Hannah Arendt

This paper examines the unique structures of identity formation within the craftsperson/maker mindset and their relation to Western views of work and labor. The contemporary Maker Movement has its origins not only in the internet revolution, but also in the revival of handicraft during the last several economic recessions. Economic uncertainty drives people toward the ideals and practices of craft as a way to regain a sense of agency and control. One learns how to become an active participant in our (...) material lives by making and maintaining the objects that surround us. This orientation toward craft has the potential to alter the practitioner's sense of self going forward. I will argue that the work-based nature of craft leads to a unique and positive sense of self that the assumed freedom of ‘art’ and intellectualized labor unwittingly discourages. Tacit mechanisms shape the craft mindset through emphasis on skill, mastery of materials, polymathic problem solving, and quality. Hannah Arendt’s notion of the vita activa and Martin Heidegger’s arguments on modern technology reveal the dynamics between physical and intellectual labor and how many have greatly misunderstood the ‘essence’ of the craftsperson’s work. Peter Dormer and Glenn Adamson’s analysis of the nature of craft demonstrate how these two lines of thought can be unified into one system of selfhood granting the greater sense of agency many seek without relying on an individualized sense of self. The Richard Sennett shows how this sense of self challenges the desire to liberate ourselves from labor via technology and poetic autonomy as seen in Franco Berardi’s Manifesto of Post-Futurism. Malcolm Gladwell's work on intuition examines the impact of this tacit craft mindset and the psychological mechanisms that drive it. This will allow Peter Korn’s first-hand account of his own craft practice to demonstrate this structure and its inherent points of resistance against today’s hyper-individualized and resultingly selfish ways of life. Throughout this paper, a clear emphasis on materiality as a profound source of embodied knowledge will be maintained to reveal craftspersonhood as a source of deep existential fulfillment and practical philosophy. Acknowledging and embracing our intrinsic materiality and all that it has to teach us is imperative in the face of a consumption-centric culture of excess and exploitation that looms over much of the West. (shrink)

In his recently published posthumous works "Prefiguration" and "The Rigorism of Truth" Hans Blumenberg surprisingly steps into the area of political history that he had left widely unconsidered in "Work on Myth". While "Prefiguration" tackles the “demonic” aspects of Napoleon and Hitler that Blumenberg tries to dismantle and bring into derision, in "Rigorism of Truth" he attacks Hannah Arendt's phrase of the Banality of Evil in relation to the Jerusalem trial against Adolf Eichmann in 1961. In this latter issue Blumenberg (...) defends the demonic he sees culminated in the form of Eichmann to assert what he calls the “mythical dimension“ in the Israeli process of nation-building. To him, Eichmann represents a prototypical demon incarnate that must be slaughtered by the heroic character seen in young state Israel. This obviously turns Blumenberg's criticism of Napoleon and Hitler into an affirmation of political myths that, on the face of it, appears to be a contradiction in terms. The essay focuses on this theoretical tension and tries to point out that significance (“Bedeutsamkeit”) is not only a necessity for individual self-assertion (“Selbstbehauptung”) but also a category of communality that must be handled with care. (shrink)

In this article I demonstrate how Hannah Arendt both appropriates and transforms Aristotle’s view of political friendship. I argue that the brief discussion of Aristotelian political friendship in The Human Condition relies on an earlier de-materialization of Aristotle’s work on friendship. This de-materialization of Aristotle’s view of friendship allows Arendt to discuss Aristotelian friendship as a kind of ‘respect’, where ‘respect’ is a philosophical notion unavailable to Aristotle. Ultimately, for Arendt, the experience of friendship opens up a space for human (...) beings to begin to practice a distinct way of seeing one another – a ‘respect’ – that can in turn be practiced in public, making the experience of friendship an important precursor to action. (shrink)

O texto analisa quais teriam sido as razões estruturais pelas quais Habermas, no seu texto sobre a desobediência civil de 1983, estranhamente, não referencia o nome de Arendt, mas o de Rawls. Para isso, apresenta alguns elemen tos do t ratamento arendtiano da desobediên cia civil que inviabilizaram o alinhamento do trabalho de Habermas sobre a desobediência civil [1983] com aquele da pensadora. Por fim, aponta para as prox imidades da teoria de Habermas com aq uela de Rawls, muito embora (...) com ciência das diferenças importantes entre as duas propostas. (shrink)

