Tag: Equality

Maria Robaszkiewicz, Michael Weinman: Hannah Arendt and Politics

Hannah Arendt and Politics Book Cover Hannah Arendt and Politics
Thinking Politics
Maria Robaszkiewicz, Michael Weinman
Edinburgh University Press
2024
Hardback
232

Reviewed by: Samantha Fazekas (Trinity College Dublin)

In their book, Hannah Arendt and Politics, Maria Robaszkiewicz and Michael Weinman not only develop a comprehensive and rich account of Hannah Arendt’s conception of thinking and judging. But their analysis also constitutes an act of thinking and judging itself, as they employ Arendt’s “exercises in political thinking” (2023: 3) to understand the political crises of Arendt’s time as well as our own. Following the “Introduction,” which sketches Arendt’s elusive notion of “exercises in political thinking,” comes Part I, “Arendt and Politics: Thinking about the World as a Public Space,” which consists of three chapters: Chapter 1: “Action,” Chapter 2: “Between Human Action and the Life of the Mind,” and Chapter 3: “Exercises in Political Thinking.” Part I provides an excellent account of Arendt’s conception of politics, the human condition, as well as thinking and judging.

In Part II, “Arendt and Political Thinking: Judging the World(s) We Share,” Robaszkiewicz and Weinman offer up a wide variety of political (and social) topics for debate. In Arendtian fashion, they think about the crises that Arendt was confronted with herself, namely, the conflict between the philosopher and the polis (reflected in the Heidegger controversy) and the Eichmann trial, explored in Chapters 4 and 5 respectively. However, Robaszkiewicz and Weinman do not limit their analysis to the political concerns that Arendt sought to understand. Instead, they apply her exercises in political thinking to the crises and political concerns of our time. In Chapter 6, “The Earth, Education, and Human Action,” the authors tackle one of our most pressing political concerns: the climate crisis. By taking the Fridays for Future protest as a “case study” (2023: 199), Robaszkiewicz and Weinman emphasize the vital role that children play in shaping and changing the world.

Chapter 7, “Social Justice and Feminist Agency,” explores an appropriate way to politicize social concerns, thereby making feminist action possible within an Arendtian framework. Chapter 8, “Human Rights and Popular Sovereignty,” sets “political personhood,” not nationality, as the criterion for membership in a political community (2023: 157). Lastly, Chapter 9, “Thinking With and Against Arendt about Race, Racism, and Anti-racism,” exposes the blind spots in Arendt’s thinking about race, her Eurocentrism, and subsequently employs Arendt’s conception of enlarged mentality as a means for incorporating diverse perspectives into our own.

Robaszkiewicz and Weinman navigate between thoroughly sketching the secondary literature on each proposed topic, advancing their own original opinions, and maintaining the freedom of their readers to think and judge for themselves. The authors thus tease out and exemplify what it means to engage in exercises in political thinking. To this end, the “Introduction” sheds light on Arendt’s elusive and ambiguous notion of exercises in political thinking. As the authors point out, this notion appears as an “inconspicuous remark” because Arendt only mentions it in the title and “Introduction” of Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (2023: 1). It is therefore no wonder that this notion has not been picked up in the secondary literature.[1]

However, Robaszkiewicz’ and Weinman’s novel contribution to the secondary literature is their contention that Arendt’s exercises in political thinking lie at the very core of her work. As they claim, “Arendt’s writings, regardless of their scope, specific subject matter, or the time they were written, can function as examples of such exercises” (2023: 1). Robaszkiewicz and Weinman thus establish a new and powerful approach to considering Arendt’s work. “Throughout her body of work,” the authors maintain, Arendt “never loses sight of her primary goal: to understand and judge the phenomena of political life” (2023: 1). It is generally acknowledged that understanding political events is Arendt’s main objective. However, Robaszkiewicz and Weinman shine new light on Arendt’s oeuvre by viewing it as an instantiation of exercises in political thinking, which is a means for gaining an understanding of the world.

The wide array of topics covered in Hannah Arendt and Politics thus serve as examples for how to think and judge about the world. By applying Arendt’s exercises in political thinking to the political crises and issues of our own time, Robaszkiewicz and Weinman illuminate the continued relevance of Arendt’s thought. “By examining more closely Arendt’s concept of exercises in political thinking,” the authors claim, “our work understands itself as an opening for further research into the practical applicability of her political thinking” (2023: 201). In this way, each chapter offers an example of a possible judgment on a given topic, from Arendt’s misjudgment of Heidegger to framing the Friday for Future protests as an example of the political capability of children to change the world. By exemplifying what it means to think and judge, Robaszkiewicz and Weinman thus equip their readers with a framework through which to think about the concerns and crises of our time.

At the same time, the authors remain true to Arendt’s thought, insofar as they do not prescribe how their readers ought to think about and judge political events. As Robaszkiewicz and Weinman maintain, “we also express our judgments and we do so in an explicitly Arendtian sense: not trying to tell our readers what they should think, but inviting them as dialogue partners to think and judge together about the world that we share” (2023: 71). Thus, the accuracy of their approach is that they remain true to the freedom involved in thinking and judging. Robaszkiewicz and Weinman could describe themselves in the way they describe Arendt: “perhaps like Socrates: a gadfly irritating the people of Athens to motivate them to thinking and better understanding of the world and themselves” (2023: 153). Like Arendt, Robaszkiewicz and Weinman inspire their readers to think and judge critically and freely, so that they reach their own judgments and conclusions. Hannah Arendt and Politics therefore truly embodies what the authors claim lies at the core of Arendt’s own work: exercises in political thinking.

In Chapter 1, Robaszkiewicz and Weinman proceed by accurately and succinctly sketching the core tenets of Arendt’s thought by following Arendt’s own unsystematic method, which is “nothing more than to think what we are doing” (Arendt 1958: 5). Since Arendt defines the activity of thinking as inconclusive or “resultless” (Arendt 2003a: 167), the authors thus paint the broad strokes of Arendt’s political thought. Not in “building block format,” but rather, they “pave Arendt’s conceptual paths in small steps, from one notion to the next, illuminating the fragile framing of her theory” (2023: 11). Accordingly, Robaszkiewicz and Weinman employ the concepts of “natality, plurality, action, power, freedom, the private and the public, and the social” as “guideposts” (2023: 12) to understand Arendt’s political thought.

