Although Hannah Arendt is considered one of the major contributors to social and political thought in the twentieth century, this is the first general anthology ...
The favourable social conditions Fechner met at Leipzig with its university and its book industry as well as the close ties to the citizenship of that town were of outstanding importance for G.Th. Fechner (1801â1887), his scientific achievements as natural scientist and philosopher, as the founder of psychophysics and of experimental aesthetics. Since 1825 Fechner had been integrated into its social, scientific and art life in many different ways. His political and theoretical social ideas were obviously influenced by ist bourgeois (...) liberal circles. (shrink)
Hans Kelsen refused to develop a democratic theory of the basic norm. Given that he expounded a strong distinction between law and politics as two separate scientific disciplines he consistently argued against any attempt to politicize legal science and corrupt its object of cognition. As a result, there has been very little discussion of the basic norm in relation to his democratic theory. This article attempts to fill this gap by tracing the relationship between the basic norm and democracy in (...) Kelsen’s legal and political writings. More precisely, it maps Kelsen’s seminal distinction between autonomy and heteronomy onto his reflections on constitutional making and probes the anti-democratic implications of his theory of the basic norm as they undermine the normative foundations of democratic theory. The article concludes by addressing the question of whether it is possible to articulate a theory of the democratic ground norm, of democratic foundings with a normative content, by proposing the idea of an immanent, performative basic norm as the source of validity of a democratic constitutional order Key Words: Hannah Arendt • basic norm • constitu ere • constitutional making • democracy • immanent norm • Hans Kelsen. (shrink)
Heidegger's 1950 claim to Jaspers (later repeated in his Spiegel interview), that his Nietzsche lectures represented a "resistance" to Nazism is premised on the understanding that he and Jaspers have of the place of science in the Western world. Thus Heidegger can emphasize Nietzsche's epistemology, parsing Nietzsche's will to power, contra Nazi readings, as the metaphysical culmination of the domination of the West by scientism and technologism. It is in this sense that Heidegger argues that German Nazism is "in essence" (...) the same as Soviet Bolshevism and American capitalism. Jaspers himself had likewise emphasized the Will to Power by contrast with the doctrine of eternal recurrence. Heidegger differs from Jaspers (as from their mutual student Hannah Arendt) inasmuch as Jaspers preserves an enthusiasm for the possibility of scientific certainty while yet recognizing (as Heidegger does) a strong sense of the limits of science. None of the three can correctly be labeled anti-scientific. The essay closes by recalling Arendt's reflections on the very possibility of resistance using the example of Jaspers' own resistance to contemporary political events.
My concern in this paper is how to reconcile a central tension in Hannah Arendt’s thinking, one that – if left unresolved – may make us reluctant to endorse her political theory. Arendt was profoundly and painfully aware of the horrors of political evil; in fact, she is almost unparalleled in 20 th century thought in her concern for the consequences of mass political violence, the victims of political atrocities, and the most vulnerable in political society – the (...) stateless, the pariahs, the outcasts. At least, this is the case in her discussions of concrete, historical political situations. Yet in her philosophical writings, she continues to argue that the political realm ultimately redeems human existence, and furthermore, that politics should remain distinct and autonomous from moral evaluation. Political action must be evaluated according to “greatness,” not goodness or any other explicitly moral or even ethical standard. She goes so far as to suggest that politics and morality may be deeply hostile to one another, and can only be reconciled in situations of extreme emergency. This can leave many feeling both perplexed and deeply uncomfortable with the theory of human action that Arendt proposes. Drawing on her notions of political conscience, judgment and - in particular - her account of forgiveness, in this paper I argue that Arendt offers an ethics of plurality, in which what is good is developed from what is most politically important: amor mundi, or love of our shared political world. (shrink)
The paper explores the possibility of collectives forgiving and being forgiven. The first half of the paper articulates and amends Hannah Arendt’s account of forgiveness of and by individuals. The second half raises several objections to the possibility of extending this account to forgiveness of and by collectives. In reply, I argue that collectives can have emotions, be guilty, and meet other necessary conditions for forgiving or being forgiven. However, I explain why, even though collective forgiveness is possible, it (...) may, nonetheless, prove dissatisfying. (shrink)
Abstract Many have been struck by Hannah Arendt?s remarks on loneliness in the concluding pages of The Origins of Totalitarianism, but very few have attempted to deal with the remarks in any systematic way. What is especially striking about this state of affairs is that the remarks are crucial to the account contained therein, as they betray a view of agency that undergirds the rest of the account. This article develops Arendt?s thinking on loneliness throughout her corpus, showing (...) how loneliness is connected to thoughtlessness. In so doing, the article also suggests a connection between Arendt?s notion of loneliness and Stanley Cavell?s notion of skepticism. This connection, it is argued, allows us not only fully to answer a question Arendt leaves unaddressed (the cause loneliness), but also allows us to see how we, as agents and users of language, are perpetually prone to loneliness. (shrink)
Although Hannah Arendt is not usually read as a philosopher of religion, her political philosophy is noticeably filled with references to religious figures and thinkers, including Jesus of Nazareth, Augustine and Duns Scotus. Also notable is the implicit centrality in her thought of amor mundi, or love of the world. The difficulty is that although she spoke to her students about it, she rarely wrote about amor mundi. In this article, I seek to provide a plausible explanation of the (...) meaning of amor mundi in Arendt’s thought, drawing in particular upon the influence of Augustine on Arendt’s unique development of the ethical and political principle of love for the world. Specifically, through a close reading of Arendt’s doctoral dissertation, Love and Saint Augustine, I identify the relationship between Augustine’s conception of cupiditas and Arendt’s conception of amor mundi. (shrink)
Os usos do passado e da tradição em uma sociedade pós-tradicional, na perspectiva de Zygmunt Bauman, é resultado dos desdobramentos da modernidade em sua produção da ambivalência. O objetivo do presente artigo é rastrear esse pensamento na obra de Bauman a partir da suturação do conceito de tradição com a obra mais ampla do filósofo. Buscaremos, então, pontos de contato com outros autores que também trabalharam esta temática – notadamente, Hannah Arendt – a partir da ótica de que a (...) modernidade é marcada pela dependência de um passado ressignificado. (shrink)
Cette étude, dans un premier temps, apporte des preuves à la possibilité d’interpréter la pensée politique de Hannah Arendt comme un projet phénoménologique original dont le but est d’élever l’apparence de la personne au rang de mode unique de l’apparaître. Puis elle présente brièvement la phénoménologie matérielle de Michel Henry dans laquelle le Soi individuel joue un rôle tout aussi central, puisqu’il est la condition de l’apparence de la vie et le fondement de tout apparaître. En conclusion, l’étude esquisse (...) les conséquences d’une telle position privilégiée du sujet individuel pour la conception théorique de la réalité effective de l’apparaître, de même que pour les problèmes pratiques de l’action de l’homme dans le monde. (shrink)
Normal 0 21 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Tabela normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:#0400; mso-fareast-language:#0400; mso-bidi-language:#0400;} En este trabajo se analiza la concepción del totalitarismo de Hannah Arendt a partir de la novedosa perspectiva aportada por Jean-Luc Marion con su teoría del fenómeno saturado. Para esto se comienza profundizando en las características específicas de este tipo de fenómenos y las consecuencias que acarrea, buscando (...) reconocer luego en las descripciones de Arendt la pertinencia de tal análisis y su riqueza, articulando este pasaje con la ayuda de las valiosas puntualizaciones de Juan Carlos Scannone en torno a la interrelación fecunda entre fenomenología y hermenéutica. (shrink)
The article is dedicated to the politico-theological critique of Judaism from the position of Christianity. It shows the affinity of Marx’s early critique of liberal state and of Hannah Arendt’s criticism of formal legalistic thinking in the contemporary judicial treatment of Nazism (and of similar international political crimes). Marx’s critique of nation-state finds its unlikely continuation in Arendt’s critique of international law. The politico-theological argument is explicit in Marx and implicit in Arendt, but both develop the Hegelian (...) criticism of liberal state which shows its reliance on the abstract law, on the one hand, and on the egotistic abstract individual, on the other. The theological undercurrent of the argument is both sign of its limitations, and of the subsisting relevance of the politico-theological framework, even in the similarly novel circumstances of the twentieth century. It is only within and through the theological critique and critique of theology that these issues would stand a chance of resolution. (shrink)
Hannah Arendt escreveu que o “mal banal” origina-se da incapacidade do indivíduo para pensar. Porém, pode-se perguntar se o mal não pode se originar da falta de julgamento. Oou seja, o indivíduo comete atos maus porque não averigua os dados, não os avalia. Eem tal hipótese, o “mal banal” ocorre devido à ausência do “juízo reflexionante” (ou reflexivo) e da “mentalidade alargada” kantianos, resolvendo muitas das lacunas que o mal derivado do pensamento possui, como a que exige distinguir o (...) raciocínio do pensamento. (shrink)
Hans Reichenbach, a philosopher of science who was one of five students in Einstein's first seminar on the general theory of relativity, became Einstein's bulldog, defending the theory against criticism from philosophers, physicists, and popular commentators. This book chronicles the development of Reichenbach's reconstruction of Einstein's theory in a way that clearly sets out all of its philosophical commitments and its physical predictions as well as the battles that Reichenbach fought on its behalf, in both the academic and popular press. (...) The essays include reviews and responses to philosophical colleagues, such as Moritz Schlick and Hugo Dingler; polemical discussions with physicists Max Born and D. C. Miller; as well as popular articles meant to clarify aspects of Einstein's theories and set out their philosophical ramifications for the layperson. At a time when physics and philosophy were both undergoing revolutionary changes in content and method, this book is a window into the development of scientific philosophy and the role of the philosopher. (shrink)
Unter dieses Thema ein internationales Symposion in Berlin zu stellen, das zum Gedenken an Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht (1919-1999) veranstaltet wurde, erschien umso naheliegender, zumal Eggebrecht die Frage aWas ist Musik?o existenziell ...
