Tracing the development of modern philosophical history from the pen of a personage whose writings have often been misunderstood is not an easy task. It is, however, the task of this book. In this book, existentialism as a modern attempt at meaning will be examinedāa supranational dialogue involving multiple threads and arriving, in its French, German and now American materializations at remarkable conclusions. The exchange of ideas in this conversation is transatlantic and in this sense comparative, affecting the development of ideas in countries touched by the intellects of Germany, France and the United States. The approach this volume takes is to enter into a discussion of modern existentialism and its postmodern aftereffects along a path that first requires understanding the ideas its thinkers put into words. To do so, however, the contributions of a thinker who has become a premier figure in intellectual assessments of the political and the international will need to be explored.
Hannah Arendt is the modern and American segue for this incisive survey of existentialist thought. Such a survey is best undertaken, however, with awareness of what this thinker did and did not professāand of how she has and has not been accurately represented. In order to investigate Arendtās criticisms of modern ideology and her contributions to existentialist thought, in order to better understand her approach to philosophical awareness and political practice, it is necessary to distinguish between what was written by her and what has been said about her. Arendtās work presents a contextualized and internationally aware account of modernity; Arendt located her work specifically in political terms and went so far as to associate modernity with a ārevival of political thoughtā.1 As such, she has been noted among the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century2 and remains of peculiar relevance to understanding the progression of existentialist thought and its bearing to pervasive ideologies in senses political, contextual and topical. Nevertheless, Arendt did express less-than-favourable assessments of what modern intellectual, technological, and political revolutions have to offer.
Modernity, for Arendt, is ideological. The social atomization of modernity has been reflected philosophically in the existentialist attempt to reassert the individual in defiance of mass society. Arendtās mentors Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger, philosophers of the existential variety, arrived at different interpretations in their respective philosophies of Being. Jaspersās epochal consciousness hinged upon the axial period of history, which he defines as central to the creation of human myth, meaning and cultural awareness As Heidegger would have it, āinquiry must begin from the āexistentiellā (concrete, specific, local) sense we have of ourselves as caught up in the midst of a practical worldā3; it is this experiential reality which Heidegger refers to as life-world. In conversation with these voices, Arendtās work can be seen as a further extension of existentialism, albeit atypical in its approach to tradition and its embrace of human possibility in the context of political community.
In political terms, modernity is often associated with the rise of the nation-state, although the conceptualization of modernity lends itself rather too easily to broad sociological connotations. For Arendt, the political significance of modernity commences with the eighteenth-century French and American Revolutions concomitant with the rise of modern democracy. Philosophically, Arendt associates modernity with thinkers such as Kant, Kierkegaard, Marx and Nietzsche. Modernity, in the creation of a secular mass society, has produced the existentialist quest and ushered in postmodernity. Given the span of Arendtās life (1906ā1975), modernity will be interpreted here as referring to the early twentieth century onwards.
The formulation of ideologyāfirst coined by Antoine Destutt de Tracy and coming into formal existence with the French Revolutionāis a distinctly modern phenomenon. āSince the mid-nineteenth century, the term ideology has been made so capacious ā¦ it has become variously a system of ideas, a zeitgeist of an epoch, a cultural digestā.4 However, Arendtās critique of modernity locates ideology in terms that are primarily philosophical and cultural, and that is where my use of the term will reside. Although Arendt displays some support for liberal ideology in her advocacy of democratic pluralism in line with Aristotleās harmony of political voices,5 yet the ideological developments of modernity remain highly problematic. Modernity is a problem in terms of its anti-tradition, its secularism, its tendency towards the violent in its exaltation of activity and its untethered need for progress and change. These features are as much a product of modern ideological developments as they render modern society susceptible to new waves of ideological persuasion.
What makes Arendtās existentialism significant is the extent to which she follows Karl Jaspers in approaching philosophy not only as an intellectual engagement but as an experiential reality to be embarked on with courage. This is not the approach that Heidegger would take, although it may suggest resonances with existentialism of a French variety, as will be explored in Chapter 6. This is only o...