Arendt’s Politics of Appearance
Peter Gratton
The task of writing on Arendt and phenomenology is daunting. It is true that perhaps her greatest influence, Martin Heidegger, engaged in phenomenological analyses that permeate her writings from beginning to end, whatever the critical distance she took from him. And it’s also the case that dozens of book chapters and articles, let alone whole books, can be found connecting Arendt to phenomenology in their very titles. And no doubt, many chapters in this book reference Arendt’s work as “phenomenological.” Yet, among the few times she uses the term in her works (her letters to Jaspers and others reflect on her distance from Husserl), it’s merely to point to the fact that a certain group of thinkers, as she put it in parentheses in her only use of the term in her last great work, The Life of the Mind, were looking to declare the end of philosophy and metaphysics. As she puts it, “The attraction of Husserl’s phenomenology sprang from the anti-historical and anti-metaphysical implication of the slogan ‘Zu den Sachen selbst’ and Heidegger, who . . . aimed at overcoming metaphysics, as he repeatedly proclaimed since 1930.”1 As she put it in her Life of the Mind:
I have clearly joined the ranks of those who for some time now have been attempting to dismantle metaphysics, and philosophy with all its categories, as we have known them from their beginning in Greece until today. Such dismantling is possible only on the assumption that the thread of tradition is broken and that we shall not be able to renew it. . . . What has been lost is the continuity of the past as it seemed to be handed down from generation to generation, developing in the process its own consistency. . . . What you are left with is still the past, but a fragmented past.2
Margaret Carnovan, in the introduction to the second edition of The Human Condition (1998), calls this work a “phenomenology of human activities,”3 and one finds all over the commentary for the translation of her doctoral writings, Love and Saint Augustine, over thirty references to a phenomenology available there that is said to inform many of her later writings, even as the term itself never appears in the work and she employs neither the epochē of Husserl nor the kinds of analyses found in Being and Time.4 One could thus be left to wonder how an in-depth analysis of Augustine’s notion of love counts as phenomenological. One often sees the contortions made in order to make Arendt a phenomenologist. For example, here we have Dermot Moran in his Introduction to Phenomenology, near the beginning of his chapter on Arendt:
Arendt’s practice of phenomenology is original and idiosyncratic; she exhibited no interest in the phenomenological method and contributed nothing [my emphasis] to the theory of phenomenology. Indeed she was suspicious of all methods and systems. She first encountered Husserl’s phenomenology in Heidegger’s seminars at Marburg, and as a result, she was never attracted to Husserl’s conception of phenomenology as first philosophy. . . . She [also] never showed any interest in Heidegger’s project of a fundamental ontology, though she clearly appropriated and creatively transformed many of his conceptions, including Dasein.5
By the end of his chapter on Arendt, he argues that her “overall framework is heavily dependent on the philosophies of Heidegger and Jaspers and their concerns for human existence and being-in-the-world,” one that provides a “phenomenological account of the conditions necessary for the creation and maintenance of the public space.”6 Serena Parekh, for her part, argues the following:
Arendt’s method is phenomenological. Rather than giving one sustained argument on the topic, she develops a number of portraits and examples of the intersubjectivity of the common realm. . . . Because she is a phenomenologist, we must approach Arendt’s view of the common world through these . . . phenomena as they appear, rather than through dialectic argument.7
While it’s true that dialectical argumentation in the broadest sense connects a host of figures, from Plato through Aquinas to Hegel, in the tradition, this is rather thin for making Arendt a phenomenologist, given that all the figures that do not take up philosophical dialectic as their modus operandi. Moreover, since Arendt is often, in collected volumes on phenomenology, along with Simone de Beauvoir, among the only female authors included, one could be led to believe her inclusion to be an attempt to diversify a certain school of thought to the point of making phenomenology include everything and hence meaningful of nothing.
