Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-hc48f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-24T09:37:15.142Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Existentialism Politicized: Arendt's Debt to Jaspers

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Lewis P. Hinchman  and
Sandra K. Hinchman
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

There has been much debate about how to locate Hannah Arendt within the tradition of political philosophy. This article argues for an “existentialist” reading, claiming that Karl Jaspers's categories reappear, politicized, in Arendt's own thought. Her language and arguments do not, in fact, become completely intelligible until read in the context of Jaspers's Existentz philosophy. The authors contend that the apparent obscurity and ambiguity of Arendt's writings owe to her attempt to stretch the framework of existentialism to fit the milieu of classical antiquity, to which it is fundamentally alien. Conversely, Arendt appropriated only those aspects of Aristotelian theory that suited her existentially defined concerns while ignoring the rest, a procedure that accounts for many of the tensions and contradictions found in her work.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 53 , Issue 3 , Summer 1991 , pp. 435 - 468
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1991

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1. Arendt, Hannah, “Eichmann in Jerusalem: Reply to Gershom Scholem,” Encounter 22, no. 1 (1964): 53.Google Scholar

2. See our earlier article, “In Heidegger's Shadow: Hannah Arendt’s Phenomenological Humanism,” Review of Politics 46, no. 2 (1984): 183–211.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Other commentators who have discussed Arendt's existentialism and/or her relationship to Jaspers, and Include, HeideggerJay, Martin, “Hannah Arendt: Opposing Views,” Partisan Review 45, no. 3 (1978)Google Scholar; Parekh, Bhikhu, Hannah Arendt and the Search for a New Political Philosophy (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1981) especially pp. 66–83, 177–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Vollrath, Ernest, “Hannah Arendt and the Method of Political Thinking,” Social Research 44, no. 1 (1977)Google Scholar; Wolin, Sheldon, “Hannah Arendt and the Ordinance of Time,“Social Research 44, no. 1 (1977)Google Scholar; Gunnell, John, Political Theory: Tradition and Interpretation (Cambridge, MA: Winthrop Publishers, 1979), pp. 80–82Google Scholar; Canovan, Margaret, “Socrates or Heidegger? Hannah Arendt's Reflections on Philosophy and Politics,“ Social Research 57, no. 1 (1990)Google Scholar; and Young-bruehl, Elisabeth, “Reflections on Hannah Arendt's The Life of the Mind,” Political Theory 10, no. 2 (1982).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3. Young-bruehl, Elisabethemploys this approach successfully in her book, Freedom and Karl Jaspers' Philosophy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981).Google Scholar

4. Arendt, Hannah, “What Is Existenz Philosophy?”, Partisan Review 13, no. 1 (1946): 38.Google Scholar

5. See Jaspers, Karl, Philosophy, 2 vols., trans, by Ashton, E. B. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970)Google Scholar, 2: 3: “What we refer to in mythic terms as the soul and God, and in philosophical language as Existenz and transcendence, is not of this world. Neither one is knowable, in the sense of things in the world. Yet both might have another kind of being. They need not be nothing, even though they are not known.”

6. For a fuller discussion of Jaspers's pluralism, see Wallraff, Charles, Karl Jaspers: An Introduction to His Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), pp. 53–63.Google Scholar

7. See Jaspers, , Philosophy, 2: 298.Google Scholar

8. Ibid., p. 196.

9. As Jaspers writes: “There are not two worlds lying side by side.. it only seems [so] because we cannot avoid using objective concepts and categories as means of expression” (ibid., p. 18).

10. “There is no freedom outside self-being. The objective world has neither a place nor a gap for it. Jaspers, , Philosophy, 2: 167.Google Scholar For a fuller discussion of Jaspers's approach to the Kantian “two worlds” dichotomy, see Young-bruehl, , Karl Jaspers, pp. 100–106.Google Scholar

11. See Jaspers, , Philosophy, 2:3Google Scholar, and also p. 360, where he writes that “Existenz is not in the sense in which objects are. Nor is it in the sense of the being of subjects accessible to psychology.. The sense of being of possible Existenz is not an observable phenomenon.”

