103.56.207.239103.56.207.239/462/1/keladu-dissertation.pdf · 2020. 12. 21. · university of santo...

UNIVERSITY OF SANTO TOMAS GRADUATE SCHOOL

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THE ETHICS OF WORLDLINESS AND ITS CONTRIBUTION

TO POLITICAL RECONCILIATION:

A STUDY OF HANNAH ARENDT’S POLITICAL THOUGHT

A Dissertation

Presented to the Graduate School

University of Santo Tomas

Manila, Philippines

In Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements of the Degree

Doctor in Philosophy

By

YOSEF KELADU

May, 2015


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ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Writing a dissertation is challenging and yet it is a rewarding and overwhelming

experience. It involves not only myself but also a lot of people who, in many different

ways, have assisted me to successfully complete this study. I acknowledge that without

their help, this study would not have been possible and therefore they deserve my

acknowledgement and words of thanks.

First and foremost, I praise and glorify the Holy Triune God for many blessings

and graces bestowed upon me throughout my whole life, especially during the time of

doing this doctorate program.

I gratefully acknowledge the contribution of Dr. Paolo A. Bolanõs as my advisor.

Thank you very much for his guidance and timely advice. He always makes himself

available for me to discuss and particularly to read and comment on my manuscript. His

comments and inputs are very helpful and insightful. His willingness, readiness and

generosity are highly appreciated.

I express my gratitude to Br. Dr. Romualdo Abulad, SVD for giving his time to

read and edit the manuscript. And I also wish to convey my appreciation to the

examiners of my dissertation, Dr. Romualdo Abulad, Dr. Robert Montana, Dr. Franz

Cortez, Dr. Leonardo Mercado, and Dr. Jove Jim Aguas, for their constructive and

encouraging comments during the oral exam.

Sincerest thanks to the Society of the Divine Word (SVD) and particularly my

Provincial Superior, Fr. Leo Kleden, SVD and his Council for allowing me to do this

doctorate study and for their continuous support and encouragement. I would like to

thank Fr. Superior Delegate, Fr. Venus Dante, SVD and Fr. Angel Magada, SVD for

arranging everything for me to study and make my stay here enjoyable; and also Fr.


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Joks, SVD for helping me with the necessary papers for immigration in order to legally

stay in the Philippines.

I am also grateful to the members of the Provincialate Community, especially Fr.

Provincial, Fr. Nielo Cantilado, SVD, Fr. Rector, Fr. Treasure and all other members for

their support and words of encouragement.

I would like to thank my family, my father and mother, Lazarus Lado Koten

(died) and Sesilia Doka Teluma, my brothers and sisters (Rafael, Marselina, Mery and

Ignas) and their spouses and childrens, relatives and friends who always be with me in

the difficult times and continously give their support for me.

Finally, thanks to all and God bless you!


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ABSTRACT

Hannah Arendt’s works deal mostly with past political violences, particularly

those performed by Hitler’s regime in Germany in the tragedy of the Holocaust. In

Arendt’s view, violence has ruptured modern civilization. It has shattered all political

thoughts and moral judgments. However, it is surprising that Arendt still appeals to

human thinking to make sense of that kind of violence in order to prevent its recurrence.

Here she offers a wordly perspective of thinking that is based on neither traditional

political nor moral standards, but rather on the world and the action that takes place in

that world. Thinking about the world means being attentive to the world, the sort of

attentiveness which reveals our responsibility for the world. And in judging a political

action we should be aware of the great things that an action could bring to the world. In

other words, in judging we seek for the meaning which past events might have for

common life in the world. This is Arendt’s ethics of worldliness, understood as a way of

thinking about the man-made condition of human existence.

This dissertation takes Arendt’s emphasis on making sense of past wrongs and

proposes that her ethics of worldliness can shed light on the contemporary discourse on

political reconciliation. From the perspective of Arendt’s ethics, political reconciliation

can be formulated as the possibility of coming to terms with the givenness, which is the

world, understood as the condition of human existence that includes the horror of its

history. Recently, one way of promoting political reconciliation is through the

establishment of truth commissions whose central tasks are to discover the truth of the

past wrongs and to encourage forgiveness among the conflicting parties. These

objectives are expected to be attained through testimonies and public hearings where the

victims and perpetrators are given the opportunity to tell own stories about what had

happened.


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The components of Arendt’s ethics, such as responsibility for the world and the

search for meaning are concretely manifested in her discussion of storytelling and

political forgiveness. The interesting point of Arendt’s notion of storytelling and

political forgiveness is that in telling such a story and eventually forgiving, victims and

perpetrators commonly assume the responsibility for the common world. Therefore, in

this dissertation I argue that Arendt’s constant discussion of storytelling and political

forgiveness in the light of responsibility for the world and the search for meaning of

action for the common world is the reason why her ideas are meaningful for political

reconciliation.

Manila, May 2, 2015

Rev. Fr. Yosef Keladu, SVD


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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

Title i

Approval Sheet ii

Certificate of Originality iii

Certificate of Turnitin iv

Certificate of English Editing v

Acknowledgement vi

Abstract viii

Table of Contents x

Introduction 1

A. Background of the Study 1

B. Defining Arendt’s Ethics of Worldliness 12

C. Political Reconciliation 20

D. Design of the Study 30

Part One: The Reconstruction of Arendt’s Ethics of Worldliness 37

Chapter One: The Relationship between Modern Worldlessness and

Crimes against Humanity 42

1.1. Arendt’s Critique of Modern Nihilism 45

1.2. The Phenomena of Modern Worldlessness 50


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1.2.1. Escape from the World 50

1.2.2. The Rise of the Social 55

1.2.2.1. The Blurr of the Distinction between the Private and

the Public Realms 56

1.2.2.2. Mass Society 59

1.3. Modern Worldlessness and Crimes against Humanity 62

1.3.1. Worldlessness and Violent Action 63

1.3.2. Worldlessness and the Loss of the Right to Have Rights 67

Chapter Two: Thinking about the World and Responsibility 75

2.1. Thinking about the World 77

2.2. The World as Human Creation 91

2.2.1. The World of Fabricated Things 92

2.2.2. The World of Human Affairs 96

2.3. Responsibility for the World 101

2.3.1. The Frailty of the World and Responsibility 101

2.3.2. The World Inflicted by Evil and Responsibility 108

Chapter Three: Judging Political Action and the Quest for Meaning 117

3.1. Action as Politics and Politics as Action 118

3.2. Judging Political Action 129

3.2.1. Arendt’s Appropriation of Kant’s Reflective Judgment 130

3.2.2. The Collapse of Traditional Moral Standards 136

3.2.3. Greatness as the Standard for Judging Action 143


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3.3. The Ethical Character of Arendt’s Reflective Judgment and

the Quest for Meaning 148

Part Two: The Contribution of Arendt’s Ethics to Political Reconciliation 153

Chapter Four: The Importance of Storytelling in Political Reconciliation 159

4.1. Memory, Story and the Failure of ‘Holes of Oblivion’ 162

4.2. Arendt and the Narrative Theory of Action 167

4.2.1. The Story and the Enactment of Past Events 167

4.2.2. The Story and the Life 170

4.2.3. The Political Character of Story 176

4.3. Storytelling and Political Reconciliation 177

4.3.1. Reconsidering Truth Commissions’ Concept of the Truth 179

4.3.2. Storytelling and the Search for Meaning 185

4.3.3. Telling the Story and Responsibility for the World 189

Chapter Five: Arendt’s Notion of Forgiveness and Political Reconciliation 197

5.1. Promise and Its Relation to Forgiveness 201

5.2. Reconstructing Arendt’s Political Forgiveness 207

5.2.1. Forgiveness and Natality of the Other 208

5.2.2. Forgiveness and the Plurality 212

5.3. Forgiveness and Political Reconciliation 216

5.3.1. The Importance of Judgment in Forgiveness 219

5.3.2. The Importance of Judgment in Reconciliation 224

5.3.3. Forgiveness, Reconciliation and Responsibility for the World 227


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Conclusion and Summary 238

A. Arendt’s Political Theory and the Reasonable Disagreements 238

B. Deliberative Democracy and Political Reconciliation 251

C. Summary 256

References 259

Curriculum Vitae 273


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INTRODUCTION

A. Background of the Study

Hannah Arendt’s writings mostly deal with past wrongs, which are considered as

the burdens that human beings put to themselves. In Denktagebuch (Diary of Thought),

written soon after her short visit to Germany in June 1950, Arendt writes: “The wrong

that one has done is the burden on one’s shoulders, something that one bears because he

has laden it upon himself” (Arendt, 2002, p. 3). Or, in the Origins of Totalitarianism

(published in 1951), Arendt claims that past political violences had laid the burdens on

people in the past and at the same time have the potential to become the burdens for

people now and in the future. It is the burden of guilt of our times or, as Arendt puts it:

“The burden which our century has placed on us...” (Arendt, 1951, p. viii).

What Arendt means by offenses or wrongs constitute ‘radical evil’—a term

borrowed from Kant1--whose nature is unknown to all but which destroyed everything

that appears in the world, including human beings. Writing after the tragedy of the

1 Kant develops his notion of radical evil in human moral life in book one of Religion within the

Boundaries of Mere Reason. In contrast to the Christian original sin that is inherited, Kant argues that

radical evil is self-incurred, in the sense that each human being brings it to him or herself because he or

she fundamentally misdirects the capacity of willing and thus leads to the corruption of the choice for

action. In other words, maxims, the principles for action that one poses to oneself are inverted. Instead of

following the categorical imperative as the fundamental principle of choice, one implants in his or herself

propensity to make exceptions to this categorical imperative. Kant writes: “If a propensity to this

(inversion) does lie in human nature, then there is in the human beings a natural propensity to evil; and

this propensity itself is morally evil, since it must ultimately be sought in a free power of choice, and

hence is imputable. This evil is radical since it corrupts the ground of all maxims (Kant, 1998, p. 59).


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Holocaust, Arendt refers past wrongs to the state-organized crimes committed by

totalitarian regimes that have annihilated millions of Jewish people in concentration

camps. For Arendt, however, the Holocaust is the only point of departure. Her main

concern is actually the offenses that can be done again in many different ways.

The burden of past wrongs, in Arendt’s view, is caused by man’s failings. It is

the failing of the human capacity. This is clear in her understanding of evil as the failure

of acting and thinking. For Arendt, as Birmingham argues, evil is not a human

characteristic. Rather, evil as well as good is a human capacity. It is not a demonic

nature, but a capacity (Birmingham, 2006, p. 106). Arendt repeatedly claims that since

human beings are acting and thinking beings, the burden of past wrongs is caused by

two very different and novel human failings, namely, the crimes of human action and

thinking (Levi, 2010, p. 229).

The crime of human action refers not only to the act of killing people with the

active participation of political regimes, but also to any attempt to deprive others of their

existence as social beings or prevent others from possessing rights. Remi Peeters

indicates three characteristics of the violence of human action. First, it is directed by the

means-ends category and is essentially instrumental and material. In this category, a

violent act can be justified by the end it serves, but it can never be legitimate (Arendt,

1970, p. 52). Second, violence destroys the human capacity of speech, which is for

Arendt necessary for action. It makes people mute or incapable of speech. When the

capacity of speech is destroyed, human action is reduced to merely productive and

technological activity. Without speech, Arendt claims, an action not only loses its power


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to reveal the identity of the actor, but also the actor is treated as a performing robot and

not as an acting person (Arendt, 1958, p. 178). Third, violence isolates people since it

diminishes the relation between humans. This is the combination of the first two in the

sense that when people are utilized for other purposes and are forced to be speechless,

they become isolated and superfluous (Peeters, 2008, p. 131-132).

This is exactly what totalitarian regimes intend to attain. Before taking the action

of killing in concentration camps, the victims were uprooted, made superfluous, and

stateless. It is therefore understandable why Arendt begins The Origins of

Totalitarianism with the investigation of anti-Semitism which explains the hate against

Jewish people and imperialism that has limited the space for people and consequently

produced stateless, uprooted, and superfluous individuals. Elizabeth Young-Bruehl is

correct to claim that the radical evil of totalitarianism is seen in its attempt to make

people superfluous because it destroys human action and speech and deprives humans of

their right to belong to a certain group (Young-Bruehl, 2006, p. 39).

Since the violence of human thinking refers to the failure of vita contemplativa

or thought, it thus comes from the failure to think. It is called thoughtlessness, which is,

for Arendt, one of the outstanding characteristic of our time. Thoughtlessness is

discovered not only in Stalin in Russia and Hitler in Germany but also in other political

leaders throughout the world who maintain their power by means of violence. It is also

displayed by the ordinary people like the Nazis and particularly Adolf Eichmann. In her

investigation of the phenomena of warfare in the modern age, Arendt states that the most

dangerous thing is not so much to “think the un-thinkable” as not to think at all (Arendt,


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1970, p. 6). When attending the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem,2 she describes

him as someone who was unable to think. His inability to think was shown when he

unthinkingly followed the orders of his superior in the concentration camps and also

when he constantly repeated phrases in order to find peace with victims in the trial.

When people unthinkingly adhere to phrases that are socially accepted, they are not able

to see the reality as it is (Arendt, 1978, p. 4).

Both violences (on action and thinking) are interrelated and thus make violence

itself as something so real as to be capable of being done again in many different ways.

The reality of evil or violence, in Arendt’s view, can be considered from the fact that the

evildoers, such as the Nazis, were ordinary men and so what they have done can be done

by others who also have the capacity to act and think. She writes: “The reality is that

‘the Nazis are men like our-selves’, the nightmare is that they have shown, have proven

beyond doubt what man is capable of” (Arendt, 1994, p. 134). The reality of evil can

also be seen in the gas chambers and camps of totalitarian regimes, which are considered

as the embodiment of the concrete lived experience of evil. This concreteness of evil,

signified by the Holocaust, Arendt claims, pushed philosophical and religious accounts

of the problem of evil to their own limits.

Patrick Hayden investigates Arendt’s emphasis on the reality of evil in the

dehumanizing policies and practices that render people superfluous in the condition

2 Adolf Eichmann was an ordinary man who joined the Nazi party in April 1932 and then became a

member of the Security Service (Sicherheitsdienst) in 1933. He was one of the major organizers of

Holocaust since his job was facilitating and managing the logistic of mass deportation of Jews to

concentration camps during War World II. After the defeat of Germany in 1945 he fled to Austria, stayed

there until 1950 and moved to Argentina until his capture on May, 11, 1960 by the Israel’s intelligence

service, Mossad. Nine days later he was flown to Israel. He was brought to trial in the District Court in

Jerusalem on April 11, 1961 (Arendt, 1963, p. 21-35).


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where they have no right to belong to a political community, to be protected by states’

law, and to act and speak in modern societies. He argues that in her emphasis on its

reality, Arendt challenges two metaphysical accounts of evil: first, evil is lack of reality

in comparison to the good and second, evil is demonic motives or intentions (Hayden,

2010, p. 253). The first account conceives of evil in comparison to the good. This is

seen in St. Augustine’s notion of evil as privatio boni (the privation of good) and in

Heidegger’s lack of being. In Enchiridion: On Hope, Faith and Love, Augustine claim

that evil is a corruption because it is a privation of the good. It is the absence of good

that is supposed to be present in the human soul. He writes: “What are called vices in the

soul are nothing but privation of natural good” (Augustine, 1955, p. 342). For

Augustine, evil is not a substance or entity but an accident.3 Heidegger follows

Augustine’s idea in his assertion that evil is a defect or lack of being which is called

nothingness. In this sense, evil represents a negation or privation of Being and not a

power of being, like the Good. He writes:

Least of all can we come any closer to the existential phenomenon of guilt by

taking our orientation from the idea of evil, the malum as privatio boni. Just as

the bonum and its privatio have the same ontological origin in the ontology of

the present-at-hand, this ontology also applies to the idea of value, which has

been abstracted from these” (Heidegger, 1962, p. 332).

The second account attempts to locate evil in human motives. In this sense, evil

is explained on the basis of the demonic intention of the subject. This idea is initiated by

3 St. Augustine compares the relationship between good and evil with health and disease in order to show

the accidental aspect of evil. He writes: “In the bodies of animals, disease and wounds mean nothing but

the absence of health; for when a cure is effected, that does not mean that the evils which were present—

namely, the diseases and wounds—go away from the body and dwell elsewhere: they altogether cease to

exist; for the wound or disease is not a substance, but a defect in the fleshly substance,—the flesh itself

being a substance, and therefore something good, of which those evils—that is, privations of the good

which we call health—are accidents (Augustine, 1955, p. 342).


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Kant who locates evil in human motive and explain evil on the basis of the demonic

intention of the subject. According to Kant, in the human nature there is a propensity, a

tendency to act in particular manner, either in accordance or in tension with the moral

law. This implies that propensity is an innate feature that corrupts human character as a

whole. Consequently Kant argues that every person has a tendency to act in tension with

the moral law and thus all human beings have a propensity to evil. This implies that

propensity is universal and it is woven into human nature (Kant, 1998, p. 54).

In Arendt’s view, these metaphysical accounts of evil are not helpful in coming

to terms with the true reality of evil or inadequate to explain evil as historical, political

and systemic phenomenon. For Arendt, evil actions are not the external manifestation of

innate corrupted human nature but, rather, are the concrete and political actions. In case

of Eichmann, for instance, Arendt argues that his actions cannot be explained by

appealing to his inner monstrosity but to the concrete and material reality that is the fact

that normal people (normal is not the same as innocent) can take part in and do evil acts.

Eichmann was, Arendt claims, ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor

monstrous (Arendt, 1963, p. 3-4; 1978, p. 4).

In her writings, she is not concerned with the historical and empirical account of

what had occurred or how many people had been victimized or who were the

perpetrators. She is concerned with how such cruel actions could take place at all. The

title of her work, The Origins of Totalitarianism, in itself suggests what Arendt intends

to do, namely, to explore conditions that had driven European states to become

authoritarian during the first half of the twentieth century in order to intellectually


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respond to the past political events. Here, Arendt attempts to look at the material and

political condition of the European states. Lee argues that Arendt’s ideas of race and

racism found in her investigation of imperialism, anti-Semitism and totalitarianism, are

significant in colonial and post-colonial thought because those are ideological elements

in the implementation and justification of European imperialism (Lee, 2011, p. 101). It

is clear that Arendt refers this political condition to totalitarian ideologies that

continuously generate ‘organized loneliness’, which is the common ground for terror

and the essence of totalitarian regimes.4 Totalitarian ideologies serve as a theoretical

framework for totalitarian regimes in their total domination to destroy the world and

everything in it, including the other human beings. In other words, totalitarian ideologies

are conditions that have driven the violent attitude of modern men or made them

radically evil.

Violence, such as the Holocaust, in Arendt’s view, has ruptured our civilization.

The Holocaust has demolished our political concepts and definitions as well as our

categories of thought and standards of judgment (Arendt, 1994, p. 302). It is an event

that marks a rupture in modern social and political thought. In Between Past and Future

Arendt describes totalitarian domination “as an established fact, which in its

unprecedentedness cannot be comprehended through the usual categories of political

thought, and whose crime cannot be judged by traditional morals standards or punished

within the legal framework of our civilization...” (Arendt, 1961, p. 26). Jean-Francois

4 There are only two ideologies that claim themselves to be comprehensive and predictive explanations of

human conduct and become state policy, namely, Communism of Stalin in Russia and National Socialism

in Germany, while others ideologies or better doctrines are partial. Crick calls those two ideologies as

economic determinism and racial determinism (Crick, 1997, p. 80)


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Lyotard shares the same idea; for him the Holocaust cannot be grasped in thought

because human knowledge, as well as the means to measure it, has been destroyed.

Lyotard draws an analogy between the Holocaust and the image of an earthquake that

“destroys not only lives, buildings, and objects, but also instruments used to measure

earthquake directly and indirectly” (Lyotard, 1988, p. 56).

It is surprising that although ‘radical evil’ has exploded our moral and political

thought, Arendt still appeals to human thinking or understanding to make sense of those

violences in order to prevent their recurrence. This is due to the fact that what is

destroyed by the Holocaust, in Arendt’s view, is the old way of thinking that proceeds

from the absolute philosophical truths or absolute moral standards, and not thinking as

such. The Holocaust has effectively exploded our existing standards for moral and

political judgment. Thus, if we are to think and judge at all after the radical break with

tradition, we must now think and judge without relying on banisters or fixed

metaphysical, epistemological, political or moral foundations. We must think without a

banister. In this regard, Arendt then offers a “worldly” perspective, in the sense that we

must think of the world or political realities on the basis not of either traditional political

or moral standard, but of the world or politics itself. This implies that in the act of

thinking, we travel back and forth across a gap that separates the experience of everyday

life from the contemplation of it. In this way of thinking, we will focus on our

experience of the world and the world itself. In thinking on the basis of the the world or

politics, Arendt intends to reasert the politics as a valuable realm of human action, praxis

and the world of appearances.


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Arendt has, as Bernauer claims, the gift of thinking poetically amid the ruins of

modernity’s dark times. As a poetic thinker, Arendt is said to be like a pearl diver who

discovers and brings to the surface the rich and strange treasures of the past experiences

in their new crystalized forms. Here, Arendt’s works “recovers out of the wreck of

western culture’s belief, a faith in the redemption of the world through the salvific action

of those who make it a home where ‘no one is lost’” (Bernauer, 1987, p. 1).

Arendt believes that it is only through thinking evil from the worldly perspective

that we will be able to do what Robert Fine calls “making sense of the senseless’” (Fine,

2000, p. 10). Here one finds an affinity between Arendt and Theodor Adorno. When

facing the phenomenon of the damaged life, Adorno offers the re-evaluation of

philosophical language and the activation of the ethical character of thinking.5 It is

similar to Arendt’s emphasis on the importance of thinking about the world and judging

political actions. In fact, after the tragedy of the Holocaust, Adorno and Arendt develop

a new philosophical thinking, called philosophy of difference, that is critical of the

forms of social pathology and is closely related to the phenomenal reality. In construing

philosophy of difference, Adorno turns towards non-identity thinking, and Arendt

towards the faculty of judging the particulars, in order to grasp the meaning of a

particular event in our lives in common.

5 Adorno claims that the roots of Auschwitz must be discovered the mechanism behind perpetrators,

which he calls ‘distorted epistemology’ in the form of absolutization, universalization or dogmatization

caused by identity’s thinking. “One must come to know the mechanism that render people capable of such

deeds, must reveal these mechanism to them, and strive, by awakening a general awareness of those

mechanism, to prevent people from becoming so again” (Adorno, 2003, p. 21. And for the defense of

Adorno’s ethical character of thinking see Paolo A. Bolanõs, “Philosophy from the Standpoint of

Damaged Life: Adorno on the Ethical Character of Thinking” (2012).


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This dissertation takes Arendt’s emphasis on making sense of past wrongs and

proposes that her political thought can shed light on the contemporary discourse on

“political reconciliation.” Arendt never specifically treats the topic of political

reconciliation in her political thought and thus it is understandable why there has been

less attention given to it, in contrast to her theory of political action which is widely

recognized as her major contribution to political theory. Therefore, the claim that

Arendt’s political thought can contribute to political reconciliation raises at least three

problems, which are the focus of this dissertation.

First, what is Arendt’s ethics of worldliness? Facing the phenomenon of

worldlessness, Arendt emphasizes the importance of the new way of thinking about the

world and judging an action. Arendt insists that in thinking about the world, it is

important to be attentive to the events in the world because any event—including

political violence has its own value that can be recognized by the human mind.

Regarding the judgment of political action, Arendt emphasizes the importance of

judging an action when it is performed. In order to understand fully human action we

need to look at the condition or the world where action takes place and to

representatively judge it, in the sense that we are required to enlarge our mentality in

order to include other points of view.

Second, how do we properly understand Arendt’s idea of political reconciliation?

It suggests that her political reconciliation should be understood in the context of her

ethics of worldliness, which she develops as a response to the modern worldlessness. In

Arendt’s view, modern worldlessness is a condition where people are alienated from the


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public realm and deprived of their political membership. This condition is brought about

by past political violences, particularly the tragedy of the Holocaust that has raptured our

categories of thought and standards of moral judgment.

Third, how does Arendt’s ethics contribute to political reconciliation? Recently,

one way of promoting political reconciliation is through the establishment of truth

commissions with its specific mandate to seek for the truth of past wrongs or injustices.

The truth-seeking is commonly undertaken by holding the public hearings where

victims, witnesses and perpetrators are given the opportunity to tell their own stories

with the hope that a shared understanding of what happened in the past can be attained

and thus encourages forgiveness among victims and perpetrators. The commissions

presuppose that truth and forgiveness will lead to political reconciliation. In other words,

truth and forgiveness are central in political reconciliation. The problems are twofold:

first, to what extent can the truth be acquired by the commissions? How does telling the

story bear the truth? Second, how is it possible that forgiveness, a concept loaded with

religious-moral implications, can be political?

Arendt’s ethics of worldliness, I argue, is significant in answering those

problems. In thinking about the world, we assume responsibility for the common world

either by taking a concrete action or having an opinion concerning things taking place in

it. And in judging political action, we search for the meaning of past wrongs in the

context of the common world we have created and shared. That means, responsibility

and the quest for meaning are elements of Arendt’s ethics of worldliness. These

elements, I argue further, are concretely manifested in her discussion of storytelling and


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political forgiveness. This implies that the significance of Arendt’s ethics of worldliness

to political reconciliation is actually drawn from her idea of storytelling and political

forgiveness. Therefore, this dissertation will argue that Arendt’s ethics of worldliness

sheds light on the contemporary discourse and practice of political reconciliation. Its

objective is twofold: first, to reconstruct Arendt’s ethics of worldliness; and second, to

demonstrate how Arendt’s ethics can contribute to political reconciliation.

B. Defining Arendt’s Ethics of Worldliness

The term ethics is usually distinguished from the word morality. Morality

belongs to normative universals and ethics to a particular way of life. In other words,

morality appeals to transcendental values and ethics to the particular condition of an

individual in the world, in terms of his relations to others, to the world, as well as his

own capacities. This difference is described by Gilles Deleuze as follows: “Morality is

the judgment of God, the system of judgment. But ethics overthrows the system of

judgment. The opposition of values (good-evil) is supplanted by the qualitative

difference of modes of existence (good-bad)” (Deleuze, 1988, p. 50). Unlike morality

that deals with essence and values, ethics deals with human beings, their mode of being

or what they are capable of, what we can do. Arendt herself indicates the difference

between morality and ethics in terms of origins. For her, morality is derived from the

Latin word mores and ethics from the Greek, ethos (Arendt, 2003, p. 50).

In ethics, we evaluate the concrete or practical conditions of human life in order

to reveal something that affects us, namely what is alive in us right now and what makes

life wonderful in this world. In this context, Raymond Geuss identifies two senses of the


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term ethics: 1) “rules that contain restrictions on the ways in which it is permissible to

act toward other people” or 2) the “whole way of seeing the world and thinking about it”

(Geuss, 2005, p. 6). In the first sense, ethics is simply translation of old world morals

and is viewed as general instance of normativity that enable us to judge the validity of

our practices and discourses. While in the second sense, ethics refers to a kind of

thinking about a way of being in the world and a principle of action. It is a way of seeing

and thinking about the world where we live in.

I follow Geuss’ second sense of ethics in construing Arendt’s ethics because, in

my observation, her ethics is derived from her specific notion about the world and the

action taking place in the world. However, before elaborating Arendt’s ethics of

worldliness, it is necessary to look at the controversies around the reconstruction of

Arendt’s ethical thinking. It is not easy to reconstruct her ethics because she intensely

criticizes morality and therefore it is understandable that Arendt scholars have been

divided into two different camps: the opponents and the supporters.

On the one hand, there are scholars who are against Arendt’s ethics. George

Kateb extremely charges Arendt for promoting an immoral politics. In his book

Patriotism and Other Mistakes, particularly in the chapter about “the Judgment of

Arendt,” Kateb argues that in her theory of political action, Arendt re-conceives of

political phenomena as aesthetic phenomena in her claim that there is a common

element between art and politics that is both are phenomena of the public world (Arendt,

1961, p. 218). It is the aestheticization of politics, a phrase initially introduced by Walter


24

Benjamin.6 The problem with Arendt is, as Kateb sees it, that she considers aesthetic

judgment as the most political quality of politics and thus becomes the standard for

judging political action. In other words, her judgment on political action is based on the

aesthetic judgment. For Kateb, in judging actions from the vantage point of aesthetic,

Arendt intends to liberate politics from the hold of abstract and universal truth. But, in

so doing, Arendt “subordinates practicality and morality to the aesthetic potentiality of

politics” (Kateb, 2006, p. 151).

Dana Villa and Boni Honig criticize Arendt’s theory of action for being

agonistic;7 this leads to an individualized action because of its overemphasis on the self-

containedness or self-sufficiency or perfection of political action, which cannot thus be

taken as ethics. For Villa, Arendt has “the most radical rethinking of political action

undertaken by a theorist” because of her theory of action that attempts to radically

reconceptualize action (Villa, 1996, p. 4). That is why her theory of action takes as its

ideal an agonistic subjectivity that appreciates the opportunity for the individualizing

6 In his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Benjamin discusses the notion

of aestheticization of politics through the concept of ‘aura’ and its lost. In capitalism, he argues, the

reproduction of a work of art lacks “its presence in time and space, its unique existence at place where it

happens to be” (Benjamin, 2007, p. 220). Here, the work of art loses its authenticity signified by the

presence of the original that affects the authority of the object in a work of art. The experience of art is

degenerated and changed into mass consumerism of aesthetics. Therefore, Benjamin claims that in the

mechanical reproduction, the aura of the work of art is disappeared because the unique existence of an

object of art is substituted with a plurality of copies and the reactivation of the object reproduced for

satisfying the beholder or listener (ibid., p. 221). 7 The word agonism is derived from Greek term ‘agon’ that literally means ‘struggle’. As a political

theory, agonism refers to the fact that there is always a struggle or conflict in in politics. From Arendt’s

perspective, as Benhabib argues, agonism refers to the competitive space where each individual competes

his or her distinctiveness. For Benhabib, Arendt’s idea of public sphere emphasizes the importance of

competition and it “represents that the space of appearance in which moral and political greatness,

heroism, and preeminence are revealed, displayed, shared with others. This is a competitive space in

which one competes for recognition, precedence, and acclaim” (Benhabib, 1992, p. 78).


25

action. And Honig argues that Arendt’s identification of action with politics or her

theorization of practice is disruptive, agonistic and never over. The agonistic action

creates the actor’s identity that resists any homogenization and struggles for

individuation and distinction: “a ‘who’ rather than a ‘what’. She writes: “Arendt sees the

self as a creature that is always agonistically engaged and implicated with established

identities and subjectivities that never quite succeed in expressing it without remainder”

(Honig, 1993, p. 9).

On the other hand, some scholars constantly defend Arendt’s ethical thinking.

Steve Buckler explores the implications of Arendt’s distinctive theoretical approach and

argues that Arendt appeals neither to morality nor to tradition as sources of ethical

constraint in politics, but rather to the very dynamics of the political action and

appearance itself. The agonal element in Arendt’s conception of political action provides

the core of her ethical conception. These considerations will be supplemented by an

account of what Arendt’s approach implies for the role and responsibilities of the thinker

in relation to politics (Buckler, 12-13).

For Arendt, since it is only action that can create and preserve the common

world, action is therefore the most political of human activities. Action can only be done

in the presence of other people. In other words, action requires plurality which is the

most politically characteristic of human beings. It can only be experienced in our

encounter with others and so is a practice that both presupposes and is actualized only in

human polity. In this context, Alice MacLachlan calls Arendt’s ethics as the ‘ethics of

plurality’. She argues that a deep ethical concern for the condition of human life is the


26

basis of Arendt’s theory of political action (MacLachlan, 2006, p. 3). Meanwhile

Eveline Cioflec contends that Arendt’s ethical claim is derived from her emphasis on the

common responsibility which is rooted in the in-between of human beings. So, at the

center of Arendt’s ethics is the world and the in-between of human beings (Cioflec,

2012, p. 646). Finally, William Garrath argues that Arendt’s political ethics lies in the

love of and responsibility for the world. When we act in the world, we pay attention to

the idea of responsibility and the on-going responsiveness to the world. That means that

responsibility or continuing care for the world is inherent in the action itself. Garrath

writes:

The world is the space between persons, fashioned through political actions and

the durable works which constitute a culture. And just as human culture is

profoundly artificial, so is the public realm; so much so that its existence is far

from inevitable where people are together and, if it is to be preserved, it may

require each actor’s continuing care (Garrath, 1998, p. 940).

I am in favor of the supporters of Arendt’s ethical thinking. In my view, Villa

and Honig overemphasize the agonistic aspect of Arendt’s notion of public space and

action. Both seem to focus only on the subjective aspect of action and forget the inter-

subjective aspect of Arendt’s notion of public space and action. Consequently, they

overlook the fact that Arendt’s political action requires a certain kind of solidarity. In

terms of political action, the political is, for Arendt, concerned with plurality and

freedom. In other words, the gist of Arendt’s agonism is to understand conflicts as a

condition for freedom and human plurality. While in the context of her emphasis on the

public sphere, Arendt strongly believes that true solidarity can exist among different

individuals: “Being seen and heard by others derive their significance from that fact that


27

everybody sees and hears from a different position. This is the meaning of public

life…so that those who are gathered around them know they see sameness in utter

diversity” (Arendt, 1958, p. 57).

In her theory of political action, Arendt repeatedly claims that politics is

signified by the constitution of public space where people appear before one another to

freely act and speak. Although Arendt draws from the Greek notion of politics as

agonistic that involved a struggle to achieve excellence among equals, for her, this

struggle is not primarily meant for the individual gain or freedom of only the few. What

Arendt means by the struggle is that citizens attempt to reveal their distinctiveness

through action and speech. In acting and speaking, each individual freely initiates

something new whereby a public a shared social reality is disclosed. In this context, the

struggle is intended to enact a public space in which the freedom is publicly recognized

and human plurality is acknowledged. Therefore, in the context of Arendt’s idea of

political action and public sphere, the notion of conflict, struggle or contest is deeply

grounded in respect and concern for the others. The struggle is not oriented to simple

subjectivity but intersubjectivity that presupposes mutual admiration.

Kateb overly interprets Arendt’s appropriation of Kant’s reflective judgment. It

is true that Arendt takes over Kant’s aesthetic judgment in construing her political

judgment, but that does not mean that Arendt aestheticizes politics. Rather, she attempts

to discover the political character of Kant’s aesthetic reflective judgment. Therefore,

drawing from Kant’s Critique of Judgment, Arendt’s own reflective judgment is tied to

two terms: first, common sense (sensus communis), which is related to the world of


28

experience and implies that one is sharing a common world with others. Common sense

is human sense because it makes possible speech or communication (Arendt, 1992, p.

70). Second, ‘enlarged mentality’, a mindset that orients itself to the world that implies

openness to embrace the perspective of everyone else (Fine, 2006, p. 165). In other

words, whenever we judge, we take other perspectives into account or, engaging with

other’s perspectives, we make our judgment from everybody’s point of view. This is the

most political aspect of judgment, in Arendt’s view, because it is inter-subjectively

grounded in our shared-political world.

Therefore, following Schaap I propose that Arendt’s ethical thinking can be

formulated as ‘the ethics of worldliness’. However, unlike Schaap who considers

Arendt’s ethics only from the world-disclosing potential of politics that depends on

action and judgment (Schaap, 2005, p. 53-69), I construe her ethics from her thinking

about the world that proceeds not from the absolute ideas of concepts but from the

reality of the world, thus judging an action representatively. As I have said above, from

Arendt’s perspective, ethics is a way of seeing and thinking about the world. But, what

is the world? Arendt refers to the world as the condition of human existence and the

objectivity of the world or the world’s reality. Both supplement each other because

human existence is conditioned existence. In The Human Condition, she writes: “Men

are conditioned beings because everything they come in contact with turns immediately

into a condition of their existence... Whatever touches or enters into a sustained

relationship with human life immediately assumes the character of a condition of human

existence” (Arendt, 1958, p. 9).


29

In this context, the world is not the nature or the earth, albeit it is needed to build

a home and to preserve human life. The earth becomes the world in the proper sense

only when “the totality of fabricated things is so organized that it can resist the

consuming life process of the people dwelling in it” (ibid. p. 210). In other words, it is

only through human works of fabricating and arranging things of the earth that

worldliness of the earth becomes a reality. This implies that worldliness is the condition

that corresponds to the activity of work or fabrication. It is a man-made condition.

Therefore, in this dissertation, Arendt’s ethics of worldliness would be taken to mean a

way of thinking about the man-made condition of human existence.

The key element in political judgment is understanding or thinking that is based

on the inter-subjective ground in our shared-political world. Without thinking one is not

able to make any judgment. In other words, the ethics of worldliness presupposes

understanding, which is, according to Arendt, in contrast to indoctrination or any kind of

ideological nonsense. Arendt claims that understanding is “a profoundly human

activity... a specifically human way of being alive; for every single person needs to be

reconciled to a world into which he was born a a stranger and in which, to the extent of

his distinct uniqueness, he always remains a stranger” (Arendt, 1994, p. 308).

In thinking, we examine and reflect on all that come to pass. It is the activity that

is capable of conditioning our human existence. Furthermore, the faculty of thinking is

always accompanied by the faculty of imagination: “...by the force of imagination it

makes the others present and thus moves in a space that is potentially public, open to all

sides; in other words, it adopts the position of Kant’s world citizen” (Arendt, 1992, 43).


30

Maurizio Passerin argues that judgment that is directed to others is an ethical element of

Arendt’s politics. In other words, judging, together with other capacities, constitutes the

ethical basis of Arendt’s politics because it always takes into account other people’s

points of view or the plurality of perspectives. He states: “For Arendt the morality

appropriate to politics must be grounded in public criteria and finds expression not in

private sentiments, but in the exercise of our ordinary moral capacities for promising,

forgiving, judging, and thinking” (D’Entreves, 1994, p. 95).

C. Political Reconciliation

Many societies throughout the world have been divided because of the ongoing

burden of the past wrongs. The experiences of colonialization, war, crimes against

humanity such as the Holocaust and ethnic cleansing, and a long history of exclusion

and discrimination against minority groups because of their ethnicity, religion, and

ideology—these experiences have become the burden and the source of division among

people in many countries throughout the world. In facing these problems, in the recent

years, reconciliation has been widely employed as a political tool to deal with past

wrongs. The establishment of truth commissions since 1974 is the proof of this political

endeavor to promote reconciliation.8

8 A comprehensive treatment of truth commissions is given by Priscilla Hayner, in her book, Unspeakable

Truth, first published in 2001 and re-published in 2011. In that book Hayner explores the global

experience of truth-seeking after the widespread of the violence. From 1974 to the end of 2009, Hayner

notes, there have been 40 commissions established as the response to the violent conflicts throughout the

world. The first three commissions were not referred to as truth commissions but, rather, as commission

on disappearances such as Commission of Inquiry into the Disappearance of People in Uganda (1984),

National Commission of Inquiry into Disappearance in Bolivia (1982-1984), and National Commission on

the Disappeared in Argentina (1983). It was only in 1990 that the term truth commission emerged in

Chile’s National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation (Hayner, 2011).


31

However, political reconciliation is problematic for two reasons. First, it is

contradictory in terms because politics refers to disclosure, openness, conflict and

difference; while reconciliation is intended for closure, harmony, peace, and consensus.

The International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA) in

Reconciliation after Violent Conflict: A Handbook Series (2003) formulates this

contradiction in relation to the understanding of reconciliation as both a goal and a

process. It is said that as a goal—something to achieve—reconciliation refers to a future

aspiration, something important or ideal to hope for, such as harmony, peace, or

consensus; whereas as a process—a means to achieve that goal—reconciliation points to

political, social and legal ways of dealing with past wrongs (IDEA, 2003, p. 12). It

seems that once harmony, peace and consensus have been attained, past wrongs are

settled or closed in order for people to move forward.

Second, political reconciliation is a complex matter because of the wide range of

issues that need to be addressed—injustices, discriminations, human rights violations,

and crimes against humanity—and the diverse understanding of politics that traditionally

includes all aspects of political life. As a process, reconciliation refers to political,

social, and legal aspects of society, in the sense that it seeks the political leaders’

pronouncement or apology for what have gone wrong; the common projects to repair the

damages; and the effort to bring wrongdoers to justice. In fact, many attempts to

promote reconciliation at the political level have focused on moral or religious aspects.

A full treatment of political reconciliation from the perspective of moral concern is


32

found in Colleen Murphy’s book A Moral Theory of Political Reconciliation (2010).

Murphy argues: “A conception of political reconciliation is relevant politically if it

provides insight into which aspects of interaction should be of moral concern” (Murphy,

2010, p. 23). As a moral concern, political reconciliation should focus on the broken

political relationship by diagnosing its causes whether it is attitudinal or institutional

and/or political; finding ways of rebuilding it; and clarifying the moral significance of

rebuilding such relationship (ibid. 24-25). The emphasis on morality in political

reconciliation gains its support from the criticism against truth commissions, particularly

the South African Truth and Commission (TRC) that attempts to promote reconciliation

through seeking truth and granting amnesty. The critiques claim that in doing so, TRC

satisfies political and legal needs and sacrifice moral concern (Gutmann and Thompson;

Crocker, Bhargava, 2000).9

These contradictions and diverse interpretations of political reconciliation raise

two major questions: first, how do we understand reconciliation, a morally loaded

concept, politically? Second, what are the elements of politics that can be included in a

reconciliation process? This dissertation suggests that reconciliation can be understood

9 Gutmann and Thompson argue that TRC’s attempt to grant amnesty sacrifices justice for the sake of

political and social goal called reconciliation. In other words, TRC satisfies the political and social

benefits and not the moral ones. For them, a truth commission should be morally founded or justified in

terms of its principle, perspective, and practice. In principle, a truth commission should “explicitly appeals

to rights and goods that are moral and therefore are comparable to the justice that is being sacrificed”

(Gutmann and Thompson, 2000, p. 22-23). In perspective, a truth commission should offer reasons that

are accessible to all citizens and inclusive in the sense that it includes as many people as possible. In

practice, a truth commissions should offer reasons that can be embodied or exemplified in their own

proceedings. A similar objection to truth commissions also comes from David Crocker who claims: “It is

morally objectionable as well as impractical for a truth commission or any other governmental body to

force people to agree about the past, forgive the sins committed against them, or love one another”

(Crocker, 2000, p. 108). While Bhargava, focusing on forgiveness, questions the moral appropriateness of

forgiveness. For him, forgiveness is inappropriate unless it is “consistent with the dignity and self-respect

of the victims” (2000, p. 61).


33

politically in the context of the ethics of worldliness and that Arendt’s ethics contains all

necessary components in conceptualizing political reconciliation.

Arendt does not directly deal with political reconciliation. Moreover, she does

talk about reconciliation coupled with the topic of forgiveness and revenge. It seems that

her discussion of reconciliation is inconsistent in three of her works. In the first seven

pages of Denktagebuch, Arendt claims that reconciliation is the only proper way of

dealing with wrongful deeds because it “posits a new concept of solidarity” (Arendt,

2002, p. 6). But in The Human Condition, she argues that forgiveness is the only proper

reaction to wrongs that can release the one who forgives and the one who is forgiven

from the burden of wrongful deeds or acts. She writes: “Without being released from the

consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined

to one single deed from which we could never recover” (Arendt, 1958, p. 237). Later, in

her discussion of Adolf Eichmann, Arendt seems to reject forgiveness and reconciliation

and turn, instead, to language of revenge: “I think it is undeniable that it was precisely

on the ground of these long-forgotten propositions that Eichmann was brought to justice

to begin with, and that they were, in fact, the supreme justification for the death penalty”

(Arendt, 1963, p. 277). Here Arendt invokes the idea of metaphysical balance in which

great crimes that offend nature demand vengeance. As a result, in Arendt’s judgment,

Eichmann must disappear from the world because the world as it is, with Eichmann in it,

is irreconcileable with human plurality and dignity.

