Abstract
Though differing in their approach to race in the United States, Hannah Arendt and Simone de Beauvoir work on two different levels of a philosophical-ethical spectrum, paralleling Husserl’s distinction between the transcendental and pretheoretical, life-world levels. Each level needs the other in order to realize an authentic sociopolitical pluralism.
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References
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Garden City, New York, 1958), 26–27, 28–29, 30, 33, 46, 52, 53, 82–83, 163, 166, 180–181, 197; Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future, Six Exercises in Political Thought (New York: The Viking Press, 1961), 107, 110.
The Human Condition, 53, 65, 103; Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: The Viking Press, 1965), 65–66; Richard J. Bernstein, Philosophical Profiles, Essays in a Pragmatic Mode (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), 246–247.
“Reflections on Little Rock,” Dissent 6 (1959): 51.
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1951), 137, 149, 157, 161, 166, 170, 175, 178, 183, 221–226, 232, 236, 239–240, 249, 297, 302, 309, 310, 351–352, 397, 423, 427–432; Hannah Arendt, The Jew as Pariah.Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age, ed. Ron H. Feldman (New York: Grove Press, Inc. 1978), 41–44, 64, 66, 84–85, 107–110.
On Revolution, 49, 79, 80, 81, 84, 85, 91, 108, 110.
“Reflections on Little Rock,” 52–53.
Ibid., 50–51.
Ibid., 52, 53; Hannah Arendt, “Reply to Critics,” Dissent 6 (1959): 180–181; James Bohman, “The Moral Costs of Political Pluralism: The Dilemmas of Difference and Equality in Arendt’s ‘Reflections on Little Rock,’“ in Hannah Arendt, Twenty Years Later, ed. Larry May and Jerome Kohn (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: The MIT Press, 1996), 53–80. The is in the last sentence are mine.
“Reflections on Little Rock,” 55, and also 45, 49, 53.
Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 39–41.
Ibid., 10, 20, 72–74, 83; Between Past and Future, 219–222.
“Reflections on Little Rock,” 51–52.
Alfred Schutz, “Equality and the Meaning Structure of the Social World,” in Collected Papers, vol. 2: Studies in Social Theory, ed. Arvid Brodersen (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964), 261.
Ibid., 250–273; Alfred Schutz, Collected Papers, vol. 1: The Problem of Social Reality, ed. Maurice Natanson (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962), 58–59.
“Reply to Critics,” 180–181.
Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, 40–44; On Revolution, 91; James Bohman, in “The Moral Costs of Political Pluralism: The Dilemmas of Difference and Equality in Arendt’s ‘Reflections on Little Rock,’” 64, 72, makes the case that segregation deprives citizens of abilities to initiate human action, blocks genuine access to the public world, and renders their actions ineffective and their opinions insignificant. Critical of the diversity that Arendt thus upholds and that would undermine full participation in the political sphere, Bohman summarizes the contradiction in Arendt’s position: “diversity can hardly be maintained at the costs of the very conditions that maintain it: public equality and common citizenship.”
Philosophical Profiles, Essays in a Pragmatic Mode, 252–253.
Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self: Gender, Community, and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics (New York: Routledge, 1992), 98.
Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, 21 ; Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, vol. 1: Thinking (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 37, 186, 188–189, 191 ; Albrecht Wellmer, “Hannah Arendt on Judgment: The Unwritten Doctrine of Reason,” in Hannah Arendt, Twenty Years Later, 38, 41, 43.
Jürgen Habermas, “Discourse Ethics: Notes on a Program of Philosophical Justification,” in Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholson (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1990), 88–98. Habermas characterizes his arguments as “weak” transcendental arguments. Karl-Otto Apel has argued that the transcendental presuppositions of argumentation, including the moral character of those presuppositions, are stronger since even if one were to argue against them one must presuppose a discourse in that very argumentation and that discourse would make use of those very transcendental presuppositions. See Karl-Otto Apel, “Normatively Grounding ‘Critical Theory’ through Recourse to the Lifeworld? A Transcendental-Pragmatic Attempt to Think with Habermas against Habermas,” trans. William Rehg, in Philosophical Interventions in the Unfinished Project of Enlightenment, ed. Axel Honneth, Thomas McCarthy, Claus Offe, and Albrecht Wellmer, trans. William Rehg (Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England: The MIT Press, 1992), 142–143.
The Jew as Pariah, 217.
Robert Bernasconi, “The Double Face of the Political and the Social: Hannah Arendt and America’s Racial Divisions,” Research in Phenomenology 26 (1996): 8.
I am indebted to Elizabeth Fallaize for pointing out that although L’Amérique au jour le jour is presented as a diary, Beauvoir constructed this diary after the fact on the basis of a diary she kept while in the United States, newspaper accounts, and other sources. Hence I use the term “diary format.” Margaret Simons has suggested that this text is the first of Beauvoir’s autobiographical texts and that Beauvoir undertook such an autobiographical style at least in part under the influence of Richard Wright’s Black Boy.
