The Sensus Communis and Common Sense:
The Worldly, Affective Sense of Judging Spectators
Peg Birmingham
It is well known that Arendt died before undertaking what was to be the third part of Life of the Mind on judging. Although two epigraphs left in her typewriter indicate she had just started her systematic work on judgment, she was in fact well underway on her thinking through the question of judgment, most notably in her lectures on Kant’s political philosophy given at the New School for Social Research in 1974. I suggest, however, that we not be tempted to turn immediately to these lectures in an attempt to understand her theory of judgment and, more precisely, her notion of the sensus communis, but instead, linger with her stated project of the The Life of the Mind as this will more clearly indicate why judging and the sensus communis are the anticipated denouement of Life of the Mind, holding equal importance to action in Arendt’s rethinking of the concept of the political after its twentieth-century failures, most notably the event of totalitarianism.
I will begin with two striking aspects of Arendt’s Introduction to Life of the Mind, Thinking. First, referring to Eichmann and her coined phrase “the banality of evil,” Arendt remarks that her reflections in Life of the Mind are provoked by confronting something that was “utterly different and still undeniably factual,” namely, that while the deeds were monstrous, the doer “was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous.”1 As she puts it, “Having been struck by a fact, that willy-nilly ‘put me in possession of a concept’. . . . I could not help raising the quaestio juris, ‘by what right I possessed and used it.’”2 She goes on to say that the moral questions “arising from factual experience, and going counter to the wisdom of the ages,” prompted her to raise the larger questions of thinking and judging that emerged from the trial. Strikingly, Arendt begins a reflection on the life of the mind by referring to factual experience no less than three times in the first three pages.
The second striking aspect of the Introduction is Arendt’s discussion of the death of metaphysics and her critique of metaphysical leave-taking from the realm of appearance. She points out that that however much philosophers might have disagreed on the concept of being, one point was “taken for granted,” namely, metaphysics “dealt with matters that were not given to sense-perception and that their understanding transcended common-sense reasoning.”3 Arendt puts herself on the side of Kant, harboring no regret that the “age-old distinction” between the many and the “professional thinkers” had fallen into disrepute. While Arendt makes a distinction between common sense, on the one hand, and thinking and judging, on the other, nevertheless, thinking and judging are for her rooted in the earthly condition of appearance, which she argues is characterized by a “perceptual faith” in an “objective reality” that depends “entirely on the object’s also appearing as such to others and being acknowledged by them. Without this tacit acknowledgement by others we would not even to be able to put faith in the way we appear to ourselves.”4 Her critique of Descartes is instructive as she argues that had he actually “been born in a desert, without a body and its senses to perceive ‘material’ things and without fellow-creatures to assure him that what he perceived was perceived by them too,” he would never have been able to think at all. The condition of thinking and judging is appearing, which “carries with it a prior indication of realness.”5 This feeling of reality, she argues, emerges from the “sensorily given.”6 Common sense is for her this feeling of worldly reality as it is given to the senses.