The author argues for bringing the work of Michel Foucault and Hannah Arendt into dialogue with respect to the links between power, subjectivity, and agency.Although one might assume that Foucault and Arendt come from such radically different philosophical starting points that such a dialogue would be impossible, the author argues that there is actually a good deal of common ground to be found between these two thinkers. Moreover, the author suggests that Foucault's and Arendt's divergent views about (...) the role that power plays in the constitution of subjectivity and agency should be seen as complementary rather than opposed. (shrink)
In this paper, I situate Hans Blumenberg historically and conceptually in relation to a subtheme in the famous debate between Martin Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer at Davos, Switzerland in 1929. The subtheme concerns Heidegger’s and Cassirer’s divergent attitudes toward philosophical anthropology as it relates to the starting points and goals of philosophy. I then reconstruct Blumenberg’s anthropology, which involves reconceptualizing Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms in relation to Heidegger’s objections to the philosophical anthropology of his day (e.g., Max Scheler, Helmuth (...) Plessner, and Arnold Gehlen) as unduly anthropocentric. Blumenberg builds on anthropologist Gehlen’s assumption that human beings are biologically underdetermined and therefore world-open. With this starting point, symbolic forms, such as myth and language, make up a compensatory life-world that supports human existence. Action, or self-assertion, which is necessary given the lack of a seamless fit between human beings and the environment, is thus circumscribed and shaped by the historied, cultural constructs that constitute a life-world. Human beings can thus be characterized as a species that continually renegotiates the shape of its existence through its relation to biological limits on the one hand and cultural constants on the other. Because Blumenberg and philosophical anthropology are relatively unexplored by Anglophone philosophers, and because philosophical anthropology is central to Blumenberg’s methodology generally, this study provides an introduction to both. (shrink)
This paper argues that Hannah Arendt's political theory offers key insights into the power that binds together the feminist movement - the power of solidarity. Second-wave feminist notions of solidarity were grounded in notions of shared identity; in recent years, as such conceptions of shared identity have come under attack for being exclusionary and repressive, feminists have been urged to give up the idea of solidarity altogether. However, the choice between (repressive) identity and (fragmented) non-identity is a false opposition, (...) and the Arendtian account of solidarity developed here allows us to move beyond this opposition. Thus, Arendt provides us with a model of solidarity that can stand a post-identity politics feminist theory in good stead. Key Words: Hannah Arendt • feminist theory • identity politics • power • solidarity. (shrink)
In contrast to political realism's equation of the `political' with domination, Hannah Arendt understood the `political' as a relation of friendship utterly opposed to the use of violence. This article offers a critique of that understanding. It becomes clear that Arendt's challenge to realism, as exemplified by Max Weber, succeeds on account of a dubious redefinition of the `political' that is the reverse image of the one-sided vision of politics she had hoped to contest. Questioning this paradoxical turn (...) leads to a critique of Arendt's separation of violence and power and, consequently, her attempt to insulate a politics of friendship from one of hostility and coercion. However, political realism is not thereby affirmed. What is required, instead, is a view of the `political' that accepts the interwoven-ness of violence and power but also emphasizes the normative ideals of moderation and care. Key Words: Hannah Arendt • enmity • friendship • moderation • the `political' • power • realism • violence • Max Weber. (shrink)
This article compares Nietzsche's and Arendt's critiques of the juridical concept of responsibility (that emphasizes duty and blame) with the aim of deriving an account of responsibility appropriate for our time. It examines shared ground in their radical approaches to responsibility: by basing personal responsibility in conscience that expresses a self open to an undetermined future, rather than conscience determined by prevailing moral norms, they make a connection between a failure of personal responsibility and the way a totalizing politics (...) jeopardizes human plurality. Two differences between Arendt and Nietzsche are also explored: Nietzsche's account of the corporeal and affective dimensions of conscience explains how politics can foreclose the futural, undetermined dimension of conscience; Arendt's account of political community exposes the mutual dependence of personal and political responsibility. By drawing together these aspects of Arendt's and Nietzsche's thought, the article aims to show how a failure of political responsibility can precipitate a failure of personal responsibility by undermining the basis of normativity that both liberal democratic politics and individual moral conscience would ordinarily share. Key Words: Hannah Arendt • conscience • futurity • Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche • normativity • responsibility • somatic reflexivity • totalitarianism. (shrink)
For Hannah Arendt, spontaneous, ‘initiatory’ human action and interaction are suppressed by the normalizing pressures of society once ‘life’ - that is, sheer life - becomes the primary concern of politics, as it does, she finds, in the modern age. Arendt’s concept of the social is indebted to Martin Heidegger’s analysis of everyday Dasein in Being and Time , and contemporary political philosophers inspired by Heidegger, such as Jean-Luc Nancy, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Giorgio Agamben, tend to reproduce her (...) account of the withdrawal of the political in modernity. In this article, I complicate Arendt’s theory by turning to Michel Foucault’s parallel but diverging understanding of the nature of power in modern society to show, surprisingly, that Foucault’s narrative of the emergence of modern power pictures a society that is more, not less, politicized. Key Words: Hannah Arendt • bio-power • Michel Foucault • Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe • modernity • Jean-Luc Nancy • pastoral power • the social • rulership. (shrink)
Machine generated contents note: 1. Introduction Seyla Benhabib; Part I. Freedom, Equality, and Responsibility: 2. Arendt on the foundations of equality Jeremy Waldron; 3. Arendt's Augustine Roy T. Tsao; 4. The rule of the people: Arendt, archê, and democracy Patchen Markell; 5. Genealogies of catastrophe: Arendt on the logic and legacy of imperialism Karuna Mantena; 6. On race and culture: Hannah Arendt and her contemporaries Richard H. King; Part II. Sovereignty, the Nation-State and the Rule (...) of Law: 7. Banishing the sovereign? Internal and external sovereignty in Arendt Andrew Arato and Jean Cohen; 8. The decline of order: Hannah Arendt and the paradoxes of the nation-state Christian Volk; 9. The Eichmann trial and the legacy of jurisdiction Leora Bilsky; 10. International law and human plurality in the shadow of totalitarianism: Hannah Arendt and Raphael Lemkin Seyla Benhabib; Part III. Politics in Dark Times: 11. In search of a miracle: Hannah Arendt and the atomic bomb Jonathan Schell; 12. Hannah Arendt between Europe and America: optimism in dark times Benjamin R. Barber; 13. Keeping the republic: reading Arendt's On Revolution after the fall of the Berlin Wall Dick Howard; Part IV. Judging Evil: 14. Are Arendt's reflections on evil still relevant? Richard Bernstein; 15. Banality reconsidered Susan Neiman; 16. The elusiveness of Arendtian judgment Bryan Garsten; 17. Existential values in Arendt's treatment of evil and morality George Kateb. (shrink)
Hannah Arendt and The Phenomenology of Human Rights examines contemporary debates on the foundations of human rights through the lens of Arendt's writings, showing how Arendt’s phenomenological standpoint, unique within these debates, is able to shed new light a number of problems within human rights theory.
