Hannah Arendt and the Specter of Totalitarianism

Marilyn LaFay

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137392954
• eBook ISBN: 9781137382245
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This work positions Arendt as a political writer attempting to find a way in which humanity, poised between the Holocaust and the atom bomb, might reclaim its position as the creators of a world fit for human habitation.

CHAPTER 1

Love and Saint Augustine: The Abstracted Neighbor

This chapter examines Arendt’s dissertation, Love and St. Augustine. The dissertation is an important addition to the Arendtian oeuvre for it “grounds her political thought and provides the existential context for her phenomenology of public life.”¹ My focus in this chapter is to draw out the themes of “care for the world” and “love for the neighbor” that emerge in the dissertation and that act as binding agents in Arendt’s thought. Examination of the dissertation shows these themes as politically problematic, however, for both “care for the world” and “love of the neighbor,” as Arendt develops them here, rely on an abstraction into the future. And in this we find the dissonance that runs throughout Arendt’s work: she wants to impose upon people a type of similarity—a similarity of futurity—which may be all well and good philosophically speaking, but is highly suspect, if not outrageous when brought into the political realm.

My core argument is that, in Love and St. Augustine, Arendt exchanges neighbor-love in the present for the love of the futurity of the neighbor. Arendt’s reading of the neighbor thus radically alters Augustine’s political thought, moving us away from the material, experiential, self and other of Augustinian texts, toward an abstracted, decontextualized, neighbor: Arendt’s Augustinian neighbor lacks a reflexive connection with the concrete. In so doing, she fatally strips away all that makes us human, taking away the rich and dialectical experience of life that is at the core of the Augustinian project. Individuals and individual experience, through the equality of death, become interchangeable with one another. Thus, in her configuration of neighborly love, it is not the concrete manifestation of the neighbor whom we love, but rather, an abstracted and minimized neighbor. It is a neighbor who does not possess individual qualities, nor one who exists in the world: we lose the ability to respect and appreciate the neighbor, for we see him not as a whole being, but only as that part which has the potential to be perfected. Respect for the other would thus lie in the breadth and depth of the perfection of the other, not in any sort of sense of who he is as an individual.

This situating of the neighbor as a perfectible being has serious implications for the possibilities of a “care for the world,” for it becomes a world populated by no one in particular. This is ironic, given Arendt’s concerns for reclaiming the world from History or Tradition, to make the world a place “fit for men to live”:

But aside from the pain and the consequences, alienation is to be lamented as the wrong condition to be in. The largely unargued premise is that the human race exists in order to be at home in the world and on earth; that our humanity is tied to the absence of alienation—at least, the radical alienation in the modern age . . . Let us just say that though she is adamantly untheological, Arendt seems to have a religious commitment to the notion that we exist to be at home in the world and on the earth, and that human identity depends on it.²

But when we look at the character and qualities of those who are to live in this world, we see that they are not any who are of this world, and in this respect, she moves us far away from Augustine.

Arendt’s Augustinian Roots

The modern dilemma in which Arendt situates herself is that of “being lost in a world otherwise totally explained.”³ But for Arendt, writing her dissertation against the backdrop of 1920s Germany, this idea of a “world totally explained” is absurd. Even worse than absurd, the “world totally explained” is a lie, if not hubris. The world had not just been turned upside down, but rather, laid bare: all “reason” was a lie; all “ideology” broken; all political apparatus suspect. All that can apparently be relied upon is one’s own experience. But even this is unreliable for any interpretation of experience may be underwritten with cynicism, horrified by the past and suspicious of the future.

How appropriate then that Arendt should turn to Augustine. Like Augustine’s Rome, Western Civilization no longer seems capable of containing the pressures imposed upon it from within and without. The Augustinian quaestio—of being a question unto oneself—takes on an urgency again, not only because it addresses the alienation of the Self in the modern world, but also because the world has itself become a question. Arendt uses the existentialist Augustinian quaestio, centered on love of neighbor, as the referent point for addressing the dilemma of the modern. This, I posit, is the central theme throughout her works: how do we, as moderns, engage in allowing the world to remain a question unto itself, rather than revert to thinking that all is explained?

Let us tread carefully here. Arendt is not about to use Augustine to support some sort of return to Christian charity or reliance on “grace.” She is, despite some of her pretences and misgivings, undoubtedly a modern, insofar that she views the world as something that is in the hands of humanity and humanity alone. That is the point: we create the world in which we live. But in order to create such a world, we must remain open to possibility, and hence open to the sort of open-ended questioning and searching for which Augustine provides a framework. His quaestio is horizonless and pitiless. Moreover, the only possible response to Augustine’s quaestio is to engage in a type of radical love, the love of caritas. Caritas demands a willingness not only to engage in the harsh glare of self-reflection, but also to knowingly enter into relationships fraught with a lack of determinism; it is a love that is neither self-abnegating nor self-fulfilling. In Arendt’s reading, Augustinian caritas becomes the means by which conscience can engage the world.⁴ Perhaps the Augustinian appeal—again recalling the backdrop of Weimar—is best summed up by Jean Bethke Elshtain’s synopsis:

Augustine displays the negative of ideology by articulating a canny and scrupulous attunement to the here and now with its very real limits. There are affirmations that flow from his negation of positive philosophy. Augustine creates a complex moral map that offers space for loyalty and love and care, as well as for a chastened form of civic virtue. If Augustine is a thorn in the side of those who would cure the universe once and for all, he similarly torments cynics who would disdain any project of human community, or justice, or possibility . . . Wisdom comes from experiencing fully the ambivalence and ambiguity that is the human condition.⁵

And here is why Arendt makes this interesting turn to Augustine, and specifically, an existentialist Augustine: he is no stranger to the virtues of both angst and community. Nor is he wary of the need to embrace the wholeness rather than the partiality of human existence. In this, Arendt finds a philosophical “kindred spirit,” with whom she might engage a process of “unsystematic; new beginn[ing]s.”⁶ The position I thus take is that Arendt views the radical release of Being as being balanced within the complicated, messy humanity of being-with-others: hers is never an “heroic” and isolated Being, but rather a Being fraught with all the neuroses that come from living amid a world populated with other Beings. Arendt and Augustine, then, are both beginners in the sense of trying to find a home in a “new world.”