In the present article, I offer a new reading of Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, specifically her argument that ideologies such as racism engender totalitarianism when the lonely and disenfranchised laborers of modern society develop a pathological fixation on formal logic, which I term “logomania.” That is, such logical deductions, from horrifically false premises, are the closest thing to thinking that individuals can engage in after their psyches, relationships, and communities have broken down. And it is only thus that (...) totalitarianism can achieve power, since it offers at least some form of connectedness and meaning, regardless how terrifying and violent. The danger persists, clearly, with the resurgence of the far Right, including in the extraordinary regime of Trump in the United States. From this I conclude that, along with the admirable calls to fight loneliness and rebuild our communities, we should also supplement all formal logical instruction and community education with instruction in creative thinking (including aesthetics), thereby discouraging the monomaniac reliance on formal logic as inadvertent weapon of totalitarianism. (shrink)

As I have explored elsewhere, the Birmingham Philosophy Guild, which my former students and I re-founded in 2012, is a team of community members who engage in theoretical discussion, support group self-cultivation, and community activism. To further promote the guild as a catalyst for progressive social change, the present article connects it to both the popular cultural phenomenon of the “X-Men”—to make the guild more appealing to students and laypeople—and to the cutting-edge contemporary French philosophy of Étienne Balibar—to make the (...) guild more appealing to professors and culture workers. Moreover, the article connects these low- and high-brow phenomena to each other as well, thereby illustrating the political relevance of the lower, as well as a weakness in the higher, pursuant to social justice activism today. (shrink)

Phenomenology and ancient Greek philosophy. The title of this book, indicating these topics as its two main subjects, could give the impression that the subjects are held together by a circumstantial “and.” The title would then indicate a connection between phenomenology and a topic, ancient Greek philosophy, the way titles such as Art and Phenomenology, Phenomenology and Psychological Research, Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics do. This impression would be wrong. First, ancient Greek philosophers take pride of place in the dialogues initiated (...) by many phenomenologists with various figures from the history of philosophy. Second, this is not just because phenomenological philosophers have tended to regard ancient Greek philosophy as the revered beginning of Western thought, reflection upon which may help illuminate any topic modern human beings wish to inquire into or give it a kind of historical dignity. It is first and foremost because ancient Greek philosophy, understood as the scientific attempt to understand the world, ourselves, and our place in the world, in the phenomenological tradition is regarded as one important origin of contemporary Western philosophy and science, even if contemporary philosophy and science is also determined by a new ideal of philosophy that emerges in early modernity. Indeed, for most phenomenologists, Greek philosophy can be regarded as the roots supporting this new ideal—even if these roots are sometimes hidden from sight or forgotten. The main rationale for confronting ancient Greek philosophy phenomenologically is accordingly the attempt to bring to light in its full radicality the phenomenon “philosophy.” Unearthing philosophy as it was originally understood by Greek thinkers may, according to many phenomenologists at least, help us understand what philosophy in the full sense of the word was, has been, and may be again, but also what it has become or even degenerated into in modern times, for instance positivism. It is this way of approaching ancient Greek philosophy that we wish to concentrate on in this book, in the hope that the volume will prove instructive both to people who have an interest in ancient Greek philosophy and wish to know more about the phenomenological approach to it and to people who work within phenomenology and wish to know more about the various approaches to ancient Greek philosophy characterizing the phenomenological movement. We have therefore sought to make the introduction and the individual chapters accessible to non-experts, for instance by transliterating all Greek text, and confining quotes in other languages than English to footnotes and glosses. (shrink)

If the instance of human rights cannot ensure the protection of the rightless, as Arendt famously claimed, how can the rightless struggle for freedom and equality? In this essay, I attempt to answer this question by reconsidering Arendt’s influential critique of human rights in light of the two polar responses it evoked from contemporary French philosophers Jacques Rancière and Étienne Balibar. Rancière, who objects to Arendt’s delimiting of the political, finds her argument excluding and dangerous. Balibar, on the other hand, (...) believes that it conveys an immense potential for politics to come, as it points to the dialectical political truth of equaliberty. In the following, I show the problematics of Rancière’s ingenious formulation of rights, and the answer Balibar’s original interpretation of Arendt’s thought might suggest in response. I contend that working through Rancière’s critique of Arendt’s argument and Balibar’s affirmation of it not only highlights the merits of her critical account but also points to the fundamental relation between Arendt’s work on rights and her later discussions of the human condition of non-sovereignty and the power of promises. I believe that such a reading can contribute to our interpretation of Arendt, and pave new routes of action for non-citizens (such as refugees, stateless persons and subjects of military occupation), who cannot employ the authorities’ strength for their protection. (shrink)

