Hannah Arendt’s Aesthetic Politics: Freedom and the Beautiful

310 Pages·2019·3.064 MB·English

by  Jim Josefson

Hannah Arendt’s
Aesthetic Politics
Freedom and the Beautiful
Jim Josefson
Hannah Arendt’s Aesthetic Politics
Jim Josefson
Hannah Arendt’s
Aesthetic Politics
Freedom and the Beautiful
Jim Josefson
Department of Political Science
Bridgewater College
Bridgewater, VA, USA
ISBN 978-3-030-18691-3 ISBN 978-3-030-18692-0 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18692-0
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A
cknowledgements
I would like to thank the many scholars who commented on the parts of
this book I presented at several panels of the Midwest Political Science
Association National Conference, the 2011 Arendt Circle meeting, the
2015 Western Political Science Association annual meeting, and the 2nd
Istanbul Critical Theory Conference (in Exile). These include, espe-
cially, Matthew Weidenfeld, Jonathan Schwartz, Wynne Walker Moskop,
Claudia Leeb, Lars Rensmann, Gaye İlhan Demiryol, and Zeynep
Gambetti. I especially owe Martin Shuster for his suggestion that Arendt
“got Kant right” and that I should read Henry Allison. Rafael Zawisza
provided not only encouragement but the sort of intellectual friendship
I thought only existed in Arendt’s letters. And, Agata Bielik-Robson
pushed me to think more deeply about the influence of Duns Scotus
and horror. Finally, I couldn’t have persevered through graduate school,
let alone through writing this book, without the friendship of Jonathan
Bach, Art Ward, and Scott Solomon.
v
c
ontents
1 Introduction 1
2 The Moment 19
3 The Beautiful 71
4 Judgment 125
5 Spirit 159
6 Res publica 189
7 Conversations 247
Bibliography 283
Index 299
vii
l f
ist of igures
Fig. 6.1 Greek polis (color figure online) 211
Fig. 6.2 Roman republicanism (color figure online) 217
Fig. 6.3 Hannah Arendt’s radical republicanism (color figure online) 220
Fig. 6.4 Orthodox Arendtian republicanism (color figure online) 221
ix
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
In 1975, mere months before the end of her life, Hannah Arendt
traveled to Copenhagen, Denmark, to receive the Sonning Prize for
contributions to European civilization. In her acceptance speech, she
engaged in a sort of public dialogue, half with the audience and half
with herself. I take it as a model of her thought as a whole given that,
in the speech, she gives a public performance, thinks aloud, makes judg-
ments and even shows the ambivalence of her will. That is, we see all the
components of Arendt’s philosophy in a compact space such that we are
afforded a singular perspective on her project. In this moment, I think,
we find some surprising revelations that call into question some of our
core assumptions about the nature of that project.
One of those surprises is that Arendt publicly confessed to being
in one of the most clichéd states of the 1970s: an identity crisis. And,
even more remarkably, she proceeded to work her way through a public
self-therapy session. “Let me try and sort these things out,” she asked
her Danish audience.
Arendt began that task by reflecting on the oddness of the occasion.
She was given an award for contributions to Europe after having left it
involuntarily. She fled from the Nazis twice, from Germany to Paris in
1933 and from France to America in 1941. However, she did not just
reluctantly resort to American citizenship. Her naturalization, after care-
ful study of the American Founding, involved a voluntary, conscious
identification with the political and philosophical project of American
republicanism and a rejection of European civilization.1 She told her
© The Author(s) 2019 1
J. Josefson, Hannah Arendt’s Aesthetic Politics,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18692-0_1
2 J. JOSEFSON
audience that she came to associate Europe with everything she stood
against: “homogeneous populations,” an “organic sense of history,”
class divisions and a politics that revolves around “national sovereignty.”
And yet, Arendt confessed that she maintained her Europeanness with
a “slightly polemical stubbornness,” despite her American loyalties and
the fact that she “never wished to belong [to any identity], not even in
Germany.” She associated this Europeanness with her “mother tongue,”
her “rather happy years in France,” and moments like the Danes’ refusal
to allow their German occupiers to round up Jews with “mere words,
spoken freely and publicly.”2 Taken together, along with her recog-
nition of her Jewishness and femaleness, Arendt’s introduction to her
