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Thinking for oneself: Realism and defiance in Arendt

2008; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 22; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/09502360701842058

1470-1308

Rei Terada,

Hannah Arendt's Political Philosophy

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1 Martin Jay, ‘Afterword’ to Hannah Arendt and the Meaning of Politics, ed. Craig Calhoun and John McGowan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 338. 2 See Richard Bernstein, Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), pp. 154–78; Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self (New York: Routledge, 1992); Maurizio Passerin d'Entrèves, The Political Philosophy of Hannah Arendt (New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 101–38; Dana R. Villa, Politics, Philosophy, Terror: Essays on the Thought of Hannah Arendt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), pp. 55, 87–106. George Kateb sees much of The Life of the Mind as ‘a qualified accusation of philosophical thinking’ (Hannah Arendt: Politics, Conscience, Evil [Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Allanheld, 1984], p. 189). 3 Arendt, The Life of the Mind, 2 vols (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), p. 1:193. Hereafter abbreviated LM and cited parenthetically by page number. In The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), Arendt writes: For us, appearance – something that is being seen and heard by others as well as by ourselves – constitutes reality. Compared with the reality which comes from being seen and heard, even the greatest forces of intimate life – the passions of the heart, the thoughts of the mind, 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. (p. 50) It's a matter of course that thought that reaches others, however indirectly, has value. If Arendt's late argument were limited to such thought, it would be not only consistent with The Human Condition, but redundant with it. 4 Arendt, ‘Thinking and Moral Considerations’, in Responsibility and Judgment, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2003), p. 160. Hereafter abbreviated ‘T’ and cited parenthetically by page number. 5 Arendt, Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 20. 6 Mary McCarthy, ‘The Hue and Cry’, in The Writing on the Wall and Other Literary Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1971), pp. 68–9. Arendt also admires McCarthy's answer in a letter to McCarthy in Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, 1949–1975, ed. Carol Brightman (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1995), p. 160. 7 Arendt, ‘Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship’, in Responsibility and Judgment, p. 18. Arendt incorporated formulations from both ‘Thinking and Moral Considerations’ and ‘Personal Responsibility’ into The Life of the Mind. Although The Life of the Mind is the later text, I generally cite the essays, since their narrative continuity often provides useful context. Arendt expresses a similar objection to behaving ‘as though there existed a law of human nature compelling everybody to lose his dignity in the face of disaster’. (Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, revised ed. [New York: Viking Press, 1964], p. 132; hereafter abbreviated E and cited parenthetically by page number). For Giorgio Agamben, there is such a law: shame is ‘the fundamental sentiment of being a subject’ (Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller Roazen [Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 2002], p. 107). Agamben writes, ‘[T]here is certainly nothing shameful in a human being who suffers on account of sexual violence’, yet goes on, ‘but if he takes pleasure in his suffering violence, if he is moved by his passivity – if, that is, auto-affection is produced – only then can one speak of shame’ (p. 110). Why even then? a tough psychoanalyst might ask. Arendt, in contrast to Agamben, is keen to avoid the conclusion that shame is constitutive of human experience. Her value on intelligibility moves toward the possibility of shameless victimhood, even though Arendt herself still feels shame at victimhood and is anxious to prevent the feeling from arising. Better than either Arendt's resistance to shame or Agamben's embrace of it is the possibility of rendering traumatic vulnerability even more intelligible. 8 Arendt, ‘Personal Responsibility’, p. 18. 9 Here I am connecting two passages in ‘Personal Responsibility’ and ‘Thinking’. In ‘Personal Responsibility’ Arendt quotes McCarthy and declares, ‘I had somehow taken it for granted that we all still believe with Socrates that it is better to suffer than to do wrong’ (p. 18). In ‘Thinking’, she adds ‘for me’ (p. 182). Of course, it could be better for her because of the law or the possible feelings of the friend and the enemy, but this doesn't change the fact that what counts is her evaluation of the effect of those factors on herself. 10 The distinction remains standard; for Richard Moran, for example, moral responsibility consists in concentrating on the consequences of one's actions for the object rather than what one thinks of them oneself. See Moran, Authority and Estrangement: An Essay on Self-Knowledge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). 11 Arendt, ‘Personal Responsibility’, p. 44. See also the similar discussion in ‘Some Questions of Moral Philosophy’, in Responsibility and Judgment, pp. 60–146. 12 Arendt, ‘Personal Responsibility’, p. 45. 13 Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), §188. 