1. Last week I
ended by indicating some biographical details from Arendt's life. You will
remember that she was a student of classical German philosophy who came to
political philosophy almost by accident. This accident was the political
triumph of National Socialism and the almost immediate beginnings of the policy
that was to lead to the Holocaust and the destruction of Europe. Arendt's turn
to political philosophy or political theory in this context might seem almost
self-explanatory. However, a more precise understanding of her motives is
illuminating. When Arendt fled Germany she lived for several years in Paris
working practically for Zionist organisations. This dramatic shift from the
life of the mind to the active life was not merely the result of being a
stateless person in a foreign country without connections and certification but
a conscious choice. In a later interview Arendt explained that this career
change had two fundamental motives. The positive one was the political
realisation that being attacked as a Jew left her no alternative but to defend
herself not as a German or World citizen or as the upholder of human rights but
simply as a Jew. Initially her interest in the Jewish question had been a
personal issue expressed in the work on Rahel Varnhagen which follows the
efforts of a Jewish women in the age of Enlightenment trying to come to terms
with her own historical fate and its pervasive anti-Semitism. Now it became
political and she felt the need to defend herself as a Jew aligned to an organisation.
The negative motive in this decision was the disgust she felt at the typical
behaviour of intellectuals after the Nazis take-over. The intellectual circles
in which Arendt had lived capitulated almost voluntarily to the Nazis policy of
co-ordination (Gleichschaltung) to
secure positions and employment. She did not so much blame German intellectuals
for this collective lack of courage (which is surprising) but attributed
responsibility to the "intellectual business" itself. We have noted
that Arendt had been reluctant to become a professor later when the opportunity
arose in the United States. This is partly explicable in terms of this earlier
experience that there was something deeply problematic about a life exclusively
devoted to intellectualism. She explains Heidegger’s own personal attraction to
Fascism in these terms. Being alone is the professional deformation of the true
thinker and this can often induce a partiality for tyranny. As we will see, she
becomes a fierce opponent of the classical attempt to appropriate politics for episteme.
2. While
Arendt may have abandoned academia after her experience in Germany, it would be
wrong to say that her classical philosophical education ceased to impact on the
way she viewed the world. Her identification with her own Jewishness eventually
gave shape to a self-understanding that aligned her to a Jewish intellectual
tradition that she designated the "conscious pariah". This tradition,
which she associated particularly with the names of Heine, Bernard Lazare, and
Kafka, was characterised by political rebellion against its own exclusion.
Lazare was a journalist who defended the Jewish officer Dreyfus in the famous
treason in France at the end of the 19th Century that had exposed
the depth of French anti-semitism. He had opposed the Zionist movement in the
early decades of the 20th century on the grounds that it patronised
the ordinary Jews by excluding them from the councils of policy, while the
wealthy Jews were able to exchange their money for political control of the
community. For Arendt, Lazare’s preparedness to be a pariah in his own
community made him a hero: he did not believe the Jews could save themselves by
withdrawing from the rest of the world and separating themselves from the
oppression of others. This orientation made a major combative contribution to
the constitutive features of the pariah tradition: innocence, natural freedom,
aloofness, fancy and utopianism. These other qualities were the need for
struggle, to face the real world and assume a sense of responsibility for what
the world has done to them. This identification aided the orientations of
Arendt's own critical attitude and consciously marginal standpoint: the strange
mixture of uncompromising realism, flights of classical fancy and love for the
world. However, it was her immediate philosophical tutors--Heidegger and
Jaspers-- to whom she turned to give shape to her diagnosis of the contemporary
world and it is in a theoretical dialogue with them that she begins to fashion
her own distinctive standpoint.
3. One of the
few places that this dialogue become explicit is the early 1944 article-- ‘What
is Existenz Philosophy?’--that
attempts to explain to her new US audience the contours of German Existenz Philosophy. This little summary
of the historical antecedents of contemporary existentialism presents Arendt's
version of the crisis of modern self-understanding and the relative merits of
Heidegger and Jaspers in meeting the abyss revealed by it. For Arendt, it is
Kant who is the father of modern philosophy. It was he who shattered the
classical unity of thought and being. Before Kant, it was presupposed that
"everything thinkable also existed and everything extant, because it was
knowable, also had to be rational" (Essays in U, P168). Kant's
critical philosophy disturbed this ancient security of being as a being at home
in the world, as the harmonious fit between rational categories and the
structure of the cosmos. Kant argued that any proposition making a statement
about reality reaches beyond the concept of any given thing. Furthermore,
Kant's rejection of the ontological proof for the existence of God (that
anything accessible to reason had to exist) results in the abandonment of the
modern individual to a godless world with nothing more than his/her own
autonomy. For Arendt, modern philosophy departs from the interpretation of this
ostensibly abandoned individual. The term "which first appears in its
modern sense in the work of the late Schelling refers to the pure
"thatness" of arbitrary existence. Universalising reason supplies us
with a "what" without qualities: the emptiness and colourlessness of
this "what" only underlines the utter contingency of existence. The
objective truths of science leave us helpless because they cannot solve the
problem of existence, of our own individual meaning. This recognition is the
force behind Kierkegaard's revolt against Hegel. His system presumed to
comprehend and explain the whole of reality. For Kierkegaard, the existence of
the individual is neither thinkable nor foreseen by reason. This protest of
modern irrationalism puts on the philosophical agenda a whole new set of themes
hitherto neglected by rationalism: death, contingency and guilt.
