Given that the topic of the readings today are plurality and politics they intersect in important ways with the events of the last year, last six months, and last three or four days in Charlottesville, Virginia. We are going to try and highlight how what you’re reading very much relates to the events of the last few days and last six months in ways that will both affirm many of the things you believe, but I also believe very strongly they will challenge and provoke you in many ways that you might find difficult. So, I ask you to be open to that and try and understand why we emphasize the ways that Arendt is provocative, not for the sake of being provocative, but for the sake of getting us all to think clearly and deeply about these issues.

Samantha Hill:

The Human Condition is actually the first book of Hannah Arendt’s that I read in my first semester of college. And I had no idea what she was talking about, but I loved the way that she wrote. I became somewhat obsessed, and I wanted to read more.

How’s everyone doing? Has everyone been following what’s been going on politically? It’s kind of hard to miss, but not everyone reads the newspaper. It’s been occupying a lot of our thoughts for the past couple of days, and I know yesterday — to me, at least — felt like Inauguration Day. And so I found myself last night going through some of Arendt’s older essays, and I came across one I remember she wrote for a symposium in The New York Times in 1968 responding to the question, Is America By Nature a Violent Society?

Arendt’s contribution was titled “Lawlessness Is Inherent in the Uprooted.” In that essay she takes on questions of race, the Civil Rights Movements, and the use of violence in political movements. She repeats one of her central thoughts about American politics, that “Freedom of Assembly is among the most crucial and cherished and, perhaps, most dangerous rights of American citizens.” We should all take this seriously and think about how freedom of assembly is both central to American democracy and dangerous. Democracy, according to Arendt, is not safe. It is a contest and an engagement. And she celebrated the fact that in the 1960s students others were engaged and became active in politics. She says in this essay, they became “de-alienated” from politics.

But after celebrating the power and success of the peaceful and non-violent Civil Rights Movement, Arendt adds a caution. The power of freedom of assembly and the success of the Civil Rights Movement should not, she writes,

“make us forget that the Ku Klux Klan and the [John] Birch society are also voluntary associations, and no one will deny that the outbreak of violence can be greatly helped by such groups. It is difficult to see how this danger could be eliminated without eliminating freedom of assembly; it is not too high a price to pay for political freedom.”

What Arendt is saying in this quote is that we have to remember that the KKK and other organizations we often associate with words like racism, or bigotry, or hatred, that these are volunteer associations that people join because they have political opinions. And we might really disagree with their political opinions, but they choose to join these organizations. And Arendt is saying that with these organizations, with the freedom of assembly, comes the threat of violence. Further, that the only way we can insure that this violence does not exist is by getting rid of the freedom of assembly; and that’s too high a price to pay. It’s very provocative to think that allowing these organizations to exist and thrive is the price of freedom and democracy.

So, why is Arendt making this argument? For Arendt plurality and politics necessitate one another; they go together. Plurality is a condition of politics, it’s a condition of small ‘d’ democracy, of a democratic society. She defines plurality in The Human Condition and it’s a key part of the first three chapters on action that you’re reading for Language & Thinking. In these passages, she talks about how we appear before one another in as distinct individuals in a public realm, who have the ability to engage one another, and the world around us, with speech and action. And it is this condition of plurality, our distinctness and difference, that is essential to the public, political realm. We cannot foreclose the appearance of individuals, because they might have contentious political views, we must find a way to engage with difference as a democratic practice.

At the beginning of the book Arendt writes:

“Plurality is the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live.” — The Human Condition, 8

And at the opening of Chapter 24, which you’ve read for today, she adds:

“Human plurality, the basic condition of both action and speech, has the twofold character of equality and distinction.” — The Human Condition, 175

RB:

I think the quote that we started with that Sam read must be understood within the context of Arendt’s thinking on plurality and politics. Voluntary associations are essential for both plurality and politics. So when she says that the KKK and the John Birch Society are voluntary associations, what does she mean?

Arendt has a very important belief about the centrality of voluntary associations to democratic politics. These voluntary associations and the right to public assembly — the right to act and speak in public in ways that matter — are for her the essence of democratic freedom. For people to come together and act together in politics to pursue their ends is what it means to be free. And this is to her the essence of democracy. It’s participation, it’s engagement, it’s acting in concert.

