Hannah Arendt

Speaking of admirable women philosophers (see below)...

LISTEN. WATCH (Recorded October '20). The most interesting philosopher in today's CoPhi lineup, for my money, and by far the one with the most timely and relevant message for this moment when the future of democracy feels so precarious, is Hannah Arendt. She warned us to beware the "terribly and terrifyingly normal" average fellow citizens we'd never suspect of harboring a capacity for sadism and violence. She said:

• “The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.”
• “As citizens, we must prevent wrongdoing because the world in which we all live, wrong-doer, wrong sufferer and spectator, is at stake.”
• “Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.”
• “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.” Origins of Totalitarianism

In other words, Fantasyland is ripe for the picking. There may never in history have been such a concentration of banal, unthinking, uninformed, lonely (isolated, disconnected, paranoid/conspiratorial) people as we find here now.

Paranoid/conspiratorial?

"[T]o a great many Americans, digital communication has already rendered empirical, observable reality beside the point... Many Americans have become so deeply distrustful of one another that whatever happens on Nov. 3, they may refuse to accept the outcome...Combating the deception that has overrun public discourse should be a primary goal of our society. Otherwise, America ends in lies." Farhod Manjoo

Why "lonely"?

Loneliness radically cuts people off from human connection. She defined loneliness as a kind of wilderness where a person feels deserted by all worldliness and human companionship, even when surrounded by others. The word she used in her mother tongue for loneliness was Verlassenheit – a state of being abandoned, or abandon-ness. Loneliness, she argued, is ‘among the most radical and desperate experiences of man’, because in loneliness we are unable to realise our full capacity for action as human beings. When we experience loneliness, we lose the ability to experience anything else; and, in loneliness, we are unable to make new beginnings. --Samantha Rose Hill, Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities, Aeon [and see her FiveBooks recommendations]

But don't overlook the crucial distinction between loneliness and solitude, the latter being indispensable for the independence of thought that enables us to think for ourselves. Sapere Aude, as Arendt's fellow Konigsbergian implored. "We need the private realm of solitude to be alone with ourselves and think."

Let us hope she was right to think a relative few thinking, informed, connected citizens would or could suffice to neutralize their threat. "Under conditions of terror most people will comply but some people will not… No more is required, and no more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation."

And, let us hope we can still share and vindicate her confidence in the power of education to resist the anti-democratic tide.

“Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it, and by the same token save it from that ruin which except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and the young, would be inevitable. And education, too, is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world.” 

Love for the "common world," for John Dewey's "continuous human community in which we are a link," is precisely what we should be teaching and learning. Nothing else will save democracy or preserve a habitable planet for the next generations. That's why voting is such a big deal, even for blue voters in red states (and vice versa): it's our most democratic ritual of renewal.


Originally published 10.22.20

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Arendt thought philosophers should give more attention to natality, the natural complement of mortality.

The two central features of action are freedom and plurality. By freedom... Arendt means the capacity to begin, to start something new, to do the unexpected, with which all human beings are endowed by virtue of being born. Action as the realization of freedom is therefore rooted in natality, in the fact that each birth represents a new beginning and the introduction of novelty in the world.

...by acting individuals re-enact the miracle of beginning inherent in their birth. For Arendt, the beginning that each of us represents by virtue of being born is actualized every time we act, that is, every time we begin something new. As she puts it: “the new beginning inherent in birth can make itself felt in the world only because the newcomer possesses the capacity of beginning something anew, that is, of acting ” (HC, 9).

...“It is in the nature of beginning” — she claims — “that something new is started which cannot be expected from whatever may have happened before. This character of startling unexpectedness is inherent in all beginnings … The fact that man is capable of action means that the unexpected can be expected from him, that he is able to perform what is infinitely improbable. And this again is possible only because each man is unique, so that with each birth something uniquely new comes into the world ” SEP

Expect the unexpected. That's wisdom.