To prevent drawing the conclusion that Arendt’s concern with common sense is something unique to Life of the Mind, we must recall that the problem of common sense preoccupied her from the very first pages of The Origins of Totalitarianism. The first chapter of the book, titled “Anti-Semitism as an Outrage to Common Sense,” raises the question of how a seemingly small question, namely, the Jewish question, could lead to Nazism, a World War, and the death camps. Arendt uses “outrage” in the double sense of barbarity and fury: not only is common sense outraged by the turn anti-Semitism took in the twentieth century (from religious to political anti-Semitism), at the same time, the barbarism of twentieth century anti-Semitism is a crime against common sense. She elaborates on one of the key elements of the crime a few pages into Origins when she claims that totalitarianism’s key condition is replacing reality with the radical lie: “The most striking difference between the ancient and the modern sophists is that the ancients were satisfied with a passing victory of the argument at the expense of truth, whereas the moderns want a more lasting victory at the expense of reality.”7 In the final chapter of Origins, “Ideology and Terror,” Arendt provides a bookend for the beginning, claiming that common sense—the sense of worldly reality—has been replaced with ideology’s hellish fantasies, characterized by a “strident logicality,” a logic through which the whole of reality is rationally and systematically organized with a view toward domination. This logicality, she argues, permits the fabrication of a “literally senseless world” in which everything is possible.8
In her essay “Understanding and Politics,” written two years after the completion of Origins, Arendt takes up again to the issue of common sense, defining it as “traditionally a body of pre-understandings which are shared by members of a shared tradition and unites them as such. . . . [It is] a kind of common language whose roots is a common culture, a concrete collective life.”9 She goes on to say that this preliminary understanding is “an implicitly shared language out of which judgment arises. It is true that any proposal for action which does not strike roots in this common ground necessarily falls on deaf ears—it is literally beyond comprehension.”10 Still further, she claims that the disappearance of common sense, which reveals itself as the incapacity to judge, is rooted in “the downfall of customs, the weakness of the laws, [and] a society that could no longer give an account of its categories of understanding and standards of judgment when they were seriously challenged.”11 With the disappearance of common sense, which she defines as “the common world into which we all fit,”12 logicality and “strident consistency” take its place, pointing out that it is no surprise from out of this bankruptcy of common sense arose “the new logical movement in philosophy.”13
Important to this essay are the footnotes in which she connects the loss of common sense with the destruction of factual reality: “[totalitarianism] has lost the earlier Marxist respect for facts . . . assuming only the validity of the law of a moving History or Nature. Whoever acts in accordance with this law no longer needs particular experiences.”14 Lest we jump to the conclusion that Arendt’s references to factual reality indicate some residual positivism in her thinking, she is clear that attention to “factual reality” requires a concept of history that not only illuminates the unprecedented event of totalitarianism but at the same time also recognizes the bankruptcy of traditional categories of judgment and understanding that has occurred with the destruction of common sense. As we will see further, in her discussion of appearance, she is not positing the existence of an independent objective reality; instead she is thinking a common sense of the real—a primordial sensus communis—that emerges in a plurality of perspectives and provides the basis for judging and what might be called a second-order sensus communis.
Finally, returning to the immediate context of The Life of Mind, namely, Eichmann’s thoughtlessness, Arendt does not understand “thoughtless” to mean that Eichmann lacked motives such as career advancement. In “Collective Guilt and Organized Responsibility,” she is clear that Eichmann and those like him were “good family men,” whose paramount concern was their regular paychecks and health insurance policies. At the same time, while Eichmann may not have held “firm ideological convictions,”15 nevertheless, in her trial report she points out that Eichmann was an “ideas” man, someone who was caught up in the idea of the Third Reich and a new millennial regime, and as a result often found himself “elated” with Himmler’s “winged words.”16 This is all to say, Eichmann was certainly not a realist. Thus by “thoughtlessness,” Arendt means neither an absence of private motives nor being devoid of ideas. Again, Eichmann had both motives and ideas. Instead, Eichmann’s thoughtlessness lay in his utter lack of common sense, that is, his utter lack of engagement with reality. As Arendt puts it in the context of Eichmann’s use of clichés right up to the moment of his death:
Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality, that is, against the claim on our thinking attention that all events and facts make by virtue of their existence.17
She notes that while we would be exhausted if we recognized this claim all of the time, Eichmann’s thoughtlessness lay in recognizing “no such claim of reality at all.”18
My point here is that Arendt’s abiding concern throughout her writings is the loss of common sense in the modern age.19 Lacking common sense, Eichmann had no sense of reality, and it was this lack that rendered him incapable of thinking or judging. Significantly, Arendt sees Eichmann’s flight into the world of ideas as contributing to this lack. Thus, her turn to the death of God, and with it the demise of the distinction between the supersensory and the sensory worlds, a turn that follows on the heels of her reflections on Eichmann’s banality of evil, is more than simply setting the stage for a reconsideration of what it might mean to think, will, and judge after the death of metaphysics. The end of metaphysics with the twin deaths of the sensory and the supersensory worlds provides the opening to carry out a rehabilitation of appearance that will allow her to recover a notion of common sense without relying on traditional categories of thought or judgment (an exercise in nostalgia), or rehabilitating a notion of the common world rooted in a common culture or tradition (an impossibility given the rupture in tradition and the plurality of cultures). This in turn will allow her to address the banality of evil, which for her, is Eichmann’s complete loss of the ability to judge, a loss rooted in the double loss of common sense and the sensus communis.
