Healing Multiculturalism: Middle-Ground Liberal Forgiveness in a Diverse Public Realm

This article examines debates about political forgiveness in liberal, pluralist societies. Although the concept of forgiveness is not usually taken up by liberals, I outline a plausible conception by exploring two recent approaches. The first, ‘unattached articulation’, concept requires no real emotional change on the forgiver’s part, but rather a form of civic restraint. In contrast, the second version highlights a strong form of empathy for perpetrators. In spite of their advantages, each concept proves too extreme. The problems are revealed by focusing on the case of the Harkis, who fought for the French during the Algerian war. Often still marginalised in French society, their case helps to highlight the conceivability of a ‘middle-ground’ or moderate concept of political forgiveness. Its core rests on the forgiver’s care for the social world. While this concept brings considerable challenges also, and is not inevitable in any particular case, it entails a more plausible combination of emotional and rational shifts in the forgiver’s world-view. Although the article does not recommend forgiveness by any person or group, it observes, recalling Arendt’s idea of amor mundi or ‘love of the world’, that political forgiveness may sustain a viable connection between diverse citizens’ public and non-public lives.     

On Hannah Arendt: The Worldly In-Between of Human Beings and its Ethical Consequences

Abstract

In this paper, I show how a concept of ethics can be derived from Hannah Arendt’s theory of action in The Human Condition, which contains from her call for action. When she looks at the ‘political actor’, as well as at the concept of ‘political situation’, her ethical claim is first of all the need to take initiative, to act. Hence, ‘political situations’ as she defines them are discussed as common responsibilities. But common responsibility is rooted in the in-between of human beings, rather than in individual human nature and is determined by Arendt’s principle of humanity. Therefore, at the centre of an implicit Arendtian ethics stands the world and the in-between of human beings.     

Reading Hannah Arendt as a Biblical Thinker

This article presents an interpretation of the role that religious concepts play in Hannah Arendt’s political thought. While Arendt is typically regarded as a secular thinker, I argue that she turns to resources found in biblical traditions of thought when she finds Greek and Roman traditions to be lacking in vital respects. The concepts that she associates most strongly with the Bible—natality, forgiveness, and plurality―are necessary to her vision of a political community that is genuinely pluralistic and which understands the nature and implications of human action. By examining the role that biblical concepts play in Arendt’s thought, this article explores the possibility of setting her work in dialogue with a range of Jewish and Christian traditions. Placing Arendt in such a dialogue also opens up the question of what it means to be a "biblical thinker."     

Margaret Miles and the Platonist’s Daughter

Margaret Miles’ academic memoir Augustine and the Fundamentalist’s Daughter uses Augustine as both a guide and an interlocutor as she recounts her own odyssey of the soul. Miles, using a similar framework to that in the Confessions, makes a public account of her own private reflections on herself, her academic life, and her journey in faith. Taking up the implicit invitation to self-reflection and dialogue that this book provides, this review attempts to bring out key philosophical issues inherent in the book, including Miles’ views on education, love, the body, and God’s grace.     

Arendt’s genealogy of thinking

This paper presents what I will call Arendt’s genealogy of thinking. My purpose in doing so is to strengthen Arendt’s critique of thoughtlessness which I believe is both a powerful, but underappreciated analytic tool and a consistent, but under-examined thread that occurs throughout Arendt’s oeuvre. To do so I revisit her phenomenology of thinking and the distinction between thinking and cognition she introduces in her last, unfinished work, The Life of the Mind. When read alongside the genealogy of action in The Human Condition to create a parallel genealogy of thinking, we can begin to see that the implications of this distinction between thinking and cognition are radical, challenging, and deeply important.     

Political itineraries and anarchic cosmopolitanism in the thought of Hannah Arendt

In this paper, I argue that Arendt's understanding of freedom should be examined independently of the search for good political institutions because it is related to freedom of movement and has a transnational meaning. Although she does not say it explicitly, Arendt establishes a correlation between political identities and territorial moves: She analyzes regimes in relation to their treatment of lands and borders, that is, specific geographic movements. I call this correlation a political itinerary. My aim is to show genealogically that her elaboration on the regimes of ancient, modern, and ‘dark’ times is supported by such a correlation. I read Arendt in light of the current clash between an amorphous global political identity (and ‘new’ international order) and the renewal of nationalisms. I show that, for Arendt, the world is divided by necessary frontiers – territorial borders and identity frames – and that the political consists precisely of the effort to transgress them. Arendt never proposed a restoration of authority but, on the contrary, a worldwide anarchic (that is, based on no predetermined rule) politics of de‐localization and re‐localization; in her terms, a politics of free movement of founded identities, a cosmopolitanism, which, nevertheless, would have nothing to do with global sovereignty.     