12. Earle, William, trans., “Introduction” to Jaspers, Karl, Reason and Existenz (New York: Noonday Press, 1955), p. 11.Google Scholar

13. On Existenz understood as being oneself, see Jaspers, , Philosophy, 1: 55Google Scholar, and Philosophy, 2: 3, 135.Google Scholar

14. Jaspers, , Philosophy, 2: 135.Google Scholar

15. See ibid., p. 16, where Jaspers, referring to the term Existenz as a “sign” and not a descriptive word, remarks that, “In elucidating Existenz I speak of the self as if it were a universal whose structures I demonstrate, but I can mean only my own self, for which nothing can substitute.”

16. See Jaspers, , Man in the Modern Age, trans. Eden, and Paul, Cedar (Garden City: Doubleday and Co., 1957), p. 177Google Scholar: “I am not what I cognise, nor do I cognise what I am.”

17. Jaspers, , Philosophy, 2: 122–23.Google Scholar Here as elsewhere, Jaspers seems to posit two selves: the genuine self vs. the robot-like clone that sometimes passes for or stands in for it. How this squares with his emphatic repudiation of all two-worlds theories is not entirely clear.

18. In ibid., p. 9, Jaspers describes this process as follows: “either I allow the course of things to decide about me — vanishing as myself, since there is no real decision when everything just happens — or I deal with being originally, as myself, with the feeling that there must be a decision.” Tolstoy's Ivan Ilyich furnishes a powerful literary example of what Jaspers means by existential elucidation.

19. See ibid., p. 111: “Existenz does not appear immediately as a finished product; it is acquired step by step, by way of decisions taken in the course of time. Its phenomenon is not the single moment but the historic succession of interrelated moments.”

20. Jaspers, , Philosophy, 2: 155.Google Scholar

21. Ibid., p. 173. Jaspers elaborates that, “In me lies a source that is entirely myself and from whose point of view I see my phenomenality.. as an existence I have to mold.” See also Philosophy, 1: 56.

22. Jaspers, , Reason and Existenz, p. 49.Google Scholar

23. See Jaspers, , Philosophy, 1: 107Google Scholar: “mundane existence (Dascin) does become the objectivity of Existenz — not a thing I can know in my world-orientation, only what I have adopted and created, or rejected and destroyed, as Existenz. My world is then no longer the world that exists, let alone the world that is known. It is a world which freedom finds and helps to bring about.” (Emphasis in original.)

24. Ibid., p. 167.

25. As Jaspers, explains in Philosophy, 2: 17Google Scholar: “The rules of reality are cau sal laws; whatever happens has its cause and its effect in the course of time. Existential reality, on the other hand, is self-originating as it appears to itself in time —in other words, it is free.” See also Arendt, , “What Is Freedom?” pp. 143–45Google Scholar, and Arendt, Hannah, The Life of the Mind, vol. II: Willing (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), pp. 28–34.Google Scholar

26. Ibid., p. 18.

27. Arendt, , Willing, p. 200.Google Scholar See also Arendt, Hannah, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), pp. 31–31Google Scholar and Arendt, , “What Is Freedom?” in Between Past and Future, 2nd ed. (New York: Viking, 1968), pp. 148–49.Google Scholar In the latter work, Arendt contended that “political freedom” is the ground for “inner freedom.”

28. In Human Condition, p. 179, Arendt puts it as follows: “The manifestation of who the speaker and doer unexchangeably is.. retains a curious intangibility that confounds all efforts toward unequivocal verbal expression. The moment we want to say who somebody is, our very vocabulary leads us astray into saying what he is; we get entangled in a description of qualities he shares with others like him.”

29. Ibid., p. 181.

30. Ibid., p. 178.

31. Ibid., p. 176.

32. Ibid., pp. 180–81.

33. Ibid., p. 180.

34. Ibid., p. 177.

35. Ibid., p. 178.

36. Arendt, , Willing, pp. 30, 32–33.Google Scholar

37. Arendt, , Human Condition, p. 178.Google Scholar On the intellectual lineage of this idea see ibid., pp. 7–9, 177, 189.

