Ronald Beiner
Hannah Arendt’s most direct statement of her views concerning truth is her essay “Truth and Politics”; hence that will be the text upon which we’ll focus in what follows. She begins the essay by discussing the relationship between politics and truthfulness—that is, situations in which I have the truth in my possession, but withhold it for the sake of, say, considerations of reasons of state. There is, she suggests, an age-old conflict between power and truth because power-holders have typically been prompted by considerations of political expediency to lie, suppress inconvenient truths, and to deceive their subjects or fellow citizens. As Arendt sets up the discussion, the issue of temporality and the fleeting character of human affairs figures prominently in this contest between politics and truth. The basic reality is that human beings are “natal and mortal”—they are “beings who know they have appeared out of non-being and will, after a short while, again disappear into it.”1 How to respond to this basic reality? Arendt suggests that there are two conflicting ways to shelter ourselves in some measure from the flux of existence. Each of these two responses is compelling in its own fashion, but the crucial point is that they are rival responses, that they are existentially in conflict with each other.
The first response is care for the public realm, or politics as an existential possibility. She also refers to this as political action understood noninstrumentally: understood not as a means to some other end but as an intrinsic end.2 The second response to our condition of fleeting existence between natal and mortal nonexistence is truth-telling, which Arendt divides into two modes of truth: factual truth (which is indeed relevant to any decent and desirable politics) and what she calls rational truth (the kind of truth of interest to scientists and philosophers).
What is at stake is survival, the perseverance in existence . . . , and no human world destined to outlast the short life span of mortals within it will ever be able to survive without men willing to do what Herodotus was the first to undertake consciously—namely . . . to say what is. No permanence, no perseverance in existence, can even be conceived of without men willing to testify to what is and appears to them because it is.3
Arendt thereby guides us to the conclusion that politics and truth are in a state of mutual conflict because they offer alternative ways of securing a measure of existential stability in the face of the fleetingness or ephemerality of human existence.
Putting aside the question of truth-telling with respect to factual truth, which, as she realizes, undermines her strict dichotomy between the realm of truth and the realm of politics—factual truth, as she later acknowledges, “is political by nature”4 —Arendt focuses on so-called rational truth. The purpose of the next stage of her argument is to trace the conflict between politics and rational truth to a perennial tension between two ways of life: the life of the citizen and the life of the philosopher. She calls them “two diametrically opposed ways of life,”5 two “way[s] of human existence,”6 and cites Parmenides and Plato as the two archetypal historical thinkers who had defined the very meaning of the life of the philosopher.7 Again, the central issue is the flux of human affairs and the ever-mutable opinions they elicit. Philosophy is removed from this world of political and cognitive flux because it offers the prospect of rational principles that, once discovered, would “stabilize human affairs.”8 Philosophy as a way of life is defined by the quest for “everlasting” truths that would provide permanent remedy for the “state of constant flux” that characterizes the opinions of ordinary citizens.9 Thus depicted, philosophic life is the negation of civic life, for it strives for everlastingness, over against the constitutive mutability of the realm of human affairs. Arendt cites James Madison, for whom politics is based on opinion, not truth, as the civic antipode to Plato. As she puts it, “Every claim in the sphere of human affairs to an absolute truth, whose validity needs no support from the side of opinion, strikes at the very roots of all politics and all governments.”10
Next, Arendt turns back to the issue of factual truth and its relation to politics. Arendt concludes this discussion with an astonishingly radical thesis, namely, that “it may be in the nature of the political realm to be at war with truth in all its forms.”11 Although this is presented as a “suspicion,” not a confident affirmation of the nature of political life, one wonders why, to the extent that Arendt’s suspicion is warranted, it doesn’t lead to a profound indictment of political life, rather than the celebration of political life that pervades Arendt’s work as a whole. As she says herself, things would be utterly “desperate” (more desperate than the account of politics depicted by Plato) if one were unable to refute this suspicion “that it may be in the nature of the political realm to deny or pervert truth of every kind, as though men were unable to come to terms with its unyielding, blatant, unpersuasive stubbornness.”12 Yet Arendt does nothing to remove this huge question-mark placed over political life as a whole. Factual truth “is political by nature” because, in contrast to rational truth, it belongs naturally to the realm of human affairs and doesn’t try to assert a transcendent realm more stable and less mutable than what transpires in the political realm: “Factual truth informs political thought just as rational truth informs philosophical speculation.”13 However, notwithstanding this claim of a natural affinity between facts and opinions, and therefore, in this limited sense, of an affinity between the domain of truth and the domain of politics, Arendt nonetheless declares that there’s something in the character of political existence as such that stamps “a commitment even to factual truth” as “an anti-political attitude.”14 The profound question raised here about how to vindicate political life if it implies such a hostility to truth in general and even factual truth in particular goes strangely unanswered in her reflection on truth and politics.
