Arendt's Thinking Research Articles

Hannah Arendt and the promises of politics beyond sovereignty

Hannah Arendt expresses several critiques of the Western philosophical tradition in her work due to conceptual misunderstandings that played a crucial role in the course of many events in our history. This article attempts to understand how concepts such as power, freedom, and sovereignty appear in Arendt's thinking and shed light on our understanding of politics. Thinking about the relationship between these elements allows us to understand that there are other possibilities for politics besides representative democracies. It is about seeking the centrality of politics as an exercise of freedom that is only possible when we meet and act in concert.

Old Facts, New Beginnings: Thinking with Arendt about Algorithmic Decision-Making

AbstractMore and more decisions in our societies are made by algorithms. What are such decisions like, and how do they compare to human decision-making? I contrast central features of algorithmic decision-making with three key elements—plurality, natality, and judgment—of Hannah Arendt's political thought. In “Arendtian practices,” human beings come together as equals, exchange arguments, and make joint decisions, sometimes bringing something new into the world. With algorithmic decision-making taking over more and more areas of life, opportunities for “Arendtian practices” are under threat. Moreover, there is the danger that algorithms are tasked with decisions for which they are ill-suited. Analyzing the contrast with Arendt's thinking can be a starting point for delineating realms in which algorithmic decision-making should or should not be welcomed.

La dimensión política del mal radical y de la banalidad del mal en el pensamiento de Hannah Arendt

El mal radical y la banalidad del mal son las dos formas en que Arendt ha catalogado al mal totalitario en distintas etapas de su obra. El objetivo del presente trabajo es abordar las diferentes concepciones arendtianas del mal desde la perspectiva política con el fin de determinar si existen continuidades o si, por el contrario, hay un cambio abrupto en el pensamiento de Arendt. La dificultad que debe enfrentarse es que el problema del mal y las reflexiones sobre lo político no son temas abordados por Arendt de forma directa sino que son contenidos transversales que deben rastrearse en la totalidad de su obra. Se concluye que el mal radical y el mal banal no son nociones excluyentes sino que remiten a dos niveles diferentes, uno más general y estructural y el otro vinculado con el comportamiento de los individuos dentro de las estructuras gubernamentales estudiadas.

Federalismo ao pensamento de Hannah Arendt como exercício político do cidadão ao espaço público.

O presente estudo apresenta como tema o federalismo como reflexão do pensamento de Hannah Arendt. O tema é problematizado a partir do pressuposto sobre a ação como uma das atividades da vita activa e o espaço público como local do exercício das relações sociais e políticas entre os cidadãos de uma comunidade. A partir disso, pode-se supor a sua finalidade de coesão para os membros dessa comunidade como garantia da participação do indivíduo político com equidade pelo discurso, além do respeito da pluralidade de atos da convivência nesse espaço público decisório. No intuito de compreender o conceito do termo em discussão, utilizou-se como fundamentação teórica os estudos de Hannah Arendt acerca do termo “federalismo”. Por isso, ele é fruto do republicanismo como tema essencial do pensamento da autora. A pesquisa é bibliográfica e utiliza a compreensão e a reconstrução teórica dos textos de Hannah Arendt: A condição humana (1958), Sobre a Revolução (1962), A promessa da política (2005) e O que é política (1993). O principal resultado alcançado diz respeito à compreensão de que o sentido do termo confere uma condição de pertencimento e responsabilidade pelos atos decisórios de uma comunidade, pois o federalismo constitui o agir para estabelecer uma ordem e vigência de prerrogativas comuns entre a política e o direito.

A educação e resistência aos tempos sombrios: reflexões a partir de Hannah Arendt

O trabalho analisa, a partir do pensamento de Hannah Arendt, a concepção de educação e o conceito de mentira organizada. Hannah Arendt, pensadora judia, testemunhou tempos sombrios do regime totalitário na Alemanha em meados do século XX. Com o totalitarismo a mentira invadiu o espaço público de maneira organizada, através da propaganda de massa com objetivo de destruir o passado, a realidade e a política. Este trabalho fundamenta-se em textos da autora como “Verdade e Política” (1967) e “A mentira na política” (1971), que chamam à atenção que, mesmo findo os regimes totalitários, os riscos da manipulação da realidade e da história ainda espreitam a vida política contemporânea. Mesmo não tendo um caráter político, segundo o texto “Crise na educação”(1958) de Arendt, a educação tem a responsabilidade de apresentar e narrar às crianças e aos jovens uma herança cultural e histórica de um mundo comum. Com efeito, o presente trabalho busca defender que mesmo diante de todos os riscos a educação surge como um contraponto e resistência à mentira organizada.

