Kascha Semonovitch
This chapter traces how Arendt’s phenomenological practice hides in her early career and then appears more clearly in her later writing, especially as articulated in a dialogue with Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology and his ontology. In her early work including The Human Condition, Arendt does not explicitly identify her practice as phenomenological, but it is implicitly so in its method. She offers a careful phenomenology of relations with others. This chapter contrasts Arendt’s phenomenology with that of Merleau-Ponty to expose Arendt’s view of the human as fundamentally divided into mind, body, and will. Certain critiques of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology are shown to apply to Arendt’s. The chapter concludes by pointing out that for Arendt no phenomenological or ontological project ought to be divorced from political action.
For biographical and historical reasons, Arendt is often categorized with phenomenologists of the early twentieth century, but her relationship with phenomenology is as tricky as her relationship with philosophy in general. Arendt, a student of Heidegger, not far from Husserl, did not identify herself as phenomenologist per se. In an oft-cited interview with Günter Gaus, Arendt claimed she was not even a philosopher at all but merely a political theorist.1 Nonetheless, Arendt once remarked that she might actually be a “sort-of phenomenologist . . . though not in Hegel’s way, or Husserl’s.”2 Dermot Moran asserted that she shows “no particular interest in the phenomenological method,” yet includes her work as exemplifying the practice.3
What then is Arendt’s relationship to phenomenology? Arendt’s phenomenological practice reformed itself around the “matter under study”—from revolution to the human condition to the life of the mind.4 This chapter will discuss briefly how Arendt’s phenomenological practice hides in her early career, and then point to how the phenomenological method began to show itself in later writing, especially in relation to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology and ontology.
Hiding
In a 1948 essay, Arendt categorized phenomenology, as Husserl practised it, as a species of modern and existential philosophy.5 She does not here declare herself to be phenomenologist or an existentialist, but the aim of her essay is to point the way toward the true task of “modern philosophy” and that path is through phenomenology. Is then her subsequent work on human rights and The Human Condition also phenomenological?
The answer must be yes. Although Arendt herself might not have consistently and explicitly identified her practice as phenomenological, it is implicitly so in its method, insofar as Arendt focuses on the lived structures of labor, work, and political action. As Marieke Borren puts it “understanding the meaning of political phenomena, facts, and events, as well as the structures of human existence, presupposes a phenomenological analysis.”6 In her articulation of human rights, for example, Serena Parekh identifies Arendt’s work on rights as phenomenological insofar as it focuses on the appearance of the world for those in need of rights rather than in some natural or transcendental world outside human perception that might justify rights.7 The phenomenological tradition in any form asks the thinker to return to the “concrete, lived experience”8 whether that is, for example, embodied experience (as in Merleau-Ponty) or social and emotional experience (as in Sartre).9 The phenomenologist considers rather than accepts the distinction between subject and object, as Arendt consistently avoids simplistic dualities between humans as “natural and worldly beings” or between “‘consciousness’ and ‘nature.’”10
Arendt not only practices phenomenology in the tradition of Husserl or Heidegger but articulates her own methodology. Arendt’s work must be understood in response to the totalitarianism of the early twentieth century rather than the existential and metaphysical questions that prompt Heidegger’s work. Briefly, we might note that in contrast to Husserl, the other is known “no t in a direct way” but analogously because they are like me, but for Arendt, others are not necessarily like me and thus cannot be understood analogously.11 Others are to be understood phenomenologically as they appear when “building the world in common through action, fabrication, and judgment.”12 It is when phenomenology grows up from Husserl’s naïve, indirect study of the other that Arendt can claim it for herself. The phenomenologist should think critically, in the Kantian sense of that term. This isn’t to say that the phenomenologist has the capacity to know all minds from her own mind, nor does she acquire the gift of knowing other minds directly: “Critical thinking does not consist in an enormously enlarged empathy through which one can know what actually goes on the minds of all others.”13 For Arendt, all others in a plurality are not like me and thus such a method would not offer phenomenological insight. Thinking is not just putting one’s self in the position of others and then taking on their prejudices. Instead, the phenomenologist acquires the capacity for “abstracting from the limitations which contingently attach to our own judgment.”14 It is her attention to relation to others in the world that shapes Arendt’s entire practice. To fully appreciate the implications of her choices, it is helpful to contrast her work with Merleau-Ponty’s.