In this article, we examine the political and educational relevance of Hannah Arendt’s account of friendship. Drawing from Arendt’s central works on friendship, we offer a novel interpretation of the concept by connecting the notion with the idea of educational ‘love for the world’, amor mundi. With this interpretation, we seek to demonstrate that the concept of friendship has both direct educational and indirect political significance. Thereby, we distinguish our interpretation from two previous understandings of the educational relevance of the (...) Arendtian notion of friendship—those by (1) Aaron Schutz and Marie G. Sandy, and (2) Morten T. Korsgaard—in which friendship is either assigned a specifically political role (as in (1)) or its significance to education is narrowly understood (as in (2)). We argue our interpretation of friendship offers both a new contribution to the understanding of the relationship between education and politics in the context of Arendt scholarship, and a novel way of thinking about the educational significance of friendship in the context of contemporary democratic politics, especially the prevailing political polarization. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger’s view of conformity comes in his description and understanding of Das Man or “the One”. There is controversy within Heidegger scholarship regarding the interpretation of Das Man as an existential mode. Most scholars interpret Das Man to mean the existential mode of inauthenticity and delineate the two modes of authenticity and inauthenticity in Heideggerian existentialism. Less popularly, scholars like Hubert Dreyfus and Michael Zimmerman interpret the positive and negative aspects of Das Man and suggest the third mode of (...) indifference in Heidegger’s _Being and Time_. This paper follows Dreyfus’ understanding of Das Man to posit indifference as a third mode of being that is structurally similar to inauthenticity but motivationally different from it. It then uses this difference to categorize two forms of moral conformity in Hannah Arendt’s analysis of the difference between a morality of custom and a morality of conviction. The problematic of this paper concerns the distinction between these two forms of moral conformity and the moral status of people like Adolf Eichmann whose actions Arendt describes as the banality of evil. Usually seen as preservative of morality, Arendt shows how conformity may be a site for moral conflict. (shrink)

A recepção de Hannah Arendt ocorre principalmente no domínio da filosofia política, de modo a interpretá-la como uma teórica das crises do século XX. Contudo, essa perspectiva perde de vista os pressupostos e compromissos teóricos que a obra arendtiana assume com a tradição filosófica alemã, os quais permitem identificar problemas ainda não tratados em sua recepção. Assim, por meio de uma revisão bibliográfica, aliada à análise de ensaios teóricos da autora, esse artigo objetiva apontar uma lacuna na literatura arendtiana ao (...) verificar, de um lado, a presença de uma estrutura fenomenológica nos textos de Hannah Arendt e, por outro, conexões entre os seus temas e métodos e o problema da crise de identidade da filosofia. Dessa forma, ao evidenciar o tratamento deste problema na obra de Hannah Arendt, amplia-se sua recepção além do domínio da filosofia política. (shrink)

This book addresses a lacuna in scholarship concerning Hannah Arendt's Augustinian heritage that has predominantly focused on her early work. It de-canonises the sources that political theology has appealed to by shifting the interpretive focus to her mature treatment in The Life of the Mind. Arendt's initial criticism of Augustinian desiring is that it generates worldlessness. In her later works, Arendt develops a more nuanced reading of the movements of thinking, desiring, and loving in her engagement with Augustine. This study (...) attends to these movements and inspects the spatio-temporal framework which structure Arendt's conception of the political. The author assesses the claim that Arendt's conception of the political is drawn from a pedagogy of desiring and thinking from Augustine severed from his mystagogy. Although respecting the method of political theory, the author contends that Arendt's severing of Augustinian pedagogy from mystagogy brings her to an insurmountable aporia. Instead, the author embeds these pedagogical practices within Augustine's theology and suggests how that aporia might be overcome and used to develop a mystagogy for contemporary political life. The book will be of particular interest to scholars of political theology, as well as political theory, and political philosophy. (shrink)