And so when she says that even though the KKK — and we could add now the neo-Nazis — are racist, and clearly violent in the sense that they envision a society built on oppression, exclusion, and violence, they are also expressions of voluntary associations and thus democratic. These fringe groups are at the root of what it means for a group of people who share a common opinion to get together and express that opinion. We need to understand and even appreciate the pluralistic spirit of these protests even as we have the right, and I think, responsibility, to oppose that opinion if we don’t agree with it and to argue strenuously against it; but that doesn’t mean eliminate it.

Arendt’s argument in her essay reminds me of the quote she knew well from Federalist Paper 10 by James Madison, perhaps the most famous quote from our founding era: “Liberty is to faction what air is to fire.” You can’t have fire without air, right? And you can’t have liberty without faction, without disagreement. To seek to abolish faction by taking away liberty is always a seduction, especially when those factions are dangerous and offensive. But the faction that comes from liberty is, in Arendt’s words, “not too high a price to pay for political freedom.”

It is important for us today that we remind ourselves that you can’t have action and speech, you can’t have politics, without plurality. And that means that in all plurality, in all faction, in all disagreement, in all action and speech, there’s going to be both equality and distinction. That means that we are distinguished from the KKK and the neo-Nazis, but we’re also equal to them in a certain way, and we have to hold onto both those ideas. We are, as Arendt says in the quote from the Human Condition, “all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live.”

This is not to say at all that the KKK and the anti-fascist groups are the same. Plurality does not affirm sameness or equivalency, which is the mistake President Trump made in his initial remarks and then again on Tuesday. Plurality does, however, affirm both our sameness and our difference. And affirming both is important.

I think a good comparison here is that Hannah Arendt later, in 1963, published a book called Eichmann in Jerusalem. One of the things she said in that book is that the Jews who worked in the concentration camps for the Nazis, and the Jews who worked in the ghettoes for the Nazis, were wrong to do so. And people went nuts and said to her, “How can you blame the Jews for the Holocaust?” And she said, I’m paraphrasing here: “I never blamed the Jews for the Holocaust. I said they were wrong. That doesn’t mean they were at fault for the Holocaust. The Nazis are at fault for the Holocaust.” It’s not an equivalence. And yet she also wanted to say the Jews were wrong. And I think the parallel to what’s going on today. We can and should say that those on the left who are engaging in violence are wrong without in any way saying they’re responsible for what’s going on or that there’s an equivalence.

By Evan Nesterak — After the clash, CC BY 2.0

And why are those on the left engaging in violence wrong? That’s an important question. The Arendtian answer, is that to engage in violence in order to try and eliminate faction, or eliminate disagreement, or eliminate plurality is anti-pluralistic. It is to suggest that politics is not about dissent and opinion, but about one truth that has to be violently imposed. And the core of Arendt’s thinking throughout her entire life emerges from this idea of plurality, that if we really want difference, uniqueness, distinction in the world, we have to be willing to let plurality exist, even amidst those people we find offensive.

SH:

Plurality means that uniqueness and distinction exist in the world. It is a condition of our birth. And when there’s any kind of attempt to restrict the appearance of plurality, or the spaces where we can appear before one another and engage in conversation (even if that’s a conversation where we’re having a political disagreement because we have different political opinions), then for Arendt that’s a sign of totalitarianism encroaching upon democratic politics, upon our democratic polity.

I want to illustrate what Roger was saying in material terms and give the example of the protest that happened in Durham, North Carolina, the other night. Did anyone see the video of the protestors who gathered together around the war memorial and tore down the statue, and then proceeded to boot-stomp it violently and take pictures in front of it? This was an act of violence. It was an act of destruction, and it was organized on the left.

We might disagree about whether or not these Confederate statues should be taken down, but individuals forming a mob, gathering in a public square, and violently removing war memorials is not democratic. So, when Arendt talks about plurality in this context, what it means is that politics requires us in our difference to come together in a public space and to have a civil conversation with one another about why we should remove these memorials. Or, why we should let them stay, or what we should do with them. And then if the people of Durham, for example, voted to remove this memorial, then the memorial gets taken down. But then it’s a democratic decision, then it’s not the will of a small group of individuals.

Q:

When she said the Jews were wrong, what was she suggesting they do? Weren’t they kind of forced to work at risk of being killed?

SH:

She’s not saying all Jews.