But I think the surmise that she is a phenomenologist is not wrong-headed and her inclusion in such a canon does not stretch the term beyond its breaking point. Indeed, my argument here is that Arendt accepts the premise that holds various phenomenological accounts together, namely, that there is no Being beneath appearances. Indeed, as she writes in The Life of the Mind, “our whole existence is determined by appearances,”8 and the first, great part of that work is titled nothing other than “Appearance,” with its first chapter being “The World’s Phenomenal Nature.” Given that phenomenology is nothing other than a logos or account of phenomena, Arendt hence fits within a certain set of figures who see a break within the Western tradition and are concerned with how to think afterward. In addition, while many think she showed the limits of phenomenology’s primary theses (see the chapter on Heidegger) in terms of its often apolitical accounts,9 Arendt takes this thinking of appearance to its limits in a different way, thinking the Other, freedom, and death, among other “things,” as always apparent, as appearing. Given the limits of space, I will show how phenomenology informs the work that seems least connected to phenomenology’s dicta and practices, namely, The Origins of Totalitarianism. Other chapters in this volume make the case for her phenomenology, most especially discussing her accounts of Being as appearing in The Human Condition and The Life of the Mind. My surmise is that if I can show a political phenomenology in Origins, then it would follow that her later works were all informed by a certain phenomenology, which is the red thread of her writings.
Origins would seem to be least “phenomenological.” It is a work first and foremost of history, but not in any Hegelian sense that history tends toward this or that end. In a study of how the event of totalitarianism came about—one she believed without precedent in the history of the politics—Arendt argues that totalitarianism need not have come to be, and that racism, imperialism, and the rise and fall of the nation-state “crystallized” into being totalitarianism’s historical condition of possibility. Arendt is first and foremost a thinker of the event, of the fact that individual agency here, there, and everywhere brought forward a “subterranean stream”10 of Western history whose appearance was not preordained, since it required cross-global and intra-European bureaucratic decisions, events, and the appearances of new forms of thinking and acting in the broad sense. The task, often not discussed in regarding Arendt, is that while many celebrate her thinking of appearance, of the plurality of being-together, this conflation of being and appearance carries with it its own risks, one seen in various nihilisms of the past century. Without the supposed guarantor of a transcendent God, some Spirit to history, or a transcendental thinking as in Kant that can move back from the stream of appearances, how does one discern some proper morality or politics beyond the mere movement of the becoming of history? There is a typical moral blackmail in those who argue that, with the death of God, that is, absolutes beneath or beyond the realm of appearances, one must fall in with traditional ways of looking at the world. The problem that Arendt has to negotiate is one that is obvious and that has followed all thinking of politics and power since the Greeks: in the realm of appearances, there are not “truths,” but only doxai or opinions, and those opinions circulate without a guarantor beyond or outside the very political conditions to which they gave rise. We must live with a politics only of appearances. The Greeks dealt with this problem in terms of the Sophists, and Plato’s grand metaphysical edifice (and we might say all of Western metaphysics that follows as a footnote to his work) was built, brick by brick, in order to attempt to defeat them. The end of Platonism, that is, the end of philosophy, may mean to some that we do not have a rational basis for defending against the mere play of appearance that occurs when politicians lie or when they use propaganda, a major theme in Origins, to defeat any common sense since any appearance is as good as any other, since when we argue over the facts beyond these appearances, we simply produce further texts and images at odds with one another.