Page references in this paragraph are to the French version that will be cited throughout this essay: Simone de Beauvoir, L’Amérique au jour le jour (Paris: Gallimard, 1947), cf. 231–42, 265–69, and 207–10. The first English translation appeared as America day by day, trans. Patrick Dudley, pseud. (New York: Grove Press, 1953). A second translation has been produced: America day by day, trans. Carol Cosman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). The author of this chapter did not have access to this most recent translation when writing this chapter. Translations in this chapter were made by the author of the chapter.
Simone de Beauvoir, “La phénoménologie de la perception de Maurice Merleau-Ponty,” Les temps modernes 1 (1945): 363.
L’Amérique au jour le jour, 304–305. 21. Ibid., 11–12.
Ibid., 179.
Ibid., 339.
“La phénoménologie de la perception de Maurice Merleau-Ponty,” 364–366; Max Scheler, “The Nature of Philosophy and the Moral Preconditions of Philosophical Knowledge,” in On the Eternal in Man, trans. Bernard Noble (New York: Harper & Brothers Publications, 1960), 74, 83, 88, 89–90, 91–92, 95–98; Michael D. Barber, Guardian of Dialogue: Max Scheler’s Phenomenology, Sociology of Knowledge, and Philosophy ofLove (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press; London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1993), 141–146; Martin Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking, trans. John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 54–57.
L’Amérique au jour le jour, 18, 25, 38,40, 55, 69–70, 117–118, 120/142, 147–148, 154, 169, 170, 190–191, 205, 212, 252, 254, 260, 264, 267, 270–271, 282, 283, 289, 292, 318, 325.
Ibid., 369–370. See also 111, 116, 134, 177. On the ethic of the project versus the ethic of the erotic, of generosity, see Debra B. Bergoffen, The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir, Gendered Phenomenologies, Erotic Generosities (Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1997), 41, 64, 90, 173, 185, 188. The mention of élan here may refer to Bergson’s élan vital
Ibid., 40.
Ibid., 235, see also 230–242.
Ibid., 301.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945); Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge and New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1962), 62.
L’Amérique au jour le jour, 200. The is in the quotations in this paragraph are my own. Susan Cataldi has rightly pointed out that although Beauvoir writes as if the pain of African-Americans becomes her own, she still remains at a distance from their pain. Scheler’s account of sympathy permits an entrance into the other’s experience, but that experience is never felt as one would feel it if the experience were one’s own. I have recognized this distance by using the term “as if.” Gail Weiss has suggested that Beauvoir’s becoming aware of her whiteness here resembles the grasp of one’s body through a “racial epidermal scheme,” described by Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Wiedenfeld, 1967), 111–112, 161–164.
L’Amérique au jour le jour, 39–42, 61, 224, 230.
Ibid., 224–225, 243; Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague, Boston, London: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981), 68–77.
L’Amérique au jour le jour, 224, see also 83,122. On the pre-reflective character of this anarchic, ethical meeting with the other see Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1979), 28,35–40, 80–81, 195, 201, 212–214; Otherwise than Being, 99–102.
L’Amérique au jour le jour, 227–228.
Ibid., 258, 304, 320, 322; The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir, 103, 110.
L’Amérique au jour le jour, 314, 341.
This heading and the discussion throughout the paper might have given the mistaken impression that there are only two levels of human activity: transcendental thought and the pre-theoretical sphere. There is indeed the transcendental level, but I have interpreted it in the first part of the paper along the lines of an examination of the conditions of the possibility of every discourse, as Habermas and Apel might interpret it. These conditions, which include the ethical presuppositions, which Habermas has fleshed out and to which Arendt might have appealed, are “transcendental” in the sense that they make possible any discourse, including a discourse that might seek to question these conditions (even as it must make use of them). It would be possible to show the compatibility of Apel’s description of the transcendental plane with Husserl’s eidetic analyses, especially since Apel repeatedly credits Husserl with influencing him in this regard. The pre-theoretical level refers to an experiential moment in which one encounters the other’s ethical demand before reflecting on that demand, assessing it, etc. It seems to me that Beauvoir and Levinas are both speaking of such an experiential moment and such a level. Of course, there is much reflection and theory that goes on between these levels, and so I would not equate all theoretical reflection with transcendental reflection, nor would I construe the phenomenological “natural attitude” as merely practical, devoid of any theory or reflection.
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Barber, M.D. (2001). Phenomenology and the Ethical Bases of Pluralism: Arendt and Beauvoir on Race in the United States. In: O’Brien, W., Embree, L. (eds) The Existential Phenomenology of Simone de Beauvoir. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 43. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9753-1_9
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