RB:

No. No. Certainly not all Jews. It’s those who actually killed other Jews on behalf of the Nazis. And those who actually chose to save themselves and their families by sacrificing other Jews to be transported to the camps.

Were these Jews who cooperated with the Nazis forced to do so? Well, it depends what you mean by forced. They were forced to in the sense that if they hadn’t they probably would have been killed. So they chose to save their lives by killing others or helping to kill others. And what Arendt says is — Let’s break it down: It’s a choice no one should be forced to make. And because it’s a choice no one should be forced to make, none of us can be clear how we would react to it. And we shouldn’t say that they are responsible for the deaths of Jews in a legal way. They shouldn’t be punished for it. And they are not the ones responsible for the fact that Jews are dying, for the Holocaust or for the deportations.

But Arendt still thinks that, morally, cooperation was the wrong choice. So what should they have done? There are a couple of options. One: They should have fought back and maybe died fighting. That’s her preferred option. They should resist. That is what it means to act politically. Second, they could try to escape. And third, they could commit suicide. She thinks all of these would be morally more honest and more meaningful, and she thinks would do more to help Jews.

Not everyone is going to act morally — we shouldn’t expect all people to be superbly moral. And those who don’t act morally aren’t evil. They are not equal to the Nazis. But they were wrong.

What is more, their wrong choice did make it easier for the Nazis to kill Jews. Because some Jews complied with the Nazis, they proved to the Nazis that people were willing to go along with what the Nazis were doing. They didn’t make the Nazis confront their own horror. In fact, one of the reasons it’s so abhorrent that at the time of this talk no one in Trump’s administration is resigning and only six CEOs have stepped down in the last three days, and the 200-plus other ones have not, is because those who stay give to those on the extreme fringe solace in saying what you’re doing is not bad enough for me to take a stand against it. And the point is that at some point you have to take a stand against things like this, and that takes courage.

Q:

I don’t understand — I guess that you’re stating that they shouldn’t have torn down the monument because it’s an act of violence, but then the Jewish people who were working for the Nazis should have rebelled. I just don’t understand where that line is drawn.

SH:

It’s a good question. I don’t think that we can compare those two situations, and I don’t think that we can compare them for a couple of reasons. The most important of which is that America is still a democratic society. Since Donald Trump was elected in November, the question that I get asked more than anything else is, Is America fascist? Is America becoming a fascist country? No. The answer is no.

I think that sometimes we feel a sense of crisis, like yesterday and in the past week, and it’s been more present lately than at other moments in recent history; but this is a constitutional republic. The United States has representative democracy, and our political institutions are remarkably resilient. We have a public sphere where we can engage in civic discourse with one another. And I think that we have a moral responsibility to think about what that engagement looks like.

When Hannah Arendt is writing The Origins of Totalitarianism, and when she’s later writing Eichmann in Jerusalem, she is trying to understand the phenomenal appearance of an entirely new form of government in the world, which is totalitarianism. And the hallmark of that form of government that people were living under is the foreclosure of public space and the ability to appear before one another as unique individuals, and to engage in conversation. Totalitarianism is in part defined by the absence of plurality. America is not a totalitarian country, which is not to say that there isn’t violence, or racism, or anti-Semitism; but that we have a public sphere where we can appear before one another and engage in civic, and civil discourse.

RB:

At the time Arendt is talking about the Jews, they’ve been denaturalized. They had their citizenship taken away, they had no political rights, they couldn’t vote, they actually no longer could old most jobs, they were in concentration and death camps. They had been disappeared from society.

In a democracy, Arendt sees that it is absolutely essential that we have what we call equality in public. That means we all can vote, that we all can talk, we can all act, we can all speak. She says in another book that the great sin of the United States and what may in the end undo it was slavery. And the sin of slavery was that it made blacks in the United States invisible, not appearing. And it thus made them not part of the public space.

So when Sam says we’re not in a fascist country right now and we’re not in a totalitarian country, what I take that to mean is that we still have a public sphere; we still have a place where people of all sides, whether they’re neo-Nazis, or whether they’re Antifa, or whether they’re liberals or conservatives, or blacks or whites, or Muslims or Jews, can organize, join voluntary associations, run for office, and engage in public discourse.

