Judgment After Arendt

Max Deutscher

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138259478
• eBook ISBN: 9781317110163
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Judgment After Arendt is both the first full-length study of Hannah Arendt's The Life of the Mind and, at the same time, a philosophical work on the core concepts of thinking, willing and judging. Comprised of Thinking and Willing, her final and most sustained philosophical project, Arendt's work is framed by the 'thought-less' Adolf Eichmann whose 'banality' of mind in committing evil she observed at his trial in Jerusalem. Arendt's project, cut short by her death, was to have included Judgment. Without judgment, she argued, a life of thought and of will can still collude with evil. In analysing Arendt's work Deutscher develops this theme of judgment and shows how, by drawing upon literature, history, myth and idiom, Arendt contributes significantly to contemporary philosophy.

PART 1 Appearances of Thought

Chapter 1 Appearances

DOI: 10.4324/9781315590721-1

Restoring appearances

Arendt approaches thinking by a detour around the rift of ‘appearance’ and ‘reality’ that is called the dualism of mind and body. The ‘things of the world’ are what can appear:

In this world which we enter, appearing from a nowhere and from which we disappear into a nowhere, Being and Appearing coincide (LM, 19).

Epigrammatically – ‘Nothing could appear … if recipients of appearances did not exist.’ Reality does not reduce to its appearing, though. Just to the extent that being can appear (sometimes via specialised instruments), what does appear appears as being – as something that exists. A dualism of appearance and being is further undermined by the fact that the humans and other animals to which things appear are themselves things that appear. As much as we are the ones to which the world appears, we are numbered amongst the things of the world: ¹

1 See Sartre on the phenomenon (Sartre 1976, ‘Introduction’), and Heidegger’s nuanced treatment of appearing (Heidegger 1962, ‘Introduction’). ‘Each writes in the spirit of Nietzsche’s attack on Being as lying behind appearance’.

The worldliness of living things means that there is no subject that is not also an object and appears as such to somebody else, who guarantees its ‘objective’ reality (LM, 19).

Consciousness itself is within the ‘worldly’ order. From the pure fact ‘that I am aware of myself and … can appear to myself’, the reality of what I seem to be conscious of is ‘never guaranteed’. As part of the world, each thinking ‘I’ loses its central position – ‘to be alive means to live in a world that preceded one’s own arrival and will survive one’s departure.’

That ‘world’ in which every conscious being lives transcends the consciousness of any being to whom it appears. Still, it is marked out by the time spans of those who live in it, along with the natural recurrences of day and night, and the seasons that it presents to them_

On this level of sheer being alive, appearance and disappearance … are the primordial events (that) mark out time, the time span between birth and death … Thus the lived experience of the length of a year changes radically throughout our life (LM, 20).

This temporal ‘appearance and disappearance’ structures our experience of time – ‘a year is the fifth of the whole life of a five-year-old’. Against these relativities we construct an idea of an invariant length of a year ‘that never changes’, set against a concept of a world without beginning or end.

Arendt begins to differentiate ‘the inorganic thereness of lifeless matter’ from ‘living beings’ in terms of appearing and appearance rather than of mind and body. These ‘living beings … are possessed by an urge toward self-display which answers the fact of (their) own appearingness’ (LM, 21). This idea of self-display is introduced by a twist on the philosopher’s standard picture of the ‘richness’ of the world of appearance in contrast with the bare, spare world of the physicist: What is ‘hardly ever mentioned by the thinkers and philosophers … [is] the sheer entertainment value of its views, sounds and smells.’ There is a theatrical side to this. The appeal of ‘being’ itself is the appeal of the ‘world in its appearances’ as the entertainment value of the world as the bearer of beauty. This value of things beyond their usefulness is matched by the value that the viewer of them places upon themself in the desire to display their own appearance(s):

Living things make their appearance like actors on a stage set for them. … To appear always means to seem to others, and this seeming varies according to the standpoint … of the spectators. [E]very appearing thing acquires … a kind of disguise that may … hide or disfigure it (LM, 21).

