Institute for Culture and Society Western Sydney University ARENDT’S POLITICAL THOUGHT: THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN TRUTH AND POLITICS A dissertation submitted to the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University, in candidacy for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Valeria Pashkova March 2016 The work presented in this thesis is, to the best of my knowledge and belief, original except as acknowledged in the text. I hereby declare that I have not submitted this material, either in full or in part, for a degree at this or any other institution. _________________________________________ Valeria Pashkova 2016 Table of Contents ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ..................................................................................................................................... I ABSTRACT........................................................................................................................................................ II CHAPTER ONE. DOES ARENDT HOLD TRUTH IN OPPOSITION TO POLITICS? ..................................................... 1 1. THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN TRUTH AND POLITICS IN THE LITERATURE ON HANNAH ARENDT’S POLITICAL THOUGHT .......... 1 2. THE LIFE OF THE MIND: TRUTH IN RELATION TO THE QUEST FOR KNOWLEDGE AND THE QUEST FOR MEANING................. 18 3. SUMMARY OF SUBSTANTIVE CHAPTERS ............................................................................................................ 27 CHAPTER TWO. SOCRATES AND THE DISCLOSURE OF THE TRUTH OF OPINION ............................................. 36 1. PLATO’S AND SOCRATES’ UNDERSTANDING OF TRUTH ......................................................................................... 38 2. DOXA AS THE WORLD “AS IT APPEARS TO ME” ................................................................................................... 50 3. THINKING IN THE SENSE OF A QUEST FOR MEANING AND ITS ROLE IN SOCRATIC MAIEUTICS ......................................... 68 4. THINKING AS THE DIALOGUE OF THE “TWO-IN-ONE” ........................................................................................... 78 CHAPTER THREE. LESSING: TRUTH AND POLITICS IN “DARK TIMES” .............................................................. 93 1. HANNAH ARENDT’S ACCEPTANCE OF THE LESSING PRIZE IN GERMANY IN 1959 ....................................................... 96 2. SELBSTDENKEN: A REFUTATION OF ABSOLUTE TRUTH AND AN AFFINITY WITH “TRAGIC PLEASURE” .............................. 107 3. “WORLDLESS” HUMANITY: “FRATERNITY” AND “INNER EMIGRATION” ................................................................. 122 4. STORYTELLING AND “THE INNER TRUTH OF THE EVENT” ..................................................................................... 132 5. “POLITICAL” FRIENDSHIP AND TRUTH-TELLING ................................................................................................. 140 CHAPTER FOUR. THE QUEST FOR UNDERSTANDING TOTALITARIANISM ...................................................... 151 1. UNDERSTANDING AS THE QUEST FOR MEANING AND THE NEED TO “RECONCILE ONESELF TO REALITY” ......................... 153 2. UNDERSTANDING AND THE NEWNESS OF THE EVENT ......................................................................................... 164 3. THE MODERN STORY OF THE DEGRADATION OF COMMON SENSE ......................................................................... 172 4. THE SUBSTITUTION OF LOGICALITY FOR COMMON SENSE: “A LYING WORLD ORDER” ................................................ 179 5. THE TASK OF A HISTORIAN: THE DANGERS OF CAUSALITY AND THE NOTION OF AN “EVENT” ....................................... 195 CHAPTER FIVE. FACTUAL TRUTHS AS “THE GROUND ON WHICH WE STAND” .............................................. 212 1. THE CONTROVERSY AROUND ARENDT’S REPORT ON THE TRIAL OF EICHMANN ........................................................ 212 2. FIAT VERITAS, ET PEREAT MUNDUS ................................................................................................................ 215 3. TWO DISTINCTIONS: THE TRUTH OF FACTS AS DISTINCT FROM RATIONAL TRUTHS AND OPINIONS ................................ 221 4. “ORGANIZED LYING” AS DISTINCT FROM TRADITIONAL LIES ................................................................................. 227 5. RESPONSIBILITY FOR SELF-DECEPTION ............................................................................................................ 233 6. RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN TRUTHS OF DOXAI AND TRUTHS OF FACTS ..................................................................... 242 7. WHO IS THE TRUTH-TELLER? ........................................................................................................................ 254 CHAPTER SIX. PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY FOR JUDGING FOR ONESELF ...................................................... 260 1. REFLECTING ON THE EICHMANN CONTROVERSY: JUDGMENT AND RESPONSIBILITY ................................................... 263 2. JUDGMENT THAT IS NOT BOUND TO RULES ...................................................................................................... 276 3. PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY AND THE COG THEORY ............................................................................................ 287 4. PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY AND THE NATURE OF TOTALITARIAN DICTATORSHIP ....................................................... 