Their method thus does not over-systematize Arendt’s thought, but rather establishes a red thread that twists and turns through paradoxes, weaving key concepts into a rich and colorful fabric that allows us to see Arendt’s thought as a whole. For example, the authors establish a link between the activity of labor and the realization of the political phenomena that Arendt cherishes, e.g., speech and action, plurality, and political freedom. In what is meant to be a summary of Arendt’s political thought, Robaszkiewicz and Weinman thus already make a novel contribution to the secondary literature. While they provide a standard definition of labor as responsible for maintaining the natural life cycle, they tease out the political implication of labor that Arendt seems to overlook herself.

Generally, labor is regarded as pre-political in the sense that it tends to necessity (Arendt 1958: 31), thereby setting persons up for political participation. What Robaszkiewicz and Weinman add however is that the body is the medium through which citizens speak and interact with each other. As they contend:

This description of labor might seem deflated but we must not forget that human embodiment is one of the central conditions for all activities we ever undertake. Without a body that we take time to nourish, care for, and cultivate, as subjects we would have no worldly reality (2023: 16).

In this way, embodiment can be regarded as the physical condition for the possibility of political action and the realization of all public-political phenomena. Without engaging in labor, neither political participation, natality, plurality, nor political freedom could unfold in the world.

In Chapter 2, Robaszkiewicz and Weinman correctly parse out three versions of thinking, which are often overlooked and conflated in the secondary literature. Namely, metaphysical or philosophical thinking; dialectical thinking (the Socratic two-in-one); and political thinking (enlarged mentality). I will focus on the first two versions and will return to the third later. Robaszkiewicz and Weinman rightly note that metaphysical thinking undergirds the conflict between the philosopher and the polis (city). This follows because the philosopher must withdraw from the world to pursue eternal and universal truths through contemplation. As such, the philosopher is fundamentally at odds with the polis and political involvement. Robaszkiewicz and Weinman thus convey the tension between the contemplative and active life as Arendt sees it: “thinking as such has little use for society” (Arendt 2006h: 190)” (2023: 39).

In contrast, Robaszkiewicz and Weinman frame the second type of thinking, namely, dialectical thinking, as relevant to the political community. They elucidate what Arendt means with dialectical thinking by turning to Socrates. While Socrates too withdraws from the world, “in his thinking he is alone, but not lonely” (2023: 40). Even though Socrates must retreat from the world in order to think, his internal conversation partner keeps him company. As such, dialectical thinking contains an inner form of plurality and intersubjectivity, insofar as it represents a dialogue between two people (Arendt 2003b: 90). This leads Robaszkiewicz and Weinman to the conclusion that dialectical thinking “turns out to be a thoroughly practical activity, even if of a very particular kind” (2023: 40). Similarly to other scholars, such as Berkowitz (2010), Fazekas (2024), and Topolski (2015), Robaszkiewicz and Weinman present dialectical thinking as world-oriented. Precisely because the internal dialogue between Socrates and himself mirrors public debate (Arendt 2017: 625-626).

Specifically, the authors argue that the political relevance of dialectical thinking is that it fosters moral character development, underlining political speech and action with moral responsibility (2023: 45-46). On the one hand, their claim squares with Arendt’s link between dialectical thinking and morality. As Robaszkiewicz and Weinman correctly observe, morality is “a by-product of the activity of thinking itself (SQMP 106)” (2023: 46), insofar as it is achieved by conversing with oneself openly and harmoniously. The authors explain that an honest internal dialogue therefore prevents self-deception and self-contradiction (2023: 45).

On the other hand, Robaszkiewicz and Weinman concede that their proposition appears to contradict Arendt’s stringent demarcation between morality and politics (2023: 46). Arendt upholds this division because morality is fundamentally subjective (Arendt 2003b: 97), which opposes the intersubjectivity and plurality that marks political debate. This follows because the golden standard that guides dialectical thinking, for Arendt as for Socrates, is being able to ‘live with oneself’ (Arendt 2003b: 78). Basing morality on internal harmony makes it subjective, seeing as what persons can live with is highly changeable. As Arendt admits herself, moral judgments “can change considerably and uncomfortably from person to person, from country to country, from century to century” (Arendt 2003b: 101).

Yet Robaszkiewicz and Weinman claim that dialectical thinking underscores political participation with moral responsibility. Thus, they suggest a link between morality and politics:

We may see the relation between them as an instance of the butterfly effect: as a by-product of thinking, the constitution of the person influences all her actions. Since action takes place between people, it always has a moral dimension (2023: 46).

While they point out that there is no guarantee that citizens will ignite and maintain an internal dialogue with themselves (2023: 47), the moral imperative is clear.[2] If citizens do not converse with themselves, they run the risk of contradicting themselves, and hence not being able to live with themselves.

Robaszkiewicz and Weinman unfortunately leave the precise connection between moral responsibility and political action implicit. There are three reasons that make it difficult to connect the dots. First, Arendt does not make it easy to link morality to politics, owing to her commitment to keep morality and politics entirely separate. Second, and as the authors acknowledge, “Arendt herself sees this connection as somewhat ephemeral” (2023: 46). Third, Arendt’s understanding of morality is self-referential and highly subjective, which presents difficulties when squaring it with the world-interest, plurality, and the intersubjectivity of the political world. However, the following questions remain: How is the “moral dimension” inherent in political action expressed in a way that makes it amenable to politics? What assures the world-orientedness of moral responsibility if Arendt’s golden rule is nothing other than being able to live with oneself? If political action is world-oriented, then it follows that moral responsibility (in a way) should be as well. Robaszkiewicz and Weinman seem to favor this interpretation when they hold that dialectical thinking “improve[s] both the moral and political competence of democratic citizens” (2023: 47).

Although this answer remains implicit in Chapter 2, it can be teased out in Chapter 5 by turning to Robaszkiewicz’ and Weinman’s analysis of Arendt’s “ironic tone” (2023: 96) in her judgment of Adolf Eichmann. In this chapter, the authors interpret Arendt’s irony in her assessment of Eichmann as a means for the public appearance of her personality (2023: 101). In this way, Robaszkiewicz and Weinman capture the importance of the delivery of judgments, as opposed to their “particular content” (2023: 101). As the authors rightly note, Arendt’s irony in delivering her judgment of Eichmann reveals who she is and how she sees the world in her own unique way.

