Simon Critchley’s Problem of Politics and Hannah Arendt’s Idealism for the USA

Abstract

An ethical politics should answer the question of how to preclude the assimilation of otherness. Hannah Arendt’s faith in the ethical ideals of political community provides a viable response to this problem of politics when a government does not reflect the thinking of the diversity of its governed. Her dramatic voices linking conscience and consciousness continue to resonate in contemporary American political discourse surrounding such issues as homophobia, torture in the war on terror, xenophobia, the moral responsibility of the financial managers of capitalism, and immigration. Her personal odyssey from foreigner to a voiced member of an ethical political community is a model for outsiders. Along the way she cultivates the distinction between private and public, empowers the political pariah, and questions political space. By opposing the status of a pariah excluded from public space, she advocates political friendship built upon the discussion of common stakes. Arendt brings the idealism of Kant into a political application of the ethics promoted by Levinas. Her democratic framework for questioning and discussion makes Kant’s ethics more humane by fostering dialogue with others to promote the civic virtues of forgiveness, compassion, and Gelassenheit (allowing others to be) in an ethics of hospitality within democracy in the USA.