The scudding beauty of the world along with this plasticity of roles of those who behold it all underlines the stable solidity of the world, in fact. This stability is presupposed by these appearances and is the stage for our own display of them. ²

2 See On Beauty and Being Just for a consonant investigation of beauty and display (Scarry 1999).

If ‘all the world’s a stage’ on which we can display ourselves, this world is all the ways it appears to us. This fact makes it possible to displace the ‘natural straightforward attitude’ ³ of my experience as a translucent medium that carries me directly to its relatively opaque object. Instead, I ‘withdraw from the world as it appears and … bend back toward the self’ (LM, 22), to experience as (to use my own expression) ‘its seeming to me that …’ rather than as ‘the world’s appearing (to me) thus and so.’ Arendt points out the fallacy in inferring from this shift in attention, that ‘really’ we experience only our own experiences. She analyses the fallacy while recognising its plausibility:

3 A phrase Husserl creates and constantly uses in his final work in 1937 (Husserl 1970).

[This fallacy] would never have been able to survive … if it had not so plausibly corresponded to some basic experiences. As Merleau-Ponty put it, ‘I can flee being only into being’ (LM, 23).

I can reject the reality of what presents itself, but then can turn only to reality in some other guise. Arendt remarks pithily that ‘since Being and Appearing coincide for men, this means that I can flee appearance only into appearance.’ Arendt’s theme of thinking is that it appears as a withdrawal from the world of action. Though the world must appear in order to appear real, to treat the world as only its appearing to me signals an attitude of withdrawal from it. The world does not have to be known (impossibly) as a being in itself, in order that it, itself, be known, but a withdrawal from the world of action is made possible by thought. The withdrawal can be described only in terms of what it is not – and in terms of what is foregone in order that thinking take the power of pre-eminence. In the existentialist terms of Sartre and Beauvoir, in being for myself I take cognisance of a world that has being for me. I do not, in that same act, take cognisance of my being for another. That mode can take me by surprise when I discover myself as the object of another’s scrutiny. In Arendt’s terms:

[To treat the world only as it ‘seems to me’] would cause no great problem if we were mere spectators … thrown into the world to look after it … and be entertained by it. … However, we are of the world and not merely in it … While we come from a nowhere, we arrive well equipped to deal with whatever appears to us and to take part in the play of the world (LM, 22).

Other things appear and disappear as we open and close our eyes, but our own appearing and disappearing does not thus appear and disappear. I cannot hold sway over this appearance of myself. This shows that the ‘two worlds’ picture is a radical distortion of my experience that I have in being for myself (Deutscher 2002, Chapter 7). Since that being that I take to be so privately ‘my own’ can appear to another, it is in the very realm of being in itself. It is not another being, but a differing mode of the same being. But we are not at once out of dualism into the uplands of patent physicality:

[That I can flee appearance only into appearance] does not solve the problem [that] concerns the fitness of thought to appear at all, and the question is whether thinking … can [ever] find an adequate home in the world (LM, 23).

Dichotomies of mind and body

Restoring the surface

In this opening section, entitled ‘Appearance’, having set out from the ‘phenomenal nature’ of the world, Arendt is about to deconstruct (‘true’) being as against (‘false’) appearance by a ‘reversal’ of that ‘hierarchy’ so as to privilege the ‘surface’. This leads her to reconsider the relation of body and mind, and to put ‘appearance and semblance’ in place of the old dichotomy of ‘being and appearing’. She moves forwards from the critique of any dichotomy of being and appearing established by Nietzsche and taken up by the phenomenological tradition. ⁴ In fact she ‘find(s) a first consoling hint regarding this subject … (in) … the old metaphysical dichotomy of (true) Being and (mere) Appearance.’ Things do appear. In the attempt to establish the dichotomy, to privilege ‘being’ over ‘appearing’, the metaphysician relied on ‘the primacy … of appearance’ (LM, 23). Appearing is the only clue we have about this being as ‘behind’ the appearing.