A questão feminina não é um tema visado por Arendt. O paradoxo encontrado por algumas teóricas em relação ao fato desta reconhecer-se enquanto judia, mas não enquanto mulher, faz afastar a essência do pensamento político arendtiano do movimento filosófico do feminismo, acusando Arendt de ceder à hegemonia masculina. Este prisma perde muito ao não reconhecer como sua crítica da modernidade oferece uma base sólida para pensar a mulher contemporaneamente. Sobretudo, tolhe a saída mais digna: a que reconhece o humano. O (...) escrito, a partir da revisão bibliográfica de obras como Entre o Passado e o Futuro (ARENDT, 2016) e Feminism theory and Hannah Arendt’s concept of public space (BENHABIB, 1993a), propõe demonstrar como o sujeito arendtiano, na condição de original, capaz de ação e na imprevisibilidade, existe e age no ínterim do passado-futuro é o sustentáculo teórico dos principais quadros dessa última fase do feminismo. O ponto central é retomar a discussão sobre teorias que retiram do ser a capacidade de agir, reduzindo-os ao homogêneo, e fazer a crítica às teorias contemporâneas sobre as mulheres. A partir da pesquisa, foi possível levantar diversas pensadoras que, iluminadas pela teoria de Arendt, pensam horizontes femininos para uma nova política. (shrink)

​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 philosophical 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. (shrink)

In the opening pages of the Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, Arendt links history to both judgment and action. She finds any idea of progress in history to be “against human dignity.” Against this background, Arendt outlines a stark choice between a Hegelian philosophy of history which she finds deeply distasteful and a Kantian option with which “we can maintain [...] the autonomy of the minds of men.” This article explores both sides of this fork by detailing exactly what it (...) is that Arendt finds objectionable in Hegel and just how it is that she sees herself aligning with Kant. This article then indicates ways in which Arendt departs from both these philosophers in order to develop her own robust theorization of the concept of history in relation to her ongoing concerns with judgment and with action. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt’s politics is aesthetic rather than practical, motivated by enjoyment rather than well-being, and so it should be rejected. I begin with an account of aestheticism as the doctrine according to which seemingly non-aesthetic things are actually aesthetic, parts of a whole dimension of reality that we might simply call “the aesthetic.” We access it by taking a disinterested attitude, one that affirms things for their own sakes, and there are four ways of doing this: disinterested appreciating (e.g., of (...) beautiful art), fun playing, fantasizing, and putting on shows or spectacles. While Arendt’s politics takes a classical republican form that is like a competitive game, an analysis of her conceptions of acting and judging reveals that the modes of disinterested showing and appreciating are also present. Her philosophy has another motivation, however, alongside enjoying the aesthetic: the need to escape the reality of evil. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt plačiai žinoma kaip filosofė, kuri mėgino reabilituoti senovės graikų politikos sampratą. Remiantis Žmogaus būklės skaitymu, Arendt paprastai laikoma „graikofile“, jai prikišama „Atėnų nostalgija“. Sunku paneigti Arendt simpatijas graikams – ji iš tiesų atsigręžė į atėniečių politikos supratimą, bandydama jame iškristalizuoti kertinius autentiškos politikos elementus. Vis dėlto ši interpretacija yra pernelyg vienpusiška. Didžiausius nuopelnus politikos suvokimo srityje Arendt priskiria ne graikams, o romėnams. Pastarieji žymiai geriau sprendė politikos stabilumo, tęstinumo ir tvarumo problemą. Visą dėmesį sutelkiant į veiksmą, spontaniškumą ir (...) nepaprastus žygdarbius, kyla grėsmė destabilizuoti ir „išcentruoti“ politinės bend­rijos gyvenimą. Romėnai, įvesdami tokias sąvokas kaip tradicija, autoritetas, steigties (įkūrimo) šventumas, teisė (lex), taip pat pabrėždami politinę atleidimo ir pažado reikšmę, atveria graikams svetimą politinės sedimentacijos plotmę. Ši plotmė suteikia būtinus saugiklius, be kurių tvari politinė egzistencija yra neįmanoma. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt is widely known as a philosopher who attempted to rehabilitate the ancient Greek conception of politics. According to established readings of The Human Condition, Arendt is generally regarded as a ‘Graecophile’ whose thought is underwritten by ‘Athenian nostalgia’. Arendt’s sympathies for the Greeks are hard to deny: she did indeed turn to the Athenian understanding of politics in an attempt to crystallise in it the core elements of authentic politics. However, this interpretation is excessively one-sided. In Arendt’s view, (...) the greatest contribution to the understanding of politics was offered by the Romans, not the Greeks. The Romans were much better at dealing with the problem of stability, continuity and order of politics. In Arendt’s view, an exclusive focus on action, spontaneity and extraordinary deeds threatens to destabilise the life of the political community. By introducing concepts such as tradition, authority, the sacredness of foundation, the law (lex), as well as the political significance of promise and forgiveness, the Romans opened up a dimension of political sedimentation which was alien to the Greeks. Political sedimentation provides safeguards, without which a sustainable political existence would become impossible. (shrink)