Their interpretation squares nicely with Arendt’s insistence that the appearance of our personalities is a fundamentally public-political phenomenon over which individuals have no control (Arendt 1958: 179). It is against this claim that Robaszkiewicz’ and Weinman’s portrayal of Arendt should be read. For the authors argue that the tonality of Arendt’s characterization of Eichmann has been questioned and misunderstood (2023: 101). From Arendt’s perspective, perhaps it is the lack of control that persons have over their appearance that has caused a discrepancy in the way Arendt judged Eichmann and the way her verdict has been received. To substantiate their claim, Robaszkiewicz and Weinman focus on “how she wrote (and spoke) even more than what she did in judging Eichmann;” and how her “‘wildly ironic’” (2023: 101) tone has been misunderstood.

Accordingly, the authors take Gershom Scholem’s criticism of Arendt as an example of misinterpreting Arendt’s irony in response to Eichmann (2023: 98). As Robaszkiewicz and Weinman explain, Scholem found Arendt’s irony not only misplaced, but also indicative of her lack of love for her own people (Knott 2017: 203-204; 2023: 102). In response, Arendt contends that Scholem misunderstood her irony. She did not absolve Eichmann of culpability for committing crimes against humanity. Instead, Arendt believed she was simply recounting Eichmann’s statements in an ironic tone (2023: 102). Robaszkiewicz and Weinman thus clarify that Arendt’s irony was her unique mode of judging Eichmann.

The objection to Eichmann [the book], Arendt is saying, is actually an objection to her subjectivity: not really the particular content of her judgments, but the personality that comes across in her manner of expressing that content (2023: 101).

This leads the authors to claim that irony is not only a means for the public appearance of the who. But it is also a means for sustaining public debate when confronted with unprecedented political events (2023: 102). Irony is thus portrayed as a mode of judging that reinvigorates public debate, and hence preserves the political world.

Furthermore, uncovering Arendt’s irony as the only viable response to unprecedented political events could have provided Robaszkiewicz and Weinman with a more precise connection between morality and politics. Arendt’s ironic response to Eichmann thus clarifies the questions raised above: How is the “moral dimension” inherent in political action expressed in a way that makes it amenable to politics? What assures the world-orientedness of moral responsibility if Arendt’s golden rule is nothing other than being able to live with oneself? A potential answer could be that the moral imperative to externalize one’s internal dialogue sustains and preserves public debate, and by extension the political world. Arendt’s particular way of acting on this moral imperative was to frame Eichmann’s statements in an ironic tone.

Accordingly, what makes moral responsibility less self-referential and more world-oriented is perhaps the realization that expressing one’s inner dialogue has the potential to promote the continuity and integrity of the political world. Robaszkiewicz and Weinman seem to imply this when they claim, albeit in reference to political thinking, “the public performance of irony as the manner of passing reflective judgment is integral to enacting one’s sense of personal responsibility as a democratic citizen” (2023: 107).[3] This statement demonstrates why the connection between moral responsibility and political action remains somewhat unclear. While Robaszkiewicz and Weinman distinguish between dialectical and political thinking, this distinction becomes muddled in their analysis of Arendt’s response to Eichmann.

However, there is a way to account for a possible connection between moral responsibility and political action while maintaining a distinction between dialectical and political thinking. Realizing that expressing one’s internal dialogue has the potential to spark public debate is the moment when dialectical thinking turns into political thinking, thereby making moral responsibility less self-referential and more world-oriented. This squares with Robaszkiewicz’ and Weinman’s claim that reflective judgment ties moral responsibility to political action (2023: 107). This realization thus constitutes a bridge between dialectical thinking and political action, mediated by political thinking.

Moreover, the third form of thinking, namely, political thinking, is presented in Chapter 3. Robaszkiewicz and Weinman sketch political thinking conceived of as enlarged mentality, which Arendt plucks from Kant’s aesthetic reflective judgment. The most salient aspect of their account is that Arendt follows Kant by conceiving of enlarged mentality as a reflective ability. In contrast, many scholars, such as Disch (1993), Flynn (1988), Passerin d’Entrèves (1994), Pitkin (1981), and Young (2001), have misread Arendt’s version of enlarged mentality as a public ability. However, as Robaszkiewicz and Weinman make clear, enlarged mentality sparks a “speculative” plurality and “speculative community” (2023: 54), which occurs when persons think in the place of someone else. The authors thus proceed by teasing out the elements of reflective judgment that appeal to Arendt: the plurality incited by enlarged mentality (2023: 54); the intersubjective validity, impartiality, and communicability of aesthetic judgments (2023: 54-59).

Subsequently, Robaszkiewicz and Weinman introduce a valid point that problematizes the veracity of Arendt’s notion of enlarged mentality. They wonder, “[c]an we really think in place of someone else, let alone everyone else?” (2023: 55). This follows because we cannot truly know what it is like to judge from someone else’s perspective. The authors thus criticize Arendt’s choice of example when elucidating political thinking. Robaszkiewicz and Weinman explain, “she suggests a thought experiment, in which she imagines how she would feel living in a slum from the perspective of a slum dweller (SQMP 140), and she frames this example as if it was not a problem whatsoever to do so” (2023: 55). The issue is twofold. First, if one has not experienced what it is like to live in such a situation, then one cannot fully inhabit the perspective of someone who has. Arendt seems to suggest as much when she holds that “one trains one’s imagination to go visiting” (Arendt 1992: 43; 2023: 55).

While Arendt’s example fails, reading her reflections on enlarged mentality as a whole allows us to arrive at the type of exercise the authors believe is more accurate. As Robaszkiewicz and Weinman have it,

one can attempt to find a third perspective, in which the judging subject simultaneously remains herself and brackets her own position: the one in which she still judges as herself but, in doing so, she imagines multiple other perspectives, which are not her own, and thinks them through in a critical way (2023: 56).

