Phenomenology and the Political

S. West Gurley, Geoff Pfeifer

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781783487707
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Phenomenology in Philosophy

This timely volume brings together a diverse group of expert authors in order to investigate the question of phenomenology’s relation to the political. These authors take up a variety of themes and movements in contemporary political philosophy. Some of them put phenomenology in dialogue with feminism or philosophies of race, others with Marxism and psychoanalysis, while others look at phenomenology’s historical relation to politics. The book shows the ways in which phenomenology is either itself a form of political philosophy, or a useful method for thinking the political. It also explores the ways in which phenomenology falls short in the realm of the political. Ultimately, this collection serves as a starting point for a groundbreaking dialogue in the field about the nature of the relationship between phenomenology and the political. It is a must-read for anyone who is interested in phenomenology or contemporary social and political philosophy.

Part I

PHENOMENOLOGICAL POLITICS AND LIVABILITY

Chapter 1

Recovering the Sensus Communis

Arendt’s Phenomenology of Political Affects

Peg Birmingham

There is nearly unanimous agreement among her readers that Arendt’s political theory is rooted in the rehabilitation of action and the human capacity for beginning something new. In this telling, Arendt’s political theory emerges from and thinks against a totalitarian politics rooted in a model of fabrication that uses any and all means, usually violent, in order to achieve its ends. Arendt counters totalitarianism mythical-poetic model of the state with an unconditional celebration of the contingency and unpredictability of a plurality of actors acting in concert for the sake of the new. While this view of Arendt’s political theory is not entirely incorrect, it misses Arendt’s fundamental claim about the nature of totalitarianism, namely, that its key element is a reliance on a new type of political deception.

At the outset of Origins of Totalitarianism, prior to her analysis of anti-Semitism, imperialism, or radical evil, Arendt raises the issue of deception, considering the difference between ancient and modern sophists and their relation to truth and reality:

Plato, in his famous fight against the ancient Sophists, discovered that their “universal art of changing the mind by arguments” (Phaedrus 261) had nothing to do with truth, but aimed at opinions which by their nature are changing, and which are valid only “at the time of the agreement and as long as the agreement lasts,” (Theatetus 172).… The most striking difference between the ancient and modern sophists is that the ancients were satisfied with a passing victory of the argument at the expense of truth, whereas the moderns want a more lasting victory at the expense of reality.1

In these early pages of Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt claims that the characteristic that sets totalitarianism apart from tyrannical and dictatorial regimes is precisely the modern sophistic victory at the expense of reality, which institutes a “lying world order.” Indeed, her discussion of radical evil cannot be understood apart from her continuing preoccupation with the problem of this particular kind of political deception. When Arendt writes in 1945, “The problem of evil will be the fundamental question of post-war intellectual life in Europe,”2 she is indicating in the strongest terms possible that the problem of radical evil is by no means eradicated with the defeat of totalitarianism and this in large part because of its inseparable link to a certain kind of deception, which for her has nothing to do with what we understand by falsehood, error, or even the deliberate lie. Falsehood and error are the opposites of truth, while a deliberate lie is the intentional dissimulation of the truth; radical deception adds something new: “One can say that to some extent fascism has added a new variation to the old art of lying—the most devilish variation—that of lying the truth.”3

In her analysis of Eichmann’s thoughtlessness, Arendt returns to the type of deception at the heart of totalitarianism. Eichmann’s “thoughtlessness” does not mean that he lacked motives such as career advancement or a better pension plan.4 Instead, Eichmann’s thoughtlessness, the banality of his evil, lies in his utter lack of common sense, that is to say, his utter lack of engaging with reality. As Arendt puts it in the context of Eichmann’s use of clichés, “Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality, that is, against the claim on our thinking attention that all events and facts make by virtue of their existence.”5 While we would be exhausted if we constantly recognized this claim, Eichmann’s thoughtlessness lay in recognizing “no such claim of reality at all.”6

A confrontation with totalitarianism, therefore, requires a recovery of a sense of reality, the condition for political action and possibility of new beginnings. Arendt articulates the centrality of this recovery in the preface to the first edition of the Origins of Totalitarianism, where she argues that confronting the event of totalitarianism requires facing up to the “shock of reality”:

Comprehension does not mean denying the outrageous, deducing the unprecedented from precedents, or explaining phenomena by such analogies and generalities that the impact of reality and the shock of experience are no longer felt. It means, rather, examining and bearing consciously the burden which our century has placed on us—neither denying its existence nor submitting meekly to its weight.7

The claim of this chapter is that Arendt carries out a recovery of a sense of the real through a phenomenology of appearance that includes a phenomenology of the affectivity animating this sense of reality. Still further, I claim that Arendt’s “double phenomenology” articulates a recovery of a sense of reality that, as just noted, is the condition for the recovery of the political after its near-totalitarian destruction.