But, the question is: Has Arendt been really inconsistent? Shai Levi and Roger

Berkowitz disagree that Arendt is inconsistent. Levi argues that Arendt rejects revenge


34

and forgiveness in Denktagebuch because both fail to ground a political community

through their attempt to undo the past. Arendt relates reconciliation to ‘passing by’: In

reconciliation or passing by (Versohnung oder dem Vorübergehen) what another has

done is made into what is fated to me, that which I can either accept or that I can, as with

everything that is sent to me, move out of its way” (Arendt, 2002, p. 6). In this sense,

reconciliation does not unburden the wrongdoer, but encourages acceptance of the past

as given. It is the willingness of the victims to carry the burden together with the

wrongdoer. This is what Arendt means when she claims that reconciliation presupposes

solidarity. Therefore, the different approach to past wrongs as described above is only

the change of the way how human beings relate themselves to the world (Levi, 2010, p.

231). While Berkowitz claims that Arendt prefers reconciliation as the proper response

to wrongful deeds because reconciliation makes a space for human action and judgment.

Reconciliation can respond to past wrongs in a way that fosters the political project of

building and preserving a common world (Berkowitz, 2011, p. 3).

In light of the acknowledgment that Arendt’s discussion of reconciliation is

related to her idea of the world or realm of politics, in recent years, the interest in

Arendt’s political reconciliation has emerged. A more comprehensive treatment is found

in Andrew Schaap’s work, Political Reconciliation in which he argues that “political

reconciliation begins with the invocation of a ‘we’ that is not yet and proceeds from the

faith in its possibility towards a shared understanding of what went before” (Schaap, p.

71). Therefore, he begins by elaborating the constitution of a space for politics, which

requires both the beginning, the moment in which people first appeared on the political


35

scene and the promise ‘never again’ to provide perpetrators the possible condition to

enact a community in the future. In other words, reconciliation is based on the

understanding of the present as a possible new beginning. Hence, the space for politics

or polity, he argues, “is not related to jurisdiction or state organization, but to the

performative constitution of ‘we’ through collective action” (ibid. 81).

Understanding space for politics as such makes possible a collective reckoning

with the past. In other words, the possibility of having a shared understanding of the

burden of past wrongs is grounded in a common world, something to be enacted through

collective action. It is only when perpetrators and victims have the same concept about

the world that they live in at the present moment that they can proceed to reach a shared

understanding of what have happened to that world. For Schaap, political reconciliation

should start by recognizing the fragility of the world and intending to attain a sense of

community. He claims that reconciliation should be thought not as the repairing of

political relationship but as the founding or constituting of a political community.

Here Schaap appropriates Arendt’s emphasis that the world or the realm of

politics is human creation through action and speech. Arendt is convinced that citizens

have the ability to talk, discuss, and act together in order to preserve a community which

is created through action and speech. Every citizen enters into public realm in order to

exchange ideas in an open and unforced discussion with others. It is only on this ground

that Schaap could claim that, in order to be relevant and effective, political

reconciliation should be endorsed by citizens, in this case by victims and perpetrators. In

this context, Schaap understands political reconciliation as the possibility of the victims


36

to come to terms with the perpetrators at the present so that both parties can rebuild a

new world in the future. However, this understanding, in my view, is too narrow and

thus does not wholly capture Arendt’s notion of reconciliation. What Schaap leaves out

is Arendt’s emphasis on the importance of reconciling oneself to the givenness, which is

the world with its history of the horror of the past as the product of human actions.

In her essay “Understanding and Politics”, which is written as a response to

totalitarianism that is considered as the central event of the world, Arendt claims that

making sense of what had happened in the world is not “to condone anything, but to

reconcile ourselves to a world in which such things are possible at all” (Arendt, 1994, p.

308). In this context, reconciliation is intended not to closure but to disclosure—the

disclosure to the worldliness, including the horror, of our history. On the basis of

Arendt’s ethics of worldliness, political reconciliation is understood in a much broader

sense than Schaap’s because it includes not only past wrongs as the products of human

actions but also the world as the condition of human existence. Thus, from Arendt’s

perspective, political reconciliation can be formulated as the possibility of coming to

terms with the givenness, which is the world, understood as the condition of human

existence that includes the horror of its history.

This understanding of political reconciliation, I argue, can shed light on the

contemporary discourse and practice of political reconciliation. Political reconciliation

must address the issues of how to reach a common understanding of the diverse stories

about the past wrongs that have divided societies, how to restore and transform

communities damaged by violent conflicts in the past, how to restore political


37

relationship among citizens, and how to encourage people to be responsible for the past

wrongs and the world where they commonly create and live in. In this way, Arendt

actually promotes participative and deliberative democracy, in which politics is

expressed authentically when citizens get together in a public realm and actively

participate in deliberating common concerns and issues that have divided them. The

deliberative process is not intended to reach consensus but the transformed perspective.

This is exactly the goal of political reconciliation in Arendt’s perspective.

Scholars have attempted to promote Arendt’s political reconciliation from

different points of view. Seyla Benhabib, Michael Jackson and others promote Arendt’s

political reconciliation from the perspective of her emphasis on the importance of

memory and storytelling. Benhabib, for instance, argues that from Arendt’s perspective,

stories have a redemptive power that fills the gap between past and present, the gap

caused by the breakdown of tradition. “When tradition has ceased to orient our sense of

the past...the theorist as storyteller is like the pearl diver, who converts the memory of

the dead into something ‘rich and strange’” (Benhabib, 1990, p. 188). Meanwhile,

Jackson argues that the individuals transform private into public meanings and sustain a

sense of urgency in the context of disempowering conditions. He writes: “By

constructing, relating and sharing stories, people contrive to restore viability to their

relationship with others, redressing a bias toward autonomy when it has been lost, and

affirming collective ideals in the face of disparate experiences” (Jackson, 2002).

A story relates an experience and therefore storytelling brings us back and bears

witness to the fact of how we really live. Thus storytelling is the basic restoration of a


38

person’s humanity. In the process of telling a story, there is the freedom of a subject to

make that story as his or her own. Since each individual life is told as a story by every

individual, then it becomes “the storybook of mankind” (Arendt, 1958, p. 184) and out

of which people derive a meaning from what has happened in the past. It seems that for

Arendt storytelling reveals the meaning of the past wrongs and makes possible

reconciliation with things as they really are. This requires the discovery of concrete

events and specific individuals so that everybody, particularly the victim’s family gets a

real story about what has happened.

Others promote Arendt’s political reconciliation from her emphasis on

forgiveness and making promise. While acknowledging the Christian roots of it, Arendt

nevertheless claims that forgiveness is an ‘authentic political experience’ which we can

take ‘seriously in a strictly secular sense’ (Arendt, 1958, p. 238-239). Forgiveness is

significant for preserving the space of politics. At the same time it requires the space of

the political. Focusing on Arendt’s politico-theoretical thoughts, Daniel Levy and

Nathan Sznaider argue that the political significance of forgiveness is contingent. It

depends on a set of historical and institutional circumstances that condition the meaning

of forgiveness (Levy and Szneider, 2005, p. 84).

Political forgiveness must be followed by a promise in order to redeem the

irreversibility and unpredictability of human action. For Arendt, the faculty of making

and keeping promises is necessary in facing the uncertainty of the future. In the Human

Condition, Arendt insists that promises stabilize the world of human affairs and protect

it from the unpredictability of human action. It is a way of controlling the future which


39

is the basis of every political community. This control emerges from “the will to live

together with others in the mode of acting and speaking” (Arendt, 1958, p. 246). In this

way, a promise points to a reciprocal commitment that binds people together through a

common purpose of preserving society. For Arendt, making and keeping a promise is

fundamentally a faculty of memory that encourages people to go back to their beginning.

It is the articulation of natality. Through control of the future by means of drawing the

future further into the past, one is born is born into a secured past (Lemm, 2006, p. 162).

What I gather from these discussions is the attempt to apply Arendt’s ethics of

worldliness in political reconciliation through the practice of storytelling and

forgiveness. In other words, there is a common assumption interwoven throughout the

elaboration of storytelling and forgiveness that is found in Arendt’s ethics of

worldliness. As I have mentioned above, the elements of Arendt’s ethics of

worldliness—responsibility for the world and judging action—are concretely manifested

in her discussion of storytelling and political forgiveness. Truth and forgiveness are

central in the contemporary discourse and practice of political reconciliation. Therefore,

in my attempt to consider the contribution of Arendt’s ethics of worldliness to political

reconciliation, I will demonstrate how Arendt’s notion of storytelling and political

forgiveness can give some insight to improve the truth commissions’ work of seeking

the truth and bringing about forgiveness that can lead to true reconciliation at the

political level. With regard to storytelling, Arendt’s claim that storytelling is meant to

reveal meaning and not the truth of the past, is worthy of consideration by any truth

commission. While regarding forgiveness, Arendt’s constant defense of the importance


40

of thinking forgiveness from the perspective of politics can challenge the work of truth

commissions that is often colored by moral or religious belief (this is the main point in

my discussion of Arendt’s political forgiveness.

D. Design of the Study

This dissertation is a study of Hannah Arendt’s political thought in order to show

how her ethics of worldliness contributes to the contemporary practice of political

reconciliation. This implies that the ideas presented here mainly informed by Arendt’s

own works that engage with the works of selected commentators. Therefore I will

develop and defend the dissertation by way of a sustained engagement with the works of

Hannah Arendt and her scholars. While my engagement with Arendt is primarily

exploratory, the dissertation, as pointed out above, deals with a topic (political

reconciliation) that is largely understudied, despite the numerous secondary literature on

the philosophy of Arendt. In this sense, this study may be considered as a humble, yet

novel, contribution to the discourse on political reconciliation with reference to Arendt.

I will divide this dissertation into two main parts. The first part is the

reconstruction of Arendt’s ethics of worldliness in order to lay a solid ground for

drawing her idea of political reconciliation since she never directly talks about it. This

part will occupy the first three chapters. Arendt’s ethics of worldliness can be found in

her conception of the world, which is not identical with the earth or with nature, but

rather as human artifacts and human affairs. However, in order to comprehensively

understand her idea of the world, it is necessary to look at the background out of which

this idea emerges. Arendt develops her specific idea of the world as a response to the


41

backdrop of the modern world, known as the modern worldlessness or the worldlessness

that is caused by modernity.

Therefore in Chapter One, I discuss the inseparability between worldlessness and

crimes against humanity. In fact, Arendt claims that worldlessness is the precondition

for crimes against humanity. Like Nietzsche, Heidegger and other contemporary

philosophers, Arendt detects a nihilistic way of thinking inherent in modernity in its

tendency to universalize or absolutize philosophical truth and moral standards. This

nihilistic thinking has generated worldlessness in the phenomena of the escape from the

world and the rise of the social. In the former, Arendt claims that modern humans have

been driven away from the world, either to the universe by the progress in modern

sciences or to the self by modern philosophy, as initiated by Descartes’ methodical

doubts. Arendt claims in the prologue to The Human Condition that the modern world’s

alienation can be traced in “its two flight from the earth into the universe and from the

world into the self” (1958, p. 6). In regard to the latter, Arendt criticizes the rise of the

social in the modern age that has generated the mass society. In the mass society, she

claims, people are organized in such a way that they are still related to one another but

have lost their sensibility to the common world. Hence there is nothing in-between that

unites and everything that separates people.

Arendt links the destructive effect of mass society to the rise of the social in the

capitalist society as discussed in The Human Condition and the loss of the right to have

rights in the phenomena of superfluousness, uprootedness, statelessness and deprivation

of the rights of individuals to belong to a political community, as elaborated in The


42

Origins of Totalitarianism. This relationship shows the fact that worldlessness is the

precondition of crimes against humanity, in the sense that after people are made

superfluous, uprooted, and stateless, they are rendered either to be violent as Hitler and

the Nazis or to be the object of human rights’ violation, as Jewish people. This

inseparability between worldlessness and crimes against humanity points to Arendt’s

idea that evil or crime is something real.

Chapter Two and Three consist in the elaboration of the elements of Arendt’s

ethics of worldliness. In Chapter Two, I will focus on the first element called thinking

about the world and how it is related to Arendt’s specific notion of the world and the

human responsibility for the world. The focus of this chapter is threefold. First, thinking

about the world or the realm of politics that proceeds not from ideas or concepts, but

from the reality or events in the world. Arendt believes that any event in the world has

its own meaning and provides necessary information for thinking about the world.

Second, the world as human creation is the sum of fabricated things and human affairs.

For Arendt, a world or public space is enacted when people get together to exchange the

products of their works. The second claim is that the world is one of human affairs. As

human affairs, the world is common to all. It exists whenever people live together to set

a new beginning in action and to disclose themselves in speech. Action and speech

require the presence of others. Whenever people act and disclose themselves, a world is

created among them. In this sense, Arendt then calls this world also as a ‘web of

relationships.’ Since this web of relationships is built not only with those who live at the

present time, but also with those who lived in the past and those will enter it in the


43

future, then Arendt emphasizes the importance of story in order to preserve it.

Furthermore, Arendt claims that an action is performed for the sake of freedom and

meaning. When humans act and speak, they reveal themselves to others. For Arendt, by

means of free speech and action, humans exercise their capacity for agency. In other

words, action is the public disclosure of the free agent. It is the freedom of the agent to

initiates something new into the world. The third claim has to do with man’s

responsibility for the world. In her discussion of action, Arendt also foresees the

unpredictability and irreversibility of human action as that which makes the human

world frail because the space of appearance is only formed when people act and speak

together. It is in this context of the frailty of the human world that Arendt emphasizes

the importance of responsibility toward the common world. In other words, since the

world is common, then all are equally required to take care of it, either by either by

taking action or by having an opinion about anything taking place in the world.

In chapter Three, I discuss the second element of Arendt’s ethics of worldliness

called judging an action. I begin this chapter with Arendt’s notion of political action.

Arendt sees the similarity between action and politics because both are grounded in the

condition of plurality and freedom. As a result, she identifies action with politics, called

political action. However, this identification is problematic because Arendt is also fully

aware of the destructive effects of past political violences. Therefore, in order to avoid

misunderstanding of Arendt’s political action, it is necessary to explore Arendt’s notion

of reflective judgment that she borrows from Kant. Arendt claims that the public space

or the space of appearances is constituted not only by action, but also by judgment.


44

When humans act, their action is judged by others or spectators to whom the actor

appears. It is the recognition of spectators that gives meaning to the actor’s deed and its

significance for the common world. Without the presence of others who witness the

actor’s deed, the world in-between is not possible; and without the judgment of others,

the meaning of action cannot be comprehensive. In judging an action, it is necessary to

include the other’s point of view. This is the ethical aspect of thinking and judging.

Part Two, which consists of Chapter Four and Five, is the application of

Arendt’s ethics of worldliness in political reconciliation. Drawing from her ethics,

political reconciliation is the possibility to come to terms with the givenness of the

world, with its traumatic experience of history. This understanding of political

reconciliation, I propose, sheds light on the contemporary discourse of political

reconciliation, particularly in the context of the recent establishment of truth

commissions throughout the world.

Chapter Four focuses on Arendt’s concept of storytelling and how it plays a

central role in political reconciliation, where citizens strive towards a shared

understanding of the past wrongs. It is believed that one way of attaining this

understanding is through the discovery of the factual truth of what had happened in the

past. In the recent practice of political reconciliation by truth commissions, the truth is

discovered through testimonies and public hearings where victims and perpetrators are

given the opportunity to tell their own stories about the wrongs they experienced or have

committed. It is expected that by attaining the truth, both conflicting parties can be

reconciled and society as a whole can move forward. In theory, truth commissions


45

conceptualize truth as acknowledgment, in the sense that when the facts of past wrongs

are acknowledged, there is the truth about what happened. The problem with the

commissions’ truth-seeking is that it focuses only on what victims and perpetrators tell

in testimonies and public hearings. It remains questionable whether through these

documents they tell the truth or lie, whether they are honest or pretentious. Furthermore,

when the acknowledgment does not come from the public—shared collective memory of

the past—but from the state’s officials then this acknowledgment is the product of the

interplay between truth and power. In order to overcome these difficulties, this

dissertation looks into Arendt’s idea of storytelling, which is primarily meant to reveal

meanings—not truth—of the past wrongs. For Arendt, telling the story discloses the

meaning of what actually had happened and so it has the power to release the burden of

past wrongs and opens up a new beginning. That is the redemptive power of narrative,

which is crucial in the political reconciliation process.

In Chapter Five, I will deal particularly with forgiveness and how it is important

in political reconciliation. Forgiveness has become the underlying principle of truth

commissions, particularly the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission

(TRC). But forgiveness is religious in its origin and commonly considered as a private

matter or else it belongs to morality. Individuals who forgive are in the private sphere

and their act of forgiving is largely determined by personal dispositions and specific

situations. Therefore, when forgiveness is taken into the public sphere in political

reconciliation, it becomes controversial. In order to shed light on this controversy, this

dissertation invokes Arendt’s idea of forgiveness which is neither moral nor religious,


46

but rather political. Arendt acknowledges the Christian root of forgiveness, but for her,

there is a political character of forgiveness in the sense that it requires the presence of

others and is done in the view of the common world. In line with her theory of action

and public space, Arendt argues that political forgiveness is grounded on the natality of

the other and the fragility of the world. In this context, forgiveness is not meant to

restore the perpetrators into an existing community, but rather to make possible a realm

in which members of a divided community contest each other’s perspectives of past

wrongs and their significance for their political association. This is what is meant by the

assuming of responsibility for the common world. In this way, forgiveness becomes an

essential element in the political reconciliatory process.


47

PART ONE:

THE RECONSTRUCTION OF ARENDT’S ETHICS OF WORLDLINESS

When receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, on June 16, 2012, Aung San Suu

Kyi said: “What the Nobel Peace Prize did was to draw me once again into the world of

other human beings outside the isolated area in which I lived, to restore a sense of reality

to me” (Suu Kyi, 2012). This statement perfectly captures the pair of phenomena—

wordlessness and the world—dealt with by Hannah Arendt in her writings. On the one

hand, the isolated area refers to Suu Kyi’s own experience of being imprisoned for more

than two decades under the military junta that ruled her country, Myanmar. In putting

Suu Kyi into jail, the military junta expected to make her disappear by denying her the

rights to act and speak in the public realm. Arendt calls this condition of being deprived

of the right to act and speak as worldlessness. On the other hand, Suu Kyi acknowledges

that the Nobel Peace Prize brought her into the world of other human beings and

restored a sense of reality to her. Suu Kyi regains the world or public sphere where she

lives together with other people and also the freedom to act and speak in an open and

uncoerced condition. Being with other people and having a sense of reality are central in

Arendt’s concept of the world or the realm of politics. It is in her discussion of these pair

of phenomena that her ethics of worldliness emerges.


48

In Arendt’s works, the terms politics and the world are interchangeably used

because she defines politics as the space between people or the in-between. For Arendt,

the world exists in-between people who share a common political space. She identifies

politics with the disclosure of a world. The interchangeability between politics and the

world indicates how Arendt phenomenologically approaches politics, in the sense that in

her political theory, she prioritizes the factical and experiential character of human life

in the world as opposed to other political philosophers who describe politics from the

vantage point of such common ideas as authority, power, state, or sovereignty. In other

words, Arendt’s thinking on politics is informed and guided by her concern for the

political itself (Malpas, 2011, p. 39). It is politically situated and always oriented to the

world of human interactions and encounters. Consequently, her thinking, as Margaret

Canovan puts it, “was driven by some actual political events and that her objection to the

dominant Western tradition of political philosophy because it distorted the actual

experience of political actors” (Canovan, 1995, p. 3).

Arendt once claimed that she does not belong to the circle of philosophers. She

prefers to be called a political theorist. This means that if there is such a thing as a

profession, it is political theory and not philosophy that fits to describe what she is doing

(Arendt, 1994, 1). Of course, Arendt’s refusal of being called a philosopher is not

without reason. Based on her own experience, she claims that many professional

philosophers are so preoccupied with their own business or are caught up in the

theoretical world and thus lost contact with reality. They are cut off from the human

world or reality that surrounds them.


49

Philosophizing from the isolated ivory tower, Arendt argues, makes it impossible

for philosophers to be attentive to the reality of the world. Their activity of thinking

about the world and the product of that thinking process do not really reflect the world

as it is. It, rather, mirrors a fantasized world created in the human mind and has no

relation with the real world. For Arendt, thinking from the outside of the world’s

perspective destroys the human world enacted through action and speech that leads

further to the loss of the power of the world to unite and separate people and its

meaningfulness. It also prevents people from being responsible for the common world or

for the political dehumanization. It is a kind of escape from the common responsibility.

In an attempt to avoid a solipstic outlook caused by philosophizing from the

isolated ivory tower, Arendt offers a phenomenological perspective that requires

attentiveness to the phenomena of the world. This means, the world as it appears itself in

a particular situation and time or what is commonly called the situational elements of the

world is the basis and measure of thinking about the world or the realm of politics. This

is the reason why Arendt emphasizes the importance of commitment to the world.

Although Arendt openly claims herself as a political theorist, but, as Margaret Hull

argues, the underlying leimotive of Arendt’s writings is not only political but also

philosophical. Inspired by her own experience of being marginalized as a Jew and her

philosophical training, Arendt’s writings reflect and respect human plurality,

distinctiveness, togetherness and interaction. In other words, the commitment Arendt

talks about is “a philosophical and political commitment to interaction and plurality”

(Hull, 2002, p. 2-3). Human plurality and interaction show the validity of


50

intersubjectivity which is opposite to abstract universalism. For Arendt, being with and

among other people is the center and focus of philosophy (ibid. p. 41).

Philosophizing from the standpoint of the human plurality and interaction or

intersubjectivity points to the importance of appearance in public space. Like her

teachers Husserl and Heidegger, Arendt shares the primacy of appearances. According

to Arendt, things in the world where we live—whether it is natural or artificial, living or

dead, transient or sempiternal—have something in common, that is, they appear

themselves and are meant to be perceived. That means, the appearance of things requires

the presence of the sentient beings to perceive them. Furthermore, those sentient beings

also appear themselves before one another. For Arendt, the world of appearing things is

guaranteed by human beings who are, at the same time, appearing beings (Arendt, 1978,

p.19). Here Arendt emphasizes the importance of intersubjectivity because the

appearance of an individual requires the presence of others. The intersubjectivity, which

is central in phenomenology, is also interwoven in Arendt’s political thought.

Although Arendt acknowledges the importance of the realities of the world as

they appear themselves, the world where we live in is articulated by distinctions. One

phenomenon is distinct from the others. Each experience is related to a certain kind of

object. Consequently, there is a need to make distinctions by bringing out what one thing

is in contrast to its proper others. It is an attempt to show that this thing is not that thing.

Making distinctions is a thoughtful activity. It is the most fundamental activity in the life

of the mind. In the context of making distinctions, thinking is not drawing inferences

from premises or applying principles or categories to instances, but bringing out


51

something new from the self-evidencing or appearing things. Here distinction refers not

only to the ways of experiencing things, but also to the objects as they appear

themselves (Sokolowski, 1995, p. 133).

The failure to make distinctions brings about confusion and it can be devastating.

This is exactly what Arendt sees in the modern worldlessness, as we will see in chapter

one. She argues that the modern worldlessness is caused by the failure to make the

distinction between the public and the private, the polis and oikos, property and wealth,

labor and work, work and action. Therefore, throughout her political writings,

particularly in her thinking about the world and in the judgment of an action, Arendt

tries to maintain those distinctions. By maintaining the distinctions, Arendt is able to

offer a new understanding of the world or politics and, more importantly, she is able to

show what it means to be responsible to the world and how we will be able to draw the

meanings of an event that takes place in the world.

Therefore, in this first part I intend to reconstruct Arendt’s ethics of worldliness,

drawing from her phenomenological approach, where she brings out a specific notion of

the world on the basis of the phenomena that appear themselves. Since she develops the

notion of the world as a response to the backdrop of the modern world, then I will begin

by elaborating the relationship between modern worldlessness and crimes against

humanity in Chapter One. Meanwhile chapter two and three will deal with the elements

of Arendt’s ethics, namely, thinking about the world that reveals our responsibility for

the common world (chapter two) and and judging political action in which we intend to

quest for meaning of an event to the world in common (chapter three).


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CHAPTER ONE:

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN MODERN WORLDLESSNESS

AND CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY

This chapter attempts to investigate Arendt’s idea that crime against humanity is

inseparable from the condition of modern worldlessness consisting in the phenomena of

the escape from the world and the rise of the social. Modern worldlessness renders

people superfluous, uprooted and stateless. In the condition of being superfluous, people

are easily turned to violence as seen among the Nazis and particularly Eichmann in

Germany and also exposed to crimes as experienced by the Jews either in Germany or

elsewhere in Europe during the Holocaust.

After the tragedy of the Holocaust, Arendt predicts that one of the fundamental

issues to be dealt with by the intellectuals in Europe is the problem of evil (Arendt,

1994, 134). This is the reason why as an intellectual she constantly deals with evil in

most of her writings. Based on her own experience of totalitarianism in Germany,10

10

Hannah Arendt was born into a German-Jewish family in 1906. After finishing high school, she studied

philosophy with Martin Heidegger at the Marburg University. After a year in Marburg, she moved to

Freiburg University where she attended Edmund Husserl’s lectures only for one semester. In 1926 she

went to Heidelberg University where she studied with Karl Jaspers and completed her dissertation under

his supervision, entitled Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin in 1929. Because of the Hitler’s rise to power,

Arendt, was forced to leave Germany in 1933 for France and there stayed until 1039 where she worked for

Jewish refugees’ organizations. In 1941, Arendt was forced again to leave France and moved to New York

where she then got her American citizenship. In the United States, she lectured at the University of

Princeton, Berkeley, Chicago and the New School for Social Research until her death in 1975. Arendt

wrote many articles and published books, including The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), The Human

Condition (1958), Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), On Revolution (1965); and the collections of essays

such as Men in Dark Times (1955), Between Past and Future (1961), and Crises of Republics (1969). Her

posthumously work, the Life of the Mind was published in 1978 (Young-Bruehl, 1982).


53

Arendt considers the tragedy of the Holocaust as a new and unprecedented kind of

crimes against humanity. It is commonly accepted that crimes against humanity are the

systematic attacks, such as mass murder or genocide, kidnapping, disappearance, against

the civilian population (Moises, 2006, p. 4). But what Arendt has in mind is a specific

species of crime against humanity called genocide that is characterized by the

destruction wholly or in part of a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. In the

Epilogue to Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt claims that crime against humanity is new

and unprecedented because it is a crime against the human status (Arendt, 1963, 255-

257). In other words, as Kateb claims, the unprecedented category of crime against

humanity lies in the fact that it refers to “the act of genocide which was perpetrated

against a people simply because it existed on the fact this earth as this specific kind of

people, as exemplifying one way of being among the many possible modes of human

diversity” (Kateb, 1996, p.51). In the Holocaust where millions of Jewish people were

killed in Hitler’s concentration camps Arendt sees a new form of genocide which is a

state-organized attack on the human plurality and diversity.

Arendt is concerned not with the actual killing or the large number of victims but

with the conditions behind the crimes. Why could such crimes take place at all? Arendt

offers a new way of understanding a crime that is neither philosophical nor religious, but

rather political. It is political because Arendt relates evil to the human capacity to act

and think. Since all human beings have this capacity then evil is considered as

something real and likely to be capable of being done again in many different ways.


54

Furthermore, Arendt sees a relationship between crimes against humanity and

worldlessness. She claims that evil comes to exist in the condition where people feel

abandoned or superfluous, which is a condition of worldlessness. It is in the condition of

worldlessness that people are either turned to violence or exposed to crime.

Arendt describes worldlessness as the condition where people do not belong to

the world that defines them as individuals. It is the condition where people are deprived

of “a place in the world which makes opinions significant and actions effective”

(Arendt, 1951, 293). Gottsegen suggests that Arendt’s notion of worldlessness can be

understood in three ways: objectively, subjectively, and essentially. Objectively, it is the

condition where people are forced to be members of a world or political community but

do not have rights in it; subjectively, it refers to the condition where people are alienated

from the world shared with others; and essentially, it is the condition where people are

deprived of their place in a world where they can act and speak (Gottsegen, 1994, p. 5).

In other words, worldlessness is the condition where people have nothing in common

with others. There is no institution to be relied upon and no room for people to freely act

and speak. In this condition, people are treated not as a who, a subject that can act and

speak, but as a what, as thing-like.

Therefore in this chapter I would like to investigate: first, the condition behind

modern worldlessness called nihilism; second, the phenomena of worldlessness in the

modern age, known as escape from the world and the rise of the social; and third, the

relationship between worldlessness and crimes against humanity.


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1.1. Arendt’s Critique of Modern Nihilism

Arendt’s concern with modern worldlessness is not something new. Friedrich

Nietzsche calls worldlessness as ‘the loss of the world’ and openly blames nihilism as

the cause of it. Nihilism is the conviction that the highest values cannot be realized in

the world. There is an unbelief in the world since the world appears to be valueless. He

writes: “Existence has no goal or end; any comprehensive unit in the plurality of events

is lacking” (Nietzsche, 1967, book I, section 12). Meanwhile Martin Heidegger

considers the effect of nihilism to be the denial of the object or nature and the disregard

of the value of the objective world. This is clear in the objectification of nature, in which

nature is conceived a priori, in the sense that the essence of a thing is decided in

advance. It is only a thing that can be specified in advance and counted as real. Here the

real is represented as an a priori knowledge or theoretical reproduction. This a priori

representation is inseparable from the prediction, control, and domination of the earth.

“Earth itself can show itself only as the object of assault, an assault that, in human

willing establishes itself as unconditional objectification” (Heidegger, 1988, p. 107).

Following her predecessors, Nietzsche and Heidegger, Arendt shares the idea

that nihilistic thinking on the basis of the universal or the absolute is the origin of

worldlessness. However, her point of departure in her discussion about worldlessness is

quite different. Unlike Nietzsche who departs from the fact that the world is valueless or

Heidegger from the objectification of the world by scientific representation, Arendt

proceeds from the inhuman condition or the reality of evil that is signified by the rupture

of traditional metaphysics, known as thinking from the perspective of the universal or


56

the imposition of the universal principles on the world where we live in. Like Heidegger,

Arendt blames the traditional metaphysics as the origin of nihilism, particularly in its

attempt to find the explanation of problems concerning human life in the world on the

basis of the old ontological framework that prioritizes the concept.11

This nihilistic way

of thinking has the potential to destroy the world because its explanation does not fit

with the reality of the world and makes people stop thinking.

For Arendt, the danger of nihilism lies in the fact that it arises out of the “desire

to find results that would make further thinking unnecessary” (Arendt, 1978, p. 176).

When people stop thinking, they become thoughtless. This is the reason why people

unthinkingly apply philosophical truth and moral standards into the world. For Arendt,

the unthinking application of the absolute truth into the world is the reduction of the

world or the realm of politics into a domination of philosophical truth which makes the

truth the driving force of politics and the foundation of the world. Arendt traces this

reductive thinking to Plato, who in his search for the ultimate truth about the world,

turned away from the world of human affairs and located it in the realm of Ideas, which

is beyond the world, singular, eternal and unequivocal or what Arendt calls ‘self-evident

truth’ (Arendt, 1961, p. 107).

The Platonic Ideas have the power to become the measure of human conduct and

human institutions. Of course, Arendt admits that there are basically authoritative

11

Theodor Adorno raises a similar concern. For him, after the Holocaust or Auschwitz and other tragedies

in the world, our human life has been damaged. The result is ‘the wrong state of things’. By damaged life

Adorno refers to the destruction not only of the physical world, but also of the human faculty of thinking,

including traditional way of thinking. He writes: “Our metaphysical faculty is paralyzed because actual

events have shattered the basis on which speculative metaphysical thought could be reconciled with

experience” (Adorno, 2005, p. 362).


57

elements or qualities in the Ideas that enable people to rule and form an ideal

community, but what concerns her is the use of the Ideas as a ‘blueprint,’ model, or the

measure of men facing the predicaments of the world. This could result in a kind of

domination.12

One example of this is Plato’s way of creating an ideal polis. Plato claims

that political community should be formed on the basis of an ideal or model found

among the Ideas. This means, the materials for creating a political society are norms and

laws, which are the embodiment of the Ideas (Enaudeau, 2007, 1031). Arendt observes

that this way of creating a political community is problematic for two reasons. First, it is

the outsiders who decide what needs to be done to it. When one defines politics from the

perspective of truth, which is ‘self-evident,’ one takes a stand outside the political realm

(Arendt, 2000, p. 570). Second, it is the privilege of a few to decide what is best for the

community as a whole. In the case of Plato’s model, it is only those who appropriate this

model, mainly the rulers—Plato calls them ‘philosopher kings,’ who determine the

ideals and the ends of the community as well as the instruments to obtain those ends.

The danger here has to do with the sovereignty of philosophers, those who know how to

rule over those who are supposed not to know. Consequently, the inherent political

capacity of the majority of the people is denied (Abensour, 2007, p. 955-956).

Arendt discovers that Plato’s thought is predominant in modern political thought,

in which politics refers only to those who decide what society ought to do in the name of

12

In elaborating Plato’s allegory of the cave, Arendt writes: “The Ideas become measures only after the

philosopher has left the bright sky of Ideas and returned to the dark cave of human existence. He[Plato]

tells of the philosophers’ loss of orientation in human affairs, of the blindness striking the eyes, of the

predicament of not being able to communicate what he has seen, and of the actual danger to his life which

thereby arises. It is in this predicament that the philosopher resorts to what he has seen, the Ideas, as

standards and measures, and finally, in fear of his life, uses them as instrument of domination...” (1961,

p.110)


58

that society, for how long and at what cost. Politics belongs only to politicians or those

who wield political power because they are the few who distribute and exercise political

power for the sake of the society in general. Thus, the majority of citizens are treated as

spectators, deprived of their rights to participate in politics. It destroys the plurality of

persons, perspectives and the possibilities of human action, which are, for Arendt, the

main characteristics of politics. In her observance of politics in recent European

philosophical thought, Arendt writes: “What the philosophers almost unanimously have

demanded of the political realm was a state of affairs where action...would be either

altogether superfluous or remain the privilege of the few” (Arendt, 1994, p. 429).

This way of creating a political community is carried out by totalitarian regimes

that attempt to create such a political community on the basis of ideologies. Arendt’s

concern with ideologies is not about the content of ideas but the principle of logical

consistency or the process of remaking reality to prove a premise (Young-Bruehl, 1982,

p. 290). Regarding totalitarian ideologies, Arendt claims that in an attempt to dominate

the real world, totalitarian regimes create a fantasized world or closed system that has no

connection at all with reality. For her, a totalitarian ideology conceals within itself the

potential for tyranny since its claim or its absolute premise is functioning as a tool of

political power and despotism. She notes: “The insanity of such system clearly does not

lie only in their first premise but in their very logicality which proceeds regardless of all

facts and regardless of reality” (Arendt, 1950, p. 366). The real world is therefore

coerced in order to be fitted into a model and to be fantasized in an ideology. This

fantasized world is seemingly real because although it contains elements of experience


59

and of reality, but those elements are pictorially represented in such a way that confuses

people and makes them unable to differentiate between ideology and reality. It is also

essentially self-referential since it has no reference to the world of plurality

(Grunnenberg, 2002, p. 361). In short, the creation of a fantasized world is intended to

confuse citizens so that they are unable to make any judgments and easily believe in

what is pictorially presented to them.

Arendt relates the totalitarian’s way of confusing people through its fantasized

world to the phenomenon of lying in modern societies in the form of terror and the

invasion of the political processes by sheer criminality (Arendt, 2003, 265). The

examples of such an invasion are Hitler in Germany and Stalin in Russia. But what

concerns Arendt here is the proceedings after the defeat and suicide of Hitler and the

sudden death of Stalin. She observes that in both countries, there was an attempt to

introduce a political kind of image-making in order to cover up the unbelievable record

of the past (ibid., 265). In Men in Dark Times, she connects lying in politics to “the

highly efficient talk and double-talk,” particularly coming from political leaders who try

to explain away “unpleasant facts and justified concerns” (Arendt, 1955, p. vii). Here

Arendt is concerned with how the political violence is publicized or shown in public

discourse. She observes that many discourses on political tragedy do not shed light on

what had happened, and instead hide the true facts. The consequence of this cover-up of

the facts is that many past wrongs or injustices remain unacknowledged or even ignored

by the society at large. For Arendt, the darkness in the mid-twentieth century is not only

the horror of tragedy, but also the invisibility of facts, how the facts of the tragedy are


60

covered up and thus become invisible to all people. Of course, at the level of society, the

withholding of the essential information from the public is inevitable: “Every

government must classify certain information, withhold it from public notice, and he

who reveals authentic secrets has always been treated as traitor” (Arendt, 2000, p. 552).

But the main concern of Arendt is public discourse, designed particularly by political

leaders in order to cover up what had happened so that the real facts of tragedy remain

hidden. In this way, public discourse is employed as a means to destroy reality and

replace it with an image of it; it is thus the replacement of the facts with the images of

the factual world (Berkowitz, 2010, 3-4). This destruction of the reality of the world

becomes clear in worldlessness, as discussed below.

1.2. The Phenomena of Modern Worldlessness

Arendt observes that there are two phenomena or conditions of modernity that

have generated the worldlessness by which the world loses its power, namely the escape

from the world and the rise of the social.

1.2.1. Escape from the World

Along with her contemporaries Horkheimer and Adorno, Arendt criticizes the

modern scientific disenchantment of the world. They are concerned with the destructive

and repressive effect of the enlightenment’s project of modernity. Horkheimer and

Adorno claim that there is a paradox in this project because despite of all its greatness,

enlightenment has turned into its opposite, barbarism. In enlightenment, both argue,

‘humanity, instead of entering humanity into a truly human state, is sinking into a new

kind of barbarism” (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002, xiv). Horkheimer and Adorno are


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concerned with the mastery of nature that generates the domination of the human

subject, in which individuality is reduced into an automatic process of consumption and

production through the expansion of instrumental reason. They write: “The individual is

entirely nullified in the face of the economic powers. These powers are taking society’s

domination over nature to unimagined heights” (ibid., p. xvii). The barbaric aspect of

modernity is central in Arendt’s discussion of modern worldlessness, the loss of the

power of the world. In her view, modern instrumental rationality has brought about the

alienation of the human world.

According to Arendt, the world’s alienation is caused by our loss of trust or faith

in the power of the world. In The Human Condition, Arendt’s concludes her prologue by

saying that the modern world’s alienation can be traced in “its two flight from the earth

into the universe and from the world into the self” (Arendt, 1958, p. 6). She attributes

the former to the modern scientific progress that enables modern men to travel in space

and the latter to modern philosophy that turns away men from the common world into

what Simon Swift calls ‘inner exile’ (Swift, 2008, p. 21-22). In both, Arendt observes

that modern men desire to escape from their condition as being-in-the-world.

With regard to the first flight ‘from the earth into the universe’, Arendt claims

that in the modern age we live in “a world thoroughly determined by a science and

technology....in which a knowledge acquired by selecting a point of reference outside

the earth is applied to earthly nature and the human artifice” (Arendt, 1958, p. 268). For

Arendt, the modern age began in the seventeenth century with Galileo’s discovery of the

telescope in order to search for the secrets of the universe and bring them down into


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human cognition. This means that the telescope puts “within the grasp of an earth-bound

creature and its body-bound sense what had seemed forever beyond his reach” (ibid.,

260). The invention of the telescope is accompanied by the discovery of the

Archimedian point, “a point outside the earth from which to unhinge the world” (ibid., p.

262). These discoveries were driven by the fear that our sense-organs deceive us in the

reception of reality and the doubt about the certainty of human perception.

Arendt observes that the loss of trust in the power of the world has led modern

sciences to turn towards experimentations in which the nature is utilized as mere objects

in order to be assured of the progress (Arendt, 1961, p. 55). Arendt acknowledges that

these discoveries have resulted in progress; the problem, however, is that modern

sciences have the potential not only to destroy all earthly organic life and even the earth

itself, but also to consider nature from a point of view outside the earth. It amounts to

the handling of nature from the perspective beyond human reach, outside the earth.13

Regarding the second flight ‘from the world into the self’, Arendt points it to

modern philosophy, initiated by Descartes that placed the radical doubt in a central

position. Philosophy after Descartes, Arendt claims, consists in “the articulations and

ramifications of doubting” (Arendt, 1958, p. 274). In an attempt to search for an order of

the science of clear and distinct knowledge in universal terms, Descartes returned to

himself and declared in certainty that it is the individual self with its thinking mind

13

Arendt writes: “For whatever we do today in physics—whether we release energy processes that

ordinarily go on only in the sun, or attempt to initiate in a test tube the processes of cosmic evolution, or

penetrate with the help of telescopes the cosmic space to a limit of two and even six billion light years, or

build machines for the production and control of energies unknown in the household of earthly nature, or

attain speeds in atomic accelerators which approach the speed of light, or produce elements not to be

found in nature, or disperse radioactive particles, created by us through the use of cosmic radiation, on the

earth—we always handle nature from a point in the universe outside the earth” (Arendt, 1958, p. 262).


63

which must be responsible for constructing such order. Descartes argues that what

certainly exists is the thinking part, while the body including the world may or may not

exist. The point is that there is a doubt about the existence of the human reality or the

world. Since everything else seems to be doubtful, the only way out is introspection,

which is, for Descartes, the source of certainty. In this way, the existence of the world

depends on the process of the human mind (Gill, 2002a), which is introspection

inasmuch as the objective reality is here dissolved into the subjective mental process.

In her biography of Rahel Varnhagen, Arendt traces the unworldly introspection

to the fascination with the inner world of ideas and experiences. Varnhagen and other

prominent figures in the German culture, she claims, were so unpolitical because they

have been blinded by this introspection (Canovan, 1995, p. 9). Fascinated by the

enlightenment’s promise of individual emancipation and freedom, Varnhagen and other

Jewish women in Germany attempted to erase their Judaism’s heritage and their

experiences as Jews for the sake of assimilating themselves into the German culture or

tradition. For Arendt, Varnhagen is the example of a person who denied the reality or

the world, which is her Judaism’s heritage for the sake of self-searching or introspection.

In fact, according to Arendt, introspection destroys the actuality by dissolving it into the

state of mind and “lends everything subjective an aura of objectivity, publicity, extreme

interest” (Arendt, 1957, p. 16). In other words, introspection dissolves the objective

reality into the subjective mental process. What is construed in the human mind is the

only thing that is certain, intelligible and so assures the existence of the outside. Here,


64

the human mind replaces the Archimedian point because the human reason has become

the point, where men can look upon the reality of the world. 14

For Arendt, the handling of nature from the outside of the earth’s perspective—

whether in modern sciences or modern philosophy—points to the fact that cosmic and

mental processes are imported into nature, which is called the ‘acting into nature’ that

presupposes “the godlike powers that mankind takes on in its delving into the

fundamental nuclear processes and the ultimate unpredictability of such powers and

interventions” (Janover, 2011, p. 27).