Engaging in critical introspection, while not knowing exactly what it is like to think in someone else’s shows, is precisely the hallmark of Arendt’s version of enlarged mentality. While we can neither extricate ourselves from our own perspective fully, nor inhabit someone else’s perspective perfectly, what matters is that we ‘enlarge’ our mentality and aim for our judgments to be “more representative” (Arendt 2003b, 141; 2023: 55) of the political world.

This leads into the second point. As Robaszkiewicz and Weinman maintain, our ability to invoke possible perspectives, and hence our very ability to judge politically, is flawed. As the authors point out, we might not envision someone else’s perspective accurately, let alone know what it is truly like for them to see the world. Robaszkiewicz and Weinman thus hold, “[i]t is clear that in this process we might simply be wrong in our representation of other persons’ perspectives” (2023: 56). The authors link the failure of judgment up nicely with Arendt’s conception of opinion as partial, fleeing, and vulnerable. Arendt conceives of opinion, as the authors rightly note, in line with Socrates, namely, as “‘what appears to me’ (dokei moi)” (2023: 56). While opinions should always incorporate other possible perspectives, what Robaszkiewicz and Weinman home in on, is that opinions are nevertheless grounded in subjectivity.[4] That is, one can only ever engage in enlarged mentality from one’s own viewpoint. As such, political thinking and judging will always be limited, flawed, and sometimes completely mistaken. The novelty of their reading is that they present political thinking as “a very fragile practice, in which neither the journey nor the destination is certain” (2023: 56).

At the same time, Robaszkiewicz and Weinman maintain that political thinking is not an altogether futile undertaking. While we might fail in our thinking and judging, what motivates us to try again is to keep the political world alive. As the authors hold, “Arendt’s keenest and most lasting observation: the political, which is what makes us human at all, entails an ongoing practice of exercises in political thinking” (2023: 192). Robaszkiewicz and Weinman thus correctly observe that political thinking is a never-ending process of improving and correcting our judgments. On the one hand, this can be achieved by taking new perspectives into account when enlarging our mentality (2023: 200).

On the other hand, conceiving of political thinking as a “practice” means that “the potential exercise of political judgment is never fully actualized” (2023: 200). The open-endedness of political thinking thus ensures that persons continue to improve and correct their judgments – with the hope that they will learn to judge well and more accurately each time. We can therefore view Hannah Arendt and Politics as an open-ended, non-prescriptive yet loosely instructive, performative guide for thinking and judging through the political events that marked Arendt’s time, as well as the current and future political events of our time. As such, Robaszkiewicz and Weinman fulfill their aim of unearthing “the hidden treasure of [Arendt’s] political philosophy” (2023: 198).

Bibliography

  1. Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
  2. Arendt, Hannah. 1992. Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, edited by Ronald Beiner. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
  3. Arendt, 2003a. “Thinking and Moral Considerations.” In Responsibility and Judgment, edited by Jerome Kohn, 159-192. New York: Schocken Books.
  4. Arendt, 2003b. “Some Questions of Moral Philosophy.” In Responsibility and Judgment, edited by Jerome Kohn, 49-146. New York: Schocken Books.
  5. Arendt, Hannah. 2006h. Vom Leben des Geistes. Munich and Zurich: Piper.
  6. Arendt, Hannah. 2017. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York and London: Penguin Classics.
  7. Bar On, Bat-Ami. 2002. The Subject of Violence: Arendtean Exercises in Understanding. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
  8. Berkowitz, Roger. 2010. “Solitude and the Activity of Thinking.” In Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics, edited by Roger Berkowitz, Jeffrey Katz, and Thomas Keenan, 237-246. New York: Fordham University Press.
  9. Bot, Michael. 2013. “Irony as an Antidote to Thoughtlessness.” Amor Mundi, July 10. https://hac.bard.edu/amor-mundi/irony-as-an-antidote-to-thoughtlessness-2013-10-07
  10. Disch 1993. “More Truth than Fact: Storytelling as Critical Understanding in the Writings of Hannah Arendt.” Political Theory Vol. 21, No. 4 (November): 665-694.
  11. Fazekas, Samantha. 2024. “Leaving PhronesisBehind: Arendt’s Turn to Kant,” in Works of Philosophy and Their Reception (WPR). Edited by Nicholas Dunn. Berlin: De Gruyter. https://www.degruyter.com/database/WPR/entry/wpr.28861265/html
  12. Flynn 1988. “Arendt’s Appropriation of Kant’s Theory of Judgment.” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology Vol, 19, no. 2: 128-140.
  13. Gines, Kathryn T. 2014. Arendt and the Negro Question. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
  14. Knott, Marie Luise, ed. 2017. The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
  15. Koivusalo, Markku. 2010. “Hannah Arendt’s Angels and Demons: Ten Spiritual Exercises.” In Hannah Arendt: Practice, Thought and Judgment, edited by Mika Ojakangas, 105-150. Helsinki: Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies.
  16. Passerin d’Entrèves, Maurizio. 1994. The Political Philosophy of Hannah Arendt. London & New York: Routledge.
  17. Pitkin, 1981. “Justice: On Relating Private and Public.” Political Theory Vol. 9, No. 3 (Aug.): 327-352.
  18. Robaszkiewicz, Maria. 2017. Übungen im politischen Denken: Hannah Arendts Schriften als Einleitung der politischen Praxis. Wiesbaden: Springer.
  19. Robaszkiewicz, Maria, and Michael Weinman. 2023. Hannah Arendt and Politics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
  20. Topolski, Anya. 2015. Arendt, Levinas and a Politics of Relationality. London/New York: Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd.
  21. Young, Iris Marion. 2001. “Asymmetrical Reciprocity: On Moral Respect, Wonder, and Enlarged Thought.” In Judgment, Imagination, and Politics: Themes from Kant and Arendt, edited by Ronald Beiner and Jennifer Nedelsky, 205-228. Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

[1] Robaszkiewicz and Weinman list the following accounts that deal with Arendt’s exercises in political thinking: Bar On (2002); Koivusalo (2010); and Robaszkiewicz (2017); (2023: 1).

[2] The term, “moral imperative,” is used here in the loosest sense possible, seeing as moral decision-making, for Arendt, does not establish any rules for moral actions (Arendt 2003a: 78).

[3] Robaszkiewicz and Weinman cite Michael Bot (2013) as making a similar point (2023: 105).

