Über den wahrheitsliebenden Politiker (original) (raw)
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Reading Arendt to rethink truth, science and politics in the era of fake news
Democracy and Fake News. Information Manipulation and Post-Truth Politics, 2021
This chapter considers relevant concepts and paradigms elaborated in Hannah Arendt’s works, which have been at the centre of modern and contemporary Western political thought even beyond Arendt. It explores the relation between truth, lying, and politics in contemporary democracies. In her reflection on Truth and Politics, Arendt distinguishes between factual truths and rational truths to specify the different relations they have with the political debate in a plural society and to investigate the consequences of their negation or mystification. Factual truths, while being at odds with the political debate, are necessary for the exercise of democratic power in a plural society. Also, this is the category which acquires critical relevance today with reference to the problem of fake news: it is factual truths that fake news denies. Arendt is quite optimistic about the fact that, as long as there are witnesses and truth-tellers, in the long run truth will outlive organised lying.
Remembering Hannah Arendt in the “Post-truth” Era
Arete Political Philosophy Journal
In this paper I shall glance at Hannah Arendt's arguments about lying in politics that are frequently evoked in relation to 'post-truth' politics. To do so, first of all I will begin with her discussion of totalitarianism with regard to lying, and then with her two articles, Truth and Politics and Lying in Politics, I will try to point to her account of the relation between lying and politics, especially in democracy. In conclusion, I shall try to point out Arendt's general account of lying and its impasses which still haunt today's debate on post-truth politics. I shall especially tackle one of these impasses which is particularly immanent to her discussion of witnessing.
Truth and Politics. A Vulnerable Realm
HannahArendt.net, 2021
The objective of this article is to discuss some aspects of Hannah Arendt's thought on the relationship between truth and politics, which, although they were developed in a different context from the current one, are particularly relevant to reflecting on the notion of the "fake," a concept which has become such a characteristic feature of contemporary culture that it is now a way of structuring our model of reality. Arendt's contribution is analysed following two basic lines of argument. Firstly, we seek to show that her ideas reveal the problem of truth as it currently emerges to be one of indifference towards reality and the world. Subsequently we explain how this indifference relates to another key point in Arendt's thought, namely, responsibility towards this same world. Once the synergy between responsibility and the world has been established, we examine the roles of the narrator and the spectator in constructing the relationship between truth and lies. 1 This article was written as part of the research project titled "Vulnerabilidad en el pensamiento filosófico femenino. Contribuciones al debate sobre emergencias presentes" ("Vulnerability in women's philosophical thought. Contributions to the debate on current emergencies," PGC2018-094463-B-100 MINECO/AEI/FEDER, EU). 2 Arendt distinguishes between rational truth and factual truth. While the former is related to theories and discoveries, the latter refers to facts and events (Arendt, 1968, 231). Rational truths are permanent and certain ones, while factual truths, as we explain below, are bear a direct relationship with contingency and do not have any absolute reason for being as they are.
Arendt, Truth, and Epistemic Responsibility
Arendt Studies, 2018
In this article, I offer a politico-philosophical perspective to reassess the much-contested role of truth in politics to put forth a principle of political action that will make sense of a “right to unmanipulated factual information,” which Hannah Arendt understands as crucial for establishing freedom of opinion. In developing a principle of epistemic responsibility, I will show that “factual truth” plays a key role in Arendt’s account of political action and provides a normative order that can extricate her account from charges of immoralism.