Appearance and Common Sense
Arendt’s discussion of appearance in Life of the Mind develops a point that she had made in The Human Condition in a section titled, “The Public Realm: The Common,” where she distinguishes between two senses of the “public,” which she argues “are closely inter-related but not altogether identical phenomenon.”20 As Arendt puts it, the public means “first, that everything that appears in public can be seen and heard by everybody and has the widest possible publicity. For us, appearance—something that is being seen and heard by others as well as ourselves—constitutes reality.”21 She develops this point in Life of the Mind, claiming that being and appearing are coincident, and as such appearance requires a spectator: “Nothing and nobody exists in this world whose very being does not presuppose a spectator. In other words, nothing that is, insofar as it appears exists in the singular; everything that is is meant to be perceived by somebody.”22 Hence, she claims, “plurality is the law of the earth.”23 The law of plurality indicates that the “common” cannot be unified or given some kind of essential definition. Instead, Arendt thinks the common as being-in-common:
All sense-endowed creatures have appearance as such in common, first an appearing world and second, and perhaps even more important the fact that they themselves are appearing and disappearing creatures, that there always was a world before their arrival and there always will be a world after their departure.24
In this later work, Arendt indicates that appearance and disappearance are more fundamental than natality and mortality, which in The Human Condition she reserves for the human being whose unique life, marked by birth and death, cuts a rectilinear path across the time of species life. Strikingly, Arendt suggests that all living beings as distinct beings in a plurality with others appear and disappear, and as appearances are always more than simply species life.
This last is supported by Arendt’s claim in Life of the Mind: Thinking that living beings are not mere appearances. As she puts it,
Seen from the perspective of the world, every creature born into it arrives well equipped to deal with a world in which Being and Appearing coincide; they are fit for worldly existence. Living beings, men and animals, are not just in the world, they are of the world and this precisely because they are subjects and objects—perceiving and being perceived—at the same time.25
Again, living beings are not “mere appearances,” reducible to bare life. Instead, living beings have the desire to appear and this is something far different than the Hobbesian conatus for self-preservation. As Arendt puts it, “To be alive means to be possessed by an urge toward self-display which answers the fact of one’s own appearingness.”26 Here again she alters her account of species life in The Human Condition: “It is indeed as though everything that is alive—in addition to the fact that its surface is made for appearance, fit to be seen and meant to appear to others—has an urge to appear, to fit itself into the world of appearances by displaying and showing, not its ‘inner self’ but itself as an individual.”27 Living beings as individual beings appear, and this appearance is marked by a desire to appear as an individual.
Looking to the research of the Swiss biologist and zoologist Adolph Portman, Arendt argues that this “desire to appear” cannot be explained in functional terms; instead, she suggests, it is gratuitous, having to do with the sheer pleasure of self-display. Human beings, who have a concern with an enduring image, transform this urge to self-display into a desire for self-presentation that she argues involves a “promise to the world, to those to whom I appear, to act in accordance with my pleasure.”28 Moreover, this urge to self-display cannot be understood in terms of something “inner” wanting to express oneself. The self is given in its appearance, in its self-display. Again, this is not “expressiveness” in the sense that the expression reveals something “inside” the expression.
Common sense therefore is a worldly sense that fits living beings into a common world with others. As Arendt puts it, this worldly sense is given by the “senses playing together, kept in turn by common sense and guaranteed by the fact of plurality.”29 Critiquing the distinction between depth and surface, as if the surface owes its appearance to something hidden, Arendt argues that the self makes it appearance on the surface in its sentient, embodied relation with the world. As Kimberly Curtis beautifully puts it,
We find [in Arendt] an ontology of display that suggests that reality in an appearing world such as ours is something born out of a highly charged mutual sensuous provocation between actors and spectators that is essentially aesthetic in nature. A universe alive with yearning to sense and be sensed, a universe that perpetually gives birth to its own plurality and profusion.30
Prior to the sensus communis that emerges through a plurality of judging spectators, Arendt claims a more primordial sensus communis of sensuous spectators: “To appear always means to seem to others and this seeming varies according to the standpoint and the perspective of the spectators.”31 As we shall see, the sensus communis of judgment is not rooted in a transcendental condition, but rather has its origins in the common worldly sense of appearance.
