Hannah Arendt's Concept of the Public Realm
BEING ONESELF WITH ANOTHER:
HANNAH ARENDT'S CONCEPT OF THE PUBLIC REALM
A Thesis
Submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements
For the Degree of
Master of Arts
In
Social and Political Thought
By
Deniz Ferhatoglu
Regina, Saskatchewan
May, 2011
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FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES AND RESEARCH
SUPERVISORY AND EXAMINING COMMITTEE
Deniz Ferhatoglu, candidate for the degree of Master of Arts in Social and Political Thought, has presented a thesis titled, Being Oneself With Another: Hannah Arendt's Concept of the Public Realm, in an oral examination held on May 2, 2011. The following committee members have found the thesis acceptable in form and content, and that the candidate demonstrated satisfactory knowledge of the subject material.
External Examiner: Dr. Margaret Ogrodnick, Department of Political Studies, University of Manitoba
Supervisor: Dr. Phillip Hansen, Department of Philosophy and Classics
Committee Member: Dr. William Stahl, Luther College
Committee Member: Dr. Robert Piercey, Department of Philosophy and Classics
Chair of Defense: Dr. Ian Germani, Department of History
*Not present at defense Abstract
What does it mean to be an authentic human in a world we share with other human beings? How do we belong individually and collectively to that world? How has modernity conditioned our experiences in it? And if totalitarianism is one of the most vivid historical examples of the vulnerability of our political togetherness, how can we fortify it, and where should we begin? Hannah Arendt's political theory is a response to these questions. Her genuine concern for human affairs and political togetherness, and her belief that understanding them is part of their rehabilitation makes her work an insightful guide for overcoming the predicaments and supplying remedies for the modern human condition.
Considering her work as a whole, this thesis focuses on Arendt's concept of the public realm. Although Arendt's interpreters focus specifically on Arendt's arguments in
The Human Condition when evaluating the concept of the public realm, I argue this to be an inadequate approach, particularly when the matter at hand is Arendt's political theory.
Although insightful and original, Arendt's writings can come across as unsystematic, confusing, and incoherent at times. Thus, drawing conclusions based solely on one of her works can sometimes be misleading. In order to avoid this, in this thesis I survey
Arendt's central works and focus specifically on three main themes from which I evaluate Arendt's concept of the public realm: (1) its ontological roots (2) its focus on citizen participation, and (3) its ethical component. By doing so, I hope to show that
Arendt's work amounts to a cohesive narrative, and aim to situate the concept of the public realm within this narrative.
2 A cknowledgements
This thesis would not have been possible without the guidance and assistance of the individuals who in one way or another assisted me during the preparation and completion of this study.
I am heartily thankful to my supervisor, Dr. Philip Hansen who offered his guidance and support during this arduous process while allowing me the room to work in my own way. I am also very grateful to Dr. Shadia Drury for her genuine concern, consideration, and support during my studies at the University of Regina. I also benefited from the constructive and insightful comments of Drs. Robert Piercey, William Stahl, and
Margaret Ogrodnick.
It is my pleasure to acknowledge the Department of Philosophy and Classics and
The Faculty of Graduate Research and Studies for their generous funding without which writing this thesis would have been next to impossible. Also, the staff at both departments has been of great help throughout this process. I am particularly grateful to Ms. Colleen
Gills, Ms. Corrine Gogal and Ms. Mary Catherine Litalien for their assistance.
Last but not the least, I would like to express my gratitude to my parents who have always supported me in every way they can and encouraged me to pursue my dreams. My deepest gratitude goes to my partner and best friend Waleed Al-Rabeh whose selfless love has been a source of hope and courage.
3 Table of Contents
Abstract 2
Acknowledgments 3
Chapter One
Introduction 5
Chapter Two
The Ontological Foundations of the Public Realm 24
Chapter Three
Founding and Recovering the Public Realm: Revolution and Citizen Participation 47
Chapter Four
The Public Realm and Intersubjective Ethics 68
Chapter Five
Conclusion 89
List of References 100
4 Chapter One
Introduction
In this thesis my primary concern is to give a thorough analysis of Arendt's concept of the public realm. Rather than focusing solely on The Human Condition where
Arendt offers her most detailed exposition of the concept, taking my cue from this work I argue that a comprehensive understanding of Arendt's account of the public realm requires consideration of her political theory as a whole.
I develop my argument based on the continuity that I claim exists between
Arendt's earlier, more abstract and philosophical works such as The Human Condition
(1958) that provide us with the explanation of the existential-phenomenological foundations of the public realm through the example of the Greek polis, her later more concrete and explicitly political works such as On Revolution (1977) and Civil
Disobedience (1972) that deal with the ways through which this realm can come into existence by offering an analysis of the modern revolutions, and Arendt's last more philosophical works such as Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy (1982),
Responsibility and Judgment (2003), and Thinking (1978) where Arendt addresses the concept of the public realm from the perspective of the human mental faculties, and which, in my opinion, amount to an intersubjective ethics. I argue that Arendt's emphasis on speech and plurality defies transcendental moral values and instead points to a form of ethics that is a result of public communication and collective action.
Of course, what I try to portray here as continuity between Arendt's earlier and later works does not occur in an obvious and systematic manner. Nevertheless, in this
5 thesis I argue that Arendt's call for an ontological1 foundation of the public realm, her reflections on the founding and preserving of freedom in this realm through citizen participation, and her argument that the public realm generates its own ethics all stem from the same concern: How can we bring into being a public realm in which individual and collective freedom can be fully experienced?
In this context, I challenge Arendt's interpreters who have often analyzed the concept of the public realm by focusing solely on Arendt's earlier works, especially The
Human Condition. Arendt's arguments in this work, although illuminating and definitely necessary for laying the foundation for her argument that we need to rethink the concept of the public realm, remain abstract and incomplete. My analysis can also be read as a critique on scholars like Margaret Canovan and George Kateb who argue that Arendt's later "philosophical" works are in contradiction to her earlier political works. Rather than being in contradiction, I believe that these works complement and clarify each other.
Moreover, when considered together they disclose two of Arendt's most unique intellectual merits: the courage to approach an issue from the least expected and explored perspectives, and the capacity to think beyond the common prejudices, ossified modes of thinking, and memorized convictions—a capacity that Kant called selbst denken and that she epitomized as "thinking without banisters."
Arendt's unique thinking was urged by her own experience in Nazi Germany, and most importantly by her conviction that totalitarianism is the extreme outcome of the
1 Ontology, especially in modern continental thought and under the influence of Martin Heidegger's usage of the concept, has come to mean the study of being, or what Arendt called whoness. Cf. Todd May, Gilles Deleuze: An Introduction (UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 13. Although it is true that Arendt took a critical stance toward Heidegger's ontology of solitary Dasein, she nevertheless made the question of being the foundation for her political thought. Taking her cue from Heidegger's ontology, she too, and despite her political revision of the concept, reminds us of the "question of being." Cf. Jacques Taminiaux, The Interpretation of Aristotle's Notion of Arete in Heidegger's First Courses, in Raffoul and Petigrew, eds., Heidegger and Practical Philosophy (Albany: SUNY, 2002), p. 29
6 modern age where the ways of experiencing and thinking about politics often prove to be insufficient, misleading, and disastrous. Totalitarian regimes in particular and modern politics in general are based on the conditions which prevent freedom and power from appearing in the human world by destroying the spaces where citizens can appear to one another as unique and indispensable individuals. As a result, Arendt claimed that the modern individuals are disenchanted by public affairs, suffer from a collective political apathy, and feel homeless at the most basic existential level. Arendt calls this situation world alienation.
Politically, world alienation, or worldlessness means that at some point in human history some individuals or group of individuals are denied their place in the political community, or, as it is the case in the modern age, they lose touch with the public world.
In the Greek polis slaves and women, in Nazi Germany Jewish people, and in the modern age, most citizens have lost their place in the world as political actors who contribute to a collectively created human world. What is particularly modern about this loss is the scale at which it has taken place. The industrial revolution, the socio-economical, cultural, and technological developments of the modern age have contributed to the conditions in which citizens as a whole have lost their place in the public realm, either because they are excluded systematically from the decision-making process by political elites, or because they have excluded themselves through sheer indifference towards public affairs. And when they get the opportunity to participate in politics, they do not do so as unique individuals, each offering their own opinion to the public realm, but act and speak as if they are one single person. Arendt believed this to be the main reason behind the rise of modern mass societies and mass movements. It is important to note here that, although
7 Arendt uses the terminology of the elite theory2, she does not agree with its central argument that people are prone to become a mass everywhere under all conditions.
Rather, as I will show in the second chapter, for Arendt, the mass is the indication of the disappearance of the exclusively political public realm, which both relates and separates individuals. On the one hand, it serves as a common ground for discussion, action, appearance, recognition, and remembrance; on the other hand, it provides citizens with the necessary distance from which they can shape their own opinions.
Existentially, this homelessness that is characterized by a failure to come to terms with worldly reality has led to individuals' detachment from the public world. Instead, the lives of modern individuals are marked by loneliness, apathy, conformity, and consumerism. Under such conditions individuals become susceptible to propaganda and political lies, and as Arendt shows this is the reason behind the success of totalitarianism.
Totalitarian movements took advantage of modern "homelessness" by offering individuals a place to belong. But the pseudo-politics of the totalitarian movements did not allow for plurality and diversity; instead following Hegel and Marx, they emphasized the futility of the individual and the infallibility of the universal represented by the party, the nation-state, and the historical progress of humanity.
According to Arendt, our political and existential homelessness poses a challenge also to our most fundamental moral standards. Arendt's example is Adolf Eichmann—the
Nazi bureaucrat who claimed that when obeying the monstrous orders of the regime he was following Kant's categorical imperative. Arendt interprets Eichmann's actions as a failure to think; if he could think, he could tell a right action from a wrong one, thereby
2 Elite, or elitist theory, is based on the assumption that in every society a small group of political elites rule over the majority of citizens. Some of the representatives of classical elite theory are Vilfredo Pareto, Gaetano Mosca, Robert Michels and Joseph Schumpeter.
8 exercising the faculty to judge. It is Arendt's contention that by participating in the public realm, citizens shape their own opinions and constantly bring them at par with the political and ethical standards they have in common. This habituates and prepares them to judge even when they are not physically present in the public realm, and most importantly, by taking others' views into consideration, they learn to think and act from a more "objective" yet still personal point of view, which Arendt hoped would prevent them from wrong-doing.
In order to overcome the worldlessness bestowed upon the modern individual,
Arendt sets out to recover the public realm and rehabilitate the modern individual's understanding of the human condition on earth. Arendt's project can be seen as developing in three main steps, each of which constitutes a chapter of the present thesis:
(1) the ontological foundations of the public realm, (2) the founding of the public realm through citizen participation, and (3) the intersubjective ethics of the public realm.
I
In order to recover the public realm, first Arendt engages in a political ontology from an existential-phenomenological perspective. She turns to basic human experiences such as natality that is evident in human birth and plurality that is manifested in the fact of living among other human beings, and to activities such as labour, work, and action in order to discern the political elements of human existence.
Whether this undertaking can be called exclusively "ontological" is open to dispute. It has also been called phenomenological humanism, existentialism politicized
(Lewis P. Hinchman and Sandra K. Hinchman), phenomenological essentialism (Seyla
9 Benhabib), political ontology (Shiraz Dossa, Phillip Hansen), philosophical anthropology
(Judith Butler), political anthropology (Julia Kristeva), inquiry of human existence
(Michael G. Gottsegen, George Kateb), and phenomenology of human activities
(Margaret Canovan, Bhikhu Parekh). This variety of interpretations stems from the
difficulty in discerning Arendt's intentions, specifically in The Human Condition and, as
Lewis Hinchman and Sandra Hinchman have pointed out, also from her synthesis of two
intellectual sources that are alien to each other: "the framework of existentialism" and
"the intellectual-practical environment of classical antiquity" (1994, pp. 143-144).
There is no doubt that the major influences on Arendt's unique take on the public
realm are phenomenology and existentialism, especially the works of her teachers Martin
Heidegger and Karl Jaspers. Phenomenology—"the study of human experience and of the
ways things present themselves to us in and through such experience"—compelled
Arendt to think of the world as the space of appearance (Moran, 2000, p. 288;
Sokolowski, 2000, p.2). Following Heidegger, she addressed the question of politics
through the trajectory of phenomenology: its appearance and disappearance in the human
world. Arendt also employed Heidegger's concepts of "disclosure," "unveiling," and
"publicness" to chart out the central deficiencies of modern politics that led to the rise of
totalitarianism (Kristeva, 2001, p.70; Villa, 2007, p. 984). However, while for Heidegger
authentic existence was realized through "the individual's care for his own being,"
Arendt reconstructed this notion of authenticity and radically politicized the problem of
"being-in-the world" with her concept of plurality (Villa, 2007, pp. 991-992). She objected to the solitary individual who has been the primary subject and concern of
Western philosophy and maintained that "men, not Man live on the earth and inhabit the
10 world," thereby replacing it with a notion of individuality which is situated and realized
in a plural and intersubjective world (1958, p.7). Moreover, instead of individual's care
for the self, she argued for the care and love of the world that individuals share with
others.
Also, existentialism, the theory of the search for authentic human existence, plays
a significant role in Arendt's political theory, specifically in her argument of authentic
individuality, or, what she calls the "who" of the person, and in her concept of plurality.
Applying Jaspers' concepts such as "pluralism of perspectives," "communication," and
"isolation" to an exclusively political realm, Arendt emphasized the importance of
intersubjectivity for the development and flourishing of this existence (Hinchman and
Hinchman, 1994; Moran, 2000, p. 301). But she parted with Jaspers in her strict
separation between politics and philosophy (Griinenberg, 2007, p. 1026). Arendt did not
believe that philosophy can be a way of engaging in politics; for her, doing philosophy
and doing politics are two different activities. As I will show in the third chapter, this
does not mean that they are necessarily performed by two different people; Arendt
believes that the philosopher should take interest in the public realm, at least as a
spectator, but he or she cannot be a philosopher (spectator) and a political activist (actor) at the same time, because while the first requires one's withdrawal from the world, the latter entails one's involvement in it. Consequently, it is safe to say that although Arendt detaches herself from the apolitical aspects of phenomenology and existentialism, she uses existential-phenomenological elements to create a new understanding of political association "from the vantage point of our newest experiences and our most recent fears"
(Arendt, 1958, p. 5).
11 At the core of The Human Condition is Arendt's claim that there are certain unchangeable qualities that we can attribute exclusively to human beings, and perhaps even refer to as essence (1958, p. 193). However, this does not mean that Arendt believes there is something called universal human nature or political essence. Instead, from the outset of this work she differentiates herself from the tradition of contract theory and argues against the idea of human nature. She notes that our exclusively human characteristics such as natality and plurality are also the characteristics that potentially make us political beings, yet these qualities become fully political only when realized and expressed through speech and action in the public realm. Speech and action are interrelated in the sense that one cannot exist without the other. While action as the capacity of beginning corresponds to the actualization of the human condition of natality, speech corresponds to the distinctness of the human condition of plurality-living as a distinct and unique being among equals (Arendt, 1958). Individuals, when relating to one another through speech and action, bring the space of appearance into being. It is this space that precedes not only the public realm, but also the existence of power and freedom.
For Arendt, power is the outcome of citizens acting together. It "springs up between men and vanishes the moment they disperse" (Arendt, 1958, p. 200). Power is not based on material factors such as numbers or physical strength; it depends only on citizens acting in concert and on the strength of their opinions they share with others.
Arendt takes great pains to disassociate citizen participation from violence. She is aware that politics involves conflicts which are not always settled peacefully, thus she tries to come up with a notion of power which is based exclusively on civil citizen participation.
12 Arendt believed that involvement in public affairs can serve as a legitimate display of
consent or dissent citizens might have with their political institutions. Thus, she hopes
that this notion of power can help citizens protect their freedoms and ensure the
endurance of the public realm. Viewed in this way, power becomes the ultimate
guarantee for the survival of political association.
But what is the purpose of political association? For Arendt, the only reason
humans live in political communities is to experience freedom. By freedom, Arendt
means the opportunity to bring forth and experience one's uniqueness and to share with
others in the public realm. It is both an individual and collective experience, but most of
all it is a political experience. Freedom cannot be imagined outside of human association;
both positive and negative freedoms are relational and defined by the presence of others.
Following the Ancient Greeks, Arendt also claims that freedom is political and
experienced through action. Human activities, such as labour and work, are not defined
by freedom; while labour is based on mastering necessity, work is based on mastering the
material world. Moreover, neither requires the presence of other human beings. Hence,
Arendt argues that it is only political action that defines one as free. But, like power, it
also needs an organized public realm, because if it was not for the organized public
realm, action and speech would always be extraordinary and heroic. The public realm
allows freedom to become a shared everyday activity and be part of the experience of the
public happiness citizens enjoy when they share in public affairs. By their willingness to take part in the public realm and relate to each other, they guarantee to each other the recognition as free, equal, and unique individuals.
