Rebecca Seté Jacobson Submitted to the University of Hertfordshire in partial fulfillment of the ...

208 Pages·2013·0.94 MB·English

BORN AGAIN: NATALITY, NORMATIVITY AND NARRATIVE
IN HANNAH ARENDT’S THE HUMAN CONDITION

Rebecca Seté Jacobson

Submitted to the University of Hertfordshire in partial fulfillment of the
requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.
June 2012
To Norm.
For BT, BB, REL, JHT and AMGT.
In memory of Lindie.
Under any and all circumstances tell yourself often and mean it—I don’t believe in
defeat.
—Norman Vincent Peale
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

If I had my druthers, my acknowledgements would fill at least as many pages as
those used to discuss the works of Hannah Arendt. Since that is not a possibility, I
will name just a few faculty, friends and family members without whom I would not
have been able to complete this dissertation. I do so, however, with the caveat that
there are many, many more amazing people whom I love and appreciate for the
beauty, richness and warmth they bring to my life. I will trust that they know who they
are, and that they understand their importance to transcend any words I could ever
put on a page.
With that said, let me begin by offering my deepest and most profound
gratitude to Shaun Gallagher. I marvel every single day at the fact I am mentored by
a scholar of his renown. Not only does he possess an unparalleled intellect, which he
employs to prolifically produce the brilliant scholarship which is reshaping the way we
think about the mind and the body, he is also a kind and gentle man. He has
generously given me his time and attention, calmed me in my more neurotic and
high-strung moments, pushed me when he knew I could produce better work, always
believed in my ability and respected my voice, and has been immeasurably generous
in offering me amazing professional opportunities to supplement my studies. I know
with absolute certainty that I will never be able to repay Shaun for all he has done,
but I will strive to at least be worthy of the gifts he has given to me.
I must also thank my other two Supervisors, Danièle Moyal-Sharrock and
Daniele D. Hutto. Both Danièle and Dan are scholars of the highest caliber, and my
work has been greatly influenced by their attention to detail, academic rigor and
insightful feedback. I am privileged to have had their guidance. Furthermore, this
dissertation has benefited greatly from the involvement of Jonathan Tennis, who
remained steadfast in his commitment to read and comment on my work even when
the process proved itself to be a test of mental strength and endurance. Additionally,
I would like to acknowledge the copyediting and formatting skills of Lee Davidson.
The Sixteenth Edition of The Chicago Manual of Style is 1026 pages long and,
therefore, something I was grateful not to have to tackle without her expertise.
Beyond the excellent academic and technical advisement I received, I simply
would not have survived writing this dissertation without an immense amount of
moral support and encouragement. I would like to especially acknowledge my
parents, Stephen and Rena, who raised me to believe that the pursuit of knowledge
and of understanding are worthy ends in and of themselves. I am also grateful to Jim
and Anna Annarelli, and Norman Smith. Jim always took the completion of my
dissertation to be an absolute and unquestionable given, which, in darker hours,
provided necessary motivation. Anna unfailing made me feel as though writing this
paper was akin to hanging the stars in the sky, and I will never cease to appreciate
how smart and special she believes me to be. For a dozen years now, Norm has
offered advice and encouragement at crucial decision-making points, and I shudder
to think how lost I would be without his well-reasoned opinions.
I would be absolutely remiss if I did not acknowledge my indebtedness to
Sarah Kay, Liz Kicak, Angelina Garcia Tennis, Brianna Day, Jaya Eeten and Bryan
Thompson who were, without a doubt, my front-line dissertation ground troops. Sarah
understood with absolute clarity the power of an encouraging card, text, call or email.
Liz possessed an uncanny ability to know just when to check in and make sure
everything was all right, which, at the moment she would call, it almost never was. In
the course of writing the paper, Angelina gave me a graduate education in what it
means to be a family and, in the process, even coined the phrase, “See you later,
dissertator!” Brianna reminded me that there is nothing more powerful than finding
the courage to face our deepest fears in order to build a better future for ourselves.
Jaya, as she has for the past 20 years, centered my universe, and I know without
question how much of this project is owed to her. Finally, anything I could say about
Bryan, my beautiful, brilliant, kind and soulful husband, would be woefully insufficient.
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He is my blue sky, my best friend, my heart, my home and my reason for being. He
sees me for “who” I am and, like a miracle, he loves me anyway. I cannot thank him
enough for helping me fulfill my dream of becoming a doctor (although not the kind
that helps people!).
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TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT i
CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 1
Contributions to Knowledge 4
Structure of the Project 7
CHAPTER 2: OUR BIO-ONTOLOGICAL NATALITY 10
The Birth of Natality 10
The Private Realm, Labor, and Our Bio-Ontological Natality 18
Labor and the Fulfillment of Biological Necessity 22
The Work of Our Hands: Building a Common World 26
The Space of Appearance, Action and Our Existential Natality 31
CHAPTER 3: POTENTIALITY TO ACTUALITY: OUR EXISTENTIAL NATALITY 34
Labor Pains: Three Formulations of the Second Birth 35
The Enacted Story and the Web of Relationships 46
CHAPTER 4: REIFICATION, RECOGNITION AND REMEMBRANCE 54
Reification and Recognition 54
Reification and Remembrance: Honneth Meets Hannah 58
Spectator Judgment 64
From Heroes to No-Bodies 70
CHAPTER 5: SOCIAL COGNITION AND THE HUMAN CONDITION 77
Social Cognition 78
Primary Intersubjectivity 81
Secondary Intersubjectivity 91
Participatory Sense-Making 97
CHAPTER 6: NARRATIVE 103
Selfhood and the Story: Lived Narratives and Retrospective Recountings 103
Defining Arendtian Narratives 111
Reified Work and Conditioning Object: The Two Functions of Arendtian
Narratives 119
CHAPTER 7: RUBY 122
Arendt’s “Reflections on Little Rock” 122
Observations on New Orleans 125
Steinbeck and the Cheerleaders 132
Rockwell Gets Real 135
Robert and Ruby 138
Conclusion 144
NOTES 149
BIBLIOGRAPHY 189
ABSTRACT