Our sense of reality therefore depends upon this sensuous world of appearances shared in common with a plurality of other beings. Indeed, as Curtis points out, our capacity to experience a world in common is “utterly dependent upon the aesthetic provocation of multiple, distinct appearing beings. If we can locate the common world at all, therefore, it is paradoxically to be found only where this provocation flourishes.”32 In other words, our capacity to sense the real depends upon a mutual provocation between and among appearing beings and this provocation is aesthetic, both sensuous and affective.
Arendt’s account of a primordial sensus communis at the level of appearance itself demonstrates the centrality of embodied life in her understanding of common sense and the sensus communis of judging spectators. The plurality of perspectives that marks the Arendtian public space is inseparable from the plurality of embodied and sensual perspectives. Appearing beings, human and animal alike, are living organisms enmeshed in a matrix of material, embodied, and interdependent relationships, and the human capacity for action is inseparable from this earthly appearance. As Arendt claims in The Human Condition, “Action . . . corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world.”33 As just seen in her later work Life of the Mind: Thinking, Arendt claims that living on the earth is already to inhabit a world. Again, the life of action (vita activa) is inseparable from the sensuous and affective habitation that marks its earthly condition. This is also true of the judging sensus communis; it too has its origin in sensuous, embodied appearance on the earth and in the world. As Cecilia Sjöholm puts it,
Arendt relocates the question of judgment from the transcendental subject to the plurality of the public sphere. To Arendt, a community is always coming into being through the time-space of its conditioning, a time-space that is itself affected by its inhabitants. Rather than being erected through transcendental laws of apprehension that forever remain the same, a community of taste is affected by the bodies that inhabit it.34
From Common Sense to the Sensus Communis : The Cosmopolitan, Historical Sense
While Arendt does not ground the sensus communis in a Kantian transcendental subject, it is, nevertheless, marked by a dislocation from the space of appearances, a dislocation in marked contrast to withdrawal of thinking. At the same time, the imagination works differently in the two activities. The thinking imagination “transforms a visible object into an invisible image . . . in these operations the mind learns how to deal with things that are absent and prepares itself to ‘go further,’ toward the understanding of things that are always absent, that cannot be remembered because they were never present to sense-experience.”35 The thinking imagination reproduces in thought what was once given in experience: “Imagination prepares the objects of our thought. Before we raise such questions as what is happiness, what is justice what is knowledge, and so on, we must have seen happy and unhappy people, witnessed just and unjust deeds, experienced the desire to know and its fulfillment or frustration.”36 Every thought is an afterthought. “By repeating in imagination, we de-sense whatever had been given to our senses . . . only logical reasoning has cut all strings to living experience.”37
Moreover, thinking’s withdrawal from the realm of appearances is “unlocatable and indeterminate.” Reading Kafka’s parable “He,” Arendt describes thinking as standing in the diagonal or deflected force of the present, a deflection that emerges in the clash between the forces of the past and those of the future. While thinking has a definite temporal origin in the present, its end is indefinite: “For this diagonal, though pointing to some infinity, is limited, enclosed, as it were, by the forces of past and future, and thus protected against the void; it remains bound to and is rooted in the present.”38 Arendt characterizes the solitary stance in the gap between past and future as the “quiet in the center of the storm.”39
The judging spectators of the sensus communis know no such quiet. When thinking returns to the realm of appearance, it frees judging, “the most political of all our faculties.” As Arendt goes on to claim, “When it [thinking] emerges from its withdrawal and returns to the world of particular appearances, it turns out that the mind needs a new ‘gift’ to deal with them.”40 The gift of evaluating the “world of particular appearances” is that of judgment, a gift given only a plurality of judging spectators:
Hence the spectator’s verdict, while impartial and freed from the interests of gain or fame, is not independent of the views of others—on the contrary, according to Kant, “an enlarged mentality” has to take them into account. The spectators, although disengaged from the particularity characteristic of the actor, are not solitary. Nor are they self-sufficient.41