An important part of Arendt’s campaign to restore dignity to opinion, over against Plato’s slanders against opinion, is her attempt to give a well-rounded account of the central role in political life of the capacity for reflective judgment. This is certainly the most helpful and illuminating part of Arendt’s argument. But here again, her account of judgment is undermined by her misleadingly extreme dichotomization of philosophy and politics. According to Arendt, the mark of valid judgment is impartiality, and we ascend to an impartial view by breaking free of our own narrow perspective and seeing the object of judgment from a liberating plurality of other points of view. Imagination is therefore intrinsic to the work of judgment. These ways of characterizing the process of judgment are genuinely illuminating, but it remains mysterious as to why Arendt thinks that in order to celebrate judgment, she needs to knock truth off the pedestal on which the history of philosophy from Plato onwards had placed it. It seems almost as if Arendt felt that one could only answer Plato’s slanders against opinion by matching them with equal slanders against truth as a philosophical ideal.
In matters of opinion, but not in matters of truth, our thinking is truly discursive, running, as it were, from place to place, from one part of the world to another, through all kinds of conflicting views, until it finally ascends from these particularities to some impartial generality. Compared to this process . . . it is in [the] very nature [of rational truths and factual truths] to withstand further elucidation.15
It is, to say the least, not at all clear that it is coherent for Arendt to speak of the “validity” of opinions, as she does in this section of the essay,16 without allowing for a certain re-convergence between opinion and truth. Arendt speaks of “the persuasiveness inherent in opinion.”17 But what is the telos of persuasion? Surely, opinions persuade us when they offer grounds or at least intimate grounds for believing the truth of what is affirmed by those opinions as opposed to rival views. Thus, it is incoherent to speak of the persuasiveness of opinion in abstraction from that with respect to which opinion persuades, namely, truth.
In many respects, politics fares quite poorly in Arendt’s account of the conflict between politics and truth. For instance, Arendt writes that “if the teller of factual truth wants to play a political role, and therefore to be persuasive, he will, more often than not, go to considerable lengths to explain why his particular truth serves the best interests of some group.”18 If this is what it takes to render truth politically relevant, this is certainly not to the credit of politics. Arendt also makes the argument (not any less damning for politics) that it is more natural for liars to be political actors than it is for truthtellers; the latter, but not the former, need to, as it were, refashion themselves so as to be effective in the domain of opinion.19 Arendt seems to anticipate these objections in her concluding paragraph, where she expresses her awareness that the image of politics that emerges from her essay is much less flattering than the view of political life that she actually holds.
Since I have dealt here with politics from the perspective of truth, and hence from a viewpoint outside the political realm, I have failed to mention even in passing the greatness and the dignity of what goes on inside it. I have spoken as though the political realm were no more than a battlefield of partial, conflicting interests, where nothing counted but pleasure and profit, partisanship, and the lust for domination. In short, I have dealt with politics as though I, too, believed that all public affairs were ruled by interest and power.20
Arendt takes this opportunity to reaffirm her standard view of the glories of political life—“the joy and the gratification that arise out of being in company with our peers, out of acting together and appearing in public, out of inserting ourselves into the world by word and deed, thus acquiring and sustaining our personal identity and beginning something entirely new”21 —and she insists that her purpose is not to qualify in any way her usual view, but simply to acknowledge “that this whole sphere, its greatness notwithstanding, is [nonetheless] limited”:
It does not encompass the whole of man’s and the world’s existence. It is limited by those things which man cannot change at will. And it is only by respecting its own borders that this realm [of politics] can remain intact, preserving its integrity and keeping its promises. Conceptually, we may call truth what we cannot change; metaphorically, it is the ground on which we stand and the sky that stretches above us.22
What’s all-important is for politics to “respect its own borders,” and truth and truthfulness lie outside its borders rather than within them. The suggestion seems to be that truth-telling has its distinctive integrity and political action has its distinctive integrity, but trying to bring the two together inevitably corrupts both, which is, again, a highly pessimistic thought for someone who wants to redeem the dignity of political life. If politics is in a natural state of tension with “the ground on which [it stands] and the sky that stretches above [it],” why does it have the high status that Arendt attribute s to it?