Showing
For the early Arendt, Merleau-Ponty was merely one of many “French Existentialists” who offered “radicalizations of Heidegger’s position.”15 But in The Life of the Mind, Arendt takes up Merleau-Ponty’s work, especially The Visible and Invisible, with deeper interest. Like Merleau-Ponty, Arendt finds that since Descartes, philosophy has prioritized interiority, the working of the mind for itself, and she finds this historically prevalent hierarchy of inner over outer person in philosophy frustrating, with its suggestion that “our ‘inner life,’ is more relevant to what we ‘are’ than what appears on the outside.”16 We are visible because we are plural and are plural because we are visible:17 “Not Man but men inhabit this planet. Plurality is the law of the earth,”18 as she puts it in The Life of the Mind. For Arendt, all true human action takes place in a plurality, between people, not in the privacy of an overly hallowed mental life.
Having realized that human action must appear, Arendt takes an interest in what that appearance is even at the level of the animal. Alongside Merleau-Ponty’s work, Arendt reflects on a 1948 book by Adolf Portmann, Animal Forms and Patterns, that interested Merleau-Ponty. The German title of his book is Die Tiergestalt, “Gestalt” denoting the whole of the being: both the process that generates that whole and the whole product itself.19 The animal—apparently including the human animal in this passage of Arendt—cannot be understood in isolation but only as part of an embodied totality. In The Human Condition,20 she denies a human “nature” as such and takes a fairly anti-naturalist stance in that text,21 and emphasizes the fulfillment of appearance in the public sphere rather than as a laboring body within the household. But these passages in The Life of the Mind seem to set aside this rejection of the “natural” human body, now comparable to the animal body. When we truly reverse the Platonic metaphysical hierarchy,22 she claims that we find not only a new emphasis on existence rather than essence but also an orientation toward appearance and visibility.23 She quotes Merleau-Ponty’s Visible and the Invisible, which in turn invokes Husserl:
There is no Schein without an Erscheinung, every Schein is the counterpart of an Erscheinung. That modern science, in its relentless search for the truth behind mere appearances, will ever be able to resolve this predicament is, to say the least, highly doubtful, if only because the scientist himself belongs to the world of appearances.24
Like Arendt, Merleau-Ponty took Portmanns’s work as indicative on the ontology he wished to express. This affiliation with Portmanns’s work underscores how others appear more directly in Merleau-Ponty’s later ontology than in Husserl’s; others are known intimates of my species, bodies that appear with me. As Merleau-Ponty puts it, “What exists are not separated animals, but an inter-animality.”25 Inter-animality is not an illusion, but a perceptual relation. This inter-animality arises not among “subjects” or among “minds,” but among visible, displaying bodies, pre-reflectively oriented toward one another.
In aligning themselves with Portmann, Merleau-Ponty and Arendt recognize the whole meaning of the animal form for the beings who experience it as visible.26 In Merleau-Ponty, Arendt finds an ally who does not overlook our embodied relation to others.
But does Arendt, denier of human “nature,” wish to use interanimality in the same way as Merleau-Ponty? Despite the citation of Merleau-Ponty in these passages and the affirmation of Portmann’s significantly alongside his work, Arendt’s reading of interiority and exteriority differ significantly.
Revealing—the Other
These distinctions show up in two ways: in ethical and ontological critiques of Merleau-Ponty’s account of the other, and finally in Arendt’s privileging of the will in the final volumes of Life of the Mind.
Merleau-Ponty has received sustained criticism for his account of the other in his later ontology from feminist readings and ethical studies in general: Arendt’s work merits some of these critiques. For example, consider Mary Rawlinson’s criticism of how indifferently Merleau-Ponty uses the term “man” to identify human existence in general, and how he adopts passages from Hegel without acknowledging the strong sexual biases.27 Like Luce Irigaray, she wishes for poetic terminology that might explicitly identify feminine difference within bodies. Arendt’s work as well would benefit from more poetic, specific terminology to articulate gendered difference. Arendt, in retaining gendered terminology, makes a similar error to that which Rawlinson remarks on in Merleau-Ponty. Even in this famous phrase, “Men not man live upon the earth”—a key passage in which she asserts directly that the very definition of the condition of plurality is difference—she slips in to traditional substitution of “man” for existence in general. Her own gender does not absolve her of such mistakes.