Among the sources of Hannah Arendt's philosophy of action is an unexplored one: the account of agency in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Drawing on a consideration of what has been called the 'dramaturgical' character of Arendt's philosophy of action, the article compares the accounts of action in Arendt's Human Condition and in the 'Spirit' chapter of the Phenomenology. Both works share a similar overall structure: in each case, the account of action begins with the opening-up of previously (...) unseen or unexpected tragic consequences within action and concludes with an exploration of what can be forgiven or reconciled in action. The Arendtian and Hegelian appropriations of tragedy and forgiveness reveal nonetheless important differences in their view of what counts as action and how its tragic elements are to be understood. Key Words: action • agency • Arendt • forgiveness • Hegel • tragedy. (shrink)
The dominant narrative today of modern political power, inspired by Foucault, is one that traces the move from the spectacle of the scaffold to the disciplining of bodies whereby the modern political subject, animated by a fundamental fear and the will to live, is promised security in exchange for obedience and productivity. In this essay, I call into question this narrative, arguing that that the modern political imagination, rooted in Hobbes, is animated not by fear but instead by the desire (...) for glory and immortality, a desire that is spectacularly displayed in the violence of the modern battlefield. I go on to argue that Hannah Arendt, writing in the ruins of the Second World War, rethinks the modern legacy of political glory. I claim that Arendt's reflections on violence and glory, which she rethinks from her earliest writings on violence in the 1940s to her later reflections on war in the 1960s, offer the possibility of a new political imagination wherein glory and the desire for immortality is now rooted in the responsibility of bearing an enduring world. (shrink)
This essay engages in a comparative analysis of Theodor W. Adorno and Hannah Arendt. It does so by situating both thinkers in terms of their respective Auseinandersetzungen with the fundamental ontology of Martin Heidegger. While Heidegger seeks to engage in a Destruktion of the opposition between time and being, Adorno and Arendt seek to understand this relation critically in terms of the concept of ‘natural history’. For both, a reading of Kant’s Third Critique becomes the indispensable means by (...) which it is possible to locate a path pointing beyond the chiasmic structure of natural history. Key Words: Adorno • aesthetic experience • Arendt • Heidegger • history • inter-subjectivity • judgement • phenomenology • politics • writing. (shrink)
Though there exists a vast literature dealing with Hannah Arendt's thoughts on evil in general and Adolf Eichmann in particular, few attempts have been made to assess Arendt's position on evil by tracing its connection with her reflections on conscience. This essay examines the nature and significance of such a connection. Beginning with her doctoral dissertation on St Augustine and ending with her posthumously published studies in The Life of the Mind, Arendt's oeuvre exhibits strong thematic continuity: (...) the triad thinking-conscience-evil forms its most enduring core. A puzzling core, to be sure, considering the controversies triggered, especially regarding her notion of the 'banality of evil'. By placing the role of conscience at the very center of Arendt's lifelong reflections, this essay explores the - in many ways related - influence exerted by St Augustine and Heidegger. Heidegger's conception of conscience in Sein und Zeit is identified as a crucial source for understanding - so the claim holds - why Arendt found Heidegger's philosophy particularly wanting as regards the question of evil. Key Words: Arendt • Augustine • conscience • evil • Heidegger • Socrates • thinking. (shrink)
Considering the enormous outpouring of scholarly work on Schmitt over the last two decades, the absence of an adequate treatment in English of Schmitt's concept of history and the problem of secularization is quite surprising. After all, it is Schmitt himself who claims that “all human beings who plan and attempt to unite the masses behind their plans engage in some form of philosophy of history,” such that the attempt to make sense of Schmitt's program remains incomplete without a serious (...) treatment of his philosophy of history. This article is an attempt to address this problem by means of his exchange with Hans Blumenberg who, more than any other critic of Schmitt, was privy to the political intentions behind Schmitt's metaphorical use of theology. While their discussion is extensive and wide-ranging, I focus here on their diverging philosophies of history, precisely that aspect that is most relevant to gaining a more expansive understanding of Schmitt's arguments, and indeed the relationship between political thought and historical thought. (shrink)
The notion of biopolitical sovereignty and the theory of the state of exception are perspectives derived from Carl Schmitt’s thought and Michel Foucault’s writings that have been popularized by critical political theorists like Giorgio Agamben and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri of late. This article argues that these perspectives are not sufficient analytical points of departure for a critique of the contemporary politics of terror, violence and war marked by a growing global exploitation of bodies, tightened management of life, and (...) endless and unpredictable abusive force. To better capture the singularity of our present condition of violence, war and terror, a supplementation of Schmitt’s and Foucault’s approaches by way of Hannah Arendt’s language of political action and agonistic engagement is useful. By bringing Arendt’s language of political agony to bear on contemporary biopolitical debates and discourses, we wish to revisit common practices of war and terror as matters of ‘agonal sovereignty’. ‘Agonal sovereignty’ allows us to peer into the ‘abyss of total violence’ that manifests itself after sovereign decisionism and biopolitical modalities of power have taken over the everyday conduct of political affairs. (shrink)
In this paper I examine three historically significant readings of the epochal transition from the Middle Ages to the modern world: that provided by Alexandre Koyré in From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe , that of Hans Blumenberg in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age and that of Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition . Each of these readings isolates crucial aspects of the epochal transition which contribute to an understanding of the loss or transformation of traditional (...) measures for knowing and doing consequent upon the shift from the contemplative to the active life. Blumenberg provides a philosophical explanation for the cosmological shift which Koyré describes, while Arendt thematizes the dangers inherent in the loss of an ethical measure which accompanies this transition. Yet both Blumenberg and Arendt conclude that the search for a world-immanent epistemological measure, which would allow us to gauge the adequacy of our descriptions of the world, is not simply a problem for the modern philosopher to address, but rather an impossibility already abandoned in the transition to the modern age. I argue that, on the contrary, such a measure is a requisite of the modern scientific enterprise. (shrink)
Certain critics, e.g. Manfred Frank and Hans-Herbert Kögler, claim that Hans-Georg Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics reduces the individual subject to a mere instrument of history and tradition, the latter reproducing themselves through the subject. However, Gadamer also emphasizes the active role of the subject in shaping and creating history and tradition. In this article I argue that the critics mistakenly emphasize a one-sided conception of history. By incorporating both active and passive aspects of the subject, Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics provides the means (...) by which the individual may be conceived more aptly in an interdependent, dialectical relation to their corresponding historical, cultural, and social context. (shrink)
The aim of the article is to outline and compare the way that Carl Schmitt and Hannah Arendt understand the spheree of politics as well as analyse the concepts of power and freedom connected with their theories. Both Schmitt and Arendt criticise liberal democracy for its “neutrality” and counterpoise it with their own understanding of political action. Especially Schmitt who understand such action as a conflict between friends and enemies. The analysis of their approach to the power and (...) the contrasting their models of politics allows Wonicki to draw conclusions about contemporary liberalism and indicating its limits. (shrink)
While the recent publication of the Hannah Arendt-Martin Heidegger correspondence confirms that there existed a close personal tie between these two thinkers, the relation between their philosophies is far more problematic. This article argues that Arendt's originality presents itself in its full light in her two major theoretical works of the 1950s, Between Past and Future and The Human Condition , when these works are considered to present a thinly veiled, implicit critique of Heidegger's philosophy. Arendt's critique (...) becomes especially visible in the 'existential' role that she attributed to natality in its relation to political action and to remembrance, placing in question the central orientation of Heidegger's existential ontology in terms of being-toward-death. (shrink)