38. Ibid., pp. 178; see also pp. 42–45.

39. Arendt, ,“Existenz Philosophy,” p. 34.Google Scholar

40. Ibid.

41. See ibid., pp. 46–51.

42. Ibid., p. 51.

43. Quoted in Young-bruehl, , Karl Jaspers, p. 169.Google Scholar

44. See Arendt, , “Existenz Philosophy,” p. 51.Google Scholar

45. See Arendt, , “Karl Jaspers: Citizen of the World?”, in Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1968), p. 85.Google Scholar

46. Arendt, , “Existenz Philosophy,” p. 56.Google Scholar

47. Arendt, , Willing, p. 200.Google Scholar

48. Jaspers, , Philosophy, 1: 57.Google Scholar

49. See Jaspers, , Philosophy, 2: 212Google Scholar: “Existenz, for us, is solely phenomenal.”

50. Ibid., p. 30.

51. Ibid., pp. 91, 93.

52. Ibid., p. 328.

53. Ibid., pp. 308–309.

54. See Jaspers, , Man in the Modern Age, pp. 54–55.Google Scholar

55. Arendt, , “Karl Jaspers: A Laudatio,” in Men in Dark Times, p. 75.Google Scholar

56. Arendt, , Human Condition, pp. 180, 184.Google Scholar

57. However, it must be recognized that Arendt, did not entirely abandon either criterion. She still spoke of love as manifesting “the essence of who somebody is” (Willing, p. 95)Google Scholar and of communication as a requirement of reason (Life of the Mind, vol I: Thinking, p. 99).Google Scholar

58. See Arendt, , Human Condition, pp. 8, 175–76Google Scholar; for commentary, consult Dennehy, Michael, “The Privilege of Ourselves: Hannah Arendt on Judgment,” in Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the Public World, ed. Hill, Melvin (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1979), pp. 250–51Google Scholar, and Canovan, Margaret, “Arendt, Rousseau, and Human Plurality in Politics,” in Journal of Politics 45 (1983).CrossRefGoogle Scholar For a view that dissents from Canovan's, see Barnard, F. Mechner, “Infinity and Finality: Hannah Arendt on Politics and Truth,” Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory, 1, no. 3 (1977).Google Scholar

59. See Arendt, , Willing, p. 200Google Scholar; “What Is Freedom?”, pp. 156–71; and On Revolution, pp. 71–74. Commentary on the will and plurality in Arendt is provided by Canovan, “Arendt, Rousseau, and Human Plurality,” and Jacobitti, Suzanne, “Hannah Arendt and the Will,” Political Theory 16, no. 1 (1988).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

60. These critics include Martin Jay, “Hannah Arendt”; Wolin, Sheldon, “Hannah Arendt: Democracy and the Political,” Salmagundi, no. 60 (1983)Google Scholar; and Pitkin, Hanna, “Justice: On Relating Private and Public,” Political Theory 9, no. 3 (1981).CrossRefGoogle Scholar An intelligent defense of Arendt is supplied by Levin, Martin, “On Animal Laborans and Homo Politicus: A Note,” Political Theory 7, no. 4 (1979).CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also Canovan's, Margaret discussion in “The Contradictions of Hannah Arendt's Political Thought,” Political Theory 6, no. 1 (1978)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Botstein, Leon, “Hannah Arendt: Opposing Views,” Partisan Review 45, no. 3 (1978): 378Google Scholar

61. Arendt, , Human Condition, p. 41.Google Scholar

62. Ibid., p. 41. See also p. 46: “Society is the form in which the fact of mutual dependence for the sake of life and nothing else assumes public significance and where the activities connected with sheer survival are permitted to appear in public.”

63. Arendt, Hannah, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973), pp. 465–68;Google Scholar also Arendt, , Human Condition, pp. 43, 322–23.Google Scholar

64. Arendt, , Human Condition, p. 41.Google Scholar See also Christopher Lasch, “Introduction” to issue on Arendt, , Salmagundi, no. 60 (1983), pp. vii–viii.Google Scholar

65. Margaret Canovan has also noted the similarity between Arendt's and Jaspers's analyses of mass society, though in a different context. See her “The Contradictions of Arendt's, Hannah Political Thought,” Political Theory 6, no. 1 (1978): 9.Google Scholar