14 After Arendt's death McCarthy, who had for a long time been unofficially editing Arendt's prose style, gave in to the temptation to become her image consultant, explaining her decision to change one of Arendt's favourite phrases to something higher-toned: ‘“When the chips are down”: I cannot say why the phrase grates on me, and particularly coming from her, who, I doubt, ever handled a poker chip. But I can see her (cigarette perched in holder) contemplating the roulette table or chemin de fer, so it is now “when the stakes are on the table” – more fitting, more in character’ (Editor's Postface to LM, 2:248). McCarthy, apparently even less experienced at cards than Arendt, misses the point that poker, unlike roulette, is an interpersonal game of stoicism and challenge. 15 Sigmund Freud, ‘Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning’ (1911), Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth, 1953–74), 12:219; Freud, Gesammelte Werke, 18 vols. (London: Imago Publishing Co., Ltd., 1940–68), 8:231; my emphasis. 16 As Arendt puts it, ‘Whether what affects you exists or is mere illusion depends on your decision whether or not you will recognize it as real’ (LM, 1:155). 17 Spinoza, The Ethics, in A Spinoza Reader: The Ethics and Other Works, trans. and ed. Edwin Curley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 157. 18 Freud, Standard Edition, 8:220 n. 19 Freud, Standard Edition, 8:223. Sandor Ferenczi is the great theorist of the impossibility of simply establishing the sense of reality. See Ferenczi, ‘Stages in the Development of the Sense of Reality’ (1913), in First Contributions to Psychoanalysis (New York: Bruner-Maazel, 1980), pp. 213–39; and ‘The Problem of Acceptance of Unpleasant Ideas – Advances in Knowledge of the Sense of Reality’ (1926), in Further Contributions to the Theory and Technique of Psychoanalysis, ed. John Rickman (London: Hogarth, 1950), pp. 366–79. 20 The capacity to realize that circumstances aren't good enough isn't in itself something to celebrate; it may lead to destructive aggression, a new strategy for removing whatever we don't like. Derrida points out in his reading of Arendt's texts on lying that the seed of totalitarian violence, as well as of constructive action, is the desire to change reality, which entails recognition of the events and facts of Arendt's public sphere. Thus lying, for Arendt, is ‘linked in an essential manner to the concept of action, and, more precisely, political action. She often recalls that the liar is a “man of action”‘– Derrida goes on, ‘I would even add: par excellence’. See Derrida, ‘History of the Lie: Prolegomena’, in Without Alibi, trans. and ed. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 66. 21 Arendt, Human Condition, 5. Karl Jaspers's General Psychopathology (1913), which Arendt must have known, similarly characterizes experiential reality by three features: ‘What is real is what we concretely perceive’, ‘Reality lies in the simple awareness of Being’, and ‘What is real is what resists us’. See Jaspers, General Psychopathology, trans. J. Hoenig and Marian W. Hamilton, 2 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 1:94. 22 Thanks to Bernard Richter for showing me this passage, and for many other ideas. 23 Nietzsche, Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, ed. Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1968), §36. 24 Derrida, ‘History of the Lie’, p. 60 (‘for the best’). 25 Some commentators view adopting the perspective of others as the main element of Arendt's thinking; see Lisa Jane Disch, Hannah Arendt and the Limits of Philosophy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994). One touchstone for this interpretation might be Arendt's equation, at one point in Eichmann, of thinking with ‘think[ing] from the standpoint of somebody else’ (E, 49). Seyla Benhabib remarks, ‘[T]his did not mean empathizing or even sympathizing with the other, but rather the ability to recreate the world as it appeared through the eyes of others’, that is, to recognize ‘the perspectival nature’ of the world (‘Hannah Arendt and the Redemptive Power of Narrative’, Social Research 57 [1990]: 189). Again, in The Life of the Mind that external somebody else is within, as the difference in consciousness with which the Socratic self must harmonize. 26 See Alan Bass's consideration of disavowal's ‘global generalization of defensive processes’ in Difference and Disavowal: The Trauma of Eros (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), pp. 17, 45. 27 Arendt goes on to name what she wishes he had seen: ‘Eichmann did not see much. … It was easy to avoid the killing installations, and Höss, with whom he had a very friendly relationship, spared him the gruesome sights. He never actually attended a mass execution by shooting, he never actually watched the gassing process, or the selection of those fit for work – about twenty-five per cent of each shipment, on the average – that preceded it at Auschwitz’ (E, 89–90). 28 In 1918, Karl Kraus links disavowal to the supposedly Germanic trait of endurance: ‘Sticking it out, for example – we revel in it. … There are in fact no hardships, but we take them joyfully in our stride. That's the trick of it. We have always done that well’. See Kraus, The Last Days of Mankind: A Tragedy in Five Acts, trans. Alexander Gode and Sue Ellen Wright, ed. Frederick Ungar (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1974), pp. 35–6. Compare Arendt on Himmler (E, 105). 29 Ferenczi argues that reality testing, too, can function the other way around: we can use it to avoid reality. This would be reality testing without falling in love with it, hence not thinking (‘Stages’, p. 235). 30 See Melanie Klein, ‘A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States’ (1935) and ‘Mourning and its Relation to Manic-Depressive States’ (1940), in The Writings of Melanie Klein, Vol. 1, Love, Guilt and Reparation and Other Works 1921–1945 (New York: Free Press, 1975). 