This paper offers a restatement of the basic project of Hannah Arendt's Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, tries to trace its theoretical motivation, and presents some criticisms of Arendt's interpretation of Kant's Critique of Judgment. Arendt's political philosophy as a whole is an attempt to ground the idea of human dignity on the publicly displayed 'words and deeds' that con stitute the realm of human affairs. This project involves a philo sophical response both to Plato's impugning of (...) the dignity of the polis and to Hegel's founding of modern historicism. The Kant Lectures bring this philosophical project to its completion because the enact ment of public deeds presupposes a company of judging spectators who draw meaning from the spectacle by judging and appreciating what is enacted. But this conception, precisely because it relates so deeply to Arendt's own theoretical impulse, leads to a sometimes onesided and misleading reading of Kant. Key Words: aesthetic judgment • dialogue/communication • Hannah Arendt • Immanuel Kant • political judgment. (shrink)
What does it mean to claim of law that it is a normative discipline? Can the answer be so simple that one need merely refer to law’s normative object of study and the conclusions that the legal participant must allegedly draw from this? What, in any case, is a ‘normative discipline’? The essay attempts to address these questions by analysing Hans Kelsen’s ‘normological’ theory of law through his work on sovereignty and especially by focusing on the normative character of Kelsen’s (...) epistemological claims regarding law. A theoretical critique of Kelsen is offered through Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological account of logic as a normative discipline. (shrink)
In The Life of the Mind, Hannah Arendt explores the relationship between thinking, willing and judging. She poses the question of whether these may be among those conditions that prevent a person from doing evil. While many consider her account of thinking and willing (she died before writing the third volume on judging) insufficient for treating this question, I argue that in order fully to understand Arendt's notion of the will, particularly as it relates to our ability to (...) avoid doing evil, one must consider the way in which she attempts to overcome the Augustinian dilemma of how one can love both God and one's neighbor at the same time. Drawing on her Love and Saint Augustine, I seek to show that her 'Augustinian' notion of the will is extremely fruitful for helping us understand what she meant by the two movements of withdrawal from, and activity within, the world. Key Words: Arendt • Augustine • ethics • evil • love • will. (shrink)
Hannah Arendt is recognized as one of the most important political theorists of the 20th century. This paper, however, suggests that she is as much a thinker as a theorist. Against the professionalized discourse of political theory that offers theories of democracy, citizenship, and liberalism, Arendt insists that political thinking is of more importance that political theory. The force of Arendt's political insight is that we court danger when we take thinking for granted. Against the worship of (...) reason and rationalized calculation that dominates political discourse, Arendt holds up an idea of thinking that sets up obstacles to hasty and thoughtless action. The paper develops Arendt's particular articulation of what it calls Arendt's activity of thinking. (shrink)
Philosophy is a dangerous profession, risking censorship, prison, even death. And no wonder: philosophers have questioned traditional pieties and threatened the established political order. Some claimed to know what was thought unknowable; others doubted what was believed to be certain. Some attacked religion in the name of science; others attacked science in the name of mystical poetry; some served tyrants; others were radical revolutionaries. This historically based collection of philosophers' reflections--the letters, journals, prefaces that reveal their hopes and hesitations, their (...) triumphs and struggles, their deepest doubts and convictions--allow us to witness philosophical thought-in-process. It sheds light on the many--and conflicting--aims of philosophy: to express skepticism or overcome it, to support theology or attack it, to develop an ethical system or reduce it to practical politics. As their audiences differed, philosophers experimented with distinctive rhetorical strategies, writing dialogues, meditations, treatises, aphorisms. Ranging from Plato to Hannah Arendt, with contributions from 44 philosophers (Augustine, Maimonides, AlGhazali, Descartes, Pascal, Leibniz, Voltaire, Rousseau, Hobbes, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, among others) this remarkable collection documents philosophers' claim that they change as well as understand the world. In her introductory essay, "Witnessing Philosophers," Amelie Rorty locates philosophers' reflections in the larger context of the many facets of their other activities and commitments. (shrink)
This article builds on Arendt’s development of a Kantian politics from out of the conception of reflective judgment in the Critique of Judgment. Arendt looks to Kant’s analysis of the beautiful to explain how political thought can be conceived. And yet Arendt describes such Kantian reflection as an empirical undertaking that justifies itself only in relation to the abstract principle of the moral law. The problem for such an account is that the autonomy of the moral law (...) appears to be at odds with the social cohesion of Kantian political life. The ensuing contradiction can be deemed the antinomy of political judgment. Kant’s conception of reflective judgment offers such an inquiry considerably more to work with than Arendt uncovers. In particular, the regulative principle of the purposiveness of nature that is shown to direct all reflection can be seen to offer the solution to this antinomy. (shrink)
Abstract Hannah Arendt frequently referred to herself as a phenomenologist in that she wished to reveal how action, in the Greek sense of praxis, engenders a public space of appearances or of phenomenality. The life of the Greek city?state, of the polis, was made possible through this activity, this bios politikos. However, beginning with Plato and continuing right down to Hegel and Heidegger, there has been a sustained attempt to cover up and conceal the specific phenomenality of the bios (...) politikos in favour of the bios theoretikos, involving the substitution of poiesis and theoria for the life of praxis. At the roots of this concealment of the active life is a misunderstanding of the true nature of the theoretical and its highest form, namely, thinking. (shrink)
Hannah Arendt’s (1906-1975) conception of power is entirely distinctive. It is rooted in a political philosophy that celebrates the public realm of freedom that emerges when people act with others as citizens or political equals. For Arendt, power is actualized where people act together to sustain or to change the world they share with one another. Her fundamental claim is this: ‘Power corresponds to the human ability not just to act but to act in concert. Power is never (...) the property of an individual; it belongs to a group and remains in existence only so long as the group keeps together’. This entry offers some background to Arendt’s account, highlights two important contrasts that she makes between power and violence, and then points to her related notion of authority. (shrink)
In the literature on Hannah Arendt’s Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy , two sorts of claim have been made by different interpreters. First, there is Beiner’s observation that there is a shift in Arendt’s thoughts on judgment, which has led to the idea that Arendt develops two distinct theories of judgment. The second sort of claim concerns Arendt’s use of Kant’s transcendental principles. At its core, it has led to the critique that Arendt detranscendentalizes — (...) or empiricalizes — Kant, by linking Kant’s judgments of taste to an empirical sociability. In this article, I argue against both of these claims. Early fragments of Arendt’s on judgment make clear that she develops only one theory of judgment. It is only that it is not until later in her life that she fully elaborates it. Nor does Arendt confuse Kant’s idea of enlarged thinking with an actual dialogue with others. In fact, Arendt introduces an interesting interdependence between judgment and speech, or communication. I develop my argument by first outlining the problems Arendt hoped to resolve via judgment. Through my reading of the Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy , I show how Arendt interprets Kant’s Critique of Judgment not as his theory of aesthetic judgments, but as an answer to the more general question ‘How do I judge?’ I also clarify the difference Arendt draws between common sense and community sense . With community sense, Arendt uncovers a foundation not only for men as political beings but also for the idea of humanity. This finding is often overlooked in the literature. I conclude with another Arendtian distinction that is often overlooked, that between spectators and the solitary philosopher. (shrink)