13 In Arendt's opinion, modern individuals no longer think of politics as a set of affairs through which they exercise power and freedom, get the opportunity to display their unique self, and become equals among equals, as the citizens of Ancient Greece did for instance. Instead we often view politics as something completely antithetical to our personal development and liberties. Only in emergencies do some of us recognize the power that politics has in transforming our lives; most often we view it as a means towards furthering our personal interests, or ignore it all together. For Arendt, politics at its most basic ontological level provides us with the opportunity to recognize others as humans and be recognized as a human. Human, not in terms of the all encompassing
universal Kantian category which takes human to be one and the same thing universally
under all conditions, or in the sense of the seventeenth century classical liberalism that prescribes human nature, from which an artificial polity can be fabricated; neither in terms of the radical individualism of existential philosophy; rather, by human Arendt means the most fundamental qualities, activities, and experiences that we identify as human, thus setting us apart from other species. While Arendt identifies labour as an activity that we have in common with animals, she depicts work as apolitical, since when making and producing something, we do not necessarily need others' presence. For
Arendt it is only action accompanied by speech that makes us human. This is so, not only
because labour and work often come as innate activities that we do not really think about and are often naturally urged to perform, but also because it is only action that, in order to be performed, requires the existence of a more sophisticated environment, a public realm, which cannot even be imagined without the plurality of distinct beings. Hence Arendt sets out to show that being human and being a member of a political community are
14 closely related to one another. In a way, she offers an ontological justification from the existential-phenomenological perspective for the existence of the public realm.
This is the framework in which I analyze Arendt's ontological exposition of the public realm. I believe that it offers a good start for understanding the importance of this concept for Arendt's political theory. And most of all, it gives us the confidence and hope to act not only when the chips are down, but to do so everyday to reassure ourselves and others that we are first and foremost humans in our own unique way. As Arendt was also aware, our humanness is not enough for the existence of a public ream; nonetheless it offers a very good start for its establishment.
II
After establishing the ontological foundations of the public realm in The Human
Condition, Arendt sets to explore the activity of founding it in her works On Revolution and Civil Disobedience. She notes that the founding of the body politic has often come at the expense of change, which in turn has led to the marginalization of political action.
Through her analysis of modern revolutions, Arendt tries to find room for change, plurality, action, and freedom among the institutions of stability. However, unlike social contract theorists, she does not resort to hypothetical beginnings. Rather, she observes that the modern revolutions, specifically the American and the French Revolutions, provide us with actual examples of the act of founding public spaces. In Arendt's opinion modern revolutions exhibit a unique example of founding, although temporarily, a public realm which can house both the institutions of stability and the channels of change.
15 Revolutions are significant for Arendt's task for two main reasons. First, they are
"the only political events which confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of
beginning" (1977, p. 21). Second, if they remain true to the concept of plurality they tend
to initiate the emergence of a new type of government which allows for robust citizen
participation, i.e., the council system.
First, as Arendt maintains in The Human Condition, the notion of beginning originates
in the human condition of natality and is most visible during political action. Human beings
affect each other individually and collectively through this capacity, and thereby the human
world undergoes constant change. Change then is an indispensible component of the public
realm and a permanent force in human affairs. It is "inherent in a world inhabited and
established by human beings, who come into it, by birth, as strangers and newcomers" (1958,
p. 77). Every newcomer, by virtue of spontaneity and the ability to begin, grows up building
new relationships both with the world and other individuals, often interrupting the processes
and relationships which were already intact in the human world. Human affairs are thus
exposed to the continuous disruption of human activity. Arendt calls this the fraility of human
affairs. As a result of which, human affairs are shaped and reshaped by every action taken
and word uttered.
This "fraility" is a source of hope and fear. On the one hand, it is the indication that the unexpected can be expected from human beings even in the darkest of times; on the other hand, it poses a serious threat to the stability of human affairs and manifests the urgency of building the boundaries and fences which will help preserve security and order in the public space. The dilemma which confronts humanity is that to control the force of change is synonymous with going against the human capacity to begin, but without stability
16 human affairs would remain permanently chaotic. The need for stability, which is the motivation for all forms of social contract, especially in politics, has come at the expense of the freedom to act. Robust citizen participation, rather than being a sign of a healthy public realm, has been viewed as a disturbance to its stability, and even associated with mob rule and the tyranny of the majority. And citizens' involvement in politics has been restricted to the election day. Against this background, Arendt urges us to rethink the foundations and the founding principles of the public realm in a way that would allow for the source of change inherent in human action to coexist with the institutions of stability which provide us with a sense of security in an otherwise volatile world.
In On Revolution, Arendt explores the phenomenon of modern revolutions as it is
manifested during the American and the French Revolutions. In Arendt's view, the
importance of the American Revolution lies in its constitutional beginning. Even before
the revolution, American colonizers created the public spaces which were based on the
plurality and equality of the actors involved. And during the revolutions, these public
spaces served as the political platforms where power, as the collective citizen action, and
freedom, not only in the negative sense as citizen rights and civil liberties but also in the
positive sense as citizen participation and self-government, could be exercised (Wellmer,
2000, pp. 220-221).
In Arendt's opinion, in contrast with the American Revolutionaries, the French
Revolutionaries, due to their emphasis on the social question and the eradication of
poverty, failed to understand the role plurality and direct citizen participation played in
the founding of the public realm. Instead, following Rousseau, they misinterpreted
people's power and solidarity as indivisible general will and sovereignty. Arendt claims
17 that this misunderstanding of citizen power is also prevalent in today's liberal democracies in which public happiness is the privilege of the few and the majority of the citizens are excluded from political affairs. Arendt believes that the lack of political involvement leads individuals to political apathy and turns them to mass society. Thus, while Arendt portrays the American Revolution as the political revolution, she criticizes the "social" character of the French Revolution.
Second, for Arendt, modern revolutions are important because they initiated the emergence of plurality in the form of citizen councils. Revolutionary councils "sprang up as the spontaneous organs of the people" during the revolutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and provided the citizens with public spaces where they could discuss political matters without resorting to violent acts of resistance (1977, p. 249). Arendt observes that councils, although for a brief moment, proved that the coexistence of stability and change is possible. Her examples are the American ward system, the Paris
Commune, the Russian Soviets, and the German Rate. All of these citizen assemblies were internally democratic and "permit immediate citizen participation" (1977, p. 251).
For Arendt, their most significant achievement was the "direct regeneration of democracy" (1977, p. 263). Moreover, they constituted a public realm, which Arendt believed could help "break" mass society and help overcome political apathy. Therefore,
Arendt sought ways to revive the spirit of these councils in the modern world.
Arendt believes that modern revolutions provide us with the examples of the founding of the public realm that she had in mind. However, being aware of the role violence played in the revolutions, she seeks the ways to bring the revolutionary element to non-violent everyday politics. Citizens do not need to wait for revolutionary moments
18 to bring change and improve the conditions of their lives; rather, by participating in the
public realm they gain the say and the opportunity to shape their futures. Arendt's
analysis of modern revolutions then teaches us that the founding of the public realm does
not need to originate in revolutionary action accompanied by frustration and violence;
rather, everyday citizen participation can be the source for founding, recovering, and
preserving it.
Ill
Arendt's attempt to recover the public space also pertains to what can be called
intersubjective ethics. Arendt argues that political participation does not only lead to
freedom but also helps people structure their relationships with others. At the centre of
this ethics is judgment, the most political of human mental faculties.
How do human beings make sense of the world? How do they reflect and react to
the events they face everyday? Arendt's experience of totalitarianism taught her that
when it comes to human affairs, individuals do not only learn or know what is happening
around them, but they also use a special set of mental faculties such as thinking and
judging that turn them from mere rational animals into political beings. By virtue of their
judging capacity, human beings can make up their mind and act accordingly.
The Eichmann trial is a turning point in Arendt's political theory. As she says, with the post war trials she became aware of the moral and the individual aspect of the phenomenon of totalitarianism. During those trials, individuals were held responsible and asked to give account of their role and actions during the Nazi regime. In Arendt's view, the convicts were "ordinary people who had committed crimes with more or less
19 enthusiasm, simply because they did what they had been told to" (2003c, p. 59). This moral collapse that took over otherwise "good" people, compelled Arendt to seek the origins of the moral issues that concern individual conduct and behavior, and also to see whether these have any political implications at all. To her surprise, etymologically ethics and morality mean nothing more but mores and customs. Arendt believes that the theological and philosophical accounts of moral principles as self-evident truths are equally compelling. Yet, if these principles were equally compelling, why did they seem to work for some people and not for others?
Arendt's comments on the non-participants are of significance here. In Some
Questions of Moral Philosophy, Arendt says that the non-participants are not those who possessed superior moral principles, or who were simply good people, but who were able to think for themselves and knew that they would not be able to live with themselves if they took part in the atrocities (p. 44). This claim suggests that those who refused to participate in the crime did not care for the world but for themselves only. For Arendt, the care for the self and not for the world is the central characteristic of the human conscience. Conscience appears during the process of thinking, when one engages in a dialogue with his or her self and talks matters through. The emergence of this two in one plurality is a result of the faculty of thinking. Hence, Arendt judges Eichmann's statements as sheer lack of thinking. Eichmann could do what he had done not because he was evil or because he was stupid, but because he was not capable of thinking, of engaging in the dialogue "between me and myself' (Arendt,
2003d, p. 159). If he had thought, he could have been able to judge and differentiate between one set of rules and another, and could have told duty from crime (Arendt, 2003d, p. 159).
Arendt's encounter with Eichmann compels her to examine the affiliation between thinking
20 and morality and to ask whether "the activity of thinking as such, the habit of examining and reflecting upon whatever happens to come to pass, regardless of specific content and quite independent of results, could this activity be of such a nature that it "conditions" men against evildoing?" (2003d, p. 160)
Arendt, following the example of Socrates, describes thinking as the dialogue that occurs between "me" and "myself." When we think the ego is engaged in relation only to itself, thinking becomes a solitary process. Individuals withdraw from the world when they think. They think not through real objects but representations. Thinking as such suffers from worldlessness. It is not interested in the world and the well-being of others, but is concerned only with the agreement in the self. More importantly, thinking has a destructive character both on its own values and also on the established criteria and values. Therefore, Arendt believes that a faculty as such cannot be the basis of moral judgment, and it cannot commit one to act politically. Conscience that is the product of the faculty of thinking cannot be a source of moral action on its own. Hence, we cannot rely solely on thinking to protect the world from wrong; instead, we need political action and a mental faculty that will help one to tell good from wrong. This faculty is judgment. Judgment for Arendt is also a personal mental activity as well; however, it is other-oriented because the one who judges takes others into consideration. Also, once it appears in public space and is shared with others, judgment becomes an opinion that is subject to the others' challenge.
Arendt's concept of judgment is influenced by what she calls the political philosophy
Kant had never wrote. Arendt finds in Kant's aesthetic judgment a political quality. For
Arendt, Kant's great importance lies in the fact that Kant, although he does not tell how to combine with others to act, does tell one how to take others into account (1982, p. 45).
21 Common sense is what Kant believed directs us toward others, and this inner faculty universal
to everybody is most active in aesthetic judgment. Although Arendt agreed on the political
aspect of common sense, she did not believe that it is something that is innate. Instead she
argued that the ability to call upon the presence of others when they are not present and invite
them to engage in a dialogue is something that we learn through our engagement with others
in the actual public space. In that sense, Arendt finds a way to develop a link between the
public and private sides of the human mind. If indeed taking others into account or practicing
Kant's enlarged mentality is oriented towards others, then it must have a positive effect on the
world. This is not telling only about what Kantian ethics were, but also tells us a whole lot
about Arendt's own version of ethics: "a certain way of being with others" (McGowan, 1998,
p. 123). Judgment hence is the kernel of Arendt's intersubjective ethics not only because it
accustoms us to consider others when we are alone, but also because when we are with others
it compels us to engage in conversation with them and be counted among the members of the
public realm.
IV
Against this background, in this thesis my aim is to give a broad and detailed
exposition of Arendt's views on the public realm and its potential rehabilitation. Following a
chronological outline I divide Arendt's views in three main sections: the foundation,
constitution, and ethics of the public realm. In the first chapter, I look at the ontological foundations of the public realm and explain why it is important to explore the concept of the
public realm starting as Arendt did from an existential-phenomenological perspective. Here I
also try to situate the concept of the public realm in relation to other central concepts such as
plurality, natality, freedom, and power. In the second chapter, I discuss the ways in which
22 Arendt proposed the constitution of the public realm should take place. Here I explore
Arendt's argument about the role modern revolutions play in creating public spaces with
focus on the American and the French Revolutions. Finally, in the third chapter, I argue that
Arendt's concept of the public realm also amounts to what can be called intersubjective ethics. Here I consider Arendt's last most philosophical works in relation to Arendt's earlier works and argue that Arendt's depiction of judgment as the most political of man's mental abilities is the product of Arendt's continuing attempt to reconcile the acting and thinking subject, the citizen and philosopher. I believe that it is in this context that Arendt's concept of the public realm needs to be understood.
23 Chapter Two
The Ontological Foundations of the Public Realm
The focus of this chapter is the ontological foundations of the public realm which
Arendt examines in The Human Condition. In this work, Arendt identifies the basic characteristics of human existence by simultaneously developing a critique of the modern human condition. At the centre of this critique lies Arendt's contention that "genuine" politics has disappeared and the public realm, which is supposed to house this politics, is invaded by socio-economical concerns and activities. As a result, humans are deprived of the physical space where they can experience freedom and authenticity. Most importantly, they are divested from the common ground which relates them to one another and compels them to show interest and take part in public affairs. Thus Arendt, among other things, sets out to provide her readers with a phenomenological-existential analysis of what it means to be a human on earth, uses this analysis to demonstrate the connections between being human and being a member of a political community, and thereby to draw the path towards the recovery of the public realm.
PLURALITY AND NATALITY
The two human qualities that are central to Arendt's analysis of the ontological foundations of the public realm are plurality and natality.
If there is one concept that sets Arendt apart from other political philosophers and theorists it is the concept of plurality. Against the Western tradition, which according to her since Plato has focused on the individual in his singularity, she argued that the subject of
24 politics and political theorizing should be individuals in their plurality. She assiduously argues that plurality, the fact "that men in plural, and not Man in singular, live on earth and inhabit the world", is the condition of all political life (Arendt, 1958, p. 7).
For Arendt, human existence is always a plural existence. Both being human as a natural being and dweller on earth, and as a political being and member of the public realm, imply human plurality. Therefore, in Arendt's view the political and legal conditions of citizenship and political community should be based on the single ontological reality: being human implies the existence of other human beings. By making this claim, Arendt does not disregard the fact that human beings are also private beings; rather her intention is to highlight the relationship between human plurality and politics. If politics is possible at all, it is because, unlike philosophy and theology, it is based on human plurality (Arendt, 2005, p. 93).
However, unlike the plurality of other species, human plurality is not merely a numerical quantity. What is unique about human plurality is the fact that each one of us is human in his or her own distinctive way. Thus, politics is not only about the togetherness of humans, but about "the coexistence and association of different" humans (Arendt, 2005, p. 93).
In Arendt's view, the failure to understand the significance of plurality to politics has
been catastrophic. For a species that is born in a plurality of different beings, who have the innate urge to communicate, display, and sometimes overcome their differences, to be forced to live in social and political environments where the ignoring of plurality and difference takes place means living an unfulfilled human existence. Arendt also notes that organizations such as family, social group, class, and nation-state have been based on the assumption that individual conformity is better than diversity. Although this might not be true in the twentieth century where social and political institutions are becoming more and more diverse and even
25 democratic, Arendt's argument that plurality is and should be an important component of human life, especially of politics, still holds.
Another human characteristic that has political implications is natality, which Arendt describes as "the new beginning inherent in birth" and as the ontological quality of action
(1958, p. 9). Natality is evident in each person's birth and continues its presence throughout human life as spontaneity and beginning. Natality, Arendt tells us, is most apparent in demographic change: "the human world is constantly invaded by strangers, newcomers whose actions and reactions cannot be foreseen by those who are already there and are going to leave in a short while" (Arendt, 1961b, p. 61). Politically, this means that unless natality and, hence, human spontaneity are fully abolished from human affairs, any attempt to predict the future or to prescribe strict and rigid plans and programs for human organizations are in contradiction with human freedom.