4 Principally, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty.

The difference between the images of the world presented by the sciences and those thrown up within our ‘everyday’ dealings with things and people has revived the old metaphysical distinction. This difference does not, however, overtake the distinction of being and appearing. The object that is studied and described scientifically is known as it appears to the scientific investigator by measuring instruments and within speculative theory. The scientist works within the logic of appearing and being in the continual revision of experiment and theory. In Kant’s philosophy, the bifurcation of phenomenon and Ding an sich (‘thing in itself’) places appearance in the textual foreground, just as Heidegger’s division of being and beings places perceptible and lived modes of being in the philosopher’s spotlight. Observing this inevitable primacy of appearance, Arendt ponders:

Could it not be that appearances are there not for the sake of the life process but … that the life process is there for the sake of appearances? … [I]t should be obvious to the naked eye that the enormous variety of animal and plant life, the very richness in display in its sheer functional superfluity, cannot be accounted for by the common theories that understand life in terms of functionality (LM, 27–8).

When Arendt speculates that this urge for self-display cannot be explained in terms of ‘functionality’ (presumably a reference to any form of evolutionary mechanism), she sees the urge for display – the phenomenon of its luxuriant excess – as making no calculation of its practical benefits. The urge to display might have become entrenched in our species because of its role in attracting a mate and as a mode of competition with rivals. Nevertheless, whatever ‘functionality’ might explain its origin, our present use of that urge may have only a vanishing resemblance to what originated it. Intelligence has been of an evolutionary advantage to our species and having become intelligent we can philosophise. But one cannot infer that we are following some obscure ‘evolutionary imperative’ in making this particular use of our intelligence. There is, in that sense, no such thing as an ‘evolutionary imperative’. To think so is to reinvest the process with a kind of hidden purpose – of ‘ensuring the survival of the species’. Since evolutionary theory is constructed to counter an appeal to any over-arching Designer, an adaptive mechanism itself has no purpose of ensuring survival – whether (depending on one’s version), of individuals, species, or genes. Such an idea would mirror the old theology in which a Creator imbues us with just that darkling intelligence by whose use we shall, after long travail, finally recognise that True Creator of our nature.

From evolution, via the surface, to mind and body

Our desires for self-display that attract Arendt’s attention involve aesthetic judgment and are proto-political in intent. Arendt is not reducing the concepts of conscious behaviour to those of an evolutionary mechanism. Her language, though not reductionist in style, sustains an anti-dualist strategy nonetheless. The findings of ‘modern science’ as such, but also the socially interactive spirit of enquiry required by the sciences (as by philosophy and by literary creation) have dislodged Descartes’ ‘esprit’ from its separate and controlling function over his ‘corps’. Arendt’s ‘value of the surface’ includes what anatomical investigation and ingenious experiments can discover. These strategies disclose worlds of new ‘surfaces’ – of the liver, heart and brain inside the body – of the interface between orbiting electrons and more or less stable nuclei of atoms, and so on. And, consider again the difference between the ‘surface’ as the sensible, expressive and legible human body as against its inner organs, bones, blood and sinews. It is the ‘appearance’ that these inner organs make possible that constitutes us essentially as ourselves. Even the brain, the repository of our memories and organ of our intelligence has its importance in enabling us to display our appearances – as worker, comedian, lover, speech-maker, dancer or philosopher.

All the same, Arendt is sensitive to the increasing role of physical theory in explaining these appearances. She is about to discuss a theme she calls Body and soul; soul and mind and the contemporary reader will be aware of a controversy about a possible identity of thought with function...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Frontmatter
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• PART I: APPEARANCES OF THOUGHT
• PART II: THINKING WITH OTHERS
• PART III: WILLING MYTHS
• PART IV: JUDGMENT
• Bibliography
• Index