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Between Philosophy And Politics: The Political Philosophy Of Hannah Arendt's Study

Posted on:2007-02-03Degree:DoctorType:Dissertation
Country:ChinaCandidate:Y L WangFull Text:PDF
GTID:1116360212984703Subject:Foreign philosophy
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When Hannah Arendt sought to understand totalitarianism, she found there was a vital tension between philosophy and politics, between man as a thinking being and man as an acting being. For her, the conflict between philosophy and politics means the attitude philosophers are likely to have toward the whole realm of human affairs. She thinks that the traditional philosophers degrade action to work out of aspiration for absolute and truth and dislike of individuality and opinion. For her, politics means the life style of sharing words and deeds as Aristotle said, the bios politikos, based on human's existential conditions of plurality and natality. To say that we are political animals is to say that we can use words and actions to show who we are, a political community is a common space which is opened in words and deeds between persons. Politics—talking with others, concert in act, showing yourself before others, speaking opinions and taking responsibility for the common things—have its dignity for itself, and represents what she called "the public happiness" which can not be experienced in the private life. She deeply objects the modern privatization and looks the modern crisis as the political crisis, because for her "wherever the relevance of speech is at stake, matters become political by definition, for speech is what makes man a political being." She deeply concerns that if we can not communicate and interact with others and see the world with other's perspectives, we would not know who we are and what we are doing.The chapter one analyses Arendt's critique on Western traditional political philosophy. According to her view, there was an unification of thought and action, as well as theory and praxis in Polis. But for eternity versus immortality established by the Greek philosophy, Plato and Aristotle established the priority of "vita contemplativa" to "vita activd" and substituted making for acting, which eliminating autonomy of politics and dominating the Western tradition of political philosophy, which even shared by our modern. In her views, the modern secularization which in general means the upside down of thought and action never changes the conceptualstructure set forth by Plato. On the contrary, under the dominating condition of modern science in which knowledge means taking action, acting means making something, the mode of making goes into the realm of human affairs from nature, so that the human beings not only make nature but also make state and history. Thought and action at the same time become functional activities of society and history in the "progress" of the technological age and lose the significance of both.Chapter two analyses Arendt's political ontology and phenomenology surrounding her nuclear concepts of action, the public space and the world. I think these three concepts sum up the comprehensive meaning of politics in her thought: self -revelation of individuals, appearance of political realm, the common world and its history and future. Mostly, these concepts aim at her critique of modernity rather than philosophical construction, for her, the distinction of labor\work \action is against modern naturalism and instrumentalism, the duality of the private realm and the public against "the rise of the social", and the importance of the world against the modern world-alienation. Many Critiques for her thought focus on her these distinctions, the book would examine her distinction between labor and work from Marx' theory, examine her distinction between work and action form Heidegger's theory(we can see the trisection as her secret dialogue with Marx and Heidegger). And examine her distinction between private and public from feminism.From the perspective of phenomenology, action and world both are parts of politics and interdependent: world is a "between" opened by plural actions and the very source of meaning from which actions generate. But in reality, they have different demands. The demand of action for novelty may conflict with the demands of world for stability and continuality, the agonal spirit of action may destroy the common world. It is not only a problem of how to coordinate innovation and conservation, freedom and obedience, but also a problem of reality: the political activity and its realm are occupied by other activities so that people become homeless and rootless in the modern age, which she called "world-alienation". The world became more important in her articles in 60's. Unlike Greek polis as the prototype of political experience in the Human Condition, now the political experience of Roman--all later actions be hold and added to the first foundation-- became anexample for her. She used the Roman tradition against the Hebrew-Christian tradition. When reflecting on the crises of modern culture and education, she also recalled the classical humanism from Roman. In On Revolution, she made an ontological and historical reconstruction for modern revolution. According her interpretation, modern revolution means that people open a space of freedom spontaneously. By analyzing the success of American Revolution, first, she illustrated that the French Revolution confused the social problem with freedom unsuccessfully; Second, she interpreted modern constitutionalism as the act of constituting government, rather than a set of constitutions to protect private freedom in general; Third, she thought about how toremain this new body of politics stable--this is a difficulty of modernrepublicanism, and based on phenomenology, she resorted to the "beginning" coeval with "principle" which make its appearance in the world.Arendt always refused to be called a "philosopher", but in her later age, especially after her participation in the Eichmman Trial in 1964, she said she must "go back to philosophy". She began to reflect the political significance of the mental life and answer "what does thinking means for people?" So Chapter Three is indispensable to answer how Arendt resolve the conflict between philosophy and politics. Her introspection about the life of mind dismantled the old conflict between vita contemplativa and vita active, proved that even when thinking, we were still in the public world and communicated with others. Especially, she found judgment — — to think the particular qua particular, to put ourselves in thought in the place ofmore persons--as an exemplar bridge connecting thinking with acting, vitacontemplativa with vita activa. This chapter illustrates her interpretations about Arestotle's practical judgment (phronesis ) and Kant's aesthetic judgment. Wavering between politics and philosophy, Arendt sees the shadow of totalitarianism in thinking and acting at the same time: when plural action is regarded as instrumental work or consumptive labor, or when active thinking is regarded as specialist's knowing or logic reasoning.But at last, Arendt understood judgment as Kant's reflective judgment of spectator,not Aristotle's practical judgment of actor and insisted on the basic comparison between thinking and acting, why? The book supposes that her choice is of some relevance to the impasse of modern freedom. "Modernity" means we have lost everything timeless and universal norms or values from traditional theology and metaphysics, means the complete historicization of human's existence. Arendt also believed that we have not any universal and absolute knowledge as many contemporary philosophers, and proved plurality, spontaneity and aesthetic performance of human life from ontology. But she could not refuse the universal as the French post-modernists, otherwise she would refuse human's capability to understand their selves and their world, because for her, to think means to generalize. From the impasse of modern freedom, the conflict between philosophy and politics emerges as the conflict between the general and the particular, the necessity and the contingency, how we can give up pursuing the necessity of history and give meanings for human's action? She said: "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 so, we may reclaim our human dignity, win it back, as it were." In addition, she always detested many kinds of theories were used in practice and tried to change the world in the twenties' century, she thinks that actions would be done in their particular occasions, theory can not reduce to practice and philosophy can not reduce to some creeds of political activities. In this point, she insisted on that she should only "understand what happened" as a thinker.If to be called a political philosopher has any meaning for her, that is a spectator and a story-teller. We can say she didn't resolve this conflict successfully, but just as R. J. Bernstein said, this is one of deepest problems in our age.
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