speech accepted “what” she was, her collective memberships: German,
American, Jew, woman, and European. However, these sorts of identi-
fications were, crucially, not the source of her identity crisis. She appar-
ently only brought them up as if to say that an identity crisis occasioned
by these associations would constitute an inability to reconcile with
rather simple and obvious realities.3
The pressing issue of Arendt’s crisis, instead, was that the Danes had
recognized her in a way that she had not recognized herself, as a pub-
lic figure who made contributions to European civilization on par with
Churchill, Niels Bohr, and Bertrand Russell. We might call this iden-
tity public-Arendt. This by itself shouldn’t have been much of a prob-
lem for Arendt, since she had “always believed that no one can know
himself, for no one appears to himself as he appears to others.”4 This,
after all, is a core principle of Arendt’s thought. For Arendt, “Being
and appearing coincide,” so, if the reality of Hannah Arendt appeared
only to her audience, then she could hardly complain when they
judged her.
So why the crisis? Well, for one thing, Arendt knew that she
had “instinctive impulses” to shyness such that she could not show
everything to the public. To me, that means she recognized that the
public was missing something about Arendt the physical person. We
might call this person of private impulses and drives natural-Arendt.
Arendt then immediately admitted to the irony of her introversion,
for she recognized it would seem hypocritical for someone who wrote
books about the glory of showing off in a public realm to be only a the-
orist instead of an activist. However, she insisted that it “is indeed quite
possible to understand and to reflect about politics without being a
so-called political animal.”5 So, now her crisis is coming more into focus.
1 INTRODUCTION 3
We already have three Arendts. We will call this last person who reveals
her understandings and reflections in books professor-Arendt.
But then she went on to describe even more Arendts, the identities
influenced by anti-political “trends” of her formative years, the 1920s.
The first of those was the trend that favored “a contemplative way of
life,” philosophy, over public life. For Arendt herself, this simply meant
thinking, “a soundless dialogue between me and myself [which] is the
only way I can keep myself company and be content with it.”6 It is not
the same professor-Arendt that she revealed inadvertently in her books,
but the Arendt that appeared to herself in her own consciousness. We
might call this person thinking-Arendt.
The Sonning Prize honoree defended this thinking-Arendt as neces-
sary when traditions and roles are in flux, like in the twentieth century.
Such a person comes to terms with the reality of the world and herself
even when not accepting awards from European states. But she then
went on to describe other fashionable ways of thinking from the 1920s
that separated persons from such genuine thoughtfulness. One was ide-
ological thinking that darkened the public sphere with clouds of chau-
vinism and propaganda. People who thought this way, Arendt explained,
“had the net effect of desubstantializing every issue they touched, in
addition to confusing utterly the minds of their audiences.” Her word
choice here, “desubstantializing,” implied that ideological discourse
dissolved the solidity of substantial realities with a stream of acidic non-
sense. It liquefied the public into mere publicity. In that environment,
Arendt explained, anyone who entered public life was made a member
of either a partisan group or part of “an international ‘society of celeb-
rities’” none of which turned out to have any lasting importance. The
implication here, it seems to me, is that such fame would be worth-
while if it were not so fleeting. Then, it would entail a sort of glory
that would confer immortality. So, to the extent that Arendt’s iden-
tity becomes ideological, where there is true Arendtian philosophy, we
have another Arendt I will denote Arendtian-Arendt. You might say
that the point of academic scholarship usually is to prove that one’s
Arendtian-Arendt professor-Arendt. And, to the extent that Arendt’s
=
fame becomes akin to Plato, Machiavelli, or Washington rather than
a Kardashian, Paul Whiteman or Lincoln Beachey, we could call her
glorious-Arendt.
Now, Arendt showed little interest in either Arendtian-Arendt or
glorious-Arendt, but she did confess to have been influenced by the