Hannah Arendt

Key Concepts

Patrick Hayden, Patrick Hayden

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317545873
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Hannah Arendt is one of the most prominent thinkers of modern times, whose profound influence extends across philosophy, politics, law, history, international relations, sociology, and literature. Presenting new and powerful ways to think about human freedom and responsibility, Arendt's work has provoked intense debate and controversy. 'Hannah Arendt: Key Concepts' explores the central ideas of Arendt's thought, such as freedom, action, power, judgement, evil, forgiveness and the social. Bringing together an international team of contributors, the essays provide lucid accounts of Arendt's fundamental themes and their ethical and political implications. The specific concepts Arendt deployed to make sense of the human condition, the phenomena of political violence, terror and totalitarianism, and the prospects of sustaining a shared public world are all examined. 'Hannah Arendt: Key Concepts' consolidates the disparate strands of Arendt's thought to provide an accessible and essential guide for anybody who wishes to gain a deeper understanding of this leading intellectual figure.

PART I

On the human condition

ONE

Natality

Karin Fry

From very early on in her intellectual career, Hannah Arendt’s interest in life and the political implications connected to the fact of being born is significant. The concept of “natality” is central to her overall theory of politics, and perhaps, its most optimistic aspect. Focusing on life and natality, as opposed to death and mortality, raises the political life into a hopeful activity in which one truly displays aspects of the self to the world in meaningful ways. Focusing on natality suggests that individual action is important and earthly events are significant. Connected to her concepts of political action and plurality, natality is at the heart of Arendt’s theory of politics.

Natality and Augustine

Having attended Martin Heidegger’s lectures during the period in which he was writing Being and Time, Arendt’s first significant break from his point of view occurs in her doctoral dissertation, published in 1929 as Der Liebesbegrif bei Augustin: Versuch einer philosophischen Interpretation. This work has been translated into English as Love and Saint Augustine (published in 1996), and includes later revisions Arendt made to her thesis as she anticipated its English publication during 1964–5. Because of her failure to finish the revision, there is controversy concerning the overall significance of her investigation of Augustine.¹ Nonetheless, her revisions to the English translation include the term “natality” and indicate that her examination of Augustine’s work may have inspired the formation of this concept. Ultimately, Arendt explains natality more thoroughly in her later work, especially in The Human Condition. Nonetheless, Arendt’s thesis and its revision provide interesting clues to the overall significance of natality to the rest of her theory.

Martin Heidegger’s fundamental ontology looms large over her dissertation, although her thesis supervisor Karl Jaspers’s Existenz philosophy also has an influence. Arendt’s analysis of Saint Augustine’s theory is a phenomenological exploration of the concept of love in much the same vein as Heidegger’s exploration of time. Nevertheless, there are two aspects in particular that break with Heidegger’s work. Throughout her career, Arendt’s major criticism of Heidegger involves his lack of attention to the active life of politics, in favour of the contemplative life of eternal truths. Although this criticism is expressed more directly in her later work, it emerges in her discussion of Augustine’s concept of love and is explored in two different ways in this text. First, there is an analysis of natality, or what it means to be born, as opposed to Heidegger’s emphasis on mortality. Second, Arendt develops a critical analysis of Augustine’s discussion of love of the neighbour from the Christian worldview. This criticism extends to Heidegger’s work as well, since Heidegger fails to give much attention to positive relations with others in Being and Time. Focusing on the solitude of death, as opposed to the potential of birth, may result in a more solitary and less politically oriented philosophy.

Heidegger’s Being and Time ([1927] 1967) is known for exploring the authentic life of the individual in the mode of being-towards-death. The authentic person faces up to his mortality and does not pretend life is endless. Only through acknowledging that life is limited will one be filled with the urgency to make authentic decisions about one’s present life. Often, Heidegger writes about this as a seemingly solitary and individual task, since mortality is uniquely one’s own. In ordinary experience, other people distract us and encourage us to be inauthentic, as they are caught up in everyday concerns that refute the idea that death is an ever-present possibility. Heidegger calls other people in the inauthentic mode of engagement with the self das Man, sometimes translated as “the they”. Engaging with the inauthentic “they” leads one away from facing mortality and towards getting caught up in the idle chatter of everyday concerns. Even though Heidegger mentions the possibility of authentically being-with-others, what he calls Mitsein, its discussion is not as emphasized as the seemingly more usual problematic relation with other people that produces inauthentic behaviour based in either distraction or outright denial of the limited time that one has on earth.² By examining different forms of love in Augustine’s work, Arendt finds problems that may easily extend to Heidegger’s ontology. Arendt rejects the solitary “authentic” existence that seems to be the outcome of both Heidegger and Augustine’s work.