But Arendt’s claim in Origins is that rather than thinking the world, as she does, as the space of appearances—a world that is both common and pluralistic at the same time—totalitarianism operates by a sort of horrific parody of metaphysics, presuming in its theories what lay beneath the contingent appearances of history could only lead an inexorable violence to make that contingent world fit with that theory. Ideology and terror, then, are less a state than a “movement” or “process,” making a fact of heretofore imagined laws (the classless future; the battle of races) that ideologies made the key to all of existence. As she puts it:
Totalitarian lawfulness, defying legality and pretending to establish the direct reign of justice on earth, executes the law of History or of Nature without translating it into standards of right and wrong for individual behavior. It applies the law directly to mankind without bothering with the behavior of men. The law of Nature or the law of History, if properly executed, is expected to produce mankind as its end product; and this expectation lies behind the claim to global rule of all totalitarian governments. Totalitarian policy claims to transform the human species into an active unfailing carrier of a law to which human beings otherwise would only passively and reluctantly be subjected.11
Terror becomes the principle of Nazi governance precisely because violence is as close as one comes to the logical necessity of history’s movement their race theories envisioned. The “guilty,” she notes, are simply those who stand in the way of some “historical process”; their very freedom from it puts the lie to the ideology in question. Arendt’s claim is that this spontaneity got in the way of the “fabrication of mankind,” which “eliminates individuals for the sake of the species,” and “sacrifices the ‘parts’ for the sake of the ‘whole.’”12 Arendt argues that freedom, as initium, as the power to begin something, which is at the heart of her chapter on action in The Human Condition, is “identical with the fact that men are being born and therefore each of them is a new beginning, begins, in a sense, the world anew.13 ” This is why totalitarianism goes beyond just the loss of “plurality” marked by lawless tyrannies, since “the fact that men are born and die can be only regarded as an annoying interference with higher forces.”14 In short, the terror is meant to create “One Man,” not “men in the plural,” which as we have seen is how Arendt defines the world. This “One Man” is defined by ideology, which she defines as follows:
1. They have the appearance of a science, of discerning the reality based upon a given hidden principle beneath the play of appearances of the world.
2. They are based upon the “logic of an idea,” which allows its adherents “to pretend to know the mysteries of the whole historical process-the secrets of the past, the intricacies of the present, [and] the uncertainties of the future.”15
3. They are preternaturally incurious. Racism is no more interested in considering race than a rock is interested in becoming a scientist. All history is consistent with the substratum of one idea; anyone who suggests otherwise is to be killed as an enemy of Being itself.
4. They claim total explanation, the first of three totalitarian elements to all ideologies.
5. They describe not what is, “but what becomes, what is born and passes away,” and everything is about motion and inexorable processes defined by hidden and non-apparent laws of history.16
6. Ideological thinking is “emancipated from the reality that we perceive with our five senses, and insists on a ‘truer’ reality concealed behind all perceptible things.”17 No doubt, this is a key phenomenological insight.
7. They achieve this emancipation from reality not by inconsistency, but by a logical apparatus fully consistent—as nothing is in life—with its fundamental idea or axiom.
Once in power, then, plurality—the fundamental human trait—is a threat, and so is the common ability to form one’s own view, to be persuadable and thus to be able to persuade others. She writes:
For an ideology differs from simple opinion in that it claims to possess either the key to history, or the solution for all the “riddles of the universe,” the supposed intimate knowledge of the hidden universal laws which are supposed to rule nature and man. Few ideologies have won enough prominence to survive the hard competitive struggle of persuasion, and only those two have come to out on top and essentially defeated all others: the ideology which interprets history as an economic struggle of classes, and the other that interprets history as a natural fight of races.18
This is not an argument that politics is other than about persuasion in the play of appearances to which doxa and opinion respond. Indeed Arendt long argued that where there are claims to ultimate truths, there can be no politics, since politics is precisely about this play and plurality of appearances. Pace Alain Badiou and the Platonists before him, politics can never be about truth because any claim to truth is an attempt to put an end to that play of appearances. Nor is she claiming that ideologies are deserving of being called a full-fledged theoretical doctrine, as found throughout philosophical history. Rather, “every full-fledged ideology has been created, continued, and improved as a political weapon.”19 Nevertheless, they too must operate within the realm of persuasion: the “tremendous power of persuasion”—she writes about race ideology and vulgar Marxist theories of economic history—in “our time is not accidental. Persuasion is not possible without appeal to either experiences or desires, in other words to immediate political needs.”20