Within the text of The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt circumscribes the concept of
natality in ways that tend to conflate its biological, historical, institutional and
phenomenological dimensions. This dissertation seeks to clarify this concept and the
conceptual territory that surrounds it. Specifically, it is argued that Arendt’s
construction of the concept of natality is inherently dual. Each person is delivered into
a worldly environment through her primary, biological birth. As soon as she is born,
she begins to be conditioned to the accepted normative standards of her community.
A gap necessarily exists, however, between the person she is socio-culturally
conditioned to be, and who she is explicitly, uniquely and authentically. When deeds
and words are employed in service of revealing someone’s individual identity or
essence, and thereby showing her to be more than simply a mirror of her cultural
conditioning, it heralds a second birth, one which is existential instead of biological.
According to Arendt, this existential natality must take place in the presence of other
existential agents, and also may be witnessed by a spectator who then seeks to
express the significance of what has occurred to those removed from the original
event either by space and/or time. This expression takes the form of artifactual
objects, including works of art, architectural monuments and various forms of
narratives. Arendt’s theory concerning the creation of these objects contains two
major problems that are critically addressed within this project. The first problem
concerns the spectator’s capacity for making judgments. Works written after The
Human Condition are shown to demonstrate Arendt’s attempts to address this issue.
The second problem concerns the way in which Arendt portrays the issue of
embodiment. This issue must be reconciled both by appealing to work from within
her canon, as well as through the introduction of recent scholarship from the field of
social cognition. The project concludes with the presentation of a concrete, historical
example intended to be illustrative of the preceding theoretical material.
i
CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION

Hannah Arendt died unexpectedly of a heart attack in her New York apartment on
December 4, 1975. Two months later, a tribute written by Hans J. Morgenthau, her
friend and colleague at the New School for Social Research, was published in the
journal Political Theory. Therein, Morgenthau stated that she was “propelled forward
by a passion whose object was thinking itself. As others enjoy playing cards or the
horses for their own sake, so Hannah Arendt enjoyed thinking. The analogy is,
however, correct only with the important qualification that she did not play games
with thoughts but was deadly serious about them.” He then added, “To tell the truth
as she saw it or at least to demolish error parading as truth was for her a high
vocation.”1 Of course, errors parading as truths are not limited to any one discipline
or domain of thought, and it is therefore not surprising that Arendt published works of
journalism, literary criticism, history, political theory and, of course, philosophy.2 No
matter the subject, Morgenthau stated in summary of her work, “Familiar concepts
and issues looked different after her mind had worked them over.”3
In her 1958 text The Human Condition, Arendt engaged just the sort of
familiar concepts and issues Morgenthau referenced, including what she termed
“action.” Arendt’s formulation of the concept was, however, so complex and multi-
faceted—encompassing birth and death, words and deed, the public and private, the
individual and the plurality—that, even before The Human Condition was published,
she had started writing another book which would have offered needed clarification.4
In a grant application submitted to the Rockefeller Foundation seeking support for the
project, Arendt stated that The Human Condition “actually is a kind of prolegomena
to the book which I now intend to write. It will continue where the other book ends. In
terms of human activities, it will be concerned exclusively with action and thought.”5
Arendt went on to detail how this new book, which she had tentatively titled
1
Introduction Into Politics, would contain two areas of focus: “First, a critical
reexamination of the chief traditional concepts and conceptual frameworks of political
thinking—such as means and ends, authority, government, power, law, war, etc.”
Second, Arendt would provide a systematic account that was not so much concerned
with politics per se, as with the fundamental categories of human activities from
which anything political must start:
Here I shall be chiefly concerned with the various modi of human plurality and
the institutions which correspond to them. In other words, I shall undertake a
reexamination of the old question of forms of government, their principles and
their modes of being together: to be together with other men and with one’s
equals, from which springs action, and to be together with one’s self, to which
the activity of thinking corresponds. Hence, the book should end with a
discussion of the relationship between acting and thinking, or between politics
and philosophy.6
Much of the material Arendt completed for Introduction Into Politics had to do
with the first area of focus outlined in her grant proposal; those writings became part
of Between Past and Future: Six Exercises in Political Thought, which was published
in 1961. Arendt did not, however, meaningfully reengage with many of the issues she
intended to address in the second part of Introduction Into Politics for more than a
decade after she wrote to the Rockefeller Foundation. At that point, it seemed as
though Arendt intended to bring many key concepts full-circle through The Life of the
Mind, a trilogy dedicated to explicating the faculties of thinking, willing and judging.
These mental activities—considered in antiquity and the Middle Ages to be the
purview of the solitary man living a life of contemplation, a vita contemplativa—were
to stand in contrast to the pluralistic and worldly life of the vita activa that Arendt
described in The Human Condition, a life focused on another triad: labor, work and
action.7
2