According to Arendt, Augustine describes love as involving appetitus, or craving, which concerns desiring an object thought to bring happiness (Arendt 1996: 9). However, craving is not unrelated to fear, since all goods can be lost. Arendt notes appetitus in Augustine’s work is often related to mortality, since mortality can be understood as an enemy to be feared, connected to loss. Typically, mortality is beyond personal control, and humans crave the ability to face the future without fear or loss of life (ibid.: 11–12). As Arendt’s biographer Elizabeth Young-Bruehl notes, the ultimate goal of craving is a “life without fear” (Young-Bruehl 2004: 491). Yet, to truly satisfy the craving, the right kind of love is required. Through loving God, the fear of mortality is superseded by a love that produces eternal life, which is crucial for the Catholic saint. The wrong sort of love, cupiditas, is love for things of this world and in Augustine’s framework it is exemplified by those who belong to the city of man, doomed to not be saved. Arendt describes cupiditas in Heideggerian terminology as a flight from death. Those who crave for permanence cling “to the very things sure to be lost in death” (Arendt 1996: 17). This produces unsatisfying enslavement to things outside of one’s control that can be lost against one’s will (ibid.: 20). Fear of death does not end with cupiditas because one is still tied to temporal things that can be lost (ibid.: 23). Arendt describes this phenomenon as a type of “flight from the self” and parallels it to Heidegger’s description of inauthentic life (ibid.). Through cupiditas, one is distracted from fear of mortality, but the self gets lost in earthly things and the anxiety about death is not resolved (ibid.: 23–5).

Augustine’s cure for this state differs from Heidegger’s, largely due to Augustine’s overtly Christian concerns. Caritas is the right kind of love that pursues eternity (ibid.: 17). The correct kind of love, caritas, finds eternity through rejecting the objects of the temporal world and closes the gap between the individual and God (ibid.: 20). Through caritas, God, or the beloved “becomes a permanently inherent element of one’s own being” (ibid.: 19). The true happiness of the eternal life of the soul emerges through this love, by transcending human, mortal nature (ibid.: 30). Unlike for Heidegger, being and time are opposed for Augustine. Arendt states that in Augustine’s work, to truly be “man has to overcome his human existence, which is temporality” (ibid.: 29). In effect, “Death has died” (ibid.: 34). Humans are essentially liberated from mortality because of an eternal afterlife. The love of life on this earth is a sinful temptation, or at best, secondary and derivative, as compared to the rewards of caritas.

In order to explain how temporality works in Augustine’s thought, Arendt turns to natality. Heidegger emphasizes the future eventuality of death, but for Augustine, it is the past that is more crucial for influencing the present and the future (ibid.: 47). In her revision to the dissertation for its English translation, Arendt changes her discussion of the importance of the past for Augustine to include the word “natality”. By this time, she has already elaborated upon natality in The Human Condition and other works. She includes the following statement in her revision of her thesis: “the decisive fact determining man as conscious, remembering being is birth or ‘natality,’ that is, the fact that we have entered the world through birth” (ibid.: 51). In her original dissertation, Arendt discusses only the phenomena of “beginning” and “origin” but adds the word “natality”, which signifies that some of the inspiration for this idea can be found with Augustine (Scott & Stark 1996: 132–3). In fact, Arendt usually quotes Augustine whenever she discusses natality or birth. In relation to Heidegger, mortality is still important for Arendt, but not as emphasized because natality and the potential that humans have for living has greater significance for political action. Jeffrey Andrew Barash argues that the difference in temporal emphasis between Arendt’s examination of Augustine and Heidegger’s temporality is fundamental to her criticism of Heidegger as a whole.³ Barash describes Heidegger’s ontology as being a type of existential “futurism”, whereas Arendt stresses the importance of memory and remembrance more greatly than Heidegger (Barash 2002: 172–6). For Arendt, memory and origin are fundamentally related to the capacity for humans to act politically.