‘Reflections on Little Rock’ and Reflective Judgment

Reflections on Little Rock (RLR) is one of Hannah Arendt’s most controversial writings. Read from the perspective of the political philosopher, it appears even more contentious than her famous remarks in Eichmann in Jerusalem. In the last two decades, a number of critical contributions have been published addressing this essay, highlighting how it casts serious doubts on the correctness of Arendt’s dealing with the racial question and, more generally, on the tenability of central elements of her political thought – e.g., her distinction between the political and the social. However, only occasional – and, as I will try to demonstrate, quite imprecise – analyses of the implications of RLR for an understanding of Arendt’s view of judgment have been produced. The aim of the present article is to reread what both Arendt’s position on judgment and its main contemporary reformulation, advanced by Linda Zerilli, imply for the making of political choices in pluralistic societies. Special attention will be also paid to the relation between the particular and the universal in Arendtian thought. In the first section I will reconstruct the main (factual and argumentative) weaknesses of RLR, while in the second a detailed assessment of the criticisms relating RLR and Arendt’s view of judgment will be provided. Finally, in the last section I will discuss at length Zerilli’s conception of feminist judgment.     

Augustine,Arendt, and Anthropy

Arendt’s theoretical influence is generally traced to Heidegger and experientially to the traumatic events that occurred in Europe during the Second World War. Here, we suggest that Arendt’s conception of politics may be usefully enriched via a proto-anthropic principle found in Augustine and adopted by Arendt throughout her writings. By appealing to this anthropic principle; that without a spectator there could be no world; a profound connection is made between the ‘cosmic jackpot’ of life in the universe and the uniquely human activity that takes place in the political realm. By making this connection we suggest that solutions present themselves to a central puzzle arising in Arendt’s thought: namely, what it is that people actually do in the political realm. The first solution directly addresses the issue of content: what people talk about in Arendt’s public space. The second addresses the importance of ‘maintaining’ a space of appearances. The third considers the effect of participating in and observing the public domain. Consequently, we conclude that, for Arendt, action is nothing less than the activity of ‘world-making.’     

Considering the Public Private-Dichotomy: Hannah Arendt,Václav Havel and Victor Klemperer on the Importance of the Private

This paper examines the political significance of discursive activity in the private sphere in the thought of Hannah Arendt, Václav Havel, and Victor Klemperer. Against criticisms of Arendt which claim that she pays too much attention to the public sphere and consequently misses the importance of the private sphere in her analysis of political action, this paper highlights important insights in Arendt’s writing on family and friendship and the ability of these relationships to act as havens where discourse can thrive. What emerges from the analysis is a rich agonistic discourse ethics. The paper employs the respective thought of Havel and Klemperer to highlight Arendt’s work on the political significance of private virtues for promoting an awareness of responsibility. This position is then defended against the criticisms of discourse ethics offered by Chantal Mouffe.     

The Mark of Cain: Sovereign Negation and the Politics of God

Hannah Arendt calls for the “abolition of sovereignty from the body politic.” In this article I affirm some key elements of Arendt’s critique, arguing against versions of Christian ethics that try to deploy divine authorization for particular policies, institutions, goals, or virtues. But I also argue that the attempt to abolish sovereignty allows the political process itself to become a sovereign good and erodes the forms of life that can sustain the kind of vision and politics that Arendt desires. The better alternative to the usual politics of sovereignty is not the absence of sovereignty, but a changed – and negative – conception of the relationship of sovereign power to the political order. In developing this argument I contend with Arendt’s reading of Herman Melville’s Billy Budd and, behind that, her reading of the biblical story of Cain and Abel. I argue that the city of Cain is made possible not by Cain’s murder of his brother, but by the mark with which God negates the legitimacy of both the murder and the violence to avenge the murder. Sovereign negation makes the polis possible.     

REPUBLICS AND THEIR LOVES: REREADING CITY OF GOD 191

In City of God 19.24, Augustine rejects Cicero's definition of res publica as a society founded on justice for a new definition focused on common objects of love. Robert Markus, Oliver O'Donovan, and a host of Augustinian political theologians have depicted this move as a positive gesture toward secular society. Yet this reading fails to account for why Augustine waited so long to address Cicero's definition, first discussed in Book 2, and for the radical dualism Augustine sets forth between the two cities throughout his text. I argue, in line with Rowan Williams and John Milbank, for a minority reading of Book 19 that draws upon the narrative structure of City of God. In Books 3–5, Augustine recounts the history of the earthly city according to Rome's penchant for violence and idolatry, both a function of love for temporal goods. In Book 18, Augustine traces the history of the earthly city before Rome according to the same themes, completing a narrative argument that humanity has always been divided according to differing loves. Book 19 advances the idea that such idolatry is injustice—a failure to grant God the worship he is due. With the new definition of 19.24, Augustine retains Cicero's emphasis on the importance of virtue in civic society while characteristically shifting the terms of discussion from justice to love. While such a definition means that Rome can be called a res publica, it also prompts a negative judgment upon her history according to her objects of love. Given her violence and idolatry, Rome is no better than Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, and Greece—all subject to withering critique in Book 18. Thus, Augustine's new definition does not retract but extends the polemic of City of God.     