The concept of natality is one of the most fascinating concepts of Arendt's political theory for at least two reasons. First, Arendt believes that an element of natality is inherent in all human activities. However, it is only action that is exclusively related to beginning. Unlike other species on earth, human beings can engage in new beginnings through their capacities for speech and action, thereby overcoming "the bonds of nature" and the instrumentality of work (Dietz, 1994, p. 235). When new members enter the world of human affairs they affect this world through their actions and words. Natality, in that sense, is the seed of novelty engraved in each human existence. This led Arendt to liken humans to "miracle workers"
(2005, p. 113). As Arendt puts it:
The new always happens against overwhelming odds of statistical laws and probability, which for all
practical, everyday purposes amounts to certainty; the new therefore always appears in the guise of
26 miracle. The fact that man is capable of action means that the unexpected can be expected from him,
that he is able to perform what is infinitely improbable. And this again is possible only because each
man is unique, so that with each birth something uniquely new comes into the world (1958, p. 178).
When human affairs are left to their natural workings, decay is inevitable. In such an environment, what saves the world from turning into dust is the miracle of natality (Arendt,
1958, pp. 246-247). Thus, for Arendt, natality is a source of hope. At the end of The Origins of Totalitarianism, although Arendt warns us that the totalitarian elements will remain potential in modern democracies, she points to the remedy of this situation, which is to be found in the concept of beginning.
Beginning has an out-of-nowhere appearance onto the world. It is a break of continuity; it is marked by unexpectedness and defies all probability. It is "as though the beginner had abolished the sequence of temporality itself, or as though the actors were thrown out of the temporal order and its continuity" (1994, p. 206). This means that even in the darkest of times, a new beginning is possible-one only need to think of events such as the
Hungarian revolution (1956), the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989), and most recently the
Egyptian revolution (2011). Arendt is aware that most radical beginnings, such as revolutions and the founding of the new body politic, contain elements of the past, yet for her what makes each beginning unique is the fact that it is initiated by actors who are beginners themselves, and who are capable of bringing their uniqueness to the activity of beginning. Hence she argues that every beginning no matter its source, time, and setting because of its unique beginner "looks like a miracle" (1958, p. 246).
Second, for Arendt natality means that humans can transform their existential status that has been defined in Western tradition according to the concept of mortality. For Arendt,
27 western philosophy, especially the existential and metaphysical tradition, has not only treated human beings in their singularity, but also has defined them according to their mortality.
Mortality has been viewed to be the ultimate condition of human existence. On the contrary, for Arendt "men are not born to die but to begin" (1958, p. 246). By shifting our attention from mortality to natality, Arendt proposes a new way of being human, not one that is defined by being towards death, but one that is the source of countless potentialities.
SPEECH AND ACTION
For Arendt plurality and natality are politically significant only when they are expressed through speech and action in a public realm (1958, p. 246). While action as the capacity of beginning corresponds to the actualization of the human condition of natality, speech corresponds to the distinctness of the human condition of plurality: living as a distinct and unique being among equals (Arendt, 1958). As Arendt states:
If men were not equal, they could neither understand each other and those who come before them nor
plan for the future and foresee the needs of those who will come after them. If men were not distinct,
each human being distinguished from any other who is, was, or will ever be, they would need neither
speech nor action to make themselves understood. Signs and sounds to communicate immediate,
identical needs and wants would be enough (1958, p. 175).
In other words, speech and action bring a richer, more sophisticated and more "human" way of communicating and relating to human affairs, thereby allowing the formation of a common ground. Thus, speech for Arendt is not merely a rhetorical device, but a way of relating to individuals who hold different opinions. It is an ability to create a common world that looks
28 familiar to all who are part of it. We can be deeply concerned about certain issues, but not
until we discuss them with others can we make these issues familiarly human. As Arendt states in her essay on Lessing:
We humanize what is going on in the world and in ourselves only by speaking of it and in the course of
speaking of it we learn to be human. The Greeks called this humanness which is achieved in the
discourse of friendship philanthropia, "love of man" since it manifests in a readiness to share the world
with other men" (1960, p. 25).
In that respect, the willingness to speak to each other and to share the same public space means that we recognize each other not only as peers and as fellow citizens, but first and foremost as fellow humans. Without such willingness, we cannot relate to each other, let alone constitute a political association or a public realm. Moreover, as I will show in the third chapter, this willingness to relate to one another has ethical implications. By virtue of having shared a public space and talked to others, one acquires the habit of taking others into consideration and engaging in conversations with them even when he or she is alone. And it is this conversation that Arendt hopes might ensure the survival of the public realm and political community.
Moreover, speech and action reveal the "who" of the person rather than the
"what" of the person. Through acting and speaking among others, individuals "reveal actively their unique personal identities and thus make their appearance in the human world" (Arendt, 1958, p. 179). These qualities which constitute the "essence," and not the nature of the person, are different than those that constitute the "what" of the person such
29 as his or her talents, profession, likes, and shortcomings.3 Instead, the revelatory quality of speech and action brings to the fore the qualities that constitute the "who" of the person and which are visible to others and are to be judged by others at the end of one's life. In that sense, in order to reveal the "who," one needs to distinguish oneself from others, hence Arendt states that the "who" is most visible during the heroic actions.
This, as Arendt herself observes, implies an antagonistic public realm, one that is quite different from the more associative and intersubjective public realm that her emphasis on speech and action suggests. This aspect of her theory has led Arendt's interpreters such as Passerin D'entreves and Seyla Benhabib to argue that there is an irreconcilable tension between the agonistic and associational elements in her theory of political action (Villa, 1999, p. 129).
I believe this to be an apparent tension. Arendt herself recognizes that the disclosure of the "who" as what makes one unique and different is individualistic in nature and that it is a form of "agonal-spirit," but at the same time she points to the Greek remedy of the problem: the polis, an organized public realm. Arendt argues that the polis allows the extraordinary individual actions to become ordinary political actions, and thereby to multiply "chances for everybody to distinguish themselves" (1958, p. 197).
Thus being a member of a political community and participating in the public realm become the remedies for the individualistic, or antagonistic character of political action.
It is no longer the select few, stronger, well-spoken, or better looking who lure the public
3 Arendt differentiates between essence and human nature. She means by essence the universal human qualities that humans have in common. For instance, speech, action, natality, and plurality are essentially human qualities. On the contrary, she objects to the concept of human nature as it has been used, for instance, by contract theorists in terms of predictable actions and behaviors. Rather, she argues that despite our similar qualities, we do not share what has been called "nature:" a set of characteristics that make our actions predictable and subject to measurements and calculations. Such a view does not only diminish the miracle of humanity, i.e., freedom, but also reduces human action to a set of reactions.
30 realm, but everybody now gets the chance to appear and reveal themselves. This means that, citizens don't need to compete for fame in order to be remembered, instead the polis itself becomes "a kind of organized remembrance" (1958, p. 198). It is in the public realm where people are neither for nor against each other where everyone gets the equal opportunity to be simultaneously the performer, the witness, and the storyteller of extraordinary actions.
This means that, for Arendt, a life that has never been touched by the light of the public realm is somehow not lived folly; it has remained in the shadow where there are no fellow human beings who can tell and remember the story of one's life. Hence, despite her interest in heroic action as the revelation of the self, Arendt seems to be more interested in how this human element can be employed to establish a public realm, a modern polis, and a political togetherness which can make it "worthwhile for men to live together" and urge them to share their words and deeds (1958, pp. 196-197).
THE PUBLIC REALM
Whenever men are together in the manner of speech and action they constitute a public realm (Arendt, 1958, p. 199). But Arendt differentiates the exclusively political features of this public realm from its other public yet apolitical features and argues that the revelatory quality of speech and action constitutes two types of "in-between." First, in- between is fully objective and is concerned "with the matters of the world of things in which men move, which physically lies between them and out of which arise their specific, objective worldly interests" (Arendt, 1958, p. 182). This "in-between" varies according to each group and is based on what is common. For example, what we call identity politics or what we
31 include in the categories of social and economic today would involve consideration of this type of "in-between." Social organizations like guilds, professional associations, and social clubs would be part of this in between. There is no need to debate about the matters that are in common and which appear the same to everyone such as scientific truths. Also, although these issues require one to be present in the public realm, they are not truly political in the sense that they do not express a concern for the human affairs in general but they are self- interested. For instance, women or people of colour do not necessarily share an identity or a political space based on their gender and skin colour. Their gender and the colour of their skin can become a political subject and eventually lead to political action, but the reason behind this is not gender or skin colour alone (Parekh, 1981, p. 95). The reason is more likely to lie in the larger social, economic, and political structures where gender and colour might have become a basis for injustice, discrimination, and oppression. According to Arendt, however, the grievances of these individuals would need to be addressed in another "in-between."
Arendt calls this "in-between" the "web " of human relationships and the realm of human affairs (1958, p.183). This second in-between is where Arendt includes all that is political. It "consists of deeds and words and owes its origin exclusively to men's acting and speaking directly to one another" (Arendt, 1958, p.183). For Arendt this in-between is subjective, not because it is personal but because it requires each party to have and present its own perspective on the matters at hand. Because of this diversity in viewpoints on a public issue, people should discuss and debate what is of concern to all. This in-between is not tangible and its objectivity needs to be communicated and worded by actors in a way that can be understood and appreciated by all the citizens. Otherwise, there is nothing to make it concrete since it does not leave any material traces in the human world. However, Arendt
32 argues that "for all its intangibility, this in-between is no less real than the visible world of things we have in common" (1958, p. 183).
While the first "in-between" involves what is social, the second is purely political. The question that presses itself here and that has puzzled most of Arendt's readers is: can we really separate social concerns from our political concerns today? And if so, what would be our criteria?
From Arendt's treatment of this issue throughout her work we can discern three main characteristics of what constitutes a "proper" political matter. First, the matter should be suitable for dispute and its resolution should rely solely on public discussion. Arendt believed that some issues do not benefit from a public debate; they are better off being addressed by administrative channels. For instance, where to build a bridge can be decided either by public debate, or by the governors of the city, although Arendt argues that it is better if it is decided by the citizens (Arendt, 1979, p. 317). The issue of adequate housing, on the other hand, can be addressed solely by the administration, since there is no need for discussion. As Arendt maintains, it is clear that everyone should have adequate housing. On the other hand, if the issue is whether adequate housing should also mean integration to mainstream society, it should be decided by the citizens themselves (Arendt, 1979, p. 318).
Second, the quality of the issue depends on the motivation of the actor. As Arendt states, "The decisive thing is whether your own motivation is clear—for the world—or, for yourself, by which I mean for your soul" (Arendt, 1979, p. 311). In that sense, whatever contributes to the political community and benefits the political community as a whole is political. Arendt's example is Rosa Luxemburg, who despite acting from a strong sense of justice, acted for the world and within the world (Arendt, 1979, p. 311).
33 Arendt's position is most visible in her treatment of the labour movement. Although
Arendt views labour as a purely subjective and private activity "in which man is neither together with the world nor with other people, but alone with his body, facing the naked necessity to keep himself alive" (1958, p. 212), she nevertheless acknowledges that workers' concerns become political the moment they break free from ideologies, partisanship, and self- interest and when they word their demands in common terms proposing, for example, the foundation of a new democratic government (1958, p. 216). Arendt writes:
From the revolutions of 1848 to the Hungarian revolution of 1956, the European working class, by
virtue of being the only organized and hence the leading section of the people has written one of the
most glorious and probably the most promising chapter of recent history (1958, p. 215).
In that sense, Arendt differentiates between the economical interests of the trade unions and of their political interests. The trade unions, in her opinion, were only defending the interests of the working class; they were concerned with issues such as "economic security, social prestige, and political power" (1958, p. 216). According to Arendt:
The trade unions were never revolutionary in the sense that they desired a transformation of society
together with a transformation of the political institutions which this society was represented, and the
political parties of the working class have been interest parties most of the time, in no way different
from the parties which represented other social classes. A distinction appeared only in those rare and yet
decisive moments when during the process of a revolution it suddenly turned out that these people, if
not led by official party programs and ideologies, had their own ideas about the possibilities of
democratic government under modern conditions. (1958, p. 216).
34 The care for the world and not for the self, then, may it be self-interest, or concern
for one's well-being, is the most elemental condition of political speech and political
action. Hence, the content of speech, Arendt argued, should not be private or social.
Instead, citizens should be concerned with the common world that they share with other
citizens and about the issues that affect all. Arendt's example is the Greekpolis where
what was privately experienced such as love and pain, could hardly find a place in the
agora, because the citizens were aware that some private issues, like pain, cannot be
worded in public terms; and that some, like love, can be destroyed by the brightness of
the public space. Only when private issues are brought up to the light of the public realm
and shared with others as a public concern can they be addressed in a political manner.
But again they need to be fit to appear in the public realm; individuals need to be aware that what they bring into the public space will no longer be the same. This concern seems to be relevant especially in a time of reality television where people have no trouble sharing their most intimate issues in front of millions. As Arendt argues, blurring the lines between what is private and public does harm to both realms and diverts them from their initial purpose. The purpose of the public realm is to discuss the issues that the political community has in common from the point of view of different individuals; to bring a private issue to the concern of all means that everyone has a say in it and that everyone's opinions matter. And this kind of intrusion by others defeats the purpose of private which is to be kept away from the eyes and opinions of others.
Third is Arendt's contention that since there is no one single political community, there is no one single topic that can be considered public everywhere at all times. As Arendt says:
35 At all times people living together will have affairs that belong in the realm of the public - "are worthy
to be talked about in public." What these matters are at any historical moment is probably utterly
different. For instance, the great cathedrals were the public spaces of middle Ages. The town halls came
later (1979, p. 316).
Arendt takes great pains to avoid the metanarratives and grand theories that can fit all humanity at all times. Instead, she genuinely believed that the citizens can establish the grounds that are most suitable for their own political existence and decide on their own which issues can endure the light of the public realm and which should be protected and kept out of it. And, as I will show in the next chapter, this does not mean that just because the majority of the citizens have agreed to exclude or include certain issues that they are right, instead, Arendt leaves plenty of room for dissident minorities to challenge the majority. But once again, dissent and disagreement like consent and agreement require an exclusively circumscribed political space in order to exist at all. But what are the qualities of this space?
THE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE PUBLIC REALM
Arendt evaluates the political realm according to its spatial, normative, and epistemological qualities (Gottsegen, 1994, pp. 49-50). In spatial terms, and following the
Greek example, Arendt separates the political realm, the polis, from the private realm, or the household which is always the space of necessity, self-interest, and sometimes violence. But, it is especially its normative qualities which separate the public realm from the private realm.
Much like Aristotle, Arendt argues that the household offers a form of togetherness that is based on biological life and on meeting its demands. The polis, on the contrary, is the space of freedom. It provides citizens with a public ground where they can appear among their equals
36 and communicate with them through speech and persuasion and not coercion. Speech, in other words, brings civility to human togetherness. Action, when accompanied by speech, is political because it does not only reveal the actor of the deed, but also, and most importantly, it shows that the doer of the deed has refrained from violence and instead opted for a more civil way of relating to his or her peers (Arendt, 1958, pp. 178-179). No doubt, speech is also the aspect of the public and the social realms, but it is only the public realm, which in order to exist, needs speech as an alternative to violence. For the citizens of the polis, only one who was free to leave behind the necessity-bound household was blessed with a public persona.
And only such people were able to experience the second birth that is possible only with one's appearance among his or her equals. As for women, slaves, and foreigners who were deprived of public life, it was as if they did not exist (Arendt, 1958, p. 58). And those who were not allowed to take part in this communication were subjected to a mute private realm. Of course, they did talk too and they did express themselves, but there was no guarantee that their worries and concerns and pain could be communicated and brought to public attention.
To be a slave in the polis also meant to be subject to violence, which Arendt defines as being deprived of the opportunity to engage in "the pre-political act of liberating oneself from the necessity of life for the freedom of world" (1958, p. 31).
Slaves were excluded from "a way of life in which speech and only speech made sense and where the central concern of all citizens was to talk with each other" (Arendt, 1958, p. 27). Here Arendt is not referring to physical violence; rather she is talking about the political violence that is done to anyone who has been denied membership in the polis.
Slaves were deprived from equality, a selfhood, and opportunity to take part in the process of collective meaning-making.
37 The polis was distinguished from the household in that it knew only "equals," whereas the household
was the center of the strictest inequality. To be free meant both not to be subject to the necessity of life
or to command of another and not to be in command oneself. It meant neither to rule nor to be ruled
(1958, p. 32)
However the equality of the citizens is not a natural equality. Rather, it is the political equality "that those who are most different guarantee for each other" (Arendt, 2005, p. 94). Unlike Hobbes, Arendt does not believe that humans are equal in their individual power "as potential murderers" (1951, p. 140). Instead, she believes that equality is acquired through one's membership in the political community. But this equality is not the equality of material conditions or social status, but the existential equality to realize oneself in the public realm. It is neither sameness nor conformity, but the equality of unique and different beings.