What concerns Arendt is the new emphasis that is placed upon the cosmic or

mental process and not on things-in-themselves. This emphasis de-emphasizes of things-

in-themselves or the objective world. In this context, the world loses not only its power

but also its meaningfulness. The meaning of the world or universe depends on the ideas

created in the human mind. This implies that there is no more sacred structures that once

were considered as the sources of meaning for human beings and society in general.

Consequently, the social arrangements and the modes of actions are open to be

redesigned. This is the point of the next section where I discuss how the social

arrangement is redesigned in modernity due to the rise of the social, which is closely

related to the progress of modern sciences.

14

The mind dominates the sophisticated world or must be in control and has the power to embody

material part or body, world, and passion. It is only the mind that can discern matters outside the mind

itself. Descartes writes: “Through this philosophy we could know the power and action of fire, water, air,

and the stars, the heavens and all the other bodies in our environment, …and we could use this

knowledge…for all the purposes for which it is appropriate and thus make ourselves, as it were, the lords

and masters of nature” (Descartes, 1985, 142-143).


65

1.2.2. The Rise of the Social

In order to understand Arendt’s critique of the rise of the social, it is necessary to

look at her project of rediscovering the distinction between the public and the private as

found in the ancient Greek understanding of politics. The private is the realm of natural

association whose center is the household (oikia) and the family. In the household

human beings live together in order to fullfill their biological needs for their

maintainence and survival through the labor of men and the labor of women in giving

birth. Thus, the driving force for the household is the necessity to preserve life ( Arendt,

1958, p. 30). The public realm (polis or city-state) arises out of and stands in direct

opposition to the household. The public signifies “the world itself, in so far as it is

common to all of us and distinguished from our privately owned place in it (ibid., p. 52).

The public realm (polis) is the sphere of plurality, freedom, and equality. It is a sphere

where people appear before another to reveal themselves as distinct persons in action

and speech. Although the public and the private realms are two distinct and separate

entities, but both are fundamental conditions for human existence. Arendt writes:

The rise of the city state meant that man received besides his private life a sort of

second life, his bios politikos. Now every citizen belongs to two orders of

existence; and there is a sharp distinction in his life between what is his own

(idion) and what is communal (koinon) (ibid., p. 24).

Besides the public and the private realms, there is also a third realm called the

social. The term social has no equivalent in Greek language and thought. It is only found

in Seneca’s translation of Aristotle’s zõon politikon as animal socialis and became the

standard translation through Thomas Aquinas (man is by nature political, that is, social).

But, the substitution of the social for the political, Arendt argues, betrays the original


66

Greek understanding of politics (ibid., p. 23). The social acquires its general meaning of

a human fundamental condition in Latin usage of the word societas which indicates an

alliance between people for a specific purpose (ibid., p. 23). Thus, in the context of

society, the term social means companionship since a man cannot live outside the

company of others. For the ancient Greek, the social is not a separate realm but as part

of the household because companionship or the tendency to live with others is imposed

on us by necessity for maintaining and preserving life (ibid. p. 24).

In the modern age, the social emerges as a separate realm or what Arendt calls

the rise of the social and bases its political form in the nation-state (ibid., p. 28). Here

the social refers to a kind of household space that is enormously extended and embraces

whole nations. It is like the administrative household for the nation-state because a

political community is administered in the image of a family. She calls this phenomenon

“collective housekeeping” in the sense that the collective of families are organized into

one super-human family called society (ibid., p. 28-29).

1.2.2.1. The Blurr of the Distinction between the Private and the Public Realms

The rise of the social blurrs the distinction between the private and the public

realms because it is neither private nor private. For Arendt, in the condition where the

distinction is disappeared, the narrow realm of the household is transcended and rises

into the realm of politics. Here the limits of the household is liberated and channeled

into the public. It is the realm where the private concern gains its public significance.


67

This is what Arendt means by the rise of the social or society.15

Society replaces

altogether the private and public realms. Arendt writes:

Society is the form in which the fact of mutual dependence for the sake of life

and nothing else assumes public significance and where the activities connected

with sheer survival—previously confined to the private sphere—are permitted to

appear in public (Arendt, 1958, p. 46).

The rise of the social brings about the worldlessness because the world loses its

significance due to the intrusion of the private realm. Arendt gives a concrete example

of the worldlessness created by the rise of the social in the blurring of the distinction

between property and wealth. Property, Arendt argues, is necessary in maintaining one’s

life. It also allows people to enter into the public realm in the sense that by having

property of his own, a person becomes free or no longer governed by the necessities of

life and thus is able to participate in the public life (ibid., 65). For Arendt, property

becomes the condition of worldliness, because it is only by owning property that one is

able to be part of the world, shared with others. In this sense, property has a worldly

dimension because it represents “the privately owned share of a common world and

therefore is the most elementary condition for man’s worldliness” (ibid., p. 253).

The problem actually emerges when property is transformed into wealth in

capitalism marked by the process of exploitation of peasants or laborers. In the capitalist

society, laborers lose their stable place in the world and are not protected—either by

15

Arendt writes: “The bringing of all human activities into the private realm and the modeling of all

human relationships upon the example of the household reached far into the specifically medieval

professional organizations in the cities themselves, the guilds, confrèríes, and compagnos, and even into

the early business companies where the original joint household would seem to be indicated by the very

word company... What distinguishes this essentially Christian attitude towards politics from the modern

reality is not so much the recognition of a common good as the exclusivity of the private sphere and the

absence of that curiously hybrid realm [public realm] where private interests assume public significance

that we call society” (Arendt, 1958, p. 35).


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their own property or family (Gill, 2000b). For Arendt, wealth is worldless because it

replaces the immobile, durable and worldly property and has the tendency to create a

fluid or unstable commercial society. This consumer’ society, Arendt argues, “cannot

possibly know how to take care of a world and the things which belongs exclusively to

the space of worldly appearances, because its central attitude toward all objects, the

attitude of consumption, spells ruin to everything it touches” (Arendt, 1961, p. 211).

Thus, for Arendt it is necessary to keep the distinction between property and wealth.

The extension of the household reaches its peak in capitalism and imperialism

where the social and economic matters become the main concern of national

bureaucracy (Young-Bruehl, 1982, p. 320). In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt

argues that capitalism and imperialism are related. In Arendt’s view, the driving force of

imperialism is the expansion. As she puts it: “Expansion as a permanent and supreme

aim of politics is the central political idea of imperialism” (Arendt, 1951, 125). The

imperial expansion was driven by the social and economic interests. Economics

becomes the leitmotive of the states to expand their political power. In so doing, the

states are concerned more with accumulating wealth than with the well-being of citizens.

This phenomenon is known as the colonialization of the political, in which the state

turns away from its responsibility to the public matters and submits itself into the forces

or imperatives of the social. In this context, politics becomes a part of social life. This is

clear in a bourgeois society as the consequence of imperialism. Arendt writes:

Imperialism was born when the ruling class in capitalist production came up

against national limitations to its economic expansion. The bourgeoisie turned to

politics out of economic necessity; for if it did not want to give up the capitalist

system whose inherent law is constant economic growth, it had to impose this


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law upon its home government and to proclaim expansion to an ultimate political

goal of foreign policy (ibid. p. 126).

Furthermore, when the regimes of the capitalist states concentrate on maximizing

profit and accumulating capital, they disregard the role of the people and, worse, the

states purposely force citizens to lose their common interest, have no goal to obtain in

their lives, and become indifferent to the societal matters. In the totalitarian states,

Arendt observes that there is a state-organized effort to deprive citizens of their active

participation in the social and economic life. In striving for the capital accumulation, the

state is turned into ‘a highly atomized society’ because it is structured on the basis of

competitiveness (ibid. p. 310). The impact of this process is that those citizens who

fulfill these criteria are allowed to participate in the states and those who do not are

automatically eliminated. The fact shows that only few citizens can attain it and the

majority of people cannot. As a result, the majority of citizens are “either live desperate

lonely separation or are pressed together into a mass (Arendt, 1961, p. 89-90).

1.2.2.2. Mass Society

Arendt also finds the loss of the power of the world in the modern phenomenon

of mass society as the product of the rise of the social. In The Human Condition, Arendt

claims that mass society is marked by conformity. In fact, the conformity becomes the

mode of life of the society. The rise of the social, Arendt argues, destroys the

distinctiveness of each individual because society requires its members to conform

themselves into ‘a certain type of behavior’ (Arendt, 1958, p. 40). People are required to

act as one huge family and to have only one opinion and interest. There is no room for

people to differentiate themselves either in acting or speaking. It is tantamount to the


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destruction of the plurality of perspectives and marks the end of the common world

because the world is always plural (Hull, 2002, p. 68). It is not Man but men who inhabit

the world and the world itself is enacted when the plurality of men together in action and

speech. Arendt sees in the rise of the social the condition that the common world of

deliberate and joint action is fragmented into solipsistic and unreflective behavior. She

claims that people in the mass society “are all imprisoned in the subjectivity of their own

singular experience” and the common world ends when “it is seen only under one aspect

and is permitted to present itself in only one perspective” (Arendt, 1958, p. 58).

Conformity eliminates the freedom of people to act. Since people are deprived of

the opportunity to talk about their lives’ story and the value of the products of their

works, then their destiny is decided not by their own free action but by an elite’s group

who happen to possess either economic or political power. As Richard Gill claims,

worldlessness means the “loss of the sense of reality as individuals are thrown back

upon their own subjective experiences and natural drives, tending less to initiate

spontaneous actions than to conform to predictable patterns of behavior” (Gill, 200b).

Arendt observes that the rise of the social, along with the curious neurotic

concern with the self as the product of introspection, described above, are the

overpowering events that have made stories disappear. Consequently, people have

nothing to tell because what they have are not their distinct life’s stories but the

variations of identical experiences (Arendt &McCarthy, 1995, p. 291). Moreover, the

objective world or things-in-between that provide the space for people to appear before

one another and to act and tell their life stories, has been destroyed by the emergence of


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mass society in the midst of modern capitalist society. In the mass society, the world

loses its power to gather people together, to relate and separate them. Arendt illustrates

this situation as follows:

The weirdness of this situation resembles a spiritualistic séance where a number

of people gathered around a table might suddenly, through some magic trick, see

the table vanish from their midst, so that two persons sitting opposite each other

were no longer separated but also would be entirely unrelated to each other by

anything tangible (Arendt, 1958, p. 53).

In the Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt analyzes the totalitarian attempt to

establish the absolute power. In favor of a single party, totalitarian regimes abolished all

other parties in order to establish the absolute power and in doing so break down all

social and class formations in order to create a mass society (Young-Bruehl, 2006, p.

38). Totalitarian regimes organize masses, the sheer force numbers of people, for the

purpose of gaining the support. In order to attain this purpose, totalitarian regimes have

employed total terror, including secret police and established concentration camps.

Arendt obseves that in totalitarianism, citizens are treated as masses, where they

are not held together by a consciousness of common interest and they lack of the

determined, limited and obtainable goals as found in the social classes. In other words,

in totalitarian masses, people are not allowed to have their own interests and to articulate

their goals as a group. The consequence of organizing people into masses is the people’s

indifference to public affairs and neutrality on political issues. The problem with treating

people as masses, Arendt claims, is not the brutality this may create or the consequent

unprogressiveness of people, but their isolation of people as a group and the destruction

of human relationships. For Arendt, totalitarianism becomes a new form of government


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that destroys politics because it methodically eliminates speaking and acting human

beings and attacks the very humanity of people. It thus makes people superfluous as

human beings (Young-Bruehl, 2006, p. 39).

1.3. Modern Worldlessness and Crimes against Humanity

Modern worldlessness as described above is the condition out of which

totalitarianism emerged. It has driven the European states to become authoritarian during

the first half of the twentieth century. The totalitarian ideology has generated ‘organized

loneliness’, which is the common ground for terror and the essence of totalitarian

regimes. Totalitarian ideology serves as a theoretical framework for totalitarian regimes

in their desire for total domination in order to destroy the world and everything in it,

including other human beings. This domination is mainly intended to make people

superfluous. Arendt writes: “Totalitarianism strives not toward despotic rule over men,

but toward a system in which men are superfluous” (Arendt, 1951, p. 457). In other

words, the great danger of totalitarianism is the isolation of people, their entire

atomization and superfluousness.

For Arendt, totalitarianism is, as McCarthy puts it: “a scheme in the minds of

certain displaced men to rob other men of their sense of reality” (Arendt & McCarthy,

1985, p. 2). By making people superfluous, totalitarian regimes believe that people can

easily be so turned as to be violent or exposed to violence. In the letter to Jaspers in

March 1951, Arendt describes her understanding of radical evil that is related to

superfluoussness, a form of worldlessness. For Arendt, radical evil has to do with the


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superfluity of men as men (Young-Bruehl, 1982, p. 255). This is exactly what Arendt

means by the inseparability of worldlessness and the crimes against humanity.

1.3.1. Worldlessness and Violent Action

According to Arendt, the condition of worldlessness has generated the violent

attitude of modern men or made them radically evil. This is clearly seen in Eichmann

and other Nazis in Germany. She explores this point in her report on the trial of

Eichmann, a series of articles in the New Yorker, published in book form called

Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). In this book, Arendt

attempts to relate the individual moral character—good or bad—to community in

totalitarianism, through her description of evil as banal because evil comes to exist in a

condition where people are being abandoned or made superfluous.

In order to understand the banality of Eichmann’s evil, let us look at the

condition that has made him such as a monstrous person. Eichmann, in Arendt’s view,

was a ‘victim’ of a totalitarian ideology called Nazism; he was an agent of

totalitarianism, the instrument of an evil political system. Hitler’s ideology changed not

only how people acted or behaved to one another but also human nature itself. Arendt

claims that the aim of a totalitarian ideology is to transform human nature by inducing

them to become ideological creatures (Arendt, 1951, p. 432). What Arendt stresses is the

fact that it is only when people have been possessed by ideas or more accurately, by a

system of ideas (ideology) that they turned to be vicious people (Kateb, 2002, p. 321).

In the case of Nazism, the transformation of human nature was carried out

through the establishment of concentration camps, which Arendt describes as the


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fabrication of hell on earth. Arendt divides three types of death camps that correspond to

the concept of life after death; hades, purgatory, and hell. Of the three types, Arendt is

concerned more with the third type called hell because it was the embodiment of Hitler’s

concentration camps (Arendt, 1951, p. 445). The image of hell in the form of

concentration camps is meant to construct the fantasy that human beings can be

omnipotent. Arendt writes: "The totalitarian hell proves only that the power of man is

greater than they ever dare to think, and that man can realize hellish fantasies without

making the sky fall or the earth open” (ibid. p. 446). The desire for omnipotence is

called ‘the madness for the superlative,’ “a madness that brings God down to earth in the

figure of a particular omnipotent individual” (Birmingham, 2006, p. 108). Through this

desire, the Nazi regime wanted to totally dominate the world, achieved through

eliminating plurality in favor of ‘being one’ or the only one. Hitler as Führer desired the

absolute power, a godlike power on earth.

One way of concretizing the Nazi ideology is through the establishment of

concentration camps in which the desire for absolute power was transferred into the

mind of the ordinary Germans and the Nazis. In favor of being omnipotence, they were

driven to carry out the order of transporting, organizing, and then murdering the inmates.

Because of the fantasy of omnipotence, the Nazis were reluctant to give in to their vices

and resisted the temptation to do the good. This resistance occurs through the Nazi’s

imperative of obedience and self-sacrifice. Arendt claims:

Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it—

the quality of temptation. Many Germans and many Nazis...must have been

tempted not to murder...but God knows, they had learned how to resist

temptation (Arendt, 1963, p. 150).


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The perfect example of this is Adolf Eichmann. The imperative of the Nazi

regime has stimulated Eichmann’s own consciousness and thus his conscience was

carried away and caught up in the voice of others. Eichmann’ voice had been the voice

of Himmler. In this way, Hitler’ desire and fantasy, voiced by Himmler, became

Eichmann’s own desire and fantasies (Birmingham, 2006, p. 109). Arendt argues that

the sacrifice of Eichmann’s desire through the elated voice of conscience is

accomplished by turning the basic instinct of pity back to oneself. “The trick used by

Himmler consisted in turning these instincts around, as it were, in directing them toward

the self” (Arendt, 1093, p. 106). That means that the sacrifice of desire for duty displays

Eichmann’ fantasy of being omnipotent as well. In this context, Hitler’s desire to be an

absolute Führer was transferred into the mind of Eichmann.

This fantasy has driven Eichmann to be an agent of the state’s criminal policies.

Consequently, his crime represents a new form of evil, which Arendt calls as the

banality of evil, referring to “the condition of a humanity that has been forsaken,

banished” (Birmingham, 2006, p. 112). In other words, totalitarianism has attacked

Eichmann’s existential conditions, namely public freedom and space that allow one to

think and act. Thus, the destruction of these conditions means the demolition of human

freedom and public space; and the demolition of both means the deprivation of human

capacity for acting and thinking. It is clear that Arendt is concerned with the phenomena

or what appears and not with a supposed or pictorial reality that lies behind the

phenomenon. In dealing with evil, Arendt focuses on the existential condition of human


76

life and not on a hidden nature or an invisible essence. In her reply to Eric Voegelin,16

Arendt writes: “The success of totalitarianism is identical with a much more radical

liquidation of freedom as a political and as a human reality than anything we have seen

before” (Arendt, 1994, p. 402). It is clear that Arendt is concerned with the phenomena

or what appears and not with a supposed or pictorial reality that lies behind the

phenomenon. For instance, in dealing with evil, Arendt focuses on the existential

condition of human life and not on a hidden nature or an invisible essence.

Arendt strongly believes that when people are not able to think and lose their

freedom to act, it is more likely that they are easily mobilized especially by the state to

take part in policies that purport evil. In this context, Arendt argues that evil is banal

because people act out of ideals which they had taken over from others without

understanding them. For instance, the Nazis acted out of the ideal of being omnipotence

imposed by Hitler and his companions. The inability to think makes people ‘hollow’

because they do not know what they are doing and thus fail to recognize the negative

impacts of their action on others. In other words, for Arendt, the evildoer is a ‘hollow

16

Eric Voegelin was a reviewer of Arendt’s book The Origins of Totalitarianism. Among other things,

Voegelin dissatisfied with Arendt’s portraits of the political and moral breakdown that are rooted in the

condition of worldlessness in the sense that the situation or reality such as totalitarianism could change

human nature. According to Voegelin, Arendt’s claim is convincing but she failed to recognize diverse

response to the breakdown which is rooted in the potentiality of human nature rather than in the situation

itself. For Voegelin, human nature as such is unchangeable and that totalitarianism originated from the

spiritual disease of agnoticism. In her response, Arendt expounds fully her method of dealing with

totalitarianism that is using historical elements to argue against history. In this context, Arendt claims that

her book The Origins of Totalitarianism does not deal with the origins of totalitarianism, but gives a

historical account of the elements which crystalized into totalitarianism such anti-Semitism and

imperialism. She writes: “I did not write a history of totalitarianism, but an analysis in terms of history; I

did not write a history of anti-Semitism or of imperialism, but analyzed the elements of Jew-hatred and the

elements of expansion insofar as these elements were still clear visible and played a decisive role in the

totalitarian phenomenon itself.” This is exactly what Arendt discovers when she deals with the historical

elements of Jew-hatred and expansion. For Arendt, these elemental structures of totalitarianism and

domination actually have liquidated human freedom and reality to act and think (Arendt, 1994, 409-417).


77

man’, “emptied of whatever it is that distinguishes human beings as human” and the

consequence of a hollow man’s act is called banality, the sheer mechanical

thoughtlessness” (Lang, 1988, p. 269).

In the case of Eichmann, he was superfluous as a human being, deprived of his

individuality as a free and thinking person. Although he appeared as a normal person,

whether during the Holocaust or at the trial in Jerusalem, in fact he lacked of the

capacity for freedom as well as for thinking or understanding (ibid., p. 272). Eichmann

was an ordinary man, but his lack of thinking and freedom, generated by Hitler’s

ideology (Nazism) has made him a monstrous person. He is the perfect example of how

worldlessness in the form of superfluousness can be the driving force of a violent action.

In this context, Eichmann represents the terrorists and fundamentalists in our time that

have been driven to violent actions because of ideals induced by certain ideologies or

religions. They are the victims of the politic of brainwashing where people are deprived

of their own ideals or desires and replace them with other ideals coming from the

outside. In the condition of being deprived, terrorists are also not able to think and

recognize the negative impacts of their actions on other people. The ideals or closed

systems have closed their minds from the reality or the common world.

1.3.2. Worldlessness and the Loss of Right to Have Rights

Besides driving people to be violent actors, worldlessness also renders people

vulnerable, in the sense that they are easily exposed to crimes such as experienced by

Jewish people during the Holocaust. For Arendt, the Holocaust is not necessarily a

unique event due to the large number of victims and suffering in the history, but a


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unique horror that negated modernity’s universalism, absolutism, and ideology (Crick,

1997, p. 78). It marks the failure of modernity because instead of bringing about a

healthy human condition, where human beings can freely and meaningfully act and

speak as equals, modernity has succeeded in creating a worldless or inhuman condition.

It has generated worldlessness, which Arendt considers as the precondition for crimes

against humanity, understood as the act of genocide perpetrated against a people. The

Jews have been killed because they were considered as a group of people who had no

right to be on earth. This implies that in the condition of worldlessness, people lost their

rights to have rights. They become the rightless people.

The inseparability between crimes against humanity and worldlessness shows the

fact that Arendt’s own account of human rights is based neither on moral or legal theory,

but instead on political theory. She reflects on human rights from the perspective of

politics and not from the universal human rights’ points of view. Arendt is dissatisfied

with the modern philosophical idea that human rights are given to us by nature in the

sense that these rights are inalienable.17

This dissatisfaction has driven Arendt to adopt

Burke’s idea where he claims that human existence as such is not the source of human

rights. Rather, it is relied upon the authoritative forms of recognition found in certain

communities, as quoted by Arendt:

According to Burke, the rights which we enjoy springs ‘from within the nation,’

so that neither natural law, nor divine command, nor any concept of mankind

17

A modern philosopher, John Locke claims that human rights precede all agreement between people or

social contract. For instance, in his theory of property, he asserts that individual’s right to property

because he or she “mixes his labor with it.” This right is then protected by a constitution and laws of

property as the product of human agreement. In other words, the purpose of contractual agreement is to

guarantee the individual’s right to property. That means, the right is prior to any contractual agreement

(Robert C. Solomon and Kathleen M. Higgins, 1996, p. 199).


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such as Robespierre’s human race, the sovereign of the earth, are needed as a

source of law (Arendt, 1951, p. 295).

Following this idea, Arendt claims that human rights are not natural. They are

conventional because they are recognized through the human agreement and when

people are living together. Without the presence of others to recognize us, there is no

such thing as right. Like our action requires the presence of others and the meaning of

our action depends on the faculty of speech, our rights also requires the presence of

others and the meaning of our existence depends on the agreement after deliberating in

the spirit of togetherness. One cannot claim his or her rights in isolation. Rather, it is

only in the midst or in the presence of others, one’s rights are recognized. Thus, for

Arendt, as Serena Parekh puts it: “Human rights are intersubjective, created through our

capacity for making promises, and guaranteed through the power that is rooted in

natality, is grounded on a particular view of the common world” (Parekh, 2008, 69).

Although Arendt draws from Burke’s idea that human rights are forms of

recognition, but she disagrees with Burke’s assertion that the recognition is granted by a

certain political community where people belong to. The reason, as Jeffrey Isaac claims,

is that the phenomena of statelessness, uprootedness and superfluousness that generate

crimes are beyond the border of a political community. They “fall between the crack of

nationals or other authoritative political identities and outside officially recognized

categories of memberships” (Isaac, 1996, p. 64). Thus, if human rights are tied to the

recognition granted by a determinate political community, then there is little ground for

defending those rights, which are universally accepted (ibid. p. 64)). Furthermore,

Arendt’s disagreement with Burke is also justified from her emphasis that the tragedy of


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the Holocaust was not against the Jewish people as members of certain political

community, but it was against humanity. This is the reason why in her writings, she

elaborates in detail the loss of the right to have rights of refugees, national minorities,

migrants, and the unemployed people—she calls it superfluousness or statelessness.

In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt traces the loss of the right to have

rights to the failure of the nation-states that began in the late nineteenth century with

anti-Semitism and imperialism and reached its climax in the middle of the twentieth

century with totalitarianism. The idea of the nation-states emerged as a response to the

growth of ethnic groups within the state that demanded for the recognition of their

rights. William Batkay claims that the nation-states are based on the premise that a state

should be the political embodiment of a racial or ethnic nation. This is the replacement

of a state that is based on individual or citizen’s right (Batkay, 1995, p. 746). The nation-

state is reflected in the Westphalian system, “the nation-state survived as an organized

political community in which citizens were granted rights and a meaningful space

among equals” (Rensman, 2012, p. 132).

However, the problem with the nation-state is that it is contradictory because

since the beginning, the nation-state has been based on the principle of ‘nationality’. In

other words, the principle of nationality is the founding element of a nation-state. But,

the fact shows that, in the beginning of twentieth century, this principle was the driving

force of the expulsion of citizens and minorities from some of European nation-states. It

was on the basis of the principle of nationality that the nation-states expelled their own

citizens, particularly minorities and rendered them superfluous. Thus, minorities were


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not protected in their own nation-states and at the same time could not find any

protection from international authority or even from other countries (ibid., p. 132-133).

This is what Arendt calls as the decline or crisis of the nation-states which were

unable to cope with the emergence of large ethnic minorities within the existing states.

The obsession with national or ethnic rights that have generated both the domination of

one ethnic group over the others and the war between the ethnic’s nations (Batkay, 1995,

p. 746). This is exactly what Arendt sees in anti-Semitic and imperial politics. For

Arendt, nationalism easily turns into racism and anti-Semitism that provides the impetus

for the hate against minority. The first victim of the change from individual- or citizen-

based state to ethnic-based state is the Jews. Arendt claims that anti-Semitism grew in

propotion as the nation-states declined (Arendt, 1951, p. 4).

What concerns Arendt in anti-Semitism is the politicization of this social

discrimination, in the sense that the hate or discriminating attitude is formalized by the

political leaders in order to maintain their power and carry out their hidden agenda. In

Arendt’s view, the driving force of the hate towards Jewish people is political (ibid., p.

87). One good example of the politicization of such social phenomenon was Hitler’s

nationalism. When he came into power in 1933, Hitler declared: ‘Germany for the ethnic

Germans’ or ‘Germany is not an immigrant state’. Of course this pronouncement

brought about the spread of prejudices and the hate against minority groups, particularly

the Jews firstly in Germany and then in the other European states (Buckler, 2011, p. 62).

The decline of the nation-states can also be seen in imperialism, which was

driven by what Steve Buckler calls its ‘depoliticizing mentality’ (ibid., p. 64).


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Imperialism has marginalized people who lost their right to belong to a political

community and, worse, were deprived of their active participation in the political life

(Isaak, 1996, p. 62). This is found in a bureaucracy, where the state is ruled by the few

or the elites who wield political or economic power. In this way, the large numbers of

ordinary citizens are disempowered and the states become “the precious cement for

binding together a centralized state and an atomized society” (Arendt, 1951, p. 231).

Arendt observes that national sovereignty has thereby deprived the majority of people of

their right to have rights. In fact, she discovers that in modern worldlessness human

rights are at stake because the loss of polity refers to the loss of “a worldly context in

which human life can have meaning and in which humans recognize one another as free

and equals (Rensman, 2012, p. 133).

The decline of nation-states as described above has brought about the loss of

people’s right to have rights. There are three indications of this phenomenon, the first of

which is “the loss of their homes” (Arendt, 1951, p. 290). Home is a special entity and

significant space because in a home we find security and even the meaning of our lives.

When homes are destroyed, then the human world that defines human existence and

meaning is also destroyed. Arendt is not only concerned with the loss of the homes, but

also with the difficulty of finding a new home or a new place for human shelters.

Describing the condition of migrants, Arendt writes:

What is unprecedented is not the loss of a home but the impossibility of finding a

new one. Suddenly, there is no place on earth where migrants could go without

the severest restrictions, no country where they would be assimilated, no territory

where they could found a new community of their own (ibid., p. 290).


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Second, there is “the loss of government protection” (ibid. p. 290). Here, Arendt

points to the people who are looking for political asylum. These people, she argues, are

not politically and legally protected in their own country and are uncertain to find

protection in other countries. What is unprecedented in this context is that people do not

belong to any community. And since there is no country in the world which wants to

claim them, they then remain superfluous. This is exactly what the Nazi regime did to

the Jewish people. Arendt claims: “The Nazis started their extermination of Jews by first

depriving them of all legal status (...) and cutting them off from the world of the living

by herding them into ghettos and concentration camps” (ibid., p. 293).

Third, there is the loss of humanity where human capacity of action and speech

are destroyed: “[People] are deprived not of the right to freedom, but of the right to

action; not of the right to think whatever they please, but of the right to opinion”

(Arendt, 1951, p. 294). The complete destruction of humanity is seen in the Nazi’s

concentration camps where people were not only deprived of their right to action and

opinion, but also were treated as thing-like so that they can be predicted and calculated.

Their spontaneity and conditioned being were denied. In concentration camps, Arendt

claims, Jewish people were not treated: first, as judicial beings because they were

arbitrarily arrested and put into camps; second, as moral beings because they were

completely cut off from the world; and third, as distinct individual beings because they

were permanently and institutionally tortured (Arendt, 1950, p. 372).

It becomes clear that for Arendt, the loss of ‘the right to have right’ particularly

the right to be a member of a political community is the preconditions for the


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annihilation of the Jewish people in the concentration camps. Before they were killed,

they were first made superfluous, uprooted, and stateless. They were stripped of their

citizenship. For Arendt, the loss of citizenship is similar to the loss of worldliness or the

condition of human existence. In fact, Arendt’s thinking on crimes against humanity is

informed by her awareness of dehumanization brought about by racism, imperialism,

colonialism, militarism, and bureaucratic domination in modern society and politics.

That means, as Hayden argues, that crimes against humanity are closely related to the

modern structure and condition of superfluousnes, created and maintained by “political,

economic, and social structures, attitudes and beliefs that normalize and legitimize

extreme deprivation and exclusion” (Hayden, 2010, p. 458).

Arendt’s idea that crimes against humanity are related to the condition of

worldlessness is still seen in our times. In the recent years, many forms of worldlessness

have generated crimes, such as the deprivation of people’s right to act and speak in the

public realm, the discrimination against minority groups, and countless other social and

economic injustices. For Arendt, in order to eradicate these crimes, it is not enough to

focus only on the character and intention of the criminals. What is required is a

comprehensive strategy by creating a human condition where people have the freedom

to act and speak, to easily find the government’s protection and the room for developing

their own lives in unforced situation. Arendt’s description of the inseparability of

worldlessness and crimes against humanity does not mean that she defends the

criminals. Her main point is to consider a crime in the broader context in order to get a

whole picture of why such a cruelty could happen.


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CHAPTER TWO:

THINKING ABOUT THE WORLD AND RESPONSIBILITY

In order overcome the predicament of human rights posed by modernity in the

form of modern worldlessness as described in Chapter One, Arendt proposes a new and

distinct concept of the world. Along with her predecessors, Nietzsche and Heidegger,

Arendt sees the urgency of dealing with the nihilistic thinking that has brought about the

modern worldlessness. However, each one of them takes a different stance regarding the

proper way of facing this phenomenon. Before a valueless world, Nietzsche foresees a

new age where each ‘free spirit’ will posit or create his or her own values. Nietzsche

believes that human beings are the ones who give meaning and value to the things since

there is nothing valuable in itself or naturally (Nietzsche, 2001, p. 171). As a result, each

individual should create values that are appropriate to his or her own condition in the

world. To some extent, Nietzsche’s emphasis on the human creation of values inspires

us to be critical of any existing value and to invent or discover values that are

appropriate to our condition. Nietzsche urges us to direct our energies back into the life

of this world, considered as our main source of intuition and inspiration.

As a phenomenologist, Heidegger recognizes the importance of the inter-

subjectivity that enables humans to derive meaning from the world. Consequently, he

encourages our involvement within a primordially and naturally meaningful world,


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believing that its structure can orient human life only if “man opens his eyes and ears,

unlocks his heart and gives himself over to meditating and striving, shaping and

working, entreating and thanking” (Heidegger, 1988, p. 18-19). As long as our cultural

practices remain unarticulated, they can direct our activities and make our lives

meaningful. Here Heidegger emphasizes the importance of understanding “the shared

every day skill, concerns, and practices”, available in one’s situation because it is only in

this way that people are able to "make sense of the world” (Dreyfus, 2013, p. 9). It

seems that Heidegger shifts the focus of understanding the world from interpretation

using theoretical frameworks to existential understanding, a direct, non-mediated,

authentic way of understanding being in the world. It is an effort to gradually unveil the

layers of traditions back to the source, Dasein itself.

Like Heidegger, Arendt also claims that the reductive thinking destroys the

meaning or value of reality or experience; thus, it would be necessary to re-think about

the worldly realities as they actually show themselves to us. Here, Arendt proposes a

new way of thinking that proceeds not from the absolute ideas or concepts but from the

world that is always plural. For Arendt, the concrete events of the world are the reliable

sources and point of departure for thought. On this ground, she attempts to conceive the

world as something that lies in-between people, constituted jointly by fabricated things

and human affairs. Since this is a world created together by human action and speech,

then it is frail and contingent. Human beings are thus required to be responsible for what

they have created in common. Responsibility for the world is the ethical character of

Arendt’s thought. This responsibility is generated when we think about the world where


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we live in. Thus, this chapter will focus on her notion of the world as human creation,

with responsibility as the appropriate response to the frailty of the human world.

2.1. Thinking about the World

Before expounding on Arendt’s specific idea of thinking about the world, it is

necessary to look at what thinking means for her. According to Arendt, thinking is not

rationality or reason. Here she follows Heidegger’s line of thought denying that thinking

is having an opinion or representing human affairs; nor is it doing an inference or

drawing a valid conclusion from premises or concepts (Gray, 1968, p. x). There are two

reasons why Arendt rejects the equation of thinking to reason. First, reason is seductive

in so far as it is loaded with answers. In reasoning, she argues, people intend to find a

justification for their own behavior, action and belief. Reason is thus intrumentalized for

a hidden agenda or purpose. It is even meant to justify sometimes that ought to be un-

thinkable. Ordinary people such as the Nazis justified their evil action by arguing or

reasoning that they just followed the order of higher authority. In our time, terrorists

provide the same reason for their act of violence whether religious or ideological. What

we find in these examples is the treatment of reason as a form of escape.

Second, reasoning is secretive. Arendt calls it ‘ice-cold reasoning’ because it is

done in the loneliness of a fantasized world where one relies only upon him or herself

and has no relationship with others. In this context, reason is ‘inner coercion’ for a self-

justification or self-confirmation. Here, reason fits human beings “into the iron band of

terror” (Arendt, 1951, p. 478). This is exactly what Arendt sees in the logicality of

ideological thinking as displayed by totalitarian regimes, such as Hitler’s in Germany.


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Therefore, she claims that thinking should not be equated with that “ability of logical

reasoning whose premise is the self-evident” (ibid., p. 477).

In contrast to reasoning, the precondition for the activity of thinking is solitude,

which is not the same with loneliness because “solitude requires being alone whereas

loneliness shows itself most sharply in comapny with others” (ibid., p. 476). A solitary

man is alone with him- or herself, while a lonely man, though in the midst of others, has

lost the experience of being with others. Thus, for Arendt, it is in the condition of

solitude and not loneliness that human beings exercise their capacity of thinking. Arendt

draws the foundation of thinking in solitude not from a theory but from a model, figure,

or the example of thinker who “in his person unified two apparently contradictory

passions, for thinking and acting” (Arendt, 1978, p. 167). There are two important

figures who, in Arendt’s view, were able to move back and forth between experience in

the world of appearances (acting) and the need for reflecting on them (thinking),

namely, Karl Jaspers and Socrates.

In her article “Karl Jaspers: A Laudatio,” published in Men in Dark Times,

Arendt admires Jaspers’s idea of humanitas, which she defines as “something that was

the very height of humanness because it was valid without being objective (Arendt,

1955, p. 73). Humanitas is not an object to be objectively demonstrated or a property of

an isolated subject, but a “personal element beyond the control of the subject” (ibid., p.

73). Although Jaspers was entirely separate, independent and alone in the dark times

brought about by the Nazi regime, but in his solitude he thought of public affairs that

concerned humanitas as a whole. In this way, Jaspers represents the philosophers who


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are at home because his home or world is his mind, but his thought although it is partial,

remains intact with the world and people in it (ibid. p. 79). Solitude for Jaspers is, as

Berkowitz puts it: “A refuge that harbors the proper realm of thinking. And not simply

thinking. The solitary act of thinking is, for Arendt, inevitably an activity of politics”

(Berkowitz, 2010, p. 241).

With regard to Socrates, Arendt considers him as a pure example of a thinking

man. Socrates is an example of a thinker whose thinking interrupts the citizens’ lives

and drives them away from conformity—whether to opinion (doxa) or to socially

accepted norms or values or types of behavior. As Berkowitz claims, Socrates constantly

dialogues with himself and the product of this dialogue “stings citizens and also himself

and thus arouses them from the satin sleep of conformity to the activity of thinking”

(Berkowitz, 2010, p. 241). His trial and death speaks clearly about this point. Instead of

conforming to the common opinion held and promoted by the Sophists and others

political authorities of Athens, Socrates preferred going on thinking by challenging

citizens, particularly young people to find the truth in their own opinion.

Socrates acknowledged that doxa or opinion is inevitable in thinking, but it must

be treated as partial truth and not as an absolute truth. Consequently, a doxa must be

examined in a constant dialogue either with oneself or with others. The method of doing

dialogue, 18

what is now commonly known as Socratic thinking is “talking something

18

Plato’s dialogue is aporetic in the sense that it leads nowhere or goes around in circle. In a dialogue a

common opinion (doxa is examined). That means that a doxa is treated as a partial knowledge that needs

to be clarified in a constant dialogue in order to find its truthful meaning of that doxa. For instance, in

order to be a just person, one must know what justice is. One must have an a priori knowledge about it.

Althought that knowledge is unexamined and partial, it is necessary to have it in order to inquiry into what

justice is (Arendt, 1978, p. 169).


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through, but this dialectic brings forth truth not by destroying doxa, but on the contrary

by revealing doxa in its own truthfulness” (Arendt, 2005, p. 15). This dialogue is

exemplified in friendship. After describing the importance of friendship as the bond of

communities whether in Plato’s or Aristotle’s thought, Arendt concludes that a truthful

dialogue between friends is the element of friendship. In dialogue, one is led to

comprehend the specificity of the common world that appears to the others. This means

that one is required to understand the world from his friends’ perspectives because “this

kind of understanding is the political kind of insight par excellence” (ibid., p. 18).

Dialogue is used by Plato as the instrument to pass on his idea to others through

Socrates. In all of Plato’s dialogues, Socrates appears to be the one who knows himself

before engaging in a dialogue with the interlocutors. This means, for Socrates, that

knowing oneself is the prerequisite before one can know how to live with others: “Only

he who knows how to live with himself is fit to live with others” (ibid. p. 21). In other

words, in a dialogue of solitude, Socrates presents himself as a distinct person in the

midst of humanity or the plurality of men. In solitude, Socrates is not alone but with

himself, because he is in a situation of a constant dialogue of the ‘two-in-one’.

What Arendt gathers from these two models or figures is that thinking is done in

solitude when it is a dialogue between me and myself. However, this dialogue of the

two-in-one “does not lose contact with the world of my fellowmen because they are

represented in the self with whom I lead the dialogue of thought” (Arendt, 1951, p. 476).

This dialogic thinking does not need pillars, standards, or traditions. What is needed is

“to look around to that we are standing in the midst of a veritable rubble heap of such


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pillars” (Arendt, 1955, p. 10). In other words, dialogic thinking is an activity that takes

into account the surrounding realities.

Therefore, instead of classifying thinking as an essential element of vita

contemplativa as found in Greek philosophers, Arendt argues that thinking should be an

integral part of vita activa. Thinking is necessarily an action. This is the main idea of

Arendt’s book, The Life of the Mind, where she relates thinking to acting. Arendt

discovers the relationship between thinking and acting in the Greek word schole, which

literally means leisure and is in contrast with a-scholia (occupation), a state of being

deprived of leisure.19

According to Arendt, the word schole is not spare time or

inactivity; rather, it is a deliberate act of holding oneself back from ordinary activities in

order to contemplate the whole (Arendt, 1978, p. 93-94). A similar interpretation is

found among Aristotelian scholars who emphasize Aristotle’s idea of the active

participation in politics. 20

In line with this thought, Arendt considers thinking as a kind

of action: “When everybody is swept away unthinkingly by what everybody else does

19

Aristotle was the first to consider schole as an essential element of vita contemplativa. In fact, for

Aristotle, leisure appears to be the ethical goal of the ideal state, which is the peacefulness of the city as a

whole. He writes: “There must be war for the sake of peace, business for the sake of leisure, things useful

and necessary for the sake of things honorable” (Aristotle, Politics 1333 a 35-37). 20

Ernest Barker, for instance, claims that leisure as Aristotle understood it is not laziness or passivity, but

a noble activity which is chosen for its own sake. He admits that when Aristotle speaks of leisure, “it is

not a bare leisure, but a full and concrete leisure, which must have a content of proper action” (Barker,

1959, p. 437). The same interpretation comes from Richard Mulgan who attempts to solve a seemingly

inconsistency in Aristotle’s treatment of active or political participation. On the one hand, Aristotle seems

to support the practice of engaging oneself in politics in order to achieve his or her goal in life as found in

Politics. On the other hand, there is an indication that Aristotle suggests staying away from politics,

particularly in his discussion of three kinds of life in Nicomachean Ethics, namely the life of seeking

pleasure, the life of seeking political achievement, and the life of thinking. Among the three, Aristotle

claimed that the life of thinking or philosophical life is the highest of all. Therefore, men must withdraw

themselves from un-leisured activities in order to pursue philosophy (Aristotle, NE 1095 b 17). According

to Mulgan, Aristotle’s treatment of leisure is consistent with his emphasis on the importance of exercising

the civil duties of citizens. The life of leisure does not prevent virtuous citizens from participation in their

civic duties (Mulgan, 1990, p. 196).


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and believes in, those who think are drawn out of hiding because their refusal to join in

is conspicuous and thereby becomes a kind of action” (Arendt, 1978, p. 192).

For Arendt, in order to think and judge, one needs to withdraw his or herself

from ordinary activities. She compares withdrawal for thinking with the judgment of

spectators of a play. Spectators contemplate, look upon the play as outsiders. They are

not taking part in actualizing the spectacle. In fact, the precondition for spectators to see

the whole play and understand it is to withdraw themselves from the play itself. The

spectators do not leave the play, but just retire from the active involvement in order to

see and understand the play as a whole. In this context, thinking as a solitary activity is

necessarily always one with the plurality of men who are also thinking beings.