Obviously that was not always the case in this country. And so in another essay called “On Violence,” Hannah Arendt says, there are times when violence is necessary for politics. The denaturalization and killing of Jews in Germany was one such time because Jews were not part of the public sphere. And she argues that up until the 1970s or ’80s, for African Americans in this country, violence was necessary at times in order to make visible grievances on behalf of those who are rendered invisible. And so Arendt says terrorism, at times, can be justified if the people engaging in it are so invisible that it’s their only way to make their claims visible.

But what I think Sam is saying — and I certainly agree with her — is that this is not the case in the United States right now. The danger of the people acting like they did in Durham and tearing the statue is that we will so come to overuse violence that the very public sphere that makes violence unnecessary will disappear. That’s the danger. If that happens it will turn us into a fascist country. There’s nothing in our country that will prevent it if we continue down this path.

Let me move on the next quotation on plurality from The Human Condition.

“Human distinctness is not the same as otherness– . . . Otherness, it is true, is an important aspect of plurality, the reason why all our definitions are distinctions, why we are unable to say what anything is without distinguishing it from something else. . . In man, otherness, which he shares with everything that is, and distinctness, which he shares with everything alive, become uniqueness, and human plurality is the paradoxical plurality of unique beings.” — The Human Condition, 176

There are three different words Arendt opposes here: otherness, distinctness, and uniqueness. Otherness is simply that everything is other. There’s the book, the chair, and the person — they’re all other things; that’s sort of the most obvious category.

Distinctness is something else. Distinctness is what we share with dogs and cats. It’s the things we share with things that are alive. It’s not just that we’re other inorganic things; we are all alive, yet live differently. We are all alive, and yet we’re different from each other in meaningful ways.

And then there’s uniqueness, which is not just otherness or distinctness, but an expression of our human ability to “distinguish himself” even from other humans; and this is the core of plurality. We really are unique.

Well, what Arendt is saying is, Not so fast. Human beings are not just other and not just distinct; they’re unique. And they have completely different views. And it’s not surprising that some people want to live a religious life, and some people think religion is an opiate of the masses. And it’s not surprising that some people want to live amongst people like themselves in tight, homogenous communities, and other people want to live amongst cosmopolitanism and difference. And not one of these is right and one of them wrong. That’s plurality. Taking that seriously is at the heart of her understanding of what it means to be human.

SH:

Let me introduce our next quotation.

“Speech and action reveal this unique distinctness. Through them, men distinguish themselves instead of being merely distinct; they are the modes in which human beings appear to each other, not indeed as physical object, but qua men… A life without speech and without action… is literally dead to the world; it has ceased to be a human life because it is no longer lived among men.” — The Human Condition, 176

Arendt used the word men. She’s German, and in German the word she uses is Mensch, which is a kind of universal — human rights in German are called Menschenrechte — so she means everybody, but the standard translation of Mensch in English is man, which is to be heard, if you can, in a non-gendered way.

Arendt says here that speech, action, and appearance go hand in hand. When Roger was talking about why violence was okay politically inside the concentration camps, it was precisely for Arendt because those people were not able to speak and act and appear as unique individuals. They were reduced to what she calls the “atomization of the masses”. She understands that totalitarianism squeezes us together so that we lose our distinctness and uniqueness and our ability to appear before one another as unique and distinct individuals…

We live in a country where the political antagonisms that underlie our democracy are becoming visible on an increasingly daily basis; and those antagonisms, for the most part, tend to break down along race and economic lines. So a number of people who are American citizens who have the right to vote, who have the right to engage in civic discourse don’t actually feel like they can appear as equals in the public sphere. And even when they do have that right, they sense that they are valued differently, that they are discriminated against, and they are treated violently by the apparatuses of the state, like the police force or the National Guard. In the United States, if people don’t feel like they do have that ability to appear as equals, then how do we open up that democratic space where they might receive recognition?

RB:

That’s one of the most important questions that we’ve been struggling with for the last 40 or 50 years, since the different civil rights movements, the suffrage movements, and the gay rights movements, and many others. I think one of the problems we have right now — again, this is not an equivalency — is how many different groups feel that they are invisible in society, including a lot of white men, a lot of men, a lot of religious people. I was at a retreat with a lot of Bard students, many of these were minorities and many were from the South. And a lot of these students are religious. And one of the things that came out at the retreat, at least the year I was there, was that for many people at Bard the thing they feel most invisible about and unable to come out in public about is not race or class, but religion; and so I think it depends on what community you’re in and where you are. But one of the situations we have right now is that so many different groups throughout society feel invisible and are making claims upon it.

