[lit-ideas] Hannah Arendt's Politics

From: "John McCreery" <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx>
To: Lit-Ideas <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 14 Jan 2009 22:17:15 +0900
From
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2009/01/12/090112crat_atlarge_kirsch?currentPage=all


> Arendt's experience at the Eichmann trial bolstered the belief that defines
> her political philosophy: that there must be a rigorous separation between
> love, which we can experience only privately, and respect, which we earn in
> and require for our public lives. If it is true that, as Arendt once
> observed, "in the works of a great writer we can almost always find a
> consistent metaphor peculiar to him alone in which his whole work seems to
> come to a focus," then her thought is certainly focussed on the image of
> distance or separation. A dignified individual existence, she believes,
> requires distance from others, the "interspace" that she described in the
> Hamburg speech. Compassion is dangerous, in her view, because "not unlike
> love," it "abolishes the distance, the in-between which always exists in
> human intercourse." What preserves that distance, on the other hand, is
> pride—the pride of equals that she finds exemplified in the political realm,
> the "public space."
>
> This view of politics may help explain why, in "The Human Condition" and
> "On Revolution," Arendt exalts it as the highest of human activities.
> Politics, in her work, is not really an empirical concept—an affair of
> elections and legislation, still less of tax policy or Social Security
> reform. Everything having to do with economics, in fact, Arendt prefers to
> exclude from her definition of politics, relegating it to the nebulous
> category of "the social." Real politics is found, rather, in the
> deliberations of the Founders in Philadelphia, or the debates of the
> Athenians in their assembly. It is an affair of exceptionally talented
> individuals—people not unlike Hannah Arendt—arguing with one another under
> conditions of equality and mutual respect.
>
> Still more revealing than Arendt's definition of politics is her
> explanation of why people are drawn to it in the first place. We do not
> enter the political world to pursue justice or to create a better world. No,
> human beings love politics because they love to excel, and a political
> career is the best way to win the world's respect. In ancient Greece, she
> writes, "the polis was permeated by a fiercely agonal spirit, where
> everybody had constantly to distinguish himself from all others, to show
> through unique deeds or achievements that he was the best of all. The public
> realm, in other words, was reserved for individuality; it was the only place
> where men could show who they really and inexchangeably were." Arendt
> recognizes that most of the people of Athens, including all women and
> slaves, were shut out from this arena, but she accepts that her kind of
> politics is necessarily an aristocratic pursuit. In yet another instance of
> her favorite metaphor, she defends "the bitter need of the few to protect
> themselves against the many, or rather to protect the island of freedom they
> have come to inhabit against the surrounding sea of necessity."
>

Love is personal, politics public. Love, like compassion, abolishes social
distance, blurring the difference between self and other. Politics depends
on pride, asserting difference and maintaining distance between individuals
who compete for respect. As the USA approaches a moment in which an
administration rooted in "greed is good" and "the devil take the hindmost"
is replaced by one that asserts compassion and "love thy neighbor as
thyself" as the highest good, how do we, as philosophers, regard these
competing perspectives?

John

-- 
John McCreery
The Word Works, Ltd., Yokohama, JAPAN
Tel. +81-45-314-9324
jlm@xxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.wordworks.jp/
[lit-ideas] Hannah Arendt's Politics

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