Besides its relation to action, thinking is also related to speaking, the faculty of

speech. Arendt admits that all mental activities, including thinking are invisible and

manifested only through speech. The driving force of speaking or what Arendt calls ‘the

urge to speak’ (ibid., p. 98) is the quest for meaning and not for the truth or falsehood of

a proposition or statement. Arendt writes: “In any case, since words—carriers of

meaning—and thoughts resemble each other, thinking beings have an urge to speak,

speaking beings have an urge to think” (ibid., p. 99). The relationship between thinking

and speaking lies in the fact that when we think or speak out the product of our thinking,

we are in the process of searching for the meaning of our own thoughts and the language

or words we use to communicate them. In other words, the urge to think and to

communicate is the quest for meaning, which “relentlessly dissolves and examines anew

all accepted doctrines and rules” (ibid., p. 176).


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What Arendt means by language here is not the complexity of grammar and

syntax, but metaphorical language. In fact, she claims that all philosophical terms are

metaphors, frozen analogies and the meaning of those metaphors disclose themselves

only if we dissolve the terms into the original context in the mind of the philosopher

who first used those terms (ibid. p. 104). Arendt gives the example of the term ‘ideas’ of

Plato. The idea (eidos) is the blueprint or image in the mind of a craftsman before he

begins his work. This image is then actualized into the object of his works and that

object serves again as an image of all other works. That image then endures for all times

and so fits for eternity in the sky of ideas (ibid., p.104). Plato’s doctrine of Ideas can be

analogically reconstructed as follows:

As the craftsman’s mental image directs his hand in fabrication and is the

measurement of the object’s success or failure, so all materially and sensorily

given data in the world of appearances relate to and are evaluated according to an

invisible pattern, localized in the sky of ideas” (ibid., p. 104).

This example shows that in order to understand the meaning of Plato’s doctrine

of ideas, we must employ analogy or metaphor. As a philosophical term, ‘ideas’ is

metaphorically used by Plato and thus must also be interpreted and understood as a

metaphor. Many philosophers particularly in the modern age fail to do so and

consequently they interpret and apply this doctrine literally. According to Arendt, it is

only through metaphor that we are able to discover the true meaning of a philosophical

term, which is the fact that thinking is always related to the world of appearances.

Understood metaphorically, a speaking word or term is the manifestation of thinking

that is always in reference to the reality. Quoting Kant, Arendt argues: “The metaphor

provides the abstract, imageless thought with an intuition drawn from the world of


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appearances whose function it is” (ibid., p. 103). In this way, metaphors connect the

invisible mental activities of thinking to the world of appearances. For Arendt, the

metaphorical language manifests the meaning of any event taking place in this world

when we are alive. She writes:

To think and to be fully alive are the same, and this implies that thinking must

always begin afresh; it is an activity that accompanies living and is concerned

with such concepts as justice, happiness, virtue, offered us by language itself as

expressing the meaning of whatever happens in life and occurs to us while we

are alive (ibid., p. 178).

Arendt’s elaboration of the interconnection between thinking and acting, and

between thinking and speaking points to the same fact that thinking is powerful. Since

thinking is always related to the world, then it allows us to gain access to the world of

appearances. Arendt appropriates Kant’s distinction between intellect (Verstand) and

reason (Vernunft) in a way that is not merely empirical but also ontological. On its most

fundamental level, Kant claims, as quoted by Arendt, that the distinction between reason

and intellect, lies in the fact that “the concepts of reason serve us to conceive (begreifen,

comprehend), as the concepts of the intellect serve us to apprehend perceptions

(Wahrnehmungen)” (Arendt, 1978, p. 57). From Kant’s perspective, Arendt then claims

that thinking is not the same as knowing because the goal of the intellect is cognition or

knowing and the highest criterion for cognition is truth.

However, that truth is factual because it is derived from the world of appearances

or what is given to the senses. This factual truth thus depends on the evidence of the

senses, while the goal of the faculty of thinking or what Kant calls ‘reason’ is to

understand or think the meaning of what already exists in sense perception. The faculty


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of thinking takes for granted the existence of something in the sense perception and

wishes to understand what it means for it to be. Arendt writes: “The intellect (Verstand)

desires to grasp what is given to the senses, but reason (Vernunft) wishes to understand

its meaning” (ibid. p. 57).

Robert Burch argues that the implication of Arendt’s appropriation of Kant’s

distinction between intellect and reason is threefold: first, cognition and the thirst for

knowledge never leave the world of appearances altogether. That means, whether it is

common sense or scientific investigation, all are inherent in the world of appearances.

Second, the desire to know is the desire for the full presence of the object. Third,

knowledge is essentially object knowledge because it is derived from and within the

world of appearances (Burch, 2010, p. 18-19).

In this way of understanding of human thinking, Arendt actually offers a

distinctive alternative to the philosophical tradition. For Arendt, thinking is always

unfinished process; it cannot proceed merely from the tradition, nor is it merely the

product of logical reasoning. Thinking employs neither history nor coercive logic

(Arendt, 1955, p. 8). She refers the former to modern philosophy that absolutizes or

universalizes its idea and the latter to the logical determinism of totalitarian ideologies.

With regard to tradition, it is worth nothing that Arendt acknowledges that tradition can

be the basis of our thinking but we must be critical to it. She is concerned with certain

elements in tradition or history that is totalizing and thus there is no room for people to

ask and criticize. Arendt herself uses the historical events of her time to think through

the nature of history or tradition. For instance, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt


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investigates the racial hatred (the element of anti-Semitism) and the colonial domination

(the element of imperialism) and in thinking through these elements, she criticizes the

history of anti-Semitism, imperalism and totalitarianism that are totalizing and

ideological.

For Arendt, since thinking is an unfinished process then any thought or idea that

happens to emerge should be treated as partial and thus open to criticism, or as Burch

puts it: “the end of thinking is the ongoing process of thinking itself, self-destructive in

being ever self-critical and self-renewing” (Burch, 2010, p. 12). Steve Buckler calls

Arendt’s treatment of thinking as a “self-consciously mediated standpoint”, which

presupposes an epistemological and a temporal mediation. The former is necessary to

avoid conceptual closure and opens up the possibility of communicating the product of

thinking; and the latter to avoid historical closure in order to recognize that political

actions are meaningful regardless of their historical locations (Buckler, 2011, p. 8).

Meanwhile Mark Antaki argues that Arendt’s approach to thinking about the

politics carries with it double negativity, in the sense that when we think about politics,

we are confronted with the nothing. The first negativity is involved in thinking, and the

second is in politics. In fact, this double negativity gives meaning either to thinking or

politics itself (Antaki, 2010, p. 63). Since we deal with thinking about politics, it is

necessary to understand what the first negativity means. For Arendt, thinking is negative

because “the quest for meaning which relentlessly dissolves and examines anew all

accepted doctrines and rules” (Arendt, 1978, p. 176). Or, as she acknowledges in

‘Thinking and Moral Considerations”, thinking, which is ‘soundless dialogue...between


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me and myself” (Arendt, 2003, p. 184) requires the acceptance of the fact of plurality of

human being-in-the-world. This means, the power of thinking lies in its capacity to free

us from unexamined beliefs as well as in its capacity to allow us to gain access to the

actuality of others and otherness.

This understanding of thinking is the entry point for Arendt’s notion of thinking

about the world. Arendt acknowledges that any thinking produces thought or idea, but

that knowledge or thought is not the end of our thinking process. When she was

challenged by Günther Gauss, whether or not she expected her writings to become a

significant source of knowledge for the future political thought, Arendt asserted that in

writing what she was attempting to do was to understand things. Although certain things

are formulated in the form of knowledge, but that is not the main reason for her to write.

Rather, as she puts it clearly: “The most important to me is the thought process itself”

(Arendt, 1995, p. 3). What she seeks is the understanding of the things and if others

understand the way she understands them, then her thought is shared with others because

it is bound to the reality of the world and takes its bearings from the world (ibid. p. 3).

Arendt follows Heidegger who claims that thinking is a response to a call coming

from the nature of things. How we think and what is the object of our thinking is, as

Heidegger calls it, related to ‘the most thought provoking’ (Heidegger, 1968, p. 4).

However, Arendt is critical to Heidegger’s own exclusive world of thought that has

made him a stranger to the wider world of human affairs. She highlights a seriuos

deficiency in Heidegger’s thinking, which is a self-absorbed unworldliness from which

he was unable to escape.


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For Arendt, thinking is worldly because it is meant to be of the world. Here

Arendt turns to other figures, namely Lessing and Walter Benjamin. According to her,

Lessing’s attitude towards the world was neither positive nor negative. Rather, he is

radically critical and revolutionary, particularly in relation to the public realm of his

time. This attitude was driven by his “curious kind of partiality which clung to concrete

details with an exaggerated, almost pedantic carefulness” (Arendt, 1955, p. 5), but

without letting himself to be coerced by tradition or by closed systems. Lessing is the

example of someone who possesses “independent thinking for oneself “ (ibid. p. 8).

Meanwhile in her essay on Walter Benjamin, Arendt concludes that Benjamin

had ‘the gift of thinking poetically’ (ibid. p. 205). This kind of thinking, she argues, is

like a pearl diver who goes down into the depth of the sea to unfasten ‘the fragments’—

the pearl and the coral—and carry them to the surface. In the same way, thinking

poetically means delving into the depth of the past and bringing into the world of the

living what is alive or has survived in a new crystalized forms, that is, as ‘thought of

fragments’, something that is rich and strange (ibid. p. 206).

Arendt adopts this way of thinking in her description of the world. Therefore,

Janover is right when he claims that there is an element of poetry in Arendt’s writing

about the world (Janover, 2011, p. 25). Arendt poetically thinks about the world by

enlarging her account of the world and worldliness, contrasting it with worldlessness or

world alienation. In this way, the world and worldliness is “a kind of talisman... a

signifying symbol for all that confers meaning on human existence” (ibid., p. 26). The

same claim comes also from Seyla Benhabib who asserts that Arendt as well as Adorno


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have the ‘Benjaminian moment’ in their emphasis on the importance of going on

thinking despite of the break of civilization brought about by the Holocaust and the rise

of the social in modernity. Arendt and Adorno are convinced that in the midst of a dark

period, we must learn to think anew by freeing ourselves from the power of false

universals and being attentive to the actuality of things that appear themselves. It is what

Arendt calls it thought of fragments or what Adorno calls it the primacy of the objects

(Benhabib, 2012, p. 33). In Negative Dialectics, Adorno refers the primacy of the

objects or the object’s preponderance to the idea that one should interact with objective

world without assuming the judgment of absolutely knowing that object. The object

cannot be absolutely captured in an abstract theory or concept. Each object has its own

particularity which is always new, unfolding, dynamic and multidimenstional. Dialectic

must be coupled with an acknowledgment of the primacy of object because its

singularity that gives dialectic its mandate to remain open to otherness. He writes: “To

grant precedence to the object means to make progressive between things which in

themselves are indirect; it means a moment in dialectics—not beyond dialectics, but

articulated in dialectics” (Adorno, 2002, p. 186).

What Arendt and Adorno have in common is the claim that, in order to think

anew, we must go beyond the traditional philosophy and methodology and let the

fragments or the objects of the world appear themselves and inform our thought. This

would be thinking on the basis of the phenomenon that takes place in the world itself.

This implies a conviction that there is novelty in any event or political reality in the

world and that, by thinking about the novelty of phenomena, we will be able to get into


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the essence of that phenomenon.21

Thus, Arendt emphasizes the importance of getting

into the events themselves or “to look upon the past with eyes undistracted by any

tradition’ and to ‘dispose of a tremendous wealth of raw experiences” (Arendt, 1978, p.

12). Arendt strongly believes that any event including political violence has its own

meaning or value that can be recognized as useful for some human purpose. This means,

the reliable sources for thinking about the world is the world itself because the world can

be meaningful in itself. She writes:

Events, past and present—not social forces and historical trends, nor

questionaires and motivation research, nor any other gadges in the arsenal of the

social sciences—are the true, the only reliable teachers of political scientists, as

they are the most trustworthy source of information for those engage in politics”

(Arendt, 1951, p. 482).

Another essential element of thinking about the world is inter-subjectivity

because there is no single thought that can capture the whole picture of a thing in the

world. In fact, the world itself opens up differently to every man according to his

position in it (Hull, 2002, p. 41). The consequence of this world disclosing itself to

plurality of humans is that each individual has a unique perspective of the world. Arendt

believes that there is something common in the world that calls everyone to have a

perspective on it. This commonness implies that “the same world opens (itself) to

everyone and all who inhabit that world are human. Thus, in her notion of the world,

Arendt emphasizes the reciprocity between the “dynamic nature of human qualities and

human reality” (ibid., p. 41).

21

Elizabeth Young-Bruehl concludes that in almost all of her writings, Arendt intends to discover the

novelty of events that take place in the world. She writes: “Starting with the Origins of Totalitarianism,

Arendt had continuously stressed how crucial it is to see the novelty (or the unprecedented) in phenomena,

for the novel leads to the essence of something, the nature of it, what distinguishes it fundamentally from

other phenomena” (Young-Bruehl and Kohn, 2007, p. 1051).


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According to Arendt, the phenomenological approach is crucial in the process of

reconstructing the world that has been destroyed by modernity where the particular thing

is separated from its functional context or its praxis. In other words, in the modern sense

the world has nothing to do with the existence of the particular thing in it. Thus, in

contrast, Arendt claims that the practical aspect of the world explains and justifies the

existence of a thing in the world. Phenomenology, in Arendt’s view, by virtue of the

‘stream of consciousness’ enables us to reintegrate the isolated things into human life

and thus to reconstruct the world.22

In this way, the world should be considered as a

created world (Arendt, 1994, p. 165).

2.2. The World as Human Creation

In describing the world, Arendt enlarges the range of interpretation by combining

different ideas of activity such as work, action, speech, and thinking. There is

interconnection among these human activities. As described above, thinking is related to

action and speech and in thinking about the world we must proceed from the world itself

and the events that take place in it. As a result, the world can be said to be created by

human beings. As a human creation, there are two accounts of the world in Arendt’s

view, namely the world of fabricated things and the world of human affairs. She writes:

This world, however, isn ot identical with the earth or with nature, as the limited

space for the movement of men and the general condition of organic life. It is

related, rather, to the human artifact, the fabrication of human hands, as well as

22

The phrase ‘stream of consciousness’ is introduced by Husserl in relation to his concept of the lived

world. For him, a lived world is a sense-determined context of motivation and a realm of freedom and

self-determination. It is never given to us in isolation, but within our horizon. In other words, the object is

not just an isolable thing that we come to understand but fundamentally given in understanding. Thus the

lived world of personal subject is its stream of consciousness, which is comprised of intentional

experiences (Husserl, 1982, p. 81).


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to affairs which go on among those who inhabit the man-made world together

(Arendt, 1958, p. 52).

2.2.1. The World of Fabricated Things

In order to understand Arendt’s discussion of the world as fabricated things,

things-in-between, it is necessary to look at her notion of work, making things which are

meant to be used. Arendt distinguishes between labor and work, which is, she admits,

unusual but striking because it is historically recognized and based on the simple fact

that in every European language labor and work are two unrelated words (ibid., p. 79).23

Labor is a human activity which corresponds to the biological processes and the

necessity to sustain and preserve human life. While work is a human activity which

corresponds to the unnaturalness of human existence. Arendt distinguishes between

labor and work in a number of ways. Firstly, labor is bound to the necessity of nature

and work violates the realm of nature by transforming nature for the sake of human

needs. Secondly, labor is subject to necessity (unfreedom) and work is governed by

human ends and under human control and sovereignty (freedom). And finally, labor is

concerned with a private affair since it is primarily meant to satisfy individuals’ need,

whereas work is inherently public since it creates an objective and common world which

stands between humans and unites them (Arendt, 1958, 80-93). In other words, in

23

According to Arendt, the distinction between labor and work has actually appears in John Locke when

he distinguished between working hands and a laboring body, which is a reminiscence of the Greek

distinction between the craftsman (cheirotechnēs) and the work with human body (tõ sõmati ergazesthai).

But, in the ancient and modern usage, work and labor are considered synonymous. For Arendt, there is

one important aspect that really makes the distinction between labor and work crucial that is, as she puts

it: “the word labor, understood as a noun, never designates the finished product, the result of laboring, but

remains a verbal noun to be classed with the gerund, whereas the product itself is invariably derived from

the word for work, even when current usage has followed the actual modern development so closely that

the verb form of the word ‘work’ has become rather obsolete” (Arendt, 1958, p. 80).


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contrast to labor, the product of human work is the thing that lies between people. It both

separates and unites them.

In Arendt’s view, the emphasis on the thingly character of human works is

significant for coping with the contempt of labor among the ancients and with the

glorification of labor among the moderns. Both are rooted in their overemphasis on the

subjectivity and productivity of human labor that results in the failure to keep the

distinction between labor and work. Arendt is not concerned with the contempt of labor

in ancient Greece where there was a mistrust of the homo faber which, she

acknowledges, “is true only of certain periods” (ibid., p. 82). She is concerned more

with the glorification of labor in the modern age, when labor is treated as the source of

values; laborers are classified as productive and unproductive, skill and unskilled; and

then all activities are divided into manual and intellectual labor (ibid., p. 85). For

Arendt, the glorification of labor is initiated by Karl Marx in his theory of labor where

he emphasizes the fact that the activity of laboring has its own productivity in terms of

location, function and durability.

In Marx’s theory, as Arendt puts it: “Labor’s productivity is measured and

gauged against the requirements of the life process for its own reproduction” (ibid., p.

93). Here the productivity of labor resides not in the quality of the produced things, but

in the surplus inherent in human labor. In this way, the distinction between labor and

work is completely denied. The glorification of labor results in the intrusion of labor into

work and action and consequently the distinction between the private realm and the

public realm, between oikos and polis is blurred. The impact of this blurring is


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devastating because it destroys not only the human world but also the humans

themselves.

In order to keep the distinction between labor and work, it is necessary to

consider the product of human works as a worldly thing that has “its location, function,

and length of stay in the world” (ibid., p. 94). In this context, the product of human work

guarantees its own permanency and durability, which for Arendt is the character of the

world. The character of fabricated things has to do with their durability, although they

are not absolute nor they last long since they can decay. The products of human works,

such as houses, tables, chairs, paintings and so on, are relative and independent from the

men who produce and use them. In this way, fabricated things have their objectivity that

gives them endurance at least for a time against human needs and wants.

In contrast to their subjectivity, there is the objectivity of these man-made things.

Arendt contends that it is only we who “have erected the objectivity of a world of our

own from what nature gives us, who have built it into the environment of nature so that

we are protected from her, can look upon nature as something objective” (ibid., p. 137).

This objective world lies between men and thus unites and at the same time separates

people. Arendt’s emphasis on the role of things-in-between to unite and separate people,

in my view, is significant for two reasons: first it avoids the tendency of equating

people with things as seen in the modern sciences and it prevents the complete

separation of people from the products of their works as found in modern capitalism.

The modern worldlessness, as we saw in the chapter one, is caused by the failure of

modern men to see the role of things-in-between.


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Arendt argues that from the perspective of their permanency and durability—

although it is temporary—the fabricated things can be considered as constituting the

human world. Thus, the first and foremost account of the world has to do with the

thingly character, “the world of things in which men move, which physically lies

between them and out of which arise their specific, objective, worldly interest” (ibid., p.

182). In this context, the world represents things, fabricated by human hands and human

works and thus it is artificial (Janover, 2011, p. 27).

Human beings, as homo faber, the builder of the world and the producer of

things, have the capacity to possess a public realm of their own, although this realm may

not be political. This public realm is similar to the market place, where humans

exchange their products with one another. In the market place, men build a relationship

among themselves, in the sense that a person “can show the products of his hand and

receive the esteem which is due him” (Arendt, 1958, p. 160). This realm is not political

because in the market, people do not meet as persons but as owners of commodities and

exchange values. Here Arendt quotes Marx who claims that in this way men degrade

themselves into commodities and therefore are judged not on the basis of their existence

as men but on the quality of their products (ibid., p. 162). In other words, the market

place is a place for the revelation not of men as such but of their products, so that the

recognition is given not to the producer but to the product itself. However, the point

Arendt wants to make in this regard is the fact that there is a world created when people

meet to exchange the products of their works.


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Of course, the earth can provide things for human survival and labor can

undertake the production process to maintain that survival, but it is only when natural

and fabricated things are organized through the human work, that the earth becomes a

world and can resist the consuming life process (Arendt, 1961, 210). Unlike labor, an

activity that is dictated by necessary biological process to keep species going is a

consuming life process, the work—whether in art or artifice and fabrication—is an

activity of making things that in turn provide the objective, tangible, and durable space

for human beings to live their lives and to perform their activities. Since it is fabricated,

this space is distinct from all natural surroundings. The world of existence or the human

world or what Arendt calls ‘worldliness’, in its simplest sense means “the capacity to

fabricate and create a world” (ibid., p. 209). Here, the world refers to the public space

that is similar to marketplace where people come together to exchange the products of

their works.

2.2.2. The World of Human Affairs

The second account of the world is that it consists in human affairs. As human

affairs, the world is common to all. Arendt refers to this commonality as what human

beings have in common that unites and enables them to build a relationship. For this

purpose, she turns to Aristotle’s notion of man as a political animal, zoon politikon.

Aristotle claims that human beings have the inclination and capacity to live together.

They naturally form polis or city-states, dwell in it, and can achieve their natural goals in

the sense that they can fully develop their potential only by living in a political

community with others (Yack, 1993, p. 62). However, unlike other gregarious animals,


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such as bees and ants that also live in groups, humans have the capacity for reasoning

along with speech and argument. “Man is the only animal whom she has endowed with

the gift of speech” (Aristotle, 1958, 1253a10). It is only humans who have the capacity

to work together for the progress and ongoing existence of the polis, to reason with each

other, to know what is useful and harmful, to decide what is right and wrong, and

consider the effects of their action. From the perspective of Aristotle, as Bernard Yack

claims, it is natural for human beings to “reason and communicate the advantages and

disadvantages of various forms of communal living” (Yack, 1993, p. 65).

Human beings, in Aristotle’s view, must actively participate in the life of the

polis as a whole. They must be active not only by making uses of the things that are

available in the polis, but also by being active participants in its life. Arendt takes on

Aristotle’s emphasis on activity to mean that each citizen needs to act in order to reveals

who he or she is to others and also to show his or her concern for what is common,

including the world where all live in. In this context, Arendt then speaks about the

importance of action and speech in providing security for the world.

According to Arendt, living together in a world means that we share and act

within a common place, and not simply to inhabit the same space. In this regard, Arendt

then introduces the third activity of the human condition, called action. How is action

distinguished from work which is a distinct human activity which creates a public and

common world? Arendt distinguishes between work and action on the ground that work

is still subject to a certain kind of necessity, which arises from its instrumental character.

This means that work is dictated by a purpose outside itself. A carpenter produce a table


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not for the sake of the table itself but for human use. In contrast to work, the

fundamental quality of action is its eliminable freedom, its status as an end in itself. This

is clear in her description of action. Arendt defines action as the capacity to bring

something new to the world: “To act, in its most general sense, means to take an

initiative, to begin (as the Greek word archein, ‘to begin’, ‘to lead’, and eventually ‘to

rule’, indicates), to set something into motion” (Arendt, 1958, p. 177). Here action

fulfills the condition of natality, because in birth, the newly born child is a newcomer in

the world and his or her presence brings something new to the world. In natality, each

person enters the world as a distinctive presence: “Nobody is ever the same as anyone

else who ever lived, lives or will live” (ibid., p. 8). For Arendt, the distinctiveness of a

newly born introduces something novel to the world. Each new birth, which is every

man, brings about a beginning and guarantees its presence.

In the same way, Arendt argues that in action, man initiates something new. The

initiative, therefore, is the element of action (ibid., p. 9). Action is not an activity that

produces a new life as labor or a new product as work, but is an activity that covers

interactions with other people. Arendt says of action that it is “Action, the only activity

that goes on directly between without the intermediary of things or matters” (ibid., p. 7).

Action necessarily requires the presence of other people. An action would be

meaningless unless there were other people present to see it and so give meaning to it. In

other words, the meaning of an action can only be established in the context of human

plurality. The sphere of action is a sphere of plurality, where we disclose ourselves to

others and interact in our full difference as persons.


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As in natality the distinctiveness is the condition of new beginning, so in action

each individual discloses his or herself as a distinctive person, as ‘who’ rather than as

‘what’. When we act we reveal ourselves to the others. However, human beings are not

machines or performing robots. They have inherently the capacity to act and at the same

time to speak. Thus, human action is necessarily accompanied by speech. In fact, as

human activities, both action and speech arise from human plurality and disclose the

uniqueness of each to individuals (Canovan, 1995, p. 131). Like action, speech also

corresponds to the condition of a new beginning or natality because in speech one

reveals one’s distinct and unique being among equals. Arendt connects action to speech

because through action as speech, individuals disclose themselves. Action is the public

disclosure of the agent in the speech-deed: “With word and deed we insert ourselves into

the human world and this insertion is like a second birth” (Arendt, 1958, p. 176-177).

Considering the revelatory character of action and speech, Arendt then claims

that this revelatory character can only be displayed in togetherness or when people are

with others (ibid., p. 180). It requires a public realm, where people meet and reveal

themselves in words and deeds. Our action and speech are concerned with the world of

things in-between, where we move and out of which arise our common interest. Thus,

the origin of the world in-between is the human action and speech that are directed to

one another. In other words, this world is concerned with the subjective in-between,

which is not tangible and is also called “the web of human relationships” (ibid., p. 183).

When people act and speak to one another, a reality or common world is enacted. In


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other words, the world as human affairs “consists of the web of human relationship

which exists whenever men live together” (ibid., p. 183-184).

As a common world, the world as the web of relationship is not only formed with

those who live together at the present time, but also with those who have lived in the

past and those who will enter into this world in the future. Therefore, following

Heidegger’s idea of being-in-the-world, Arendt emphasizes the importance of the

common world, a world shared with others: “The common world is what we enter when

we are born and what we leave behind when we die. ... It is what we have in common

not only with those who live with us, but also with those who were here before and with

those who will come after us” (ibid., p.55).

Here Arendt emphasizes the importance of stories in order to relate people of all

generations. Stories, in Arendt’s view, are the medium in which action and speech

become real in the sense that an action that has been done in the past is experienced or

felt as something real. When actions or speeches are transformed into stories—whether

in documents, monuments, or art works--and then told and retold, those actions or

speeches become living reality. It is through storytelling that we know and then are

related to other people: “Who somebody is or was, we can know only by knowing the

story of which he himself is the hero” (ibid., p. 186).

Furthermore, as described above, Arendt relates acting and speaking to thinking

in order to show that thinking is always in reference to the world. Action and speech are

the outward manifestations of the activity of thinking or thought. Consequently Arendt’s

claim that action and speech enact the world of human affairs implicitly includes the


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activity of thought. Arendt admits that the reality or worldliness of thought is not similar

to fabricated things that need to be used or consumed or action and speech that need to

be seen and heard. However, the worldliness of thought has much more in common with

action and speech because they require: first, the presence of others to see, hear and

remember them; and second the transformation of something that is invisible into the

visible thing. Arendt writes:

In order to become worldly things, that is, deeds and facts and events and

patterns of thought or ideas, they must first be seen, heard, and remembered and

then transformed, reified as it were, into things—into sayings of poetry, the

written page or the printed book, into paintings or sculpture, into all sorts of

records, documents and monuments (ibid., p. 95).

Arendt’s main point here is that action, speech and story are essential elements

out of which a human world is formed. In other words, when people who live together

engage in acting, speaking, and telling stories, they build a web of relationships or enact

a world as human affairs. This is significant because without those elements, there

would be no human world, but only worldlessness, as described in chapter one.

However, among the three, the story is more important than the ability to act and speak

in front of others because if there were nobody to whom to tell the story of a deed, the

deed itself would perish and be forgotten (ibid., p. 184).

2.3. Responsibility for the World

2.3.1. The Frailty of the World and Responsibility

For Arendt, the world is formed only when people get together to act and discuss

matters concerning them all. This world, Arendt admits, is fragile and contingent

because “it comes into being whenever men are together in the manner of speech and


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action...[W]henever people gather it is potentially there, but only potentially, not

necessarily and not forever” (Arendt, 1958, p. 199). The world as human creation is not

permanent nor does it last forever because it depends entirely on the surrounding

presence of nature in the case of the world as fabricated things and the presence of other

people in the case of the world as human affairs. In other words, as long as there is

nature out of which men fabricate things and as long there are other people whom one

can act and speak with and so therewith build a web of relationship, there is a world.

Recognizing the frailty and contingency of the human world, Arendt then speaks

about the importance of responsibility for the world. Arendt believes that humans have

the capacity for “building, preserving, and caring for a world that can survive us and

remain a place fit to live in for those who come after us” (Arendt, 1961, p. 95). As a

human capacity, responsibility is common to all and affects each and every one in the

world. For Arendt, according to Margaret Hull, “[as] sharers of the common world, we

all are equally responsible for it” (Hull, 2002, p. 75). Human beings must get out of

themselves in order to be aware of and respond to the reality of the world. Margaret

Canovan perfectly concludes that the overwhelming message of Arendt’s political

writings is how human beings must be responsible for the world in which they live.

Canovan writes:

It was a humanist message of political commitment: commitment to take

responsibility for what was happening in the world instead of surrendering in the

face of supposedly inevitable trends, and commitment to face up to reality

instead of escaping into private or collective fantasies (Canovan, 1995, p. 11).

How do human beings concretely exercise this responsibility? Here I suggest to

re-visit Arendt’s notion of amor mundi, love of the world that she draws from St.


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Augustine. In her dissertation about St. Augustine’s concept of love, Arendt derives

three meanings of love, namely, love as craving (appetitus), love as a relation between

man and God, and neighborly love (Arendt, 1995, p. 3-93). Of the three, the neighborly

love is the most fundamental because it is toward which the first two concepts are

oriented (Young-Bruehl, 1982, p. 74). In the context of neighborly love, Arendt admits

that St. Augustine offered love or charity as the basis of the ideal community in the

world: “It was Augustine who proposed to found not the Christian brotherhood but all

human relationship on charity” (Arendt, 1958, p. 53). In her article ‘The Crises of

Education’, Arendt emphasizes the importance of education as “the point at which we

decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it” (Arendt, 1961,

p. 196). Here, she argues that our decision to care for the world by assuming

responsibility for it determines the meaning of our existence in the world and the

recognition that the care or love of the world is superior than the care of the self is the

foundation of political solidarity among people of good will (Bernauer, 1987, p. 2).

However, Arendt observes that a community based on charity is a kind of

distortion of social life because it takes for granted the world, forgetting somehow that it

is a public space created, shared, and shaped by its members who lived in the past, are

living in the present or will live in the future. Arendt claims that Augustine’s notion of

love refers to general human experience since it corresponds to the state of the highest

emotional intensity and intimacy, which has nothing to do with the world described as a

public space where human beings present and disclose themselves before one another

(Thoma, 2012, p. 108). In other words, as general human experience, love is possible


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whether or not the world exists. Consequently, she asserts that “love by its very nature is

un-worldly” (Arendt, 1958, p. 242). Although love in Arendt’s view is worldless, we

cannot easily dismiss her phrase ‘love of the world’. Rather, we should look for a

meaning of love that is fitting to the world. Dieter Thoma claims that Arendt attempts to

transform the disclosing power of love and suit it to the social structures; so, for Arendt,

love means the ‘whole-hearted commitment’ to the realm that transcends private

relations. It means that love, like friendship, is to be considered as “a stance of affection,

inclination or fondness” (Thoma, 2012, p. 108).

Arendt takes on the love of the world to mean a sense of concern with the world.

When one is concerned with the world, he or she tries to understand or know the world

and judge what is going on in it. Arendt insists that without thinking that reaches out in

dialogue to others there can be no moral agency, no possibility of collective action, and

no care for the world. In thinking about the world, one fits his or herself into the world.

Arendt writes: “To love the world is to care about what becomes of it, and it is precisely

this concern that gives weight to one’s choices about to whom and to what one belongs”

(Arendt, 1958, p. 69). When we try to understand the world and show our concern for

the world, we certainly choose it as our home. Arendt, for Straume, is the most

politically concerned of all political philosophers because of her constant emphasis on

the importance of conceiving politics as the care for the common or human world

(Straume, 2012, p. 114). One of the most important tasks of politics is to keep itself open

for a self-questioning, reflexive and ongoing discourse. This means, political institutions

should facilitate the coming of many different perspectives. Since the world is our home


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then it is necessary for us to make it human by speaking about it. Arendt beautifully puts

in Men in Dark Times:

... for the world is not humane just because it is made by human beings, and it

does not become humane just because the human voice sounds in it, but only

when it has become the object of discourse. (...) We humanize what is going on

in the world and in ourselves only by speaking of it, and in the course of

speaking of it we learn to be human (Arendt, 1955, pp. 24-25).

In the context of making the world one’s home, Arendt speaks about the

importance of telling the story coupled with remembrance and the forgiving of each

other’s wrongs along with making and keeping promise. I will discuss these topics in

detail later in chapters four and five, but for now I would like to emphasize the fact that

the act of remembering and telling the story as well as forgiving and keeping promises is

necessary in maintaining a world that is created by human own action and speech. The

story enacts past events, how the world as the sequence of events and the web of

relationship that has been formed by past generations. Thus, in telling the story we

establish and maintain a common world with those who lived in the past. However,

telling the story is not possible without remembrance. It is only when past events are

remembered that we have something to tell about. Therefore, in remembering and telling

the story we assume responsibility for the world created by past generations.

Furthermore, human action is irreversible and promise is easily broken which could lead

further to the destruction of the common world. In order to prevent this destruction, it is

necessary to forgive each other’s wrongs and keep our own promise. Forgiveness and

promise are thus essential in maintaining the common world. In forgiving and keeping

promise we show our responsibility for the world created by our action and speech.


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Another sense of love of the world has to do with the acceptance of the givenness

or the affirmation of life in the world. Arendt writes: “There is no greater assertion of

something or somebody than to love it, that is to say: I will that you be—Amo: Volu ut

sis” (Arendt, 1978, 104). The affirmation of one’s own will does not mean that one

should possess or assimilate oneself to what is willed for. In fact, for Arendt love is the

very opposite of possession and assimilation. Arendt speaks of the world as givenness

since we are born into an existing web of relationships; thus responsibility means the

acceptance of our givenness, which is the world itself. Here Arendt turns to Rahel

Varnhagen who attempted to deny her Jewishness for the sake of being assimilated into

the German culture and tradition. Varnhagen thought that by thus assimilating herself

she would show her care for the country where she lived in. But the fact shows that she

failed to erase her trace as a Jew. For Arendt, Varnhagen would succeed if she

assimilated herself as a distinct Jew with her Jewish heritage. “In order to really enter an

alien history, to live in a foreign world, she had to be able to communicate herself and

her experiences,” says Arendt (Arendt, 2007, p. 26). What Arendt means here is that

Varnhagen should learn to live in the present with her past and future, her darkest and

lighest experiences as a Jew. Her destiny was her Jewishness and consequently she

should learn to live with it as conscious pariah. Being a Jew is a gift and Judaism is

Varnhagen’s givenness, her world. Thus, for Arendt, she should be grateful and be

responsible for her own identity and experience as a Jew.

The acceptance of the givennes is a matter of grace. Since it is grace the world

calls up love in us. We can either do or do not respond to it. There is something in us


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that needs to be thanked for because it cannot be willed for. There is no further

justification for affirming oneself in the world because rationalization and justification

may turn one away from the gift and the givenness of the world. Arendt writes: “When

men could no longer praise, they turned their greatest conceptual efforts to justifying

God and His Creation in theodicies” (Arendt, 1978, p. 97).24

Arendt is not satisfied with

the idea of theodicy because for her, the very idea of theodicy presupposes the

justification of life in the world. Life in the world needs to be praised and not to be

justified because life itself is a gift and given to us. In this context, responsibility for the

world is not something that can be demanded of us; rather, it should be our natural

response to the world that is given to us. It is a ‘burden to be borne by human beings’

because the world where we live in is “both an undeserved gift and an undeserved

burden” (Antaki, 2012, p. 514).

Both meanings of love of the world as described above point to responsibility

because being responsible to the world means showing concern for the world and

affirming life in the world. Or, as Garrath argues, from Arendt’s perspective,

responsibility represents two things. First, responsibility represents the obligation of

each actor to know the world into which she or he acts and to understand his or her own

act. Second, in relation to the temporal continuity of our agency, responsibility

represents an on-going responsiveness to the world, including a need to respond to what

24

Theodicy is a doctrine, initially introduced by the German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz in dealing with

the question of why does God who is omnipotent and omnibenevolent permit evil or suffering in the

world. Theodicy is drawn from the Greek words theos (god) and dike (justice), which literally means

justifying God. It attempts to show that the problem of evil in the world does not conflict with the

goodness and omnipotence of God. The world with many evils in it is the best of all possible worlds.

Theodicy offers a framework which can account for the existence of evil and demonstrate that God’s

existence remains probable after the problem of evil is posed (Leibniz, 2007).


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has been done (Garrath, 1998, p. 946). It is clear that in the context of the world’s frailty

and contingency, responsibility is a response to what is given to us either as life or as

world that includes the horror of its history.

2.3.2. The World Inflicted by Evil and Responsibility

If life is a gift and the world is the givenness that cannot be justified, then how is

evil a part of human life in the world? How can we be grateful without justifying evils?

For Arendt, what is indicted in an evil act is creation itself and not the world. Evil is

neither a deep nor demonic aspect and, therefore, it does not infect the world at depth;

rather, it makes us despair about it. In order to fully understand this claim, let us turn to

Arendt’s discussion of guilt and collective responsibility

After the Holocaust the question is raised concerning whether or not the ordinary

German citizens should assume collective responsibility for the crimes committed by the

Nazis. Like Jaspers, Arendt affirms that they should be collectively responsible by virtue

of their belongingness to a political community (Schaap, 2001, p. 750). Jaspers draws

his idea of political responsibility from his understanding of guilt, which is classified

into four kinds, namely political, criminal, moral and metaphysical guilt.25

According to

Jaspers, political and criminal guilt have something in common because both are

25

According to Jaspers, criminal guilt is related to the violation of laws—whether it is natural or positive

laws—and lawbreakers should have been convicted by a court. This guilt meets with punishment. Political

guilt belongs to all citizens who are presumed to bear the deeds of their government by virtue of their

membership. All citizens should be responsible for the consequences of the misdeeds of their regimes. It

meets with liability. Moral guilt implies personal responsibility which one bears before one’s own

conscience either because one has done something wrong or conforms to an immoral system, is indifferent

to sufferings of others, or fails to resist a criminal regimes. Metaphysical guilt occurs when people fail to

show absolute solidarity with their fellow human beings regardless of their particular relations to them.

Human solidarity brings feeling of guilt to those who have done nothing to prevent the evil’s deed

(Jaspers, 2001, pp. 25-26). On the ground of this fourfold guilt, Jaspers speaks about responsibility.

Criminal guilt meets with punishment, political guilt with liability, moral guilt with penance and renewal,

and metaphysical guilt with the transformation of the human conscience before God (ibid., p.30).


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subjected to public judgment, while moral and metaphysical guilt are personal and

therefore cannot be subjected to jurisdiction. On the ground of this analysis, Jaspers then

claims that all Germans are morally and metaphysically guilty by virtue of their

individual actions and inactions during the Nazi regime. As a result they are collectively

responsible for the Nazi crimes (Schaap, 2001, p. 751). In this way, Jaspers takes for

granted that guilt can be collective. Facing the tragedy of the Holocaust, Jaspers argues

that the Germans should accept the crimes committed in their names and be responsible

for them (Grunnenber, 2007, p. 1013). The collective acceptance of crimes enables them

to undertake a collective process of spiritual purification and thus pave the way into a

new life. Jaspers writes in The Question of German Guilt:

Clarification of guilt is at the same time clarification of our new life and its

possibilities. From it spring seriousness and resolution. (....) We must seize the

happiness of life, if it is granted to us for intermediate moments, for breathing

spells—but it does not fill our existence; it appears as amiable magic before a

melancholy background. Essentially, our life becomes permitted only to be

consumed by a task. The result is modest resignation. In inner action before the

transcendent we become aware of being humanly finite and incapable of

perfection (Jaspers, 2001, p. 113).

Jaspers insists that when people realize their moral and metaphysical guilt

through public communication, they automatically assume responsibility for what have

gone wrong. This realization of moral and metaphysical guilt is the ground for

purification that leads to the development and transformation of self-consciousness

(ibid., p. 36). In other words, when we are aware of our wrongs and communicate those

wrongs with other people, we are in the process of purifying our own consciousness.

Communicating with others is one way of making personal guilt and personal awareness

public or collective. In relation to the Nazi crime, Jaspers argues that when an


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individual’s consciousness of the personal implication of a Nazi crime is spread

throughout the country through public communication, this process is certainly widening

and deepening the sense of co-responsibility. This is the way how Jaspers draws political

responsibility from her analysis of guilt at the political level. Here, political

responsibility is taken for granted and Jaspers does not offer any particular way of

assuming this responsibility.

In a letter to her husband, Heinrich Blücher, Arendt criticizes Jaspers’ idea of the

inner transformation of the German because it prevents people for fighting as the

manifestation of actions of solidarity and the assumption of responsibility for freedom.

For Arendt, Jaspers presents himself and other Germans to be the wise saints and

martyrs that makes it impossible to fight or do something for the degraded and the

humiliated. “It seems impossible for the wise of germany and Judah to turn themselves

into fighters” (Arendt & Blücher, 2000, p. 86).

Arendt disagrees with Jaspers’ identification of guilt and responsibility. Arendt

claims that the feeling of guilt is not the origin of political responsibility because guilt is

personal and cannot be made collective. Making personal guilt collective, Arendt argues,

not only disregards the possible innocent people, but also diverts our attention from the

particular perpetrators. It is a kind of “whitewash of those who had done something”

because “where all are guilty no one is” (Arendt, 2003, p. 28). She gives the example of

the postwar era in Germany where ordinary and innocent people assured each other and

the whole world that they felt guilty of what had happened particularly in the Holocaust.


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In doing so, Arendt claims, the innocent people were either morally confused or playing

intellectual games. She writes:

Well, if young people in Germany, too young to have done anything at all, feel

guilty, they are either wrong, confused, or they are playing intellectual games.

There is no such thing as collective guilt or collective innocence; guilt and

innocence make sense only if applied to individuals” (ibid., p. 29).

Arendt holds the idea that guilt and responsibility must be distinguished from one

another. Guilt is personal and belongs to the realm of morality, while responsibility is

collective and belongs to the realm of politics. In the same letter to Blücher, Arendt

argues that Jaspers’ guilt-discussion is “a trick that manages to prohibit moral judgment

for those whom those bastards do not want to include in the loving communication”

(Arendt & Blücher, 2000, p. 86). In her postcript to Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt

agrees that Eichmann should be condemned not for his political responsibility but for his

guilt (Arendt, 1963, p. 298). Of course, Eichmann is politically responsible, but in the

court his individual guilt or innocence must be the basis for condemning him. In her

essay ‘Collective Responsibility’ she claims: “What I am driving at here is a sharper

dividing line between political (collective responsibility, on the one side, and moral

and/or legal (personal) guilt, on the other” (Arendt, 2003, pp. 150-151).

It is clear that for Arendt when we talk about guilt we always refer it to

something that pertains to morality or law, whereas responsibility refers to politics. In

this context, political responsibility has nothing to do with morality or law. Therefore, in

line with her idea that the world or realm of politics is the space where individuals make

their presence before one another, she claims that responsibility should be understood in

the context of political presence. In other words, from the perspective of politics,


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Arendt’s usage of the term responsibility is in the context of either belonging to a

political community or doing something (Herzog, 2001, p. 41). That means, one

assumes responsibility because he or she is member of a community and has done

something wrong that offends the community where he or she belongs to. This requires

the acceptance of the givenness of our community.