Further, consider Judith Butler’s criticism of Merleau-Ponty’s work as hetero-normative and restricted to defining the body as object;28 others have replied to this critique with the position that although Merleau-Ponty’s account of sexuality might be “rudimentary,” it is not incompatible with a position like Butler’s.29 But even supportive readings admit that Merleau-Ponty does not fundamentally prioritize the feminine or nonnormative gender. For example, in other scholarship led by Kristeva, Gosetti speculates:
It is perhaps true that Merleau-Ponty’s inattentiveness to any account of gender could be due not so much, as has been claimed, to his tendency to neglect femininity in his phenomenology of the body, but rather his lack of an account of the motivations for repression of the intersubjective origins of language.30
Critiques of Merleau-Ponty from Levinas, Derrida, and Kristeva come from a different angle. Levinas claims that Merleau-Ponty does not fully recognize alterity—that his account fails to account for the full range of engagements with the other beyond face-to-face encounters.31 This concern with preserving asymmetry and alterity also runs through Derrida’s critique of Merleau-Ponty. In On Touching, Derrida assesses Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Husserl and remarks that Husserl privileges touching over vision while Merleau-Ponty does not properly distinguish these two senses. This same criticism might be leveled at Arendt, who, like Merleau-Ponty, appears to treat vision as an exemplary sensation that indicates the will to appear. In more recent research, however, authors have upheld Merleau-Ponty’s work in relation to Derrida and Levinas’s initial propositions. For example, Ann Murphy, defends Merleau-Ponty’s ontology as more ethical than Husserl’s and less violent than Derrida’s.32 Merleau-Ponty’s vision of the flesh is “shot through with passivity” and presented in the language of genesis and birth, while Derrida’s account is restricted to the language of violence.33 Per Murphy’s position, Merleau-Ponty succeeds where Arendt fails.
Arendt preserves a radical difference between interiority and exteriority that Merleau-Ponty rightly abandons. Even as she poetically echoes Merleau-Ponty writing, “whatever appears wants to be seen,” Merleau-Ponty fails, she says, when he declared it an intertwining: “Precisely the lack of such chiasmata or crossings over is the crux of mental phenomena.”34
These early passages in which she engages with Merleau-Ponty must be understood in light of her intentions in the final volume of The Life of the Mind dedicated to the will. The Life of the Mind presents human existences as structured not by a dichotomy of mind and body or subject and object: rather, mind and body belong to a triad controlled by will.
A radical distinction—rather than an intertwining—must be maintained in order to accommodate the will. Mental phenomena only appear when we will them to. “Every show of anger, as distinct from the anger I feel, already contains a reflection on it. . . . To show one’s anger is one form of self-preservation: I decide what is fit for appearance.”35 This invisible “I,” the willing agent, only appears in the world as expression. The body is meant for just such expression because our way of being is conditioned by belonging to a plurality that demands expression in body and speech. The will, however, controls expression. In fact, the only outward expression of the mind is absent-mindedness.”36 We decide when we show our thinking. The will hides, invisible, from the visible “conditions of either life or the world.”37 The will, which does not appear, retains a fundamental inaccessibility, an impermeability to the other, unlike the chiasmatic subject-object in Merleau-Ponty’s active-passive, dehiscing flesh.
This critique from Arendt points at the same ontological intersection that prompted criticism of Merleau-Ponty from Derrida and Levinas. However, neither Levinas nor Derrida nor Merleau-Ponty reserve the faculty of will as a mediator between subject and object. By contrast, for Merleau-Ponty the body is permeable, fragile, not a will that controls expression: passivity “vitiate[s]” existence.38 One has no reserve of will that can “decide” to express anger; anger washes over mind and body, permeates the boundary—a structural osmosis that passes between the thin, bodily material between visible and invisible life.