Fictions of Migration in Contemporary Britain and Ireland by Carmen Zamorano Llena

Reviewed by: Fictions of Migration in Contemporary Britain and Ireland by Carmen Zamorano Llena Rita Sakr Fictions of Migration in Contemporary Britain and Ireland, by Carmen Zamorano Llena (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, 220 p., hardcover, €75) A broad range of scholarship explores literary representations of the Irish migrant experience across the world and, more recently, the experience of migration to an increasingly multicultural Ireland (Pilar Villar-Argaiz, 2017; Ailbhe McDaid, 2017; Anne Mulhall, 2020, among others). There is an even larger body of criticism on the dynamics of migration, diaspora, and asylum-seeking in British literature (Agnes Woolley, 2014; Matthew Chambers, 2015; Deirdre Osborne, 2016, among others). Given the intertwined histories and geographies of the two islands, constructing a coherently productive methodological [End Page 154] approach to the literatures of migration in the two countries in the same study is both a convincing as well as a challenging intellectual feat, especially from the perspectives of postcolonial theory and globalization studies. Yet Carmen Zamorano Llena's Fictions of Migration in Contemporary Britain and Ireland achieves precisely this. Zamorano Llena's monograph focuses on fiction published since the 1990s. While the pairing of Ireland–Britain in the title could suggest a duality of national literatures, the book's significant scholarly contribution is its exploration of a vast network of transnational dimensions, including the contributions of non-migrant writers on this topic. The introduction offers an overview of relevant fields, including comparative literature and world literature, as well as the multifaceted concept of cosmopolitanism. It may not necessarily be clear at the start in what ways and how successfully the study will map "the connection between present fictions of migration and earlier migration literature, as well as postcolonial writing and new forms of cosmopolitan writing, with special attention to their role in redefining national literature and literary traditions." However, the case studies in the six main chapters deliver on the promise, in some instances with astonishing rigor and originality. The succinct discussion of "new cosmopolitan theory" in terms of redefining the interrelationship of postcolonialism and globalization at the start of Chapter 2 is more impressive than the relatively brief close readings of the disruption of nationalist "home" imaginaries in Caryl Phillips's A Distant Shore and Foreigners. Chapter 3 cleverly addresses "the democratising effects" of Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin as a literary rendering of Ulrich Beck's concept of "inclusive differentiation" in terms of its narration of both the experience of 9/11 as well as of exile. Engaging Global North–Global South relations in Abdulrazak Gurnah's By the Sea and Gravel Heart, Chapter 4 incisively sets up Achille Mbembe's reconceptualized "Afropolitanism" as a groundwork to discover "new possible worldviews." Chapter 5 takes Jacques Rancière's work, particularly The Politics of Literature (2011), as well as Martha Nussbaum's and Sara Ahmed's writings on emotions, as a starting point to analyze Elif Shafak's Honour as "a fictional narrative that counters the simplifying narratives of the Muslim other." Chapter 6, on Rose Tremain's The Colour and The Gustav Sonata, is a standout in many respects, not least in its ambitious triangulation of Hannah Arendt's thinking on solidarity and "enlarged mentality" with Giorgio Agamben's concept of "bare life" and Michael Rothberg's notion of "noeuds de mémoire" in order to engage historical fiction in the context of what it correctly identifies as the fruitful "synergetic combination of migration studies and memory studies." The treatment of transcultural memories, particularly through Rothberg's "multidirectional memory," continues in Chapter 7 as a foundation to examine "the interconnections between Irish Famine diasporic [End Page 155] memory, transatlantic slavery past and Australian convict narratives" in Evelyn Conlon's Not the Same Sky. One of the study's strongest elements is the close analysis of formal techniques in the selected works of fiction. Zamorano Llena deftly addresses the often innovative narrative methods and motifs that approximate the sociohistorical shifts that are engendered and the ethico-political turns that are triggered by the "timespaces" of migration. This ranges from McCann's use of the metaphor of the tightrope walker signifying the migrant's "acrobatic mobility"; Gurnah's spatiotemporal "dialogism...