It is often claimed that social media accelerate political extremism by employing personalization algorithms that filter users into groups with homogenous beliefs. While an intuitive position, recent research has shown that social media users exhibit self-filtering tendencies. In this paper, I apply Hannah Arendt’s theory of political judgment to hypothesize a cause for self-filtering on social media. According to Arendt, a crucial step in political judgment is the imagination of a general standpoint of distinct yet equal perspectives, against which individuals (...) compare their own judgments in order to test their defensibility. I argue that social media inhibit this step by gamifying the pursuit of social status, which encourages users to consider the perspectives of others not for the sake of a general standpoint but for the sake of improving their social status, resulting in self-filtering. Consequently, ameliorating political extremism on social media requires not just reforming the algorithms that deliver content to users, but the interfaces on which users present their social identities. (shrink)

Este trabalho se situa na interface entre a Filosofia Política e a Psicanálise, sendo seu objetivo investigar o conceito de nacionalismo, contrapondo-o ao de pluralidade, enquanto uma condição do humano, tomando como fundo os processos identificatórios. Para desenvolver o objetivo proposto, nos debruçamos sobre a obra de Hannah Arendt, visando os conceitos de nacionalismo e pluralidade, bem como compreender o modo como tais conceitos compuseram o pensamento de sua filosofia política. Dentro deste contexto, os conceitos de massa e identificação foram (...) costurados à discussão, já que uma massa é liderada por um líder com quem os indivíduos que a compõem estabelecem uma forte relação de identificação. Neste aspecto, a teoria freudiana colaborou com os conceitos de massa e identificação. Ao longo deste trabalho, foi desenvolvida a hipótese de que o nacionalismo consiste em uma estratégia política de cunho psicológico: uma pretensa promessa de união, de pertencimento, de unidade social e interna. Esta é uma pesquisa, em sua íntegra, teórica e bibliográfica. Como resultado, vimos que a interface entre a Filosofia e a Psicanálise se revelou como um campo frutífero para a abordagem do fenômeno do nacionalismo, no contexto da atual política contemporânea nacional. (shrink)

El texto es una traducción de la conferencia que Hannah Arendt dió en la Rand School of Social Science en 1962. Retoman importancia sus palabras en torno al argumento del analísis filosófico de la técnica y especialmente frente a producciones cinematográficas como Oppenheimer y nuevas tecnologías como la inteligencia artificial y los drones usados en la invasión a Ucrania.

In “History of the Lie: Prolegomena,” Derrida criticizes Arendt’s commitment to the “great resiliency” of factual truth against all lies in her essay “Truth and Politics,” claiming that she reintroduces a teleological account of history that clashes with her anti-totalitarian and anti-systematic thinking. By focussing on her understanding of truth-telling as action, this article shows that Arendt does not turn truth into a permanently stable ground for politics. Instead, Arendt’s theory of self-deception constitutes a lie capable of ending all truth. (...) Set in opposition to the nihilism of self-deception, Arendt understands truth-telling as an exemplary act that preserves the possibility of truthfulness and future actions. (shrink)

Part of 'Works of Philosophy and Their Reception' series / -/- Contributors include: Ronald Beiner, Linda Zerilli, D.N. Rodowick, Cecilia Sjöholm, Martin Blumenthal-Barby, Helga Varden, Roger Berkowitz.

Dana Villa’s Hannah Arendt: A Very Short Introduction offers the reader an introduction to Hannah Arendt’s thought in five concise chapters. As part of the broader Oxford University Press series of...

In the face of seemingly new truth-related political phenomena, Hannah Arendt’s theory of truth in politics has recently seen a flare of renewed attention. Central to her theory is the distinction between rational and factual truths, and the claim that the latter, unlike the former, belongs to the political. The coherence of this claim, however, has been the object of much discussion and criticism. This article intervenes in the debate by foregrounding her conception of factual truth as “the outcome of (...) action” and advancing that this is best understood as an “extended” conception, one that includes in its compass a future-regarding concern for the facts yet-to-be. In so doing it contributes to clarify why it can be said that Arendt does not—like her critics have maintained—exclude truth from the realm of politics, but that in fact it brings to light truth’s most political dimension. (shrink)

