Fiddling while Rome burns: Hannah Arendt on the value of plurality and the role of the political theorist (original) (raw)
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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.
Hypatia. A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, 2020
She has published widely on Hannah Arendt's political phenomenology. Borren's research expertise lies at the intersection of continental political philosophy, philosophical anthropology, and phenomenology, with a particular interest in feminist and postcolonial perspectives. Quote: "After reading this book, nobody should doubt any longer that Arendt's work and method belong to phenomenology, and, what's more, how she enriched it with a political vocabulary and a method that fits actualized plurality…" *** This impressive study is the first systematic and comprehensive reconstruction of Hannah Arendt's phenomenology ever pursued. Careful not to turn Arendt into something she is not-an orthodox (that is, Husserlian) phenomenologist-Austrian philosopher Sophie Loidolt puts Arendt's work squarely within the so-called second generation in the phenomenological tradition, alongside Merleau-Ponty, Fink, Patocka, Levinas, Sartre, and more recent work in social ontology. Loidolt demonstrates how Arendt is firmly embedded in first-generation phenomenology (Husserl and Heidegger), while stressing how she transformed-that is, politicized-it through her notion of "actualized plurality," or what Loidolt calls Arendt's "core phenomenon."
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The Sociality of Phenomenology: Discovering the 'We' (Routledge 2015)
With her concept of plurality, Hannah Arendt has made an important contribution to the intersubjective transformations of philosophy in the 20th century, which has been acknowledged in numerous commentaries, especially in political theory. I want to argue, however, that these accounts often remain on the level of “standard interpretations,” which fail to capture the radicality of Arendt’s ontological commitment to plurality. Thereby, the more profound philosophical consequences of Arendt’s approach, which conceives of the political realm not as one “regional ontology” among others, but which instead reconceptualizes the whole ontological order from the departing point of plurality, are left unexplored. In contrast to these interpretations, I will engage in an explicitly phenomenological interpretation of Arendt’s core phenomenon of “actualized plurality.” My aim is to promote a new understanding of plurality as something that not simply occurs but has to be actualized in certain modes of being together. The heritage of the phenomenological notions of “intersubjectivity” and Mitsein is obvious in the unfolding of the phenomenon of actualized plurality, as is its transformation of the classical, Husserlian or Heideggerian, phenomenology. I will systematically assess this ancestry and give an account of how, in actualized plurality, we may phenomenologically discover the “We.”
PLURALITY AND HUMANISM: A CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF ARENDTIAN THOUGHT OF POLITICS
Confronted with the totalitarian barbarity that had led to the destruction of the human being, Arendt will propose a political-humanist project through her concept of plurality. In fact, it is the sine qua non and per quam conditions of political life. According to the latter, plurality is a political virtue and is defined as the possibility for people to act, speak and think together, in other words, to be in correlation with others. Based on an analytic-critical approach, our ambition in this article is to present the humanistic meaning of plurality, and to show that this Arendtian paradigm, so much praised for its attachment to humanism, is only a sham. By arguing that there is true humanity only in the political space of equals, does Arendt not turn plurality into a selective paradigm? Isn't Arendt's plural humanism in its anti-humanist principle?
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Hannah Arendt was, among many other things, a migrant. This borderline experience had impact not only on her biography, but also on her work. In this chapter, I argue that although every migration story is situated in a specific individual, historical, and political context, on a deeper level there is a common phenomenal structure that enables us to recognize them as experiences of migration. I then suggest that Hannah Arendt’s writings can help us to retrieve this structure. Arendt’s political phenomenology offers a basis for mapping stories of migration in their plurality and opens possibilities to a better understanding of migration as a phenomenon. In this chapter I refer to Arendt’s metaphors of darkness and light as guideposts for such understanding.
On Hannah Arendt's Political Thought: Finding the Locus of the Political and the Anti-Political
This paper attempts to find the locus of Hannah Arendt's conception of the political and the anti-political. In doing so, the paper identifies Arendt's essential qualifications of the political and the anti-political and attempt to find concrete spaces where we can more or less locate these events. However, this does not mean, as this paper tries to show that these said loci are uncontroversial, incontestable, and an ideal representative of Arendt's articulation of such activities, most especially the political. Despite this, the paper dares to find the spaces whereby the political and the anti-political could possibly be thought to thrive. The space where anti-political resides can be thought easily, whereas, the political is not. In Arendtian sense, the political is elusive and fragile that it can easily be overwhelmed by anti-political activities. The insights are coming mostly from her two major oeuvres namely: The Human Condition and The Origins of Totalitarianism. This paper is divided into two major sections: firstly, an exposition of Arendt's concept of the political explicated in The Human Condition and of anti-political in The Origins of the Totalitarianism and secondly, an attempt to find their loci in our everyday affairs.
Hannah Arendt and the Philosophical Repression of Politics
Sympathetic readers of Arendt might be surprised by Rancière‟s claim that Arendt‟s political thought, in fact, represses politics in a way paradigmatic of the tradition she sought to escape from. On the contrary, it might appear that rather than offering a rival view of politics, Rancière actually amends and extends an Arendtian conception of politics. I want to caution against such an interpretation. It is true that Arendt is an important influence on Rancière, despite his polemic against her. Arendt's understanding of praxis seems to resonate within Rancière‟s work. However, those apparently Arendtian notions that Rancière make use of are fundamentally transformed when transposed within his broader thematization of dissensus. To develop this argument I first examine Arendt‟s own account of the tension between philosophy and politics in order to understand the phenomenological basis of the political theory that she sought to develop. I then consider how persuasive Rancière‟s characterization of Arendt as an archipolitical thinker is. In the final section, I discuss some key passages in Disagreement in which Rancière alludes to Arendt. These passages highlight how those Arendtian concepts that do seem to find their way into Rancière's thought are transformed when displaced from her ontology.