Two central strands in Arendt's thought are the reflection on the evil of Auschwitz and the rethinking in terms of politics of Heidegger's critique of metaphysics. Given Heidegger's taciturnity regarding Auschwitz and Arendt's own taciturnity regarding the philosophical implications of Heidegger's political engagement in 1933, to set out how these strands interrelate is to examine the coherence of Arendt's thought and its potential for a critique of Heidegger. By refusing to countenance a theological conception of the evil (...) of Auschwitz, Arendt consolidates the break with theology that Heidegger attempts through his analysis of the essential finitude of Dasein. In the light of Arendt's account of evil, it is possible to see the theological vestiges in Heidegger's ontology. Heidegger's resumption of the question concerning the categorical interconnections of the ways of Being entails an abandonment of finitude: he accommodates and tacitly justifies that which can have no human justification. (shrink)
Many of Hannah Arendt's readers argue that differences between her earlier and later work on judgment are significant enough to constitute an actual break or rupture. Of Arendt's completed works, the 'Postscriptum' to Thinking , the first volume of The Life of the Mind , and her Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy are widely considered to be her definitive remarks on judgment. These texts are privileged for two primary reasons. First, they were written after Arendt's controversial text, (...) Eichmann in Jerusalem . It was Arendt's recognition of the role that Eichmann's inability to think played in his war crimes which motivated her to analyse more fully not only the 'mental activity' of thinking, but those of willing, and judging as well. Second, in The Life of the Mind and the Kant Lectures , Arendt treats judgment as a distinct mental activity; in her earlier work judgment is connected to both politics and thought. In this essay I argue that while Arendt does indeed reformulate her notion of judgment, she does not depoliticize it. I begin by calling into question Ronald Beiner's claim that Arendt's later work on judgment can stand in for the unwritten third volume of The Life of the Mind . I then consider two more specific claims, the first of which is that judgment is relevant only in 'rare' times of 'crisis'. I argue that a crisis as Arendt understands it is not necessarily and merely a 'rare' and short-lived phenomenon. The effects of what Arendt refers to as 'dark times' are long-term and pervasive and, moreover, the function of making judgments within such an expanded context is politically germane. Second, I problematize the idea that conceiving of judgment as a distinct mental faculty necessarily disconnects it from politics. I examine the nature of Arendt's relationship to Kant and argue that she appropriates and reconceptualizes his work in such a way that judgment, while a distinct faculty, nonetheless retains its political relevance. I conclude by suggesting that the impulse to systematize Arendt's unsystematic treatment of judgment ought to be resisted. (shrink)
In this essay I compare Nussbaum’s and Arendt’s approach to narrativity. The point of the comparison is to find out which approach is more adequate for practical philosophy: the approach influenced by cognitive theory (Nussbaum) or the one influenced by hermeneutic phenomenology (Arendt). I conclude that Nussbaum’s approach is flawed by methodological solipsism, which is due to her application of cognitive theory.
There is much disagreement among many commentators of Hannah Arendt's work about whether her contributions to politics and philosophy contain a clandestine version of decisionism or, by contrast, represent an explicit attempt to break away from the elements of voluntarism, arbitrariness, and irrationality, which are considered to be inherent to any theory of the decision. Despite the many disagreements that set apart these two interpretations of Arendt, however, there is a common presupposition that both share. They are in (...) agreement concerning the decision: it is a threat and a vice, intrinsically dangerous and potentially totalitarian in nature, which ought to be expelled from any theory of politics with a normative content. As a result, the terms of the debate pertain solely to whether Arendt was a (crypto-) decisionist and not to the nature and evaluation of the decision as such. This paper argues, contrary to Arendt's critics, that although elements of a theory of the decision can be found scattered throughout many of her writings, she was nonetheless unswerving in her opposition to decisionism. But unlike her defenders, it also argues that had Arendt built on these elements to elaborate a systematic theory of the decision, she would have avoided many of the flaws and inconsistencies that plague her concept of politics. (shrink)
Abstract If we define tradition too hastily we leave to one side the question of what the relevance of tradition is for us . Here the concept of tradition is opened up by considering the different views of it taken by Hannah Arendt, Michael Oakeshott and Alasdair MacIntyre. We see that each has put tradition into a fully developed picture of what our predicament is in modernity; and that each has differed in their assessment of what our relation to (...) tradition is or should be. Arendt sees tradition as something which no longer conditions action, Oakeshott sees tradition as something which conditions all action, and MacIntyre sees tradition as something which should condition right action. In each case, the view of tradition is clearly one element in an attempt to see how the most important constituent elements of human existence - variously called the human condition, human conduct, or human virtue - should be understood in a modernity which is ours because it has put the traditional concept of tradition into question. (shrink)
This is a critical and exegetical introduction to the work and thought of Hannah Arendt, one of the most powerful and important political thinkers of the twentieth century. The book traces the connections in Arendt's work between public life and political thinking and the ways in which each informs the other. In conclusion, the author suggests why Arendt provides a unique way of rendering the political visible and relevant to people in an everyday setting.
Recognition of Hannah Arendt's contribution to the history of western philosophy is long overdue. Arendt was a 'political thinker', but this book highlights the importance of her ontological preoccupations for an understanding of her work.
In my Mind and World I appeal to second nature, which, according to Hans-Peter Kr ger, plays a central role in Plessner's philosophical anthropology. But I think this convergence is less significant than Kr ger suggests.This note differentaties my purpose-to disarm the temptation to think perceptual experience, natural as it is, could not figure in what Sellars called “the space of reasons”-from Plessner's, which is to disarm the temptation to hope for an ahistorical insight into what is properly authoritative over (...) the shape of our lives. (shrink)
Authority qua empowerment is theweak reading of authority in Hans Kelsen's writings.On the one hand, this reading appears to beunresponsive to the problem of authority as we know itfrom the tradition. On the other hand, it squares withlegal positivism. Is Kelsen a legal positivist?Not without qualification. For he defends anormativity thesis along with the separation thesis,and it is at any rate arguable that the normativitythesis mandates a stronger reading of authority thanthat modelled on empowerment. I offer, in the paper,a prima (...) facie case on behalf of a stronger reading ofauthority in Kelsen. I go on to argue, however, thatthe textual evidence weighs heavily in favour of theweak reading. Both nomostatics and nomodynamics arepervasive points of view in the Pure Theory of Law,and both reflect species of empowerment as theendpoint of Kelsen's reconstructions. (shrink)
BRENTANO'S APPROPRIATION OF THE Scholastic notion of intentionality, and of what Brentano called "the intentional (or mental) inexistence of an object," was early on exploited in a reading of Kant's theory of objects and appearances. Apparently the first systematic attempt was undertaken by Hans Vaihinger. However, Vaihinger's is radically different from more recent intentionalist readings of Kant. Albeit not in every respect, I propose that a return to this aspect of Vaihinger's approach supports a rewarding advance on such readings. After (...) a general introduction, I survey three instances of the latter—Prauss, Pereboom, and Sellars—in section 2 (and comment on some others in notes throughout). In sections 3 and 4, I then turn to Vaihinger's approach. (shrink)
In Eichmann in Jerusalem , Hannah Arendt struggled to defend the possibility of judgment against the obvious problems encountered in attempts to offer legally valid and morally meaningful judgments of those who had committed crimes in morally bankrupt communities. Following Norrie, this article argues that Arendt’s conclusions in Eichmann are equivocal and incoherent. Exploring her perspectival theory of judgment, the article suggests that Arendt remains trapped within certain Kantian assumptions in her philosophy of history, and as such (...) sees the question of freedom in a binary way. The article argues that Adorno’s philosophy of freedom provides the resources to diagnose and overcome Arendt’s shortcomings. Adorno’s position provides a way of embracing the antinomical character of judgment, by emphasising the need for elements of reason and nature in the phenomenon of freedom. In Adorno’s lights, judgment becomes an attempt to express a ‘spirit of solidarity’ with the tragic status of the potentially free but actually unfree subject of modernity. (shrink)