The word isonomy coins what Arendt means by political equality, a sort of equality that was actually opposed to democracy4, it was not equality of condition, but "the quality of those who form a body of peers" (1977, p. 30). Because human beings are not equal by nature, they "need the artificial institution, the polis that would make them equal" (1977, 30-
31, 278). Hence, Arendt concludes that "equality existed only in this specifically political realm, where men met one another as citizens and not as private persons" (1977, p. 31). The public sphere is the only place where equality can be realized; in that sense equality is always political. Thus, for Arendt, equality is the essence of freedom and is derived from one's political membership (1958, p. 33). To be free means that one can enter the public
4Arendt often uses democracy in its most simple numerical terms. However, as I try to demonstrate in the next chapter, Arendt's reflections on post-revolutionary assemblies show that once supplemented with her notion of political togetherness, democracy can indeed become a respectful form of political association.
38 realm and be among his or her peers. It means that the "citizens lived together under the conditions of no rule, without a division between rulers and ruled" (Arendt, 1977, p. 30).
In epistemological sense, the presence of others in the public realm provides us with common reality and common sense:
To live together in the world means essentially that a world of things is between those who have it
in common, as a table is located between those who sit around it; the world, like every in-between,
relates and separates men at the same time (1958, p. 52).
Although the public realm is the fundamental condition of the realization of plurality and natality, its manifestation "as a living reality, and not just as a possibility, requires the achievement of another state of affairs: worldliness" (Hansen, 1993, p. 65). The world provides a political frame for human affairs and enables the relationship between them by constantly relating and separating them (Arendt, 1958). Individuals can relate to each other and appear to each other as unique human beings only if there is a world between them, a
"common world" that is comprised of stable and familiar objects (Hansen, 1993). The world in between relates and separates them; it makes them more than solitary individuals, it provides a common ground which can relate them to others, but it also puts a space between them to prevent their togetherness from generating into a mass. Once their common ground disappears, individuals become isolated.
For Arendt isolation is the personal experience of worldlessness. It is when the opportunity and the space "where they act together in the pursuit of a common concern, is destroyed" (1951, p. 474). The distinction between loneliness and isolation is crucial. While loneliness is a mere feeling, isolation is a political condition that has altered the "basic
39 experience in the living together of men" (Arendt, 1951, p. 474). The basic experience of living with another is the condition of plurality. It is this condition that makes human reality essentially a political one. When isolated from each other, human beings lose the ability to reach each other and this not only transforms their political reality but also the capacity to decipher this reality through thought and experience. Reality as such becomes susceptible to propaganda and political lies through which the "distinction between true and false" disappears (Arendt, 1951, p. 474).
The public realm also helps to prevent people from falling over each other and maintains the distance between them. When that distance disappears, even when they might act "politically" as it is in the case of the mass politics, people start acting as one. When people act as one and hold identical opinions they do not exhibit plurality and difference.
This is what destroys the public realm and leads to mass society as it was the case in the
Weimer Republic. Here again the key is to take into consideration and make plurality the cornerstone of the public realm. But again this plurality needs to be realized in a public realm. The public realm keeps people together and allows a certain distance among each other. This is the creation of a common world that serves like a common platform for individuals who are unique and distinct.
For though the common world is the common meeting ground of all, those who are present have
different locations in it, and the location of one can no more coincide with the location of another than
the location of two objects. Being seen and being heard by others derive their significance from the fact
that everybody sees and hears from a different position (1958, p. 57).
40 Totalitarian regimes tend to treat members of society not in respect to their distinctness but
in their unity with others, as one wholesome body: "as if all humanity were just one
individual" (Arendt, 1951, p. 438). So they abolish the space between citizens and turn to a mass society. I take up this issue in chapter two, thus it is adequate to mention here that the concept of mass society emerges due to an inability of the common world to relate and separate human beings, which ultimately leads to the disappearance of a public realm and a failure to establish a proper political togetherness.
POWER AND FREEDOM
For Arendt, what keeps the public realm in existence is power (1958, p. 200).
Whenever people gather together, power is potentially present and it disappears when people leave the public realm. Power is not dependent on numbers, material means, or violence. Its only material is the "living together of people" (1958, p. 201). The public space can only contain its potential power, when people live physically closer to each other, not as one single entity or mass, and where they keep their distance but do not withdraw from the common world. Power can appear only in the public realm that has sustained the conditions of plurality, equality, and non-violence. Hence, Arendt differentiates power from strength as the property of one single individual, and a force that is a natural phenomenon, respectively.
In her view power is also an end in itself. It does not serve other ends. It belongs to groups and stems from their agreement. In Arendt's words:
[Power] is actualized only where word and deed have not parted company, where words are not
empty and deeds are not brutal, where words are not used to veil intentions but to disclose realities,
41 and deeds are not used to violate and destroy but to establish relations and create new realities
(1958, p. 200)
For Arendt cities allow such spaces to develop (1958, p. 201). When people withdraw from
the public world and start living as isolated individuals, power disappears. This is what
happened in totalitarian regimes. Totalitarianism has succeeded in abolishing the public
realm that is possible only when citizens come together and not when individuals are
isolated from each other or when they live as one single individual.
Power also gives political institutions their legitimacy; citizens ensure the survival of the political institution through their support and participation in political affairs
(D'entreves, 1994, p. 79). And by virtue of this, when they believe that their complaints and grievances are not adequately addressed, they hold the right to withdraw their support and dissent. Yet unlike the marginal forms of political resistance, power and its exclusively political conditions allow it to appear as a form of civil disobedience, "one of the most active and efficient ways of action ever devised" (1958, p. 201). However, this disobedience is not a simple resistance but has important political dimensions. I believe Arendt's example of civil disobedience to be of importance here:
[Civil disobedients] are in fact organized minorities, bound together by common opinion, rather than by
common interest, and the decision to take a stand against the government's policies even if they have
reason to assume that these policies are backed by a majority; their concerted action springs from an
agreement with each other, and it is this agreement that lends credence and conviction to their opinion,
no matter how they originally have arrived at it (1972, p. 56).
42 From the example of civil disobedience, we see that what underlies concerted action and power are common opinion and the agreement with fellow citizens. This agreement does not need to be a large scale agreement; the group of civil disobedients can be a minority against a majority. Anti-war movements and the student movement in the 60's are examples of such minority organization. In that sense, Arendt's turn to civil disobedience as a form of political action shows that, to her, political action is most significantly about the conditions of political life and the preservation of these conditions (Kateb, 1984, p. 17). Power, then, as the citizens' "acting in concert," is the very basis of the political community (D'entreves, 1994, p.
79).
But the constitution of proper political community ultimately means something more for Arendt. Although Arendt refrains from attributing politics and political community a pragmatic role, she nevertheless states that "the raison d'etre of politics is freedom, and its field of expertise is action" (1961a, p. 146). However, this does not mean, as Hegel argued for instance, that politics is the catalyst of historical progress through which humanity reaches freedom. Rather, freedom, for Arendt, seems to be almost identical to political coexistence through which the ontological conditions of natality and plurality are realized in a "space of appearance." Thus freedom is "the reason that men live together in political organization at all" (Arendt, 1961a, p. 146). And this form of freedom needs to be exercised in "a politically guaranteed public realm" where it can become a worldly object through constant citizen participation (Arendt, 1961a, p.153).
Arendt is aware that her concept of freedom as an exclusively political capacity is unusual in a world where freedom is defined as freedom from politics (Arendt, 1961a, p. 158).
She says that the separation of freedom from politics is based on the association of freedom
43 with the notion of free will which has fatal consequences. In Arendt's opinion, to equate freedom with the capacity to will is to define human affairs in terms of oppression and ultimately state violence, where the freedom of one group or person comes at the expense of another's. Arendt explains that will, unlike the two-in-one conversation that is the condition of thinking and the measure of one's friendship with himself or herself, when divided as "I will" and "I will-not," requires one of the two sides to gain superiority over the other part.
And this has a paralyzing effect on the will itself and suggests a type of "monstrosity" where the individual turns against himself exercising a command on himself (1961a, p. 159).
Arendt's example to this situation is self-control, which might lead to conflict within oneself.
At the personal level, this does not need to be harmful. For instance, in order for an athlete to succeed in an upcoming race, he or she needs to meet certain nutritional and physical demands. In that specific case self-control is not disastrous, but contributes to the development of the athlete. The problem, as Arendt sees it, is that in order for the will to lead to action, it needs to be in harmony within itself, which politically requires, as Rousseau also argued, the indivisibility of the will. However, this contradicts the condition of plurality.
Plurality, as Arendt notes over and over again, is the most and foremost condition of the political realm where there are no rulers or ruled. To demand oneness and indivisibility in a political community might lead to the oppression of the people, groups, and individuals who are viewed as harming or threatening to the harmony of the political association. This is also the reason Arendt rejects Rousseau's concept of sovereignty that presupposes the notion of a collective will of the people, where plurality and difference are sacrificed. As Arendt notes:
Under human conditions, which are determined by the fact that not man but men live on earth, freedom
and sovereignty are so little identical that they cannot even exist simultaneously. Where men wish to be
44 sovereign, as individuals or as organized groups, they must submit to the oppression of the will, be this
the individual will with which 1 force myself, or the "general will" of an organized group. If men wish
to be free, it is precisely sovereignty they must renounce (1961a, pp. 164-165).
Against this background, one can argue that Arendt establishes a unique relationship between the concept of the political and the notion of freedom in a way that one cannot be fully comprehended without the other. Freedom is what differentiates a human from a solely natural being. The political realm for Arendt is a place where human beings can be free; it is a space that is "neither driven by ourselves nor dependent on the givens of material existence"
(2005, p. 95). Arendt's concept of freedom thus suggests that humans are not only able to live together, but can decide on the conditions and the mode of their coexistence. This coexistence is the most elaborate "artifact" of human beings who are able to constitute a community and overcome their differences without relying on a much stricter difference of friend and foe.
CONCLUSION
In this chapter, I have tried to give an account of the ontological foundations of
Arendt's notion of the public realm. I have explored the concepts of natality and plurality in relation to speech and action, and described the ways in which they can constitute power and freedom and eventually lead to the establishment of an exclusively political public realm.
I have argued that Arendt's unique depiction of politics and the public realm invites us to see them in a different light. In modern liberal democracies we are inclined to think of politics as a means through which we gain the civil liberties which provide us
45 with the protection against the interference of the state and other individuals, and which aid us in furthering our private benefits. Arendt does not see the public realm as Aristotle did, as a big family where necessities are met, nor does she see politics as John Locke did, as a way of securing personal life, liberty, and estate against the injuries of other men. Instead, taking her cue from the existential-phenomenological tradition, Arendt links the foundation of political organizations to the very question of the meaning of being human, where the political and the ontological concerns of humanness become identical. In this chapter, trying to theoretically link the ontological and political elements in Arendt's work, especially as they appear in The Human Condition, I argued that
Arendt's unique approach can teach us a great deal as to how we think of the foundations and the purpose of the public realm, not as a platform which can aid us in furthering our self-interests, but as a place that determines the conditions of our humanness and citizenship. In the next chapter I look at how this public realm can come into existence.
46 Chapter Three
Founding and Recovering the Public Realm:
Revolution and Citizen Participation
In the previous chapter my primary concern was to explore the ontological foundations of the public realm, which I have argued offers a good start for understanding the significance Arendt puts on the public realm. The focus of this chapter is Arendt's analysis of the founding of the public realm. Taking her cue from modern revolutions and social contract theory, Arendt points out the importance of citizen participation for the recovery of the public realm and the founding of public spaces.
In the modern world political stability and security are all too often achieved at the expense of citizen participation. As Arendt writes, the freedom to act is usually sacrificed for the act of foundation (1977, p 232). In addition, the invasion of the public realm by socio-economical concerns, or what Arendt calls "the rise of the social," has further hindered citizens' experience of power and freedom. In search for a new beginning that can allow the public realm to regain its political character, Arendt sets to evaluate two kinds of political founding: the original social contract and revolution.
In Civil Disobedience Arendt briefly touches upon the contract theory. She challenges Hobbes' depiction of the social contract by arguing that it is executed top- down: citizens do not have any say in the conditions of the contract and simply exchange their natural freedom for the security provided by the political organization. On the contrary, in Arendt's opinion, Locke's social contract theory, due to its horizontal character, encourages individuals to take part in the founding of the public realm.
47 Arendt's example of this form of social contract is the Mayflower Compact in which the
British colonizers agreed on the most basic principles of their coexistence before setting foot onto the land of what is today Plymouth, Massachusetts, thereby making "a new beginning in the very midst of the history of Western mankind" (1977, p. 194). In
Arendt's opinion the determining factor here is whether or not individuals participate in the founding of the body politic as plural and distinct persons. In that sense, Arendt reminds us that the organization of the political association from its very beginning should be based on plurality, equality, and citizen participation. But as the American
Revolution also showed, starting a political association on the right premises does not ensure the survival of the public realm. Shortly after the American Revolution, plurality disappeared from the public realm and did manifested itself until the civil rights movements during the 60s, in citizen demonstrations and voluntary associations, which gave Arendt the hope that a new beginning is always possible.
On Revolution represents the search for that hope. In this work, Arendt explores the phenomenon of modern revolutions. First, through a comparison between the
American and the French Revolutions, Arendt provides us with two alternatives as to how the public realm can be founded anew. In Arendt's view, the American Revolution remained true to the foundation of political freedom, hence she argues it was political.
Even before the revolution, American colonizers created the public spaces which were based on the plurality and equality of the actors involved. And during the revolution, these public spaces served as the political platforms where power, as collective citizen action, and freedom, not only in the negative sense as citizen rights and civil liberties but also in the positive sense as citizen participation and self-government, was exercised
48 (Wellmer, 2000, pp. 220-221). In contrast to the American Revolutionaries, the French
Revolutionaries, due to their emphasis on the social question and the eradication of poverty, failed to understand the role plurality and direct citizen participation played in the founding of the public realm. Instead, following Rousseau, they misinterpreted people's power and solidarity as indivisible general will and sovereignty. Thus, while
Arendt portrays the American Revolution as the political revolution, she criticizes the
"social" character of the French Revolution.
Second, she notes that all modern revolutions have one thing in common: although temporarily, they bring citizen councils to existence, which existed along with the other political institutions. Arendt observes that a similar type of political association also appeared during the civil rights movements in the form of voluntary associations.
She believes that these citizen assemblies can provide us with the theoretical and practical tools that can help us recover the modern public realm and help us overcome mass society, and hopefully, allow for public spaces where freedom and public happiness could thrive to be created.
It is important to note here that by analyzing the modern revolutions and the social contract theory Arendt does not suggest that in order to recover the public realm we need to engage in a revolution. Rather, for her the important thing is to discern the political element which during revolutions allowed for a new beginning and lead to a proper public realm. Political action based on plurality and equality, for Arendt, is the element which not only initiates the foundation of the public realm, but also which, in the form of ongoing citizen participation, can help recover the public realm and protect it from ever disappearing again.
49 In this chapter, I first examine the significance of the American experience for the development of Arendt's concept of the public realm. Here, I also briefly look at the concept of founding the public realm through Arendt's interpretation of the social contract theory. Second, by drawing upon Arendt's comparison between the American and the French Revolutions, I consider the two ways, political and social, in which public spaces can be constituted. Here Arendt's distinction between the private and public realms and her views on the rise of the social are of importance. Third, I turn to the role
Arendt endows to the citizen councils in breaking the mass society.
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE
In order to fully appreciate the significance Arendt endows to the American
Revolution, we need to first look at the role plurality played in the founding of the
American body politic and at Arendt's interpretation of the indigenous social contract.
Here we find in detail Arendt's views on the importance of plurality for constitutional politics. Although it is true that Arendt is mostly known for what Andreas Kalyvas calls
"extraordinary politics" which springs like a miracle among political actors, she is equally concerned with setting the boundaries, fences, and the institutional framework which could peacefully "house" this politics (1958, p. 194; 1972, p. 101).
For Arendt political community is held together by two equally indispensable elements: (1) the constitution and the governmental institutions which provides the citizens with the principles and the foundation of their togetherness, and (2) the plural public realm which provides them with a space of action and appearance where they can
50 continuously affirm and reaffirm those principles, thereby exercising public happiness and freedom. In On Revolution Arendt treats these two elements respectively.
