POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 7
HANNAH ARENDT
- German Jew, fled to Paris, settled in the US
- republican political philosopher, original, Ancient Greek influences
- Origins of Totalitarianism (Nazism and Stalinism)
- banality of evil via Eichmann - the mindless beurocrat
- Human Condition: phenomenology of life as active
- Jaspers and Heidegger
- Life of the Mind - thinking, willing, judging
- maintains difference between the public and private spheres, understanding them as different
Totalitarianism & Eichmann:
- NS and Stalinism reducing pluralities; Eichmann who was smart, but never questioned what he was doing
- he used stock phrases, cliches, never grasping reality, only representations of it
- Officialese was the only language he spoke, a language of absolute, abstract representations
- this is the effect of totalitarianism, humans as pure extensions of the state, disposable masses
Modernity:
- mass society, beurocracy, anonymous labour, elite domination
- World Alienation: the past (up until 20th century), loss of a common world
- in modernity the political and public realm are gone, there’s only the individual private sphere
- Ancient Greeks were active participants in the social, getting glory publically (we do so privately)
- With Plato the public (Socrates’ trial) is ignored in favour of the private soul
- THE SOCIAL emerged from the merge of private and public, where the private interests begin dominating the public ones
Theory of Action:
3 fundamental activities:
1. Labour [Animal Laborans]: only survival, food, no politics, barren existence
[all is sameness]
2. Work [Homo Faber]: producing beautiful things with a goal, but still privately
[individual subordinated to the product]
3. Action [Free Human Beings]: an expression of your ontological what-ness within a plurality of being (society)
[true uniqueness]
Action:
- modernity is defined by its opposition (beurocracy, elitism, thoughtlessness)
- action allows for a shared home with meaning, without it we are lost in pure subjectivity
- what defines us is our natality: the original productive capacity to bring something into the world (same as Marx)
- action and speech reveal who you are, rather than what you are
- coordination of action via speech, language-based action, via action and speech we are something more than our pure physicality, we are a self
Polis:
- organization of people via acting and speaking together
- the space of appearance
- town hall, workers’ councils, demonstrations, revolutions, protests
Totalitarianism:
- destroys plurality, strips people of creativity, makes humans into Animal Laborans
- removes thinking (Eichmann was thoughtless)
- thinking dissolves fixed habits and destroys universals, letting us comprehend particulars
- thinking produces a conscious
- judging as the capacity to think as somebody else (‘enlarged mentality’)
No truth of right and wrong: this reduces the particular-grasping free mind to think only in universals
- there is, of course, factual truth
Republican citizenship:
- she examines not the structure, but the individual within it
- artificial, equality is not universal but man made
- spatial, people can see and touch each other, attending public events
- private/public distinction
Arendt is a civic republican
- pro private/public, just anti retreating into the private sphere
- not liberal, since she outright states what a good life is (rather than letting people decide on their own)
- politics goes beyond pure instrumentality, it gives life splendor
Rawls: agrees with republicanism, but not Arendt, grand meaning must be left for the private life
TOCQUEVILLE:
- federal republican organization allows for many power centers
She is not fond of the idea of human rights - we have civic rights, but not universal human ones
- a state realizes our rights, human rights are an outcome of this
- your right to have rights is state-dependent
- if there was a worldwide polity there’d be human rights, but now there’s only civic ones
weird take on Eisenhower’s anti-segregation reforms, where the schools are private life and should be left apart from politics