SH:

So how do we think about appearance in the public sphere as individuals who want to claim an identity? What about those who want to argue for representation based upon the identity that they claim? How do we engage in civic discourse and conversation when a number of individuals want to foreclose the possibility of even saying, well, you know, why are we talking about the existential crises that white men are experiencing in this country when they’re the ones who have rendered us invisible in the first place? How do we start that conversation in an Arendtian spirit?

RB:

You’re asking me now?

SH:

Yes, I’m asking you! It’s a conversation, right?

RB:

I think those are essential questions. We have different ways that we must respond. One is through institutional change. Let me just put out some ideas. We absolutely need laws that make any kind of discrimination in public political or legal activities illegal, or don’t legalize them. And I think we’re pretty close to that. I’m sure there are some laws that still need to change.

For example the one major institution in the United States right now which most obviously is not legally race-neutral is the prison system. We see an unbelievable over-incarceration of black men. The different ways we address black and white drug users is a scandal and needs to be changed. Also the laws which prevent felons from voting in many states even after they are released disproportionately and unjustly disenfranchises black men. If I were to put my energies to changing one of these public laws, legal regimes, that would be that one. And I assume most you know, many of you know, that at Bard we’re very involved in that struggle with the Bard Prison Initiative.

Then there are the social realms. We have to do a better job of bringing more unique people with different perspectives into the public conversations that we have. As you know, we sponsor many public conversations at the Hannah Arendt Center. We make a concerted effort to bring a wide variety of unique voices into our public conversations. This is not simply a matter of race or gender, although those are important markers. It is important to bring in business leaders — a group typically excluded in academic conversations. And we want to include artists and writers. But also conservatives who are woefully underrepresented in academia.

And there’s the question of education. We need to constantly force ourselves to have hard conversations about these questions. We need to ask about what gender and race and religion have meant in the past in this country, what they mean in the present, and what they mean in the future. You can’t run away from it.

Part of our job here is encouraging you students to have these conversations. I think in the last year conversations around memorials and monuments have been happening around the country, and I think that’s great. I have my opinions; you have your opinions. I believe mine are right, but that doesn’t mean they’re true; they’re my opinions. You may believe yours are right; that doesn’t mean they’re true. And we have to figure out how to negotiate our differences and come to some sort of common understanding of what we can agree on; and that’s the challenge of living in a multi-racial, cosmopolitan democracy.

SH:

Let me read the next quote from The Human Condition on the topic of what it means to speak and act and appear in the public sphere. Arendt says,

“To act, in its most general sense, means to take an initiative, to begin (as the Greek words archein), ‘to begin,’ ‘to lead,’ and eventually ’to rule,’ indicated), to set something into motion (which is the original meaning of the Latin agere). Because they are initium, newcomers and beginners by virtue of birth, men take initiative, are prompted into action. — The Human Condition, 177

One of the things I like about Arendt is she’s a very compact writer. There’s a lot going on in this passage, but I actually want to focus on this idea of newcomers.

In a letter that she wrote to Karl Jaspers after she started teaching in the 1950s at the University of Chicago — he had asked her about her classes: What is it like to teach American students? — she answered: My classes are great. The students are engaged, except, you know, I have this one student, and he is the worst kind of newcomer (the German is anfänger, which has the sense of one who is who is caught up in something). What she meant is that the student refused to think; that they came with their opinions, they were “caught up” in their worldview, as Roger was just talking about; they believed that their opinions were right, and they refused to engage in a kind of conversation that would open them up to thinking differently about what they were talking about. Arendt is talking about the relationship between education, democracy, and truth, and what it means to inhabit a space in thinking where we can see the world anew, where we can begin anew.

At the beginning of The Human Condition, in the preface, the axiom, that Arendt offers us, and I think underpins a lot of her work, is: “What I’m trying to do here is to simply “stop and think what we are doing.” She means that we stop, we pause, we take a deep breath, and we think. We ask of ourselves, we engage in a conversation with ourselves about a question, about what we’re thinking about; and this is thinking. It’s a self-reflective form of thinking. It’s what she calls a two-in-one conversation, where we engage in dialogue with ourselves.