In her article ‘We Refugees’, Arendt criticizes the refugees—the European

Jewish—who denied their Jewish heritage as a political identity and desired for a change

that made them to take no action and, worse, issue no opinion (Arendt, 2007, p. 271).

They just followed what were required of them from the existing states including the

process of assimilation into the German culture. In contrast to this situation, Arendt

argues that the European Jewish should have emphasized their Jewishness and

responded to their enemies’ action. A Jew could be either a parvenu or a pariah because

it is only a pariah that could develop a political consciousness, could affirm his or her

Jewish identity and seek politically a place for Jews to live with their Jewish identity

(Young-Bruehl, 1982, p.121). Arendt’s main point is that the Jewish people should have

done something for what they had experienced as a political group by having their own

opinion about what had happened to them.

When she was challenged by Günter Gauss in an interview about her own

situation where she left Germany and later became a USA citizen, Arendt defended

herself by claiming that she at least had an opinion since 1933. Her response: “I tried to

help in many ways (and) I must say it gave me a certain satisfaction. I was arrested ... I

thought at least I had done something! At least I am not innocent” (Arendt, 1994, p. 5).


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Here Arendt refers to her involvement in the Zionist organization led by Kurt

Blumenfeld. Although Arendt was not a member of this organization, she was the one

who put together a collection of all anti-Semitic statements. It was a risky task because

to organize such a collection meant to engage in what the Nazis called ‘horror

propaganda”. Thus, no Zionist could do that in order to protect the Zionist organization

and Arendt joyfully took this job because it was an intelligent idea and it gave her the

feeling “that something could be done after all” (Arendt, 1994, p. 5).

Another example of how Arendt continues to have an opinion about matters

concerning Jewish problems was her regular articles published in Aufbau.26

Arendt

acknowledged that although she was not a Zionist but by having a constant relationship

with some prominent Zionist leaders, she has the chance to nourish her Jewishness and

at the same time by constantly having an opinion about Jewish questions, she shows

herself as a conscious and responsible Jew. On the ground her own experience, Arendt

then argues that belonging to a certain political community is the main reason for

responsibility. In this way, she de-legalizes responsibility in the sense that people are

responsible not because of the predetermined law that requires them to do so, but simply

because of their belonging to a group (Herzog, 2001, p. 42).

According to Arendt, assuming collective responsibility opens up a new mode of

life through the medium of the public sphere, the core province of the political

26

Aufbau was a the news bulletin of the German Club that provided new German immigrants to the

United States of America with a meeting place. This German Club was a New York organization founded

in 1924. This news bulletin was turned to a professional editor in 1937. In 1939, Manfred George assumed

control of Aufbau and turned it into an impressive weekly magazine that reached out to German-speaking

refugees all over the world. Arendt became a regular contributors since 1941 where she wrote the first

article entitled “The Jewish Army—the Beginning of a Jewish Politics” (Young Bruehl, 1982, 169-171).


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(Grunnenberg, 2007, p. 1016). In the context of this public sphere, responsibility is not a

burden and has nothing to do with moral imperatives, but it “flows naturally out of an

innate pleasure in making manifest, in clarifying the obscure, in illuminating the

darkness (Arendt, 1955, p. 75). Responsibility is independent of the individual’s action.

She writes: “I must be held responsible for something I have not done, and the reason

for my responsibility must be my membership in a group (a collective) which no

voluntary act of mine can dissolve” (Arendt, 2003, p. 149). In Eichmann in Jerusalem,

she concludes that “political responsibility...exists quite apart from what the individual

member of the group has done and therefore can neither be judged in moral terms nor be

brought before a criminal court” (Arendt, 1963, p. 299).

Arendt justifies belonging with suffering because “the actor always moves

among and in relation to other acting beings, he is never merely a “doer” but always and

in the same time a sufferer” (ibid., p. 190). However, acting and suffering are

inseparable and simultaneous. In acting, we carry the political context of our act and

then with other citizens we suffer the political consequences of our acts. There is no

doing without suffering and my responsibility is not limited to my initiative only.

However, there is no suffering without doing either, because suffering is always

perpetuated or initiated by acting. According to Arendt, suffering without doing would

be apolitical and, therefore, it would no longer be suffering (Herzog, 2001, p. 46).

The intertwining of responsibility as acting (personal responsibility) and as

suffering (collective responsibility) is explained further in Arendt’s claim that “if one is

attacked as a Jew, one must defend oneself as a Jew’ (Arendt, 1994, p. 12). Jewishness


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is one’s givenness and thus defending oneself as a Jew or one’s responsibility as a Jew

means the manifestation of the givenness in one’s acts. Responsibility is not possible

without the givenness of one’s being Jewish. Arendt makes this clear in the distinction

she makes between ‘belonging to a people and being a citizen:

In the first place, belonging to a group is a natural condition. You belong to some

sort of group when you are born, always. But to belong in the way you mean, in

a second sense that is, to join or form an organized group, is something

completely different … People who become organized have in common what are

ordinarily called interests (Arendt, 1994, p. 17).

Defending oneself as Jew points to the fact that a group must be active because it

is only acting that makes a group political. She claims that it is not enough just to say

that I am a Jew because this is an acknowledgment of a political fact that can outweigh

other personal identities (Arendt, 1955, p. 18). What is required is acting in order to

make the givenness, such as Jewishness, to become a political reality, a human condition

that is common to all. Here acting means being responsible for the transformation of the

mere fact into the condition of our political life. In other words, for Arendt,

responsibility consists in acting and acting makes public the natural givenness. Action

reflects a belonging, a suffering which results from previous acts (Herzog, 2001, p. 48).

Another example of this twofold nature of responsibility is found in the story

about Anton Schmidt, a German soldier who helped Jews to escape. The significance of

this story is the fact that Schmidt was a German (Arendt, 1963, p. 231) who knew the

situation and did something. In contrast to Schmidt’s action was that of another German,

Peter Bamm, who knew but did nothing. Arendt acknowledges that from a political

perspective, even in the midst of terror there are people who are able to act (ibid., p.


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233). Schmidt’s action displays the link between action and natural givenness (being

German), which is for Arendt is the most political dimension of responsibility. As

Germans, Schmidt and Bamm were responsible for the crime committed by the Nazis,

although they were not guilty. The act of Schmidt—taking the initiative to help Jews—

changed the meaning of being a German, his fellowship with other Germans. These

examples show the fact that Schmidt recognized his givenness (being Jew or German)

and did something to change the meaning of this givenness. Thus, by assuming

responsibility, Arendt argues, people are urged to be tactful and their acts can change the

human world, what it means to be a member of a given state. In this context,

responsibility is the link between individual deeds and belonging. It is the intertwining

of individual acts and belonging.


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CHAPTER THREE:

JUDGING POLITICAL ACTION AND THE QUEST FOR MEANING

Another essential element of Arendt’s ethics of worldliness is judging political

action. Well-known for her theory of action, Arendt claims, in The Human Condition,

that among the three human activities: labor, work, and action, it is only action that is

political because only action is done in the presence of other people. The sphere of

action is a sphere of plurality, where we disclose ourselves to others and interact as

distinct and free persons. It is the realm of the disclosure of a world and public freedom.

Arendt considers action as a public category, a worldly practice that is experienced in

our intercourse with others. Arendt identifies action with politics, in the sense that

politics is action and action is political. It is political action. This identification is not

without problems because in her elaboration of modern worldlessness, she is fully aware

of the destructive effects of action as displayed by the Nazi regime in Germany. In other

words, it is action that has deprived the things in themselves or the objective world, and

the human beings as one entity in the world.

Consequently, the main issue here is that how do we properly understand

Arendt’s celebration of political action in the face of the violent actions? In order to

answer this question it is necessary to analyze the political act itself because only in this


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way that we will be able to get the powerful ethical points which inform Arendt’s own

thought. For Arendt, in judging a political violence, the focus of our judgment is what

that event means for our common world because she is convinced that there is novelty or

something unprecedented in any event taking place in the world. What happened in the

past are historical facts and we cannot change them. What we need to do with these

unchanging facts is to judge them in order to discover the meaning of those events for

our future world in common. Therefore, the focus of this chapter is fourfold: first it

discusses Arendt’s notion of action as politics and politics as action; second, her notion

of judgment; third, the standard of judging an action; and finally, the ethical character of

reflective judgment.

3.1. Action as Politics and Politics as Action

In the previous chapter I have described Arendt’s specific way of thinking about

the world that focuses on the experience of everyday life and the world itself. This kind

of thinking demands a consideration of action, the beginning of something new, which is

unpredictable. Arendt’s theory of action is the entry point of her idea of politics because

action represents the categories needed for organizing political life and enacts the

highest realization of human activities (D’Entrieves, p. 65).

For Arendt, there is a similarity between action and politics in that both are

grounded in the condition of plurality. In The Human Condition, Arendt claims that

human beings are not created according to the same model since their essence are not

the same, implying that a plurality of men live on the earth and inhabit the world.

Consequently, an acting person is always in contact with other men. Arendt argues that


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action is differentiated from other activities such as labor and work because it is public

and political. Unlike the activity of labor that corresponds to the biological processes

and necessities of human existence and work to unnatural business of human

existence,27

action corresponds to the condition of plurality. This implies that action

necessarily presupposes the plurality of people. One cannot act in solitude. In fact,

action is dependent on the constant presence of others and it requires a public space,

where people encounter one another to act. For Arendt, the condition that surrounds

human action is plurality. In other words, plurality is the sine qua non of action. Arendt

writes: “While all aspects of the human conditions are somehow related to politics, this

plurality is specifically the condition—not only the conditio sine qua non, but the

conditio per quam—of all political life” (Arendt, 1958, p. 7).

Arendt argues that, as action, politics is “based on the fact of human plurality”

and always deals with “coexistence and association of different men” (Arendt, 2005, p.

93). However, she reminds us of the possibility of the downfall of politics if we

incorrectly understand politics. She discovers two extreme assumptions that have led to

the fundamental perversion of politics. First, the assumption that there is something

27

According to Arendt, the activity of labor corresponds to the necessities of life, that is, it is necessary

for maintaining life. Thus, the product of the activity of labor is never permanent but is always consumed

for biological sustenance. This implies that the driving force of labor is the necessity of life or, in other

words, necessity commands or enslaves human beings to labor: “To labor meant to be enslaved by

necessity” (Arendt, 1958., p. 83). In this context, the characteristic of the activity of labor is the lack of

freedom, which is distinctively human. Although it is exhaustic life, Arendt acknowledges that labor is

needed as one of the constitutive elements of the condition of human life. However, unlike Marx on the

one hand who elevates the activity of labor to the highest end of human existence reaching its peak in

modern capitalism and unlike Aristotle on the other hand who seeks to eliminate labor for the sake of the

contemplative life, Arendt argues that labor should be kept privately in the realm of the household (oikos).

Whereas work corresponds to the fabrication of an artificial world of things. For Arendt, through the

activity of work, human beings create a world that is distinct from the natural world. This fabricated world

is semi-permanent and is relatively independent from the actors and their acts.


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political among humans that pertains to their essence and thus becomes the substance of

politics. For Arendt, this assumption is wrong because there is nothing political in

human nature. In fact, humans are a-political and so human essence as such cannot be

the basis of politics. Politics, she argues, is only enacted when humans interact with one

another either in action or speech. Politics is the space between people when they get

together and do things in common. Arendt writes: “Politics arises between men, and so

quite outside of man. There is no real political substance. Politics arises in what lies

between men and is established as relationship” (Ibid. p. 95).

The second assumption is that humans are naturally unfitted to live together

because of the war of all against all, as Hobbes conceives it. Man, therefore, as Arendt

puts it, is engaged in a “war of rebellion of each against all the others, who are hated

because they exist without meaning” (ibid. 95). This has led to the modern conception of

humans as absolutely equal. Here, the plurality of humans is liquefied into one

individual called humanity, which results in the abolishment of freedom and politics

altogether. For Arendt, “we are not born equal; we become equal as members of a group

on the strength of our decision to guarantee ourselves mutually equal rights” (Arendt,

1951, p. 297). It is through the political community that equality is produced because

“man can act in and change and build a common world, together with his equals and

only with his equals” (ibid. p. 297). What Arendt is pointing out here is the absolute

difference of all humans from one another; therefore, from the beginning politics has

been organizing a plurality of people who are absolutely different from one another

(Arendt, 2005, p. 96).


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Furthermore, Arendt is concerned with the danger of the common sense or what

she calls ‘shared prejudices’. She admits that any discussion about politics always

begins with common sense, which is political in the broadest sense because originating

in our thinking and not only among the educated ones; such discussion refers to

undeniable realities and reflects our current situation (Arendt, 2005, p. 96). However,

common sense is not judgment and therefore it can make politics vanish from the world

when it invades our thoughts; it “throws the baby out with the bathwater” (ibid. 97). In

other words, when we take for granted the notion of politics solely on the basis of

common sense and do not attempt to critically judge it, we disregard not only politics

but also the world as the origin of politics.

Arendt gives the example of how politics is commonly understood as a

relationship between the rulers and the ruled. This is a utopian venture because in

reality, there is always an abyss that separates the rulers from the ruled and when this

abyss becomes so huge, there is no room left for the resistance of the ruled or for the

control of the rulers by the ruled. The product of this relationship between the rulers and

the ruled is, Arendt claims, despotism and bureaucratic governments (ibid. p. 97). Here

the capacity of the ruled to act and their freedom to criticize the rulers are abolished. It is

the abolishment not only of politics but also of the world signified by action and speech.

For Arendt, politics is not the relationship between the rulers and the ruled, but between

humans who are equal. Politics thus arises between men who are equal. Her emphasis on

this fact that politics arises between humans and organizes the absolute difference of

humans enables her to conceive politics as the realm of the disclosure of the world of


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public space and the realm of public freedom, which are closely related to her notion of

action. Thus for Arendt, politics is action and action is politics.

Politics is a realm of human action, praxis and the world of appearances. Thus,

Arendt identifies politics with the disclosure of the world of appearances. This world lies

between people and in which each individual reveals his or herself in the presence of

others. It is the world of appearances. Arendt compares the world of appearances with a

theater. In contrast to other Greek public places, such as the agora (market place), the

assembly of the citizens (ecclesia) and the tribunal (eliea), the theatre, in Arendt’s view,

is both political and narrative. As mentioned above, the agora may be public because

people get together but it is not necessarily political because they exchange the products

of their works and not who they are. The ecclesia and eliea are political but not narrative

because people act and speak together but their action and speech are not told and retold.

In contrast, the theatre offers a place where people can see and be seen, hear and be

heard. But the most important aspect of theatre is that it is political because it consists of

a plurality of people who express their human capacities either by acting and speaking as

actors or by thinking and judging as spectators, all in the same time narrative. What

makes this possible is because the play itself is a story of the individual or collective’s

action and speech and that the spectators thereafter tell the story of the play and about its

hero (Zapulla, 2011, p. 113). For Arendt the world is like a stage. As actors who make

their appearances on a stage, living beings appear themselves in the world. She writes:

Just as the actor depends upon stage, fellow-actors, and spectators to make his

entrance, every living thing depends upon a world that solidly appears as the

location for its own appearance, on fellow creatures to play with and on

spectators to acknowledge and recognize its existence (Arendt, 1978, pp. 21-11).


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The world provides a sense of reality when we appear to one another, and

mediates relationship with others when we act and speak. The world, in Arendt’s view,

gives meaning to people because it lies between people, it surrounds people, and most

importantly, it is created by people. She claims that the world exists ‘in-between’ people

who share a common space. This common space is politics because it is in this space

that human affairs are conducted (Arendt, 2005, p. 106). This understanding of the

world is significant in Arendt’s political theory. She identifies politics with a realm of

the disclosure of a world or social reality. When she was asked by Gunther Gaus in an

interview about her understanding of the world as the space in which politics can

originate, Arendt asserted that she conceives of the world as “the space in which things

become public, as the space in which one lives and which must look presentable”

(Arendt, 1994, p. 20). In other words, politics is a space of appearance, which is

understood in the widest sense as “the space where I appear to others as others appear to

me, where men exist not merely like other living or inanimate things but make their

appearance explicitly” (Arendt, 1958, pp. 198-199).

Politics as a space of appearance means that in politics everybody reveals his or

herself as a distinct person. It is a realm where individuals express their own strength

and identity and not as a way of remaking the world in accordance with the world of

forms or Ideas as Plato did. Like Nietzsche, Arendt appeals to the aesthetic self-

creational capability of individuals. However, unlike Nietzsche who locates this

capability solely in the person, called the superman, Arendt claims that this aesthetic

self-expression depends on both the person who acts and the spectators who interpret


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that action (Dethier, 2012, p. 6). David Marshal traces Arendt’s conception of polis as a

space of appearance and claims that although Arendt’s politics is concerned exclusively

with a space of appearance in which orator and auditor, actor and spectator are

immediately present to one another, but it does not mean that there must be such

immediacy for there to be politics. In fact, the polis is itself not only a zone of

immediate phenomena but also a mechanism for instantiating and comparing

phenomena across time and space. So, the topos of the polis is a figurative, a repository

towards which the imagination can direct the greatest possible diversity of present, past,

future and counterfactual material (Marshal, 2010, p. 127).

Furthermore, Arendt identifies politics with public freedom. Here Arendt

conceives of freedom not simply as the ability to choose among a set of possible

alternatives, as liberal tradition understands it, or as the faculty of liberum arbitrium that

is given by God as taught by Christian doctrine, but the capacity to begin, to start

something new, to do the unexpected.28

This is exactly what Arendt finds in action itself.

In acting, one freely introduces something new to the world of plurality. According to

Arendt, action characterizes a new beginning, something that is unpredictable. It begins

something new that necessarily presupposes taking the initiative. What is inherent in

action as the ability to introduce new beginnings is freedom. It is the miracle of

28

Arendt’s appreciation of French philosophers after the French Revolution is a new understanding of

freedom. She claims that the importance of revolution for these philosophers lies in “the fact that they

used the term freedom with a new, hitherto almost unknown emphasis on public freedom, an indication

that they understood by freedom something very different from from the free will or free thought the

philosopher had known and discussed since Augustine. Their public freedom was not an inner realm into

which man might escape at will from the pressures of the world, nor was it liberum arbitrium, which

makes the will choose between alternatives. Freedom for them could exist only in public; it was tangible,

worldly reality, something created by men to be enjoyed by men rather than a gift or a capacity, it was the

man-made public space or market-place which antiquity had known as the area where freedom appears

and becomes visible to all” (Arendt, 1965, p. 124).


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beginning inherent in natality. “The new beginning inherent in birth can make itself felt

in the world only because the newcomer possesses the capacity of beginning something

new, that is, of acting” (Arendt, 1958, p. 9). For Arendt, action and freedom are similar

in the sense that to be free means to engage in action or take initiative. Action as

beginning actualizes freedom. In other words, our capacity for freedom is revealed

through action. Arendt writes: “Men are free (...) as long as they act, neither before nor

after; for to be free and to act are the same” (Arendt, 1961, p. 153). Man is free because

he is a beginning. She sees a relationship between freedom and action in the sense that

freedom exists only when men engage in political action; and political action can take

place only where there is a common commitment to the world. As Kateb puts it:

“Political actions looks to the creation or conservation or augmentation of a suitable

world for itself, a polis or other entity, which is the scene and inspiration and source of

meaning for political action” (Kateb, 1977, p. 142).

Consequently, as in action, Arendt also claims that “the meaning of politics is

freedom” (Arendt, 2005, p. 108). In On Revolution, Arendt relates the promise of new

beginning in action to the revolutions and popular uprising which are “the only political

events which confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning”

(Arendt, 1965, p. 21). For Arendt, what is inherent in revolutions is the attempt to

demand a space where people can freely act and speak. In revolutions, people strive to

have a space where freedom can flourish, or as D’Entreves puts it: “A space where

freedom can appear as a worldly reality” (D’Entreves, 1994, p. 68). For Arendt, the

American Revolution is a primary example of the attempt to make freedom a worldly


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reality.29

She acknowledges that without intending and realizing it at the moment of their

deeds, the American Founding Fathers—through their letters and recollections—

displayed the unexpected delights in action and acquired public freedom. What united

all of them is actually is “the world and public interest of liberty” (Arendt, 1965, p. 119).

These modern revolutions, Arendt claims, display the fundamental political capacities of

all citizens, which is acting together on the basis of mutually agreed common purposes.

The main purpose of acting together is to enact a public space for civic freedom and

participation that characterize the revolutionary moments as model of politics as action.

Arendt’s identification of politics with freedom is drawn from the Greek

understanding of politics, which is centered around freedom, “understood negatively as

not being ruled or ruling, and positively as a space which can be created only by men

and in which each man moves among his peers” (Arendt, 2005, p. 117). In Greek,

politics is associated with polis or city-state and consequently politics means what

belongs to the polis (Mulgan, 1990, p. 195). The polis is distinguished from oikos, the

private realm, what belongs to the household. The Greeks were fully aware of the

distinction between what activities that take place in the household and in the polis. All

human activities that take place in the polis are considered political. Arendt adopts the

Greek distinction between the polis (public realm) and the oikos (private realm) to

signify the specific natural and political spheres of activities. She argues that a polis or

29

In On Revolution, Arendt investigates the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Paris

Commune of 1871, the Russian Revolution, the French Resistance to Hitler in the Second World War, and

the Hungarian Revolt in 1956. What is common in all of these revolutions is that people have the courage

to step forward from their private lives (routine activities) to create a public space where freedom could

appear. In doing this, they expected that the memory of their deeds could inspire the future generations

(D’Entreves, 1994, p. 68).


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political community is not only distinct but is also opposed to the natural association,

which is centered in the family. In other words, Arendt emphasizes the fact that the

Greeks identified and glorified the realm of politics, a public sphere, in which people

were free to act and interact as equals, which is in contrast with the private life of the

household, a realm of necessity. The rise of the polis means that man receives a second

kind of life, which is called political life and which is distinct from private life (Arendt,

1958, p. 24). Arendt therefore defines the polis not in its physical space, but in terms of

“the organization of a people as it arises out acting and speaking together and its true

space lies between people living together for this purpose, no matter where they happen

to be” (ibid., p. 198).

Politics is public freedom, Mark Antaki claims, can also be traced to the literally

meaning of the Greek term polis itself, which is derived from the verb pellein, which

means ‘to rise in a circular motion.’ That means, polis is an existential center, which is

in itself nothing. So, in politics as the space in-between unites the plurality of men

around nothing. Although the space in-between may not have a determinate content, but

it certainly requires a public space, where people can act and talk. What Arendt

emphasizes here is that in thinking about politics we proceeds from nothing since there

is nothing to tell us about what, how, why, and when. As a result, everybody is free to

engage in action and speech. Arendt insists that politics must be the on-going activity of

citizens that come together in order to exercise their capacity for agency, to conduct

their lives together by means of free speech and persuasion (Antaki, 2010, p. 68-69).


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Arendt is interested in the relation between the polis and distinctiveness, as she

puts it. The polis provides “the chances for everybody to distinguish himself, to show in

deed and word who he was in his unique distinctness” (Arendt, 1958, p. 197). The

emphasis on distinctness, Marshal argues, puts Arendt on the intellectual tradition that

stresses the importance of aesthetics understood as “a series of capacities to perceive

similarity and difference in a variety of registers” (Marshal, 2010, p. 134). People as

zoon politikon pursue that distinction by which various phenomena are brought into a

proximity that is a delicate balance between the similarity that renders them comparable

and the difference that keeps them distinct. In her article “Culture and Politics,”

published in 1959, Arendt quotes Pericles who boasted that “the organization of the

polis that secures the public space in which greatness may appear and may

communicate, and in which a permanent present of people who see and are seen, who

speak and hear and may be heard thus assures a permanent remembrance” (Arendt,

1959, pp. 188-189). This permanence is guaranteed by judgment, through the use of the

human faculty of imagination that Arendt compares it with the faculty of nous identified

by Parmenides as the faculty "through which you look steadfastly at things which are

present though they are absent” (Arendt, 1992, p. 80). Using imagination, Arendt claims

that we are able to be aware of and get a glimpse of something that does not appear

(ibid., p. 80). In this way, through judgment we impose disappearing particulars on

entities in order to perceive them. Thus, judgment establishes the relation between polis

as a literal space in which politically distinctive actions are manifested and the polis as a

figurative space in which those actions are transformed into arts that remain


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conceptually powerful even after the disappearance of the agents who undertook them. It

is clear that for Arendt, judgment is necessary in political life, which is discussed below.

3.2. Judging Political Action

Arendt’s identification of politics with action can easily lead to a

misunderstanding if we fail to consider it from the perspective of her notion of

judgment, a topic she planned to include in her book the Life of the Mind, which did not

happen because of her sudden death in 1975.30

Arendt is fully aware of the consequence

of political violence for the rightless people such as the stateless, the pariah, the outcast

and other victims of political atrocities in the past, and yet she is strongly convinced that

action can redeem the realm of politics. This conviction is grounded in the fact that

political violence has not destroyed the human capacity for thinking and judging, two

mental activities that are different but complementary to one another. In fact, for Arendt

thinking about the world or realm of politics needs to be accompanied by our ability to

judge action, which is inherently political. In other words, Arendt’s praise of political

action must be understood in the context of her radical reevaluation of nonpolitical

things. Her commitment to the values of freedom and worldliness is basic: her double

passion is to differentiate man from nature and save man from delusion. On the basis of

this passion, Arendt judgment either about political action or political violence follow

30

Arendt planned to divide The Life of the Mind into three main parts, called thinking, willing, and

judging. But because of her sudden death in 1975, she was not able to finish the last part of on judging.

However the material on judgment has been given as lecture at the University of Chicago and at the New

School where she taught about Kant’s Political Philosophy. Therefore the section about judgment which

appears as an appendix in The Life of the Mind, is an excerpt from this lecture on Kant’s Political

Philosophy (Arendt, 1992, p. 242). As Robert Fine claims, the reconstruction of Arendt’s idea of judgment

cannot be separated from her treatment on thinking and willing because judging is an integral part of the

life of mind. Although these three faculties are distinct and yet, they are related to one another. Arendt

herself clearly finds a relationship among thinking, willing and judging. She sees the possibility of

harmony of these three faculties of the mind (Fine, 2008, p. 156)


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with equal necessity and equal force (Kateb, 1977, p. 143). Therefore, this section deals

particularly with how a political action should be judged using Arendt’s perspective.

It is commonly presumed that an action is morally evaluated good or bad on the

basis of either the intention of the actor—what an actor has in mind before acting

(deontological morality) or the result of the action—after an action is done

(utilitarianism). Arendt denies these moral standards for political action, which she

claims must be evaluated on the basis not of goodness but of ‘greatness’ (Arendt, 1958,

p. 209). For her, politics must be guided not by a moral system dictated by motive or

goal, but by a political ethics or ethics of worldliness that arises from political action

itself. An action is judged on the basis of the principles it actualizes or found in the

performance of action itself. I proceed now to the elaboration of Arendt’s appropriation

of Kant’s reflective judgment and her rejection of the goodness as the standard of

judgment, which leads to her idea of greatness as the basis for judging political action.

3.2.1. Arendt’s Appropriation of Kant’s Reflective Judgment

Arendt deals with judgment in her book on Kant called Lectures on Kant’s

Political Philosophy where she appropriates Kant’s notion of aesthetic judgment. This

interest in Kant’s idea of judgment triggers her to determine the political character of

judgment. She writes: “If one knows Kant’s works and takes its biographical

circumstances into account, it is rather tempting to turn the argument around and say

that Kant became aware of the political as distinguished from the social, as part and

parcel of man’s condition in the world” (Arendt, 1992, p. 9).


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Arendt makes two important observations regarding Kant’s Critique of Judgment

that shed light on her own idea of judgment. First, Kant never mentions anything about

truth, “except once in a special context” because for him human beings are not

intelligible or cognitive beings; he always “speaks of man in plural, as they really are

and live in societies” (Arendt, 1992, p. 13). From this observation, Arendt then claims

that the important thing in judging an action or event is not the truth, but the meaning of

that event for our togetherness in the world. Second, for Kant, the faculty of judgment

deals with particulars (ibid. p. 13). For Kant, judgment bridges the gap between the

phenomenal world and the noumenal orders of being. Kant distinguishes between reason

through which we recognize the experiential condition of knowledge and the intellect

that enables us to grasp the noumenal order. Thus in judgment, we freely act to

recognize the experiential condition of knowledge within the noumenal order

(Deutscher, 2007, p. xv).

According to Kant, there are two kinds of judgment, namely reflective and

determinant judgments. In a reflective judgment, the particulars are given beforehand’

while in a determinant judgment, the universal is given and the particulars are subsumed

under it. In the first introduction to the Critique of Judgment, Kant writes:

Judgment in general is the ability to think the particular as contained under the

universal. If the universal (the rule, principle, law) is given, then judgment,

which subsumes the particular under it is determinate...But if only the particular

is given and judgment has to find the universal for it, then this power is merely

reflective (Kant, 1987, p. 18-19).

Drawing from Kant, Arendt acknowledges that there are two meanings of

judgment in our common usage that needs to be differentiated. In a general sense,


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judgment is taken to mean “organizing and subsuming the individual and particular

under the general and universal” (Arendt, 2005, p. 102). In this judgment, the particulars

or concrete events in the world are identified through the standards that we have formed

in our mind. The following illustration can explain what Arendt means here. When we

say that a woman is beautiful because of one, two, three or more reasons, our judgment

of the beauty of that woman comes first from our own idea or concept that we have

formed in our mind. It does not come from that woman who appears herself. Here,

judgment is rendering the standard that may or may not appropriately to measure the

thing that we judge. Another kind of judgment that is completely different from the first

one is the judgment of aesthetics and taste. This judgment arises when we are confronted

with things which “we have never seen before and for which there are no standards at

our disposal” (ibid. p. 102). The precondition for this judgment is the evidence of what

is being judged and the ability to make distinction. It is the things as they appear

themselves before us that drive us to distinguish between the beautiful and the ugly,

between right and wrong. This is what Kant calls reflective judgment.

In dealing particularly with aesthetic reflective judgment, Kant argues that one

reflectively judges the pleasure one experiences in the contemplation to be that of the

beautiful. For instance, when we judge: ‘what a beautiful rose’, this judgment is not the

result of a syllogism but arises from the fact that a rose appears itself as a beautiful

object (Arendt, 1992, p. 14). When we taste and feel something, we discern or judge

what we taste and feel and going beyond our own taste and feeling; we then tell whether

we like it or not. In this context, our judgment remains within experience, what we have


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tasted and felt of the things in themselves. According to Deutscher, judgment for Kant is

“hovering between raw experience and things as they are in themselves” (Deutscher,

2007, p. 138). In judging of aesthetics, there is no rule or even an Aristotelian syllogism

which to say that something is beautiful. The idea of the beautiful pertains to the subject

who experiences and judges it. This idea emerges after the subject experiences and

judges it. Thus, a judgment of taste is always subjective in the sense that it does not

subsume particulars under the given universals or rules. In the absence of determining

concepts or rules, Kant argues that reflective judgment is guided by a principle, an idea

that directs its inquiries by promising that for which it searches (Kant, 1987, p. 19).

Reflective judgment attempts to discover the universal in particular judgments

and in so doing, it aims at constituting a content that is both concrete and universally

communicable from experience. The subjective judgment, in Kant’s view, is

communicable because although the assent to aesthetics is autonomous and yet it can be

considered universal from the fact that it can be done by everyone: “Everyone has his

own taste’ (Kant, 1978, p. 55). This communicability depends upon the ability and

willingness to rid it of all subjective interest, and so raise a merely subjective reflection

to a judgment that all could hold (Goldman, 2010, p. 335). Reflection on pleasure is

possible due to a power, what Kant calls as common sense or sensus communis,

understood as “a power to judge that in reflecting takes account a priori, in our thought,

everyone else’s way of presenting something” (Kant, 1978, p. 160).

Common sense is related not to an ideology or theory, but to the world of

experience. It implies that the subject shares with others a common world and not as an


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isolated being. Since everybody has a common sense of what the beauty is and other

matters, then when one judges, one necessarily takes into account others’ points of view

also (Fine, 2008, p. 165). For this purpose, Kant then emphasizes the importance of what

he calls ‘the enlarged mentality’, a mindset that orients itself to the world of plurality. It

is an attitude to “behold the world through the eyes of an abstracted generalized other

and embrace the standpoint of everyone else” (ibid. p. 185). It is only through reflecting

on the represented objects that the feeling of pleasure or displeasure arises.

Arendt finds in Kant’s reflective judgment a new standard of judging that no

longer moves from the universal to the particulars but conversely from the particulars to

the universal. That means, instead of applying the accepted standards and given rules to

the particular situations, in judging we deal with objects of judgment in themselves.

When we judge, we draw some new principles that involve new concepts coming from

an individual thing or situation (Deutscher, 2007, p. 150). Thus, for Arendt, judgment is

“the manifestation of the wind of thought in the world of appearances” (Arendt, 1978, p.

193). It is the ability to apply thinking into the particulars because judgment enables us

to tell what is right from wrong, beautiful from ugly. This ability is not guided by fixed

rule or by people’s opinions, but by one’s own judgment.

For Arendt, Kant is distinguished from other philosophers because of his interest

in the world of appearances or the world of plurality. Being with others is indispensible

for Kant, related to his idea of the common sense. In Arendt’s view, this common sense

allows the subjective judgment to be contrasted with the possible judgment of others,

transforming those judgments into something universally valid or at least universally


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communicable. Arendt relates Kant’s common sense to the community sense,

considered as capacities of the mind that enable people to participate in public life.

One judges always as a member of a community, guided by one’s community

sense, one’s sensus communis. But in the last analysis, one is a member of a

world community by the sheer fact of being human; this is one’s ‘cosmopolitan

existence’. When one judges and when one acts in political matters, one is

supposed to take one’s bearings from the idea, not the actuality, of being a world

citizen (Arendt, 1992, pp. 75-76).

Although Arendt admits the importance of the common sense because it

represents a comprehensible and meaningful world, we should not overstate it. Of

course, common sense is the ground for the communicability of our judgment in the

sense that our judgment is shared with others’ judgments because all are based on

common sense relating to the world where we all live. However, we should not let this

common sense determine the content of our own judgment because it is only partially

true. Thus, we should not treat common sense as the only determining factor of our

judgment, but simply as the background out of which our own judgment emerges

(Buckler, 2011, p. 29).

Here Arendt then turns to Kant’s second idea of the enlarged mentality, taking

into account others’ points of view. Arendt calls Kant’s enlarged mentality as “the train

of one’s imagination to go visiting” (Arendt, 1992, p. 43) or representative thinking, the

formation of an opinion by “considering a given issue from different view points” or by

“making present to my mind the standpoints of those who are absent” (Arendt, 2000,

556). The capacity for representative thinking is necessary to overcome the subjectivity

of our perception and making public the opinions for an ongoing discussion. The

precondition for representative thinking is disinterestedness, the liberation from one’s


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own private interest and impartialiy. Arendt is convinced that it is only in the condition

of disinterestedness and impartiality that one is able to judge respresentatively, takes

into account as many as possible other’s points of view.

3.2.2. The Collapse of Traditional Moral Standards

Arendt’s emphasis that reflective judgment preceeds from the particular event of

the world and not from the universal standards is applicable as well to the realm of

morals. In fact, she strongly claims that the absolute moral standards have collapsed in

the tragedy of the Holocaust marking the breakdown of our civilization, which in turn

caused the loss of traditional authority. In the beginning of her essay ‘What Is

Authority,’ Arendt considers this loss of authority historically and examines the source

of its strength and meaning (Arendt, 1961, p. 92).

Historically, Arendt claims, the loss of authority is traceable to the breakdown of

tradition and religion where authority has been incorrectly taken to mean authoritarian

order requiring blind obedience. In this way authority uses force and argumentation that

result in authoritarianism. Here Arendt is concerned not with authority in general but

with a very specific form of authority which had been valid in the modern world for a

period of time.31

According to her, authority should be properly understood “in

contradistinction to both coercion by force and persuasion through arguments” (ibid., p.

31

It is worth noting that Arendt’s rejection of tradition and religion does not necessarily mean that she is

against tradition and religion in general. In fact, she firstly distinguishes between tradition and the past.

For her, tradition is not the same with the past and so the loss of tradition does not entail a loss of the past.

According to her, “with the loss of tradition we have lost the thread which safely guided us through the

vast realms of the past, but this thread was also the chain fettering each successive generation to a

predetermined aspect of the past. It coulrd be that only now will the past open up to us with unexpected

freshness and tell us things no one has yet had ears to hear” (BPF., 94). Secondly, religion or belief is not

similar to faith. It is only belief that can be exposed to doubt. “This loss of belief in the dogmas of

institutional religions need not necessarily imply a loss or even a crisis of faith, for religion and faith, or

belief and faith, are by no means the same” (ibid.p. 94).


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93). The loss of authority of tradition has created the loss of a guiding thread that

leading us to the vast realm of the past; therefore, for Arendt, authority cannot be

grounded in force or argumentation, but in the past as ‘its unshaken cornerstone’.

Indeed, authority can give “the world the permanence and durability which human

beings need precisely because they are mortals” (ibid., p. 95).

The loss of traditional authority in the modern time also means the collapse of

moral standards, particularly as found in traditional morality and Christianity. That

means, the breakdown of traditional authority is inseparable from the collapse of moral

standards. In her essay ‘Some Questions of Moral Philosophy’, delivered at the New

School for Social Research in 1965, Arendt analyzes traditional morality as encountered

in the totalitarian terror of socialism or Marxism in Russia and Nazism in Germany.

With regard to Marxism, she claims that the characteristic of Lenin’s morality is that it is

a “naïve belief that once the social circumstances are changed through revolution,

mankind will follow automatically the few moral precepts that have been known and

repeated since the dawn of history” (Arendt, 2003, p. 53). With regard to Nazism, she

avers that the totalitarian regime of Hitler changed the moral standard of ‘Thou shall not

kill’ and ‘Thou shall not lie’ into ‘Thou shall kill’ and ‘Thou shall lie’. Arendt writes:

Hitler’s criminal morality was changed back again at a moment’s notice, at the

moment ‘history’ had given the notice of defeat. .... This sudden return to

‘normality’ contrary to what is often complacently assumed can only reinforce

our doubts (ibid., p. 54).

The collapse of all established moral standards gives the impression that what we

call morality consists merely of ‘our habits’ and is no more than a set of mores, customs,

and manners which could be exchanged with another set. Moreover, this set of mores,


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customs, and manners tends to be uncritically acceptable, people never doubt what they

have been taught to believe in (ibid., p. 54). This phenomenon is what is called by

Heidegger and Nietzsche as nihilism. Arendt shares the same concern about nihilism,

but her interest is not in the values that need to be re-evaluated, as in Nietzsche, but in

the uncritical mind of people who are easily accepting of any given moral standard.

According to Arendt, obedience to universal standards has the competence to shut down

the thinking process, as can be seen in the trial of Adolf Eichmann who was described

by Arendt as someone who was unable to think. Eichmann constantly repeated phrases

that he would like to find peace with his former enemies, which was as an indication of

his inability to think (Arendt, 1978, p. 4).

The collapse of moral standards is the driving force for Arendt to assert that

morality is no longer self-understood and universally prescribed (Ludz, 2007, p. 800).

Each individual who is sane knows what is right and wrong. For example, the one who

does something wrong knows the wrong one has done. In other words, in doing

something wrong, one knows that one is in contradiction with one’s self. Taking

Socrates as the example, Arendt claims that moral conduct must depend primarily on

thinking, the dialogue with oneself (Arendt, 2003, p. 67). This means, the standard of

what is right or wrong cannot be taken for granted. It is not a matter of course, of merely

following the socially accepted rules or conduct. It involves thinking in order to discern

what is right and what is wrong and judging any socially accepted rule. Since every

individual knows within him or herself what is right and wrong, Arendt then makes the

further claim that “moral conduct has nothing to do with obedience to any law given


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from the outside—be it the law of God or the laws of men” (ibid., p. 68). In other words,

our decision to follow certain rules of conduct is driven by our own critical thought and

not by the laws of the land and the voices of other people.

Based on this observation, Arendt then asserts that all moral propositions “take

as their standard the Self and hence the intercourse of man with himself” (ibid., p. 76).

What Arendt means here is that moral standards should be derived from the self, a

worldly, an appearing and thinking being. The consequences of this assertion are

twofold: Arendt’s ethics is neither legalistic nor utilitarian. First, it is against the

legalistic approach to morality as exemplied by the deontological theory in the form of

‘categorical imperative’ of Kant and Socrates (Ludz, 2007, p. 803). Here Arendt

compares Socrates’ “It is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong’ with Kant’s “Act in

such a way that the maxim of your action can become a general law for all intelligible

beings.” According to her, both propositions can be considered as categorical statements

and not just as categorical imperatives which imply external sanction, either from God

or the community. In On Revolution, Arendt examines the danger of treating law as a

commandment because it binds people due merely to a higher or religious sanction. She

writes:

Only to the extent that we understand by law a commandment to which men owe

obedience regardless of their consent and mutual agreements, does the law

require a transcendent source of authority for its validity, that is, an origin which

must be beyond human power (Arendt, 1965, p. 189).

Therefore, instead of treating it as a law, an obligation or a categorical

imperative, Socrates and Kant’s proposition can be treated as a categorical statement. In

this way, the sanction comes from within oneself. This is self-punishment, which Kant


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calls ‘self-contempt’ and Socrates calls ‘self-contradiction’. This self-punishment is

possible only for those who live with themselves and in this way these people “find

moral propositions self-evident, they don’t need the obligation” (Arendt, 2003, p. 77). In

other words, without obligation, those who live with themselves discover in themselves

what is right and what is wrong and enforce self-punishment for the wrong they have

done. Arendt’s position here is weak and is not convincing enough because it seems that

she disregards the importance of the external sanctions, but, I think, her position should

be understood in the context of her emphasis on the importance of being critical to any

tradition, law or obligation coming from the outside. She actually challenges us to make

the external sanctions present for us and think about them in personal terms. Thus, any

sanction is taken to be our own categorical statement.

Second, Arendt’s ethics is against the utilitarian approach that considers the

result or consequence as the basis for judging an action as either good or bad. Here

Arendt draws a distinction between Socratic morality and Christian morality. The former

focuses on the importance of being one with oneself. That means, every individual must

avoid being contradictory with him or herself. It is better to be at odds with the whole

world than at odds with oneself (ibid., p. 122). The proposition ‘it is better to suffer

wrong than to do wrong’, Arendt argues, is the product of thinking or constantly

dialoguing with oneself. When one thinks, he or she discovers the right thing to have in

life. Socratic morality thus places a central role on the thinking person.

In contrast to Socratic morality, Christian morality focuses on the consequence of

an action. Here Arendt quotes the Gospel’s passage from Mathew 5, 39 and 6, 1-4 where


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it is stated that a good man is the one who turns the other cheek, lets not the left hand

see what the right does, and performs good deeds to be seen by God and not by man.