Parto de uma conceitualização geral de como o problema do mal fora abordado ao longo da tradição filosófica e religiosa, enquanto problema ontológico e relativo, no mais das vezes, a uma teodiceia que busca explicar a existência do mal no mundo. Em seguida, abordo uma nova forma de se pensar o problema do mal através do pensamento idealista de Immanuel Kant, que movimentou a problemática em uma direção outra àquela anterior, ou seja, afirmando que o mal não era um problema (...) localizado na realidade, mas no sujeito enquanto ser dotado de moralidade, residindo na dimensão mais radical da natureza humana. Em Arendt, o mal deixa o plano do sujeito singular e passa a ser compreendido enquanto um fenômeno político. Para a autora, o mal não deve ser um fenômeno político, todavia com a ascensão dos movimentos totalitários e outros fenômenos de ruptura com o fio da tradição, esse problema passa a ocupar a dimensão da vida pública. Desta forma, o objetivo da autora é tentar compreender as condições para se pensar o mal enquanto fenômeno político, assim como aquilo que lhe fundamenta e garante legitimidade. O fio condutor deste artigo são as obras Origens do Totalitarismo (ARENDT, 2018) e o conjunto de ensaios publicados no período de 1930-54 (ARENDT, 2008). O produto da presente análise refere-se à experiência humana da solidão enquanto fundamento do mal na esfera política. (shrink)

The present paper examines the possibility of political action in Hannah Arendt’s philosophical framework under the circumstance of oppression. I first analyze Arendt’s concepts of self-display and self-presentation in The Life of the Mind as they map onto her division of the human condition into social and political spheres. While society as a realm of self-display provides an outlet for natural human differences, politics is a space for our self-presentation, that is, our chosen way of appearing to others as their (...) equals via action. Since action is the most important—and consequently broad— category in Arendt, I zoom in on what constitutes specifically political action and argue that the character of political action in Arendt is helpful in our thinking about present-day social and political justice movements. However, I point out that two aspects of Arendt’s system complicate the idea of political action as an instrument that should be accessible to everyone. I title these problems as the “denial of self-display” and “denial of self-presentation.” I argue that to overcome these limitations of Arendt’s framework, we must first recognize that for oppressed groups, navigating both the social and political obstacles involves sacrifices and risks that already constitute political action. Second, we need to understand that our “given” self-displaying identities can become instruments of political action in the Arendtian sense under the circumstances of oppression and discrimination, as embracing them is to embrace the spontaneity and uncertainty of political action. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

A key aspect of the educator's responsibility as understood by Hannah Arendt is its dual character. Educators are responsible for both the life and development of the child and the continuance of the world, as Arendt puts it in “The Crisis in Education.” Moreover, these aspects of responsibility are in tension with each other. Arendt's own accounts of responsibility in her political writings are, in a similar way, riddled with tension. What should we conclude from this about the nature of (...) educational responsibility? To address this question, Julien Kloeg and Liesbeth Noordegraaf-Eelens first reconstruct the meaning of responsibility in Arendt's political writings. They find a broad distinction between political responsibility and personal responsibility: the former consists in contributing to a community (by extension, the world), and the latter in the “two-in-one” of silent self-dialogue. While political responsibility is close to Arendt's description of the responsibility of the educator (for the continuance of the world), personal responsibility does not find an obvious home in her educational thought. From this ambiguous situation of education and Arendt's own theme of the “in-between” arises the possibility of introducing a concept of educational responsibility that further develops Arendt's position. Kloeg and Noordegraaf-Eelens's concept of educational responsibility suggests a theory and practice of navigating tensions between conflicting commitments. In their view, this is both an appropriate extension and reform of Arendt's educational work and an insight that does justice to the practical situation of educators in the modern world. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt’s political thought is generally regarded as advocating nonviolence. Witnessing the rise of totalitarianism and its tragedy, she developed her political theory to recover the politica...

Since the 1990s, political theorists studied the impact of digital media on the public sphere. These debates extensively employ Arendt’s theory of the public sphere to evaluate whether social media meets the expectations and criteria set forth in her account. This common approach rests on a methodological assumption that is itself not critically examined: it asserts that one should start with a clear understanding of what political action ‘truly’ is and only then attend to its potential relation with technology. However, (...) this article identifies two issues with this approach: it overlooks the complex interplay between technology and political action, and struggles to adapt Arendt’s pre-digital era theory to digital environments. Nonetheless, I argue that Arendt’s phenomenological methodology (i.e., how she develops her political theory) does offer an effective starting point to explore the changing relationship between politics and technology in the contemporary public sphere. This approach begins with an exploration of the technological conditions shaping political action rather than with a pre-established notion of political action. I demonstrate how this methodological blueprint can be expanded with a postphenomenological framework to bring Arendt’s political theory into the digital age, revealing how digital technologies continuously re-stabilize the intentional structure of political action. (shrink)