[4] Robaszkiewicz and Weinman cite Gines (2014) as developing a similar point (2023: 192-193).

Terry Pinkard: Practice, Power, and Forms of Life, The University of Chicago Press, 2022






Practice, Power, and Forms of Life: Sartre’s Appropriation of Hegel and Marx Book Cover




Practice, Power, and Forms of Life: Sartre’s Appropriation of Hegel and Marx





Terry Pinkard




The University of Chicago Press




2022




Cloth $35.00




200

Trevor Tchir: Hannah Arendt’s Theory of Political Action: Daimonic Disclosure of the ‘Who’






Hannah Arendt's Theory of Political Action: Daimonic Disclosure of the `Who' Book Cover




Hannah Arendt's Theory of Political Action: Daimonic Disclosure of the `Who'




International Political Theory





Trevor Tchir




Palgrave MacMillan




2017




Hardcover 103,99 €




258

Reviewed by: Amy Bush (Drexel University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA)

Disruption and Remembrance in Arendt’s Theory of Political Action

Trevor Tchir’s monograph, “Hannah Arendt’s Theory of Political Action”, covers a wide spectrum of Arendt’s works in providing a framework for her theory of political action. Tchir draws upon a range of thinkers, such as Heidegger, Kant, Augustine and Montesquieu, who influenced aspects of Arendt’s theory, and upon those thinkers whom Arendt explicitly criticized, such as Marx, to demonstrate how she both breaks with the tradition of western political thought and recollects and revises some of the concepts within that tradition in order to re-conceptualize “political action” in the modern age of secular politics. Thus, Tchir also highlights how Arendt transforms and revises aspects of others’ philosophies, in significant ways, when she does borrow from them. Moreover, his inclusion of commentary and criticisms of Arendt’s approach to political action by numerous contemporary thinkers helps him to illuminate the tensions within Arendt’s thought and to delineate his own thesis and argument. However, much of his book is devoted to an exegesis and interpretation of Arendt’s diverse works in respect to her theory of political action, as she encounters the Western tradition of political thought in general, and the aforementioned thinkers in particular. Although he slowly integrates his own voice into his interpretation, it isn’t until the final chapter of the book that he fully draws out how the tensions within Arendt’s thought are fruitful for contemporary politics.

Although Tchir’s book is very comprehensive in its approach to Arendt’s theory of political action, much of the territory he covers has been traversed by other commentators, especially as regards Arendt’s conceptual distinctions between the public and the private sphere, and the political and social/economic spheres. His own primary contribution to the extensive literature on Arendt is his discussion, in chapter 3, of the importance of the metaphor of the “daimon”, as introduced in The Human Condition in respect to the political actor, as she individuates herself through speech and action in the public sphere of a plurality of spectators. (89) The metaphor of the “daimon” is used by Arendt to indicate how the political actor does not have a self transparent to herself, but, whose self can only be “known” through the diverse judgments and narratives of the plurality of spectators to her actions, as if the “daimon” sat on her shoulder concealed from her view but visible to all those who witness her. Tchir also contends that that this metaphor of the daimon gestures towards a divine or transcendent origin of the capacity of humans to act and think (and, thereby, judge the actions of the actor that appear in the political sphere). The daimon, as a mediator between men and gods, expresses that the origins of these human capacities are ultimately unknowable. In this way, Arendt encounters the residual language of transcendence in modern political thought. Within the context of modern revolutions, such as the French Revolution and American Revolution, there was an overturning of traditional authority of religion within the realm of politics, but the language of rights often retained an appeal to transcendent sources of these “natural” rights of mankind. (12) Thus, there is a tension within Arendt’s own thought on the relationship of the secular and the religious within modern politics, and within political theory generally in the modern era.

This also opens the question as to whether or not there are any “foundations” to political theory in the modern age. However, this enables Arendt to introduce a conception of freedom suitable to an age without such religious, metaphysical, or natural foundations – one that is self-grounding within a political space of appearances (rather than grounded in an invisible sphere of divine or metaphysical laws). Her notion of freedom is one that is not based on a notion of the will that masters itself or directs its actions from pre-determined principles, whether metaphysical or religious or based on reason or nature, nor is it grounded in a notion of political sovereignty, where a ruler crafts laws which subjects obey. It is this western political tradition of freedom that lies in sovereignty and rule, one that promotes relationships of domination and an illusory control over what the subjects can do and their environment, that she is disrupting, while retrieving a freedom that arises from isonomia, that is, the agonistic politics that occurs in a sphere of formal equality, as practiced in ancient Greece. (135) The disclosure of the unique, daimonic “who” is the disclosure of a non-sovereign self.

However, Tchir also shows how the metaphor of the “daimon” has existential import for human dignity and the “meaning” of existence for humans in a world of uncertainty and contingency, rather than in a world where moral or religious absolutes, whether based on revelation or reason, could guide our political actions and insure mastery. (32) This existential impact demonstrates why the realm of political action is so centrally important to human existence for Hannah Arendt, and it is why she sometimes characterizes the “political world” as also a “spiritual world”. (79) It would seem to me that this latter characterization would make the divine element in human existence immanent rather than transcendent, and would point to a fundamental mystery at the core of human existence which amplifies its uncertainty and makes complete unconcealment of origins impossible.(84) Nonetheless, Tchir argues by the end of his book that Arendt would not exclude religion from the public sphere, and this is important to understanding the conduct of politics in today’s world. At the same time, he makes the point that uncertainty plays a central role in Arendt’s re-conceptualization of political action, as the success of any political actions remain uncertain and their effects remain unpredictable in an agonistic political world of plurality of actors and spectators with conflicting wills and cross-purposes. (25) Thus, Arendt has an understanding of both politics and existence as based in a fragility of a common political world shared by a plurality of actors and spectators, and a vulnerability of humans in the face of their “passive givenness” and in their attempts to actualize their historically situated possibilities from that givenness through action. (32) Although she dispenses with a concept of “human nature” as the basis of the political, she does not argue that political action can fundamentally change our givenness so much as actively disclose our individuality, which exceeds this givenness. This actualization of our individuality remains opaque to each of us, as individual actors. However, through political action, we can assert our human dignity as we confront this givenness as well as when we encounter the contingencies of our historical situations.