Arendt connects the notion of natality within Augustine’s thought to gratitude for all that has been given. This links natality with Arendt’s idea of amor mundi, or love the world. Whereas so much philosophical analysis in Western philosophy emphasizes abstract and eternal realities, Arendt insists that a love of this world is needed. In the Augustinian framework, remembrance and gratitude quiet the fear of death (Arendt 1996: 52). Arendt describes the love that seeks eternity as a kind of recollection, a return to the self and to the Creator who made the self, linking it with origins (ibid.: 50, 53). This appreciation of the past is an appreciation of God’s part in the creation of the universe and of the self (ibid.: 50). Arendt then connects the awareness of the origin to the potential for human action. It is because humans know and are grateful for their origin that they are able to begin and act in the story of humanity (ibid.: 55). Arendt notes that Augustine uses two different words to describe the difference between the beginning of the universe and human beginnings. Principium refers to the beginning of the universe, while initium refers to the human beginnings as they act in the world (ibid.). The remembrance of the origin involves both facets, although Arendt notes that for Augustine, it seems that the initium of a human being is equally, if not more, important (ibid.: 55; Arendt 1958: 177 n. 3). Augustine is on to something with his examination of the importance of remembering origins for Arendt. Because of his interest in birth and gratitude for the world, there is the potential for a real connection to the importance of things in this world and an understanding of the meaningfulness of each individual life. However, Augustine’s Christian ideology forecloses this possibility for Arendt due to the way that Christianity understands the world, the individual’s role in it and the proper relationships to other people. The Christian world-view prioritizes the eternal and heavenly over earthly events affecting mortal humans.

Arendt asserts that for Augustine, human beings have a crucial temporal role. The existence of mortals who live life sequentially means that time and change can be marked and events in the universe can have a purpose when viewed sequentially. Different from God’s time of eternal simultaneity, humans mark what occurs in the world, and contribute to it through action. She concludes in her English revision that “it was for the sake of novitas, in a sense, that man was created” (Arendt 1996: 55). Although Heidegger also examines humanity’s relation to time, he does not emphasize the fact of birth in Being and Time except to say that we are thrown towards our deaths, since being born and dying are beyond our free choice.⁴ Arendt specifically points to Heidegger as someone who promotes expectation of death as unifying human existence (ibid.: 56). In contrast, she asserts that it is remembrance of the origin that is important, giving “unity and wholeness to human existence” (ibid.). She states “Only man, but no other mortal being, lives toward his ultimate origin while living toward the final boundary of death” (ibid.: 57, emphasis added). It is not only mortality, but natality, that leads to action.

Arendt’s English translators, Scott and Stark, emphasize that it is Augustine who guides Arendt in abandoning Heidegger’s death-focused phenomenology, by focusing instead on birth and origin (ibid.: 124). However, Arendt is not entirely uncritical of Augustine, and the last third of the dissertation examines a problem that arises out of Augustine’s Christian and Platonic worldview. In his own way, Augustine also prioritizes eternal things, such as the eternity of the soul and the eternal nature of the universe as God’s creation. Therefore, he does not acknowledge the importance of acts on this earth. The greater importance of the whole of creation and its eternal nature means that the individual life has little significance, especially outside of its potential for heavenly existence (ibid.: 60). Arendt states that for Augustine “life is divested of the uniqueness and irreversibility in which temporal sequences flow from birth to death” (ibid.). All of creation is deemed to be good as part of God’s creation. Actions only seem evil if one does not adopt the perspective of the whole and looks at events as sequential, instead of simultaneous in God’s time. Unique events are not good because of their individual distinction, but only because they are part of God’s universe. Consequently, the individual is “both enclosed and lost in the eternally identical simultaneity of the universe” (ibid.: 62). Human life does not possess autonomous significance outside of the eternal plan. Arendt believes that Augustine’s failure to acknowledge the importance of an individual life is Platonic in origin and is another instance of emphasizing the eternal and abstract at the cost of the earthly. In this sense, humans are not “worldly” and do not love this world (ibid.: 66).