The venture into the public realm seems clear to me. One exposes oneself to the light of the public, as a person. Although I am of the opinion that one must not appear and act in public selfconsciously, still I know that in every action the person is expressed as in no other human activity. Speaking is also a form of action. That is one venture. The other is: we start something. We weave our strand into a network of relations. (...) What comes of it we never know. We’ve all been taught to say: Lord forgive them, for they know not what they do. That is true of all action. Quite simply and concretely true, because one cannot know. That is what is meant by a venture. And now I would say that this venture is only possible when there is trust in people. A trust— which is difficult to formulate but fundamental—in what is human in all people. Otherwise such a venture could not be made (from the transcript of the interview of Hannah Arendt by Günther Gaus, 28 October 1964 – see EU). (shrink)
Hans Reichenbach's so-called geometrical conventionalism is often taken as an example of a positivistic philosophy of science, based on a verificationist theory of meaning. By contrast, we shall argue that this view rests on a misinterpretation of Reichenbach's major work in this area, the Philosophy of Space and Time (1928). The conception of equivalent descriptions, which lies at the heart of Reichenbach's conventionalism, should be seen as an attempt to refute Poincaré's geometrical relativism. Based upon an examination of the reasons (...) Reichenbach gives for the cognitive equivalence of geometrical descriptions, the paper argues that his conventionalism is a specific form of scientific realism. At the same time we shall argue against those interpretations which lead to a trivialization of Reichenbach's conventionalism or deny it entirely. (shrink)
How can we critique political theory when all we have to use are its own conceptual tools? As Hannah Arendt observed, it can only be done through leaps, inversions, and the turning of concepts upside-down. But this twisting operation must be done in order to turn those who philosophize back to the hard work of real life change. In Turning Operations , renowned theorist Mary G. Dietz challenges specific contemporary modes of (...) theorizing politics-from feminist theory to Habermasian discourse--while appropriating some of political theory's own approaches and some of its most striking figures, including Aristotle, Nietzsche, Weber, Beauvoir, and Arendt in order to foment some leaps, inversions, reversals and turns on politics along the way. Dietz confronts a number of current debates, arguing that most are filled with artificial division and empty terms. She argues that we must abandon commonly supported dichotomies-masculine versus feminine, speech versus action, liberty versus community -to create abetter discourse, and a better world. Turning Operations is an essential new contribution to democratic and feminist political thought. (shrink)
The political philosopher Hannah Arendt develops several arguments regarding why truthfulness cannot be counted among the political virtues. This article shows that similar arguments apply to lying in business. Based on Hannah Arendt's theory, we distinguish five reasons why lying is a structural temptation to businessmen: business is about action to change the world and therefore businessmen need the capacity to deny current reality; commerce requires successful image-making and liars have the advantage to come up with plausible stories; (...) business communication is more often about opinions than about facts, giving leeway to ignore uncomfortable signals; business increasingly makes use of plans and models, but these techniques foster inflexibility in acknowledging the real facts; and businessmen easily fall prey to self-deception, because one needs to act as if the vision already materializes. The theory is illustrated by a case study of Landis, which grew from a relatively insignificant organization into a large one within a short period of time, but ended with outright lies and bankruptcy. (shrink)
By way of an analysis of Arendt's defense of the public/private distinction in The Human Condition, this essay offers a re-interpretation of the status of the family as a realm where the categories of action and speech play a vital role. The traditional criterion for the establishment of the public/private distinction is grounded in an idealization of the family as a sphere where a unity of interests destroys the conditions for the categories of action and speech. This essay takes (...) issue with this assumption and argues that the traditional conception has had a pernicious effect not only on women, but on men as well. This argument is supported by locating a fissure in Arendt's analysis of this distinction that suggests a profound structural affinity between the public realm and the family. Key Words: Arendt • family • feminism • public/private. (shrink)
Margaret Canovan argues in this book that much of the published work on Arendt has been flawed by serious misunderstandings, arising from a failure to see her work in its proper context. The author shows how such misunderstanding was possible, and offers a fundamental reinterpretation, drawing on Arendt's unpublished as well as her published work, which sheds new light on most areas of her thought.
Politics and political science -- Equality to freedom -- Law and government -- Ethics and politics -- Power, interests, and the common good -- Justice and revolution.
Arendt’s theoretical influence is generally traced to Heidegger and experientially to the traumatic events that occurred in Europe during the Second World War. Here, we suggest that Arendt’s conception of politics may be usefully enriched via a proto-anthropic principle found in Augustine and adopted by Arendt throughout her writings. By appealing to this anthropic principle; that without a spectator there could be no world; a profound connection is made between the ‘cosmic jackpot’ of life in the universe (...) and the uniquely human activity that takes place in the political realm. By making this connection we suggest that solutions present themselves to a central puzzle arising in Arendt’s thought: namely, what it is that people actually do in the political realm. The first solution directly addresses the issue of content: what people talk about in Arendt’s public space. The second addresses the importance of ‘maintaining’ a space of appearances. The third considers the effect of participating in and observing the public domain. Consequently, we conclude that, for Arendt, action is nothing less than the activity of ‘world-making.’. (shrink)
This paper explores the ethical insights provided by Anne Truitt's minimalist sculptures, as viewed through the phenomenological lenses of Hannah Arendt's investigations into the co-constitution of reality and Maurice Merleau-Ponty's investigations into perception. Artworks in their material presence can lay out new ways of relating and perceiving. Truitt's works accomplish this task by revealing the interactive motion of our embodied relations and how material objects can actually help to ground our reality and hence human potentiality. Merleau-Ponty shows how our (...) prereflective bodies allow incompossible perceptions to coexist. Yet this same capacity of bodies to gather multiple perceptions together also lends itself to the illusion that we see from only one perspective. If an ethical perspective becomes reified into one position, it then becomes detached from reality, and the ethical potential is actually lost. At the same time, phenomenologically understood, the real world does not exist in terms of static matter, but is instead a web of contextual relations and meanings. An ethics that does not take embodied relations into account—that allows for only one perspective—ultimately loses its capacity for flexibility, and for being part of a common and shared reality. (shrink)
Fleeing from the Nazi regime, along with many German refugees, Hans Reichenbach came to teach at Istanbul University in 1933, accepting the invitation of the Turkish government and stayed in Istanbul until 1938. While much is known about his work and life in Istanbul, the existing literature relies mostly on his letters and works. In this article I try to shed more light on Reichenbach’s scholarly activities and personal life by also taking into account the Turkish sources and the academic (...) context in which Reichenbach taught and worked. (shrink)
The question of judgment has become one of the central problems in recent social, political and ethical thought. This paper explores Hannah Arendt's decisive contribution to this debate by attempting to reconstruct analytically two distinctive perspectives on judgment from the corpus of her writings. By exploring her relation to Aristotelian and Kantian sources, and by uncovering debts and parallels to key thinkers such as Benjamin and Heidegger, it is argued that Arendt's work pinpoints the key antinomy within political (...) judgment itself, that between the viewpoints of the political actor and the political spectator. The paper concludes by highlighting some lacunae and difficulties in the development of Arendt's account, difficulties that set challenges for those theorists (such as Seyla Benhabib and Alessandro Ferrara) who wish to appropriate and extend Arendt's contribution into the field of contemporary critical theory. Key Words: action • aesthetics • community • freedom • history • judgment • reflection. (shrink)
This is a review of From Discourse to Logic: Introduction to Model-theoretic Semantics of Natural Language, Formal Logic and Discourse Representation Theory, by Hans Kamp and Uwe Reyle, published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 1993.