The idea that her argument appears to imply an unseemly conception of politics only because the essay offers a view of politics as seen from the perspective of truth lacks credibility, for much of the essay in fact reads as a harsh and implausible critique of truth. In particular, Arendt focuses, in an important section of the argument, on what she sees as the coercive aspect of truth.
All truths [including factual truth] are opposed to opinion in their mode of asserting validity. Truth carries within itself an element of coercion. . . . [Various truths are arrived at in various ways,] but, once perceived as true and pronounced to be so, they have in common that they are beyond agreement, dispute, opinion, or consent. . . . [P]ersuasion or dissuasion is useless, for the content of the statement is not of a persuasive nature but of a coercive one.23
In the first paragraph of section III of her essay, Arendt aligns truth with tyranny three times: first by referring to “the frequently tyrannical tendencies so deplorably obvious among professional truthtellers,”24 next, by citing Mercier de la Rivière on the despotic character of Euclidean geometry,25 and finally by stating that politics naturally rebels against the prospect of being answerable to “something that arises from without, has its source outside the political realm, and is as independent of the wishes and desires of the citizens as is the will of the worst tyrant.”26 And she begins the next paragraph by stating that truth is “hated by tyrants,” not because truth is liberating but because “truth has a despotic character” and every tyrant hates facing competition from another tyrant.27 All three of these identifications of truth and tyranny are remarkable, but the last is especially so. If, as Arendt here suggests, citizens and statesman are so steadfastly resistant to deferring to an independent reality beyond the political realm and “independent of [their] wishes and desires,” and if this is one of the constitutive realities of political life, then this would, it seems, lead more readily to the conclusion that politics naturally lends itself to tyrannical impulses than to the conclusion that truth is a mode of tyranny.
As we have noted, it seems intensely paradoxical that Arendt’s depiction of politics as naturally antithetical to truth could be compatible with the very elevated conception of politics to which she was committed, rather than leading her to a strong indictment of politics. Conversely, if she was prepared to see a closer link between politics and truth than the one expressed in her work, it would have given her a more solid foundation for her high estimation of the calling of the citizen. Hence, we come back finally to the question: Why, then, did Arendt, as a celebrator of politics as something sublime, present politics and truth as being at war with each other? The answer, it seems, is this. At the very core of Arendt’s theoretical work is the thesis that politics is generally undervalued because the Western philosophical tradition, stretching back to Plato, made it its purpose to deprecate the whole realm of human affairs, and the idea that politics and truth are essentially antithetical is simply another way of formulating this core thesis. Arendt fights back at truth because, as she sees it, truth is the banner under which philosophy had maligned politics.
Plato, “the polis’s most determined and most influential opponent,”28 clearly occupies a privileged place in this rather perverse narrative. Truth, through the medium of philosophy, tries to force itself upon us, in contrast to the “free agreement and consent”29 that are essential to political life. Even if the philosophers don’t impose their truths by force—as Plato sought to do with the tyrant in Syracuse, in the form of a “tyranny of truth”—but instead win the free concurrence of fellow citizens, this would be, Arendt says,
a Pyrrhic victory. For truth would then owe its prevalence not to its own compelling quality but to the agreement of the many, who might change their minds tomorrow and agree on something else; what had been philosophical truth would have become mere opinion.30
Here and elsewhere in the essay, Arendt accepts Plato’s opposition between doxa and truth, rather than challenging his account of the fickleness of nonphilosophical opinion by proposing a conception of opinion that is not “mere opinion” because it is grounded in good arguments, rational insights, or perspicuous judgment.31 She approaches this idea of a kind of opinion that is not mere opinion with her notion of disinterested or impartial judgment. But she wrongly and unnecessarily resists acknowledging that invoking a standard of truth is one crucial way of distinguishing judgments that satisfy her ideal from those that don’t.