Moreover, unlike the solitary thinker, spectators are locatable in time and space, their judgments limited to “their validity to human beings on earth.”42 Recalling that Arendt claims a primordial sensus communis at the level of common sense, formed through a plurality of appearing, sensual spectators, this second-order sensus communis is formed through a plurality of judging spectators, dislocated from appearance and common sense, yet still earthbound and embodied. As Arendt puts it in her Kant lectures, the faculty of judgment “is the very essence of what we are as we are of this world only.”43 These judgments are judgments of taste; they evaluate how the world ought to look and who and what is fit to appear in it. Moreover, the criterion for judgments of taste is the enlargement of one’s humanity and sociability. Agreeing with Kant that sociality is “the very origin, not the goal, of man’s humanity,”44 Arendt argues that it is the interest of judgment, the interest of the sensus communis with furthering this worldly condition of sociability and ensuring its endurance. Hence the enlarged mentality of the judging spectators is not merely judging from the standpoint of another, but also the enlargement of humanity and the shared condition of sociability.
The enlarged mentality for Arendt is not empathic, nor does it involve the actual standpoints of others. Not empathic, the enlarged mentality does not indulge the fiction that I can assimilate or appropriate the other’s standpoint as if it were possible to make myself at home elsewhere. At the same time, emphasizing the possible standpoints of others, Arendt understands the worldly space of the sensus communis as one that is always “potentially public, open to all sides”;45 she thereby avoids thinking the sensus communis along the lines of a communitarian model, in which the judging spectators are rooted in a shared history, common beliefs, or unified identity. Indeed, Arendt insists that the enlarged mentality is representative in the precise sense of “making present absent standpoints.” Neither empathic nor bound to the actual, the enlarged mentality adopts the “general standpoint,” which Arendt argues “is not the generality of the concept—it is, on the contrary closely connected with the particular conditions of the standpoints one has to go through in order to arrive at one’s own ‘general standpoint.’”46 Again, the enlarged mentality is not engaged in a direct perception of reality as in the primordial sensus communis of common sense; instead, it is the imaginative capacity to produce a more encompassing or enlarged sense of the real by going through the particular conditions of a plurality of standpoints to arrive at the general standpoint. Again, the general standpoint is the enlarged standpoint of humanity and our shared worldly sociability.
Following from this, the enlarged mentality judges from the perspective of the world and not as a citizen of a particular political space. Arendt claims, “When one judges and when one acts in political matters, one is supposed to take one’s bearings from the idea, not the actuality, of being a world citizen and therefore, also a Weltbetrachter, a world spectator.”47 Reflecting on Kant’s notion of hospitality, Arendt clarifies this point: “One judges always as a member of a community, guided by one’s community sense, one’s sensus communis, but in the last analysis, one is a member of a world community by the sheer fact of being human; this is one’s cosmopolitan existence.”48
If the space of the sensus communis is global and cosmopolitan, its time is what we might call the “historical present.” For Arendt, the sensus communis has a common present and a plurality of pasts. She clarifies this in her essay on Jaspers in Men in Dark Times:
For the first time in history all peoples on earth have a common present: no event of any importance in the history of one country can remain a marginal accident in the history of any other. . . . But this common factual present is not based on a common past and does not in the least guarantee a common future.49
The judging spectators share a common present, while at the same time being situated in a plurality of histories. The judging spectator is then also a historian, sitting in judgment of both the present and the past:
If judgment is our faculty for dealing with the past, the historian is the inquiring man who by relating it sits in judgment over it. If that is so, we may reclaim our human dignity, win it back, as it were, from the pseudo-divinity named History of the modern age, without denying history’s importance but denying its right to being the ultimate judge.50
Given the break in tradition, the site of the historical present is a site of discontinuity that requires the activity of collecting and assembling the plural narratives that together make up the conjunctions of histories in the present. Arendt argues that the spectator as historian works in the light of the events that bring their pasts into being in the crystallization of the present. Following Benjamin, this crystallization must be understood as a suspension between past and future, a break in the time continuum, a break with all notions of progress. For Arendt, the present is not a transition to another future point, but always a singular moment in which the failures and possibilities of the past are contracted and evaluated by the judging spectators.