31 For Jean-Luc Nancy, see his Being Singular Plural (1996), trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O'Byrne (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). For Stanley Cavell, see The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 462. 32 For Gershom Scholem, see ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem: An Exchange of Letters between Gershom Scholem and Hannah Arendt’, in The Jew as Pariah, ed. Ron H. Feldman (New York: Grove Press, 1978), p. 241. For McCarthy's response to Scholem's tone, see Between Friends, p. 157. Jaspers writes: ‘What does this mean? One can discuss back and forth how, in life itself, laughter and irony can be founded in extraordinary seriousness. Plato says: Only a great writer of comedies can be a great writer of tragedies’. See Basic Philosophical Writings, ed. Edith Erlich, Leonard H. Erlich, and George B. Pepper (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1986), p. 521, quoted in Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott and Judith Chelius Stark, ‘Interpretive Essay’, in their edition of Arendt's Love and Saint Augustine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), pp. 210–11. 33 McCarthy, ‘The Hue and Cry’, p. 66. 34 Arendt and McCarthy, Between Friends, p. 166. 35 Arendt and McCarthy, Between Friends, p. 168. 36 Namely, that she had felt lighthearted ‘ever since’. Ever since when? Brightman, the editor of the Arendt-McCarthy correspondence, interpolates ‘since the war’ to alleviate the confusion. Arendt associates World War II and the Eichmann controversy, ‘after twenty years’ and ‘ever since’ Eichmann in Jerusalem. Does she mean to suggest that it's as though Eichmann were twenty years ago? By ‘the whole matter’, does Arendt mean the Eichmann affair or the war? 37 Kafka, quoted in Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (1961) (New York: Penguin, 1993), p. 7. Arendt repeats much of the discussion in The Life of the Mind, 1:202–11. 38 Arendt, Between Past and Future, pp. 11, 12. 39 Shoshana Felman, The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Traumas in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 140. On K-Zetnik's name, ‘a slang word meaning a concentration camp inmate’, and the issues it raises, see Felman, pp. 134–6, 147–9. 40 Felman, p. 146. 41 Felman, p. 150. 42 Arendt, Between Past and Future, pp. 12–13. In The Juridical Unconscious, Felman describes K-Zetnik's collapse as though he were Kafka's protagonist meeting his likely end: ‘[B]etween the present and the past, he falls as though he were himself a corpse’ (p. 149). 43 For more discussion of the relation between shame and victimhood, please see note 7 above. 44 Nancy Fraser, ‘Communication, Transformation, and Consciousness-Raising’, in Hannah Arendt and the Meaning of Politics, pp. 171–2. I am being a little unfair to Fraser, because she is responding in this passage to an essay by Lisa Disch that compares Arendt's idea of ‘visiting’ to consciousness-raising; Fraser gets her emphasis on talking and listening from this context. Since thinking is emphatically stated by Arendt to be significant only after the negotiation of social norms has broken down, however, it's off the mark to complain that it does not participate in such a negotiation, regardless of the variety of negotiation in question. 45 Beiner, ‘Hannah Arendt on Judging’, in Lectures, pp. 155, 153. 46 In Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question, Bernstein comments: ‘The very intelligibility of her claims depends on the assertion that thinking does have this liberating effect on the faculty of judging. But Arendt does not really provide any arguments to justify this assertion’ (p. 173). 47 For speculations on moral implications of the reality principle in Freud, see Elizabeth Rottenberg, ‘A Testament to Disaster’, Modern Language Notes 115 (2000): 941–73. Rottenberg concludes that ‘there would be nothing in the world to move us beyond the pleasure principle’ without ‘the relationship to a non-person whose force or power remain utterly unresponsive to the ego’; this she calls ‘the bond to absolute difference’ (p. 970). A Levinasian responsibility to all that is not the self becomes available here. This ‘bond’ is perhaps another version of the primary masochism incorporated by Hobbes, Althusser, Agamben, and others in narratives of subjectivation – if so, it is preferable to many other versions for its full recognition of the suffering involved. In comparison, the Arendtian cathexis to reality testing looks like a kind of fetishization, binding the self's feelings to the process of discovery rather than to the endangering circumstances discovered. I would argue, however, that it is a good thing to stop short of masochism. Then the self's feelings of objection and its particular position continue to be recognized, and with them more of reality. 48 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2nd ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973), p. xiv. Thanks to David Lloyd for suggesting and talking over this reference. 49 Arendt, ‘Lying in Politics: Reflections on The Pentagon Papers’, in Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, Inc., 1972), p. 27. 50 Arendt, ‘Lying in Politics’, p. 38. Arendt quotes Richard J. Barnet in Ralph Stavins, Barnet, and Marcus G. Raskin, Washington Plans an Aggressive War (New York: Vintage, 1971), p. 209. 51 Arendt, ‘Lying in Politics’, p. 39. 52 Arendt speculates that the disappearance of non-fantasy would not lead to ‘an adequate substitute for reality’, but transform fact and fantasy alike ‘back into the potentiality out of which they originally appeared’ and from which fantasy must ever again fight to emerge (Between Past and Future, p. 257).