This is incredibly politically powerful. If we could stop and think about our opinions, and then listen, and think about what another person is saying, and find a way to have a conversation, and let go of any attachment we have to a fixed world view or sense of right, then we are thinking democratically. Then we are actively fighting against what Arendt called tyrannical thinking, which is reductive and universalizing. To think this way is to inhabit a kind of vulnerable space, an in-between space, where we’re constantly coming into being, where we’re constantly open to new ways of thinking about the world.

RB:

I’m going to move on to this next slide of natality and plurality. This idea of newness and beginning, initium, that Sam is talking about is essential for Arendt. And one of the words that she uses, and I find it overused, and so I try not to use it too much, but I’ll mention it to you, is this idea of natality. Natality means birth or birthliness; prenatal, means before birth.

Aristotle says that man is a political animal, a zoon logon echon, an animal that has the capacity of speech or reason. Christian philosophers said that man is created in the image of God, and thus is almost mortal but not yet divine being. Immanuel Kant says that man is a rational being, a vernünftige Lebewesen, a living being that has reason. Arendt rejects all these definitions of humanity, and she says instead that man is a beginner. That’s her idea of man. Man is someone who begins things new, and that’s natality.

“If action as beginning corresponds to the fact of birth, if it is the actualization of the human condition of natality, then speech corresponds to the fact of distinctness and is the actualization of the human condition of plurality, that is, of living as a distinct and unique being among equals.” “The new always happens against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability…. The new therefore always appears in the guise of a miracle.” — The Human Condition, 178

For Arendt — and this is, again, shocking to many of us — miracles are not crazy things that religious people believe in. There is no humanity without miracles, because a miracle is, humanly speaking, simply something that could not have been predicted, that could not have been expected. So, for example, the emergence of the Civil Rights Movement and Martin Luther King for her was a miracle. Gandhi and his movement were a miracle. The American Revolution for her was a miracle. And the great hope of politics for Arendt is that miracles are possible, and that’s why we should never be pessimistic. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be worried; but it means we should never be pessimistic.

SH:

Let me move on to the next quotation from the text.

“In acting and speaking, men show who they are, reveal actively their unique personal identities and thus make their appearance in the human world…. This disclosure of ‘who’ in contradistinction to ‘what’ somebody is — his qualities, gifts, talents, and shortcomings, which he may display or hide — is implicit in everything somebody says and does…. The moment we want to say who somebody is, our very vocabulary leads us astray into saying what he is; we get entangled in a description of qualities he necessarily shares with others like him; we begin to describe a type or a ‘character’ in the old meaning of the word, with the result that his specific uniqueness escapes us” — The Human Condition, 179, 181

So who and what are actually proper philosophical categories for thinking about — I don’t want to use the word human beings now, but let’s call them individuals. Who a person is varies from what a person is. And I think today this is actually a really important point politically because we confuse them. We mistake certain forms of identity politics for who a person is when in reality it’s more of what a person is. What a person is are characteristics, consumer choices, things that are material, that give form to our material sense of self. Who is how it is that we think about the world, how it is that we engage in conversation, how we develop as distinct individuals through thought, through speech and action, and not through what it is that we do. I could ask you: Who are you? And you might give me your resume, what you do, where you’re from. But that’s not who you are, that’s what you are. And similarly, today, people are often quick to introduce themselves with all of their identity modifies — cisgender, heterosexual, genderqueer — but this is just another form of what. Who a person is, for Arendt, exists beyond any form of identity politics.

RB:

I’m going to move on to Arendt’s understanding of the polis and the importance of politics as a “space of appearance.”

“The Polis was supposed to multiply the occasions to win ‘immortal fame,’ that is, to multiply the chances for everybody to distinguish himself, to show in deed and word who he was in his unique distinctness….to offer a remedy for the futility of action and speech.” (197) “The Polis is the space of appearance in the widest sense of the word, namely, the space where I appear to others as others appear to me, where men exist not merely like other living or inanimate things but make their appearance explicitly.” (198–99)

By Victoria from London, UK — Flickr, CC BY 2.0

The polis is a Greek word for — well, I won’t translate it. It’s not a state and it’s not a city. Here’s the best way that I can explain to you what a polis is. A polis, which is the root of our word political and politician, comes from the Greek word pelein. And pelein was the verb that the Greeks used to describe the circular motion of smoke rings as they come up out of a peace pipe. So how does politics come out of the verb for smoke rings? Because politics is, as both Aristotle and Plato understood, the unity of a multitude; or in Arendt’s words, the shared common center of a plurality. It is the pole, the center, around which different and plural and unique people revolve, that holds them together. The polis is not only a physical place, not only a legal entity; it’s a spiritual togetherness of plural and different people.