Action itself, as characterized by natality, is the source of freedom, which is the other major focus of Tchir’s exegesis. If one of the ontological conditions of the political space of appearances is that of plurality, the other one is that of natality, as a spontaneous beginning, and the capacity to initiate or give birth to something new and unprecedented into a world that is otherwise characterized by natural or historical processes, chains of causes and effects, and normalizing routines. Arendt’s conception of natality is borrowed from the Christian tradition of miracles, as that which interrupts natural processes, especially as found in Augustine’s works. (24) This is how action is differentiated from behavior and from being simply another cause in a chain of causes and effects, although action has unpredictable and uncontrollable ramifications by setting off many chains of causes and effects in unprecedented ways. Through natality, new aspects of the shared world of appearances are themselves disclosed, along with the disclosure of the unique “who” of the actors. Thus, individuality is dependent upon the witnessing of others, and political freedom is relational. This is a realm that discloses “meaning” rather than “truth”, although Arendt will complicate this picture by insisting that spectators enlarge their mentality so that their interpretations deal with “facticity” rather than with inaccurate distortions of what happened. (173) However, one of Arendt’s presumptions appears to be that people want or seek such meaning in their lives, and not solely the accomplishment of goals, social or otherwise. This is another way in which the political realm is also a spiritual realm.

Although plurality is also a condition of the public sphere, individuation occurs within that public sphere as actors perform in front of spectators who are characterized by both their equality and distinction. (23) The shared world is not one of a common vision of the good shared by a predetermined community, as in communitarianism, (5) but one of a material world of cultural artifacts, which themselves are subject to interpretation by participants in that world, and the “web of interrelationships” that occurs in that world. “Distinction” is presupposed in the plurality of participants, while “equality” is a formal feature of the public sphere where all participants’ perspectives play a role, rather than one of material equality.

Fundamental to the possibility of individuation is Arendt’s distinction between the “existential who” and the “constative what” (4, 85). The “who” that is disclosed in the public sphere is not simply a collection of character traits and talents or of a pre-established identity, such as that of socioeconomic status, gender or race, which could be generally applied to similarly situated others, all of which would be an aspect of the person’s “whatness”. The “who” is disclosed through the performance of her acts and the virtuosity of her deeds in the political space of appearances and is not “made” as a product of a craft. The “who” transcends the “what”. However, the “meaning” of her acts is disclosed in the narratives, stories, and histories composed by spectators who judge her acts, and which show how these acts, in disclosing the principles that inspired them, serve as “valid examples” for future action within that community. (31) Tchir proposes that this plurality is not only a plurality of “opinions” (or doxa), although it is especially that, but also a plurality of “whats” that insert themselves into this public sphere wherein they can renegotiate their identities as “whats” through their individuating actions and judgments of actions. (6) In this manner, pluralities are not a diversity of predetermined “whats” along ethnic, racial, gender, economic or social lines, but the latter are not so much excluded from the public sphere as augmented and revised within that sphere. As Tchir will argue in chapter 6 of the book, it is important that spectators do not surrender their individual judgments of actions to the prejudices and “whats” of others, even though they should be taking into consideration all the diverse perspectives of those who are physically present in the public sphere, as well as the perspectives of past historical actors within that sphere. Thus, there is a nuanced attempt to make room for the entry of the whatness of participants into this sphere, without subordinating that sphere to their “whatness” or to what has been loosely called “identity politics” (my term, and not the author’s).

This public realm and its freedom are fragile because they can only be sustained by the renewal of actions and judgments within the sphere. The space of appearances has no institutional infrastructure that can guarantee its presence, although Arendt does comment on structures that may encourage or facilitate such a sphere, such as a legal framework that makes such free exchange of “opinions” possible. She proposes a “council system” in On Revolution. (28) She also comments upon those structures that tend to interfere with such a free exchange of “opinion”, such as parties and some schemes of political representation. Because Tchir’s thesis is focused on the existential implications of Arendt’s theory of political action, he tends to omit detailed discussion of alternative structures of governance implied by her theory, although he does make observations about potential deliberative spaces for global actors in his concluding chapter, and explains why Arendt proposed federalism rather than a world government as a means to insure a “right to have rights” in chapter 5.

Although this book is devoted to the disclosure of the “existential and unique who” in political action, it also attempts to characterize and clarify what constitutes political action, a subject of great controversy in the literature on Arendt. Political action is a performance that invokes inspiring principles, examples of which might include “honor, glory, equality, and excellence, but also hatred, fear, and distrust” (29). Through these examples of inspiring principles, it becomes evident that some principles might sustain freedom within the public sphere better than others. Along these lines, Arendt will suggest that the principle of “rectifying social inequality” will most likely destroy the public sphere, as she contends happened when the “impoverished Sans-Culottes entered the scene of the French Revolution. (152) When this principle inspires actions in the public sphere it tends to destroy the plurality of perspectives and opinions, and obliterate individuality through single-mindedness of an instrumental goal, and, it is here that we can see a tension between the who and what in the plurality of the public sphere. Despite Tchir’s own argument, Arendt seems to favor the plurality of opinions, which she does not treat as confined to socioeconomic factors or status. (136) I will reserve further discussion of Arendt’s view of the social and its relationship to the political to later in this review.

Actions thereby spring from principles, as understood by Montesquieu, but also may “exemplify” and “sustain a principle” (30). Although such principles are “too general to prescribe specific courses of action”, they are “greater and longer lasting than immediate ends”, thereby contributing to the continuity of the shared public world. (31) However, these principles are not transcendent metaphysical principles or determined by reason prior to action. They are exhibited in the actions themselves, and, thus, they too must be repeated in narratives to inspire future actions, and in those future actions themselves, in order to sustain their role in the public space. In this manner, political action is for the sake of itself – that is, for the sake of maintaining a sphere of plurality in which action can continue to occur, and for the sake of its inspiring principles. (26) Political action contains its own end, rather than occurring “in order” to achieve instrumental goals. (30) Some critics find this approach to political action empty, a criticism to which Tchir responds in chapters 5 and 6, and which I will address later in this review. However, his discussion of inspiring principles is one of the most interesting parts of his book, and one which he revisits in later chapters in responding to criticisms of the emptiness of the public sphere – what does anyone talk about there? – and to criticisms of the formal but not material equality of that sphere, which could influence who is included or excluded from that sphere and the communication that occurs within that sphere.