4. Yet, if
Arendt views Kant as the father of modern philosophy, he is also its hero. He
may have left us a world that was hard to live in but, Arendt reminds us, this
critical destruction of the ancient concept of being was all in the cause of
establishing the autonomy of man. At the centre of Kantian practical philosophy
are the concepts of human freedom and dignity. He underlines the uniqueness of
man in the context of being. Freedom is an indispensable regulative idea of our
ethical existence and contends that every human is an end in him/herself. On
the basis of his good will man has the possibility to determine his own
actions: he finally comes of age, declaring his autonomy as the master and
measure of himself. However, the other side of Kant, his famous dualism, is the
constriction of this freedom and dignity to the noumenal world of the subject, to the world of ideas. Once a human
desire is translated from the interior domain of intentions into the objective
world it is captive to alien forces: to the laws of causality that are quite
indifferent to, and destructive of, human freedom. In the final analysis, Kant
leaves human beings with an unfree freedom. This condition is exemplified by
the antinomies that plague theoretical reason like freedom and necessity.
Arendt maintains that the story of modern philosophy is its preoccupation and
struggle with this paradoxical legacy. The greatest modern philosophers
defiantly set out to affirm human freedom and challenge the dominance of an
alien natural world only to beat a final retreat back to the safety of the old
concept of being dressed in many new disguises. Arendt mentions Marx's
recognition of necessity, Nietzsche's amour
fati, Heidegger's resoluteness. Kant’s greatness, according to Arendt, lies
in the fact that no one after him, with the possible exception of Jaspers, had
been able to go beyond him. None of these greats could live up to Kant’s
fundamental concepts of human freedom and dignity.
5. We do not
have the time to delve further into Arendt's analysis of Existenz philosophy. However, in this article she views Jasper's as
the most promising research programme. This is undoubtedly connected to
Heidegger’s affiliation with Nazism. Jaspers, on the other hand, follows Kant
in affirming the dignity and freedom of all men against Heidegger’s
preoccupation with self-ness. Here Arendt's humanist credentials are stated
very strongly. "Since Kant the essence of man consisted in every single
human being representing all of humanity" (Essays in U, P181) in
the sense that all rational being have in principle equal access to
apprehension of the moral law. This is opposed by Heidegger who deliberate
abandons the concept of man with its alleged aspirations to mastery and its
phenomenologically unverifiable characteristics of freedom, dignity and reason
in favour of Dasein (the Being of
man)which emphasizes the singularity, the conditionedness and the contingency
of the self. Arendt make the point that this concept of self "is a concept
of man that leaves the individual existing independent of humanity and
representative of no one but himself--of nothing but his own nothingness"
(Essays in U, P181). This unambiguous preference for Jaspers over
Heidegger clearly lies in his humanist Kantian rehabilitation of freedom. This
assumes the shape of a concept of existence that “is not a form of being but a
form of human freedom”, a form in which" man as potential spontaneity
rejects the conception of himself as mere result"'(Essays in U,
P183). This affirmation of freedom, grounded in the human condition of
natality, remains central to Arendt’s mature thought. While she always thought
Heidegger the greater philosopher, what Arendt really found great in Jaspers
was his moral personality and the living dialogue she was able to carry on with
him. The preference she shows for Jasper’s philosophical attitude at this time
is, however, more than a concession to his moral personality. It signifies her
evaluation of the importance of a humanist philosophical programme stressing
human freedom, dignity and plurality. This also explains her own ambivalences
towards her philosophical inheritance and the fact that she did not immediately
return to philosophy proper after the Second World War. For her, the great
concerns of Existenz philosophy--
individual death, chance and guilt-- had been simply overwhelmed by an
unspeakably brutal collective fate of the Holocaust and the need to unravel its
real meaning and the challenge of totalitarianism for the future of mankind.
6. The act of
historical understanding is always difficult. Our capacity for empathy seems
limited and is often defeated by the mind of the alien other. Yet the
difficulties facing understanding are reduced when the other person is a
contemporary (at least for some of us). Arendt is more a contemporary than most
philosophers you will study but she experienced a world and horrors that
thankfully are beyond the experience of most of us. Until recently we could
have only read about them, they exhaust our imagination, and in so doing, lose
their potency. Arendt in correspondence with Jaspers who, married to Jewess,
was dismissed from his chair in the late thirties and lived the rest of the war
in what he called internal immigration, writes of them as being survivors of
the historical "flood" with all its biblical connotations. This is
the lived experience of surviving unprecedented historical events. Of being a
Jew in the period of European fascism, World War, the Holocaust, of
confrontation with a form of evil so historically unparalleled that Arendt thought
it even challenged the capacity of traditional moral categories to render it
meaningful. This is Arendt's point of departure in an attempt to make sense of
her world. In England The Origins of Totalitarianism was initially
published as The Burden of our Time. This title captures the spirit that
pervades Arendt's first major and probably her greatest book. She believed that
these historical events were unlike any natural catastrophe. There was no
possibility of the survivors returning to normal lives and somehow forgetting
the horror. For Arendt, the Holocaust is a singular "burden" simply
because it could not be left behind. Her very forceful and controversial
argument is that these events were no historical aberration or mere accident
but the result of "hidden mechanisms" deeply immanent to the dynamics
of modernity. There is now no prospect of ever returning to a historical epoch
of relative security and calm. The experience of the first half of the 20th
century culminating in the threat of nuclear annihilation registers a complete
break with the past and a crisis of the fundamental traditions and
institutional structures of western civilisation. If this sense of historical
rupture was not enough, the idea of the "burden of the times" also has
a compelling personal dimension for Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. Many
were tormented by the question of their own survival when all family, friends
and even whole communities had been systematically liquidated. Others felt
themselves under the sway of a special responsibility to make something of
their lives not personally but on behalf of all those who were murdered.
Survival on such terms imposes it own burdens. The Origins of
Totalitarianism may be conceived as Arendt's own personal attempt to
discharge the burdensome debt of her own survival in the face of the
annihilation of millions of others.