The concept of violence in the work of Hannah Arendt

Arendt claimed that violence is not part of the political because it is instrumental. Her position has generated a vast corpus of scholarship, most of which falls into the context of the realist-liberal divide. Taking these discussions as a starting point, this essay engages with violence in Arendt’s work from a different perspective. Its interest lies not in Arendt’s theory of violence in the world, but in the function that violence performed in her work, namely, in the constitutive role of violence in her thought. It argues that the concept of violence allowed Arendt to make important distinctions serving to catalyze the categories that constitute her political philosophy and, in particular, the categories of public and private. More specifically, it claims that the concept of violence in Arendt’s work is the a priori background against which both the public and private realms should be defined.     

A Lover’s Shame

Shame is one of the more painful consequences of loving someone; my beloved’s doing something immoral can cause me to be ashamed of her. The guiding thought behind this paper is that explaining this phenomenon can tell us something about what it means to love. The phenomenon of beloved-induced shame has been largely neglected by philosophers working on shame, most of whom conceive of shame as being a reflexive attitude. Bennett Helm has recently suggested that in order to account for beloved-induced shame, we should deny the reflexivity of shame. After arguing that Helm’s account is inadequate, I proceed to develop an account of beloved-induced shame that rightly preserves its reflexivity. A familiar feature of love is that it involves an evaluative dependence; when I love someone, my well-being depends upon her life’s going well. I argue that loving someone also involves a persistent tendency to believe that her life is going well, in the sense that she is a good person, that she is not prone to wickedness. Lovers are inclined, more strongly than they otherwise would be, to give their beloveds the moral benefit of the doubt. These two features of loving—an evaluative dependence and a persistent tendency to believe in the beloved’s moral goodness—provide the conditions for a lover to experience shame when he discovers that his beloved has morally transgressed.     

Freedom as (Self‐)Expression: Natality and the Temporality of Action in Merleau‐Ponty and Arendt

This paper draws on the philosophies of Maurice Merleau‐Ponty and Hannah Arendt in order to explore the nature of free action. Part one outlines three familiar ways in which we often understand the nature of freedom. Part two argues that these common understandings of freedom are rooted in impoverished conceptions of time and subjectivity. Part three engages with Arendt’s conception of natality alongside Merleau‐Ponty’s conception of expression in order to argue that the freely acting self draws in improvisational manners on the resources of a shared past in order to open unprecedented spaces of meaning for the future, and in so doing at once discovers and institutes herself as the self that she is. Part four draws on an example of anti‐oppressive political action in order to argue that free action not only has the power to inaugurate new spaces of shared meaning for the future, but also to change the sens of the shared past. By the same token, free action is vulnerable in its ontological status and ethical meanings to the events and judgments of the future. Part five argues with both Merleau‐Ponty and Arendt that ethical‐political actors can do no better than to cultivate a political virtù while facing up to the inherently transgressive dimensions of free action in a shared historical world.     

AQUINAS'S ARGUMENT AGAINST SELF-HATRED

Aquinas's argument against the possibility of genuine self‐hatred runs counter to modern intuitions about self‐hatred as an explanatorily central notion in psychology, and as an effect of alienation. Aquinas's argument does not deny that persons experience hatred for themselves. It can be read either as the claim that the self‐hater mistakes what she feels toward herself as hatred, or that, though she hates what she believes is her “self,” she actually hates only traits of herself. I argue that the argument fails on both readings. The first reading entails that all passions are really self‐love, and so is incompatible with Aquinas's own “cognitivist” view of what it is that distinguishes specific passions in experience. The second reading entails that persons have no phenomenal access to “self,” rendering self‐reference—how it is that the self can be an intentional object of conscious mental states—a mystery. Augustine's claim, which Aquinas accepts on authority, that all sin originates in inordinate self‐love seems to entail the impossibility of genuine self‐hatred because both thinkers fail to distinguish between two distinct forms of self‐love: amor concupiscentiae and amor benevolentiae.     