Arendt ends Origins with an account of the appearance of these needs out of which the deadly seeds of totalitarianism grew, namely, the mass loneliness at modernity’s heart. This loneliness is not simply solitude, since the former, she argues, is perhaps best felt in the midst of others. One goes to a cabin for solitude; one logs onto Facebook or takes a seat among a crowd at a bar downtown only to be overwhelmed by loneliness. This will give rise to her account of the “rise of the social” and the loss of the political in The Human Condition. Nevertheless, as with any end, we have the promise of a new beginning, one that can “understand,” in Arendt’s meaning of that term, the past out of which we have come—and which can become, without political vigilance, a precedent to be repeated. Let’s begin to conclude with these last two paragraphs of Origins:
There remains the fact that the crisis of our time and its central experience have brought forth an entirely new form of government which as a potentiality and an ever-present danger is only too likely to stay with us from now on, just as other forms of government which came about at different historical moments and rested on different fundamental experiences have stated with mankind regardless of temporary defeats. . . . But there remains also the truth that every end in history necessarily contains a new beginning; this beginning is the promise, the only “message” which the end can ever produce. Beginning, before it becomes a historical event, is the supreme capacity of man; politically it is identical with man’s freedom. Initium ut esset homo creatus est—“that a beginning be made man was created,” said Augustine [De Civitate, 12.20]. This beginning is guaranteed by each new birth; it is indeed every man.21
This will be the central ontological claim of The Human Condition. But we can see already that Arendt thinks of these births, of these appearances of the new, as always occurring within a common world, a commonality that is prior to any supposed subject or individuality. Thinking appearances as occurring a posteriori to a common world, Arendt develops a thinking of understanding as being attuned to that common world, one that provides a sensus communis that, in the last century, “mean[t] the unpremeditated attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality, whatever it may be.”22 The difficulty of “understanding,” which does not mean accepting but resisting what has appeared in common in our world, including the appearance of the unprecedented:
What runs counter to common sense is not the nihilistic principle that ‘everything is permitted,’ which was already contained in the nineteenth-century utilitarian conception of common sense. What common sense and ‘normal people’ refuse to believe is that everything is possible. We attempt to understand elements in present or recollected experience that simply surpass our powers of understanding.23
Hence, unlike the kind of understanding one finds in Heidegger’s Verstehen, Arendt’s thinking of understanding, like her later thinking of judgment, is always grappling not just with a pre-comprehended totality of involvements but with precisely that which upsets our common place notions, such as what occurs when one thinks totalitarianism to merely be another form of tyranny or its apparatchiks to be mere criminals. Like Heidegger, however, she believed that this understanding could not be broached under the sway of clichés or idle chatter, but could bring us to comprehending a common set of appearances to which the last century and our own has had to bear witness.
In sum, what is required in a world of appearances is not to turn from the appearance of the new and unprecedented, but to mark it and narrate it: to give an account or logos of its appearance or phainomena, a phenomenology. Despite some renditions—none found in this book—that depict Arendt as fetishizing the new, Arendt never argued such. Totalitarianism’s appearance in the twentieth century was surely new and unprecedented, for Arendt, but no less monstrous for all that. The task of Arendt’s work, then, is to attend to the world as appearing to multiple agents who can bit by bit create through word and deed a common world, or rather build on the world always already held by us in common. This common world could only be attended to by studying its differing modes of appearing, one that her political phenomenology would diagnose in each of her works.
Notes
1 Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (New York: Harcourt and Brace, 1978), 9.
2 Ibid., 212.
3 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), xiii.
4 Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine, ed. and with an interpretive essay, Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott and Judith Chelius Stark (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1996).
5 Dermot Moran, Introduction to Phenomenology (London: Routledge, 2000), 289.
6 Ibid., 319.
7 Serena Parekh, Hannah Arendt and the Challenge of Modernity: A Phenomenology of Human Rights (London: Taylor & Francis, 2008), 68.
8 Arendt, Life, 45.
9 This is most apparent in her overview of Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenology in “What Is Existential Philosophy?,” in Essays in Understanding, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1994), 163–87.
10 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1973), ix.
11 Ibid., 462.
12 Ibid., 465.
13 Ibid., 466.
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid., 470.
17 Ibid., 471.
18 Ibid., 159.
19 Ibid.
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid., 478–79.
22 Ibid., viii.
23 Ibid., 440–41.