Arendt argues that unlike Socratic thinking that is grounded in the faculty of judging,

Christian morality is based on the faculty of the will and consequently it emphasizes

doing good and the consequences of the deed at large (ibid., p. 125). Therefore if

Socratic morality is a morality of a man of thought, Christian morality is a morality of a

man of action (Ludz, 2007, p. 804) Of course, she admits, Christian ethics can prevent

one from revenge, betrayal or murder, but it does not prescribe any positive goal for the

subject. In fact the subject is left behind in this kind of morality since the ultimate

criterion is found not in the actor but the goodness of action (Arendt, 2003, p. 123).

Furthermore, Arendt is also concerned with the secretive quality of Christian

goodness. Whatever man does, he must not know the goodness of his or her act. It is

only God, not the actor or even the world, who is privy to the goodness of an act. In

Christian notion of goodness, Arendt observes, an action is judged good or bad not by

the actor himself but by God. It is the outsider who judges an action. Consequently, the

goodness or badness of an action is secret because it is present only in the mind of God.

Since it is secretive, the Christian concept of goodness is unsuited to the public realm. In

fact, when this criterion of goodness enters into the world, it has been corrupted.

“Goodness that comes out of hiding and assumes a public role is no longer good, but

corrupt in its own terms and will carry its own corruption wherever it goes” (ibid., p.

77). Since the idea of goodness does not come from the self and the world, it represents

the absolute purity that cannot be questioned or talked about. This refers to the fact that


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the nature of goodness itself is absolute and on the basis of this absoluteness an action

should be realized in the world (Garrath, 1998, p. 941). The absolute nature of goodness

threatens not only the plurality of opinions that constitutes the public realm, but also the

freedom of other actors. It becomes despotic because it tends to be destructive not only

of the human world but also of the action itself. Arendt claims that goodness “is not only

impossible within the confines of the public realm,” but also it is “destructive of it”

(Arendt, 2003, p. 77). Or, as she says in On Revolution, it “spells doom to everyone

when it is introduced into the political realm” (Arendt, 1965, p. 84).

What Arendt wants to do is to argue that in the public realm, the goodness should

neither be a secret nor absolute but provisional and transparent. It must be open to

different perspectives and further discussion involving both actors and spectators. This

claim is grounded in her idea of the world and action. Regarding the former, Arendt

repeatedly claims that the world is fundamentally relative and plural. It is enacted as

long as humans get together to act and speak. Regarding the latter, she speaks of the

unpredictability of an action which carriers within itself the quality of arbitrariness. It

introduces something new into the world whose ongoing chain of events results in the

actions’ being unpredictable. This unpredictability affects not only effect the actors but

also the other actors and spectators. Therefore, the judgment on the action necessarily

involves those who are engaged in that action and those who live in the world.

According to Arendt, the disclosure of the self in action cannot be reduced to

specific motives or ends. The action must be free from motive and from its goal as a

predictable effect, since motives and goals would limit the action’s miraculous


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possibilities. Acting with certain motives and goals to be attained would deny the very

essence of the action itself because action implies initiative, a new beginning and

possibility. Although motives and ends are factors that play a central role in the

formation of individual intentions, but these factors only reveal the ‘what’ of the

individual rather than the ‘who.’ In the elaboration of worldlessness I have pointed out

that, if human action is judged according to what humans produce and the actors

themselves are not involved in talking about their own products, then we treat the actors

as thing-like, as performing robots. This is exactly what Arendt sees in the organization

of people as the mass whether in totalitarianism or in modern capitalism. Furthermore,

Arendt claims that pure intentions—though they might be well-motivated—cannot be

claimed as the end. They must be provisional and rely on the further cooporation of

others because for her, the world is the plurality of men who have the capacity for action

and speech. Therefore it is necessary to engage them in the discussion about matters that

concern them all. In Arendt’s view, taking moral standards for granted and considering

an action from the vantage point of goodness or motives destroy not only the self but

also the world. In contrast, when we allow actors and spectators to judge an action, we

recognize the essential condition of a world that is created and common to all.

3.2.3. Greatness as the Standard for Judging Action

In the absence of motives and goodness, what is the standard by which to judge

an action? Arendt does not offer a set of precepts that can be applied to politics because

for her the formulation and application of universal precepts as such indicates an

inclination to legislate for politics from a vantage point that is outside of politics itself


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(Buckler, 2011, p. 126). Therefore, Arendt suggests that greatness, a principle generated

in the action itself, be the standard for judging an action. Arendt writes: “Action can be

judged only by the criterion of greatness (Arendt, 1958, p. 205). The ethical standards or

what she calls ‘principles’ are contained in the action itself. The following passage from

her essay ‘What is Freedom’ in Between Past and Future, beautifully captures what

Arendt means by principle generated in the action itself.

Action insofar as it is free is neither under the guidance of the intellect nor under

the dictate of the will—although it needs both for the execution of any particular

goal—but springs from something altogether different which...I shall call a

principle. Principles do not operate from within the self as motives do...but

inspire, as it were, from without; and they are much too general to prescribe

particular goals, although every particular aim can be judged in the light of its

principle once the act has been started. For, unlike the judgment of the intellect

which precedes action, and unlike the command of the will which initiates it, the

inspiring principle becomes fully manifest only in the performing act itself...

(Arendt, 1961, p. 152).

In her notion of action, Arendt relates action to the event of natality or birth. For

Arendt, the event of natality is the arche, which means both origin and rule or principle.

In this sense, arche is the beginning and the principle of the givenness. This points to the

fact that both—the beginning and principle—are coexisting and each gives rise to two

different relations. The beginning gives rise to plurality and principle to singularity or

uniqueness. Many people are born into the world, but each newly born introduces

something anew to the world and appears to be a distinct and unique person. That means

that the new beginning carries within itself its own principle that differentiates him or

her from the others. Therefore the unpredictability of an event of natality precisely lies

in the fact that the origin or beginning carries within itself its rule or principle. That is

exactly what happens in action. When one acts, one introduces something anew, and as a


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new beginning this action carries within itself a principle that makes that action distinct

from others. The unpredictability of an action lies in the action itself as a new beginning

that carries within itself its own principle (Birmingham, 2011, pp. 109-110).

Arendt draws the term principle from Montesquieu’s analysis of the nature of

government and the principle behind its action. Montesquieu claims that the nature of

government is what makes it as it is and the principle is what makes government acts in

a certain way. In this sense, the nature is its particular structure and the principle is the

human passions that set it in motion. There can be many forms of government, but each

form carries within itself a principle that underlies its own action. In the Spirit of the

Laws, Montesquieu claims that a form of government is animated by a spirit or ethos,

which is understood as the affection that provides the principle of its action. For

instance, the republican form is animated by the principle of political virtue; the

monarchical form by the principle of honor; and the despotic form by the principle of

fear.32

From Montesquieu’ perspective, Arendt claims that each principle operates ‘from

without’ and exists in the world not as an abstraction but as an actual action which

appears to others (Garrath, 1998, p. 943).

Furthermore, Arendt argues that a principle redeems from within the

arbitrariness of an action. She writes: “What saves the act of beginning from its own

arbitrariness is that it carries its own principle within itself or, to be more precise, that

beginning and principle, principium and principle, are not only related to each other, but

32

Garrath Williams quotes Montesquieu as follows: “...(political) virtue, being love of the republic and

thence of the (political) equality it offers; honour, ‘the prejudice of each person and each condition’,

meaning ambitiousness within a statue hierarchy, offered by bodies intermediary to sovereign and people;

and fear, which reduces every subject to ‘a creature that obeys a creature who wants’, the despot,

submission to whose whims constitutes the only enduring law” (William, p. 943)


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are coeval” (Arendt, 1965, p. 212). The same claim is also found in The Human

Condition: ”The miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its

normal ‘natural’ ruin is ultimately the fact of natality, in which the faculty of action is

ontologically rooted” (Arendt, 1958, p. 157). An action is tied to the individual through

a principle, which the Greeks called arche, from the infinitive archein; to originate,

begin, or give a rule which is conditioned by this formative principle. This reveals the

connection between the actor and the act, while the act itself combines the principle and

its performance. “The greatest that man can achieve is his own appearance and

actualization” (ibid., p. 208). The principle is disclosed by the act in its performance and

produces a novelty that only becomes intelligible after the fact. In other words, the

principle is known only after an action has been performed. Arendt writes: “Principles

do not operate from within the self as motives do...but inspire. The inspiring principle

becomes fully manifest only in the performing act itself” (Arendt, 1961, p. 152). A

principle is not an intention because it does not suggest a result and offers no obligation

to others. Unlike result and obligation that can be predetermined before the performance

of an action, a greatest principle is only conceived after an action is performed and

reified in a story. She writes:

In contradistinction to other elements peculiar to action—above all to the

preconceived goals, the impelling motives, and the guiding principles, all of

which become visible in the course of action—the meaning of a committed act is

revealed only when the action itself has come to an end and become a story

susceptible to narration (Arendt, 1955, p. 21; 1965, p. 82).

On Arendt’s account, the arche only impels action over passivity, setting the

action into motion without directing it. These principles illuminate action or “what is


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great and radiant” (Arendt, 1958, p. 206). Since political action is concerned with the

phenomenal world of appearances, then these inspiring principles become fully manifest

only in the performing act itself. We cannot judge an action until that action is done.

This implies that the judgment passes a verdict on the basis of the particular case rather

than through the imposition of general categories. This process will confers meaning on

action: “Only my equals can say who I am and tell me” (Buckler, 2011, p. 90).

The principle as the specific meaning of an action is identified after the fact by

others who witness that action. When one acts, his or her action is judged by others or

spectators to whom the actor appears. It is the recognition of spectators that gives

meaning to the actor’s deed and its significance for the common world. Without the

presence of others who witness the actor’s deed, the world in-between is not possible;

and without the judgment of others, the meaning of action cannot be comprehensive. It

remains partial because it depends only on the actor’s own judgment. This means that

the principle as the specific meaning of an action, is available to the spectators who

judges and immortalizes it in narrative. Therefore, from Arendt’s perspective, principle

is “the ideal that we identify after the fact as having brought together political actors at a

specific moment to achieve something great (MacLachlan, 2006, p. 6).

From Arendt’s perspective, principle refers to the overall motivation and an ideal

for the sake of which an action is undertaken. Of course, there can be more than one

principle at work in an action. An actor can be guided or inspired by many ends, goals or

motivations. Therefore, following Montesquieu who acknowledges that naturally there

can be more than one principle manifested in any form of government and thus there is a


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hierarchy of principles at work in any government, Arendt similarly claims that more

than one principle can be manifested in an action and thus it is necessary to discern a

hierarchy of principles that works in an action in order to discover its greatest principle

of action. In other words, among many principles, there must be one principle that is

great, radiant or highest of all and thus transcends other particular motives and goals.

Thus, what Arendt means by greatness here is the best and perfect principle that

illuminates an action. Unfortunately, Arendt does not provide the criteria for judging the

greatest principle. However, I suggest that based on her commitment to amor mundi,

love and care for the world, the greatest principle is a principle that enhances and

perpetuates the human world.

3.3. The Ethical Character of Arendt’s Reflective Judgment and the Quest

for Meaning

Arendt’s appeal to the greatness as a principle that arises out of the performative

action and as the standard of judging a political action challenges the traditional and

Christian moralities that tend to impose the universal and absolute moral principles to

the realm of politics. This tendency is destructive or anarchic because it is a kind of “an

escape from and the emasculation of, the inherently plural and conflictual sphere of

politics” (Buckler, 2010, p. 126). Thus, the question that remains to be dealt with has

something to do with the ethical constraint in the realm of politics.

Arendt offers a judgment that is neither cognitive nor historical. It is not

cognitive because it depends on the approval of others who have common sense.

Judgment is not historical because it is not intended to possess a single judgment or


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choice, but rather it is always open for an ongoing discourse (Kristeva, 2001, p. 75).

Arendt suggests that in judging we should take into account other people’s points of

view or, in other words, our judgment should be directed to others. This implicitly

implies the respect for others because, like ourselves, other people are also acting and

speaking persons. They possess every right to have an opinion of their own about

anything in the world. In the interview with Günther Gauss, Arendt claims that her

thought is always grounded in “trust in people...a trust—which is difficult to formulate

but fundamental—in what is human in all people” (Arendt, 1994, p. 23). Respect for

other points of view and trust in what is human in all people are actually interwoven in

Arendt’s writings. In fact, Arendt devotes so much attention to the individuals who not

only did good and acted right but also bravely spoke in dark times about what is right

and wrong. She discovers the latter in the figure of Socrates, as well as the other writers

discussed in her book Men in Dark Times who kept thinking and judging up to the point

of sacrificing themselves for the sake of what they held to be right and good. They are

the examples of people who still exercise their ability to judge in dark time because they

“went really on their own judgments, and they did so freely; there were no rules to be

abided by, under which the particular cases with which they were confronted could be

subsumed” (Arendt, 1963, p. 295). The point is that Arendt still believes in the human

capacity for judging things of the world.

The trust in the human capacity for judging implies that all human beings have

this capacity in common and thus all people can judge from their different positions in

the world. Consequently, any reflective judgment is always, albeit it is done in private


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and is tied to a particular condition, liable to a common and ongoing discursive

deliberation. In discursive deliberation one’s own judgment is exposed to the public

realm not to discover a cultural convention but rather to discover whether or not this

particular reflective judgment is in accord with what is the best for the public realm.

Buckler argues that Arendt’s ethics cannot be assimilated with the communitarian

thinking that appeals to the cultural convention as the ground for political ethics. That

means, a set of shared or culturally inscribed conventions is considered as the basis for

arranging the different perspectives about our common image of the good life at the

political level. Although the cultural conventions no longer refer to the universal or

absolute standards, they represent a kind of solidarity in belief, which is quite different

from Arendt’s emphasis on plurality. Consequently, Buckler claims that the

communitarian grounding of political ethics would “threaten spontaneity and so neglect

the political in favor of the imposition of a given set of ethical prescriptions” (Buckler,

2010, p. 128). For Arendt, the ethical constraint of all judgments is what is the greatest

deed or word that endures and the most radiant glory that one reveals in the human

world (Arendt, 1961, p. 218). This means, our judgment is circumstantial, a careful

attention to a particular action in virtue of what is the best for the public realm, a realm

for human action and speech (Buckler, 2010, p. 135). Thus, every time we pass a

judgment on an action taking place in the world, we discern the great thing that

particular action could bring to the public realm. In other words, in judging we are

always conscious of the ethical constraints that arise out of the public realm, which is the

greatness of public realm.


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Furthermore, Arendt repeatedly claims that one’s own judgment should be

contrasted with other judgments or other points of view in an ongoing discussion. This

process does not intend to attain an authoritative judgment, but rather to seek for the

approval or disapproval of others who inhabit the same world. Here, the ethical

constraint of Arendt’s reflective judgment is not quite similar to a set of procedural

principles. Of course, public deliberations produce a set of principles that carry

substantive ethical authority and which could provide criteria for the just arrangement of

the institution in the polity.33

Although the procedural principles follow on the practice

of politics, Buckler argues that this process of public deliberation still appeals to the

universal conditions of reflective judgment. This means that the point of reference is

judgment, the citizens’ faculty of passing judgment, but thus not necessarily the

phenomenal conditions of appearance, which is central in Arendt’s notion of reflective

judgment. These phenomenal conditions, “may provide a basis for political ethics, not

because it presupposes substantive constraints but because it implies an understanding of

how constraint might arise in the context of public realm itself” (Bucker, 2010, p. 130).

Arendt acknowledges that one particular judgment is “endowed with a certain

specific validity but is never universally valid” (Arendt, 1961, p. 221). Thus, every

partial judgment is subjected to the public gaze or the verdict of spectators. In other

words, when we pass judgment on a particular action, we anticipate what others might

33

This is found in Habermas’ approach to justice where he distinguishes the philosophical problems of

equal rights from the question of distributive justice. Habermas argues that, on the one hand, principles of

distributive justice respond to problems in the political domain and require contextual specification; and

on the other hand, principles of equal right “can be grounded from the standpoint of universalization, and

claim prima facie validity,” even if the application of these principles must be sensitive to context

(Habermas, 1992, p. 249-250).


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judge about that same action. We are conscious of the verdict that might come from

others. For Arendt, when we compare our judgment with others, we search for the

meaning of all the judgments in the common world. It becomes clear that Arendt’s

ethics advocates action and judgment and since both are primarily defined by their

reference to the public realm and other people then the ethical constraints or the

imperatives are inherent in the public realm and the verdicts of spectators.


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PART TWO:

THE CONTRIBUTION OF ARENDT’S ETHICS

TO POLITICAL RECONCILIATION

In part one I have reconstructed Arendt’s ethics of worldliness from her specific

way of thinking about the world and how judging an action takes place in it. Thinking

and judging are two different mental activities. The former deals with the invisible albeit

with representation of the absent things, whereas the latter is concerned with particulars

and things close at hand (Arendt, 1978, p. 193). However, both are interrelated because

judging the particulars presupposes thinking about those particulars. Without thinking

one is unable to make any judgment about a particular deed. Arend’s favorite example is

Adolf Eichmann whom she considers as an unthinking person. Eichmann’s inability to

think, in Arendt’s view, is the main reason why he failed to decide what was right or

wrong and good or evil concerning his participation in Hitler’s evil policies and his own

action during the Holocaust. If Eichmann was able to exercise his capacity for thinking

even in the dark moment, he would have decided not to participate in carrying out a

monstrous act against humanity.

Furthermore, the interrelation betweeing thinking and judging is also discovered

in the fact that both are essential when assuming responsibility for the common world,


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either by taking action for preserving the common world or by having an opinion about

anything taking place in it. For Arendt, on the one hand, thinking about the world means

being attentive to the world, the sort of attentiveness which reveals our responsibility for

the world into which we are thrown. On the other hand, in judging a political action we

are directed by ethical constraints to come from the world itself and the verdict of

spectators. This means that when we judge we should be aware of the great things that

an action could bring to the public realm and what others might say about it. In other

words, in judging we seek for the meaning which past events might have for common

life in the world.

The twin phenomena of thinking about the world and judging an action are

concretely manifested in Arendt’s discussion of storytelling and political forgiveness.

These general ideas of storytelling and forgiveness have become the fundamental tools

in promoting political reconciliation in the recent years. For instance, Lederach suggests

that reconciliation presupposes a worldly realm in which the truth obtained through

storytelling is confirmed and joined together in forgiveness (Lederach, 1997, p. 29). This

is clear in the establishment of truth commissions,34

whose central tasks are to discover

the truth of the past wrongs and to encourage forgiveness among the conflicting parties,

objectives that are expected to be attained through testimonies and public hearings

where the victims or their family members and the perpetrators are given the opportunity

34

For Hayner, there is no single, broadly accepted definition of a truth commission because of its wide

range of inquiries. Therefore, instead of defining what a truth commission is, she gives some parameters in

order to understand its nature. She writes: “A truth commission (1) is focused on past, rather than ongoing

events; (2) investigates a pattern of events that took place over a period of time; (3) engages directly and

broadly with the affected population, gathering information on their experiences; (4) is a temporary body,

with the aim of concluding with a final report; and (5) is officially authorized or empowered by the state

under review” (Hayner, 2011, p. 11-12)


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to tell their own stories about what had happened. The rationale behind the

establishment of truth comissions consists in ‘coming to terms with’ and ‘moving

forward’. It is assumed that by making clear the facts of the past, citizens of a

transitional state will come to terms with the past and therefore be able to move forward.

In doing so, socieites that have experienced violent conflicts will become stable and will

prosper (Rotberg, 2000, p. 6).

Truth commissions vary from one country to another and each has a specific

investigatory mandate that reflects the political realities of a particular country. They

document and record patterns of human rights abuses and atrocities over a specified time

period within a society, and yet all have something in common. Truth commissions are

established as a complementary approach to criminal justice in order to deal with the

question of justice and accountability in a broad political context because they are

intended to investigate the institutional or societal conditions, such as the structures of

the armed forces or the policies of the government that have allowed for massive

violence to take place (Hayner, 2011, p. 8). They address the needs of victims and

communities that are not reached by the criminal justice system. This means that truth

commissions are separate and independent political bodies. They are powerful

politically but not legally because their power is limited compared to the criminal justice

systems or the courts; for instance, they cannot put anyone in jail, nor can they enforce

their recommendations. In other words, truth commissions are temporarily created by a

transitional regime to investigate, clarify, and address an earlier period of repression,

conflict, atrocity or systematic human rights abuse and produce their findings with


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conclusions and recommendations for future reform or action. Thus, truth commissions

are expected eventually to promote reconciliation at the political level (ibid., p. 20). The

underlying premise in establishing a truth commission during a transitional period is that

it helps the state to come to terms with its past offenses in order to give way to a new

beginning.

The only commission that has had an extensive and powerful mandate was the

Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of South Africa. After the end of the

apartheid regime in South Africa in 1994, Nelson Mandela as first president established

the TRC in the following year consisting of seventeen commissioners, chaired by

Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Compared to others truth commissions, TRC’s mandates,

procedures, and its commissioners were democratically decided by involving civil

societies authorized not by the president or prime minister but by an act of Parliament

(Rotberg, 2000, p. 13). The mandate given to TRC was extensive because it was

composed of three interconnected committees, namely the Human Rights Violations

Committee, the Amnesty Committee, and the Reparations and Rehabilitation

Committee. The Human Rights Committee collected statements from victims and

witnesses so that the truth of past human rights violations was recorded. The Amnesty

Committee processed and decided who would be granted amnesty. And the Reparations

Committee gave the recommendation for a reparations program (Hayner, p. 28).

What concern me here are the first and second mandates to seek the truth and to

grant amnesty. The second mandate necessarily presupposes the first mandate in the

sense that amnesty can be granted only if the truth about past wrongs has already been


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established through testimonies and public hearings. Here, truth is the precondition for

granting the amnesty after the perpetrators have publicly acknowledged their direct

involvement in the violation of human rights (Hayner, p. 13). Politically, TRC was

powerful because it was able to identify the involvement of the state—the apartheid

regime of the African National Congress (ANC)—by inquiring into the patterns, causes,

and consequences of political violences. In this way, TRC was able to acquire a credible

acknowledgement by the state about past wrongs (ibid. p. 13).

Although it was a powerful truth commission, from its beginning, TRC has been

the subject of controversies, particularly in relation to two issues: TRC’s

conceptualization of the truth and its function to grant amnesty to individual perpetrators

who were able to make a full disclosure of their evil acts and prove that such acts were

done for political reasons. These controversies are the focus of my evaluation in this part

the dissertation. In the following two chapters, I evaluate particularly the South African

TRC’s concept of truth and its attempt to grant amnesty using the paradigm of Arendt’s

notion of storytelling and political forgiveness. In my view, Arendt’s discussion of

reconciliation is always in the context of thinking about the world and judging an action,

that is, always in the context of her ethics of worldliness. In other words, Arendt talks

about reconciliation in the view of our responsibility for the world and our need to

search for the meaning of past events to our life in common.

In the introduction, I have described the understanding of political reconciliation

from the perspective of Arendt’s ethics of worldliness; here political reconciliation is

taken to mean coming to terms with the world and its past traumatic horrors. The


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aspiration to reconcile enables citizens to strive toward a shared understanding of the

significance of the common world and past wrongs for their lives in common. For

Arendt, reconciliation is a proper response to the past wrongs because it challenges both

victims and perpetrators to relate themselves to the inflicted world in a new way for the

sake of building and preserving a new world in the future. But, how do we reconcile

with the world and its traumatic past? Here I propose Arendt’s notion of storytelling and

political forgiveness. Her constant attempt to discuss these topics in the light of

responsibility for the world and the search for the meaning of action for the common

world that her ideas may be seen to be meaningful for political reconciliation. For this

reason, I shall elaborate the contribution of Arendt’s ethics of worldliness to political

reconciliation in the discussion of storytelling in Chapter Four and of political

forgiveness in Chapter Five.


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CHAPTER FOUR:

THE IMPORTANCE OF STORYTELLING IN

POLITICAL RECONCILIATION

When Elisabeth Young-Bruehl asked permission from Arendt to write a

biography about her, Arendt reminded Young-Bruehl and other writers who intend to

write posthumously books to pay special attention to the illuminations that her

(Arendt’s) whole life and her ideas have to offer to the world. This is the main reason

why Young-Bruel entitled her biography of Arendt as Hannah Arendt: For the Love of

the World, published in 1982, seven years after Arendt’s death in 1975. According to

Young-Bruehl, what Arendt really means is that any of her biographers must be attentive

and view her life from up close in order to disclose both its changes and continuities.

This reminder comes from Arendt’s conviction that by making changes and continuities

available, a book opens up the possibility for the readers to exercise their faculty of

thinking and judging (Young-Bruehl, 1982, p. xviii). In other words, for Arendt, what is

written and thus told to the public must be something related to the common world and

at the same time challenges others to think and judge.

Writing a biography is similar to telling the story of an individual; how the

person understands the meaning of her life and her common identity with others, as well


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as her experiences and place in the world. This is what Arendt has in mind when she

tells the story about how people appear and move in the world and about their words and

deeds. In the preface of to Men in Dark Times, Arendt acknowledges that this book is

“concerned with persons—how they lived their lives, how they moved in the world, and

how they were affected by historical time” (Arendt, 1955, p. vii).35

In telling the story

about people, Arendt attempts to bring to the surface the greatness and dignity of the

past generations’ actions and deeds, which is necessary for creating and preserving the

common world in the present and future. However, Arendt is also critical of the people

told in her story. Most of them, as she says in her essay about Bertolt Brech, were too

much concerned with themselves and thus disregarded the real issues surrounding them.

They were good in remembering everything in detail but forgot the most important

things concerning public life (ibid., p. 220). For Arendt, the task of political theorists is

not just to see, hear and remember the political realities or actions that have taken place

in the past, but also to transform them into a story (Arendt, 1958, p. 95).

Stories of past events need to be told in order to publicly make sense and reveal

the meaning of those events to the human world or politics. Storytelling is inherently

political because it presupposes the plurality of people who have the capacity to disclose

the meaning of past events to the world or politics itself. A similar idea comes from Paul

Ricoeur who claims that the capacity to narrate plays an important role because actions

only become legible and intelligible when they are related to one another in stories and

35

Men in Dark Times is a collection of essays written as tributes to people who came from different

professions—writers, poets, political theorists and philosophers—and who, although they hardly knew

each other, shared the same experience of the political horrors of the first half of the twentieth century. In

this book Arendt presents the story of Lessing, Rosa Luxemburg, Angelo Guiseppe Roncalli, Karl Jaspers,

Isak Dinesen, Herman Broch, Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, Waldemar Gurian, and Randall Jarrell.


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the art of telling a story of oneself produces life narrative. Our life is understood and

evaluated through an understanding that has the form of narrative. In “Action, Story and

History: On Re-Reading the Human Condition,” Ricoeur claims that the permanence of

human greatness relies on the poets who “compose a mimēsis, that is, a creative

imitation of action understood in terms of its political dimension” (Ricoeur, 1983, p. 69).

The focus of Arendt’s own storytelling is the search for the good of the public

realm. This is the reason why her idea of storytelling has been widely acknowledged as

an essential element in her theory of politics. Lisa Disch, for instance, identifies

Arendt’s critical thinking as a ‘situated impartiality’ or ‘visiting’, that does not appeal to

an abstract standard of right, but to a plurality of public points of view. In this context,

‘visiting’ means “telling oneself the story of a situation from the plurality of its

constituents’ perspectives” (Disch, 1994, p. 162-163). Seyla Benhabib shows the

redemptive power of stories because they allow thinkers to fill the gap between past and

present due to the breakdown of tradition: “When tradition has ceased to orient our sense

of the past, ... the theorist as storyteller is like the pearl diver, who converts memory of

the dead into something rich and strange” (Benhabib, 1990, 188). While Annabel

Herzog argues that Arendt’s specific conception of politics has led her to a particular

kind of writing called storytelling: “In Arendt works, storytelling proved to be the most

appropriate writing form for the recounting of the political because it is the only writing

form that faithfully reports individual wanderings in the world” (Herzog, 2001, p. 172).

What these scholars have in common is that in Arendt, there is a close relationship

between storytelling and politics. Storytelling is inherently political because it


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presupposes the plurality of people and at the same time discloses the meaning of past

events to the world or politics itself.

On the ground of the close relationship between storytelling and politics, I argue

in this chapter that Arendt’s idea of storytelling is essential to political reconciliation.

This assertion is drawn from her ethics of responsibility. One way of taking action and

responsibility for the common world is by storytelling such that when one tells a story,

one takes over the role of the original actors and thus assumes the responsibility for what

had happened in the past. Assuming responsibility requires a joint venture between

victims and perpetrators to realize a future world in common. However, telling the story

is not possible without remembrance. An action needs to be remembered in order to be

told. Without memory there is nothing to tell. It is only when past events are

remembered that we have something to tell about. As a result, the discussion of the

importance of storytelling for political reconciliation in this chapter is always coupled

with memory or remembrance.

4.1. Memory, Story and the Failure of ‘Holes of Oblivion’

Arendt strongly believes that an action cannot and should not be forgotten

because it always remains with us and thus requires the human mind to think, remember

and tell the story about it. In fact, actions or events provoke us to think (hold internal

dialogue), to tell the story about what we think about or experience. The story paves the

way for communication with others and remembrance. Arendt’s conviction on the

significance of memory and story is based on her own experience about totalitarianism

that is driven by its own ideology. Arendt identifies totalitarian ideologies as an


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‘ideological nonsense’ (Arendt, 1955, p. 64) or the ‘curious air of unreality’ (ibid. p. 61)

because of the lack of utilitarian goals and the reference to reality. Thus, she calls

totalitarian ideologies as ‘holes of oblivion,’ that refers to the state of forgetting or the

fact of having forgotten. Arendt uses the phrase of ‘holes of oblivion’ to point to the

totalitarian fantasy of making all deeds, good or evil, disappear in silent anonymity:

“Totalitarian domination tried to established these holes of oblivion into which all deeds,

good and evil, would disappear...” (Arendt, 1963, p. 232). It is an organized terror to

obliterate any memory of what had happened in the past with an expectation or fantasy

that nobody will remember and then tell the story about it.

One way of constructing ‘holes of oblivion’ was the establishment of

concentration camps that were completely isolated from the surrounding world as if the

inmates were no longer part of the world. Unlike the isolation of prison in which the

prisoners are still treated as part of society and subjected to the state’s law, the Nazi’s

concentration camps cut off any relation of inmates to the outside world. “From the

moment of his arrest, nobody in the outside world was supposed to hear of the prisoner

again; it is as if he had disappeared from the surface of the earth” (Arendt, ibid. p. 60).

In this way, the Nazi’s authorities expected that anything taking place inside the

concentration camp would be forgotten. Nobody outside of the concentration camps

would be able to witness what was going on inside. “The unreality which surrounds the

hellish experiment, which is so strongly felt by the inmates themselves and makes the

guards, but also the prisoners, forget that murder is being committed...” (Arendt, 1955,

p. 61). Or in The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt writes: “The horror of the


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concentration and extermination camps lies in the fact that the inmates, even if they

happen to keep alive, are more effectively cut off from the world of the living than if

they had died, because terror enforces oblivion” (Arendt, 1951, p. 368). The oblivion

made it impossible for inmates and others to tell the story about what had happened in

concentration camps. This is confirmed by Ellie Wiesel, a survival of the Holocaust who

testifies: “It is obvious that the war which Hitler and his accomplices waged was a war

not only against Jewish men, women, and children, but also against Jewish religion,

Jewish culture, Jewish tradition, therefore Jewish memory” (Wiesel, 2006, p. viii).

The use of terror to obliterate the good or bad actions is found not only in

totalitarian states as described above but also in non-totalitarian states. A similar attempt

could be seen in the case of Suu Kyi as quoted in the beginning of the first part. In the

same speech Suu Kyi said: “To be forgotten is to die a little. It is to lose some of the

links that anchor us to the rest of humanity” (Suu Kyi, 2012). Suu Kyi’s case is one

example of the modern form of totalitarian terror in which the rulers—military junta—

still uses terror to make the opponents disappear in silent anonymity. Totalitarian terror

is still used as means to threaten politicians or human rights activists who stand firm

against those who are in power in many non-totalitarian states. The military junta of

Myanmar is one example of such non-totalitarian state’s attempt to establish holes of

oblivion. Berkowitz describes the similarity between what the military junta did and

what the Nazi regime did through the institution of concentration camps as follows:

Suu Kyi was near to falling through the cracks of the world into a black hole of

forgetting. It is such oblivion that Hannah Arendt saw to be the grave threat

totalitarian domination posed to human beings. Totalitarianism threatens to

acquire the ability not simply to oppress a people, but to do so in such a way that


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even their death and their oppression was senseless and powerless in the world.

To deprive a person or even the right to die like a human being and to be

remembered is, Arendt saw, the greatest imaginable attack on human dignity

(Berkowitz, 2013).

However, Arendt foresees that the attempt of totalitarian terror to construct

‘holes of oblivion’ has failed because facts have such a stubbornness that allows them to

surface and to be told. In other words, an action either good or bad cannot be easily

made disappeared or be forgotten. It has a power that cannot be suppressed as long as

there are minds to remember those actions and so long as the story of that action is

repeatedly told in public. Remembrance and telling the story shatters the totalitarian

myth of oblivion. Arendt writes:

...but just as the Nazi’s feverish attempts, from June, 1942 on, to erase all traces

of the massacres, were doomed to failure, so all efforts to let their opponents

‘disappear in silent anonymity were in vain. The holes of oblivion do not exist.

Nothing human is that perfect, and there are simply too many people in the world

to make oblivion possible. One man will always be left alive to tell the story

(Arendt, 1963, p. 232).

Arendt’s favorite example to show the power of a story to reveal an action is the

story about the action of a German sergeant, Anton Schmidt, who sacrificed himself for

the sake of helping the Jews to escape (Arendt, 1963, p. 230). Schmidt assisted many

Jews during the war by giving them passports, money, and papers. He did not ask for

anything in return; and because of his action, he was captured and put to death. Thus, the

significance of Schmidt’s action is the fact that “his story today remains as a powerful

reminder of the practical and moral importance of courageous self-sacrifice in the name

of the good” (Berkowitz, 2013). Schmidt’s action would perish or disappear in silence if

there is no mind to remember and tell about it.


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In line with her conviction that there is always a novelty and unprecedented in

any event in the world, Arendt believes that memory is essential in preserving the lost

treasures, caused not by the historical circumstances or natural adversity, but by the lack

of minds that foresee the appearance or reality of those treasures. This loss is

consummated by oblivion as shown by the Nazi regime in Germany and the subsequent

failure of memory (Arendt, 1961, p. 5-6). In her analysis of revolutions, particularly the

French and American revolutions, Arendt claims that the novelty of those events is the

birth of public freedom or how freedom is publicly understood to be inherently political.

In other words, those revolutions reveal the importance of the public freedom that was

threatened to disappear by the modern tendency of monopoly, absolutization and

universalization. Arendt acknowledged that it was through the minds of great people,

such as the French philosophers and American Founding Fathers that the appearance of

public freedom is re-discovered and made known to all. Human minds have preserved

and told of the treasure, called public freedom.

Furthermore, Arendt argues that memory is necessary in preserving the depth of

human existence. In fact, both “memory and depth are the same, or rather, depth cannot

be reached by man except through remembrance” (1961, p. 94). The preservation of the

depth of human existence requires remembrance.36

It means that in remembering

something of the past, we return to the past that is given to us or to the result of our own

36

In order to understand fully Arendt’s claim about the necessity of remembrance in preserving the depth

of human existence, we need to look at her concept of human existence or condition. In The Human

Condition, Arendt claims that human beings are conditioned beings in the sense that anything that enters

or touches into a relationship with human life, whether it is the product of human works or a web of

relationship built with others, constitutes the condition of human existence or what she calls worldliness

(Arendt, 1958, p. 9). Therefore, in the remembering of the past, we go back to what has become become a

part of the human existence, bringing it to the surface to be told.


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doing which has formed our human existence. Although memory is necessary in

preserving the lost treasure and the depth of human existence, but remembering alone is

not enough. What is needed is the telling of the story about things that are remembered.

This means that there is a close relationship between memory and telling the story.

Remembrance underlies the story, but without telling it, what is remembered has no

public meaning; it remains among private matters and is not public. In this context,

remembrance is the delving into our own human existence and the telling of the story,

which is tantamount to making public the depth of human existence.

Arendt admits that human actions are contingent and perishable. What have been

done are irrevocable and incomplete and thus they are partly known and have meaning

only for the dead, who are the actors themselves (Arendt, 1961, p. 6). This means that

the greatness and meaningfulness of an action is not constituted by the actor himself but

by the spectators or eyewitnesses who complete the story of an action in question

through their faculty of thinking and memory. In other words, in order to be lasting and

complete, it is required that the mind to inherit, question, think about, and remember the

action. For Arendt, “without the articulation accomplished by remembrance, there

simply was no story left that could be told” (Arendt, 1961, p. 6).

4.2. Arendt and the Narrative Theory of Action

4.2.1. The Story and the Enactment of Past Events

What Arendt means by the story has to do not only with fictional compositions

such as novels, short stories, and plays, or legends—the work of poets—but also

biography, autobiography, and historical accounts—the work of historians. Arendt


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considers both as story because in them “a committed action has come to an end and

become a story susceptible to narration” (Arendt, 1955, p. 21). However, with regard to

history, Arendt notes that just as poets who poetically narrate past events, historian also

must master the past. Poets and historians have a similar task that is to set the narrative

process and involve us in that process (ibid., p. 21).

Each event in human history discloses something that is new and unexpected.

Therefore, the task of a historian is “to detect this unexpected new with all its

implications in any given period and to bring out the full power of its significance”

(Arendt, 1994, p. 320). This is possible only if historians used their poetic mind and turn

the mere facts into a narration or narrated history. The poetic mind here is similar to

what Confino calls ‘historical sensation’ that implies: first, a historian’s awareness of the

specific context or even the mysterious aspect of the past, an awareness which demands

a certain intuition which allows for its reconstruction and understanding; and second, the

mental world of the people in the past that is neither mystical nor irrational, which

requires a certain intuition to connect elements that seem unrelated, and to see new ideas

beyond convention and tradition (Confino, 2010, 49). For Arendt, a historian must be

creative like poets who like poets who ‘say the unsayable’ cannot be silent when almost

all people are silent (Arendt, 1955, p. 228). I will return to this point later when I discuss

the importance of involving historians in the composition of truth commissions.

A story is always related to the experience of past actions and events. Arendt

claims that in order to be seen, heard, and remembered, invisible past events must be re-

enacted into stories (Arendt, 1958, p. 95). In this sense, a story is the enactment of past


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events. The story as an enactment is neither a collection of historical facts nor of

information about them. It is not a definition that explains objectively past events in

order to provide information about the past with the aim of making those events

“understandable in itself” as Walter Benjamin once conceived it.37

According to Arendt,

when we define something we apply categories, concepts or ideas and in doing so we do

not allow facts or events to speak for themselves. The danger of defining an event, in

Arendt’s view, is that we might become so preoccupied with details that we are “unable

to understand or make clear the nature of the facts” that confront us (Arendt, 2003, p.

120). Therefore, instead of collecting historical facts or information about events, Arendt

argues, a story records “a mental phenomenon, something which one may call a thought-

event” (Arendt, 1961, p. 10). What Arendt means by mental phenomenon here is the

activity of thinking or understanding an event. Of course, facts are the content of

narrative, but these facts must have been thought before recording them in a story. Thus,

for Arendt, a story is a thought-event.

As an enactment, a story is not about a single fact or event; rather, it incorporates

many facts of the past and reveals them as a related event. A story is a recounting of a

sequence of events. In order to put the separated events into a story, the faculty of

imagination is required. Here Arendt quotes Isak Dinesen who claims that there are

many events in the world remain untold because of the lack of imagination (Arendt,

1955, p. 97). In this context, a story can only be produced when we imagine what had

37

Benjamin considers a story as an explanation of past events. Consequently, a story is intended to give

the information about what had happened in the past. In this way, an event comes to us ‘shot through with

explanation’. In other words, an explanation brings about information about past events and through this

information an event reveals itself to us. Information is the self-revelation of an event; it thus makes an

event ‘understandable in itself’ (Benjamin, 1992, p. 88-89).


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happened and and repeat it. Repeating events in our imagination does not primarily

intend to remember those events accurately, but to shape or give form to them.

Imagination give life to the story, or as Michael Jackson puts it: “To reconstitute events

in a story is no longer to live those events in passivity, but to actively rework them, both

in dialogue with others and within one’s own imagination” (Jackson, 2002, p. 15). This

means, the story is the product of an intersubjective and intrapsychic process. The

former refers to the importance of dialogue with others and the latter to the capacity of

imagination. It is through the process of thinking thoroughly events in a constant

dialogue either with oneself or with others that a story is produced. Here, Arendt’s

notion of the story should be understood as the record of a thought-event.

4.2.2. The Story and the Life

By emphasizing the fact that the story arises out of repeating events in our

imagination, Arendt wants to demonstrate that all people have the ability to tell the story

of their own lives because they have the faculty of imagination. Arendt sees it in Isak

Dinesen, who was not an artist or professional story-teller or historian, but an ordinary

person. Although as an ordinary person, Dinesen was able to utilize her faculty of

imagination to repeat events of her life in her imagination and to tell them publicly in a

story (Arendt 1955, p. 97). The only thing that is required is the effort to recollect the

significant events in our lives by relating them to ourselves and others. This means, we

need to accept what life gives us and show loyalty to life itself. In other words, when

one makes an effort to catch up with his or herself and with what he or she has gone

through, or when one reflects imaginatively about what others have gone through, one is


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able to tell a story (Kateb, 2002, p. 33). Arendt strongly believes that the ability to tell

the story of our own life is a way of being alive, which is considered as the only human

aim or desire. As human beings, we have the capacity to create fictional stories, retell

our actions, narrate the events of the past and narrate our own life. Thus, what a story-

teller repeats and tells is the sequence of events, which is life that is specifically human.

Arendt writes: “The chief characteristic of this specifically human life, whose

appearance and disappearance constitute worldly events, is that it is itself always full of

events which ultimately can be told as a story...” (Arendt, 1958, p. 97).

Here I find an affinity between Arendt and Paul Ricoeur. Ricoeur claims that

narrative leads us back to life. He writes: “The process of composition, of configuration,

is not completed in the text but in the reader and, under this condition, makes possible

the reconfiguration of life by narrative” (Ricoeur, 1991, p. 22). The self is not

transparent to itself and thus in order to grasp the self it is required the activity of

narration that is manifested in creating fictional stories, retelling actions, narrating

events of the past and our own life. The most important one is narrating our own life

because it is only in this way we understand ourselves and our action. Actions are

configured from a prefigurative state into a form of narrative that is subjected to be re-

interpretation and refiguration in the light of new experience over time. This implies that

our life is evaluated through an understanding that has the form of narrative.

Drawing from Aristotle who distinguishes human life as bios, something related

to praxis from zoē, which is merely life, Arendt considers narrative as an act of grasping

a coherence from the span of life (Speight, 2011, p. 116). Arendt claims that the


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products of human action and speech have certain coherences that can be told as a story.

This means, a story reveals the coherence of human action. Kristeva claims: “The art of

narrative resides in the ability to condense the action into an exemplary moment, to

extract it from the continuous flow of time, and reveal a who” (Kristeva, 2001, p. 17).

Actions only become intelligible when they are related to one another in a story; the art

of telling a story of oneself produces the narrative of one’s life.

