16 - Existential Values in Arendt's Treatment of Evil and Morality

Summary

Existential values dominate Hannah Arendt's political theory. The result is that morality often ends up either subordinate in importance to existential values or sidelined by them. Morality must struggle to be heard. Most famously, her espousal of political action grows not out of moral concern, but out of her existential values, which political action is intended to serve. But the story does not end there. The existential values present in Arendt's writings that I consider are the two that I believe (with some encouragement from Arendt) constitute human dignity: human status and human stature. Human dignity for Arendt rests on human uniqueness, the human difference from the rest of nature. The salient element of Arendt's concept of human status is not being animal-like. The salient element of Arendt's concept of stature is the creative and audacious use of freedom in thought, art, and action. I do not quite mean to say that Arendt is a philosopher of existentialism, properly speaking, though she has noteworthy affinities to it, especially to some of its French variants.

Although my explicit discussion of The Human Condition, which is her most extended treatment of existential values, is concentrated in the last pages of this chapter, that book is always in the background of my discussion.