The Exploration Of Arendt’s Positive Freedom View

Hannah Arendt is one of the greatest original creativity ideologistand political theoretician. Arendt had written abundant works during herlife and put forward a lot of her own opinions to the current politicalsituation. Her positive freedom view also came up with new and originalideas about freedom. She believed that the true definition of freedom canonly be established from politics. Freedom was tightly connected withhuman’s creativity, worldliness and variety, and the manifest of freedomcan’t do without the existence of public domain. To compare with thenegative view of freedom, the basic feature of this view of freedomconsisted in its positivity. Namely it was not negative freedom which was“from pressing”, but a positive political way of life, a real existence ofdiversity. To compare with social contract theory, the most basic featureof it was non dominant. Namely, it was not mandatory democracy, butnon dominant freedom. To compare with Marx freedom, its most basicfeature was purity, namely it was not a mutual evolution between the necessity field and political freedom field, but a separation of politicalfreedom field and necessity field. Arendt believed that the action was theway to obtain freedom, and only in the process of action, the freedomcould be fully revealed. This action referred to the active action in publicdomain instead of negative action.The rationality of Arendt’s positive freedom view was mainlyembodied in two aspects, one was the human relations of politicalfreedom, and the other was the publicity of political freedom. Thelimitation of Arendt’s view of freedom was mainly embodied in theeconomic foundation’s limitation, which meant the general freedom formost people and the special freedom for the minority. The limitation ofits core connotation was the fully free and the pure free. The limitation ofthe way to realize it was the unity and partition. The limitation of thepractical confirmation was the feasibility of reality and the incidental ofreverie. Because the problem that how the political life can berejuvenated in modern situation is also an issue that human’s freedomhow can be realized. So to explore the reasonable and limitation ofArendt’s positive freedom view has a very significant use for reference for today’s China’s political remodeling and the development of thepolitical democracy’s connotation; for China’s public domain’s benignconstruction; as well as for developing a political democracy withChinese characteristics.