According to Arendt, the narrative action is clearly manifested in drama, which

is the imitation of action. The term drama is derived from the Greek verb dran, which

literally means to act. It is an imitation, mimēsis, of acting. This imitation refers to the

imitation of action through plot and not to the imitation of an isolated character. Arendt

writes: “This imitative element lies not only in the art of the actor, but, ..., in the making

or writing of the play, at least to the extent that the drama comes fully to life only when

it is enacted in the theater (Arendt, 1958, p. 187). However, as Ricoeur claims, mimesis

is not just copying an action but a creative imitation of an action. There is a narrative

pre-comprehension of life that takes the actual form of a narrative when it is told.

Ricoeur claims that human expressions need to be interpreted creatively. The creativity

is manifested in metaphor and narratives because metaphor enables us to redescribe

reality poetically and narrative enables us to immitate action creatively.38

38

Ricoeur devises three levels of mimēsis. Mimēsis1 is the narrative prefiguration of human action by the

author who presupposes the understanding of the three basic structures of a action: semantic, symbolic and

temporal. It refers to the competence to identify by means of its structural features (Ricoeur, p. 55-59).

Mimēsis2 refers to the mediation between the world of action and the reception of the narrative by the

reader. It is the imitation in fictional narratives. Mimēsis3 marks a return to the world where action takes

place. It is the process of the refiguration of the narrative in which the reader refigures the meaning, sense,

and reference of narrative in a world that is dynamic, complex and active. Narrative proposes a world in

which we might occupy and project our own powers (Ricoeur, 1984, p. 55-71).


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Arendt shares with a contemporary philosophical account of narrative the

characteristic of an interplay between one’s life, a life that is lived and one’s account of

life, which is the story about that lived life. In her letter to McCarthy, Arendt emphasizes

the fact that life is full of stories and that people want a story because they want to

describe their lives and fate (Arendt & McCarthy, 1995, p. 291). This narrative account

is inspired by Sartre’s formulation of Roquentin’s dilemma of choice between to live or

to tell in his famous novel, Nausea. For Sartre, there is a disparity between one’s own

experience of life, a life that is lived and the story of that life; and this disparity brings

about the dilemma whether to tell a story or to live an authentic life (Speight, p. 120-

121). Arendt acknowledges Sartre’s distinction and relates it to the crucial difference

between the agent as the ‘who’ and the story about the agent as something made up. It is

the distinction between the real (the agent) that is not made up and and the fictional story

that is made up. “The real story in which we are engaged as long as we live has no

visible or invisible maker because it is not made” (Arendt, 1958, 186).

The consequences of this difference between the agent and the story, in Arendt’s

view, is twofold (Speight, 2011, p. 121): first, there is the possibility of retrospecting the

‘who’, as the visible ex post facto through action and speech in the work of a historian or

storyteller because “action reveals itself fully only to the storyteller, that is to the

backward glance of the historian, who indeed always knows better what it was about

than the participants” (Arendt, 1958, p. 192). In the retrospectivity, we are able to view

the agent that is revealed in our own lives. Second, in the context of the dilemma


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between storytelling and living, the story opens up the possibility for us to see how it

(the story) could have saved one’s life. In the example of Isak Dinnesen, Arendt claims

that we learn how Dinnesen would never been able to live with her own life if she did

not put the experience of her life into a story. Thus, although she was compelled to give

order to her experiences in the view of the coherence required by a story, in the end she

firmly concluded, as quoted by Arendt: “All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a

story or tell a story about them” (Arendt, 1958, p. 175). The main point here is that in a

story we discover the possibility of rebirth, what Kristeva calls ‘narrative rebirth’

(Kristeva, 2001, p. 48).

In the center of an action is the agent or actor who acts. In fact, without the actor

nothing can take place in this world. Since every person is at once a ‘who’ and a

‘what’—a subject who actively participates in creating his or her own world—then

Arendt claims that a story reveals the agent, who he was and what he did; a story is the

revelation of an agent as the initiator of an action. Arendt states: “Who somebody is or

was we can know only by knowing the story of which he is himself the hero—his

biography, in other words; everything else we know of him, including the work he may

have produced and left behind, tells us only what he is or was” (Arendt, 1958, p. 186).

From this perspective, as Benhabib puts it: “To tell one’s story is neither to tell the truth

about one’s life nor to represent oneself as a master of words. It is, rather, to take what

passes for experience, together within narrative strategies by which it is constituted, and

make available for comparison and analysis” (Benhabib, 2003, p. 256).


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In a story, the self is individuated and acts are identified. It means that the actor

as ‘what’ and ‘who’ is revealed to the storytellers who possess the ability to understand

and communicate what is revealed in a story. Thus, a story is “the mode through which

actions are individuated and the identity of the self is constituted” (Benhabib, 1998, p.

33). This is exactly Ricoeur’s point when he speaks about the narrative identity. For

Ricoeur, human lives become more readily intelligible when they are interpreted in the

light of the stories that people tell about them (Ricoeur, 1991, p. 188). A narrative does

not only speak about action or events of life but also about the agent, the character.

Thus, the character is also emplotted. In emplotment of the character, the diverse

elements that are commonly present in a life story, such as interactions with other

characters, the action in which the character is involved, the physical and psychological

characteristics, find a unity that belongs to a single character. We can speak of a

character because all the different moments in which someone appears in a narrative are

united by narrative function. This means that the identity of the story constructs the

identity of the character. In combining different elements as action, circumstances, traits

of personality, emplotment allows us to articulate our identity. A life story underlines

human possibilities that are constantly configured and reconfigured through emplotment

into narrative identity, “the kind of identity that human being acquired through the

mediation of the narrative function” (ibid., p. 188).

However, many things around events or actions cannot be comprehensively seen

or heard, either by the actors who were involved in it or by the spectators who directly

witnessed those actions. For Arendt, the agent or actor is not the sole author of his or her


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own life story because the agent never actually knows it quite well, nor is he or she able

to complete his or her own action in particular or life in general. It is the storyteller who

can tell something that is hidden about the agent and his or her action. Arendt writes:

“What the storyteller narrates must necessarily be hidden from the actor himself …”

(Arendt 1958: 192). There are too many things that are invisible in an event that need to

be revealed to the public. This revelation is made possible by the story.

4.2.3. The Political Character of Storytelling

In relating the story to a life, Arendt wants to demonstrate the public and worldly

character of a story; how the story that reveals something essential about an agent, is

accessible to others although not to the agent himself or herself (Speight, 2011, p. 123-

124). For Arendt, a story is inherently public in the sense that it transforms and makes

public what a private or individual event has created by action and speech. When a story

is told in a public space, it becomes a ‘thing outside’ the subject who acted and suffered

it. It becomes an ‘object’ for all to see and hear (Arendt, 1961, 45). It is when an action

is narrated as a story shared with others that the story is able to transform human actions

into something political. By allowing itself to be shared by all who are living, the story

becomes political. Kristeva considers the political character of a story from Arendt’s

claim that the story represents the moment between birth and death that is shared with

other men. This implies, the story grounds human life, which is for Arendt is always

political. Thus, the story is essentially political. Kristeva writes:

Through this narrated action that story represents, man corresponds to life or

belongs to life to the extent that human life is unavoidably a political life.

Narrative is the initial dimension in which man lives, the dimension of a bios -

and not of a zoe - a political life and/or an action recounted to others. The initial


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man-life correspondence is narrative; narrative is the most immediately shared

action and, in that sense, the most initially political action (ibid., p. 27).

In her treatment of the political as power relationship in which private and public

realms ‘flow into each other like waves in the never-resting stream of the life process

itself” (1958, p. 33), Arendt demonstrates the political function of the story. In her view,

power relations between private and public realms require the storytelling as an aspect

of the subjective ‘in between’. Storytelling is a response to a crisis that has created the

loss of an individual’s relationship with others and the common world. In other words,

the world where the agents or actors reveal themselves is vulnerable. In this condition,

individual autonomy becomes weak, the need for recognition is restrained, and action is

not possible. Therefore, when such an individual tells the story in the public realm, he or

she restores his relationship with others and the world by making his or word stand for

the world. In this context, Jackson argues that storytelling has the power to transform

private into public meanings and sustaining a sense of agency in disempowering

situations. He writes:

By constructing, relating and sharing stories, people contrive to restore viability

to their relationship with others, redressing a bias toward autonomy when it has

been lost, and affirming collective ideals in the face of disparate experiences

(Jackson, 2002, p. 18).

4.3. Storytelling and Political Reconciliation

The first task of truth commissions is to discover the truth of past wrongs. This

truth is expected to be attained through storytelling where victims and perpetrators are

given the opportunity to tell their own stories about what had happened. However, truth

commissions are not exclusively established to promote reconciliation at the political


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level but to reveal the truth with the expectation that such revelation of the truth will

lead to the reconciliation. This implies that reconciliation is only the product or

consequence of the long process of truth-seeking and the naming of the accountable

persons. In this context, truth and responsibility are the crucial issues in the truth

commissions’ attempt to promote political reconciliation.

Truth is vital because the direct victims have the right to know the whole truth

about the crimes they suffered and the reason behind it; the family members of those

killed or disappeared desire to find out what happened to their beloved ones and where

they are, either dead or alive; and the affected society wants to know why a certain

crime has happened in order to ensure that it will not occur again in the future. While the

importance of accountability to reconciliation can be seen in the fact that it is difficult

for the victims to reconcile themselves with the perpetrators as long as there is a

widespread of feeling that the perpetrators are getting away with it (Slye, 2000, p. 179).

In other words, it is not easy for the victims to come to terms with a violent act if they

know that the wrongdoers are not held accountable for their actions.

In the case of the South African TRC, the reconciliation was expected to be

attained not only through the discovery of truth via listening to the victims’ testimonies

but also through the grant of amnesty after the perpetrators have publicly acknowledged

their wrongful acts in public hearings. The assumption behind this practice is the

conviction that telling the story, particularly through testimonies in public hearings

either by victims or perpetrators to some extent could reveal and establish the truth and

makes possible their accountability or responsibility. Here I would like to evaluate the


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South African TRC’s assumptions that storytelling could reveal the truth and bring about

responsibility from the vantage point of Arendt’s notion of storytelling.

4.3.1. Reconsidering Truth Commissions’ Concept of the Truth

The first task of truth commissions is to reveal the truth of past wrongs. In fact,

by its very name, a truth commission is set up for the purpose of discovering the truth. It

is a truth-seeking commission. This is stated clearly by the South African Truth and

Reconciliation Commission (TRC) whose main objective is fourfold: to establish the

truth, to pursue national unity, to obtain understanding, and to advance reconciliation

and reconstruction (Boraine, 2000, p. 153). It seems to me that the first goal is the key to

the other goals, in the sense that it is only by knowing the truth of what had happened in

the apartheid that national unity, understanding and reconciliation can be promoted. In

other words, truth-telling is at the center of TRC’s tasks.

TRC identifies four kinds of truth and how each truth can be attained. First, there

is factual or forensic truth, which is attained by finding who, where, when, and how the

violations had happened and who was or were involved. Then, there is the personal or

narrative truth which is attained by letting both victims and perpetrators tell their own

stories; it is believed that through storytelling the facts about past abuses are discovered

and narrative truth can be created. Third, there is the social or dialogical truth which

consists in the truth of experience as told through interactions, discussions and debates.

Finally, healing and restorative truth that is related to the reparation of the damage

inflicted on the victims and the prevention of those abuses from ever happening again in

the future (Boraine, 2000, p. 151-153).


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Since this chapter is about storytelling then the focus here is on the factual and

narrative truths that are attained through storytelling either in the testimonies or public

hearings where victims and perpetrators are given the opportunity to tell their own

stories. It must be acknowledged that TRC has succeeded in providing the narrative of

apartheid’s crime in the sense that TRC was able to give the totality of the apartheid’s

crime. Although there is a unity, order, and coherence in the TRC’s narrative, but there

is still a breach in the story because it focuses only on the individual testimonies that are

not so much related to what comes before and after as they startle in the visuality of the

facts. This is partially caused by the conceptualization of the truth that underlies the

truth commission’s task. Thus, the critical question is this: how do truth commissions

conceptualize the truth?

In his evaluation, Paul Gready claims that most of truth commissions, including

the South African TRC, conceptualize truth as the acknowledgment, in the sense that the

truth is attained when the facts of past wrongs are acknowledged either by victims or

perpetrators. This means, the acknowledgment affirms the reality of past wrongs. The

truth as the acknowledgment is also confirmed by Lederach who claims that the

acknowledgment is decisive in the reconciliation’s process. He writes:

“Acknowledgment through hearing one another’s stories validates experience and

feelings and represents the first step toward restoration of the person and the

relationship” (Lederach, 1997, p. 26).

However, the conceptualization of truth as the acknowledgment is problematic

for at least three reasons. First, when the acknowledgment comes from the state’s


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officials then this acknowledgment is the product of the interplay between truth and

power. In this context, the acknowledgment tends to be absolute. It leaves no room for

further questionings or discussions and brings to an end the thinking process. It lacks the

thinking about the facts (Gready, 2011, p. 20). The treatment of truth as the

acknowledgment is questionable particularly in relation to crimes that involve political

leaders or the state’s officials. Since a truth commission is established by the

government then the official’s acknowledgment of past wrongs is nothing but a hidden

agenda to protect the powerful actors behind those crimes. Furthermore, truth

commissions are established for political compromise. For instance, the TRC’s attempt

to grant the broad amnesty is a compromise between the unwillingness of the outgoing

regime to acknowledge its act and of society to forgive and forget without confronting

the perpetrators (Rotberg, 2000, p. 7). Here the acknowledgment, particularly from the

perpetrators is forcefully done for the sake of amnesty. I will discuss this problem in the

next section about the relationship between storytelling and responsibility.

Second, by focusing only on the testimony of victims, truth commissions

disregard the importance of investigating the patterns of the abuses (Grady, p. 23). Due

to the limit of time frame, the lack of financial support, and the lack of informants on the

side of either victims or perpetrators, truth commissions do not go further to investigate

the correlation between crimes and the conditions or circumstances that surround those

crimes. Consequently, the truth does not really represent the whole picture of what had

happened. This is admitted by a TRC’s commissioner, as quoted by Rotberg, saying that


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the final report of TRC could not “tell the story of apartheid as a whole, but only the

story of its abuses of bodily integrity” (Rotberg, p. 6).

Third, when victims tell their own stories, they do not only tell the specific facts

about what had happened, but also frame these facts from their own perspectives or

understanding about rights and justice (Du Toit, p. 136). In this context, their

acknowledgment of the facts is often determined by their personal feelings and thus we

do not know for certain whether they are honest or pretentious. For instance, it can

happen that a victim’s acknowledgment arises out of the feeling of anger and the desire

for revenge. As a result, if a truth commission relies only on the victim’s testimony, its

final recommendation about the accountability of persons can be misleading. In other

words, the seeking of truth and the identification of the responsible persons only on the

basis of testimony or storytelling are deceptive.

The critique of the truth established by truth commissions, as described above,

voices Arendt’s own concern about the imposition of the rational truth into the realm of

politics. In her essay “Truth and Politics,” Arendt describes the conflict between truth

and politics as the conflict between two different ways of life, namely the life of the

philosophers and of the citizens (Arendt, 2000, p. 549). In contrast to the citizen’s way

of life that is determined by ever-changing opinion about human affairs, the

philosopher’s life is determined by the truth that is considered as durable and universal

because it transcends human affairs and thus provides a stable reference point. Here the

truth is treated as the absolute and so when it is applied in the realm of politics


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considered as the realm of the ongoing contest between competing and various opinions

or perspectives, it becomes destructive (Smyth, 2007, p. 31-32).

Arendt acknowledges that at the level of politics, there is factual truth, the first

category of TRC’s identification, that is related to the plurality of people and concerned

with events and circumstances that involve many people. The factual truth is established

by witnesses and depends on testimony. It exists only when it is spoken about (Arendt,

2000, p. 554). It happens that at the level of politics, the factual truths are un-welcomed.

They become un-welcomed facts. This is precisely what Arendt encounters when she

reports on the un-welcomed facts of the Jewish councils’ cooperation during the

Holocaust. Factual truth, in Arendt’s view, is political because it refers and belongs to

the realm of appearance since its existence depends on the presence of other people who

witness and testify to it. And yet factual truth shares the despotic character of rational

truths because it tends to assert its validity. When a fact is acknowledged either by

victims or perpetrators, there is no more room for further discussion or debate.

Furthermore, since the facts lie at the core of social, legal and political processes then

they can be easily rearranged and thus factual truth is questionable and presents a

challenge to society. Arendt writes: “Even if we admit that every generation has the

right to write its own history, we admit no more than that it has the right to rearrange the

facts in accordance with its own perspective; we don’t admit the right to touch the

factual matter itself” (ibid., p. 554). Like Gready, Arendt is also concerned with the

monopoly of information by those who have political power. She rhetorically raises the


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question concerning the fate of factual truth if power interests, national or social, had the

last say in these matters.

It is clear that Arendt is dissatisfied with all kinds of truths in the realm of

politics because of their tendency to dominate. She writes: “The modes of thought and

communication that deal with truth, if seen from the political perspective, are necessarily

domineering; they do not take other people’s opinions, and taking these into account is

the hallmark of all strictly political thinking” (Arendt, 2000, p. 556). I have described

throughout this dissertation that Arendt is dissatisfied with and rejects the imposition of

truth, including factual truth, in the realm of politics.

Although factual truth has the tendency to be despotic, but it is surprisingly

elastic in the sense that it is able to withstand strain without being affected. Facts have

the stubbornness to surface and cannot be suppressed or manipulated and thus provide

the transience to the human affairs. Even though it is temporary but the

acknowledgement of the facts gives us the stability and enables us to make something

out of what happened in the past. In other words, facts enable us to to get a sense “by

which we take our bearings in the world” (Arendt, 2000, p. 560). Therefore, from

Arendt’s perspective, the acknowledgement of facts is necessary, but this

acknowledgment is not primarily meant to provide the truth of past events but rather to

afford the stability and open up the possibility to make sense or discover the meaning of

past events that could lead to political reconciliation. Schaap argues that the

acknowledgement of facts is the starting point of the long process of reconciliation at the

political level. He writes: “Without a shared acknowledgment of the brute facts of state


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violence, a polity lacks a common starting point from which to initiate political

reconciliation” (Schapp, 2005, p. 127).

4.3.2. Storytelling and the Search for Meaning

Arendt admits that human actions are contingent and perishable. What have been

done are irrevocable and incomplete and thus they are partly known and have meaning

only for the dead, who are the actors themselves (Arendt, 1961, p. 6). It is when past

events or actions are narrated in a story that those past events become meaningful for the

public life. She claims: “The story reveals the meaning of what otherwise would remain

an unbearable sequence of sheer happenings” (Arendt, 1955, p. 104). This implies that

reporting of facts necessarily involves the thinking and judging process, which is “an

exercise in thought” that is primarily intended to “dig under the rubble of history and to

recover those pearls of past experience, with their sedimented and hidden layers of

meaning” (Benhabib, 1990, p. 171). Thus, in line with her emphasis on the goal of the

activity of thinking to be the quest for meaning, Arendt also claims that all meaning

takes the form of a story because the story is a thought-event that is always related to the

human reality or world. This implies that in storytelling we feel reality as a reality.

Although the events or facts of the past cannot be changed, but the world

changes all the time through the occurence of new events. New events introduced by

new comers bring about change in the world. Here comes the importance of a story that

brings together those fragmentary events or experiences into a significant whole. As

Benhabib claims, the story arises from “making whole of our fragmentary experience”

(Benhabib, 1994, p. 120). In other words, the story relates one event to other events and


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together they form a sequence of events. As a recounting of a sequence of events, a story

is the record of a thought-event. It is “a revelation of meaning through the process of

understanding an event without ‘defining it’, that is consent and reconciliation with

things as they are...” (Arendt, 1955, p. 105). In order to reveal meaning, the sequence of

events recorded in a story must have been thoroughly thought out in the view of the

common world. In this way a story helps us to understand the meaning of events in the

world and thus orient ourselves to the world, “a world changed through a new event”

(Arendt, 1994, p. 325).

Arendt observes that there is a relationship between the cure after the fact and the

concern with judgment. Thinking, the dialogue between me and myself, presupposes a

capacity to stand back from the world of human affairs and from what one has done in

that world in order to search for meaning and to tell a meaningful story. In this context,

reconciling oneself to the world, in Arendt’s view, does not mean that one should

condone or no longer be horrified by evil’s deeds but, rather, one should realize the fact

that in searching for meaning, one will gain the privilege of judging past evils (Young-

Bruehl, 1995, p. 377). Arendt claims that in enacting and telling stories, we rework

events so that these events become bearable. Here she quotes Isak Dinesen who once

said: “All sorrows can be borne if you can put them into a story or tell a story about

them” (cited by Arendt, 1955, p. 106).

For Arendt, the horrifying facts must not be forgotten but be preserved in order

to be judged. Here, remembering and judging does not justify the past but to reveal the

meaning of the past for our life in common in the present and the future and enable us to


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tell the story about it. In other words, the acceptance of the world or the things as they

are, enables us to exercise our faculty of judgment that necessarily presupposes the

capacity for impartiality and enlarged mentality. It is only through judging that we will

be able to tell the story of what had happened in the past. Therefore, Arendt claims that

the story is centered around meaningfulness because it makes sense of human

experiences, including the horrible experiences. In a story, human experience is “de-

privatized and de-individualized” and in telling it, what is personal is made public and

gains public significance. In her analysis of the American Revolution, Arendt claims that

the story of this revolution brings to light some political relevances or meanings. 39

She

identifies three lessons coming out of the American Revolutions: first, it tells us that the

revolution occurred because of the common deliberation and not because of a person’s

decree, because of a common pledge and not because of one person’s desire. Second, it

is possible to form a good government on the basis of reflection and choice. And third, a

good political leader cannot rely on force.

Returning to the truth commissions, the problem is whether a truth commission

can in fact construct a narrative? Certainly it can collect the materials for a narrative, but

in order to construct these materials into a narrative, it is required that there be the artful

mind of a poet or historian. From Arendt’s perspective, in order to make a truth

39

Arendt writes: “The course of the American Revolution tells an unforgettable story and is apt to teach a

unique lesson; for this revolution did not break out but was made by men in common deliberation and on

the strength of mutual pledges. The principle which came to light during those fateful years when the

foundations were laid—not by the strength of one architect but by the combined power of mutual promise

and common deliberation; and the event itself decided indeed, as Hamilton had insisted, that men ‘are

really capable... of establishing good government from reflection and choice’, that they are not ‘forever

destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force’” and that men are really capable

of establishing good government from reflection and choice” (Arendt, 1965, 2013-214).


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commission’s work meaningful, as Maier suggests, the commission should interact with

historians in establishing, explaining and interpreting a narrative of political violence.

Since a truth commission is not a magical resource, the evidences collected by it need to

be reconstructed by a historian (Maier, 2000, p. 265). As I have explained above, like a

poet, a historian sets the process of narration in motion and always involves us in the

process. This means, the narrative makes sense of the action because it reveals the

pattern of the abuses and roles of individuals within a broader context. Of course, the

facts obtained through the victims’ stories are important, but they have little meaning if

they are not constructed as narrative. Maier claims:

The narrative seems particularly important for understanding cases of otherwise

senseless violence. Society devotes great effort to reconstructing the stories of its

violent episodes; otherwise they remain disturbing and a source of unease like

the unburied bodies of Greek mythology (ibid. p. 271).

Another danger in focusing on the victims’ own stories is the equation of the

individual lives with the stories they tell that could result in victim’s attempt to refer

back to his- or her-own life. Since the story is constructed out of one’s own life, then the

self-contained subjectivity is treated as a standard by which to determine the truth of the

narrative. Of course, every testimony is exceptional and individual since it tells of what

a speaker has personally witnessed or even lived through, but it also always points to

the collective traumatic experience. In other words, although a testimony represents an

individual experience, it also represents, exemplifies or stands for all those who were in

a similar position in the same time and place. In fact, one’s own feeling reflects the state

of the whole world (Suleiman, 2006, p. 133-134).


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Therefore, from Arendt’s perspective, in order to avoid the danger of

misinterpreting the victims’ testimonies, truth commissions should not treat their stories

as a pure creation of autonomous individuals or a pure expression of an individual point

of view. Rather, the story should be considered as the result of an ongoing dialogue that

involves a plurality of people. In this sense, a story is the enactment of a social relation

between self and others (Jackson, 2002, p. 22). In other words, in order to facilitate

testimony and hear the victims tell their stories, a truth commission should not focus on

unraveling the truth, but on discovering what meaning can come out of those stories.

This implies a truth commission must consider the victims’ stories within broader

contexts—state’s policies—and social relations. I strongly believe that it is only in this

way that a truth commission’s work can help victims to reconcile themselves with what

had happened not only to themselves or to their beloved ones, but also to the common

world. The uncovering of the facts of past wrongs through storytelling is important but

that is not enough. Facts must be narrated in such a way that they can enable people—

victims and perpetrators—to reconstruct their lives in common in the world.

Reconciliation seeks to disclose the past as a recounting of related events that could

provide the starting point for members of a society, including victims and perpetrators to

reconcile themselves to the irrevocable consequences of actions.

4.3.3. Telling the Story and Responsibility for the World

Another assumption of the commission’s truth-seeking process through

storytelling is to disclose the individuals who are responsible for the crime. The South

African TRC is the only truth commission that is known to have gone beyond the limit


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of truth-seeking by offering amnesty, which is understood to consist in as “official acts

that provide an individual with protection from liability—civil, criminal, or both—for

past acts” (Slye, p. 171). In general, a truth commission’s attempt to name the

accountable persons and the procedure of granting amnesty particularly in the South

African TRC create some level of accountability that can encourage reconciliation.

Elizabeth Kiss defends the legacy of truth commissions to name the accountable

persons on a moral basis, which she calls a ‘moral ambition’ that works within and

beyond political constraints. For Kiss, the grant of amnesty by the South African TRC is

morally innovative in three ways: first, the amnesty supported individual accountability,

in the sense that when one asks for amnesty, one must disclose in public what one had

done; and in disclosing oneself, that person expresses his or her accountability. Second,

amnesty made possible the trial of public opinion. There were amnesty’s hearings where

the applicants had to be publicly confronted by their victims. The victims had the right

to confront their abusers and hold them accountable for what they had done. Third,

amnesty created incentives for truth-telling. This is the combination of the first and

second ways, in the sense that through the applicants’ self-disclosure and readiness to be

confronted in public hearings, the truth of past abuses is revealed (Kiss, 2000, p. 76). On

this ground, Kiss claims that these innovations works between individuals—victims and

perpetrators—and groups such as between blacks and whites that can serve as a model

for a broader societal process of reconciliation (Kiss, p. 81). From the perspective of

morality, responsibility means that perpetrators publicly acknowledge their past

wrongdoings and atone for it or offer reparations (economic or other sorts) for victims


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and their descendants. The assumption behind this practice is that perpetrators or abusers

of human rights have a moral responsibility to the victims and their family. From a legal

point of view, responsibility refers to the readiness of perpetrators to go on trial

according to the judiciary system of the state.

The same defense of the South African TRC’s right to grant amnesty comes from

Ronald Slye who claims that the amnesty increases quantitatively and qualitatively

information about past violences (Slye, 2000, p. 170). He is aware of the danger that an

individual or a group might request amnesty out of a desire to obtain protection from

prosecution and liability and fear of being removed from political power, but this

politically motivated prosecution does not represent the whole picture of amnesty. Slye

grounds his claims on two facts: first, quantitatively, the South African amnesty’s

hearings involved a huge number of participants, including the key persons of past

violences. Second, qualitatively, the accused persons voluntarily initiated the

proceedings and must fulfill three requirements such as they must make full disclosure,

their acts should be associated with a political objective, and their acts should not be

personal gain (ibid. 175). These facts show that the information gained through the

South African amnesty’s hearings has brought about some level of accountability which

is necessary for reconciliation.

It is undeniable that South African amnesty, to some extent, has succeeded in

providing more accountability than any other truth commissions throughout the world

and thus increased the possibility of creating a democratic South Africa that protects all

of its citizens’ human rights. However, the problem arises concerning the credibility of


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the perpetrators’ public acknowledgment, whether they have made full disclosure of the

relevant facts and were not merely pretentious acts for the sake of amnesty. Like the

testimonies of the victims that can be framed by the feeling of anger and the desire for

revenge, the perpetrators’ acknowledgment can be also framed by the feeling of self-pity

and the desire for protection from prosecution and liability. Thus, an accountability that

is based only on the perpetrators’ public acknowledgment can be misleading because it

detracts the attention from the other important issues surrounding a violation and

diminishes the understanding of the real perspectives and motives that influenced the

individuals’ actions. Therefore, in full respect of the work done by the South African

TRC, I propose Arendt’s understanding of responsibility or accountability in order to

improve the work of truth commissions in the future. I have described Arendt’s political

responsibility in chapter two and thus here I just elaborate on the relationship between

storytelling and political responsibility using Arendt’s description of storytelling.

Arendt’s emphasis on the significance of stories for people assuming

responsibility is in contrast with totalitarian ideologies that produce thoughtlessness.

Instead of taking responsibility, ideologies, in Arendt’s view, are intended to drive

people to escape from responsibility. As I have described above, totalitarian ideologies

obliterate past deeds and thus prevent people to tell the story of what had happened.

Ideologies make people thoughtless because their lack of imagination which results

further in a lack of memory. Thus, the failure of memory makes it impossible for people

to come to terms with past deeds and assume responsibility.


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The perfect example of escaping responsibility is displayed by Adolf Eichmann

in the trial in Jerusalem. As MacPhee puts it: “Eichmann was indeed a talker and teller

of tales, but the stories he narrates do not imagine his own authorship of the events he

participated in or of the outcomes to which they contributed, but seek instead to smother

responsibility in a welter of clichē and self-pity” (2011, p. 193). Eichmann showed no

sign of awareness and assumption of responsibility because he had been driven away

from reality and so become thoughtless by Nazi’s ideology, as he himself said in his last

statement in the court as quoted by Arendt: “I am not the monster I am made out to be. I

am the victim of a fallacy” (Arendt, 1963, p. 248). For Arendt, Eichmann’s story in the

court is the example of how deceptive a storytelling can be if it focuses only on a

perpetrator and in full view of the victims. Does it mean that Eichmann’s own story

should not be taken into account and that he is not responsible for his act? That is not

what Arendt means. In her essay ‘Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship’, Arendt

invokes the importance of considering whether or not there is an element of judging,

whether individually or collectively. For Arendt, Eichmann’s own testimony should be

considered in the broad context of totalitarianism. In her own judgment, Eichmann was

overwhelmed by fear because he was part of a society where fear of judging was

widespread. This fear was so deep that Eichmann was not able to exercise his faculty of

judgment or naming names on people in power and high position (Arendt, 2003, p. 21).

Instead of judging, Eichmann repeated phrases or clichē in order to find peace with

himself. In other words, Eichmann’s story in the court is nothing but the expression of

someone who was unable to think or judge. Hence his story lacks the judging element.


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Furthermore, it is necessary to go back to the early stage of Hitler’s regime in

order to consider Eichmann’s role in a large political system called Nazism. Considering

how political system ran under Hitler, Arendt claims that the role of Eichmann and other

Nazis is similar to a cog. This is what she calls ‘the cog theory’.40

The question of the

personal responsibility of individuals who blindly participate in carrying out an evil’s

policy is is a marginal issue (ibid. p. 29). While it does not mean that Eichmann is not

responsible for what had happened, but his responsibility should be measured against his

inability or failure to think and judge the consequence of his action to the common

world. For Arendt, we can understand what actually happened in the early stages of the

Nazi regime only if we take into account the almost universal breakdown of personal

judgment as displayed by Eichmann (ibid., p. 24). Thus, Eichmann’s personal

responsibility should be taken into account in the view of the common world where

victims and perpetrators can live together in the future.

From the perspective of storytelling, Arendt offers a way of understanding

responsibility that focuses neither on perpetrators nor victims, but on the common world,

an understanding of responsibility from a political point of view. Arendt is convinced

that through public narration, we can grasp the significance of a story for our life in

common (Arendt, 1958, p. 50). But what Arendt means by common world here is not

the past but the present and future world. This means, a story reveals to us what we can

40

Arendt writes: “When we describe a political system—how it works, the relations between the various

branches of government, how the huge bureaucratic machineries function of which the channels of

command are part, and how the civilian and the military and the police forces are interconnected,...it is

inevitable that we speak of all persons used by the system in terms of cogs and wheels that keep the

administration. Each cog, that is, each person, must be expendable without changing the system, an

assumption underlying all bureaucracies, all civil services, and all functions properly speaking” (Arendt,

2003, p. 29)


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do for our world in common in the future. The story opens up a way for action or to

begin something new. As Graham MacPhee claims that the pursuit of meaningfulness

involves “the reconfiguring of the range of possibilities for future action with regard to

past events” (MacPhee, 2011, p. 185). Arendt calls this process as taking responsibility.

She explains this responsibility in her discussion of the role of legends—one form of

stories—in the constitution of political community in the Origins of Totalitarianism.

For Arendt, since human beings are always burdened with an unending chain of

events that is the outcome of the past generations’ actions, they want to know those

events and come to terms with them. This demand emerges out of the belief that their

future destiny can only be revealed in these events. This explanation is provided by

legends, which are considered as the explanation of history and function as “belated

corrections of facts and real events” (ibid., p. 208). History puts human beings into a

condition where they must be responsible for something they have not done and legends

make history or past events fit with that human condition and political aspiration. In

other words, in a legend, human beings find the connection between past events and

their own condition in the present. Arendt claims: “Only in the frankly invented tale

about events did man consent to assume responsibility for them and to consider past

events as his past” (ibid., p. 208).

Taking responsibility, in Arendt’s view, has nothing to do with the truth or

falsity. Rather, it is about the human capacity. Therefore, from Arendt’s perspective,

MacPhee claims that “narrative is not organized around the claim to know historical

events absolutely, but around the variable capacity of human collectives and individuals


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to take responsibility for them” (MacPhee, 2011, p. 178). Accepting past events implies

that we consider ourselves as if we are the authors of past deeds, although in fact we are

not. By accepting and narrating past deeds, we keep the continuity of agency, integrate it

into our own course of action, and fictionalize ourselves as their narrator. In doing so,

we assume the responsibility for what had happened in the past (ibid., p. 188).

Since taking responsibility is a human capacity, then it is applied to both victims

and perpetrators alike. It is true that storytelling is a way of holding accountability for

what happened in the past. But, what is required here is that their stories should involve

the judging element, in the sense that what they tell is a ‘thought-event’, something they

have thought about and judged. The story, even the first-person story cannot be taken to

be true as told. The victims or perpetrators’ stories need not be taken literally. The truth

commissioners must be able to determine whether or not the victims or perpetrators have

thoroughly thought their own stories and told them in the context of the future common

world. In other words, truth commissions should discern whether or not the stories told

in the testimonies or public hearings reflect an impersonal hypothesis about human life

and human world, entirely acceptable socially and intellectually when applied across the

board. This implies that when one thinks or judges something, including the gravity of

political violences, one takes into account the plurality of perspectives, as an awareness

of one’s own responsibility for the world, shared with others. Taking responsibility for

the past deeds is not for the sake of the past itself; rather, it is always in the view of our

life in common in the present and the future.


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CHAPTER FIVE:

ARENDT ON FORGIVENESS AND POLITICAL RECONCILIATION

The topic of forgiveness is traditionally considered as a private matter. It works

at the interpersonal level, in the sense that individuals who forgive are in the private

sphere and their act of forgiving is largely determined by personal dispositions and

specific situations. Therefore, when forgiveness became a political topic—after the end

of colonialization period, the Second World War, and particularly the tragedy of the

Holocaust in the mid-twentieth century—and was promoted as an essential element of

political reconciliation through the establishment of truth commissions, it raised

controversy among political philosophers and theorists.

In dealing with the tragedy of the Holocaust, Jankélévitch, for instance, claims

that this tragedy is exceptional from every point of view because it is a crime against

humanity and not only against the Jewish people. “It was the very being of humanity,

esse, that racial genocide attempted to annihilate in the suffering flesh of these millions

of martyrs” (Jankélévitch, 1996, p. 555). Facing the crimes against humanity,

Jankélévitch argues that we should not expect forgiveness from anyone because

forgiveness “died in the concentration camps” (ibid. 567). He is also against the idea of

a German collective guilty and repentance because “no one is guilty because no one was


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ever a Nazi” (ibid., p. 558) and repentance itself is a sign of defeat (ibid. 556).

Therefore, instead of forgiving which is similar to forgetfulness, he prefers retribution

and resentment. Proponents of forgiveness often recommend that in order to forget past

offenses, it is necessary to fulfill ‘the charitable duty’ for victims. But, for Jankélévitch,

caring for victims and accepting accountability for their injuries are also a charitable

duty (ibid., p. 569). Regarding resentment, he argues that it is “the renewed and

intensely lived feeling of the inexpiable thing; it protests against a moral amnesty that is

nothing but shameful amnesia; it maintains the sacred flame of disquiet and faith to

invisible things” (Jankélévitc, 1996, p. 572). What Jankélévitch wants to demonstrate

here is that forgiveness is an individual matter and thus cannot be made public; it has

nothing to do with politics. Of course, as he admits, everyone has the freedom to forgive

for the offenses that he or she personally suffered, but others, even the survivors have no

right to do so because there is no authority or principle outside of the victims to justify

it. He says: “I do not see why it should be up to us, the survivors, to pardon” (ibid., p.

569). In Jankélévitch’s idea, we see a nihilistic position with regard to forgiveness.

A contrary position comes from Jacques Derrida. Unlike Jankélévitch who

insists that it is only the individual victims who are asked for forgiveness, Derrida

claims that it is not only individuals, but also entities such as states or churches which

can request for forgiveness (Derrida, 2005, p. 28). This request, Derrida argues, has no

relation to what had happened or to certain people who suffered. He is against the idea

of political forgiveness, taking for granted that forgiveness belongs to the domain of

politics. For him, by its very essence forgiveness is beyond the order of law and politics.


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Furthermore, Derrida also disagrees with the practice of exchange as displayed in

conditional forgiveness when one has done something wrong and acknowledge, repent

and ask for forgiveness, he or she should be forgiven. In this case, he argues, forgiveness

is exchanged with acknowledgment, repentance or atonement. In other words, the

exchange for one’s repentance is forgiveness.

Therefore, Derrida proposes unconditional forgiveness where it is granted

regardless of the request from the perpetrators. Whether perpetrators ask or not,

forgiveness is granted any way because it is not the guilty as such who is forgiven, but

the guilty as guilty (ibid. p. 34). This means that forgiveness is not granted to the

particular people who suffered, but to the transcendent human substance, humanity. For

Derrida, humanity as such could not be subjected to crimes without the notion of the

sacred. In other words, the term crimes against humanity itself points to humanity as

such. It is a crime we committed against ourselves. Here Derrida individualizes victims

and crimes. The victims are humanity and not a particular group of people such as the

Jews. As a result, he argues, in order to save humanity through forgiveness from such a

crime, it is necessary to think of forgiveness in relation to the notion of the One God,

which makes the human possible. The unconditional forgiveness, for Derrida, is

exceptional and extraordinary and so is applied only for the impossible and not for the

everyday or ordinary offenses called trespasses. Derrida’s possition certainly opposes

Jankélévitch’s claim that forgiveness died in the concentration camps. For Derrida, it is

exactly in the face of radical evil such as the Holocaust that forgiveness is asked for.

Crimes against humanity are exceptional, extraordinary and thus unforgivable. It is the


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impossible and on the ground of this impossibility that forgiveness has meaning. He

extremely claims: “Forgiveness forgives unforgivable” (Derrida, 2005, p. 32).

Jankélévitch’s refusal of forgiveness and Derrida’s unconditional forgiveness

make it impossible for forgiveness to play a role in the political reconciliation’s process

to settle the past.41

In contrast to Jankélévitch’s and Derrida’s ideas I propose Arendt’s

concept of forgiveness because for me her idea can bridge the gap between

Jankélévitch’s refusal and Derrida’s over-politicization of forgiveness. While

acknowledging the fact that forgiveness “has always been deemed unrealistic and

inadmissible in the public realm” (Arendt, 1958, p. 243), because of its religious

heritage, Arendt is certainly convinced that forgiveness has a political character. As

politics signifies the realm of public freedom and the disclosure of a world that is always

plural, forgiveness inherently has the quality of freedom and is always related to the

human condition of plurality (MacLachlan, 2006, p. 6). In other words, while admitting

the religious root, Arendt offers a new way of understanding forgiveness as a

specifically political or worldly virtue. For this reason, I argue that Arendt’s political

forgiveness is essential to the discourse and practice of political reconciliation.

In The Human Condition, Arendt briefly mentions about the relationship

between forgiveness and promise. She claims that the faculty of forgiving and making a

41

Jankélévitch writes: Today when the Sophists recommend forgetfulness, we will forcefully mark out

our mute and impotent horror before the dogs of hate; we will think hard about the agony of the deportees

without sepulchers and of the little children who did not come back because this agony will last until the

end of the world (Jankewitch, 1996, p. 572). Unfortunately, Jankélévitch is trapped into the past and

therefore he is unable to move forward. His idea seems to be a lonely voice in our global time where

forgiveness and reconciliation have become a trendy topic. Derrida has a similar idea when he claims:

“Forgiveness, does not, it should never amount to a therapy of reconciliation” (Derrida, 2005, p. 41). He

refuses the role of forgiveness in political reconciliation because he refers forgiveness to the transcendent

human substance and not to the particular human beings who live in the world.


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promise belong together and complement each other, in the sense that “forgiveness

serves to undo the deeds of the past” and promise “serves to set up in the ocean of

certainty” (Arendt, 1958, p. 237). Both are necessary faculties for human beings to

redeem the irreversibility and unpredictability of human action. Therefore, before

elaborating further Arendt’s idea of political forgiveness, it is necessary to look at her

idea of promise in order to get a whole picture of how promise is related to forgiveness.

5.1. Promise and Its Relation to Forgiveness

In her discussion on action, Arendt praises the potentiality of action to enact a

world understood as a web of relationships (togetherness and communication).

However, she is also fully aware of the possibility that an action rarely achieves its

purpose. For Arendt, since an action occurs in the web of human relationships where

innumerable wills and interest collide, then action “almost never achieves its purpose”

(Arendt, 1958, 184). This means that an action can be frustrating in terms of its own

purpose and thus brings about the darkness of human affairs. There are at least three

reasons for the frustration about action (Parekh, 2008, p. 72). First, the revelation of a

distinct person promised in action is fleeting or transient. Who the person is can never be

solidified and thus we do not know what ourselves and others would become in the

future. Second, action is irreversible in the sense that once action is begun we can never

undo it or even the break the chain of events that we have begun. I have discussed this

point in Chapter Four in relation to the role of storytelling in redeeming the

irreversibility of action. The third frustration has to do with the consequence of an action

that is boundless and unpredictable, namely the “impossibility of foretelling the


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consequences of an act in a community of equals where everybody has the same

capacity to act” (Arendt, 1958., p. 244).

We cannot predict the consequence of action until it is done. In other words, the

full meaning of an action is known only after the action has been performed. For Arendt,

an action is unpredictable because it arises out of the “darkness of the human heart”

(ibid., p. 244). This means that human beings are unreliable. We cannot rely upon

ourselves and others because we cannot guarantee today who we will be tomorrow. The

inability to control and predict our own action is the price we pay for our freedom.