The Nature of Evil in Hannah Arendt’s Philosophy

The topic of has a central place in Hannah Arendt's thinking as it lies at the core of all her trains of thought. We analyze the ,,nature of evil in Hannah Arendt's philosophy through the study of her work and of her life experience, especially when she covered the trial of Eichmann in Jerusalem where she pointed out that Eichmann represented ,,the banality of evil. Our goal in this contribution is to understand whether the philosophy of Voltaire could have influenced Arendt's conception of evil, why it arises, why it persists throughout history, and whether it can be destroyed.

Acción e institución en el pensamiento político de Hannah Arendt: lecturas de Sobre la Revolución

***Ação e instituição no pensamento político de Hannah Arendt: leituras de Sobre a Revolução***Como diz Margaret Canovan, On Revolution é um dos livros menos estudados y menos compreendidos de Hannah Arendt e os nossos países não são uma exceção à regra. No entanto, o texto é de grande importância para explorar algumas questões em Arendt que, apesar de ter continuidade, são menos desenvolvidos em seus outros livros. Nele, Arendt enfoca a dimensão instituinte da ação política revolucionária. Esse é um elemento essencial para temos uma visão mais completa do pensamento político da Hannah Arendt e pensamos as nossas realidades políticas da América Latina. Neste trabalho, então, oferecemos certos elementos de análise do pensamento político de Hannah Arendt como eles aparecem na sua obra Sobre a Revolução. Vamos enquadrar a nossa leitura entre duas interpretações que, na nossa opinião, são igualmente interessantes, muito influentes no contexto da América Latina, e que são referências essenciais para a compreensão da obra de Arendt, mas diferem quanto à interpretação dada ao seu pensamento político e, em particular, quanto ao local que as instituições políticas ocupam nele. Essas são as interpretações de Étienne Tassin sobre os paradoxos da revolução na obra de Arendt e de Margaret Canovan sobre o novo republicanismo arendtiano. Em seguida, vamos desenvolver algumas chaves para uma leitura própria de On Revolution entre as duas posições. Finalmente, vamos oferecer uma conclusão e trazer os pontos mais importantes do nosso argumento.

The Evil of Banality: On the Life and Death Importance of Thinking

The Evil of Banality: On the Life and Death Importance of Thinking

The controversy of compassion as an awakening to our conflicted social condition

AbstractThe study of law and emotion is now established as a distinct field of study in its own right. In this respect, legal studies has shared in a wider ‘affective turn’ that has involved twenty-first-century social science in a new concern to explain the contribution of emotional feelings to human thought, motivation and behaviour. This development has been accompanied by a pronounced debate over how emotion should be rendered accountable within a rational frame of analysis. On the one hand, it is possible to portray this as being sustained by a movement to make us more emotionally literate and more sensitive to the ways people act and think through feeling. On the other hand, it might be interpreted as being rooted in a concern to make matters of emotion more amenable to rational discipline and the sanction of reason. In this paper, I contend that, where a focus is brought to the experience of ‘compassion’, the volume is raised on these conflicts of interpretation. I further argue that opposing and contested points of view on the experience and value of ‘compassion’ provide us with valuable insights into the wider dynamics of social and cultural change that have inspired the ‘affective turn’. These arguments are developed with reference to the social theories of Max Weber and Norbert Elias. Moreover, in taking note of Hannah Arendt's thinking on the cultural politics of compassion, I attend not so much to how the controversy of compassion might be resolved, but rather to its potential to awaken critical humanitarian concern. Compassion is hereby celebrated as an inherently ‘unstable emotion’ that brings debate to the condition and bounds of human care and social justice.

Visiting good company: Arendt and the development of the reflective practitioner

ABSTRACTThe importance of the concept of reflective practice within the teaching profession has been stressed heavily in recent decades. How it is enacted and how beginning teachers, in particular, have been encouraged to exercise it remains somewhat unclear, with the risk that it becomes a cursory, ill-informed exercise in self-affirmation rather than a central pillar of professional life. In this paper, Hannah Arendt's thinking on judgement, drawn from her studies of Kant, and particularly her concept of ‘enlarged thought’, are used to suggest a stronger basis for the nature of reflective practice and for the validity of the professional judgement involved. The paper concludes with some suggestions as to what could be involved in making fruitful use of Arendt's concept of judgement in the development of beginning teachers as reflective practitioners.