295 5. PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY AND THE DIALOGUE OF THE “TWO-IN-ONE” ................................................................ 305 CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................................................... 321 1. KEY THEMES OF THE THESIS: DIFFERENT ASPECTS OF TRUTH IN RELATION TO THE QUEST FOR MEANING ....................... 322 2. THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN TRUTH AND POLITICS ........................................................................................... 336 REFERENCES ................................................................................................................................................ 342 WORKS BY HANNAH ARENDT ..................................................................................................................................... 342 LITERATURE ON HANNAH ARENDT’S POLITICAL THOUGHT AND OTHER SOURCES ................................................................... 344 ENDNOTES ................................................................................................................................................... 350 i Acknowledgements I would like to take this opportunity to make a handful of acknowledgments. Firstly, I am grateful to the Institute for Culture and Society at the Western Sydney University and its staff for providing a very high quality research environment during the period of research on this dissertation. In particular, I would like to say thank you to Professor Gregory Noble, Higher Degrees Research & Teaching Director, Tulika Dubey, Senior Administrative Officer, and Tracy Mills, Research Scholarships Development Officer, for their continuous support and advice. Secondly, I am enormously indebted to my supervisors Professor Anna Yeatman, Dr. Charles Barbour and Dr. Jessica Whyte for their immense knowledge, insightful feedback, enthusiasm and encouragement in times of new ideas, difficulties and self-doubt. I am especially thankful to Professor Anna Yeatman for having introduced me to the world of Hannah Arendt’s scholarship and inspired me to undertake this exciting and challenging project. Without her guidance, respectful criticism and motivation this dissertation would not have been possible. Thirdly, I am thankful to my family – my parents, auntie and grandparents – for their support, loving patience and wisdom during this long PhD journey. Finally, I am very appreciative of the support of senior researchers, postgraduate colleagues and my friends who cheered me on and offered encouragement as this project progressed. Valeria Pashkova Sydney, Australia ii Abstract In the scholarship on the thought of Hannah Arendt we find a recurrent view that she sees truth and politics as not just distinct but mutually exclusive phenomena. In this thesis I argue that this is not an adequate understanding of Arendt. It has been pointed out in the previous scholarship that Arendt asserts the importance of at least one kind of truth for politics, namely “truth of facts.” I argue that this view of the relationship between truth and politics is more complex than that. In Arendt’s writings we can see a sustained enquiry into the relationship between politics and truth, in which truth includes, but is more than, “truth of fact.” To demonstrate this, I proceed from the assumption that Arendt sees “thinking” as the vehicle of this relationship between truth and politics. Thus my investigation of Arendt’s conception of the relationship between truth and politics foregrounds an exploration of Arendt’s conception of thinking. As I indicated above, in Arendt we find a fascinating and provocative suggestion that thinking concerns “the quest for meaning.” Understood as such, thinking is not released from truth-seeking. Truth here is something other than fact, although it may need to be informed by fact. Truth-seeking in relation to meaning, for Arendt, loses any connection to definite results because it has to become adequate to what she calls plurality as well as to the need of humans to “reconcile themselves” to the world that they share with others. By providing a close textual analysis of five essays in which Arendt enquires into what is thinking, I will show that Arendt associates thinking, understood as the quest for meaning, with the willingness to express one’s doxa (or opinion), the willingness to think for oneself (selbstdenken), the willingness to engage in storytelling, the iii willingness to practise the dialogue of the “two-in-one,” the willingness to face up to reality and the related willingness to recognise and accept factual truth, and, finally, the willingness to assume personal responsibility for judgment. I suggest that the quest for meaning in all these different modes must involve “truthfulness” – truthfulness in the sense of an opening to the truth of what is disclosed. This kind of truth is neither irrefutable nor refutable – it belongs to the domain of significance and profoundly concerns human experience. It is not an “objective” truth that exists independently of humans. This truth is a phenomenological achievement that demands of humans that they actively engage in an unending process of discovering this truth and are willing to seek truth. An orientation to truth involved in the quest for meaning is expressed especially in the willingness to engage with “the fact of human plurality” – perhaps, for Arendt, the quintessential “fact.” For truthfulness requires of a thinker a willingness to articulate and maintain one’s own perspective on the world, which in turn demands an orientation towards others and recognising them as unique individuals. 1 Chapter One. Does Arendt hold truth in opposition to politics? 