Political Philosophy
Hannah Arendt.
Original thinker. It is hard to pin her thought down.
She crtiqiues the thoughtlessness of modern people.
Grows up in Germany (Heidegger), flees as a jew to the US.
Lifworld from Husserl is crucial for her work.
Wrote two major studies for which she is well-remembered, Origins of totallitarianism, and Banality of evil.
She also makes a phenomenological study of the active life of human beings, labour, work, and action. The human condition connects throughout all of these works.
She also began writing a book about vita contemplativa which she never finished.
She also wrote a bunch of essays.
For Arendt, radical evil makes human beings superfluous. This superfluousness will return a lot in her analysis of modernity. It is modernity that has created a totalitarian age by making human beings superfluous, you can be replaced by anyone else. There is no spontaneity or freedom in humans. Human beings and their individuality become meaningless. What is specifically human about you is taken out of you in modernity.
She reflects on this through Eichmann. He commits a mass murder. Her analysis of this becomes quite controversial, because she thinks Eichmann is a very boring and banal person. He speaks basically in stock phrases. She believes that Eichmann is characterised by a lot of the totallitarian features, the core concept of which is thoughtlessness, the inability to think for oneself.
Basically he used stock phrases in order to protect himself from actual reality. We all use that at some point. It is impossible to think originally without classifying what we see in already existing frameworks, but Eichmann differs in that he couldn’t think apart from the pure phrases themselves at all. He even swaps the phrases; then in Israel he switched to the many phrases used during the trials there. His final words were not even original. He was unable to step aside from the system in which he had covered himself. He spoke only amtsprache.
This was controversial because it does not portray him as a diabolical figure, but rather as a kind of unable victim of totallitarianism. She also emphasised how the higher up jews in Germany assisted the Germans in many ways.
The origin of totallitarianism is modernity. She has a very negative assesment of modernity. It is mass society, bureaucracy rules, labour is anonymous. Nor does she like the fact of elite domination. She thinks that the private life is diminished and even disappears because of what the system wants you to think even privately. Her two central figures are Stalin and Hitler.
Habermas says that normal human values are colonised by the system. They are overruled by bureaucracy. He says that we should equip the lifeworld in such a way that it can fight back against the system.
She uses three complicated terms: world alienation, rise of the social, and earth alienation.
World alienation refers to the idea that a dialogically socially consituted world in which human beings bring reasons to the table has evaporated. In favour of retreating into our own private spheres. There is a form of collective action, ie. politics and so on in which plurality is crucial, but slowly this will disappear until people enitrely forget about politics. Ie. humans move in the direction political → private.
The rise of the social for her is also problematic. It is the idea that everything becomes part of the cycle of production and consumption. Selling and reselling. This cycle starts to slowly dominate everything. She regrets this fact. She has a central distinction between the public and the private. She doesn’t like that people retreats from the political, but the distinction between public and private has to be clearly maintained. She says that the ancients, ie. the Greeks, have these two spheres, and it was important for them to keep them apart. But too much escape into the private is a slavish feature instead, it is indulgence. It is not an example of a free person. The rise of the social really blurs the private and the political sphere however. A lot of the time people are not really interested in political questions that used to belong to the social sphere, and some which used to belong to the private sphere. Politics starts to care too much of stuff that should be taken care of privately. So there is a new sphere which is an amalgamation of the private and the public.
Earth alienation is a twentieth century phenomenon. It has to do with the fact that we literally escape the confines of the earth through space exploration or through recreating life in laboratory conditions, or even that we are concerned with extending the life-span unnaturally.
One of her intellectual enemies is Plato, because Plato didn’t like democracy, and retreats from public life. And since Plato, philosophy has become a philosophy of politics. There was something fundamentally ungreek about what Plato did. Socrates practiced politics and discusssed with his pupils, from Plato onwards it becomes armchair philosophy.
For Arendt there is a clear hierarchy of beings in the world. There is labour, work, and action. Labour has to do with biology. It is satisfying biological needs. Labour work is about survival. There is however little individuality here.
There is more individuality when we get to work. Work is about artificial work in which we can create things and tools, with which we can intervene into the world.
Arendt is against utilitarianism in that no things have intrinsic value, everything is for something else.
The only way to be really human is in the sphere of action. We act for Arendt together though each with our own distinct voice. Action for her is connected to things like freedom, politics and speech. The opposite of these things are totallitarian concepts like bureaucracy, fabrication, elitism, anonymity etc. One is not really human in these features of action.
Action allows for the word to become a shared home with meaning. And this is done through doing something truly new, by thinking outside of the box. Totallitarianism tries to take that capacity away from you, you become cognitively unable to create anything new. We need to make sure that we allow people a freedom of capacity to establish new rules.