What makes the American experience so noteworthy in Arendt's eyes is the
American colonizers' success in simultaneously founding the body politic and allowing for public spaces that are based on citizen plurality to emerge. Colonizers were able to do what no other community was able to do, namely come together, decide on the elemental rules of their togetherness, and constitute the spaces which provide opportunities for deliberation and acting in concert. As a result, freedom and power appeared as the natural consequences of the collective endeavors of the colonizers. It is certain that these political acts did not come out of nowhere; they were the continuation of the British political tradition. However, in Arendt's eyes, what separates the colonizers from every other community is their success in bringing to the public realm a new notion of power, one that arises among those who act together as equal and distinct individuals without the division of the people into rulers and ruled (1977, pp. 166-168).
This power appeared throughout the country as self-governing bodies. The
Mayflower Compact is the best example of such bodies. As Arendt writes:
The really astounding fact in the whole story is that their obvious fear of one another was
accompanied by the no less obvious confidence they had in their own power, granted and
confirmed by no one and as yet unsupported by any means of violence, to combine themselves
together into a 'civil Body Politic' which held together solely by the strength of mutual promise
'in the Presence of God and one another,' supposedly was powerful enough to 'enact, constitute,
and frame' all necessary laws and instruments of government (1977, p. 167).
51 Consequently, the body politic as a whole appeared to be an alliance between these different self-governing citizen assemblies. How did British colonizers achieve this?
Here Arendt's interpretation of the contract theory is important. In Civil
Disobedience, Arendt describes two key models of social contract. The first is Hobbes' version which Arendt calls the vertical version of social contract. According to this contract, each individual must consent to the secular sovereign in return for protection and safety. The second version of social contract is Locke's social contract, which Arendt interprets as "an alliance between all individual members, who contract for their government after they have mutually, bound themselves" (Arendt, 1972, p. 86). Arendt calls this the "horizontal version of social contract." It is this contract which Arendt is particularly interested in. It is important to note here, as Margaret Canovan has also observed, that Arendt's interpretation of Hobbes' social contract theory as the vertical social contract and Locke's as the horizontal social contract is open to dispute. In addition, Arendt seems to have changed her conviction that Locke belongs to the first version of social contract as she previously argued in On Revolution. Despite these inconsistencies, I agree with Canovan that what is important here is whether or not consent as the basis of social contract is a relation between plural persons (1994, p. 216).
While Hobbes' contract is achieved based on "the act of consent, accomplished by each individual person in his isolation," Locke's contract is based on "the act of mutual promise," enacted, in the words of the American Declaration of Independence, "in the presence of one another" (Canovan, 1994, p. 216).
For Arendt promising plays a big role not only in the initial contract, but also in human affairs in general. She says that it is "the uniquely human way of ordering the future,
52 making it predictable and reliable to the extent that this is humanly possible" (1972, p. 92). In
a community in which each individual is equally independent and free and in which everyone
is instantaneously changing, the capacity to act makes it impossible to predict the state of
human affairs (Arendt, 1958). Meanwhile, in a society where human behavior is predictable,
there is no freedom (Arendt, 1958). Thus promises, like natality and plurality, are essentially
human qualities that sustain the stability and well-being of the public realm. Their purpose is
to raise "guideposts of reliability" in what remains "an ocean of uncertainty" (Arendt, 1958, p.
244). They are the remedies for the unpredictability of human affairs and bring about a
society in which each independent individual is bound to other members of society (Arendt,
1972, p. 87).
Hence, binding and promising, combining and covenanting are the means by which power is kept in
existence; where and when men succeed in keeping intact the power which sprang up between them
during the course of any particular act or deed, they are already in the process of foundation, of
constituting a stable worldly structure to house, as it were, their combined power of action. (1977, p.
175).
Politically, this means that even when the government dissolves or breaks its agreement with
its citizens, promises can keep intersubjectivity intact. Arendt maintains that "the force of
mutual promise or contract" consists of keeping those who interact together. It does not operate, however, with a totalizing motivation through which human spontaneity and plurality are annihilated; rather, they keep the equal and free together.
In the organized political realm, promises appear in the form of consent. Unlike the consent to the sovereign king or the state institutions that represent the sovereign
53 people, which enable citizens to act only "when their Chains are on," the consent that is initiated by means of promises inherent in the horizontal version of social contract allows them to participate in human affairs for their freedom and in order "to prevent chaining"
(Arendt, 1972, p. 87). It is important to note here that Arendt objected the equation of citizens' political power with the sovereignty of unified people. She evaluated the normative basis of sovereignty from the perspective of plurality and concluded that sovereignty is antithetical to politics, since it does not only lead to sameness and homogeneity, but also originates in the vertical structure of social alliance that is based on command and obedience and not on the equality and plurality of citizens (Kalyvas,
2008, p. 211).
This also explains Arendt's praise of the American Revolution and her critique of the French Revolution. While the American Revolution endorsed plurality, the French
Revolution demanded undivided centralized power (Arendt, 1977, p. 24). Here, Arendt's opponent is Rousseau. As Arendt writes:
Rousseau's notion of a General Will, inspiring and directing the nation as though
it were no longer composed of a multitude but actually formed one person, became axiomatic for all
factions and parties of the French Revolution, because it was indeed the theoretical substitute for the
sovereign will of an absolute monarch (1977, p. 156).
Arendt's objection to this view of "the people" is in accord with her depiction of the horizontal version of social contract. The constitution of the French Revolution, according to Arendt, was the ultimate set of rules that could not be challenged because, in the view of
French Revolutionaries, by replacing the authority of the monarch, people also took over
54 the representation of God's will on earth. On the other hand, the American constitution
encapsulated the principle of plurality not only in the sense of Montesquieu's separation of
powers, but also by the idea of:
a written document, an endurable objective thing, which to be sure, one could approach from many
different angles and upon which one could impose many different interpretations, which one could
change and amend in accordance with circumstances, but which nevertheless was never a subjective
state of mind, like the will (Arendt, 1977, p. 157).
The notion of a sovereign will is problematic for Arendt, because as I have
mentioned in the previous chapter, the will's tendency to split within itself as "I-will" and
"I-will-not" suggests two opposing elements. In order to reach harmony, the difference
needs to be reconciled. This, as Arendt notes, takes place when one of the parts oppresses
the other. We cannot say at one time that we will do something and that we will not. In
order for action to take place, we need to decide whether we will do that specific action or
not. When we understand the notion of people as one single sovereign will, we almost
always imply the unity of the people. But the reality of the political world is different:
politics is based on the plurality of different individuals and different opinions. This means
that although there is potential for agreement and unity, sometimes there is conflict too.
When we understand people's power in terms of sovereign will, we understand that in order to bring unity to the political realm we need to follow the same process that the will follows to reach unity—oppression of the elements that are detrimental to the unity. This eventually leads to a form of politics where plurality is dangerous for the unity of the nation, and in which "the freedom of one man, or a group, or a body politic can be
55 purchased only at the price of the freedom, i.e., the sovereignty of all others" (Arendt,
1961a, p. 163). Hence, Arendt claims that in the political world in which plurality is the
ultimate principle, the people's will and sovereignty are irrelevant.
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION AND THE SOCIAL QUESTION
In Arendt's opinion, the fundamental difference between the American and the
French Revolution is that the former "remained committed to the foundation of freedom
and the establishment of lasting institutions" while the latter, on the contrary, was
"determined by the exigencies of liberation not from tyranny but from necessity" (1977,
p. 92).
The failure of the French Revolution was a failure to found a public realm which
evokes citizen plurality and inspires citizen participation. Instead, it subjected the people
to the pity and compassion of the privileged few who enjoyed public happiness and took
upon themselves the task of leadership, the right to participate and share in public affairs,
on their behalf. As Arendt writes:
The words le peuple are the key words for every understanding of the French Revolution, and their
connotations were determined by those who were exposed to the spectacle of the people's
sufferings, which they themselves did not share. For the first time, the word covered more than
those who did not participate in government, not the citizens but the low people (1977, p. 75).
The French revolutionaries started on right premises, but soon they were so overwhelmed by the misery of le people that they made the annihilation of necessity their sole purpose.
56 So, they failed to invite the French people to the public space as citizens and instead let people politicize their necessity.
Arendt is aware of the urgency of poverty and its dehumanizing effects that puts humans under the dictate of their bodies' necessities; however she argues that French
Revolutionaries were wrong to believe that poverty can be eradicated by political means.
The French Revolution showed that when necessity is addressed by political means, politics and freedom are sacrificed for the sake of necessity. And as Arendt repeatedly points out, not all matters are fit to be resolved through political means. To make poverty a subject of political debate means that the public realm, as a space for freedom and action, is overshadowed by the urgency of necessity. In most cases this leads to violence because compassion urges one to "do something about something" and to act immediately. The problem is that the urgency can become so pressing that anger can turn to violence, since it cannot wait for speech and argumentation to take place.
The actions of the French revolutionaries were guided by compassion towards the disadvantaged and not by solidarity with their fellow citizens. Compassion, in Arendt's opinion, is not political because it cannot be expressed in a political manner. One feels compassion towards misery, and expresses it in those terms, but this abolishes the distance that a public space maintains between citizens (1977, p. 86). The public realm, as Arendt claims in The Human Condition, is a space of appearance that gathers and collects citizens, thereby preventing us from falling over each another. It brings us together, but also creates a distance from which our voices can be clearly understood.
Compassion abolishes the distance which allows plurality, difference, and uniqueness to appear.
57 Thus, for Arendt, it is not compassion which changes worldly conditions and eases human suffering. And even if it does, it cannot be political because it cannot be voiced through "persuasion, negotiation, and compromise, which are processes of law and politics" (1977, p. 87). Instead, it can be articulated, in Arendt's opinion, only through the voice of "suffering itself, which must claim for swift and direct action, that is, for action with the means of violence" (1977, pp. 86-87). Instead, for Arendt, the principle that inspires and guides political action is solidarity. As she maintains:
It is out of pity that men are 'attracted toward les homes faibles' but it is out of solidarity that they
establish deliberately and, as it were, dispassionately a community of interest with the oppressed
and exploited... For solidarity, because it partakes of reason, and hence of generality, is able to
comprehend a multitude conceptually, not only the multitude of a class or a notion of people, but
eventually all mankind. (1977, p. 88).
And even though there might be cases when solidarity is also motivated by the grief one feels towards the suffering of his or her fellow citizens, the actions it inspires are guided by dignity, greatness, and honour for humanity as a whole and not only of a group of people (1977, p. 89). In that sense, Arendt envisions solidarity as an emotion-laden and inclusionary "feeling" which one has not towards one another but with one another in a common goal.
The most significant outcome of Arendt's notion of solidarity is acting in concert of citizens, which generates power. For Arendt, French Revolutionaries, unlike their
American fellows, based the source of authority in the hands of the people and made them, following Rousseau, the source of the law. The problem with putting authority in
58 the hands of the people is that it distorts the balance between power and authority, which
leads to the tyranny of majority. Arendt believed, following Montesquieu, that there is
need for checks and balances between the state apparatus and the citizens. Similarly,
Arendt believed that there should be a division between the people as the source of
political power, and the constitution as the source of authority.
People, contrary to the claims of French revolutionaries, are not the sole source of
political legitimacy. Instead there is interplay between the citizens' power and the
constitution which derives its lawfulness from their consent. As I have tried to show in
the previous chapter, what is at stake when we replace the consent of the people with the
general will is plurality and politics where "deliberate choice and considered opinion"
would matter (1977, p. 76). The problem with will is that there is no "mediation between
wills as there is between opinions" (1977, 76). In the same vain, when we define politics
in terms of general will, we evoke notions of oneness, indivisibility, one colour, and one
voice.
Contrary to the French Revolution, the American Revolution was not social but
political in nature, since it concerned "not the order of society, but the form of
government" (1977, p. 68). It is true that there was slavery and poverty in America as
well, but Arendt interprets the Founding Fathers' silence on the issue as a political
achievement on the grounds that they remained focused on founding public spaces first.
And from the beginning to end, the American Revolution remained committed to a notion of people which "retained for them the meaning of manyness, of the endless variety of a multitude whose majesty resided in its very plurality" (1977, p. 93). These might sound
59 like rather confusing claims; therefore, in what follows I try to clarify them further by turning to Arendt's analysis of the rise of the social in the modern world.
THE MODERN CONDITION: THE RISE OF THE SOCIAL AND MASS SOCIETY
In modern terms too, Arendt's treatment of the social question as a politically irrelevant, even "detrimental," association, does not emanate, as some of her interpreters have argued, from a senseless dislike of the social realm, but from her ardent emphasis on plurality and action that she attributes exclusively to the political realm. Arendt believed that each activity in vita activa (labour, work, and action) pertains to a different aspect of human existence. While "labour corresponds to the biological process of the human body," work corresponds to the artificial and material world that humans built around themselves, and finally action corresponds to the fully plural world that is established through human intersubjectivity (Arendt, 1958, p. 7). Arendt further classifies these activities according to the realm of their performance: while labour is private, work and action are public.
However, it is strictly action that is not only public, but also political because it is the only activity that corresponds directly to the condition of human plurality. Therefore Arendt argues that a healthy human organization is only possible with the full independence of each activity.
The modern phenomenon of the social, on the contrary, is inimical to political life because it forces labour onto the public realm, thereby turning it into a domain of conformity, utility, and instrumentality. Once the qualities of the household are transmitted to the public realm, political organization is perceived as a gigantic "nation-wide administration of house-keeping" (1958, p.28). Where everything is included in the cycle
60 of life, the opportunities for action disappear. Hence one of the most severe consequences of the rise of the social is the sameness and lack of opportunities for the disclosure of individual distinctness. The consequences of this inclusion are conformism and the permanent abolition of the public realm "where men could show who they really and interchangeably were" (Arendt, 1958, p. 41). As Arendt states:
It is decisive that society, on all its levels, excludes the possibility of action, which formerly was
excluded from the household. Instead, society expects from each of its members a certain kind of
behaviour, imposing innumerable and various rules, all of which tend to "normalize" its members,
to make them behave, to exclude spontaneous action and outstanding achievement (1958, p. 40).
Consequently, the political experiences of plurality, distinctness, political participation, and hence of power and freedom are obscured by necessity and consumption.
Arendt's guide to an authentic political experience is the Greek polis, where each realm had its own character that was determined by the activities performed in that realm.
Private activities that are experienced subjectively can hardly hold an objective reality in public. Similarly, Greeks believed that public activities such as speech and action would lose their meaning if performed in private where there is no one else to witness them.
This separation was influential for Arendt's understanding of the private person and the citizen. For Greeks, only one who was free from a necessity-bound household acquired a public persona and a public voice. For women, slaves, and foreigners who were excluded from the public realm, it was as if they did not exist (Arendt, 1958, p. 58). The public space in Athens was the guarantee of individuality and political togetherness. The private realm, on the contrary, was bound to the life process, necessity, and labour. Therefore,
61 Arendt believed that "the admission of household and household keeping activities to the public realm" destroys the authenticity of the public realm (1958, p. 45). This is what she called the rise of the social: a new way of being together that changed how modern individuals experience not only politics and democracy, but also citizenship and individuality.
Consequently, the modern state started to resemble a massive household rather than a space where freedom could be exercised. Modern political organization is marked by a set of important changes: the replacement of the state by administration and bureaucracy, action and individuality with behaviour and conformity, and citizen participation with representation and voting. Citizenship is no longer a solely political category, but a category that is defined mostly by its relationship to the economy. Hence citizens are usually referred to as consumers, jobholders, and taxpayers, rather than contributors to and participators in the freedom of the public space.
Unlike the citizens of Ancient Greece, modern individuals have formed social ways of being together that are largely self-interested and economically driven. Thus for
Arendt, the social represents the sphere that replaced what was once a political sphere. In other words, social togetherness that is characterized by conformity and self-interest has become the only alternative, replacing political togetherness of distinct beings.
Consequently, the realm of free and equal citizens has been replaced by job holders and solitary individuals. The result is mass society which not only made the triumph of totalitarianism possible, but also abolished the revolutionary spirit.
Hannah Arendt's concept of the mass and her exclusion of the social from the political realm need to be evaluated against this background. While the mass represents
62 the extreme case of pseudo-togetherness of the social, bringing social issues to the
political realm is nothing but a furthering of the unpolitical nature of what should be a
public realm. Thus for Arendt, mass society is not simply the consequence of democratic
inclusion; rather, it is the indication of a much more fundamental problem: the
replacement of true political togetherness by the pseudo-togethemess of the social and the
disappearance of the revolutionary spirit from modern democracies.
Arendt is neither the first nor the last to reflect on mass society. Throughout the
history of political philosophy the notion of mass has found a voice in different ways, such
as despise against people, and it has almost always been associated with democracy and
the tyranny of the majority. What we today call the theory of mass society has distinctively
modern characteristics. According to this theory, rapid industrialization, urbanization, and
the extension of franchises to large populations created an unqualified homogenization in
social, political, and cultural realms. In the eyes of the theorists of mass society, the entrance of the people, who weren't intellectually ready to take upon themselves the
responsibility of public affairs, into what had been until then the monopoly of the few,
caused debasement of political, intellectual, and moral standards (Nye, 1977, p. 20).