First and foremost, we must remember that Augustine was not only a thinker and institutionalizer of the Christian faith, but he also stood on the precipice of a new stage of Western Civilization. The glory of Rome was under attack and crumbling rapidly from without; Rome was perceived to have lost its former verisimilitude, now corrupted by decadence and licentiousness. Augustine must thus be remembered as a critic of Rome, but specifically as a critic of the ways in which “Roman virtue” had lost its sense of having a common purpose, and had instead turned into the vacuous exercise of meeting appearances. Indeed, for Augustine, the Roman world was crumbling because it had given up the very thing that had distinguished it: its vigorous civic culture. What remained of Rome was a population who were “without the tradition and guidance of a just social order, [and] lack[ing] the public standards necessary to exercise their freedom in a public world.”⁷ The Roman citizen, in other words, was no longer truly a “citizen” in the sense of having an active role to play in the political life of the Empire. There was a disconnect between people and place, and Augustine aims to offer “an alternative explanation of their place—individual, social, and political—within the world of man, the saeculum.”⁸ It is in this context that his existential pursuit lies. He aims, in his explicitly political aspect, to bring about the relevance of public action and common purpose⁹ as the basis for structuring the City of Men. As such, Augustine asks us to query and judge that which we propose as the “good,” the ways in which we shall organize and articulate our common world. But to do this, we must turn away from abstractions and tradition, relying instead upon our own judgment of how to “practice” a life.¹⁰

The complicating factor, though, and what brings this into the realm of existentialism is, of course, Augustine’s Christianity. For in the City of Men, the Christian references the City of God as a moral standpoint. Here is the inherent moment of angst, for

the Gospel can never be at home in the world, and cannot fail to bring a true believer into conflict with any existing order of things. It is in essential and permanent tension with the world. This tension should be a fruitful one, from which awkward questions are continually being put into the world. Hope is a permanently unsettling force, seeking to prevent social institutions from becoming rigid and fixed, always inclined to treat the status quo with suspicion.¹¹

And thus, here is where the angst of Augustine enters, but we must take extreme care to note a qualitative difference with Arendtian angst. For Augustine, angst is generated from a longing for God, and in particular a longing to a live a life in the City of God, but knowing full well that this is an impossibility here on earth. Judgment of how one should live thus always refers back to what we perceive to be godlike. But this judging perception is necessarily always incomplete. Our angst is built upon the tension between longing for God, but the inability to fully possess God: so long as we exist in the City of Men, we shall never find comfort, but shall always be in a state of angst. But this angst for Augustine is a productive and hopeful state. It is precisely this tension, this angst that allows one to become a question unto oneself.

As Eugene TeSelle argues, Arendt seems to lose track of this fundamental tension in Augustine, for “she distrusts the willing subject, whose horizon will always be wider than what is willed. The danger, of course, is that the willed community, the only object of loyalty that is at hand, will become a kind of finite deity.”¹² Indeed, as we have seen, her angst is situated entirely within the world of men. Without God, for the willed community, there is no moment of external reflection for the existential questioning of oneself, and hence the willed community itself must become the deity. But such is the nature of living as a modern. Thus, there is a material distinction between the angst of Augustine and the angst of Arendt, in that the Arendtian perspective must accommodate the tension of existence without recourse to an external that helps guide us through the questioning of oneself. Arendt’s existential Augustine is an Augustine without God.

Augustinian Existentialism

Setting aside the philosophical issue of whether one can fully embrace Augustine without reference to God, I believe that Augustine does indeed offer a method of approaching political life, but only so long as the role that God plays in terms of this politics is appreciated and understood. Undoubtedly, no modern would want to situate God within a model of politics. The question, however, for those seeking in Augustine an approach to politics, is whether the place of God can be appropriately secularized for modern life. I will argue that Arendt misses this mark; she eliminates God in both divine and secular forms. But first, we must situate God within Augustine’s existential enterprise.

Peter Dennis Bathory presents Augustine offering a model of “a therapy of self-examination” in which Augustine himself is an exemplar.¹³ The purpose of this therapeia is not some sort of retreat from the world in narcissistic self-contemplation, but quite the opposite:

His aim is to awaken hope in his reader, even as he speaks despairingly of his own youthful corruption. Augustine’s examination of his own life thus becomes an example. Careful self-examination of the sort that Augustine demonstrates in his Confessions will lead people to discover both the limits of human action and the great—though often unperceived—potential of the human will and of human action in this world.¹⁴

Augustine attempts to address the humanity of honest searching, a humanity that must struggle with life in all its complexity, in all the tensions between secular and holy life. Striking here is that the Self becomes the crucible of the truth of God in the therapeia of Augustine.

For Augustine, it is not enough to be taught the truth from “on high.” Rather, our coming to terms with this truth, from our perspective i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• Chapter 1   Love and Saint Augustine: The Abstracted Neighbor
• Chapter 2   Rahel Varnhagen: The Strangeness of Me
• Chapter 3   The Origins of Totalitarianism: A Surfeit of Superfluousness
• Chapter 4   Eichmann in Jerusalem: The Crisis of Conscience
• Chapter 5   On Revolution: The Fragility of Rights
• Chapter 6   Arendt’s Public Sphere: Locating a Political Existential
• Chapter 7   The Encumbrance of History
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index