Departing from Hannah Arendt’s crucial statement, in section IV of “Truth and Politics”, that factual truth is contingent (i.e. that it could always have been otherwise, which in turn makes lies, or “alternative facts”, plausible), and that it is always caught up in a narrative which gives this truth its meaning for the human mind (section V), this paper proposes to connect this observation of a contingent nature of reality with the function devolved by Lyotard to knowledge within the deliberative set-up of republican regimes. By situating knowledge (or “truth”) as but one moment within a complex discursive set-up that holds its legitimacy from a universal Idea (Freedom,…) that the community sets as its goal, Lyotard allows us to displace the question of the entanglement of truth and politics and to open it to a consideration of the broader background of modes of legitimization in their link to the fabric of collective cohesion. In The postmodern Condition (1979), The Differend (1983), as well as in subsequent writings, Lyotard insisted upon the opposition of legitimization by way of myths, predominant in so called “traditional” societies as well as in despotic regimes (and which is necessarily, inherently, xenophobic), from the republican legitimization relying on a universal Idea of emancipation. Myth and emancipation are equally narrative, but radically opposed in every other aspect. Myth legitimizes communities by orienting them toward an ethnical origin. Series of local narratives bind the members of the community together and to their common mythical origin. In this mode of legitimization, truth plays no role. Intrinsically exclusive, mythical legitimization nonetheless has a power of cultural unification that the republican set-up has not. Lyotard envisions the republican set-up as a series of steps or questions: what should we be? What could we do in order to be so? What do we know about the state of the questions? (here is the moment when truth is at stake) What should we do? The latter question calls for a deliberation, which in turn leads to a decision. Through this set-up, the community projects itself towards an ideal emancipation, which is not reserved to a limited group, but is in principle universal. This universality entails in principle the fission of the initial community, whose local identity is solidified through mythical unity. This first step in the diagnosis allows to better understand the ways in which nazi cultural politics, resorting to the identification of the masses through myth (see Nancy & Lacoue-Labarthe, The Nazi Myth), were able to overturn the Weimar Republic. Today, this opposition is further complicated by the political hegemony of the economic genre of discourse. In The Postmodern Condition, where Lyotard infamously theorized the end of meta-narratives along with this hegemony, he shows that the republican deliberation is actually not required in this genre, whose sole legitimization relies on the performativity of exchanges. Truth is not at stake either within the economic genre: efficiency is. The media industry does not escape this imperative. To be sure, “post-truth politics” have been fueled by deep transformations of the mediatic sphere. As Arendt writes in “Truth and Politics”, in reference to the application to politics of the techniques of Madison Avenue, brainwashing leads to an absolute refusal of believing in the truth of anything. Can we hypothesize, after Lyotard, that what we witness today is a renewed preeminence of mythical modes of legitimization, not as much as an effect of an erosion of truth within the political debate, than as a result of a deeper crisis of knowledge itself, corollary of a crisis of identity unleashed by the dismantlement of republican legitimization under the pressure of new, techno-scientific modes of legitimization?
Hermeneutics of the Polis: Arendt and Gadamer on the Political World
2024
This dissertation raises the question of the political world, and pursues it as central theme in the political thought of Hannah Arendt and the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer. Within the phenomenological tradition, world refers to a referential context of relations between beings, within which those beings appear as meaningful. Since Heidegger, the concept of world has been inextricably linked with that of understanding, the disclosedness that guides any interpretation of beings and allows them to appear as what they are. In what sense is the world political? In what sense does the political constitute a world? For Arendt, the political concerns human beings in their plurality. It concerns the relations between members of a polis, who are related to each other by the world that they share in common in action and speech. The polis is not simply a city or a political entity, but a space within which both things and human beings appear according to a distinctively political mode of disclosedness, a plural understanding. In this, Arendt operates within a hermeneutical ontology, though it is often unthematized or underdeveloped within her work. Gadamer’s hermeneutical philosophy makes it possible to explicate and develop this ontology, illuminating the complex reciprocal relationship Arendt develops between the worldliness of human beings and the space of appearance that arises out of the exchange of interpretive judgments: the political world. The central theme of the political world serves to uncover the hermeneutical underpinnings of Arendt’s political thought, as well as the political implications of Gadamer’s philosophy. Part I shows how an embryonic and unthematized concept of the political world arises from the analysis of being-with [Mitsein] in Heidegger’s Being and Time. Part II proposes a novel systematic interpretation of The Human Condition, situating the conceptual distinctions of the vita activa within a hermeneutical ontology, with particular emphasis on Arendt’s appropriation and development of the concept of world. Part III turns to Gadamer’s treatment of tradition and historically-effected consciousness [wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewußtsein] in Truth and Method, arguing that the handing-down of tradition describes an historical activity of plural understanding, from which the political world emerges. Part IV traces the development of Arendt’s theory of judgment in tandem with her account of δόξα, the discursive mode proper to plural understanding, and proposes a revisionist interpretation of her mature theory of judgment. Gadamer’s fusion of horizons, rather than a Kantian extended mentality, emerges as an apt description of the space of appearance that emerges within plural interpretive discourse.