Although Arendt adopted the terminology of mass theory, she differed significantly from
elitists in her understanding of politics as a political togetherness that transcends the
dichotomy between the ruler and ruled. Instead, Arendt argued for an all-inclusive notion
of politics that facilitates citizen participation. Arendt believed that the only way through
which the political can be reclaimed is by creating political spaces where plurality and
freedom can be exercised. This, she believed, could break down mass society and the
pseudo-togetherness of the social.
63 CITIZEN COUNCILS: RECONCILING CHANGE AND STABILITY
Arendt's discussion of the democratic character of the council system is one of the most interesting sections in On Revolution. Of special significance is Arendt's comparison between the council system and the modern party system. First, while councils opened the public space to participation and deliberation, and equally invited all citizens to participate, political parties "left out of account the average citizen's capacity to act and to form his own opinion" (Arendt, 1977, p. 264). Second, while councils guarantee equality and freedom among its members, the modern party lacks internal democracy and freedom. Third, while the members of the councils select themselves from "those who cared and took initiative," party representatives are selected by the people, yet not among the 'people,' but from the select few (Arendt, 1977. pp. 278; 269).
Therefore, instead of being the opportunity for public happiness and public freedom, democracy has become "a form of government where the few rule, at least supposedly, in the interest of the many" (Arendt, 1977, p. 269).
However, Arendt had realistic expectations about the scope of citizen participation. She was aware of the fact that the political way of life has never been and never will be the way of life of the many (Arendt, 1977). Therefore she called those who shared public passions such as
"courage, pursuit of happiness, the taste of public freedom, an ambition that strives for excellence" political elites (1977, p. 276). What distinguishes councils from mass democracy and makes their members "elite" in Arendt's eyes is their genuine concern for the political. The councils were all-inclusive and open to all citizens who wanted to participate in public affairs.
64 All one needs to do to belong in such a group of political elites is to "care for more than their private happiness" and to be "concerned about the state of world" (Arendt, 1977, p. 279).
By coming together in order to participate in public affairs, these political elites constitute the spaces of appearances that Arendt called "islands in a sea," and "oases in a desert" (Arendt,
1977, p. 275). And the rest who do not share the taste for public happiness are doomed to remain the members of the mass.
They remain just as they were before - large groups of anonymous individuals, incorporated into the same
remote forms of mass politics, subjected to the same social and economic forces, assuming their assigned
places in the social division of labour in exchange for the material benefits that accrue to those places
(Isaac, 1994, p. 159).
It is worth noting that Arendt is not condemning those who prefer not to participate; instead, she differentiates between two attitudes: that of the active citizens' and that of the masses'
(Isaac, 1994, p. 159).
Unquestionably, Arendt's experience of the 60's civil rights movements in the United
States has contributed to her political thought, and enriched her thinking of political togetherness. The result of this experience can be seen in her most explicitly political works:
On Revolution and Civil Disobedience. She believed the revolutionary spirit that stems from the concept of beginning to be present in both revolution and in the practices of civil disobedience.
Hence, she did not treat revolutions or councils as purely historical concepts, but explored their political significance and the possibilities that they might open in the present world (Young-
Bruehl, 1894). Arendt interpreted civil disobedience and peaceful political resistance as the modern manifestation of the revolutionary spirit.
65 Following Arendt's political work from The Human Condition through her essay Civil
Disobedience, it is easy to discern her frustration with modern politics. On the one hand, the public realm which she praised in The Human Condition as the space of miracles and beginning has been reduced to the act of civil disobedience in the modern world. On the other hand, voluntary associations, which the Founding Fathers hoped would keep the revolutionary spirit alive and protect the nation from the tyranny of the majority, were now used to protect "special interests of pressure groups and the lobbyists who represented them in Washington" (Arendt,
1972, p. 96). For Arendt, the civil rights movement and the anti-Vietnam war demonstrations during the '60s represent the potential revival of public spiritedness—the long-forgotten moral and intellectual character of the voluntary associations. And she made an unusual suggestion: in order to reclaim and reinvigorate the public space as the locus of freedom, the revolutionary spirit needs to be included among the political institutions. This attempt is most discernible in the third section of Civil Disobedience. Following Montesquieu, Arendt argues that the life of a political community is indispensable from the legal framework of that community (1972, p.
83). However, this does not mean that Arendt is solely seeking legal solutions. Instead, being aware of the fact that in modern democracies the survival of a revolutionary spirit depends on its relationship with legal institutions, Arendt tries to include public spaces among the institutions of stability.
CONCLUSION
Arendt's analysis of modern revolutions compels us to think of the public realm from two perspectives: first, founding and preserving a public realm, that is loyal to the existential and phenomenological reality of human presence on earth allowing freedom to
66 be present, depend on continuous citizen participation. Second, if a revolution at the scale of the American and French Revolutions is no longer possible, and, given the role violence played in those revolutions, not even desirable; the public realm needs to be reorganized in a way that can encourage non-violent citizen participation. Hence, she attempted to secure an extra-legal place for political action and citizen participation among political institutions. Arendt hoped that the councils which appeared out of nowhere during those revolutions, and the voluntary associations which emerged during the civil rights and the anti-war movements in the United States could present us with the examples needed for such political spaces to be built. Although she was aware that not all citizens aspire to be active participants in political affairs, she hoped that at least those who have the necessary courage and care for the world could have a place to go, not only when the chips are down, but on a regular basis, and perhaps contribute to the forming and reforming of the public realm. Arendt believed that creating a public realm which could separate and collect citizens was the only remedy for citizen apathy and mass society. Moreover, by virtue of being together, she hoped that citizens could create a certain way of relating to each other and perhaps bring into being a form of intersubjective ethics which ultimately could affect not only how they act, but also how they think and how they judge; not as isolated individuals, but citizens who recognize that the conditions of their political togetherness determines their dignity as humans, and not vice versa. In the next chapter I address the ethical aspect of the public realm Arendt envisioned.
67 Chapter Four
The Public Realm and Intersubjective Ethics
In my previous two chapters I have argued that Arendt's political theory augments our understanding of the public realm in important ways. In this chapter, I argue that
Arendt's efforts to establish judgement as the "inner simulacrum" of the public realm suggests that her work pertains to what can be called intersubjective ethics (McGowan,
1998, p. 106). By this I don't mean that Arendt is offering a comprehensive account of ethics in the sense that Hegel or Aristotle does. Rather I argue that Arendt's concept of judgement as the faculty that accustoms us to take others into account in our thoughts and inspire our actions has ethical implications. Despite Seyla Benhabib's conviction that
Arendt failed to do so, in my opinion we can still discern from Arendt's concept of judgement her attempt "to arrive at a halfway a plausible theory of ethics" (Arendt, 1982, p. 4).
The intersubjective character of this theory of ethics is most discernible in
Arendt's agreement with Kant that judgement is "a peculiar talent which can be practiced only and cannot be thought" (Arendt, 1982, p. 4). This means that everyone who participates in the public realm can acquire this talent. I believe that by attributing judgement, the most political of our faculties to everyone, Arendt encourages a type of public realm that is not defined by the relationship between citizens and the state, but by citizens' continuous relationship to each other. Citizens, by deciding who belongs to the political togetherness, and what is to be seen and heard promote a certain attitude toward the common world that encourages citizens to take care not only of the common world
68 but also of the very relationships that constitute that world. For instance, while political judgement, responsibility, promising and forgiving are the most prevalent examples of these relationships, lying and violence are to be avoided at all costs. Furthermore, citizens through their participation in the public realm overcome apathy, become less susceptible to political propaganda, and resist the sources of mass mentality.
The trial of Adolf Eichmann is the turning point in Arendt's political theory in that it brought the moral and individual component of totalitarianism to Arendt's attention. Arendt observed that morality like politics is subject to decay. The Nazi regime did not only contribute to the corruption of human togetherness, but also created the conditions which inhibited the individual's moral integrity (Arendt, 1951, p. 452). No matter how horrifying, this was no surprise to Arendt, in fact in her work on totalitarianism Arendt wrote that "the murder of the moral person in man" was part of the total domination of totalitarianism (1951, p. 451). At first, Arendt, like her contemporaries, found it difficult to come to terms with the scope of the crime and refused to seek any sensible explanation. During the post-war trials, however, Arendt became aware that those who committed crimes and shifted themselves from one set of moral principles to another without any difficulty were not criminals, but ordinary people, "who, as long as moral standards were socially accepted, never dreamt of doubting what they had been thought to believe in" (Arendt, 2003c, p. 54). Eichmann and all other ordinary people were not monsters, and were not unintelligent either; they were thoughtless. And it is this thoughtlessness that manifested the banality of evil and proved how tenuous morality has become. Instead of turning to explanations that are
"overcharged with emotions," Arendt rejected all petty sentimentalism and argued that in
69 the post-totalitarian world morality as we know it is insufficient to provide any guidance in human affairs.
Consequently, Arendt engaged in a brief inquiry into the origins of morality in order to discern the ways in which morality can be replaced by a form of rationality in a manner suitable to human beings. Arendt concluded that there were two main reasons morality is not sufficient for the political realm. First, morality concerns "the individual in his singularity" (Arendt, 2003c, p. 97). It does not matter whether we are talking of morality in Socratic terms as a properly functioning conscience, in religious terms as the good soul that obeys the divine rules (the Hebrew-Christian heritage), or in Kantian terms as rationality grounded in "the moral law within me;" morality is concerned with the self and not with the world. Thus, morality as such is not suitable for the plural character of the public realm.
Second, in its most secular terms morality has been the indication of a properly functioning conscience that appears only as a result of thinking. Since thinking requires one to withdraw from the world of appearances, it is difficult to tell whether someone is engaging in this activity or not. Although it is true that a functioning conscience constitutes one's morality, it seems to become visible only in emergencies and even then the standard is the self and not the world. This should not mean that Arendt is arguing that there are no moral principles, rather she is claiming that if we are talking about a morality that has any positive effect at all, we need to do more than hold on tightly to some principles. Then the question is: If moral principles are inadequate to guide our relationships with others, then what is?
70 In order to answer this question Arendt turns to Kant's concept of aesthetic
judgement. The appeal of Kant's aesthetic judgement is its assumption that a healthy
judgement depends on one's constant relation and communication with the community he
or she is part of. In that sense, Arendt's ethics are very much in line with Greek and
Roman ethics, where "the question is never whether an individual is good but whether his
conduct is good for the world he lives in" (Arendt, 2003a, p. 151). One's moral character,
or personality, can be better understood through the place one occupies in the public
realm and through the place one leaves for others. Arendt's ethics, thus, can be
understood not as a universal set of rules that guides human affairs, but as a type of
political relationality that is grounded in human reason.
In this chapter, I explore Arendt's concept of intersubjective ethics and its significance for the formation and recovery of the public realm. First, I talk about thinking and its "liberating effect" on judgement. Second, I look at Arendt's
appropriation of Kant's concept of judgement, especially aesthetic judgement. Third, I focus on the ethical and political character of Arendt's appropriation of Kant's concept of
judgement by exploring Arendt's interpretation of Kant's spectator-actor dichotomy.
SOCRATES, MORALITY AND THE THINKING EGO
In her essay, Some Questions of Moral Philosophy, Arendt writes that what differentiates those who did not take part in the crimes of the Nazi regime from those who did is the fact that they were able to make judgements for themselves without pre- given rules and standards (2003c, p. 44). Eichmann could do what he had done not because he was evil or because he was stupid, but because he exhibited a "quite authentic
71 inability to think" (Arendt, 2003d, p. 159). If he had thought, he could have differentiated
between one set of rules from another, and could have told duty from crime (Arendt,
2003d, p. 159). In other words, he would have been able to judge, and as a result he could
have refrained from evil.
Before we turn to the relationship between thinking and judging it is important to
understand what exactly thinking is. Thinking, Arendt argues, has three important
qualities: the first, and perhaps most important quality of thinking is that it is "out of
order" in the space of appearance; it requires one to withdraw from the world and engage
in an internal dialogue. The second quality is that thinking is not synonymous with
knowing. Knowing has an object and the need to know is satisfied once its goal is
reached. Thinking, on the contrary, is a resultless activity. One does not think for the sake of something; thinking is for itself. The third quality of thinking is that it is not the privilege of the few; everybody has the capacity to think. Contrary to the commonly held view of thinking as the monopoly of the philosophers, Arendt agreed with Kant that everyone can think and hence judge. In order to understand further the place of thinking in the world and to decide whether it could condition one against evil-doing, Arendt turned to Socrates "who did think without becoming a philosopher, a citizen among citizens, doing nothing, claiming nothing that, in his view, every citizen should not do and had a right to claim" (2003d, p.169).
Socrates had three different effects on his interlocutors that made him, in Arendt's view, the embodiment of the thinking activity. First, Socrates was a gadfly awakening citizens from their dogmatic slumbers by asking questions. By asking Athenians questions, Socrates encouraged them to question their beliefs and set their thoughts in motion. Second, Socrates
72 was a midwife, who delivered others to their thoughts, so he purged citizens of their opinions
and unexamined judgments. Third, Socrates was an electric ray who perplexed citizens. After
their conversations with Socrates, citizens were confused about their values and had nothing
to hold on to.
Arendt believes that there is a positive relation between the purging element in
Socrates' midwifery and judgment. Socrates cleansed the minds of his interlocutors from their
unexamined thoughts and prejudices by questioning their values and beliefs. Those who don't
think hold on to the given values and rules without questioning them, and when the rules
change and the order dissolves they either replace the new rules with the old ones without
even thinking, or end up indecisive and unable to make up their minds (Arendt, 2003d). They
conform and adapt without questioning the implications of their actions. On the contrary,
those who think initiate in their consciousness a conversation, a two-in-one dialogue and
create a plurality in their mind. Therefore, "when everybody is swept away unthinkingly by
what everybody else does and believes in, those who think are drawn out of hiding because
their refusal to join is conspicuous and thereby becomes a kind of action" (Arendt, 2003d, p.
188). Hence, although thinking is not political itself, by purging individuals from their
unexamined thoughts it prepares their minds for judgement and helps them think as if it is for
the first time.
Moreover, thinking as a dialogue between me and myself results in the appearance of conscience. Conscience, Arendt says, means "to know with and by myself." This is a kind of
knowledge that is actualized in every thinking process. Arendt says that the guiding
experience in thinking is friendship (1978, p. 189). By virtue of having conversations with their friends, people become aware that they can converse with themselves as well. Hence,
73 Arendt calls conscience the other self. It appears when we are on our own and it is exercised as an afterthought. Personal or moral integrity requires one to be friends with his or her conscience (Arendt, 1972, p. 63). A person who does not engage in this two-in-one conversation "will not mind contradicting himself, and this means he will never be either able or willing to account for what he says or does; nor will he mind committing any crimes, since he can count on its being forgotten the next moment" (Arendt, 1978, p. 191). Therefore, whether persons commit crimes despite this internal dialogue depends on their willingness to live with a criminal for the rest of their lives. As Arendt claimed, those who did not participate in the Nazi regime did just that:
[They] asked themselves to what extent they would still be able to live in peace with themselves after
having committed certain deeds; and they decided that it would be better to do nothing, not because the
world would then changed for the better, but simply because only on this condition could they go on
living with themselves at all (2003b, p. 44).
The problem with conscience is that it appears only in emergencies, and most of the time it is self-centred and prefers its internal integrity at the expense of the world. Socrates said that "It is better to be wronged than do wrong" and that "it was better for him to be in disagreement with multitudes than, being one, to be in disagreement with [himself]" (Arendt, 2003d, p. 181;
1972, p. 62). He did not make these propositions because his friendship with the other citizens was at stake, but because his friendship with himself was under threat. Hence, Arendt argued that this internal agreement of thinking is not political.
Nevertheless, Arendt does not dismiss the value of thinking, nor does she fail to acknowledge the effort of conscience to come up with a positive proposition, which indeed
74 does prevent one from participating in crime. However, she argues that these propositions are not adequate for a positive action to take place. The rules of conscience, Arendt says, don't say what to do, but they say what not to do and their validity depends on the character of the person (1972, p. 63). Hence, thinking remains subjective. Then, Arendt asks, how such an activity can have a "liberating effect" on judgment: "the most political of man's mental abilities?" (2003d, p.188)
Arendt saw in Kant's Critique of Judgement an alternative, "a different way of thinking, for which it would not be enough to be in agreement with one's own self, but which consisted of being able to "think in the place of everybody else" and which he therefore called an "enlarged mentality" (1961c, p. 217).