My above discussion of the “daimon” metaphor and its existential impact, as well as my discussion of freedom, plurality, natality, and the political space of appearances, are drawn primarily from the first three chapters of Tchir’s book, although, as I indicate above, I anticipate where Tchir is going in the rest of his book. Thereafter the book is organized by chapters on Arendt’s encounters and interactions with the thought of other philosophers within the Western tradition. The rest of my review will briefly survey some of the main points made in each of these chapters in order to draw out some of the main strands of the argument delineated above.

In chapter 4,”Aletheia: The Influence of Heidegger”, Tchir shows how “Arendt incorporates Heidegger’s notion of Dasein’s (the human being’s) resolute action as disclosure of both the `who’ of Dasein and of the action’s context” into her theory of political action. (97) Arendt’s attempt to “rescue political action from its historical and contemporary concealment” in conceptions of sovereignty bears an affinity to her teacher, Heidegger’s attempt to rescue Dasein from the historical concealment of Being. Both Heidegger and Arendt share a concern for “Aletheia“, as an “un-concealment” or “un-forgetting” (97), and with the various modes in which arche (sources) of Being can be disclosed. Arendt’s distinction between a “who” and a “what” is drawn from Heidegger, who, in turn, found it in Aristotle’s distinction between poiesis and praxis. In poeisis, an external product is produced by a process of what Arendt will call “work”, and in praxis, there is no external product to be generalized. Instead, the end lies within the activity itself, as Arendt characterizes political action. However, unlike Heidegger’s adoption of Aristotelian concepts, Arendt rejects the idea that action becomes “fully transparent”, (109) and proposes that “the judgment of spectators can indeed change.” (109) Moreover, Arendt’s notion of plurality, although influenced by Heidegger’s “notion of Mitsein (Being-with)”, significantly revises how the “who” is disclosed. For Heidegger, the authentic “who” of Dasein can only be disclosed by the contemplative withdrawal of the individual from the routine, normalizing discourses of the “everydayness” and “idle talk” of the “They”, while Arendt locates the disclosure of the daimonic “who” within the “web of relationships” and the plurality of opinions – that is, the talk – of the public world. “Talk” and “opinions” of ordinary members of a community can be valuable. (114) Moreover, Arendt “reverses Dasein’s primacy of `being-toward-death’, in favor of the notion of `natality’….”. (115)

In chapter 5, “Labor and `World Alienation”: Arendt’s Critique of Marx”, Tchir addresses Arendt’s distinctions between the social and the political, and between the public and the private, in the context of her critique of Marx’s conception of what she calls “socialized humanity”. (125) Arendt’s rejection of Marx’s conception of freedom rests partly on her prioritization of the disclosure of the individual in the political realm over the other realms of the Vita Activa, those of labor and work, which she claims that Marx favors. Labor is the realm of biological necessity, in which people are simply “specimens” to be preserved, so that Marx’s focus on labor and its liberation is misplaced. (130) Arendt proposes that one can only enter the public sphere where freedom occurs when biological and economic needs have already been met in the private sphere of labor. Whereas, in ancient times, all economic activity also took place in the private household, today economic activity is public, found in the realm of the “social”, which still addresses the arena of mere preservation of life. Although Arendt agrees with Marx that capitalism has had world alienating effects – it is through capitalism that economics entered the public sphere (129) – she sees his solution as “perpetuating” the problem by “glorifying labor”(126) and by focusing on the cultivating of talents (which are an aspect of “whatness”) as the source of freedom when the classless society is achieved, rather than upon political action and the disclosure of the “who” as the source of freedom. (135) By treating speech as inescapably determined by social relations of production” (127), Marx denies the possibility of an individual unique “who” who transcends the constative characteristics of that individual’s “whatness”, as well as denying the plurality of perspectives that constitute a political realm.

I cannot do justice to Tchir’s survey of the literature on this aspect of Arendt’s thought, or to how he indicates with which commentaries he agrees or disagrees. However, it is within this chapter, as well as the next chapter, that Tchir explicitly addresses issues of inclusion and exclusion within a public sphere, revisits the relationship between the “who” and the “what”, and complicates the latter distinction by the introduction of Arendt’s conception of a private “place” (133) from which we emerge to insert ourselves into the public sphere – is such a “place” an aspect of a person’s “what” or only a precondition to participating in the political world? After all, “For Arendt, it as though classes are as unavoidable as labor itself” (135), so are they aspects of “whatness” or of “place”? At the same time, she proposes that the expansion of technological and productive forces may make it possible to give every person in a society such a place, that is, to alleviate poverty to the extent that everybody may be able to “transcend” the sphere of preservation of “mere life” to that of political action and the freedom it entails. (133) This is not entirely unlike Marx’s prediction that the productive forces of capitalism will usher in an age of the end of poverty. In this way, Arendt does want the public sphere to be inclusive, but without sacrificing a plurality of opinion that isn’t reducible to self-interest or to the “whatness” of the participants.

Furthermore, Arendt claims that when social questions based on urgent needs enter the public sphere, they become dominated by the self-interests of those who need to preserve their “mere life”, and this lends itself to the violence and rage that occurred during the French Revolution. Arendt’s conception of non-sovereign freedom and political action are introduced just to reduce the role of violence and domination in political life, although she does realize that violence and exploitation played a role in the private sphere of ancient Greece, and can play a role in producing poverty. (156) Moreover, she doesn’t think that social questions and the elimination of poverty can be successfully eliminated through political means. (152)

 However, what then is talked about in the political sphere? Her answer is that questions with no certain conclusions properly belong in the political sphere. (163) For example, the question of “adequate housing” has a certain solution (in Arendt’s view), so it should be dealt with administratively, while the question of “integrated housing” is a properly political issue. (163) In that Arendt considers the provision of “adequate housing” important to establishing a place for every potential participant to enter the public sphere, (156-157) she is not insensitive to social and economic questions, although she does ignore the possibility of normative dimensions to what counts as “adequate”, as well as ignoring the question as to whether or not there should be political interference in the economic housing market in order to provide adequate housing. (159) At the same time, she herself states there is no firm distinction between political and non-political issues and that engagements with one’s historical situation means that what is talked about in the public realm will vary over time. (160) However, one commentator, Lucy Cane, suggests that other inspiring principles than that of eliminating material equality, such as one of “solidarity”, could be disclosed in the actions of political actors in such a way to address some of the concerns of those who are oppressed or exploited. (161)