Blending Arendtian Exemplarity with Weberian Ideal-Typic Analysis: Arendt’s ‘Socrates’ as a Vehicle for Social Critique

Arendt uses the exemplary validity of Socrates to think and value the possibilities of joint philosophical and political orientations in our present juncture. In this way Arendt’s ‘Socrates’ is not a mythic, historic, or dramatic individual, but offers an example of the best of the human condition. Unfortunately, because Arendt held the social conditioning and constraining of Socrates’ possibilities at arm’s length, his status as an exemplar is problematic and he ends up referring to a historical rather than contemporary possibilities. While Arendt had resources in her notion of the ‘world’ to better ground her simultaneously analytic and normative construction of ‘Socrates’, the lack of a social grounding makes ‘Socrates’ a significantly unmoored and shifting signifier. After showing the vacillations of ‘Socrates’ in Arendt, I supplement her normatively laden account with a Weberian grounding. With this firmer social grounding, ‘Socrates’ can refer to the possibilities of joint philosophical and political orientations in ancient Athens and thereby highlight how our world makes a contemporary version unlikely or impossible. Yet, this Weberian grounding comes at a cost. The normative dimension essential in Arendt’s ‘Socrates’ is lost due to Weberian value-neutrality. ‘Socrates’ can name a contemporary unlikelihood or impossibility, but if the enveloping social order does not value what it renders impossible, Weberian ideal-types on their own are incapable of offering normative resources for critique. I conclude by blending a Weberian social mooring with Arendt’s value-laden framework for social analysis and thereby recuperate the missing normative dimension. In short, by accepting the relational, necessarily plural, and dynamic root of human action we can, much like Arendt’s intended use of ‘Socrates’, value orientations that best express these norms, and criticize contemporary conditions that constrain their realization.     

Trust and Betrayal from a Husserlian Standpoint

Abstract

This paper provides an interpretation of trust and betrayal within political communities from the perspective of Husserl’s concept of social communities. I situate the paper amidst Margaret Gilbert’s theory of political obligations, arguing that at least one outside conception of trust fills a gap left in her theory. More specifically, I argue for the supplementary fit that Karen Jones’s conception of trust understood as ‘basal security’ provides for Gilbert. From there, I tie this conception of trust and betrayal to Husserl’s notions of ‘original belief’ and socio-cultural crisis. There is thereby a phenomenological elucidation of features within the social world that allow such crises to occur in the first place.     

Amor Fati as Practice: How to Love Fate

On the basis of an interpretation of key passages in The Gay Science, this paper examines Nietzsche's idea of amor fati—love of fate. Nietzsche's idea of amor fati involves the wish to be able to learn how to see things as beautiful. This gives the impression that amor, love, is supposed to play some role in the beautification of fate. But Nietzsche also explains amor fati in relation to his desire to be a devoted “Yes‐sayer.” This pulls the interpretation of amor in a different direction; for now it seems as if the love Nietzsche wants to cultivate is supposed to be expressed in a positive, affirmative attitude toward one's fate. How to think this duality under the single idea of amor fati? I develop a novel reading of amor fati as a form of practice, as something that we can do, and explain in its light how the two moments of love are to be brought together. The relation of amor fati to the “Eternal Recurrence of the Same” is also addressed: mastering the practice of amor fati can enable one to pass successfully the test of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same.     

“In the Face,a Right Is There”: Arendt,Levinas and the Phenomenology of the Rights of Man

This paper examines the differences between the thought of Hannah Arendt and Emmanuel Levinas concerning the “Rights of Man”, in relation to stateless persons. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt evinces a profound scepticism towards this ideal, which for her was powerless without being tethered to citizenship. But Arendt’s own idea of the “Right to have Rights” is critiqued here as being inadequate to the ethical demand placed upon states by refugees, in failing to articulate just what states might be responsible for. I argue that the ethical philosophy of Levinas meets this lacuna in Arendt’s thought, via his concept of the Face as the locus of human dignity and to which states can be recalled to responsibility. Levinas wrote several papers on what he called “the phenomenology of the Rights of Man”, and in his phrase, which provides a summation of precisely what is lacking in Arendt’s arguments: “In the face – a right is there”.     

Putting Religion Back Into Religious Ethics

This essay on Richard Miller’s Friends and Other Strangers (2016) locates its arguments in the context of how the practice of religious ethics bears upon debates about normativity in the study of religion and the cultural turn in the humanities. After reviewing its main claims about identity and otherness, I focus on three areas. First, while commending Miller’s effort to analogize virtuous empathy with Augustine’s ethics of rightly ordered love, I raise questions about his use of Augustine and his distinctive formulation of Augustinian “iconic realism.” Second, I suggest his discussion of public reason is at odds with the dialogical spirit of the book and may distract from the democratic solidarity required by our political moment. Third, more briefly, I highlight the practical implications of Miller’s vision for higher education at both the graduate and undergraduate level.