: This essay explores the value of oppositional, performative political action in the context of oppression, domination, and exclusionary political spheres. Rather than adopting Iris Marion Young's approach, Drexler turns to Hannah Arendt's theories of political action in order to emphasize the capacity of political action as action to intervene in and disrupt the constricting, politically devitalizing, necrophilic normalizations of proceduralism and routine, and thus to reorient the importance of contestatory action as enabling and enacting creativity, spontaneity, and resistance.
Although critical of what she calls the `antipolitical' forces of love and sovereignty, Arendt reluctantly embraces these aspects as the basis of politics itself. I explain this paradox by arguing that Arendt seeks to balance Greek and Roman notions of freedom with modern conceptions of the will. The solipsistic will poses a threat to politics (it is the source of sovereignty itself). Yet the will is a fact of modern life and cannot be ignored. I argue that despite (...) her embrace of classical understandings of freedom as contingency, Arendt seeks to limit contingency and even freedom itself. She does this to accommodate the will which must have some sense of agency and continuity in order to be able to function at all. Arendt argues that sovereignty can, if properly constrained, produce a `certain limited reality' and can (along with love) serve as a basis for politics. I claim that Arendt sacrifices her classical ideals, allowing for the possibility of a modern, lesser version of freedom (which in her view is better than no freedom at all). Key Words: love • promising • sovereignty • will. (shrink)
Authority qua empowerment is the weak reading of authority in Hans Kelsen's writings. On the one hand, this reading appears to be unresponsive to the problem of authority as we know it from the tradition. On the other hand, it squares with legal positivism. Is Kelsen a legal positivist?Not without qualification. For he defends a normativity thesis along with the separation thesis, and it is at any rate arguable that the normativity thesis mandates a stronger reading of authority than that (...) modelled on empowerment. I offer, in the paper, a prima facie case on behalf of a stronger reading of authority in Kelsen. I go on to argue, however, that the textual evidence weighs heavily in favour of the weak reading. Both nomostatics and nomodynamics are pervasive points of view in the Pure Theory of Law, and both reflect species of empowerment as the endpoint of Kelsen's reconstructions. (shrink)
In this essay, I examine Arendt's and Kristeva's account of the archaic event of natality, arguing that each attempts to show how this event is the source of our pleasure in the company of others. I first examine Arendt's understanding of natality, showing that in her early writings, specifically in The Origin of Totalitarianism, the event of natality carries with it a capacity for violence that Arendt does not continue to develop in her later formulations. This lack (...) of development leaves her later thought, specifically her notion of "public happiness" strangely light-minded on the topic of domination, unable to give an account of how violence can be part and parcel of our appearance in the public space itself. I then turn to Kristeva's understanding of the event of natality, arguing that her account, specifically the "violence beneath our desires" contributes significantly to Arendt's account of natality, allowing us to understand how pleasure in the company of others is possible despite such violence. I argue that Kristeva locates our capacity for public happiness in the aspect of natality Arendt abandons in her later thought. I conclude by showing how Kristeva's account of natality provides a foundation for Arendt's understanding of public happiness. (shrink)
: Freedom, understood as active participation in public life, connects the thinking of Rosa Luxemburg with that of Hannah Arendt. Biographically separated through the rise and victory of the totalitarian movements, they both developed a concept of the political that is oriented toward freedom and that demonstrates—in spite of their different historical experiences—essential common features: both authors emphasize the recognition of difference as a presupposition for a critical discussion of norms, traditions, and authorities, for the capacity to make unconstrained (...) judgments, and for the ability to take personal responsibility. (shrink)
This article focuses on the political 'effect' that Arendt wished to achieve with her 'old-fashioned storytelling'. It is argued that she inherited her concept of the 'redemptive power of narrative' (Benhabib) from Walter Benjamin. The close relationship of the two intuitively suggests an affinity between Arendt's concept of a 'fragmented past' and her 'storytelling' and Benjamin's conception of history and narrative. An attempt is made here to determine the amplitude and the meaning of this proximity. An account is (...) provided of Benjamin's and Arendt's shared belief that the past is fragmented and that only fragmented writing, mainly in the form of 'stories', had the capacity to be faithful to its 'ruins'. It is argued that for both Arendt and Benjamin, the purpose of this writing form was not to commemorate the dead, but to show their absence - their invisibility. It is suggested that Arendt and Benjamin held a similar conviction: that stories had the capacity to save the world. Key Words: Arendt • Benjamin • catastrophe • experience • fragmented past • imagination • remembrance • revelation • standpoint of the defeated • storytelling. (shrink)
In this paper, I argue that Arendt's understanding of freedom should be examined independently of the search for good political institutions because it is related to freedom of movement and has a transnational meaning. Although she does not say it explicitly, Arendt establishes a correlation between political identities and territorial moves: She analyzes regimes in relation to their treatment of lands and borders, that is, specific geographic movements. I call this correlation a political itinerary. My aim is to (...) show genealogically that her elaboration on the regimes of ancient, modern, and 'dark' times is supported by such a correlation. I read Arendt in light of the current clash between an amorphous global political identity (and 'new' international order) and the renewal of nationalisms. I show that, for Arendt, the world is divided by necessary frontiers - territorial borders and identity frames - and that the political consists precisely of the effort to transgress them. Arendt never proposed a restoration of authority but, on the contrary, a worldwide anarchic (that is, based on no predetermined rule) politics of de-localization and re-localization; in her terms, a politics of free movement of founded identities, a cosmopolitanism, which, nevertheless, would have nothing to do with global sovereignty. (shrink)
In place of traditional approaches in environmental ethics, I suggest an improved approach, with respect to the goal of improving the condition of the natural environment, called 'world mediation' through the use of Hannah Arendt's theory of the vita activa . This approach focuses on the relationship between human made worlds and nature, from which a theory of value is suggested. Intrinsic value theory and nature-culture monism are both criticized for an insufficient attention paid toward the human-nature relationship.
In this essay I consider the normative implications of the notion of reasonability for the construction of an idea of public reason that is cosmopolitan in scope. First, I consider the argument for the distinction between reason and reasonability in the work of Sibley and Rawls. Second, I evaluate the normative implications of reasonability through a consideration of Korsgaard's recent work. Third, I argue for a notion of reasonability that moves us beyond a Kantian concept of autonomy through a consideration (...) of the relationship between reasonability and judgment vis-à-vis Arendt's work on Kant's Third Critique. Finally, I argue for a cosmopolitan appropriation of the notion of reasonability based on Kant's notion of the aesthetic idea. The latter argument relaxes the bonds of public reason, moving us beyond the domain of ethnocentricism. (shrink)
Ever since the first meeting of the proponents of the emerging Logical Empiricism in 1923, there existed philosophical differences as well as personal rivalries between the groups in Berlin and Vienna, headed by Hans Reichenbach and Moritz Schlick, respectively. Early theoretical tensions between Schlick and Reichenbach were caused by Reichenbach’s (neo)Kantian roots (esp. his version of the relativized a priori), who himself regarded the Vienna Circle as a sort of anti-realist “positivist school”—as he described it in his Experience and Prediction (...) (1938). One result of this divergence was Schlick’s preference of Carnap over Reichenbach for a position at the University of Vienna (in 1926), and his decision not to serve as a co-editor with Reichenbach for the journal Erkenntnis that they jointly established in 1930 (which was then co-edited by Carnap and Reichenbach from 1930 to 1938). A second split rooted in different views on induction and probability, which culminated in the Hans Reichenbach’s refusal to serve as an invited author on probability within the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science series ed. by Rudolf Carnap, Charles Morris and Otto Neurath from 1938 onwards. In this regard it is remarkable that also Richard von Mises, who was the second leading figure of Logical Empiricism in Turkish exile, criticized the theory of probability put forward by his former Berlin colleague. In this paper I analyse this controversial exchange, drawing on the relevant correspondence and asking whether these (meta)philosophical differences were a typical feature of the pluralism inherent in Logical Empiricism in general. (shrink)
Pragmatic pluralism denotes a particular approach to problems of international human rights and protections that departs from conventional cosmopolitan approaches. Pragmatic pluralism argues for situated and localized forms of cooperation between state and non-state actors, particularly religious groups and organizations, that may not share the secular, juridical understandings of rights, persons, and obligations common to contemporary cosmopolitan theory. A resource for the development of such a model of pragmatic pluralism can be found in the work of Hannah Arendt. (...) class='Hi'>Arendt's early dissertation "Love and Saint Augustine" affords a model of religious community and obligation that can be read productively alongside her later political writings. The possibilities inherent in a cooperative reading of these two parts of her work can be illustrated in relation to an issue of particular concern to cosmopolitan theorists: the international refugee crisis. (shrink)
: This article draws from Hannah Arendt's theory of "inter-est" to formulate a model of coalition discourse that can coarticulate difference and commonality and approach them as mutually nourishing conditions rather than as polarities. By disrupting the normative fantasies of unified, a priori subjectivity and universal truth, interest-based discourse facilitates political interactions that neither rely on sameness nor reify difference to the exclusion of connection.
