UvA-DARE (Digital Academic Repository) Amor mundi: Hannah Arendt's political phenomenology of world Borren, M. Publication date 2010 Document Version Final published version Link to publication Citation for published version (APA): Borren, M. (2010). Amor mundi: Hannah Arendt's political phenomenology of world. [Thesis, fully internal, Universiteit van Amsterdam]. F & N Eigen Beheer. General rights It is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), other than for strictly personal, individual use, unless the work is under an open content license (like Creative Commons). Disclaimer/Complaints regulations If you believe that digital publication of certain material infringes any of your rights or (privacy) interests, please let the Library know, stating your reasons. In case of a legitimate complaint, the Library will make the material inaccessible and/or remove it from the website. Please Ask the Library: https://uba.uva.nl/en/contact, or a letter to: Library of the University of Amsterdam, Secretariat, Singel 425, 1012 WP Amsterdam, The Netherlands. You will be contacted as soon as possible. UvA-DARE is a service provided by the library of the University of Amsterdam (https://dare.uva.nl) Download date:26 Jan 2023 Amor Mundi. Hannah Arendt’s political phenomenology of world Marieke Borren Cover design: Mathijs Lieshout Cover illustration: Mathijs Lieshout, Greek theatre at Segesta, Sicily, 3d century BC; pencil on paper, 2009. Produced by F & N Eigen Beheer, Amsterdam ISBN: 9789078675891 Dit proefschrift werd mede mogelijk gemaakt met financiële steun van het Duitsland Instituut bij de Universiteit van Amsterdam en de De Bussy Stichting. Amor Mundi. Hannah Arendt’s political phenomenology of world ACADEMISCH PROEFSCHRIFT ter verkrijging van de graad van doctor aan de Universiteit van Amsterdam op gezag van de Rector Magnificus prof. dr. D.C. van den Boom ten overstaan van een door het college van promoties ingestelde commissie, in het openbaar te verdedigen in de Agnietenkapel op donderdag 9 september 2010, te 12:00 uur door Marieke Borren geboren te Vlaardingen Promotiecommissie Promotor: prof. dr. A.J.J. Nijhuis Copromotor: dr. V.L.M. Vasterling Overige leden: prof. dr. D. De Schutter prof. dr. J. Früchtl prof. dr. H.P. Kunneman prof. dr. B. Roessler dr. K.V.Q. Vintges Faculteit der Geesteswetenschappen Voor Mathijs Table of contents Abbreviations xi Introduction: integrating phenomenological philosophy, historiography and political theory 1 The debate between modernists and postmodernists in recent Arendt-scholarship 4 Structure of this book 9 Part I. Political phenomenology 15 Ch 1. Arendt’s hermeneutic phenomenology: understanding and deconstruction 15 1. The phenomenological tradition 17 2. Arendt’s hermeneutic phenomenology 20 3. Hermeneutic Exercises 26 Critique: dismantling 27 Paradoxes 34 Experiment: storytelling 35 4. The scholar-as-spectator: situated and critical impartiality 38 5. Challenging scientism and metaphysics 43 6. Misunderstandings: experience, facts and distinctions 47 Experience 47 Factuality 48 Discriminating and distinctions 50 Finally: Zu den Sachen selbst! and the broken thread of tradition 52 Ch 2. Phenomenological anthropology 55 1. Anthropological starting point: the totalitarian experience 57 2. Arendt’s phenomenology of the vita activa 63 The ‘who’, the ‘what’ and the person’s life-story 67 Plurality, natality and freedom 72 Table of contents The life of the mind and the human conditions 73 3. Arendt’s phenomenological topology of reality 74 Nature and the objective world 74 The objective and the intersubjective world 77 4. The worldliness of human existence and the paradoxes of plurality 82 The inter-esse, the space of appearances and the web of relationships 87 Conclusion Part I: Arendt’s hermeneutic phenomenology and the traditions of metaphysics, scientism and poststructuralism 91 Part II. The common world, community and the citizen 97 Introduction 97 Ch 3. Political community and the contract 101 1. The general will and enlightened self-interest: Rousseau and Hobbes 101 Solipsism 103 Unity 105 Naturalism 106 Sovereignty 107 Instability and violence 108 Hostility to plurality and worldlessness 111 2. Arendt’s alternative: the promise, opinion, action-in-concert 112 Opinion 114 Promises 115 Power as action-in-concert 117 Conclusion 117 Ch 4. Common sense 119 1. Experience and the sense of the real 123 2. Understanding and judging 129 3. Neither transcendentalism nor empiricism 132 Ch 5. Arendt and Derrida on friendship and the problem of political community 137 1. Friendship and brotherhood 139 2. Fraternization, différance and the coming friendship 140 3. Brotherhood and the loss of world and plurality 143 viii Table of contents 4. Towards a politics or an ethics of friendship? 146 5. (M/F) = 2. Many is more than two 147 6. The ‘coming community’ and the common world 148 Part III. Politics of in/visibility: world as space of appearances 151 Introduction 151 1. The private and the public and the pathologies of in/visibility 151 Public invisibility 152 Natural visibility 157 2. The social and the political and the pathologies of in/visibility 158 Social in/visibility 159 Conclusion: the pathologies of citizenship 161 Ch 6. Public visibility and private invisibility 163 1. Publicity: public appearance and participatory visibility 163 2. Privacy: the private realm of non-appearance and invisibility 167 3. The paradox of revealing and concealing: the mask 170 Conclusion: citizenship 175 Ch 7. The pathologies of in/visibility I: public invisibility and natural visibility. On the stateless and today’s illegal aliens 177 1. European refugees between the wars 177 2. The in/visibility of stateless refugees 181 Rethinking human rights and the nation-state 191 3. Today’s in/visible aliens 193 Ch 8. The pathologies of in/visibility II: social in/visibility. The social question, the race question, the Jewish question and the woman question 207 1. Councils 210 2. The social question 213 3. The Jewish question 217 4. The race question 222 5. The woman question 226 6. Gestaltswitch from justice to freedom 232 ix