Arendt tended to elevate the meaning of politics to heroic proportions at the same time that she minimized the dialogical dimensions of philosophy. According to her dichotomized categories, philosophy concerns “man in the singular”32 —what she calls “the solitude of philosophical thought”33 —not human beings in the plural. It follows for her that truth, the object of philosophy, is also associated with the solitary or singular thinker, as opposed to the plurality and “interdependence” of opinion.34 “Since philosophical truth concerns man in his singularity, it is unpolitical by nature.”35 And she suggests in an earlier section of the essay that the truths of the philosopher are “found and actualized in solitude.”36 Given the “isolation” of the philosopher, she thinks it is not surprising that Plato “yields to the temptation to use his truth as a standard to be imposed upon human affairs.”37 All of this simply conjures away the dialogical character of Plato’s philosophy (to say nothing of the rest of the history of philosophy). Contrary to what she suggests here, philosophy, like politics, doesn’t involve the assertion of “absolute truths”; it involves the hermeneutical pursuit of truth through rational dialogue. If philosophy and politics are both truth-oriented human activities (to me it seems incontestable that they are), then Arendt’s categorical opposition between truth and politics is significantly attenuated.
What’s most odd about Arendt’s analysis is that the kind of truth most relevant to political life gets completely left out of her account of truth. The consequence, I would suggest, is a defective phenomenology of political judgment. People engage in political debate with opposing views, not simply to add one more opinion to the wonderful diversity of opinions that are already circulating but in order to try to challenge mistaken judgments and try to help the truth to prevail. One fails to capture the authentic meaning of political judgment unless one understands sincerely intended judgment (leaving aside cynically intended political speech acts) as aimed at true judgment—not just true in the sense of faithful to the facts but morally and politically true: the expression of the best discernment that one can exercise. We strive for “phronetic insight,” that is, for practical wisdom. If Arendt were right that there is “an antagonism between truth and opinion,”38 it would be hard to make sense of what citizens are doing when they express political judgments and contest political judgments that they reject. In particular, it is impossible to make sense of what it means to render a political judgment in abstraction from caring about whether one’s judgment is a true one. One does one’s best to judge rightly, in the light of what one knows and what one has managed to teach oneself as well as in the light of the opposing arguments to which one has been exposed and the rival points of view one has made an effort to encounter, but the standard at which one aims is always a standard of truth, including truths of moral and political praxis. If the latter are not a presumptive standard when we issue judgments relevant to moral and political life, it becomes mysterious how anyone would be able to claim any normative privilege for their own judgments over against opposing judgments (for instance, my judgment that Donald Trump is dangerously unfit for the presidency, over against the judgments on the part of his fan base that he’s leading America back to greatness). If moral/political truth is not the object of aspiration when we hazard opinions and strive to appraise the world rightly, we descend into a sinkhole of moral relativism. One should note that this notion of the aspired-to truth of one’s judgment—synthesizing one’s grasp of the relevant facts, one’s sense of what is politically realistic, and one’s sense of what is morally justifiable—does not plausibly fit into either of Arendt’s two categories, factual truth or rational truth. Yet it is a mode of truth that is constitutive of the totality of human politics, and it is what renders political judgment a human possibility.
Arendt’s view was that one should oppose judgment to truth, since truth compels and judgment merely persuades, and she had a similar view concerning the relationship between opinion and truth. Arendt quotes Mercier de la Rivière—“Euclide est un véritable despote; et les vérités géométriques qu’il nous a transmises, sont des lois véritablement despotiques” (Euclid is a veritable despot; and the geometrical truths that he transmitted to us are laws that are truly despotic)—and she adds that this remark “applies to all kinds of truth.”39 For Arendt, truth concerns those matters where doubt and uncertainty have been banished, and therefore “opinion” is pushed aside. But this is a strange view of how truth impinges on politics. What does it mean to have an opinion? We form opinions about matters where, to be sure, we cannot be certain of being right, but we articulate and defend those opinions under the presumption of their validity—that is, opinion as it were aims at truth. An opinion that was indifferent to its truth or falsity, validity or invalidity, would be something less than an opinion. Arendt herself writes, “The more people’s standpoints I have present in my mind while I am pondering a given issue, and the better I can imagine how I would feel and think were I in their place . . . the more valid my final conclusion, my opinion.”40 What can “more valid” mean, if not “closer to the truth of the matter being judged”? To render an opinion or a judgment is always to take a stab at truth under conditions where truth is not quite within reach (but when are conditions ever otherwise?).