66. Jaspers, , Man in the Modern Age, p. 40.Google Scholar

67. Ibid.

68. Ibid., p. 33.

69. Jaspers, , Philosophy, 1: 113.Google Scholar

70. Jaspers, , Man in the Modern Age, p. 42.Google Scholar

71. Ibid., p. 47.

72. Jaspers, , Philosophy, 1: 118.Google Scholar

73. Jaspers, , Man in the Modern Age, p. 47–48.Google Scholar

74. Ibid., p. 127.

75. Arendt, , Willing, p. 200.Google Scholar

76. See Jaspers, , Philosophy, 2: 122–23.Google Scholar

77. Jaspers, , Man in the Modern Age, p. 87.Google Scholar

78. Arendt, , “Karl Jaspers: Citizen of the World?” pp. 88–89.Google Scholar See also Jaspers, , “The Axial Age of Human History,” Commentary 6 (1948): 430–35.Google Scholar

79. See Jay, “Hannah Arendt"; Wolin, “Hannah Arendt: Democracy and the Political"; Lasch, , “Introduction,” p. 329;Google Scholar Pitkin, “Justice: On Relating Private and Public"; Habermas, Juergen, “Hannah Arendt's Communications Concept of Power,” Social Research 44, no. 1 (1977);Google ScholarNelson, John, “Politics and Truth: Arendt's Problematic,” American Journal of Political Science 52, no. 2 (1978): 289–90;Google Scholar Mildred Bakan, “Hannah Arendt's Concepts of Labor and Work,” in Hill, , Hannah Arendt, p. 59;Google Scholar and Schwartz, Benjamin, “The Religion of Politics,” Dissent 17, no. 2(1970).Google Scholar For a balanced treatment of this issue, see Kateb, George, Hannah Arendt: Politics, Conscience, Evil (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Allanheld, 1983), pp. 16–22 and 43–44.Google ScholarBotstein, , “Hannah Arendt: Opposing Views,” p. 375Google Scholar, disputes the position that Arendtian political action is contentless.

80. Knauer, James, “Motive and Goal in Hannah Arendt's Concept of Political Action,” American Political Science Review, 74, no. 3 (1980): 721–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

81. Arendt, , Human Condition, p. 183.Google Scholar

82. Ibid., p. 182.

83. Ibid., p. 206.

84. Ibid., p. 206.

85. Arendt, , “What Is Freedom?” p. 152.Google Scholar

86. See Knauer, , “Motive and Goal in Hannah Arendt's Concept of Political Action,” p. 725.Google Scholar

87. For a useful discussion of unconditional action in relation to politics see Young-bruehl, , Karl Jaspers, pp. 36–37.Google Scholar

88. Jaspers, , Philosophy, 2: 256–57.Google Scholar

89. Kant, Immanuel, Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals, trans. Abbott, Thomas K. (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1949), pp. 11–17.Google Scholar

90. Karl, Jaspers, Philosophy, 2: 257–58.Google Scholar

91. Arendt insists that action should not be assessed in light of normal moral standards; see, for example, Human Condition, p. 205. Thoughtful critics of this position include George Kateb, Hannah Arendt; Bradshaw, Leah, Acting and Thinking: The Political Thought of Hannah Arendt (Toronto: University of Toron Press, 1989)Google Scholar; and Beatty, Joseph, “Thinking and Moral Considerations: Socrates and Arendt's Eichmann,” Journal of Value Inquiry 10 (Winter 1976).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

92. Arendt, , On Revolution, chap. 2, especially p. 110.Google Scholar

93. Jaspers, , Philosophy, 2: 256.Google Scholar

94. See Arendt, , Human Condition, chap. 3, especially pp. 79–93.Google Scholar For a critique of the concept of “animal laborans,” see Dossa, Shiraz, “Human Status and Politics: Hannah Arendt on the Holocaust,” Canadian Journal of Political Science 13, no. 2 (1980).CrossRefGoogle ScholarWolin, Sheldon, “Hannah Arendt and the Ordinance of Time,” p. 95Google Scholar, points out that “labor” is “a description, not of a class, but of a common mentalite” denned by “administration, technical work, and the production of culture.”

