Abstract
Hannah Arendt is sometimes read as reserving the prerequisites and perquisites of genuine action to an elite. This is largely a misunderstanding. I propose a reading of Hannah Arendt’s collection of essays, Between Past and Future, as a coherent argument that might be characterized as a kind of phenomenological description of Bildung, understood not as private selfrealization but in the public and shared sense, as the vocation of being human, or rather, of achieving humanity. Arendt invites us to see formal education as an “institution of truth”. To bring this aspect to light, the paper first rehearses the salient points in Arendt’s argument in Between Past and Future, together with relevant forays into the Kantian context of practical philosophy which she takes as her starting point on certain fundamental points. In the second part, a number of changes in ideas about thinking, learning and judging which have both contributed to and been exacerbated by the massification, marketization, mediatization and juridification of culture and learning, are analyzed in light of Arendt’s understanding of what it means to be human.
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Notes
- 1.
Cf. Arendt’s description of The Human Condition as an attempt to trace back modern world alienation, its twofold flight from the earth into the universe and from the world into the self, to its origins, in order to arrive at an understanding of the nature of society as it had developed and presented itself at the very moment when it was overcome by the advent of a new and yet unknown age (Arendt 1998, 6.)
- 2.
It is beyond the scope of this paper to address the vexed question of how to understand Descartes’ methodological doubt and to what extent it can or should be distinguished from genuine doubt. What is relevant for our purposes here are the kinds of criticisms raised by Heidegger: “Descartes does not doubt because he is a skeptic; rather, he becomes a doubter because he posits the mathematical as the absolute ground and seeks for all knowledge a foundation that will be in accord with it. (See Heidegger and Gendlin 1985, 103). For a critique that the very idea that we could doubt everything presupposes the ability to identity with certainty dubious knowledge, see Rosen (1989), 23f.
- 3.
See also Arendt (1998), 154.
- 4.
Arendt’s references to Aristotle’s Politics (1328b35) are from The Basic Works of Aristotle (Aristotle 1941).
- 5.
Arendt’s references to Aristotle’s Economics (1343a1–4) are from Aristotle (1941).The “equality” to which Aristotle refers and which is of most importance to Arendt has not to do with any similarity between individuals with regard to aptitudes or virtues, which of course vary greatly and are all dependent on accidental conditions of birth and upbringing, but to a general capacity to participate at all in the regime. This ability is shared to the extent that man is by nature a political animal, even if the virtues associated with it are not distributed evenly among citizens.
- 6.
This is explicit in, for example, Dewey (1944), especially 100–110.
- 7.
I argue for the idea of philosophy as tied to human freedom in just this respect in Rider (2015), 1185–1197.
- 8.
The edition used is not given in Between Past and Future, but it is known that where not translating directly from the German herself, Arendt relied on Norman Kemp Smith’s translation of the Critique of Pure Reason: Kant (1963), and J.H. Bernard’s for the Critique of Judgment: Kant (1951), with minor changes of her own. See Ronald Beiner’s notes to Hannah Arendt’s Lectures on Political Philosophy (Beiner (1992), 157) and Mary McCarthy’s Postface to Arendt’s The Life of the Mind (McCarthy (1978), 251). All references hereafter will be to those editions. References to Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason are to the T.K. Abbot translation used by Arendt: Kant (1898).
- 9.
Arendt cites here Kant’s vindication of freedom of speech (if limited to scholars communicating ideas as citizens not as state officials) in Kant (1996) and “What does it Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking?” in Kant (2001). But also, for instance, Kant’s famous argument for “academic freedom” (if limited to the Philosophical Faculty) in Kant (1979).
- 10.
Compare with Arendt (1958, 57): “Only where things can be seen by many in a variety of aspects without changing their identity, so that those who are gathered around them know they see sameness in utter diversity, can worldly reality truly and reliably appear.”
- 11.
Cf. Max Weber’s remark in “Science as a Vocation” (Weber 1946) that the main duty of a university teacher is to confront students with “uncomfortable truths”, that is, statements of facts which are not congenial to his political opinions.
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Rider, S. (2017). Coercion by Necessity or Comprehensive Responsibility? Hannah Arendt on Vulnerability, Freedom and Education. In: Fóti, V., Kontos, P. (eds) Phenomenology and the Primacy of the Political. Contributions To Phenomenology, vol 89. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-56160-8_9
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