Arendt loves revolutions. She studied these revolutions and one reason why she likes them so much is because a revolution interupts the normal way of being, which creates a condition in which new guidelines have to be created so that you cannot fall back onto the stock guidelines. You think instead about what must happen on a mass scale.
Her critcism of Plato would be quite similar to the one that Habermas has of Rawls. Habermas says that you should do what you do in action with others. Arendt doesn’t think that Marx allows for the sphere of action, since she thinks that he reduces politics to labour. Marx is not someone who allows human beings to come up with new creations to practice their virtue of mentality. His central concern for her is biology.
Action and speech are linked for her. For this you need to know Husserl’s lifeworld. Action and speech allow us to escape our physical nature. Labour is the world of necessity. Work is the word of artefacts and utility. But man is more than practical human being. Each has their own individuality.
Fanon belives that a central feature of racism is that it liquidates the central feature of our individuality.
Arendt says that we can escape those natural necessities by appearing as human beings, as mensch. We don’t want to be reduced to exchangable objects, but we want to appear as more than physical objects. And speech allows for this. And likewise action is made possible through the web of language by which we as humans are tied to each other. Speech makes action possible, that is, makes it possible to have meaning.
There is a human way of being together which uses human speech to imagine things which is not necessarily related to biological needs. In action and speech the who, rather than the what, is revealed. It is something that is done which is your own individual stamp.
Action can be difficult and frustrating. It is irreversible, and it is unpredictable. We can change it in a bit by forgiving and by promising. Forgiving can forgive faulty or bad actions, and promising is a bit of an antidote. It is an action that makes it more likely that a future action will also follow. It makes the future a bit more predictable.
She hates plato, stoics and christians in terms of what they say about politics.
Constant distinguishes between the ancients and the moderns, and says that they used to hate the private joissances. Constant thinks this can lead to a despot if people no longer deal with politics enough. In a way Arendt agrees. Modernity involves private joissance, but this is what we have to avoid. Much of modernity is about the private, and makes us forget the political.
Speech furthermore allows us to articulate the great deeds of our forefathers. The idea that historians and narrators through constructing a story keeps up an image of who we are collectively. The polis is a condition for overcoming our mortal fragility through collective remembrance. The polis is a space of organised remembrance.
The polis is not the city state in its physical location, but the organisation of the people as it arises out of acting and speaking together. The polis is a metaphor for acting and speaking in public debate. It stands out for the space of appearance. The polis will be recreated when people come together politically. This can happen suddenly in revolutions, or can happen slowly through legislation and policy. The space of appearance must be continually created by action.
Interestingly, for Arendt she wants to see certain laws of history which will be realised through politics. So politics subverts non-action dimensions like labour in order to realise basic laws of history. In the case of nazism we had survival of the fittest, whilst for stalinism we have marx and historical materialism. Ie. iron laws of science. In a normal despotic situation like that which Constant talks about, the public sphere is destroyed.
Vita contemplativa.
Thinking, willing, and judging.
Thinking is the silent dialogue of me and myself.
She connects the activity of thinking to that of judging. Thinking dissolves our fixed habits of thought and the accepted rules of conduct, and thus prepares the way for the activity of judging particulars without the aid of pre-established universals.
Thinking, by actualising th edialogue of me and myself which is given in consciousness, produces conscience as a byproduct.
Judging is the capacity to think representatively, that is, from the standpoint of everyone else. Arendt called this capacity to think representatively an enlarged mentality.
Opposed to the idea that judgement is to be subjected to standards of rational truth: truth is anti-political, truth has a despotic character: it cimpels universal assent, leaves the mind little freedom of movements, eliminates the diversity of views.
Republican citizenship.
Pleads for the reactivation of citizenship through revolutionary settings. Not trying to simply repeat the party line at all points, or even the line of common sense. And continues as said before to keep the public and the private apart. And she goes against the idea that we can have a natural constitution of equal rights.
Politics creates a collective identity. It allows us to talk to each other about who we collectively are. We shouldn’t just be who we are because it was passed down on to us. She dislikes the idea that all of us should think alike, this is a movement of sovereignty.
She was concerned with refugees and stateless people. Human rights concern on there being a national state. So to have human rights you must first have the right to have rights.
Politics is about gathering in a public space to deliberate together and make collective decisions. She defends active citizenship, and presents a critique of representative democracy, together with praise for the revolutionary tradition. She is a civic republican: neither liberal nor really communitarian. She rather prefers a kind of plurality, which in a sense is non-communitarian. It is a kind of republicanism with communitarian elements, given her desire to escape the fragility of life through the polis.
For her, politics is about realising individual moral values which by necessity must avoid being general, and which in a sense must be autopoitetic.