Here again we must recall that the interest of judging is the enlargement and endurance of our worldly sociability. Thus, Arendt ends her essay “Understanding and Politics,” by citing King Solomon’s prayer for an “understanding heart.”51 Arendt defines “understanding” as the ability to judge, that is,
to see things in their proper perspective, to be strong enough to put that which is too close at a certain distance so that we can see and understand it without bias and prejudice, to be generous enough to bridge abysses of remoteness until we can see and understand everything that is too far away from us as though it were our own affair.52
Again, the judging imagination of the sensus communis is productive; it brings distances closer, and that gives some distance to what is still too close; it gathers and assembles a plurality of histories and counter-histories in order to enlarge our sense of the real whose “dark density” is illuminated by the productive imagination that animates the sensus communis. Still further, Arendt claims, the judging imagination allows us “to take our bearings in the world . . . [it] makes it bearable for us to live with other people, strangers forever, in the same world, and makes it possible for them to bear with us.”53 Contrary to David Ingram’s claim that “Arendt hopes to show how judgment can redeem the past,”54 her reference to Solomon’s prayer suggests that the sensus communis is not redemptive, but rather one that bears the shock of reality and through that bearing enlarges the sense of our common worldly sociability. I will return to this at the conclusion of the essay.
A Judging Heart: The Affective Sensus Communis
As just seen, Arendt’s appeal to Solomon, the exemplary figure of judgment, is for an understanding heart. How does Arendt understand the “heart” in this prayer for understanding? How does the heart allow for judging, and in judging bear and enlarge the world? While the affective dimension of the sensus communis is not systematically developed in Arendt’s work, it is central to her account. In what follows and as a conclusion, I want to outline briefly the affects that for Arendt ought to animate the heart of the sensus communis, and this because they provide a sense of reality, that is, they provoke a “shock of reality,” the condition for judging in the sensus communis. For Arendt, proper political affects are those that are “world-disclosing” rather than concealing reality through sentimentality or feeling. World-disclosing passions and affects, she writes, “are not found in the force of the passion affecting the soul, but instead, by the amount of reality the passion transmits to it.”55 World-disclosing affections must have two additional characteristics, namely, openness to others and the disclosure of the fundamental plurality that marks being-in-the-world. With these characteristics in mind, four affects are fundamental to a sensus communis rooted in an enlarged sense of the real: shame, anger, lamentation, and joy.
But, first, a word of caution. Arendt’s notion of an affective sensus communis bears none of the traits of Carl Schmitt’s notion of an affective or intensive community that unites the citizenry and for which they are willing to sacrifice with blood in the face of a concrete existential threat. Here we must recall that for Arendt, following Kant, the sensus communis is comprised of dislocated spectators who possess the faculty of reflective judgment. As Kant puts it, the sensus communis is
a sense common to all, of a faculty of judgment which in its reflection takes account a priori of the mode of representation of all other men in thought, in order, as it were, to compare its judgment with the collective reason of humanity, and thus to escape illusion arising from the private conditions that could be so easily taken for objective, which would injuriously affect the judgment.56
As we have seen, Arendt’s reflective judgment is rooted in the common sense of dwelling on the earth and inhabiting the world rather than in Kant’s a priori transcendental realm. Nevertheless, for Arendt the sensus communis of judgment is a reflective communis wherein no immediate sharing of feelings, no shared empathy is possible. As seen earlier, for her, the “collective reason of humanity,” is the reflective idea of humanity and a worldly sociability for which there is no corresponding empirical reality. As Lyotard puts it, entirely in keeping with Arendt’s position, “there is no assignable community of feeling, no affective consensus in fact.”57 As we have seen, the judging sensus communis is dislocated from the space and time of the empirical world of common sense. Thus, there is no empirical experience of the sensus communis, no actual historical or social community.