The problem remains as to whether the formal equality that characterizes the public sphere can be maintained without material equality, and this is where many commentators criticize Arendt. Moreover, there are other types of racial and gender oppression which could distort the exchanges of opinion within the public sphere. However, I suggest that many of Arendt’s critics on these points are operating under different assumptions as to what constitutes power and power relations than those of Arendt. Thus, Tchir’s analysis could benefit from a discussion of Arendt’s own conception of “power”, as numbers of people “acting in concert”, and as distinct from violence which relies on “implements”. (On Violence, 44-46) This would not resolve all the differences between Arendt and her critics, but it would further illuminate her disruption of sovereignty as the basis of freedom, and would help support those commentators who make a case for civil disobedience as political action along Arendtian lines. (139) The role of civil disobedience comes up in Tchir’s discussion of Arendt’s conception of the “right to have rights”, which is “the right to have one’s destiny not be decided merely by how one’s given `what’ is defined and ruled by an external authority but rather by interactions with others who will judge one based on their words and deeds and allow one’s unique `who’ to appear.” (141) The “right to have rights” is the right to live in such a framework, to belong to such a community, which is denied now to those who are stateless or refugees. I suggest that equalizing the conditions of participants within the public sphere might be facilitated by multiple public spheres, based not so much on the features of “whatness” as upon diverse material worlds of cultural artifacts that those with such identities might share, and then federate these various “councils” into larger public spheres, as some protest movements form coalitions with each other. In this way, participants could immanently let their individuality shine through many lights.

In chapter 6, “The Dignity of Doxa: Politicizing Kant’s Aesthetic Judgment”, Tchir addresses in more detail how the judgments of spectators occur. Arendt draws upon Kant’s conceptions of reflective and aesthetic judgments, adapting them to the political sphere, because reflective judgments are not determinative of actions, (177) they involve the use of the imagination, and they make possible the exercise of responsibility. (173) Although each spectator judges differently, and partly from the standpoint of their “whatness”, that is, social class, gender, race, religion, etc., the imagination allows each spectator to enlarge her mentality to take into consideration the perspectives of all those physically present or those past participants in the public sphere. Such an “enlarged mentality” (163) involves a position of “disinterestedness”,(179) one in which we achieve some “distance” by “forgetting ourselves” (180), which implies that we transcend self-interest and considerations of instrumentality or usefulness. (179-180) However, it is unclear how much it involves direct exchange of opinions within the public sphere. In any case, the spectator tries to assess the meaning of acts, but not from a “higher standpoint” than those who participant within the political space.

 The “shared judging community” is the sensus communis, now detranscendentalized from Kant’s conception of it. (183) Again many commentators criticize Arendt’s conception of the judging community because of inequities in the position of different spectators in the communication among them.(182ff) However, the role of such inequities in distorting communications, depends partly on the relationship of “whats” and “who’s” within the public sphere, a situation that remains somewhat unresolved, despite the fact that Arendt doesn’t want communication to be marked by conflict among publicly pre-determined identities. However, equality (of a formal rather than material sort) may serve as an inspiring principle, as could mutual respect. (185) It would seem that the maintenance of such a space would require tolerance of potential conflict, openness to listening to different perspectives, and courage to act and retain the personal element in judging, in ways that would always be subject to subversion. (86) Consensus does not appear to be the aim of the judging community, so much as the disclosure of the meaning of their common world. Thus, in these ways, Tchir returns to existential questions.

In the end, there is no hard separation between the position of the actor and that of the spectator. (193) Arendt borrows Kant’s idea of an original compact, in such a way that the inspiring principles of this compact bring the actor and spectator together as one, and an actor can always become a spectator and vice versa. Moreover, a spectator’s judgments are always revisable. Arendt also appropriates Kant’s notion of “exemplary validity”, which implies that “particular deeds may be taken as valid examples by which to judge other cases.” (195) In this way, a tradition may be established, and this also plays a role in Arendt’s conception of history as storytelling that displays such valid examples.

In chapter 7, “Forgotten Fragments: Arendt’s Critique of Teleological Philosophies of History”, Tchir discusses how Arendt criticizes the philosophies of history of Kant, Hegel and Marx, which, according to her, eliminate the possibility of natality, that is, the spontaneous birth of the unprecedented and new that characterizes political action, and subordinate the freedom of the political sphere, which should be for its own sake and for the plurality of that sphere, to the telos of history, and to the agent of historical forces themselves as they march towards that ultimate end without regard to the plurality of humankind. Individuals are reduced to functions in the movement of history itself, one that lends itself to totalitarianism. She proposes an “alternative method of fragmentary historiography,” (205) as influenced by Walter Benjamin. It is from this alternative method that I have pulled the title of my book review, as I contend, and, I have tried to show in this review, how Arendt tends, in her very theory of political action, to perform the type of disruption of historical continuity that she says has occurred in the modern era, but, at the same time, retrieve some ancient practices to re-conceptualize political action and freedom. In so doing, she performs both an action and a judgment, which has generated, in turn, a diverse set of interpretations and judgments of her own “storytelling”, many of which Tchir surveys in his monograph.

In his concluding chapter, Tchir recapitulates some of his main points, and draws together some of the loose threads of his observations into a brief argument as to the relevance of Arendt’s theory of political action in today’s world, which is characterized by divisive discourses of populism; (236) disillusionment by people in a public sphere dominated by corporations and sensational media (242) and a neoliberal security state that relegates people to pre-determined categories of “whatness” in order to control their movements and to deny them freedom and access to a framework in which they can act and judge freely. He makes a few suggestions about the possibility of bringing Arendt’s conception of political action into the international arena, and religion into the public sphere without it dominating that sphere with absolute metaphysical principles. This chapter would be more fruitful if expanded, but, given the monumental job Tchir has already accomplished, it might be beyond the scope of his book to do so.

Works Cited:

Arendt, Hannah. 1970. On Violence. Harcourt, Brace and Company, San Diego.