Beyond Ontology
In an unfinished essay, Arendt praises Merleau-Ponty as one of a few contemporary philosophers who do manage to participate in politics.39 The ethical structure of his later ontology aside, there is no question that Merleau-Ponty prioritized political engagement over what Arendt calls the deprivation of a private life; with Sartre, Merleau-Ponty edited the influential Les Temps Moderne and wrote essays, collected in Signs and Humanism and Terror, that reflect on the unfolding events of their time. She notes that Merleau-Ponty and Sartre “look . . . to politics for the solution of philosophic perplexities that in their opinion resist solution or even adequate formulate in purely philosophic terms.”40 Arendt articulated explicitly what Merleau-Ponty did not: his ontology did not resolve ethical or political problems.41 It did not fully address alterity; it merits critique. But ontology and phenomenology themselves might merit critique if they do not emerge in concrete political action.
Like Merleau-Ponty, there is no question that Arendt consistently engaged in public, political action, from The Origins of Totalitarianism to On Violence to her essays on Eichmann published in the Th e New Yorker. Political action, not ontology in theory, designates philosophy’s task. The work in The Life of the Mind in which she most explicitly addresses Merleau-Ponty’s ontology is a brief discussion within a vast, political-focused oeuvre much like Merleau-Ponty’s own body of work. Phenomenology as Arendt and Merleau-Ponty practice it does not finish with the ontology, even an ontology inscribed with ethics—only one that appears in politics.
Those issues exceed the scope of this chapter but indicate the direction for further research on Arendt’s troubled relationship to phenomenology and philosophy as such when divorced from concrete action that writes human rights rather than only describes ontological structures that ought to entail them. In understanding Arendt’s relationship to phenomenology and to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology in particular, much rests on the impossibility of properly assessing unfinished work of both of these thinkers: Life of the Mind and The Visible and the Invisible. A critique of their phenomenological projects that are restricted to these texts oriented around thinking, and ontology fails to recognize how the seeds of thinking in this work emerge in political action. In her late Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, Arendt puts it this way: there is a “clash between the spectator and the actor.”42 This clash reflects the intertwinings and reversals of the vita activa and vita contemplativa that engaged Arendt throughout her career. She does not resolve the conflict. She thinks about it, even while broaching the difficulties of the will. She invites phenomenologists working in her wake to avoid restricting themselves the dualistic terminology of mind and body, and instead to think on the living, embodied relationship between the life of the mind and the life with others.
Notes
1 Hannah Arendt, Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2005), 1.
2 Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, For the Love of the World, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 495.
3 Dermot Moran, “Hannah Arendt: A Phenomenology of the Public Sphere,” in Introduction to Phenomenology (London: Routledge, 2000), 289.
4 In his 1927 lecture course on The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Heidegger said, “There is no such thing as the one phenomenology” because true philosophy followed the matters itself and so phenomenological inquiry suited itself to the matter under study. Cited in Moran, “Hannah Arendt,” 227.
5 Arendt, Essays in Understanding, 164.
6 Marieke Borren, “‘A Sense of the World’: Hannah Arendt’s Hermeneutic Phenomenology of Common Sense,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 21, no. 2 (2013): 232.
7 Serena Parekh, Hannah Arendt and the Challenge of Modernity (London: Routledge, 2006), 70.
8 Moran, “Hannah Arendt,” 2–3.
9 See Ibid., 287. In Moran’s account, such phenomenology originates in Husserl—though he acknowledges one may find roots in Kant and others such as Schiller or Hegel—and fulfills itself in Heidegger who enriches the project with hermeneutics.
10 Borren, “‘A Sense of the World,’” 234.
11 Parekh, Hannah Arendt and the Challenge of Modernity, 70.
12 Ibid., 71.
13 Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1982), 43.
14 Ibid.
15 Arendt, Essays in Understanding, 182.
16 Arendt, Life of the Mind (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, 1978), 30.
17 Phenomenology has shown that “we live in an appearing world” and thus it is “plausible that the relevant and the meaningful in this world of ours should be located precisely on the surface” (Ibid., 27).
18 Ibid., 19.
19 Adolf Portmann, Animal Forms and Patterns (New York: Schocken Books, 1967), 7.
20 Arendt, Human Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 10. Nothing “entitles us” to assume humans have a nature. Rather, our condition is a constant question we are posing to ourselves.