RECOVERING A SENSE OF THE REAL: COMMON SENSE AND THE SENSUS COMMUNIS

While it appears that Arendt turns her attention to a notion of the sensus communis only in her late work on Kant, she is already thinking a rudimentary sensus communis in The Human Condition, specifically in a section significantly titled “The Public Realm: The Common.” Here Arendt distinguishes between two senses of the “public,” which she argues “are closely inter-related but not altogether identical phenomenon.”8 Arendt then states: “It means, first, that everything that appears in public can be seen and heard by everybody and has the widest possible publicity. For us, appearance—something that is being seen and heard by others as well as ourselves—constitutes reality.”9 This first sense of publicity as appearance as such undergirds or supports the second sense of the public, defined as the common, political space that gathers its participants like a table that both separates and brings together and separates.

Arendt develops this first sense of appearance in the first part of Life of the Mind: Thinking, titled “Appearance.” Repeating her claim that being and appearing are coincident, she now adds that appearance as such is always appearance in common: “All sense-endowed creatures have appearance as such in common, first an appearing world and second, and perhaps even more important the fact that they themselves are appearing and disappearing creatures, that there always was a world before their arrival and there always will be a world after their departure.”10 In this later work, Arendt extends the “common” beyond a common, political world to the worldliness of appearance as such. At the same time, she argues in this later work that plurality is not merely the conditio per quam of political life as she claims in The Human Condition, but is the conditio per quam of earthly life: “Nothing and nobody exists in this world whose very being does not presuppose a spectator. In other words, nothing that is, insofar as it appears exists in the singular; everything that is meant to be perceived by somebody.”11 Following from this, she claims that “plurality is the law of the earth.”12

Moreover, Arendt argues that everything that appears is possessed by an urge toward self-display: “It is indeed as though everything that is alive—in addition to the fact that its surface is made for appearance, fit to be seen and meant to appear to others—has an urge to appear, to fit itself into the world of appearances by displaying and showing, not its ‘inner self’ but itself as an individual.”13 Here Arendt significantly changes her position on the distinction between animal and human life articulated in The Human Condition. In the earlier work, Arendt claims that only human beings are concerned with their uniqueness, moving as they do along a rectilinear path that cuts across the cyclical path of an otherwise immortal cosmos. In Life of the Mind, Arendt claims that each and every appearing being has the urge to self-display as an individual and not merely as a member of the species. Citing the research of the Swiss biologist and zoologist Adolph Portman, Arendt argues that this “desire to appear” cannot be explained in functional terms; instead, she suggests, it is gratuitous, having to do with the sheer pleasure of appearing and self-display. Moreover, this urge to self-display cannot be understood in terms of something “inner” wanting to express itself. The self is given in its appearance, in its self-display. Again, this is not “expressiveness” if by that is meant that the expression reveals something “inside” the expression.

Critiquing the distinction between depth and surface, as if the surface owes its appearance to something hidden, Arendt argues that the self makes it appearance on the surface in its sentient, embodied relation with the world. As Kimberly Curtis beautifully puts it:

We find [in Arendt] ontology of display that suggests that reality in an appearing world such as ours is something born out of a highly charged mutual sensuous provocation between actors and spectators that is essentially aesthetic in nature. A universe alive with yearning to sense and be sensed, a universe that perpetually gives birth to its own plurality and profusion.14

Prior to the sensus communis that emerges through a plurality of judging spectators, Arendt claims a more primordial sensus communis of sensuous spectators: “To appear always means to seem to others and this seeming varies according to the standpoint and the perspective of the spectators.”15

Our sense of reality therefore depends upon this sensuous world of appearances shared in common with a plurality of others. Indeed, as Curtis points out, our capacity to experience a world in common is “utterly dependent upon the aesthetic provocation of multiple, distinct appearing beings. If we can locate the common world at all, therefore, it is paradoxically to be found only where this provocation flourishes.”16 In other words, our capacity to sense the real depends upon a mutual provocation between and among appearing beings and this provocation is aesthetic, both sensuous and affective.

Arendt’s account of a primordial sensus communis at the level of appearance itself demonstrates the centrality of embodied life in her political theory. The plurality of perspectives that marks the Arendtian public space is inseparable from the plurality of embodied and sensual perspectives. Appearing beings, human and animal alike, are living organisms enmeshed in a matrix of material, embodied, and interdependent relationships, and the human capacity for action is inseparable from this earthly appearance. As Arendt claims in The Human Condition, “Action … corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world.”17 As just seen, in her later work, Life of the Mind: Thinking, Arendt claims that living on the earth is already to inhabit a world. Again, the life of action (vita activa) is inseparable from the sensuous and affective habitation that marks its earthly condition. I will return to this below when addressing les enragés of the French Revolution whom Arendt calls le puissance de la terre (the power of the earth).

In her recen...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Halftitle
• Introduction
• PART I: PHENOMENOLOGICAL POLITICS AND LIVABILITY
• PART II: RACE AND ANTICOLONIALISM
• PART III: THE BODY AND GENDER
• PART IV: SITUATEDNESS, CULTURE, AND ALIENATION
• PART V: PLACE AND THE ENVIRONMENT
• PART VI: CAPITALISM, GLOBALISM, SOLIDARITY
• Index
• About the Contributors