Arendt cannot hope to vindicate opinion by divorcing it from truth. Opinions matter because they are part of a larger communicative and cooperative enterprise aimed at what is in principle a shareable truth. To be sure, Arendt is very enamored of Lessing’s dictum that we should content ourselves with our opinions, and as for ultimate truth, this should be “commended unto God.” That is, life would be utterly boring if we actually possessed the truth; things are considerably more interesting, left as we are to trade our diverse opinions without ever knowing definitively whether they are true.41 That may well be so. But there is also a problem with Lessing’s view. Opinions would be very boring if they didn’t assert truth claims—if they merely expressed cognitive diversity without aspiring to a shareable truth beyond that diversity. (It is the radicalization of this impulse, not just to express opinions but to vindicate them to the satisfaction of all who share an interest in the opinion’s truth or lack of truth, that constitutes philosophy.) Arendt’s gloss on Lessing is that “for men, living in company, the inexhaustible richness of human discourse is infinitely more significant and meaningful than any One Truth could ever be.”42 In fact, Lessing doesn’t speak of opinion divorced from truth; his injunction is, “Let each man say what he deems truth,” which is, of course, itself an invitation to posit truth claims. Arendt doesn’t accept that opinions involve truth claims, for she writes, “The Socratic proposition ‘It is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong’ is not an opinion but claims to be truth”43 —stubbornly refusing to see that asserting a truth claim does not disqualify something as an opinion; on the contrary, the truth claim is constitutive of it qua opinion.
Arendt was incontestably right to put the emphasis that she did upon the diversity of human opinions. But at the same time, we should be careful not to fetishize cognitive diversity. As much as people differ in the content of their judgments, they are drawn together in political argument and rational debate because of what they share: a common aspiration to apprehend moral and political truth. Our opinions divide us, but we wouldn’t be motivated to formulate our opinions, articulate them, and thus share them with others unless we were participants at a deeper level in a shared quest for moral and political truth that draws us back together as a community of truth-seekers. Exercising political judgment means that holding differing opinions never separates us sufficiently to cancel out this community of shared aspiration.
Arendt’s view that judgment and truth are opposed because truth compels whereas judgment merely persuades is problematical, for the following reason. Given the finitude of human experience, truth is not a human possession but a human aspiration. Judgments are not dictated by an already-possessed truth; rather, judgments aim at truth. This requires that our judgments appeal to and take account of the efforts of others to judge rightly: our truth-aspiring judgments unfold in dialogue with the truth-aspiring judgments of others. In other words, human judgment can only make good on its aspiration toward a truthful grasp of the world that we share with others by means of a concerted exercise of imagination—trying to understand and appreciate how those differently situated others also bear the responsibility of truth-aspiring judgment. The interest in a common truth motivates us to participate in each other’s judgments, and never to cease imagining how and why others often see the world so differently.
Notes
1 Hannah Arendt, “Truth and Politics,” in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Penguin, 1977), 227–64, 228.
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid., 229.
4 Ibid., 238.
5 Ibid., 232.
6 Ibid., 238.
7 Cf., 259–60.
8 Ibid., 233.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid., 239.
12 Ibid., 237.
13 Ibid., 238.
14 Ibid., 239.
15 Ibid., 242.
16 Ibid., 241.
17 Ibid., 244.
18 Ibid., 250.
19 Ibid.
20 Ibid., 263.
21 Ibid.
22 Ibid., 263–64.
23 Ibid., 239–40.
24 Ibid., 239.
25 Ibid., 240.
26 Ibid.
27 Ibid., 241.
28 Ibid., 260.
29 Ibid., 247.
30 Ibid., 246.
31 For an excellent critique of Arendt on this point, see Albrecht Wellmer, “Hannah Arendt on Judgment: The Unwritten Doctrine of Reason,” in Judgment, Imagination, and Politics: Themes from Kant and Arendt, ed. Ronald Beiner and Jennifer Nedelsky (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), 165–81.
32 Arendt, “Truth and Politics,” 245.
33 Ibid., 242. Arendt’s account of the “two-in-one” of Socratic thinking, in her final work The Life of the Mind, possibly complicates but ultimately reaffirms her thesis of the basic solitariness of philosophy. See Hannah Arendt, Thinking (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), Chapter 18.
34 Arendt, “Truth and Politics,” 242.
35 Ibid., 246.
36 Ibid., 237.
37 Ibid.
38 Ibid., 233.
39 Ibid., 240. My italics.
40 Ibid., 241.
41 Ibid., 233–34.
42 Ibid., 234.
43 Ibid., 247.