As noted earlier, the sensus communis is animated by the cosmopolitan idea and comprised of world spectators. The animating affect of the cosmopolitan communis is international solidarity, wh ich Arendt claims arises out of an “elemental shame, which many people of various nationalities share with one another today, [and] is what is finally left of our international solidarity.”58 Arendt indicates that shame and the accompanying horror are the foundational affects of a sensus communis animated by a sense of the real. While the Greeks were provoked to think out of a sense of wonder (thaumazein) at the beauty of the world, wonder today, she claims, is provoked by the twin senses of horror and shame at what human beings are capable of doing. Only those who are provoked to think and judge out of shame and horror can be “relied upon when it comes to fighting fearlessly, uncompromisingly, everywhere against the incalculable evil that men are capable of bringing about.”59 Shame and horror, she argues, are the “pre-political affects and in need of political expression.”60
While Arendt does not explicitly elaborate upon the political affects that allow for the political expression of shame and horror, I submit that she does provide insight into what these might be.61 Chief among them is anger or outrage. In her reply to Eric Voegelin, who criticized The Origins of Totalitarianism for being too passionate, too angry, and thereby lacking the objectivity and dispassionateness required for historical judgment, Arendt asks whether it is possible or even desirable to write sine ira et studio (without hate or anger) when writing of this event. As Arendt puts it, referencing Marx, whose writings she argues emerge from outrage at the immense poverty of the British working classes during the Industrial Revolution:
If I describe these conditions without permitting my indignation to interfere, I have lifted this particular phenomenon out of its context in human society and have thereby robbed it of part of its nature, deprived it of one of its important inherent qualities. For to arouse indignation is one of the qualities of excessive poverty insofar as poverty occurs among human beings.62
Anger emerges from the worldly event of poverty, and is thereby world-disclosing, affecting actors and thinkers, who in turn ought to respond, either on streets or in libraries. Anger discloses a particular worldly event, in this case poverty, opening the self to the world and to the plurality of being with others in the world.
As noted earlier, Arendt also counts lamentation as one of the chief political affects of the sensus communis insofar as it is an affect infusing the memory of violence, both the memory of oppression and the violence used to resist it. Rosa Luxemburg is the exemplary figure whose revolutionary struggle was animated by lamentation rather than celebration for the unavoidable violence of resistance. Arendt’s profound admiration of Luxemburg lies in her lamentation at the death and violence of revolutionary action and her steadfast refusal to transform this death and violence into a form of benediction. Strikingly, Arendt suggests that political lamentation allows for the overcoming of the sacralization of violence that presently animates the nation-state, which continues to think of its citizens as martyrs, sacrificing their lives on the altar of the nation in order for the nation to live. Lamentation refuses this sacralization. Again, Arendt’s sensus communis is not redemptive. Refusing a transcendent meaning that would provide a glorious redemption for violence and destruction, lamentation allows for earthly and worldly endurance by bearing what has happened, the latter the work of judging’s production imagination.
Lamentation and outrage are tempered by joy and praise, political affects that offer reconciliation with a world gone terribly awry. Arendt turns again to Brecht who “understood what Nietzsche first understood, namely, that with the death of god and with the absence of hell, there can be now jubilation, liberation from fear rather than despair or nihilism.” Earthly joy liberates from fear that Arendt, following Lessing, counts as one of two “political evils,” the other being hope. Hope, she argues, leaps over reality while fear shrinks back from it. Joy, accompanied by earthly praise, is an “intensified awareness of reality” emerging from a “passionate openness to the world and love of it.”63
Again, the sensus communis is not a redemptive communis. At the end of his essay on Arendt, addressing the question of the banality of evil, Lyotard asks, “Who can pardon it? Who can set it right?”64 Arendt would answer: There is no pardon, no setting it right. As Horkheimer points out, the murdered are dead, no redemption is possible. Arendt would agree. There is instead only the imperative of retaining a fierce sense of reality, of judging from a common and enlarged sense of inhabiting the earth and world, animated by shame and horror, outrage, lamentation, and the improbable joy and earthly praise emerging from the passionate engagement with the world and the common sense of the real that it carries with it.