95. Arendt, , Thinking, p. 15.Google Scholar

96. See Young-bruehl, , Karl Jaspers, pp. 114–15.Google Scholar

97. Jaspers, , Philosophy, 1: 1.Google Scholar

98. Ibid., p. 43.

99. Jaspers, Karl, The Future of Mankind, trans. Ashton, E.b. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), p. 196.Google Scholar

100. Young-bruehl, , Karl Jaspers, p. 77.Google Scholar

101. See Arendt, , Human Condition, pp. 42–43.Google Scholar

102. As Arendt, puts it in The Human Condition, p. 192Google Scholar, “Action reveals itself fully only to the storyteller, that is, to the backward glance of the historian who indeed always knows better what it was all about than the participants.. Even though stories are the inevitable results of action, it is not the actor but the storyteller who perceives and ‘makes’ the story.” See also Thinking, p. 87, where Arendt asserts that, “No experience yields any meaning.. without undergoing the operations of imagination and thinking. Seen from the perspective of thinking, life in its sheer thereness is meaningless.” For commentary, see Luban's, David excellent article, “Explaining Dark Times: Hannah Arendt's Theory of Theory,” Social Research 50, no. 1 (1983).Google Scholar

103. For the continuity of philosophy and other sense-making activities see Arendt, Thinking, p. 78; for the peculiarity of philosophical objects see ibid., p. 52.

104. Ibid., pp. 3–4. For an extended commentary on the relationship between “thoughtlessness” and totalitarianism, see Bradshaw, Acting and Thinking.

105. Ibid., p. 98.

106. Ibid., p. 61.

107. Ibid., p. 123.

108. Ibid., p. 133.

109. Arendt, , “Karl Jaspers: Citizen of the World?,” p. 85.Google Scholar

110. Sternberger, Dolf, “The Sunken City: Hannah Arendt's Idea of Politics,” Social Research 44, no. 1 (1977): 133.Google Scholar See also Habermas, , “Hannah Arendt's Communications Concept of Power"; Bakan, “Hannah Arendt's Concepts of Labor and Work,” pp. 49–51Google Scholar; Kateb, , Hannah Arendt, pp. 36, 39–42Google Scholar; Gunnell, , Political Theory, pp. 48–49Google Scholar; Bradshaw, , Acting and Thinking, p. 25Google Scholar; O'sullivan, Noel, “Hannah Arendt: Hellenic Nostalgia and Industrial Society,” in Contemporary Political Philosophers, ed. De Crespigny, A. and Minogue, K. (New York: Dodds, Mead, 1975).Google Scholar Many of these scholars, however, do acknowledge as well the importance of Arendt's existentialist heritage.

111. Parekh, , Hannah Arendt and the Search for a New Political Philosophy, p. 177.Google Scholar

112. Arendt, , Human Condition, p. 12, note.Google Scholar

113. Arendt, , “Understanding and Politics,” Partisan Review 20, no. 4 (1953): 388.Google Scholar

114. See, for example, On Revolution, chap. 2, especially pp. 86–87, 105–10; Human Condition, sections 5 and 6; Arendt, , “Reflections on Little Rock,” Dissent, 6, no. 1 (1959)Google Scholar; and a roundtable interview, “On Hannah Arendt,” in Hill, , Hannah Arendt, pp. 315–28.Google Scholar In the interview, Arendt contends that problems like education, health, and housing all have “a double face. And one of these faces should not be subject to debate. There shouldn't be any debate about a question that everybody should have decent housing.. But the question of whether this adequate housing means integration or not is certainly a political question” (rather than a technical or administrative one). It is not that Arendt is indifferent to social justice, but that she thinks, perhaps naively, that the demands of justice are (or should be) self-evident and, to that extent, unpolitical.

115. Arendt, , Human Condition, pp. 41–45, 322.Google ScholarKing, Richard H., “Endings and Beginnings: Politics in Arendt's Early Thought,” Political Theory 12, no. 1 (1984): 247CrossRefGoogle Scholar, interprets Arendt as saying that “there are.. occasional momentous events and periods in which human freedom bursts on the scene in the form of collective political debate and action. On her account,.. most human history.. would be amenable to causal explanation and analysis, subject to necessity not freedom. It would only be in those isolated epochs of freedom that the sort of analysis that eschews causal explanation would be appropriate.”