1. The relationship between truth and politics in the literature on Hannah Arendt’s political thought In the scholarship on Hannah Arendt, we find a recurrent view that she sees truth and politics as not just distinct but mutually exclusive phenomena. For example, the well-known French philosopher Alain Badiou (2005) argues that politics in Arendt’s sense is “neither the name of a thought (if one admits that all thought, in the realm of its philosophical identification, is in one way or another bound to the theme of truth) nor the name of an action” (Badiou 2005, 11). He thus claims that Arendt undertakes a “double negation” (11) and divorces politics simultaneously from the theme of truth and from political action. He claims that, for her, politics “only concerns public opinion” (13), and that public opinion, as she sees it, is shaped during political debates that exclude any truth procedure. He argues that “as soon as ‘politics’ [in Arendt’s sense] finds its sole rightful place in public opinion it goes without saying that the theme of truth is excluded from it” (13). He quotes the Arendt scholar Revault d’Allonnes to justify his claim that, for Arendt, politics and truth are incompatible: “‘the antagonism of truth and opinion, of the mode of philosophical life and the mode of political life,’ [is] the matrix of Arendt’s thought” (13). Thus Badiou suggests that Arendt maintains a strict binary between truth and politics. He argues that “the antinomy of truth and debate is a bad joke” (Badiou 2005, 14). He further wonders whether Arendt’s attempt to rescue politics from truth opens politics to lying and falsity and speculates that, for Arendt, “debate, which confers rights without norms upon 2 falsity and lying, constitutes the very essence of politics” (15). He concludes that what Arendt achieves in her conception of the political is a glorification of “debate as a plural confrontation of opinions without truth” (16). It must be noted that in Metapolitics Badiou does not claim to offer a comprehensive analysis of Arendt’s works. Badiou confines his analysis to a single work – her Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy – and largely relies on the commentary that the French translator Revault d’Allonnes delivers in her Postface to the French edition of Arendt’s Lectures. Even though Badiou’s account of Arendt’s view of politics cannot be considered comprehensive, certain aspects of it seem to be shared by a range of Arendt scholars. The claim that Arendt insists on an incompatibility between truth and politics is often made. For example, Chiba (1995, 506) argues that “it is a well-known fact that Arendt made a consistent attempt to fend off any external [emphasis in the original] political factor, whether it be truth, goodness, or love, from encroaching upon the discourse proper to the public realm.” Or take, for example, the following statement: “Arendt…would have us believe that claims to truth have no place in the political arena for the simple reason that they destroy political life by ending debate” (Aboulafia 2001, 52). Ronald Beiner, the editor of Arendt’s Kant’s Lectures on Political Philosophy, argues that Arendt provides a “misleading and obfuscating account of truth” (Beiner 2008, 123). Beiner wonders why Arendt insists on the “pessimistic thought” that politics and truth are incompatible and can only corrupt each other (127). He proposes that “it seems intensely paradoxical that Arendt’s depiction of politics as in its nature antithetical to truth could be compatible with the very elevated conception of politics to which she was committed, rather than leading her to a strong indictment of politics” (128). 3 That these Arendt critics believe she seeks to expel truth from the political realm is often due to an assumption that she has no other conception of truth than the Platonic one, as Arendt understands it: a metaphysical truth which has the character of an absolute and which is viewed by philosophers as the source of absolute standards for the political realm and political opinion. According to these critics, Arendt directs her efforts towards vindicating political opinion against the Platonic idea of truth, yet fails to offer any other conception of truth that is not antithetical to politics. For example, Phillips (2013, 99) says that “in her efforts to rehabilitate opinion, Arendt makes do with an uncontentious, indeed unsophisticated, understanding of truth,” that is, the Platonic idea of truth, as she interprets it. Unlike Phillips, Canovan (1990) provides an account of truth in Arendt’s thought that brings out the complexity of Arendt’s understanding of the relationship between truth and politics. Canovan suggests that Arendt’s works have more to offer on the theme of truth than a critique of the “philosophers who were looking for a single truth to override plural opinions” (139). Canovan demonstrates that one of the important themes in Arendt’s writings is concerned with how it is possible to re-think philosophy itself. Arendt was critical of the Western tradition of philosophy, that is, the Platonic tradition of metaphysics that defined the life of the philosopher through the single experience of solipsistic contemplation (the vita contemplativa) which is oriented by the search for the metaphysical truth and which is necessarily opposed to the life in the realm of human affairs (the vita activa). According to Canovan, Arendt seeks another way of practising philosophy which is not “solitary, antipolitical, and sympathetic to coercion” (1990, 150). Canovan emphasises that Arendt is interested in exploring whether philosophical thinking can be brought into “harmony with free politics” (150). Yet, Canovan seems to argue at times that despite Arendt’s attempt to see a