JUDGEMENT, TASTE, AND KANT'S GREAT IMPORTANCE
Arendt's concept of judgement is based on what she calls the political philosophy
Kant had never written. In the Critique of Judgement, especially in its first part which deals with aesthetic judgement, Arendt finds "the greatest and most original aspect of Kant's political philosophy" (1961c, p. 216). Unlike others who employed the Critique of Practical
Reason and sought political philosophy in Kant's concept of categorical imperative, Arendt turned to aesthetic judgement for two reasons: First, aesthetic judgement is suitable for the plurality, diversity, and worldly character of the public sphere. Judging, unlike thinking, does not require one to withdraw from the public ream; rather, it requires one to be a member of a political community. Second, and more importantly, aesthetic judgement fills the need for judging without general principles. As I mentioned earlier in the beginning of this chapter, it seemed to Arendt that moral principles have lost their validity. Hence, instead of developing a
75 new system of moral principles, Arendt looked for an active, reflective, and other-related element in the human mind that could function without general rules and that, by training the mind to take others into account, would prevent evil-doing.
Kant himself dismissed aesthetic judgement because of its arbitrary, contingent and subjective character (Arendt, 1961c, p. 218). Aesthetic judgment is private because, taste, which Arendt saw as its external vehicle, cannot be communicated to others. Despite its private character, we hope that our tastes are shared and approved by others, thus we seek an agreement with them and give up or hold on to our likes and dislikes accordingly (Arendt,
1961c, p.218). Kant thought that both of these qualities make aesthetic judgement contingent and subjective. In order to endow aesthetic judgement with a universal validity, Kant sought a component through which differences of aesthetic opinion are mediated. Common sense for
Kant was that tool of mediation through which agreements in matters of taste are reached
(Gottsegen, 1994, p. 172). Arendt, for whom plurality and diversity are the most important characteristics of the public realm, saw in Kant's common sense a way to overcome not only the privacy of taste, but the self-interest that has overtaken all matters of the public realm.
Hence she argued that aesthetic judgement like any other judgement appeals to common sense, yet in order to do so it must make use of its two operations: imagination and representation.
When a particular phenomenon strikes me, it occupies my attention and I find my self in the position of someone who is exercising the faculty of judging (Young-Bruehl,
2006, p. 168). In order to reach an impartial and plausible judgement, I need to communicate my judgement in public where my judgement appears as one of many opinions (Young-Bruehl, 2006, p.166). The first step of forming a judgement is
76 imagination. My immediate "reaction" to an object is "It displeases" or "It pleases." I
don't say that something is beautiful or ugly only to me, but I claim universal validity to
my statement. Imagination, by representing to me what I immediately sensed, makes it
part of my inner sense in a non-objective manner (Arendt, 1982, p. 67).
What makes judgement so fit for human plurality is the operation of reflection that
Arendt says is the actual activity of judging something (1982, p. 68). During the process of
reflection, I am no longer affected immediately by the object; I distance myself from it
(Arendt, 1982, p. 67). Now the object that is sensibly given is ready to be reflected upon with
the eyes of the mind and enables me "to see the whole that gives meaning to particulars"
(Arendt, 1982, p. 68). At this stage, it is not the object but its pleasing character that is
evaluated according to my approbation and my disapprobation of it. But my approbation is
not self-referential; it consults others in order to form a decision.
By representing and imagining the presence of others, I gain a certain distance to my
own thoughts and feelings and reach impartiality. I no longer sense only myself, but supplement my senses with common sense. In other words, by virtue of my dialogue with common sense I enlarge and depersonalize my most idiosyncratic and least communicable response to objects. Arendt writes:
Common sense - which the French so suggestively call the "good sense," le bon sens - discloses to us
the nature of the world insofar as it is a common world; we owe to it the fact that our strictly private and
"subjective" five senses and their sensory data can adjust themselves to a nonsubjective and "objective"
world which we have in common and share with others. Judging is one, if not the most, important
activity in which this sharing-the-world-with-others comes to pass (1961c, p. 218).
77 The result is an enlarged mentality: the ability to present to oneself others' standpoints.
Arendt argues that only by presenting these other standpoints can we understand others and make ourselves understood. In other words, whenever we judge we relate ourselves to others.
To think with an enlarged mentality is possible only if "one trains one's imagination to go visiting" (Arendt, 1982, p. 43). Training one's imagination to go visiting does not mean that one trains her imagination to see through the eyes of someone else, to give up one's personal position, or to have empathy. Instead, it is an attempt to "see with your own eyes from someone else's position" (Disch, 1996, p.163). This reconciliation between the most objective and most subjective elements in human mind implies intersubjectivity (Arendt, 1982, p. 67).
Common sense makes one's personal judgement the judgement of someone who is a member of the public realm, who has overcome his or her subjective conditions, and one who had talked about certain matters with others (Arendt, 1982, p. 67). I do not simply say this is right or wrong, but by virtue of making others present through imagination I claim their assent
(Arendt, 2003c, p. 140).
Therefore for both Kant and Arendt, the most important quality of judgement is its communicability and its standard is common sense. Communicability of something depends on its fitness to appear in public. And what can appear in public and what can be communicated depends on one's common sense. Common sense does not appear out of nowhere; it is not given to us as other senses are, but arises in every human community and its validity "grows out of the intercourse with people" (Arendt, 2003c, p. 141). Hence, Arendt agrees with Kant that common sense is our "specifically human sense," but she politicizes the notion by making it the product of human affairs (1982, p. 70).
78 Arendt's departure from Kant is clear in her argument that common sense is not an inner sense universal to everyone, but that it is a faculty that we become aware of through our participation in the public realm (Gottsegen, 1994, p. 177). As you will remember, and here where Aristotle's influence is most apparent, Arendt argued the same for thinking. She argued that only through our friendship with others are we able to discover that we can engage in two-in-one dialogue called thinking. Moreover, communication creates a world of sharing oneself with others and by virtue of this, one discriminates among people, and forms one's own relations. As Arendt states: "By communicating one's feelings, one's pleasures and disinterested delights, one tells one's choices and one chooses one's company" (1982, p. 74).
Politically, this means that judgement as a public faculty makes me a member of the public realm and the larger political association, and ethically it "promotes a way of existing with others that distances us from the evil of denying others a place in the world alongside and in relation to us" (McGowan, 1998, p. 123).
JUDGMENT: ITS POLITICAL AND ETHICAL CHARACTER
Arendt's emphasis on judgment and its communicable disposition shows not only its ethical but also its political character at its best. By making judgment subject to communication, Arendt does not assume that perpetual agreement can be reached through discussion and deliberation. Such an attempt would be anti-political, because it would be inimical to the diversity and the plurality of the public sphere. Instead Arendt simply alludes to the fact that the existence of political togetherness depends on the citizens' willingness to talk and listen to each other. As Lisa Disch brilliantly puts it:
79 Thus, although there is no reason to expect public debate to produce consensus, there is no reason to
assume that differences obviate understanding and render all consensus suspect. Just as Arendt thought
solidarity could be meaningfully distinguished from enforced unanimity, so, too, she believed that the
imposition of norms could be differentiated from their democratic contestation (Disch, 1996, p. 164).
Hence Arendt placed so much emphasis on opinion. The public realm, in contrast to the plurality of the wills or interests that saturate the social realm, is constituted of a "plurality of opinions" (Denneny, 1979, p. 251). Opinions, for Arendt, are purely political in that they are formed in a process of open discussion and public debate (1977, pp. 268, 277). In The
Crisis in Culture Arendt explains the process of opinion formation as following:
I form an opinion by considering a given issue from different viewpoints, by making present to my
mind the standpoints of those who are absent; that is how I represent them. This process of
representation does not blindly adopt the actual views of those who stand somewhere else; this is a
question neither of empathy, as though I tried to be or to feel like somebody else, nor of counting noses
and joining a majority but of being and thinking in my own identity where actually I am not. The more
people's standpoints I have present in my mind while I am pondering a given issue, and the better I can
imagine how I would feel and think if I were in their place, the stronger will be my capacity for
representative thinking and the more valid my final conclusions, my opinion (1961c, p. 241).
In other words, opinions never belong to a group, but only to individuals who by virtue of their participation in the public realm shape and reshape their "understanding" of the common world (Arendt, 1977). Opinion, therefore, is a political notion that is established only among others. And it is the equality of opinion that makes the philosopher, as Kant wrote, a man like you and me. Kant argued that if publicity is possible, judgment can be expected by every
80 ordinary man. And this means that rationality "does not oppose the few to the many" (1982, pp. 28-29).
The claim that rationality is the quality of everyone challenges one of the most well- known arguments against citizen participation. Politics and democracy since Plato have been rejected on the basis that the ordinary citizen cannot exercise judgment, let alone political judgment. Arendt's concept of judgment counters this argument. Given that judgment thrives on constant communication among citizens, only in a public space in which communication and participation is enabled can citizens exercise proper judgment. The problem again is not that ordinary citizens lack the ability to exercise their faculty of judgment, but that the modern condition has abolished all conditions that allow a proper political realm to appear. Thus, she argued for opportunities where citizen participation could be realized.
The argument for political equality and plurality in public space can be challenged by Arendt's apparent agreement with Kant that the spectator has intellectual supremacy over the actors. Kant divided public space among two subject positions: the spectator and the actor. Spectators are those "who are not engaged in the game themselves" but who nevertheless observe it with "wishful, passionate participation." Actors are those who are engaged in the actual event (Arendt, 1982, p. 14). While actors are partial, the spectators by virtue of their impartiality can grasp the proper meaning of the event (Arendt, 1982, p.
68).
Based on Arendt's interpretation of Kant's dichotomy, some, like Ronald Beiner and Seyla Benhabib, have argued that she offers two versions of judgment: one that is concerned with judgment as a political faculty, and the other that sees judgment as the
81 viewpoint of the privileged spectator (D'entereves, 1994, p. 104). Whether Arendt agreed
with Kant is open to dispute. I believe that there are two possibilities here.
Either Arendt agreed with Kant's conviction that the spectator has supremacy
over the actor, as for instance Richard Bernstein has argued, and thus retreated from her
political project and opted for an elite group of philosopher-spectators; or alternatively,
she saw an opportunity in the spectator-actor division to finally close the abyss between
philosophy and politics, theory and practice, and open up the public space to everyone,
philosopher and ordinary citizen alike. I am more inclined to agree with the second
interpretation and argue that Arendt tried to reconcile the position of the spectator and the
actor.
In the Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy Arendt writes:
The condition sine qua non for the existence of beautiful objects is communicability; the judgment
of the spectator creates the space without which no such objects could appear at all. The public
realm is constituted by the critics and the spectators, not by the actors or the makers (1982, p. 63).
However Arendt does not leave it at that. She continues:
And this critic and spectator sits in every actor and fabricator; without this critical, judging faculty
the doer or maker would be so isolated from the spectator that he would not even be perceived. Or,
to put it another way, still in Kantian terms: the very originality of the artist (or the very novelty of
the actor) depends on his making himself understood by those who are not artists (or actors)
(1982, p. 63).
82 The stress here is again on communicability. Both the actor and the spectator need the other in order to exist, but the standpoint of the actor is partial and restricted. Therefore,
there needs to be some communication between spectators and actors as well. Only
spectators can present the view of actors in the public realm, and by virtue of it they can constitute the public realm. However, actors are politically and artistically superior because they bring novelty to the world; the plurality and the impartiality of their views is
brought to the public by spectators who also exist in plural. In that sense, spectators
perform the function of common sense.
This should not mean that the spectator and the actor are radically separated
positions; instead, they are related. When I hold the position of the actor, I act and
disclose myself and my uniqueness, though I also act with others and relate to others; in
terms of judgment my restricted position does not allow me to see the event as a whole.
When I hold the position of the spectator, I am not involved in the event that is unfolding
in front of me, I cannot take credit for the novelty that is brought to the world and that is
very likely to change the course of the world; but, because I can take my place outside the
event without leaving the public realm, I can obtain an impartial position and reach a
better understanding of the event. And when it is time to judge, discuss, and decide on the
meaning of a public event we all become spectators. During the making of an art work, the artist at some point or another must have adopted the point of the spectator when he or she judges the work as beautiful for or as significant for the world. It is this judgment that he or she brings to the community of spectators.
When actors bring novelty to the world, they need to refer to the known in order to be understood (McGowan, 1998, p. 131). The known is represented by the common
83 sense that is the accumulation of a community's experience and is approved by intersubjectivity. The actor or the artist can refer to common sense, because he or she also has a spectator in herself and has presented to herself the various standpoints before. In that sense, the spectator relates us, she urges us to speak and explain to each other. Then as long as I understand and am understood by others I can be a member of the political community. Hence, it is wrong to argue that Arendt seeks to separate the spectator and the actor; rather, she tries to reconcile them in the same public persona.
Moreover, I believe that Arendt's concern is more with the publicity of the spectator rather than that of the actor. In The Human Condition she had already established the actor as the public persona. On the contrary, it seemed that Arendt left the philosopher whose position had been defined against the public realm outside her political considerations. But is this an accurate interpretation? I do not believe that this is the case. Like Kant, Arendt understood that the antagonism between theory and practice and the spectator and the actor, whose origins can be found in the trial of Socrates, are the results of the lack of a public realm that can accommodate both. Thus Arendt is not willing to separate them from each other. Instead, she wants to maintain that rationality is important to our political existence and that our political co-existence has an influence on our rationality. We are not only acting beings, but we are also thinking and speaking beings. Hence, it is not that Arendt turned from the actor to the spectator, from politics to philosophy, and attempted to make philosopher kings out of the spectators, but that she invited the philosopher to join the public realm and share in the public happiness. She hoped that this public happiness and the practice of freedom would compel both the spectator and the actor within each and everyone to appear in the public realm.
84 The spectator and actor in every person work together in communicating and interpreting the world to such an extent that they humanize it. This is the reason Arendt claims that taste is "the political capacity that truly humanizes the beautiful and creates the culture" (1961c, p. 221). Political taste is developed through citizens' communication with each other and this makes the world that they hold in common not only the object of truth or a place for beautiful, but space that can be understood in human terms. As Arendt says:
As humanists, we can rise above these conflicts between the statesman and the artist as we can rise
in freedom above the specialties which we all must learn to pursue. We can rise above
specialization and philistinism of all sorts to the extent that we learn how to exercise our taste
freely. Then we shall know how to reply to those who so frequently tell us that Plato or some other
greater author of the past has been superseded; we shall be able to understand that even if all
criticism of Plato is right, Plato may still be better company than his critics. At any rate, we may
remember what the Romans - the first people that took culture seriously the way we do - thought
a cultivated person ought to be: one who knows how to choose his company among men, among
things, in the present as well in the past (1961c, p. 222).
The ethical substance of this public realm, half way or otherwise, is entrenched in
Arendt's insistence on the plural aspect of the common world. As long as plurality and intersubjectivity on earth and in human mind is preserved and maintained, human relations can obtain their ethical component. Arendt started with asking whether "the activity of thinking as such, the habit of examining and reflecting upon whatever happens to come to pass, regardless of specific content and quite independent of results, could this activity be of such a nature that it "conditions" men against evil doing?" (2003d, p. 160).
85 Arendt believes that this is possible only if thinking is connected to judgment, in other words only if thinking becomes other-oriented. So Arendt sets to transfer the dialogue between me and myself, to the public realm where I no longer talk to myself only, but communicate with others. I no longer worry that I cannot live with myself if I commit a crime, but that if I do so I will not be able to live with my peers. And it is not only my membership to the political association that is jeopardized; my identity, my freedom and my sense of reality too are put at risk. Hence, Arendt agrees with the charge that Socrates was harmful for the city, because she believed that his actions had undermining effects on the multitude (2003d, p. 103). Socrates' actions were criminal because he did not take into account the plurality of the polis. As Arendt notes: "... when Socrates said that in his opinion no greater good ever befell Athens than his arousing the city as a gadfly arouses a large, well-bred but rather sluggish horse, then he could have meant only that nothing better can ever befall a multitude than to be broken up into single men again who can be appealed to in their singularity" (2003d, p. 103). Arendt hints that Socrates of the
Apology was aware of the destructiveness of his actions:
Socrates would not have honored his own words if he had tried to escape; he would have undone
all he had done during his trial - would have "confirmed the judges in their opinion, and made it
seem that their verdict was a just one" (53). He owed it to himself, as well as to the citizens he had
addressed, to stay and die (1972, p. 59).
