An Ethic of Plurality: Reconciling Politics and Morality in Hannah Arendt (original) (raw)
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"Artifacts of Thinking: Reading Hannah Arendt's Denktagebuch”
I argue in this essay that reconciliation is a central and guiding idea that deepens our understanding of Arendt’s politics, plurality, and judgment. I also show that the judgment to reconcile with world is inspired by Arendt’s engagement with Heidegger on the questions of thinking, forgiveness, and reconciliation, as well as by her own efforts to think through her personal and intellectual reconciliation with Heidegger. I present nine theses that Arendt advances around the theme of reconciliation found in her Denktagebuch. Theses 1–4 address reconciliation—as distinct from forgiveness, guilt, and revenge—as a political act of judgment, one that affirms solidarity in response to the potentially disintegrating experience of evil. Thesis 5 situates Arendt’s discussion of reconciliation in her critiques of Hegel and Marx. Thesis 6 considers the central role of reconciliation in Arendt’s book Between Past and Future and argues that the “gap between past and future” is Arendt’s metaphorical space for a politics of reconciliation understood as the practice of thinking and judging without banisters, as she put it, in a world without political truths. Theses 7 and 8 turn to Arendt’s engagement with Heidegger on the question of reconciliation, arguing that her embrace of reconciliation with an evil world is a response to the errors of Heidegger’s worldless thinking. Finally, Thesis 9 turns to Arendt’s final judgment of Adolf Eichmann, arguing that her refusal to reconcile herself with Eichmann exemplifies the limits of reconciliation; Arendt’s decision not to reconcile with Eichmann and to demand his death is Arendt’s paramount example of political judgment. Judgments for reconciliation and nonreconciliation are judgments that can reenliven and reimagine political solidarity in the wake of great acts of evil. This essay will appear in: "Artifacts of Thinking: Reading Hannah Arendt's Denktagebuch” ed. by Roger Berkowitz and Ian Storey (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016)
Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory, 2019
The value of human plurality has come under threat by, among others, populist movements. To find illumination of our dark times, political thinkers have recently turned to the political thought of Hannah Arendt. Since the concept of human plurality is at the heart of Arendt's oeuvre, Sophie Loidolt's book Phenomenology of Plurality promises to be a timely and important contribution to both the scholarship on Arendt and the moral-political problems of the present. However, while Loidolt's book offers an impressive phenomenological analysis of Arendt's work, it does not entirely succeed in demonstrating the relevance of Loidolt's phenomenological musings for the political, moral and social problems of our age. My criticism, in other words, is not (only) that Loidolt develops a problematic interpretation of Arendt; my point, rather, is that large parts of this interpretation are of limited political relevance; and my more general point is that interpreters who misconstrueor refuse to take seriously-Arendt's distinction between the philosopher and the political theorist are bound to fail to grasp the nature, the central orientation and, ultimately, the enormous potential of her distinctly political theory.
Love and Responsibility: a Political Ethic for Hannah Arendt
Political Studies, 1998
This paper argues that those critics of Hannah Arendt's thought who have protested at her disavowal of `moral standards' as being appropriate in the judgment of political action have, in fact, misjudged the structure of her thought. My argument is, however, a constructive one: the paper seeks ...
Argument: Biannual Philosophical Journal
The aim of the article is to examine the role that memory and oblivion, forgiveness and unforgiveness play in Hannah Arendt’s thought in relation to acts of violence in the political sphere. Political communities do not always decide to remember the crimes they have committed or the wrongs they have suffered, but neither can they always forget their mutual harms, even when there is already peace between them. Without striving to exhaust the entire subject matter of Arendt’s work, I would like to illustrate the difficulty of understanding the role forgiveness plays in her thought as well as to indicate possible solutions when forgiveness becomes unachievable within the framework of her considerations. Her reflection can be divided into two stages. The first is a focus on the idea of radical evil and the need to forgive perpetrators for their crimes. Second, under the influence of the Adolf Eichmann trial, she developed the idea of the banality of evil. This idea points to situations ...
The Ontological Grounding of Hannah Arendt's Political Ethics
The European Legacy, 2023
This paper examines Hannah Arendt's account of the relationship between politics and morality. Many critics have argued that Arendt's conception of political action lacks any moral foundations, while others have tried to focus on her understanding of thinking as a normative source of her ethics. In contrast to these views, I present an alternative explanation and argue that the sources of Arendt's political ethics are located neither in the faculty of thinking nor in extrapolitical moral norms or rules, but in the ontological conditions of action, specifically worldliness, natality and plurality. This interpretation allows us to make sense of Arendt's fragmented, unsystematic accounts of the various virtues and moral dispositions required for authentic politics: courage, responsibility, care, respect, moderation, solidarity and gratitude. In particular, an inquiry into the ontological sources of political ethics provides a solid normative grounding for the two moral dispositions - promise and forgiveness - that form an explicit "moral code" of political action for Arendt.
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.
A Post-Holocaust Philosopher of Forgiveness: An Exploration of Hannah Arendt's Jesus
Ideas in History, 2015
This paper examines Hannah Arendt’s image of Jesus. While Arendt’s drawing on Jesus was unusual in political theory, her depiction of Jesus was on a number of points homologous with some theological research into the historical Jesus. Like the theologians, Arendt presented the teaching of Jesus as unique and unprecedented. Additionally, to associate Jesus’ uniqueness with forgiveness is obviously a “theological commonplace.” Yet, unlike the prevailing eschatological image of Jesus, Arendt portrayed Jesus as an ethical-political sage. In this regard, her portrayal had more in common with a previous “Jesus paradigm” which highlighted the morality and humanity of Jesus. Moreover, the quality of what she identified as Jesus’ unprecedented insight was unorthodox. Thus, “Arendt’s Jesus” insisted that forgiveness is a purely human action, i.e., that humans have the capacity to for-give and that this capacity is not derived from God. Furthermore, whereas Jesus is commonly associated with an unlimited power to forgive, Arendt’s Jesus maintained that forgiveness does not apply to deliberate wrongdoing and emphasized that some wrongdoers are unforgivable. In this regard, Arendt drew a post-Hol-ocaust image of Jesus. The paper concludes that Arendt’s image is “ambivalent,” because, on one hand, Arendt’s Jesus considered forgiveness to be an extraordinary human power. On the other hand, he was a proponent of a highly circumscribed forgiveness. Beyond this, the relationship between Arendt’s Jesus and her political thought is considered. It is contended that Arendt’s “alliance” with Jesus is strategic. This in that it functions as a part of her critique of the Western tradition of political thought for being biased and out of tune with elementary human experiences and conditions.
Hannah Arendt: A New Concept of Politics
political thinker of enormous erudition full of insights and exceptional originality of the twentieth century. In her writings she appreciates the nature and value of politics as no one has done before, brilliantly analyses the evils of modern civilization and lays the foundation of an ideal community based on participatory democracy. She is of the view that man is a public being who necessarily requires public space in all relevant areas of organized life. To her, the main aim of politics is to develop a new culture based on a public way of life. In her view, politics is concerned not only with the maintenance of order but also with action, the development of character, public freedom, dignity and humanity. She regards Politics as means of self-revelation and public happiness, a cultural activity and an 'aesthetic activity'. The plan of the present study is to discuss, analyse and evaluate Arendt's Tripartite scheme of labour, work and action and her unique conception of politics as "the pursuit of beauty". She regards politics as a means of self-revelation public happiness and an aesthetic activity. Her concept of politics, in fact, has been regarded as "the pursuit of beauty." 1