Arendt in Crisis: Political Thought in Between Past and Future

Philosophy & Social Criticism, 2000

ABSTRACT 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.

Theoria

Although Hannah Arendt is often described as a radical thinker, this article argues that such a characterization has occluded the question of what ‘radicality’ means within the particular horizon of Arendt’s political thought. While the battle over Arendt’s legacy is often fought on terms that oppose the radical to the conservative, Arendt herself is engaged in a different struggle, namely the opposition of the radical and the banal as it emerges in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), where banality is understood precisely as the problem that unradicality poses to thought. This article will investigate this tension and Arendt’s response to its emergence. Beginning with an account of radicality in relation to Arendt’s work on crisis in The Human Condition (1958) and Between Past and Future (1961), among other texts, this article will draw out an account of what it means to 'think politically' in a radical sense on Arendt's terms, first by considering the spatial logics that allow us to describe the location of the thinker who hopes to think responsively, to avoid both thoughtlessness and withdrawal in times of crisis. The article will then turn towards the particular interruption of Eichmann and ‘the banality of evil' into this project, and it will consider the stakes of this interruption. The manifest crisis of evil was accompanied for Arendt, as this article will go on to argue, by a correlative and immanent crisis of unthinkability, of “shallowness” and “rootlessness,” that threw into question in a precise way the ability of thinking to respond to the present on the terms of Arendt’s earlier work. From this perspective, the article will end by articulating a trajectory towards The Life of the Mind, Arendt’s unfinished attempt, demanded by the particular crisis of Eichmann, to think unradicality radically. It will conclude by reflecting on the form of the unfinished work - that The Life of the Mind itself is - as a way of understanding Arendt's final teaching about judgment and the possibility of a truly 'political thought.' This article is adapted from my Amherst College senior honors thesis in Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought, titled "A Form of Thinking Called Arendt" (2014).

2010

2020

The plan of this thesis is, first, to interpret Arendt's critique of the modern age. Next, this paper outlines Arendt's reconceptualization of Kant's theory of judgment as the basis for a novel model of the public sphere in light of the conditions of modernity. Finally, this paper explores Arendt's poetics as a means of activating the faculty of judgment in order to reconcile with the modern world. In order to address the political crises of modernity, Arendt develops a political aesthetic alive to the role of narrative and culture in reconstituting political communities. I argue that Hannah Arendt develops a novel political theory that is responsive to our global political context. v

Colloquy: text, theory, critique, 2017

Readers of Hannah Arendt's political theory have always found it difficult to integrate her writings on political judgment into her political theory as a whole. This is primarily because Arendt's judging subject seems to be at odds with the way that she frames the acting subject. In response to this problem, this article identifies an implicit Kantianism within Arendt's political theory, which can be employed in understanding the role of political judgement and its relation to action in Arendt. I suggest that, in order to ground the judgement of the actor, Arendt appeals to a version of Kantian reflective judgement, as it appears in Immanuel Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgement. I then argue that although Arendt attempts to distance herself from the Kantian transcendental, she also seems to lean on theoretical formulations that correlate to the sublime feeling in the spectator, also found in the Critique of the Power of Judgment. Finally, I relate these two ways of judging to the notion of power as Arendt discusses it in The Human Condition. I suggest that it is through power that political judgment appears in the world, as the clash between the reflective judgment of the actor and the philosophical judgment of the spectator.

"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)

Hannah Arendt liked to present herself in the image of a thinker who had jettisoned the grand metaphysical ambitions of the Western philosophical tradition. In this, Arendt anticipated later “anti-foundationalist” themes in what came to be called post-modernist theory. Arendt even went so far as to resist the notion that she was a philosopher at all. In my view this self-understanding was way off the mark. Juxtaposing her idea of “judging” in the posthumously-published Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy with a classic conception of judgment from the Western philosophy canon – namely Aristotle’s key notion of “phronesis,” practical wisdom – demonstrates that Arendt easily matches the metaphysical ambitions of the philosophy tradition. For a thinker like Arendt, chucking off philosophy turns out to be easier said than done. In fact, properly appreciating the judging idea in the Kant Lectures conducts us into the very centre of Arendt’s political philosophy.