 221–2, 339, 357–8, 378, 426–7, 447–50, 498–505, 506 n.2, 572 revolution  22, 25 n.16, 46, 51–2, 85, 130–1, 134, 174–5, 249–54, 359–60, 388–9, 460–2, 467–74, 483, 486–7, 519–20, 529–30, 532, 562–3 Rhodes, Cecil  35, 417 Rich, Adrienne  313 Rieff, Philip  417 Riesman, David  133–4 rightlessness  207, 352, 355, 359, 578–9, see also refugees

Index

right to have rights  207–8, 357–65, 394 n.19, 441–2, 445 romanticism  191–3, 197 n.1 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques and the general will  56–7, 187, 424, 427–8, 524–5 and intimacy  51–9, 423 and the social  40, 42, 43 n.32, 53, 195 Rühle-Gerstel, Alice  583 Sabbath  314–16, 326 n.70, 327 n.74 salon culture  195–6, 197 n.1, 562 Samnotra, Manu  148 n.29 Sarraute, Nathalie  53–4 Sartre, Jean-Paul  160, 164, 439 n.43, 530, 570 Schiller, Friedrich  154, 164 n.9, 537 Schmitt, Carl  328 n.82, 518 Scholem, Gerschom  179, 450, 537–8, 540, 542, 560, 562 science  77, 161–2, 167 n.26, 219–20, 222–5, 395, 411, 612–28, 651–4, 655 n.6 self-dialogue  233, 292, 297–8, 354, 376–8, 504 Shklar, Judith  181, 228 shmita  314–17, 329 n.83 Sieyès, Emmanuel Joseph  524 slavery  364 n.9, 389, 435–6, 596, 631–3, 638, 639–40 n.1 Smith, Adam  331–2 Smith, Stacey  567 social contract  37, 420, 423–4 social sciences  40, 88–91, 93–4, 129, 219, 571 Socrates and dialogue  73, 297–8, 377, 379–80, 559 and morality  72–6, 79, 560 solidarity  48, 57–8, 122, 361, 424, 468, 472, 493–4, 518–19 solitude  76–7, 101, 239, 353–4, 371, 375 n.33, 382, 502, 507 n.18, 515, 572 sovereignty  37–41, 55–6, 217–18, 221–2, 240, 304–5, 355, 392, 423–4, 523–7, 551, 645

 675

spectators  145–6, 259–60, 261 n.14, 282–5, 428, 511–18, 604 Spinoza, Baruch  38, 122, 214, 381 statelessness, see refugees; rightlessness Stern, Günther  4–5 storytelling, see narrative Strauss, Leo  55, 178, 181 student movements  570, 589–90 superfluousness  47, 172, 201–7, 332–3, 351–2, 355, 432, 482, 487, 555, 582 n.11, 602 Szerszynski, Bronislaw  618 Taminiaux, Jacques  105 technology  91–4, 222–3, 293–4, 396, 411, 496–7, 615–21, 651–2 temporality  15, 145–6, 152–3, 274, 288–9, 305, 318 n.10, 336–7, 425–6, 469–71, 515, 559, 644–5 terror  39, 48, 85, 99–100, 203–4, 332–3, 351–2, 437–8 n.21, 463 theater  246, 546 the social  39–42, 46, 48, 51–3, 56–7, 84–5, 101, 108–9, 133–4, 195–6, 205, 219–21, 225, 239, 251, 288, 331, 351–2, 404–5, 422, 481–2, 485–8, 560–1, 568–9, 580, 584, 598, 630–1, 633–6, 645 Thiele, Leslie Paul  624 thinking  9, 110–11, 155, 214, 264–75, 282–3, 294–9, 352–5, 368, 376–83, 428, 471–3, 496, 502–3, 514–15, 574–5 n.34 from the other’s point of view  235, 258, 272–3, 407, 515–16 without banisters (Denken ohne Geländer)  202, 210, 496 Thoreau, Henry David  133, 636 thoughtlessness  68, 110, 272–3, 291–4, 354, 377–8, 416–17, 510–11, see also Eichmann, Adolf Tijmes, Pieter  616 Tocqueville, Alexis de  128, 133, 313, 325 n.62 Tömmel, Tatjana Noemi  114–15

676

totalitarianism and historical necessity  134, 200, 462–4, 510 and loss of spontaneity  200, 203–5, 332–4, 338, 361, 432–4, 449–50, 561, 609–10 philosophical precursors  39, 41–2, 83–4, 586 as unprecedented  2, 47, 90–1, 102, 205, 214, 229, 252, 292, 434, 447–8, 462, 571–2, 581 n.6, 602, 608, 643 tradition, see also authority; death of God break with  51, 98, 150–2, 155, 202, 205, 238–40, 264–5, 270–1, 275, 293, 298–9, 377, 379, 420–1, 472–3, 495, 517 dismantling of  65–8, 96–7, 106, 264–5, 293–4, 459, 586 truth  101, 105–6, 118–19, 153–5, 205, 217, 241–4, 264–70, 281–2, 296, 366–75, 380–2, 496, 548, 559, 572, 574–5 n.34 Tsao, Roy  106–7 two-in-one, see self-dialogue; thinking Varnhagen, Rahel  191–8, 538, 560–2 Villa, Dana  16, 18, 261 n.14, 343, 346 violence as instrumental  85–6, 99, 217, 305, 341, 392, 423, 459, 529–30, 599 vs. political power  22, 94, 149–50, 171–3, 477–9, 528–33 virtue  14, 46, 55, 115, 423, 427, 503–4, 507 n.24, 562–3 vita activa, see life vita contemplativa, see life Voice, Paul  654 Weber, Max  88–95, 206, 475, 478, 529, 560–1, 644, 654

Index

Weil, Eric  60 Weiss, Theodore  133 Whitehead, Alfred North  617, 653 willing  163–5, 270–3, 377 vs. freedom  423–4, 525–6 and Kant  61–4, 67–8, 75–9, 525 Winnicott, D. W.  303–4, 317–18 n.8, 319 n.16, 320 n.24 Wolin, Sheldon  16–17, 482 wonder (thaumazein)  86, 411–12, 519 work (poiēsis)  17–21, 78, 85, 93–4, 215–17, 224, 286–7, 293–4, 302–5, 318 n.10, 318 n.12, 340–3, 345, 402, 405–9, 459, 525, 529, 595–6, 617–18, 624, see also homo faber world, see also being-in-the world; plurality; world alienation and common space of appearing  15, 19, 44–7, 53, 63–4, 97–9, 102, 106–8, 116–18, 160, 166 n.17, 216, 240–3, 246 n.46, 266, 274–5, 281–2, 282–8, 295–7, 338, 343, 378, 382, 390, 453, 469, 482–3, 493–4, 517–18, 529, 533, 546, 601–2 and durability  18, 97–8, 145, 243, 246 n.43, 285–7, 304, 307, 334, 337–9, 341–2, 344–6, 399–400, 402–3, 462–4, 470–1, 476, 509–10, 512–13, 519–20, 522 n.54, 567, 647 Yaqoob, Waseem  616–17 Young, Iris Marion  505 Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth  149, 584 Zionism  4–5, 129, 143–4, 312–14, 325–6 n.64, 532, 563, 584