21 For more detailed reflection of Arendt on nature see Birmingham, Hannah Arendt and Human Rights: The Predicament of Common Responsibility (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 71, and “The Pleasure of Your Company: Arendt, Kristeva, and an Ethics of Public Happiness,” Research in Phenomenology 33, Issue 1 (January 2003): 53–74. Arendt does not exclude the possibility that our nature contributes to the unpredictable irruption of natality from the private into the political world. We simply cannot appeal to nature to determine or to secure political rights.
22 For Arendt, this new ontology appeared in the wake of the end of metaphysics with the nineteenth-century “death of God” that accompanied the end of the entire domain of the suprasensory, the transcendent, or “whatever is not given to the senses” (Arendt, Life of the Mind, 10).
23 She summarizes: “These findings suggest that the predominance of outside appearance implies . . . whatever can see wants to be seen, whatever can hear calls out to be heard, whatever can touch presents itself to be touched. It is indeed as though everything that is alive . . . has an urge to appear” (Ibid., 29, emphases in the original). This self-display “reaches its climax in the human species” (Ibid., 30) n ot in “conscious” human activities but in pre-reflective being (Ibid., 36).
24 Ibid., 26.
25 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Nature: Course Notes from the College de France, trans. Robert Vallier (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2003), 189.
26 Given the historical tendency of natural science to discover that appearances are deceptive Portmann explains that we should “not be surprised” to find it has “contributed to the view that the great riddles of life are concealed in the invisible. . . . But such probing into what is most deeply concealed makes us strangers to the appearances of the living creatures around us” (Portmann, Animal Forms, 17).
27 Mary Rawlinson, “The Contingency of Goodness,” in Interrogating Ethics: Embodying the Good in Merleau-Ponty, ed. James Hatley, Janice McClane, and Christian Diehm (Pittsburgh: Dusquene University Press, 2006), 65.
28 Judith Butler, “Sexual Ideology and Phenomenological Description: A Feminist Critique of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception,” in The Thinking Muse: Feminism and Modern French Philosophy, ed. Jeffner Allen and Iris Marion Young (Evanston, IL: Indiana University Press, 1989).
29 Anna Petronella Foultier, “Language and the Gendered Body: Butler’s Early Reading of Merleau-Ponty,” Hypatia 28, no. 4 (Fall 2013): 779.
30 Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei, “Language as the Flesh of Being,” in Interrogating Ethics: Embodying the Good in Merleau-Ponty, ed. James Hatley, Janice McClane, and Christian Diehm (Pittsburgh: Dusquene University Press, 2006), 223. See also Erinn Gilson, The Ethics of Vulnerability: A Feminist Analysis of Social Life and Practice (London: Routledge, 2014).
31 Drawing on work by Matthey Dillon and Dan Zahavi, Anya Dayla addresses criticisms from Levinas. Anya Daly, “Does the Reversibility Thesis Deliver All That Merleau-Ponty Claims It Can?,” European Journal of Philosophy 24, no. 1 (March 2016): 18. See also Dan Zahavi, “Beyon d Empathy: Phenomenological Approaches to Intersubjectivity,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 8, no. 5–7 (2001): 151. As Zahavi points out, the encounter with others not only occur in face-to-face encounters but admits our participation with the world in action, perception and use of tools. Dayla points out that at the least, these conflicts between Levinas and Merleau-Ponty show the need to look at the “concrete embodied encounter” and ensure that ethics includes an asymmetry.
32 Ann V. Murphy, “‘All Things Considered:’ Sensibility and Ethics in the Later Merleau-Ponty and Derrida,” Continental Philosophy Review 42 (2010): 443.
33 Ibid., 446.
34 Arendt, Life of the Mind, 33.
35 Ibid., 31.
36 Ibid., 72.
37 Ibid., 70.
38 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 42. See also 70–71, 261. These passages only exemplify a theme that runs through Merleau-Ponty’s entire oeuvre.
39 Arendt, Essay in Understanding, 436.
40 Ibid., 437.
41 Arendt wrote these remarks even before the publication of Merleau-Ponty’s “Eye and Mind” or The Visible and Invisible and so it is possible that she might have seen that work head in the direction of resolving on philosophical terms, but given the robust critiques from Levinas, Derrida and feminism, it seems unlikely.
42 Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, 58.