In a brief comment in ‘History of the Lie’, his one sustained engagement with Arendt, Derrida criticizes the ‘absence’ of any reference to the ‘problematic of testimony, witnessing, or bearing witness’ in her work, and asserts that she was ‘not interested’ in what ‘distinguishes’ testimony from ‘proof’. This passage links Derrida’s reading of Arendt to a theme that concerns him throughout his later work, specifically the ‘affirmation’ or ‘act of faith’ that ostensibly conditions all human relations, and the (...) possibility of sociality in general. In this article, I claim not only that Arendt did address the problem of testimony or witnessing, and the difference between bearing witness and establishing proof, but also that her consideration of these issues represents an alternative to many of the arguments Derrida develops in his later work, especially his approach to responsibility and judgment, secrecy and memory, and the relation between the self and others. (shrink)
: Hannah Arendt's and Charlotte Delbo's writings about the Holocaust trouble our preconceptions about those who do evil and those who suffer evil. Their jarring terms "banal evil" and "useless knowledge" point to limitations and temptations facing scholars of evil. While Arendt helps us to resist the temptation to mythologize evil, Delbo helps us to resist the temptation to domesticate suffering.
In this essay I argue that despite Arendt's dislike of psychology, she, like all political theorists, relies on a particular understanding of human nature. Her account, which can be discovered with a careful reading of her work, including Eichmann in Jerusalem , The Human Condition and The Origins of Totalitarianism , resonates with the explicitly psychoanalytic one of Jessica Benjamin. When the two accounts are considered together one can find the outline of a very interesting conception of the self (...) which is neither the deconstructed, discontinuous self of postmodernism nor the strongly unified, rational subject of liberalism. This account also points to a way of under18 standing both the allure of evil and the political remedies that can stymie its realization. (shrink)
'Thinking with Hannah Arendt: An Introduction' suggests that those who read Arendt not as a system-building professional philosopher but, rather, as a thinker whose work invites and (by 'unfreezing' concepts) prepares us to think for ourselves about particular realities of our times will read her as she wished to be read. The essays following this introduction are briefly discussed as examples of such independent engagement and, in that, as truer to Arendt's work than readings by those who (...) approach her from their pre-set theoretical and/or critical stances. (shrink)
Renewing Our Common World: Essays On Hannah Arendt And Education is the first book to bring together a collection of essays on Hannah Arendt and education. The contributors contend that Arendt offers a unique perspective, one which enhances the liberal and critical traditions' call for transforming education so that it can foster the values of democratic citizenship and social justice. They focuses on a wide array of Arendtian concepts— such as natality, action, freedom, public space, authority and (...) judgment— which are particularly relevant for education in a democratic society. Teachers, educators, and citizens in general who are interested in democratic or civic education would benefit from reading this book. (shrink)
Hans Reichenbach's 1928 thesis of the relativity of geometry has been misunderstood as the statement that the geometrical structure of space can be described in different languages. In this interpretation the thesis becomes an instance of trivial semantical conventionalism, as Grünbaum calls it. To understand Reichenbach correctly, we have to interpret it in the light of the linguistic turn, the transition from thought oriented philosophy to language oriented philosophy, which mainly took place in the first decades of our century. Reichenbach (...) — as Poincaré before him — is undermining the prejudice of thought oriented philosophy, that two propositions have different factual content, if they are associated with different ideas in our mind. Thus Reichenbach prepared the change to language oriented philosophy, which he also accepted later. (shrink)
Though many have recently attempted either to locate Arendt within feminism or feminism within the great body of Arendt's work, these efforts have proven only modestly successful. Even a cursory examination of Arendt's work should suggest that these efforts would prove frustrating. None of her voluminous writings deal specifically with gender, though some of her work certainly deals with notable women. Her interest is not in gender as such, but in woman as assimilated Jew or woman as (...) social and political revolutionary. In this paper, I argue that Arendt recognized that what frequently passes for a gender question is not essentially a matter of gender at all, but rather an idiosyncratic form of loneliness that typically affects, though is by no means limited to, women. In her work one finds the conceptual tools necessary to understand the “woman problem” rather than an explicit argument or a solution to it. (shrink)
On the basis of the Weber, Jaspers, and Arendt style ‘ideal types’ of the manager as Eichmann, Richard III, and Faust it is explained how under strong organizational pressures to obey orders and further organizational ends, different types of managers cooperate with organization behavior that harms people. On the basis of Arendt's and Tillich's action philosophies, the manager as Institution Citizen with the courage to be both as oneself and as a part is presented as alternative, contrast, and (...) resistance model to the other ‘ideal types’, particularly to the Eichmann ‘ideal type’. (shrink)
In the early 1920s, Hans Reichenbach and Kurt Lewin presented two topological accounts of time that appear to be interrelated in more than one respect. Despite their different approaches, their underlying idea is that time order is derived from specific structural properties of the world. In both works, moreover, the notion of genidentity--i.e., identity through or over time--plays a crucial role. Although it is well known that Reichenbach borrowed this notion from Kurt Lewin, not much has been written about their (...) relationship, nor about the way Lewin implemented this notion in his own work in order to ground his topology. This paper examines these two early versions of the topology of time, and follows the extent of Lewin’s influence on Reichenbach’s proposal. (shrink)
Eva Buddeberg: Verantwortung im Diskurs: Grundlinien einer rekonstruktiv-hermeneutischen Konzeption moralischer Verantwortung im Anschluss an Hans Jonas, Karl-Otto Apel und Emmanuel Lévinas Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-2 DOI 10.1007/s10677-012-9366-3 Authors Norbert Anwander, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Institut für Philosophie, Unter den Linden 6, 10099 Berlin, Germany Journal Ethical Theory and Moral Practice Online ISSN 1572-8447 Print ISSN 1386-2820.
In this contribution I discuss Hannah Arendt's philosophy of culture in three rounds. First I give an account of my view on Hannah Arendt's main work The Human Condition. In this frame of reference I distance myself from the importance attached to Hannah Arendt as a political philosopher and hold a warm plea for her as a philosopher of culture (I and II). Second I pay attention to her view on science and technology in their cultural meaning, (...) expressed in the last chapter of The Human Condition. This part consists in a summary of her thoughts as I read them (III, IV, and V). After these two rounds I make some critical remarks on Hannah Arendt's interpretation of science and technology. The viewpoint of ?eccentricity? will be discussed as a frame of reference for her philosophy of culture (VI). (shrink)
A study of Hannah Arendt's indictment of social science, approaches to totalitarianism (Bolshevism and National Socialism), and of the robust responses of her ...