"With All Malice": The Testimonial Objectives of Charles Reznikoff

Social life, like art, is a problem of appeal. It is testimony, if anything, that founds the possibility of the poem. Before arriving at its famous closing phrase—“the banality of evil”—Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) presents a relentless and multi-layered meditation on the legal and moral questions posed by Adolf Eichmann's crimes. Arendt was notoriously critical of the state's method of prosecution, and credited the judges alone for keeping the trial from lapsing into a mere “play.”1 In particular, she rejected the state's attempt to paint a “general picture” (181) of Jewish suffering, of trying to extract, from the specifics of the Holocaust, some supposedly larger lessons about existential threats to Jews in the world. In Arendt's thinking, Eichmann's crimes, “different … in essence” (267), could not be tied to some “general picture,” and were not approachable through an established logic that claimed a teleology from ghetto to pogrom to genocide. While Israel's Attorney General, Gideon Hausner, was liable, before the crowds of the People's Hall, to lapse into what she called “bad history and cheap rhetoric” (19), the witnesses he called to testify on the prosecution's behalf posed, for her, a different set of problems.

O professor de filosofia: limites e possibilidades - dinâmica e problematização do ensino-aprendizagem

A temática do presente texto versa sobre limites e possibilidades do professor de filosofia na relação ensino-aprendizagem desenvolvida nas salas de aula. Localizando os elementos fundamentais ao processo pedagógico - tais como o ensino, o papel do professor, a experiência filosófica e o sentido pedagógico de reaprender o aprendido -, o contexto pedagógico é pensado nos seus agentes e no objetivo a ser alcançado: o conhecimento que permite a integração de saberes. Recorrendo à contribuição do pensamento de Hannah Arendt no que corresponde ao esclarecimento de uma das várias questões da crise da educação, que segundo a autora é a quebra da autoridade do professor, faz-se o resgate do papel fundamental do docente no jogo ensino-aprendizagem. Tal resgate torna-se possível quando a prática docente é repensada nos termos próprios de sua fundamentação e perspectiva mais abrangente: a formação humana. Ao longo do texto, as propostas pedagógicas de pensadores da educação para o ensino de filosofia em turmas de ensino médio contribuem para a compreensão das perspectivas lançadas na abordagem do tema. Elementos como aprendizagem, conteúdo, ensino, processo educativo são retomados de modo que favoreçam a apreensão do sentido verdadeiramente filosófico da disciplina filosofia. Imprescindível para tal acontecimento é a experiência, que não se caracteriza empiricamente, mas no modo pela qual busca contribuir para o desenvolvimento do modo de conceber e desenvolver a docência de filosofia, da mesma forma que tem por intenção permitir o florescimento de novas formas de aprendizagem como proporcionadora de uma verdadeira experiência filosófica.

Hannah Arendt: pensar a crise da educação no mundo contemporâneo

Dividido em três etapas complementares, o presente artigo discute a reflexão de Hannah Arendt sobre a crise da educação no mundo contemporâneo. Na primeira parte se estabelecem algumas conexões teóricas gerais entre as teses de Arendt a respeito da crise da educação e sua reflexão filosófico-política sobre a crise política da modernidade. Na segunda parte do texto, discute-se a hipótese arendtiana de que a crise da educação também está relacionada à introdução de abordagens educacionais de caráter psicopedagógico, as quais, em vez contribuir para educar os jovens para a responsabilidade pelo mundo e para a ação política, os mantêm numa condição infantilizada que se estende até a idade adulta, trazendo, em consequência, novos problemas políticos. Finalmente, na terceira parte do texto, propõe-se a hipótese de que uma das principais contribuições do pensamento arendtiano para pensar a crise contemporânea da educação se encontra em sua interessante discussão do binômio "crítica" e "crise", o qual põe em questão o binômio tradicional "crise/reforma". Arendt, assim como Foucault e Deleuze, nos ensina que crítica e crise são fenômenos modernos indissociáveis e nos convida a enxergar a crise como momento privilegiado para o exercício da atividade da crítica. Para Arendt, a crise na educação deve ser entendida como oportunidade crucial para reflexões críticas a respeito do próprio processo educativo.