And that spiritual togetherness of plural and different people for Arendt provides a space of appearance, because we know that when we act, when we speak, what will happen? People will listen, see us; even if they kill us, they will have showed us that we occurred, we mattered. The worst thing that could happen is that they ignore us. The worst thing that you can do to someone if you don’t like them, whether it’s Milo Yiannopoulos or Donald Trump, is ignore them, because that makes them invisible. But the polis is what unites us.

SH:

Let me move on to the next quotation from Arendt’s The Human Condition.

Power “corresponds to the human ability not just to act, but to act in concert.” — Arendt, On Violence, 172 “Power is what keeps the public realm, the potential space of appearance between acting and speaking men, in existence…. Power preserves the public realm and the space of appearance, and as such it is also the lifeblood of the human artifice, which, unless it is the scene of action and speech, of the web of human affairs and relationships and the stories engendered by them, lacks its ultimate raison d’être. Without being talked about by men and without housing them, the world would not be a human artifice but a heap of unrelated things to which each isolated individual was at liberty to add one more object.” — The Human Condition, 200, 204, 206

What she’s talking about at the end of that quote resonates with what she was talking about at the beginning of the chapter, and what the difference is between otherness and distinctness. We appear in the world, and we engage with one another. Arendt is using the word artifice, which for her refers to the world that we build with our hands, homo faber, through architecture, language, poetry, music, and so on. She draws a distinction between the earth, which we inhabit and must share together, and the world that we build. We interact with the common world that we build together, which includes our political institutions. And we are able to understand one another through a common language, because in some way we are equal and can appear before one another in speech and action. When we do this, we’re building a web, a web of relationships, a kind of string between peoples. And part of this web for Arendt is our collective inheritance which is constituted through human relationships, storytelling, remembering one another, remembering that George Washington and Jefferson Davis are two different people and perhaps should not be compared to one another.

That is, it’s having stories, having our political stories, having the stories of individuals told. Earlier on in the section that you’re reading she talks about the word hero. And hero, as Arendt reminds us, used to mean anyone who was qualified to participate in the public sphere, somebody who was free, and somebody who deserved to be remembered. We all deserve to be remembered for our distinctness, and we do that by telling stories and telling one another’s stories.

RB:

So we’re going to try and end, but one last thing on power and action. She writes on page 200,

“What first undermines and then kills political communities is loss of power and final impotence; and power cannot be stored up and kept in reserve for emergencies, like the instruments of violence, but exists only in its actualization. Where power is not actualized, it passes away, and history is full of examples that the greates material riches cannot compensate for this loss. Power is actualized only where word and deed have not parted company, where words are not empty and deeds not brutal, where words are not used to veil intentions but to disclose realities, and deeds are not used to violate and destroy but to establish relations and create new realities.” — The Human Condition, 200

This is a key idea for her. A lot of you, and a lot of us, think that the great evil is power. We’ve internalized this idea. You’ve heard the phrase, “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” For Arendt, that’s wrong. Power is what enables us to be free. Power is what enables us to act, to talk, to speak, to present ourselves, to insert ourselves, to force ourselves into the conversation. We need not to limit power but to multiply it. And the way to protect against one power becoming too dominant and thus restricting all of us, or limiting our freedom, is to multiply power so much that no one power can dominate them all. Think of The Lord of the Rings, right? There’s no one ring to rule them all. It’s actually very much Arendt’s thought, and there’s some great papers on Arendt and Tolkein around those ideas.

“Where power is not actualized, it passes away.” And this is what I would all tell you. You asked a question about what to do. Where we stop actualizing power, where we stop engaging, where we stop acting, it withers away. Power requires that people be involved in self-government. And history is full of examples, she writes, that the greatest material riches cannot compensate for this loss. I think you’re seeing that happen in the United States right now. No matter how rich we are, if we don’t engage politically, power will wither away, and when it does, there is the chance for violence to come in and replace it. And that’s, I think, the great danger we’re facing today.