Notes
1 Hannah Arendt, Life of the Mind (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 5.
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid., 12–13.
4 Ibid., 46.
5 Ibid., 49.
6 Ibid., 52.
7 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harvest, 1975), 9.
8 See Hannah Arendt, “Religion and Politics,” in Essays in Understanding, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1994), 379.
9 Hannah Arendt, “Understanding and Politics,” in Essays in Understanding, 310.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid., 318.
13 Ibid., 319.
14 Ibid., n. 12.
15 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (New York: Penguin, 1963), 53.
16 Ibid., 53.
17 Hannah Arendt, “Thinking and Moral Considerations,” in Responsibility and Judgment, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2003), 160.
18 Ibid.
19 In chapter six of The Human Condition, “Vita Activa and the Modern Age,” Arendt has already begun to show how the modern age is characterized by a loss of common sense. See especially her discussion of Descartes and the modern sense of “world alienation.”
20 Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1958), 50.
21 Ibid.
22 Arendt, Life of the Mind, 15.
23 Ibid., 19.
24 Ibid., 20.
25 Ibid.
26 Ibid., 21.
27 Ibid., 29.
28 Ibid., 36.
29 Ibid., 64.
30 Kimberley F. Curtis, “Aesthetic Foundations of Democratic Politics in the Work of Hannah Arendt,” in Hannah Arendt and the Meaning of Politics, ed. Calhoun and McGowan (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 39.
31 Arendt, Life of the Mind, 21.
32 Curtis, “Aesthetic Foundations of Democratic Politics in the Work of Hannah Arendt,” 44.
33 Arendt, Human Condition, 7.
34 Cecilia Sjöholm, Doing Aesthetics with Arendt (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 81.
35 Arendt, Life of the Mind, 77.
36 Ibid., 87.
37 Ibid.
38 Ibid., 209.
39 Ibid.
40 Ibid., 215.
41 Ibid., 94.
42 Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1982), 13.
43 Ibid., 74.
44 Ibid.
45 Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, 43.
46 Ibid.
47 Ibid., 76.
48 Ibid., 75.
49 Hannah Arendt, “Karl Jaspers: Citizen of the World?,” in Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt Brace 1993), 83.
50 Arendt, Life of the Mind, 216.
51 Arendt, “Understanding and Politics,” 322.
52 Ibid., 323.
53 Ibid.
54 David Ingram, “The Postmodern Kantianism of Arendt and Lyotard,” in Judging Lyotard, ed. Andrew Benjamin (London: Routledge, 1992), 126. Ingram claims in this same essay that Arendt is positing “an ideal community of speakers capable of agreeing with one another” (ibid.). I disagree, arguing that the common of the sensus communis must be understood as a common sense of humanity and common worldly sociability. As I have tried to show, Arendt’s understanding of the common is made up of a plurality of perspectives that are neither with or against, neither in agreement nor in disagreement with one another. Again, the common of the sensus communis is the world and not an agreement or consensus among the spectators.
55 Hannah Arendt, “On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts on Lessing,” in Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1968), 6.
56 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner J. Pluhar (New York: Hackett, 1998), Section 40.
57 Jean-Francois Lyotard, “Sensus Communis,” in Judging Lyotard, ed. Andrew Benjamin (London: Routledge, 1992), 24.
58 Hannah Arendt, “Organized Guilt and Universal Responsibility,” in Essays in Understanding, 131.
59 Ibid.
60 Ibid.
61 For a much longer discussion of the political affects of anger, lamentation, and joy in Hannah Arendt’s thought, please see my essay, “Recovering the Sensus Communis: Arendt’s Phenomenology of Political Affects,” in Phenomenology and the Political, ed. S. West Gurley and Geoff Pfeifer (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016), especially 9–16.
62 Hannah Arendt, “A Reply to Eric Voegelin,” in Essays in Understanding, 403.
63 Arendt, “On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts on Lessing.”
64 Jean-Francois Lyotard, “The Survivor,” in Toward the Post-Modern, ed. Robert Harvey and Mark S. Roberts (Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1995), 155.