In fact, to be saved, humans must pick a love that is outside of the world, caritas, as opposed to cupiditas that clings to the worldly (ibid.: 78). Cupiditas or covetous, sinful love detaches individual things from God’s creation and sins by doing so (ibid.: 81). Alternatively, choosing God through the right kind of love, caritas, makes the actual world a “desert” for Arendt, since the saved person can live in the world only because they have oriented themselves towards God and eternity (ibid.: 90). Those who will be saved view the world as God does, which raises questions for Arendt about neighbourly love. Love of the neighbour comes from caritas, but as such, is not a love that acknowledges the neighbour’s worldly existence (ibid.: 93–4). To love a neighbour in the proper way for Augustine, one must renounce oneself and worldly relations in order to imitate God. Instead of loving neighbours for their uniqueness, love of the neighbour “leaves the lover himself in absolute isolation and the world remains a desert for man’s isolated existence” (ibid.: 94). Every human is the same, as part of God’s creation, and not loved for any other reason. Humanity is alienated from the world and from each other. As Elizabeth Young-Bruehl describes it, since humans love neighbours for the sake of God, “love of our neighbors for their own sakes is impossible and … our neighbors are used” (Young-Bruehl 2004: 493). In this case, neighbours are loved as vehicles to gain salvation and to satisfy craving by enjoying the love of God (ibid.: 492). The common traits of humans, like their being part of God’s creation and their need to imitate Christ are emphasized by Augustine, rather than what is unique and distinct about them. Within this context, Arendt’s criticisms of Augustine’s love of the neighbour imply a needed shift in focus to the positive relation one could have with others by acknowledging the significance of their lives in this world. Arendt’s criticisms of Augustine’s love of the neighbour can be applied to Heidegger’s philosophy as well because both Heidegger and Augustine prioritize an authentic self or authentic relation to God, over engagement with others in the political realm.

The importance that Arendt places on natality and the fact that humans are born with such potential for individual distinction is paramount in her political philosophy. Although her concept of political action is not examined in relation to Augustine, it seems that both in the original dissertation and through her English revisions, her criticisms about Western philosophy typically ignoring natality emerge and are restated. By ignoring natality, those who focus on the eternal and emphasize contemplation above all else, miss the significance of this realm. For this reason, Elizabeth Young-Bruehl argues that Arendt’s interest in natality has its roots in her thesis on Augustine, but also in her personal political experiences as a displaced German Jew during the Second World War (ibid.: 495). To ignore the political, earthly realm because of ideological or intellectual concerns could result in deadly earthly consequences. For Arendt, it is not always problematic to be interested in things of this world, but rather, quite the reverse. To ignore this world at the expense of some ideal vision of politics allows for untold evils to occur. Furthermore, it misses what is precisely important about humanity: their potential to act and to be distinct individuals whose earthly lives are meaningful. Arendt argues that in both Christian and Platonic worldviews, the emphasis is on non-earthly matters, making efforts to distinguish oneself in this realm futile (Arendt 1958: 21). In Between Past and Future, Arendt connects Augustine’s discussion of “beginning” with freedom and the ability to act. She states “Because he is a beginning, man can begin; to be human and to be free are one and the same. God created man in order to introduce into the world the faculty of beginning: freedom (Arendt [1961] 1968: 167). As Scott and Stark note, if Arendt had not examined Augustine’s work, “it is difficult to imagine the context out of which her analysis of freedom and its relationship to politics may have emerged” (Scott & Stark 1996: 147). Similarly, Young-Bruehl comments that despite her criticisms of Augustine’s philosophy, it is through the writing of her thesis that Arendt begins to retrieve natality from its neglect by philosophy (Young-Bruehl 2004: 495). Although the seeds of Arendt’s concept of natality emerged in her thesis on Augustine, her later work describes the concept in much more detail.

Natality fully formed

Arendt’s notion of natality is more fully developed in arguably her most important work, The Human Condition. This book lays out the framework for Arendt’s political theory in which political action is central. The activity of labour, which is the unending effort to sustain the survival of human life, and the activity of work, which builds a world of permanent things, ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Contributors
• Introduction: Illuminating Hannah Arendt
• Part I: On the Human Condition
• Part II: On Modernity's Crises
• Part III: On Politics and the Public World
• Chronology of life and works
• Bibliography
• Index