In Socrates' tragedy Arendt sees not only the appearance of conscience but also the appearance of common sense. It is also the emergence of a person who knew that not only his relationship with himself was threatened, but also that his relationship with other
86 citizens was broken. And it is this point where Arendt's concepts of responsibility, promising, and forgiving make most sense. It seems that these concepts do not fit with
Arendt's overall realism. Moreover, trying to make sense of these concepts in the 21st century, we might not be as eager as Arendt to view these faculties as binding and as reliable as Arendt wishes us to. Only when responsibility, promising, and forgiving are not seen as merely political faculties, but also as qualities of the character of a political organization can they have any influence on us. Ethics and politics for Arendt then belong to the same public realm.
CONCLUSION
Modern political theorists generally refrain from engaging in a normative discussion of the question regarding the characteristics of "proper" citizenship; instead they believe that defining the political framework will be enough for political community to function. This is no surprise, taking into consideration the fact that throughout human history some of the attempts to understand human nature, no matter whether political or ethical, have resulted in curtailing human freedom. From Plato to Hobbes, Rousseau to
Hegel, Marx to modern social sciences, we see the same tendency to define humans, to disclose the truth about their nature, and thereby to know, classify, predict, and improve them. Totalitarianism is the most extreme embodiment of this tendency. But as Arendt's political theory shows, we do not need stop trying to understand human existence just because we cannot do so from the perspective of human nature, or because we are afraid to lose our liberties. As the complexities of political life have shown, we do not posses any liberties by virtue of being human; we have rights and liberties first and foremost
87 because we are citizens. If as citizens, we do not participate in human affairs, and do not constantly evaluate and try to come to terms with the world we live in and share with others, phenomena such as totalitarianism, war and economic collapse will come to us only as a surprise.
Arendt too avoids discussing the concept of human nature. Instead she introduces us to the concept of human condition which is based on human plurality. If there is one fact about human beings, for Arendt it is that they are plural beings. As Arendt argues both in the Origins and in the Human Condition, a political realm that is based on the concept of plurality will preserve human freedom regardless of the qualities of human nature.
The Eichmann trial compelled Arendt to explore also the ethical aspects of human condition and of the public realm. In line with her argument about the characteristics of the public realm, she develops an intersubjective notion of ethics that originates in, and derives its legitimacy from, the political association. In Arendt's view, individuals who live and participate in the public realm which is based on plurality and political freedom are also ethical individuals. Most importantly, they are the citizens who are used to engage in the mental ability to judge, take others into account, and express their judgments as opinions in an intersubjective public realm. In other words, they exercise what Phillip Hansen calls citizen rationality "with roots both in public life and in the realm of the mind" (Hansen, 1993, p. 4). And it is this rationality that Arendt believed could compel us to relate to others in judgment, to wisely choose our company, and to learn to pick the examples we live and act on.
88 Chapter Five
Conclusion
In this thesis I have tried to give a thorough analysis of Arendt's concept of the public realm. I have argued that reaching a more comprehensive understanding of
Arendt's concept of the public realm requires considering her political theory as a whole.
With this purpose in mind, I focused on three main components of Arendt's work from which the public realm can be evaluated: (1) the existential-phenomenological perspective that also amounts to an ontological explanation and justification for the existence of the public realm, (2) the perspective of citizen participation as it was exemplified by the revolutionaries of the American Revolution and by the citizens who participated in the 60s civil rights movements, and (3) the perspective of what I called intersubjective ethics, which is based on the standards developed by citizens' participation in the public realm. I have addressed these components in each chapter respectively.
I started my first chapter by giving a critical exposition of Arendt's views on the ontological foundations of the public realm. I argued that, unlike social contract theorists,
Arendt does not approach the foundations of the public realm from a hypothetical standpoint such as the "state of nature;" rather she looks at the public realm from an existential-phenomenological angle asking whether our existential condition on earth, our most basic humanness, has anything to do with the political predicaments of the modern world. For Arendt, the disappearance of the pubic realm and the lack of opportunities for political participation ultimately means that our chances of experiencing our whoness as
89 unique, distinct, equal, and free beings have diminished. I claimed that the unique connection Arendt builds between who one is, and his or her membership to the public realm, compels us to view the public realm in a different light. If we follow Arendt, we will no longer perceive our participation in the public realm as a voluntarily activity, but as a performance which has an impact on not only how we understand ourselves and our place in the world but also on our interaction with others.
I have argued that Arendt's approach is influenced by her own experiences in
Nazi Germany and by the teachings of Heidegger and Jaspers. Although Arendt also reflected on her own "homelessness" as a Jewish woman, she strongly believed that the reasons for her own existential and political situation can be traced to the modern human condition as a whole. Hence, after her insightful analysis of the origins of totalitarianism, she sets out to discern the elements of the modern condition that might have led to the modern worldlessness, disappearance of politics and the public realm, and consequently resulted in totalitarianism.
However, Arendt does not evaluate these elements in a systematic manner. Still, one can discern from her writings two reasons behind the modern individuals' worldlessness: First is the fact that from Plato on, the concept of plurality has been largely ignored by Western philosophy. Arendt believed that this has affected how we experience politics and how we understand what it means to be human on earth politically, existentially, and morally. The second reason is modern individuals' preoccupation with necessity, which in turn has led to the rise of the social. Although
Arendt was aware that meeting our biological necessities is part of our lives and
90 important for our survival, she did not consider them as significant for our humanness and for those characteristics that make us humans as opposed to animals.
Arendt argues that speech and action are two exclusively human qualities that not only make us more civil and compel us to refrain from violence, but also lead us to a life that we politically and ethically share with others. In order to show her readers the importance of speech and action for our humanness, Arendt first looks at the ontological sources of speech and action: the conditions of plurality and natality.
If there is one single concept that separates Arendt from other political theorists it is the concept of plurality. From The Origins of Totalitarianism until her last work, The
Life of the Mind, plurality is the building stone of Arendt's political theory. Throughout her work Arendt brings the concept of plurality to our attention, the fact that "men, and not Man live on earth and inhabit the world," an ontological reality which for some reason has never been taken into consideration in political theory before (1958, p. 7).
Arendt observed that this rather obvious and fundamental mistake had dramatic consequences for how we understand ourselves, and how we experience our membership both in the physically circumscribed public realm and in the larger human community.
Also, natality, the fact that we are born and that with each person's birth there is something new brought to the human world, has been underestimated by Western philosophical tradition. The human being has been mostly defined through his or her being towards death. This approach, in Arendt's opinion, has contributed to the modern individuals' failure to grasp themselves as diverse and unique beings who are capable for endless potentialities, who can change the conditions of their existential and political
91 lives, and who through this capacity are able to begin and start new process even in the darkest of times.
As I have tried to show in the first chapter, the ontological background of speech and action, although essential, is not adequate to fully understand their political importance. Their importance comes forth only when they are exercised among other individuals, in other words, when they are experienced in a space of appearance. The space of appearance, Arendt maintains, emerges among a group of people, no matter who they are and where they are. The political character of this space is determined by whether they engage in action and speech or not. While labour and work might be performed among others and with others, following the separation between the private and public realms in the Greek polis, Arendt argues that it is against the nature of these activities to be part of the public realm. Neither labour nor work requires others to be present. In addition, there are feelings like love and pain that are not only out of place in the public realm, but also cannot be communicated in an objective manner suitable for the common ground of the public realm. On the contrary, speech and action need others in order to be performed, recognized, and remembered.
Hence, Arendt argues that we need a specific space where we can exercise speech and action with others as equal and free beings, and hopefully realize our existential and political potentials. This means that, for Arendt, humans are not political beings by birth.
Rather, the existential and phenomenological reality makes it so that what is unique and distinct about each of us can be fully realized and appreciated only in an artificial world, in a home that we as a community had built for ourselves. But we are more than builders and makers of that artificial home; we also create the political and the ethical conditions
92 of our collective existence, and for Arendt our ability to do this is the most esteemed quality of our existence.
Unfortunately, as Arendt herself observed, political reality has not met her political ideal, perhaps with the exception of a few brief moments where individuals came together to create a public realm, as was in the case in the Greek polis, during the
American and the Hungarian Revolutions, and the civil rights and anti-war movements.
Except for those exceptional moments in human political history, the public realm has been almost always obscured by either violence or necessity. Especially in the modern world, Arendt observed that freedom and power have disappeared and have come to mean completely different things in comparison to what they meant to the citizens of
Athens. Thus Arendt, by trying to find the original meaning of the concepts of politics and public realm, attempts to recover the original experiences and perhaps reconstruct them to fit the modern political experience.
In the second chapter, I focus specifically on the experience of modern revolutions, which Arendt believed offers a starting point for a new political beginning that can help us recover the public realm. In search for the ways through which the modern public realm can be recovered, Arendt turns to the modem revolutions, 60's civil rights movements, and the anti-war demonstrations. She was aware that we do not need a revolution in order to recover the public realm, but citizen participation manifested in speech and action can become the very basis for a new public realm. For Arendt, the citizen councils that appeared during the modern revolutions and the voluntary associations that emerged during the 60s epitomized the new public realm where plurality, equality, and citizen participation, and hence power and freedom can be
93 experienced. Moreover, Arendt believed that these public spaces would not only enable us to share in the public happiness of the public realm, but also could serve as a check and balance against the authority of other political institutions and prevent them from infringing upon citizen freedom. Hence, Arendt suggests that a form of citizen assembly, similar to those that emerged during the revolutions and civil-rights movements, should be included among the more stable political institutions and serve as a permanent space of action. Existentially, she believed this could put an end to the loneliness and homelessness of the modern individual. And even, more importantly, it could help them reach a better moral personality.
Before Arendt goes on to suggest that we need a public realm where robust citizen participation would be possible, she addresses two central and interconnected issues that have hindered the inclusion and dignity of citizen participation in modern politics and consequently obscured the experience of power and freedom.
The first issue is what Arendt calls the "rise of the social." She believed that modern individuals have allocated all of their energies to meeting the demands of their biological needs. Consumerism and technological advancements also have contributed to the leveling of citizens to the positions of labourers, bread earners, consumers, and voters. Moreover, the experience of totalitarianism has fuelled the distrust and apathy individuals already had for robust citizen participation. From Plato on this disenchantment with politics often has surfaced in the elitists' claims that people are not fit for politics and collective decision-making. And when they do so, it is argued that they are prone to become a mass, easily influenced by propaganda and lies, and eventually make wrong political decisions. In such an environment, modern individuals' activism
94 usually has been interpreted as a futile marginal political resistance to the powers that have always been and will always be there. Consequently, political participation has been narrowed down to identity politics where each group seeks justice for themselves.
The second issue is the difficulty in reconciling the institutions of stability represented by the constitution and the political framework with the forces of change inherent in political participation. As Arendt argues, the founding of the body politic usually has come at the expense of political participation. She tries to find a version of contract theory that might actually enable us to reconcile these seemingly irreconcilable forces. Arendt looks at two versions of contract theory: Hobbes' vertical version of contract, where individuals exchange their liberties for security, and Locke's horizontal version of social contract, where individuals come together to found a public realm based on plurality and equality. Taking her cue from Locke's social contract, or what she interprets to be the horizontal version of social contract, Arendt argues that we can indeed find a place for citizen participation among the institutions of stability. Her example is the Mayflower Compact, where colonizers succeeded to create self-governing bodies based on their original contract with each other.
Moreover, she believed that we can recover the modern public realm by bringing together the element of beginning inherent in the original founding activity and the revolutionary spirit. Hence, she argued for the inclusion of citizen councils for ongoing public participation among the political institutions. As I have argued, Arendt's purpose in attempting this reconciliation is not to domesticate the revolutionary spirit, or to tame citizen participation and its powers. Instead, Arendt hoped that by bringing citizen participation among the central political institutions and assigning it its own political
95 realm, she could legitimize the existence of the public realm and citizen participation and
also protect it from the disturbance of unfree politics of the governments and other state
powers. Moreover, she believed that a legitimate public realm based on the plurality and
equality of the citizens can counter the people's tendency to degenerate into mass society,
help them overcome mass mentality, and perhaps even allow for a notion of ethics, or
what I have called intersubjective ethics, to emerge from the midst of it.
In the third chapter, I have focused on the ethical character of the public realm.
After the experience of totalitarianism, Arendt was left disappointed with the modern
individuals' capacity to act, and even worse, after the Eichmann trial, she lost hope in
their ability to think. But Arendt did not despair for long, and following Kant's concept
of aesthetic judgment she argued that judgment, when nourished by the intersubjectivity
of the public realm, could also serve as a mental reference for modern individuals'
inability to think for themselves and help them tell right from wrong. She argued that
judgment could supplement the faculty of thinking with a broader and more political
perspective.
As I have tried to show, Arendt's project to find a new basis for moral standards
does not mean that she did not believe in moral principles; rather she argued that morality
and, its vehicle, conscience are subjective. They are not concerned with the worldly
affairs but they care for the person's own internal harmony and peace. Our relationships
with others, thus, need to emanate from more impersonal standards. In Kant's aesthetic
judgment Arendt found the objective element in the human mind. She believed judgment
could serve as a bridge between what is subjective and what is objective. As a result, citizens, through their participation in the public realm, can become aware of the
96 common reality form their own informed opinions, and hopefully act from a broader and more political perspective.
Against this background, in this thesis I hope to have addressed each of these issues, which are scattered across Arendt's political writings, in a cohesive manner and to present it as a more systematic narrative. By looking at Arendt's concept of the public realm from the perspective of both of her earlier and later works, I argued that we can reach a better and more comprehensive understanding of the concept of the public realm.
By depicting the public realm as Arendt's remedy for the worldlessness of the modern individual, I tried to call attention to the central role the concept of the public realm plays in Arendt's political theory. Obviously, I could also have built my thesis around equally significant and perhaps less complicated concepts of plurality or political action. I focused specifically on the public realm, because it does not only encompass all other important central concepts, but also because it gave me a chance to look at Arendt's political theory from a much broader perspective.
I am aware that I do not take into consideration every single work Arendt has written. Although I have tried to keep the scope of the thesis as broad as possible, I acknowledge its selectiveness. A future work that deals with the concept of the public realm might also approach it from The Origins of Totalitarianism and Arendt's biography of Rahel Varnhagen—the German-Jewish writer with whom Arendt identified herself— and give an even more detailed analysis of the historical and personal background of
Arendt's political concerns. Also, one might want to address the accuracy of Arendt's interpretation of historical facts and offer a critique of Arendt's deconstruction of political philosophy and history. But focusing too much on the personal motivations
97 behind Arendt's political theory, and dwelling too long on the historical and methodological inconsistencies in her work, in my opinion, leads to the possibility of missing the focus of Hannah Arendt's political theory: to think and look beyond what we already know and see, and if necessary to rethink and relearn how we understand ourselves and our collective existence.
Also, one could look at the implications of such a public realm from the perspective of present-day politics—and which some scholars such as Elisabeth Young-
Bruehl have done brilliantly already, but such an analysis is beyond the scope of my purposes here. Thus, although I believe that these other approaches would complement and improve what I have tried to accomplish in this thesis, I still believe it has achieved its purpose: to offer an examination of Arendt's concept of the public realm, remaining true to Arendt's own project and goals.
Even if one does not agree with Arendt on the issues of separation of the private and public realms, or on the significance of the Greek polis and the American Revolution for our understanding of the modern public realm, on her concept of power, and even if one is perplexed by her silence on elemental political issues such as justice and oppression, one is nevertheless compelled to think and understand the public realm, not as Hegel argued in terms of one's freedom to "be oneself in another," but in terms of an intersubjectively defined space where one's freedom is defined by being oneself with another.
Arendt is right to argue that throughout human history individual uniqueness and the intersubjective platform where this uniqueness can be experienced have been sacrificed for national unity and economical success and that this has led to the
98 disappearance of power and freedom from the political experience. At the very core of this situation is Arendt's argument that how we understand our humanness is very much related to how we experience our citizenship. If we believe that we live in a world of distinct and unique beings, we will act and strive for this world to be as plural, equal, and as free as possible. We would consider our plural existence both in our political and moral decisions. In Arendt's view, the space in which these experiences can be fully realized, shared, and remembered with others is the public realm. Hence, she jealously protected it from the infringement of apolitical activities. Although difficult to follow,
Arendt's recommendations are worth paying attention to.
In conclusion, this thesis attempts to invite the reader to consider the following questions: did Arendt, a political theorist who witnessed the decline of the public realm in the modern age and who experienced first hand its most extreme example, totalitarianism, aim at a Utopian political ideal? Does her vision of the public realm have any realistic prospect? Most importantly, does Arendt have anything to teach us about our individual and collective existence on earth? Doing full justice to these questions is beyond the scope of this thesis. Nevertheless, it exhibits my own attempt to answer them and to explore whether another way of being together without sacrificing one's person, one's uniqueness, and one's freedom is possible, and whether Arendt's concept of the public realm can be the answer to the question.
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