Refoundation as Survival

This guest column suggests that we should follow Hannah Arendt in resisting the urge to expound doctrines or systems and, instead, should disclose the processes of our thought as they are “in motion.” While we should not hesitate to express judgments, our aim in intellectual work should be to occasion (and experience) surprise. Like Arendt, we should candidly express “the bliss of thought” as we think and write. On this basis, the political arena can become “a space for self-analysis and (by analogy with psychoanalysis) continuous rebirth.” And it is only on this basis, Kristeva argues, that reconstruction, after a century of unprecedented destruction, be accomplished without our succumbing to nostalgia. Efforts at reconstruction must be undertaken, as Arendt undertook them, “in light of the history of nihilism” and “in the name of sheer survival.” Kristeva joins Arendt in advising against a return to foundationalism while at the same time urging the development of a kind of “re-foundationalism.” Kristeva concludes by showing how, in these attitudes, Arendt's thinking was—despite her notorious dismissal of psychoanalysis—in tune with those of Freud.

Freedom and Fatefulness:

This article reassesses Arendt's relationship to Augustine, exploring the Augustinian context for Arendt's own thinking about the relationship between thought and action. What Arendt drew from Augustine, the contours of which remain in her later work, is a journey of memory in which reflection, as it removes us from the world, paradoxically reveals us as inserted into this world. Out of this ontology of origins emerges an ethic of beginning as we recognize, in the moment of reflection, a bond of kinship and an equality toward each other that is constituted by our common relationship of beginning and fatefulness to the world. It is this Augustinian journey of memory that continued to guide Arendt's thinking in developing a political ethic that shared with action the ontological foundation of beginning.

Heidegger and Arendt

Although Hannah Arendt's political philosophy advocates a return to the original experience of the Greek polis and interprets modern political phenomena in light of the philosophical categories of classical antiquity, this should not be brushed aside as an example of philosophical nostalgia. When Arendt employs the term polis, she is not first and foremost referring to, say, Athens 400 BC, but to the importance of the public of in revealing we are as individuals: The Polis, properly speaking, is not the city-state in its physical location; it is the organization of the people as it arises out of acting and speaking together, and its true lies between people living together for this purpose, no matter where they happen to be...It is the of in the widest sense of the word, namely, the where I appear to others as others appear to me, where men exist not merely like other living or inanimate thing but make their explicitly.(1) The polis is the space of appearance where human beings appear to one another and within which the who or the of the agent is disclosed. According to Arendt, human beings do not have an the way other things do. The who of human beings is not, as opposed to, for instance, a manufactured tool, fixed once and for all. On the contrary, human beings are constantly fixing their nature, and this fixing cannot be separated from their involvement with things and other people. That is, it cannot be carried out in privacy through any kind of inward self reflection or introspection, simply because that would imply the prior presence of something to be experienced, i.e., a fixed essence or nature or selfhood. The who of human beings is disclosed through action, and action takes place in the public of appearance. Obviously, Arendt's emphasis on the essence-less nature of human being places her political theory in the tradition of Existenz philosophy and phenomenology. As she puts it in a letter to a friend: If I can be said to `have come from anywhere' it is from the tradition of German philosophy.(2) Given the fact that she was a student of Husserl, Heidegger, and Jaspers, it is not unreasonable to assume that, in this context, German philosophy means the phenomenological tradition (which is, of course, not to say that she was not influenced by other German philosophers).(3) In what follows I shall investigate the relation between phenomenology and Arendt's political theory. I shall limit myself to examining the points of contact between Arendt and Heidegger, and her dependence on the latter for certain fundamental philosophical principles. Although the few comments on Heidegger in her writings does not indicate a pervasive Heideggerian influence on her work, I shall try to marshal evidence in favor of the opposite claim.(4) I shall argue that she took over a certain approach to philosophy that can be traced back to Heidegger. This is especially striking in her emphasis on existence rather than on essence when describing the human being; in her emphasis on existence as unfolding itself in active life; and in the emphasis on the worldly character of the human condition. However, it is also a matter of fact that Arendt developed this in her own direction, and that she was highly critical of some aspects of Heidegger's thinking. This I do not dispute-ut I will nevertheless maintain that her thinking is a legitimate child of the phenomenological movement. The objective of this essay will be to emphasize this aspect of Arendt's thinking. I shall proceed in the following manner. In the first section, I shall outline the general dissatisfaction with established systems of philosophy that triggered a drive towards a new notion of subjectivity around the turn of the century. In the second section, I shall elucidate how Heidegger and Arendt's emphasis on existence rather than essence, in describing the human condition, fall into line with this movement. …