Arendt writes:

The impossibility of remaining unique masters of what they do, of knowing its

consequences and relying upon the future, is the price they pay for plurality and

reality, for the joy of inhabiting together with others a world whose reality is

guaranteed for each other by the presence of all (ibid., p. 244).

The unpredictability of action creates ‘the ocean of uncertainty’ because each

individual introduces something new to the world of plurality through his or her action.

As a result, the future would be in a chaotic and uncertain condition if there is nothing to

bind people together. In other words, there is a need, Arendt argues, to master the

darkness of human affairs in order to keep people together and secure the future.

Therefore, Arendt proposes making promise and forgiving each other’s wrongs as the

ways of mastering human affairs with a view to keeping people together and securing

the future.

What Arendt means by mastery here is self-control and control over others (ibid.

p. 244). Arendt’s idea of promise as a way of controlling is certainly drawn from


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Nietzsche.42

In his On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche claims that regarding the

problem with human beings, the main task is “breeding an animal with the right to make

promises” (Nietzsche, 2000, p. 494). It is the way of mastering free will so that humans

become necessary, regular, and calculable. Nietzsche believes that a human is able to

find security for his -or her own future if he or she becomes a sovereign individual “who

has his (or her) own independent, protracted will and the right to make promise”

(Nietzsche, p. 495).

In The Human Condition, Arendt approves of Nietzsche’s claim and asserts that

promise distinguishes human from animal life. It has the power to redeem human action

from the necessity and meaninglessness (Arendt, 1958, p. 245). Arendt agrees with

Nietzsche’s claim that there is a connection between human sovereignty and the faculty

of making promise. However, as she says in an important footnote, since this connection

is lacking in clarity, it has led Nietzsche “to a unique insight into the relatedness of

human pride and human conscience” (ibid., p. 245). Arendt clarifies how sovereignty

should be understood in the context of making a promise. In The Human Condition,

Arendt claims that sovereignty is the opposite of freedom because freedom requires

acting in concert with others and not acting in isolation. This implies that when we

detach ourselves from others for the sake of sovereignty in the sense that we want to be

42

The similarity and difference between Nietzsche’s and Arendt’s notion of promise can be found in

Danel Brandes’ article, “Nietzsche, Arendt, and the Promise of Future.” In that article Brandes elaborates

on how Arendt incorporates Nietzsche’s notion of promise into her own and at the same time shows how

Arendt significantly diverges from Nietzsche. He writes: “What Arendt learned from Nietzsche and what

finds expression in her own framing and elaboration of the promising activity,..., is not ‘the connection

between human sovereignty and the faculty of making promise’; on the contrary, it is the singular

structure of passivity—a non-sovereign reflexivity—built into the promise, a passivity whose temporal

structure demands our attention” (Brandes, 2010, p. 17).


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completely independent and self-sufficient, we are not really free. In fact, the

detachment from the others or the world that is always plural makes it impossible for

freedom to flourish (Parekh, 2008, p. 73).

Therefore, instead of understanding sovereignty in relation to freedom, Arendt

suggests that sovereignty should be understood in the context of human action aimed at

mastery in the realm of making promise. Sovereignty, in Arendt’s view, emerges from

“the will to live together with others in the mode of acting and speaking” (Arendt, 1958,

p. 246). This means, promise binds or unites the plurality of people for the sake of a

common purpose that is creating and preserving the world in common. This implies also

that making promise corresponds not to sovereignty, but to solidarity (ibid., p. 73). Or as

La Caze puts it: “The promise is fundamentally connected to the power of action, as it

links people together so that they have power. Thus, the promise involves our world-

building capacity in its concern for the future” (La Caze, 2011, p. 157).

In view of a common purpose, sovereignty resides in the attempt to limit our

own independence for the sake of making the future calculable through making promise.

Thus, Arendt argues that instead of being completely free agents that will create a

chaotic and uncertain condition in the future, human beings make promise either to

themselves or to others—limit their freedom—in order to tie the future and the present:

“The superiority derives from the capacity to dispose of the future as though it were the

present, that is, the enormous and truly miraculous enlargement of the very dimension in

which power can be effective” (ibid., p. 245). Or in “What is Freedom” Arendt claims

that promise secures the continuity and durability of human relationship. She writes:


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All political business is, and always has been, transacted within an elaborate

framework of ties and bonds for the future...all of which derive in the last

instance from the faculty of promise and to keep promise in the face of the

essential uncertainties of the future (Arendt, 1961, p. 164).

It is clear that in making a promise the future is drawn into the past. The flow of

time is reversed by promise and in this way people are born into a secured past, rather

than being born into an uncertain future. Drawing the future into the past is only possible

if there is something in the past that is remembered. In other words, the power of

promise requires a particular kind of memory. In fact, as Vanessa Lemm notes it: “The

faculty of promise is essentially a faculty of memory that has the power to bring a body

of people back to their beginning, that is, back to the moment when they agreed on an

aim and a purpose” (Lemm, 2006, p. 162). Promise, in this context, reminds people,

either individually or collectively, to go back to their beginning, which is the past, in

order to move on and start a new beginning. In this sense, promise arises out of the

action itself as the articulation of natality.

For Arendt, promise enacts power, in the sense that when people agree to work

together for a common purpose, they have more power or capacities to act. Arendt gives

the example of the Mayflower Compact43

in order to demonstrate how power had been

created by people who were bound by mutual promise. The Mayflower Compact

enabled British immigrants to America to enjoy power and entitled them to claim “rights

43

The Mayflower Compact was an agreement among British immigrants drawn by Mayflower on their

journey to America and was signed when they arrived in America. Arendt speculates that the Mayflower

Compacts was an anticipation of the British immigrants as they faced the challenges in the new land

together as a group. It was a way of protecting British immigrants from the potential conflict in America.

What is striking about the Mayflower Compact is not the fear but rather their confidence in their own

power, “a power that had not been granted to them and that was unsupported by any means of violence”.

British immigrants believed in the power “to bind themselves into a political body, held together solely by

the strength of mutual promise in the presence of God and one another” (Parekh, 2008, p. 74).


216

without possessing or claiming sovereignty” (Arendt, 1965, p. 168). Of course, as

immigrants, the British did not rule over the Americans, rather, they were ruled. But,

because of the agreement and promise to act together, they gained power to insert

themselves as a political entity into the existing authorities or into the American

federation. Arendt’s point here is that promise enables people to act together and acting

together generates power to constitute the common world or political entity. Their

mutual promise or agreement allowed British immigrants to “form a political realm in

which they were entitled to claim rights without claiming sovereignty” (Parekh, 2008, p.

74). This means that promise underlies the founding of politics or society.

The understanding of promise in the context of plurality points to the fact that the

promise is necessarily connected to forgiveness. Making a promise is intended to give

people the freedom to act in the future, “without resentment toward the past and without

anxiety for the future” (Brandes, 2010, p. 18). This requires forgiveness, in the sense

that one’s own deed must be forgiven by others. In the act of promising, one commits

his or herself to personal responsibility for the possible endless consequence of his or

her action that might affect not only to him or herself, but also to others. It means that a

promise is not made in isolation, but always with others. It is thus inserted into the web

of relationships. This responsibility can become a burden that prevents that person from

acting in the future. Therefore, a promising person needs forgiveness from others,

particularly from those who are bound to suffer the effects of his or her promise. Thus,

forgiveness gives a promising person the freedom to act in the future.


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5.2. Reconstructing Arendt’s Political Forgiveness

Arendt offers a distinctive way of understanding forgiveness which, for her, is

“the magic formula to break the spell” (Arendt, 1958, p. 237). In order to ‘break the

spell’, we must conceive of forgiveness beyond our every-day understanding that is tied

to morality. Here Arendt and Derrida have something in common because both are

against the understanding of forgiveness from the moral point of view. However, unlike

Derrida who rejects moral forgiveness because it is conditional and tied to a system of

exchange, Arendt argues that it is inappropriate to a world shared in common. In her

critique of traditional or absolute morality, as I explained in Chapter Three, Arendt has

pointed out that traditional morality destroys the world of plurality. Thus, she suggests

that forgiveness should be conceived as a specifically political or worldly virtue.

Besides being unpredictable that can nonetheless be redeemed by a promise, a

human act is also irreversible in that it can neither be recalled nor revoked. We are not

able to turn around or change what we have done: “The deeds of the past who sins hang

like Democles’ sword over every generation” (Arendt, 1958, p. 237). This is an

inevitable situation because the act of every newcomer always falls into the existing

chain of events produced by the actions of those who lived in the past. Or in the context

of political community as a whole, Arendt claims: “Every generation, by virtue of being

born into a historical continuum, is burdened by the sins of the fathers as it is blessed

with the deeds of the ancestors” (Arendt, 2003, p. 27).

In this situation, Arendt invokes the act of forgiving as a way of undoing or

reversing a deed and word that has been done and spoken. She claims that forgiveness


218

undoes the deeds of the past (Arendt, 1958, p. 237). Of course, we cannot understand

‘undoing’ in a literal sense. Arendt actually foresees the danger of past deeds to

determine our present and future deeds through a lasting memory of what had happened

in the past. Thus, what Arendt means by ‘undoing’ here is to prevent a past event from

continually exerting itself into the present and undermining the human web of

relationships. Forgiveness is an attempt to “put an end to something that without

interference could go on endlessly” (Arendt, 1958, p. 241). But, what good is it to put an

end to this endless cycle of the memory of past wrongs through forgiveness? It is exactly

in the context of searching for the meaning of forgiveness that Arendt’s political

forgiveness emerges. In other words, the political characteristics of forgiveness are

identified when Arendt speaks about its meaning.

5.2.1. Forgiveness and the Natality of the Other

According to Arendt, the undoing of the past deeds opens up the possibility for

action in the future. She writes: “Without being forgiven, released from the

consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined

to one single deed from which we could never recover...” (Arendt, 1958, p. 237). As

action suggests freedom, forgiveness implies freedom or the liberation from the prison

of time in order to be born anew in politics (Levy and Sznaider, 2005, p. 84).

This is the reason why Arendt characterizes forgiveness as the unpredictable,

which is the opposite of vengeance that can be predicted. Forgiveness, Arendt argues, by

its very nature of unpredictability retains the original character of action. Forgiving, she

says, is “the only reaction which does not merely re-act but acts anew and unexpectedly,


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unconditioned by the act which provoked it and therefore freeing from its consequences

both the one who forgives and the one who is forgiven” (ibid., p. 241).

According to Arendt, as in the act of promising, forgiveness is not an outside

power that is inserted into an action, but actually comes out of the action itself. The

power of forgiveness to undo the act arises out of the action. It is the potentiality of the

action itself. It means that forgiveness is “the necessary corrective for the inevitable

damages resulting from action (ibid., p. 239). Arendt relates forgiveness to action

because both reveal the agent who forgives and who acts. In acting, the agent discloses

who he or she is to others and in forgiving one reveals his or herself to those who have

wronged him or her. Arendt states: “Forgiving and acting are as closely connected as

destroying and making comes from that aspect of forgiveness where the undoing of what

was done seems to show the same revelatory character as the deed itself” (ibid., p. 241).

Arendt links forgiveness to a new beginning. In emphasizing forgiveness as the

potentiality of action, Arendt intends to demonstrate her specific conception of

forgiveness that is directed to the doer, a person who acts and not to the behavior of the

doer or what the doer has done (Young-Bruehl, 2007, p. 97). Of course, Arendt admits,

in the act of forgiving what was done is forgiven, but that forgiveness is done for the

sake of who did it and not the deed itself. Arendt, as Ricoeur claims, situates the act of

forgiving “at the point of intersection of the act and its consequences and not of the

agent and the act” (Ricoeur, 2004, p. 489). Thus, from Arendt’s perspective, Ricoeur

argues that in forgiveness we deal with the actor and the consequence of his action and

not his or her action. Ricoeur admits that it is not easy to separate between the agent and


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action; and thus there is a paradox in forgiveness.44

He attempts to overcome this

paradox in his idea of forgetting and forgiving. For Ricoeur, forgiveness is not only

dissociating the debt from its burden of guilt, but also to release the agent from his act.

Ricoeur conceives of forgiveness as a kind of selective or active memory because in the

act of forgiving we need to forget the feeling of guilt that would prevent a new

beginning and keep in memory action and the capacity of the wrongdoers to begin anew.

He writes: “The guilty person is to be considered capable of something other than his

offenses and his faults. He is held to be restored to his capacity for acting, and action

restored to its capacity for continuing” (ibid., p. 493).

Arendt’s notion of forgiveness is focused on the possibility of building a

personal relationship between the one who forgives and the one who is forgiven (Arendt,

1958, p, 241). Although this relationship is also acknowledged by Jesus where because

of His love, He forgives people—that leads to the conviction that only love can

forgive—Arendt claims that this kind of forgiveness is not directed to who, but to what

the person is. In this context, love is concerned with what the loved person maybe, his

qualities and shortcomings. It is what a person has done or achieved is the focus of the

feeling of love. Therefore, Christian love, for Arendt, possesses “an unequaled power of

self-revelation and an unequaled clarity of vision for the disclosure of who” (ibid., p.

44

Ricoeur writes: “Everything, hangs on the possibility of separating the agent from the action. This

unbinding would mark the inscription, in the field of the horizonal disparity between power and act, the

vertical disparity between the great height of forgiveness and the abyss of guilt. The guilty person,

rendered capable of beginning again; this would be the figure of unbinding that commands all the other”

(Ricoer, 1984, 490). Henry Venema articulates the paradox of forgiveness as Ricoeur sees it as follows:

“on the one hand, the avowal of all our acts, thereby binding them to the agent in the act of responsibility

that constitutes the founding act of selfhood, and on the other hand, forgiveness as the unbinding of action

from agent” (Venema, 2011, p. 37).


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242). Therefore, instead of Christian love, personal relationship established by

forgiveness can be compared to respect that is concerned more with who the person is,

regardless of his or her qualities or achievements. Arendt writes: “Respect, at any rate,

because it concerns only with the person, is quite sufficient to prompt forgiving of what

a person did, for the sake of the person” (ibid., p. 243).

When we forgive, we recognize the identity of others not in terms of what they

were—what they have done in the past either good or bad—but who they are now. This

is what makes forgiveness different from punishment, although both are necessary in

putting an end to the endless cycle of hatred. Punishment undoes the meaning of the

wrong. It is the act or what the person has done that counts in punishment. In other

words, when a wrongdoer is punished, his or her original act is confirmed as wrong.

This is the law that is applied in criminal court. Arendt claims: “The majesty of the law

demands that we be equal—that only our acts count, and not the person who committed

them” (Arendt, 1955, p. 248). I think, it is because of its focus only on the wrongful act

that Arendt does not elaborate further on the topic of punishment in the Human

Condition compared to forgiveness.

In contrast to punishment, forgiveness “takes the person into account; no pardon

pardons murder or theft but only the murderer or the thief” (ibid., p. 248). In the act of

forgiving, we insist on seeing individuals as they are and not what they have done or

achieved. In other words, it is an attempt to see an individual as “more than whatever he

did or achieved” (ibid., p 248). In this context, forgiveness presupposes the potentiality

in others to begin anew. As Schaap puts it: “To forgive for the sake of who the other is,


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is to release him from the consequences of his actions so that he can remain a free agent.

We forgive the other what he is for the sake of who he might reveal himself to be

through action” (Schaap, 2005, p. 104). Here, in forgiveness, the other is reborn. It is the

natality of the other. There is a similarity between forgiveness and Arendt’s political

action which serves as the ground for Arendt’s political forgiveness.

5.2.2. Forgiveness and the Plurality

Another ground for Arendt’s political forgiveness is the condition of plurality.

According to Arendt, forgiveness establishes a kind of relationship that manifests the

world that is always plural. The disclosure of the agent necessarily requires the presence

of others. By emphasizing the fact that forgiveness depends on the reality of plurality,

forgiveness belongs to the domain of politics—it is political—and not to the domain of

morality. In describing Arendt’s ethics, I have emphasized that it is not based on the

universal moral standards, but on the greatness that arises out of the action itself after it

is performed in the presence of others. Unlike the classical moral precepts that are based

on the relation between me and myself, in the sense that what is just and unjust, good or

bad are determined by the attitude held by me, the principle of ethics rests on the

experiences of living with others. These principles are entirely based on the presence of

others. It is other people who can tell us what is great in our action. In the same way

Arendt claims that forgiveness is based on the experience of others. It is not our

relationship with ourselves that determines our act of forgiving others, but on the

contrary, it is our relationship with others that makes possible our forgiving act either to

others or to ourselves.


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At one point, Arendt ironically claims that forgiving oneself is not possible. For

her, nobody can forgive himself: “Closed within ourselves, we would never be able to

forgive ourselves any failing or transgression because we would lack the experience of

the person for the sake of whom one can forgive” (Arendt, 1958, p. 243). Like the act of

making promise, the act of forgiveness is not a solitary act. There is nobody who can

forgive himself or make a promise to himself anything and then stick to it. The

acceptance of the act of forgiving and making promise by others is the determining

factors. This means that these two acts depend on the presence of others and their

interplay in politics is the basis of the principles of ethics (Kristeva, 2001, p. 87).

Arendt acknowledges that the idea of forgiveness is rooted in Christianity,

particularly in Jesus’s teaching found in the New Testament. Although it has Christian

roots, forgiveness is an authentic political experience. Arendt writes:

The discovery of the role of forgiveness in the realm of human affairs was Jesus

of Nazareth. The fact that he made this discovery in a religious context and

articulated it in religious language is not reason to take it any less seriously in a

strictly secular sense. It has been in the nature of our tradition of political thought

(...) to be highly selective and to exclude from articulate conceptualization a

great variety of authentic political experience, among which we need not be

surprised to find some of an even elementary nature (Arendt, 1958, p. 238-239).

For Arendt, Jesus’ thinking about forgiveness arose out of the unworldliness that

characterized the historical period where He lived. Therefore, certain aspects of His

teaching reflects the fundamental human experience, especially the experience of a

“small and closely knit community” whose where their deeds and words were suspect to

the Roman public authorities—the Scribes and Pharisees (Arendt, 1958, p. 238). Arendt

gives two reasons why Jesus’ teaching of forgiveness represents the human experiences.


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First, it is related to human power or faculty: “It is not true that only God has the power

to forgive” (ibid., p. 239). This implies that humans also have the power to forgive.

Second, forgiveness must be practiced among humans before they can expect

forgiveness from God. Forgiveness must be “mobilized by men toward each other

before they can hope to be forgiven by God also” (ibid., p. 239).45

However, it is necessary to note that Arendt’s discussion of forgiveness in The

Human Condition can only be applied to the wrongs which the Greek and New

Testament calls ‘trespasses’, which means going astray. It is “an everyday occurrence”

(ibid., p. 240) that is done unknowingly and breaks the web of relationships among

humans. In this situation, forgiveness is needed to release people from their wrongs and

to make possible for life to go on. In this context, forgiveness is an attempt to help

people to willingly change their minds and start something new (Young-Bruehl, 2007, p.

100). In other words, in forgiving others, we place our trust on others in the hope that

together we will establish a new relation on the basis of the mutual recognition of

ourselves as co-builders of the world. This implies that forgiveness is done for the sake

of a world, held in common between victims and perpetrators and not for our shared

moral status as rational beings or God’s creatures (Schaap, 2005, p. 103). Regarding the

wrongs that are done knowingly, she describes them as “the extremity of crimes and

willed evil,” or by the New Testament’s term “skandala, they are unforgivable on earth.

45

In her footnote Arendt quotes Jesus’ saying in the gospel to support her claim. Regarding the first

reason, she refers it to Luke 5:21-24, Mathew 9:4-6, and Mark 12:7-10 where Jesus says: “The Son of

Man has power upon earth to forgive sins. While for the second reason, Arendt quotes the gospel of

Mathew and Mark: “When you stand praying, forgive.....” (Matt 18:35 and Mark 11:25) Or “If you

forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you forgive not men their

trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses (Matt 6: 14-15).


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“It would be better that a millstone were hanged around his neck, and he cast into the

sea” (Luke 17:1-5). Jesus also acknowledges these unforgivable wrongs when He said

that these kinds of wrongs will be taken care by God at the Last Judgment, the time

when God will deal these wrongs not with forgiveness but with retribution (Arendt,

1958, p. 240).

Taking Jesus’ teaching from the vantage point of politics, Arendt then claims

that these kinds of offenses cannot be forgiven or punished because they “transcend the

realm of human affairs and the potentialities of human power” (Arendt, 1958, p. 241).

Since the radical evil such as the Holocaust has broken-down civilization, in the sense

that it has shattered all moral and political thought, then it is no longer possible to deal

with this kind of crime at the political level. In other words, according to Arendt, the

radical evil must be excluded when we talk about forgiveness at the level of politics or

political forgiveness.

The exclusion of the radical evil from the realm of politics or political

forgiveness poses a challenge to the contribution of Arendt’s concept of political

forgiveness to the reconciliatory process at the level of politics because political

reconciliation always deals with crimes against humanity that are to some extent radical.

I will deal with this problem in the next section, where I will defend the idea that

Arendt’s political forgiveness contributes to the political reconciliatory process only if it

involves the faculty of judgment. In other words, it is only through judgment that we are

enabled to forgive the wrongdoers and to reconcile ourselves to the wrongs committed

by them.


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5.3. Forgiveness and Political Reconciliation

In contemporary political and ethical discourse, forgiveness has become a

political concept in the attempt to restore peace after violent conflicts, heal past injuries,

put the wrong behind and rebuild relatonships in order to move forward. This implies

that forgiveness is treated as means for other ends, including the quest for peace and

reconciliation. In this section, I would like to demonstrate how Arendt’s notion of

political forgiveness as described above could shed light on the work of truth

commissions in their effort to promote reconciliation.

In her reflection on forgiveness in The Human Condition Arendt does not deal

directly with political reconciliation. She gives no concrete example of how forgiveness

plays a role in the reconciliatory process. What she does is to demonstrate the relation of

forgiveness to politics: “Forgiveness is crucial to political existence, a fundamental

experience for the person forgiven, for the forgiver, and for the political milieu in which

their relationship evolves” (Young-Bruehl, 2007, p. 111). This relationship is at the heart

of Arendt’s political thought and thus has captured the attention of the proponents of

reconciliation at the political level where forgiveness has become one essential element

of political reconciliation.

This is obvious in the establishment of truth commissions whose task is to

encourage forgiveness among the conflicting parties. The good example for this is the

South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in which forgiveness is

made as a guiding principle for the state to come to terms with its past wrongs. TRC

attempted to find the perpetrators and challenged them to publicly acknowledge and


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repent for the wrongs they have done with the expectation that their wrongs will be

forgiven by the victims and the public so that the society may be able to move forward.

The interesting point of TRC is the use of forgiveness as an underlying principle.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, chair of TRC, acknowledges the importance of forgiveness

in TRC in his book entitled No Future Without Forgiveness, where he claims that the

remarkable thing about TRC is that “people told their heartrending stories, victims

expressing their willingness to forgive and perpetrators telling their stories of sordid

atrocities while also asking for forgiveness from those they had wronged so grievously”

(Tutu, 1999, p. 192). Of course, the root of Tutu’s idea of forgiveness is religious; yet,

he believes that forgiveness works at the political level, too, in the sense that it is the

community that decides whether or not the perpetrators merit forgiveness in order to

make the future possible. The importance of forgiveness in political reconciliation is

applied in particular by TRC’s attempt to grant amnesty after the perpetrators publicly

acknowledge and repent for what they have done.

Thus, the question to be dealt with here is: How does forgiveness contribute to

reconciliation? Does amnesty in particular and forgiveness in general help the citizens to

have a shared understanding of the past violences and thus come to terms with it? In

order to answer these questions we have to keep in mind that forgiveness and

reconciliation are distinct because in forgiveness we deal with the person and not with

what he or she has done; whereas in reconciliation we deal with what have been done—

which are considered as the actuality, the product of human action.


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In Denktagebuch, Arendt makes it clear that “reconciliation reconciles itself with

an actuality, independent of all possibility” (Arendt, 2002, p. 6). What Arendt means by

the actuality here is not only the world, but also the actual perpetrators. It means that

reconciliation presupposes human beings who act and that their actions potentially

destroy others who inhabit the same world. Arendt claims that reconciliation

“presupposes acting-and-potentially-wrongfully-acting men, but not men who are

poisoned by sin” (ibid., p 6). As a result, in reconciliation we come to terms with neither

an evil soul nor a sinful humanity, but rather with the actual perpetrators and the world

that contains the actually existing wrong. This means that reconciliation can be personal

as well as political. The personal reconciliation implies the repair of some sort of

relationship which requires the interaction between victims and perpetrators, as well as

the repentance and the acceptance of responsibility by the perpetrators (Kohen, 2009, p.

407). The requirement for the perpetrators to assume responsibility and repent marks the

difference between personal and political reconciliation because in the latter case,

victims can decide to reconcile themselves without the perpetrators’ contrition. This

means that political reconciliation can be attained without personal reconciliation.

Although forgiveness and reconciliation are distinct, both are closely related

because reconciliation depends on forgiveness. Forgiveness is considered as means in

the long process of restoring justice (reconciliation). In this section I would like to

consider the relationship between forgiveness and reconciliation from the fact that both

involve judgment and are done in the view of the responsibility for the common world.


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5.3.1. The Importance of Judgment in Forgiveness

In her essay on “Bertolt Brecht” contained in Men in Dark Times, Arendt

concludes that judgment and forgiveness are two sides of the one and the same coin.

Every act of judging can lead to the act of forgiving (Arendt, 1955, 248). However, in

my view, Arendt’s usage of the phrase ‘can lead’ points to the fact that it is not

necessarily that judgment leads to forgiveness, because it can also lead to un-

forgiveness. It depends on how we judge the crime in question. This means, in the

context of the radical evil, the judgment to forgive or not to forgive is a necessary

element, as clearly portrayed in Arendt’s own judgment of Eichmann’s crime.

During the trial Arendt discovers the inability of the judges in the court of

Jerusalem to appreciate the unprecedented quality of Eichmann’s action, resulting

further in their failure to do justice to the accused. There are two reasons for their

failure: first, in order to establish Eichmann’s guilt, they look to his state of mind and

not his action and how that action appeared to the world. This implies that the judges

consider Eichmann’s guilt from the vantage point of internal motivation or intention and

of the deed that he performed. The problem with the judges’ way of understanding

Eichmann’s crime is that they disregard the person who appears himself and try to find

what they assume to lie behind that appearing man which is his motives or intention

(Culbert, 2010, p. 147-148). What the judges did, in Arendt’s view, is futile because for

her Eichmann is an ordinary man who is neither a devil nor a clown. He did not act out

of criminal motives. His only motive was perhaps to earn a high position in the Nazi’s


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hierarchy. Eichmann did not know what he was doing and did not intend to kill

anybody. He only conformed to Hitler’s order and will.

The second failure has to do with the judges’ inability to apprehend the new

character of Eichmann’s crime. Like Jankélévitch and Derrida, Arendt claims that the

genocide of the Jews during the Holocaust was exceptional, a crime against humanity.

Therefore, from the beginning, Arendt rejects the trial of Eichmann in Jerusalem

because for her, Eichmann’s crime is a crime against humanity and not against the

Jewish people per se. It was a crime against the human status, perpetrated on the body of

the Jewish people against “the possibility and condition of humanity itself” (Culbert,

2010, p. 148). This crime violated the order of mankind and endangered the community

as a whole. For Arendt, Eichmann was an agent of the state-organized crime that was

intentionally meant to eliminate the order of the international community by destroying

the fundamental order of the human condition.

In the Epilogue to her book Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt discusses

Eichmann’s crime in the context of crimes against humanity as defined by the

Nuremberg Trial established in 1946 after the Second World War. The charter of the

Nuremberg accorded three kinds of crimes, namely ‘crimes against peace’, the

aggressive warfare; ‘war crimes’, the violations of the laws of war; and ‘crimes against

humanity’, an inhuman act undertaken for the pursuit of war and victory (Arendt, 1963,

255-257). If these crimes against humanity can be covered by international law in the

sense that the perpetrators are easily identified and punished under the existing law,

Eichmann’s crime represents a new form of crimes against humanity that can re-appear


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in many different forms in the future due to the development of technology and nuclear

weapons. Thus, what is required in anticipation is an international penal code that can

offer protection to people threatened by genocide.46

Arendt’s critiques of the judges in the court of Jerusalem do not mean that she

defends Eichmann and treats him as an innocent person and thus deserves forgiveness.

In fact, in Arendt’s own judgment, Eichmann, as Kristeva puts it, deserves no

forgiveness because in “taking into account the person,' she discovers a non-person, an

absence of the who or of 'someone,' an automaton of a civil servant incapable of judging

his acts” (Kristeva, p. 80). He was only an agent of a criminal state. His evil lies not in

his nature as a human being, but in the failure of exercising his human capacity of

thinking and judging. Eichmann was just a thoughtless person—like other Nazis—and

not a diabolic person (Young-Bruehl, 2007, p. 107-108). As a thoughtless person, he

blindly carried out Hitler’s policy of eliminating the Jewish people. What is un-tolerable,

in Arendt’s view, about Eichmann’s attitude in the court room is his assertion that he

had no intention to kill anybody while acknowledging the Nazi’s murderous policy. In

other words, although the Nazi’s policy was considered by others as criminal, Eichmann

refused to be called a criminal because he just followed the order of Hitler and the law

46

Arendt writes: “...these modern, state-employed mass murderers must be prosecuted because they

violated the order of mankind, and not because they killed millions of people. Nothing is more pernicious

to an understanding of these new crimes, or stands more in the way of the emergency of an international

penal code that could take care of them, than the common illusion that the crime of murder and the crime

of genocide are essentially the same, and that the latter therefore is ‘no new crime properly speaking’. The

point of the latter is that an altogether different order is broken and an altogether different community is

violated” (Arendt, 1963, p. 272).


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of the land. As a result, he showed no repentance or remorse. For this reason, he has no

reason to be forgiven (ibid. p. 108).

It is clear that Arendt draws a sharp distinction between the doer and the deeds.

To her, Eichmann’s character offers a dilemma between the unutterable horror of the

deeds and the undeniable ludicrousness of the man who committed them. This dilemma

could be only solved by understanding him as an exemplar of the banality of evil.

Eichmann’s deeds are monstrous, but as the doer, he is a normal person. He was just

caught up in the Nazi’s order of the obedience and self-sacrifice and thus he lost his

ability to think and judge. This is perfectly captured in the following remark:

However monstrous the deeds were, the doer as neither monstrous nor demonic,

and the only specific characteristic one could detect in his past as well as in his

behavior during the trial and the preceding police examination was something

entirely negative: it was not stupidity but a curious, quite authentic inability to

think (Arendt, 2003, p. 159).

Arendt’s portrait of Eichmann as a normal person is debatable. Some argue that

Arendt might have underestimated Eichmann’s role during the Holocaust. Peter Baehr,

for instance, claims that Arendt’s description of Eichmann as normal and ordinary were

‘unfortunate’. For Baehr, Eichmann’s thoughtlessness or his inability to think and judge

is not normal. Conversely, it is something extraordinary because as a bureaucrat,

Eichmann sacrifices everything for the sake of ideology and actively participated in the

mass murder of human beings (Baehr, 2010, p. 142). A similar concern is raised by

Christopher Browning who argues that although Arendt’s concept of the banality of evil

is an important insight for understanding many of the perpetrators of the Holocaust, this

was not the case with Eichmann himself. In his investigation of the comparison between


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Eichmann’s own statements and the other documented testimonies, Browning claims

that Arendt was fooled by Eichmann’s strategy of self-representation because he was

actually one of the many perpetrators who were pretentious (Browning, 2003, p. 3-4).

Of course, it is understandable to have different opinions concerning Eichmann’s

attitude and action. But, for Arendt, the main concern is not the truth or falsity of

Eichmann’s involvement. It is not about whether or not he was truly involved in

carrying out an evil policy. The main point of Arendt’s portrait of Eichmann is about

how such an ordinary or normal person can be caught up in committing or supporting a

monstrous crime. Here Arendt actually challenges the judges to seriously think about the

involvement of Eichmann before passing judgment on him. In this way, Arendt offers a

new way of dealing with the problem of our times where we are easily labeling the

wrongdoers as vicious and treating them as intrinsically evil before considering their

crimes in a broad context.

Thinking and judging are fundamental in dealing with perpetrators like

Eichmann. In Arendt’s own judgment about the unforgivableness of Eichmann’s crime,

she portrays how an appropriate judgment should be done. She calls our attention to the

factual phenomenon in order to judge correctly. Unlike the judges in Jerusalem’s court,

Arendt grounds her judgment on the person who appears himself and takes into account

the words he spoke in the court and not what lies behind the appearance (motives or

intention). From the appearance of Eichmann in the court, Arendt considers him as an

ordinary man and from his words he is just an example of a man who was unable to

think and judge. Here Arendt consistently defends the idea that the criterion for judging


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an event is the event as it is or as it appears itself. In the trial in Jerusalem, Eichmann is

the center of the trial and thus the focus of judgment is how he appears himself in action

and words. In this context, Eichmann is judged not on the basis of his intention or

motivation that is hidden in the darkness of his heart but of the appearing self. It is the

actual perpetrator who appears should be the focus of judgment. For Arendt, it is the

judgment on the particulars that matters and not on the universal or the absolute.

5.3.2. The Importance of Judgment in Reconciliation

The importance of judgment in reconciliation is laid out by Arendt in her

Denktagebuch where she deals particularly with the question of reconciliation. Arendt

claims that reconciliation and judgment are interrelated and presupposes each other. On

the one hand, judgment presupposes reconciliation because reconciliation is the only

response to a wrong that opens up the space for human judgment. As Shai Levi puts it:

“Judgment opens a third possibility of interrelation between humankind and world”

(Levi, 2010, p. 234). On the other hand, reconciliation presupposes judgment in the

sense that we reconcile ourselves to a wrong because we have thought and judged it.

It is the judgment that people, inflicted by the violences, should decide to

reconcile themselves to the existing wrongful world. Arendt argues that a wrongdoer

should be judged for his action that disturbs and endangers the community as a whole

and not for the “damage [which] has been done to individuals who are entitled to

reparations” (Arendt, 1963, p. 261). In the case of Eichmann, Arendt claims that as an

agent of the new form of crime, Eichmann has cooperated with Hitler’s policy to

eliminate the Jewish people and others from the earth. Therefore, the appropriate


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question that we should ask is not about the proper verdict on Eichmann’s goodness or

badness, but whether or not we should reconcile ourselves to the world where people

like Eichmann are still in it. Arendt’s own answer to this question is affirmative and in

fact, it is only when Eichmann disappears from the world that a new world can be

established (Berkowitz, 2010, p. 16). For Arendt, it is not possible any more to build a

new web of relationships in that kind of world because that world has violated human

plurality and human dignity. Thus, nobody wants to share the world with Eichmann.

Thus, from Arendt’s perspective, although victims refuse to forgive Eichmann

because his action has destroyed the common world and his lack of thinking has made

him sho no repentance during the trial, they cannot be silent or let a radical evil pass by

as if unnoticed. Of course, the radical evil, Arendt argues, is what “one cannot reconcile

himself to and that about which one ought also to neither be silent about nor to pass by”

(Arendt, 2002, p. 7). Victims need to think and judge the radical evil. Arendt strongly

believes that it is through the act of judgment that all people come to the agreement that

something is bad and it must be punished. In other words, in judgment people would be

able to come to terms with something that is new, challenging and horrible in the world

(Berkowitz, 2011, p. 3).

When discussing about totalitarianism, Arendt defies the common idea that

understanding totalitarianism will give us the right reason to fight against it. For her, the

primary purpose of thinking about totalitarianism is not for any knowledge or reason we

can get out of it, but to help us to “come to terms with and reconcile ourselves to reality,

that is, try to be at home in the world (Arendt, 1994, p. 308). Reconciling oneself with


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the world, in Arendt’s view, is a necessity because of the following reasons: first, the

world where we are born into has already existed with all its complexities and problems.

It has been created by the actions and speeches of those who lived before us. In other

words, each new comer is born as a stranger into an existing web of relationships.

Although each new comer introduces something new or initiates a new

beginning, but this new beginning enters into a sequence of events in the world that have

already existed. This implies that “every single person needs to be reconciled to a world

into which he was born a stranger and in which, to the extent of his distinct uniqueness,

he always remains a stranger” (ibid. p. 308). Second, the facts of our history, including

past grave wrongs, are unchangeable. What had happened cannot be recalled or revoked.

Since we cannot change the facts, we either accept or do not accept “what irrevocably

happened...and what unavoidably exist” (ibid. p. 322).

The point is that it is only after judging an action that is radically evil that we can

decide not to reconcile ourselves with it. When we decide not to reconcile ourselves wit

it, we actual reject the world that accommodates people like Eichmann or acts that are

radically evil. Arendt detects in Eichmann is something entirely negative: it is not

stupidity but thoughtlessness. His monstrosity arose from an all-to-human propensity

towards thoughtlessness. Thus, if Heidegger represents the unworldliness of pure

thought, then Eichmann represents the unworldliness of thoughtlessness. Both are not

connected with the plurality of the world.

According to Arendt, the object of our judgment is not the person but the

actuality, which is the world with its traumatic history because it is the world that we


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reconcile ourselves with. Reconciliation is important for Arendt’s politics because of its

power to affirm the common world on the basis of what we understand and judge what

is going on in the world. When people know how to be in the world, they understand it

and thus reconcile themselves to it. Understanding and judging that help people to make

sense of the world is a way of making ourselves feel at home in the world that depends

upon understanding in the sense of reconciliation. Understanding means, Arendt claims,

“the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality—whatever it may

be” (Arendt, 2951, p. viii). This means, it is only those who are reconciled with the

world in the sense that they accept the world as it is and come to terms with it, who are

able to act politically in the world. In her essay “Understanding and Politics,” Arendt

takes the example of King Solomon who asks for the gift of an understanding heart in

order to enable him to bear the burden as the gift of action and of making a beginning. In

contrast to mere reflection or mere feeling, the understanding heart “makes it bearable

for us to live with other people, stranger forever, in the same world, and makes it

possible for them to bear with us” (Arendt, 1994, p. 322).

5.3.2. Forgiveness, Reconciliation and Responsibility for the World

Past wrongs as the products of human actions in the past are facts that cannot be

changed or turned around. Any attempt to retrieve them seems to be no longer adequate.

What is needed is that the wrongdoers are forgiven and the wrongs are reconciled with.

Instead of letting the past wrongs to be a burden either to victims or the perpetrators or

states as a whole, it is necessary to let go of the past and allow community life to move

on.


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Speaking in front of Rwanda’s officials and members of the conflicting parties,

Tutsi and Hutu, Archbishop Tutu expresses his uneasiness with the appeal to retributive

justice as a way of bringing peace to that country. For him, the country needs to go

beyond retributive justice to restorative justice and to move on to forgiveness because

without forgiveness there was no future (Tutu, 1999, p. 191). Retribution does not

change the facts of past wrongs. They need to be accepted in order to be forgiven. It is

only when past wrongs are accepted that we will be able to reconcile or come to terms

with them. In this context, forgiveness and reconciliation presuppose the acceptance of

the past wrongs: “Forgiving and being reconciled are not about pretending that things

are other than they are. ... True reconciliation exposes the awfulness, the abuse, the pain,

the degradation, the truth” (ibid., p. 200).

Arendt holds a similar idea. In The Human Condition, as described above, when

she claims that forgiveness should be directed to who the person is and not to what the

person has done, in my view this is an indication that, for Arendt, the person and his or

her relation to the world in common—composed of a plurality of individuals--should be

the focus of forgiveness and not the past wrong as such. This is understandable because

for Arendt, what matters are the individuals who forgive and who are forgiven, not what

they have done. Forgiveness does not change the facts of the past, but it prevents the

past from persisting again in people’s memory and thus interfering in the web of human

relationships. Thus in forgiveness, it is the one who forgives and the one who is forgiven

who are released from the burden of past wrongs and in so doing both become free to re-

act and re-establish a new relationship (Berkowitz, 2011, p. 1).


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This understanding of forgiveness leads us to comprehend Arendt’s discussion of

reconciliation in the Denktagebuch where she speaks of the worldly thankfulness for

what occurred in the world as the foundation of reconciliation. “Reconciliation with

what is fated is only possible on the foundation of thankfulness for the given” (Arendt,

2002, p. 4). What is givenness and how should it be understood? Peg Birmingham gives

an interesting interpretation of Arendt’s idea of the event of natality. For Birmingham,

there is a double miracle in the event of natality, namely the miracle of the given and the

miracle of beginning (Birmingham, 2006, p. 76). I have described the latter in my

discussion about the relation of action with natality. In birth, a new beginning is

introduced to the world, which is similar to an action in the sense that in acting, the

person brings about something anew.

While the miracle of the given is related to Arendt’s notion of what it means to

be a person. In contrast to the traditional understanding of person as a “substance

(ousia)—where, following Augustine, the self is given as a fixed or unchangeable

datum”—Arendt considers the person to be “essentially a being related to others (ad

alium), open to others, and defined as a person by this very relativity” (ibid., p. 77-78). It

is the relation to a finite and changing world that forms the person. The person “exists in

the mode of relation” (Arendt, 1996, p. 53). The relation with others and the changing

world is its givenness; this is the miracle that occurs in one’s own birth. The event of

natality brings about that givenness which spells out a new beginning. This implies that

we should be grateful not only for the new beginning but also for this givenness.


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In fact, for Arendt, our gratitude for being born into the world and among

others—givenness—this precedes our activity in the world. Arendt claims: “There is

such a thing as a basic gratitude for everything that is as it is; for what has been given

and not made” (Arendt, 2007, p. 246). It is in this context that Arendt’s suggestion for

reconciling oneself to the world on the basis of the gratitude to the given should be

understood. Arendt relates reconciliation to ‘passing by’: “In reconciliation or passing

by (Versnohnung oder dem Vorubergenen) what another has done is made into what is

fated to me, that which I can either accept or that I can, as with everything that is sent to

me, move out of its way” (Arendt, 2002, p. 6). In this sense, reconciliation is not meant

to undo the past or does not unburden the wrongdoer; rather, it advocates acceptance of

the past as given. It proceeds from a willingness of the victims to carry the burden

together with the wrongdoer (Shai Levi, 2010, p. 231).

The acceptance of the givenness is not without a purpose. In fact, accepting the

givenness is a way of showing our responsibility for the world that is given to us. This

implies that the givenness is prior to our responsibility for it, in the sense that it is due to

that givenness that we are called upon to take the responsibility. Or as Mark Antaki

claims: it is ‘the very world-hood’—the priority of grace, the givenness of world and

others—that drives us to responsibility (Mark Antaki, 2012, p. 509). In my discussion of

responsibility to the world in chapter two, I related Arendt’s notion of political

responsibility to acting and belonging to the world in general. In that context,

responsibility can be described as ‘love of the world’ by showing our concern to the

world and having an opinion about everything taking place in the world. This is


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sounding really Heideggerian, the givenness of Being of which our most basic response

is that of concern—belongingness or attunement.

The relation of responsibility to love of the world seems to be limited and thus

we are unable to include the ‘banality of evil’ in that kind of responsibility, which is the

main point of political reconciliation. Therefore, in the context of reconciliation with

crimes that are banal, we need to have a radical meaning of responsibility in the sense

that responsibility requires a critical and radical transformation of a given fellowship.

For this reason, responsibility is related not to love but to gratitude. It is an ontological

gratitude for everything that has been given to us. This responsibility is ontologically

rooted in natality, ‘the miracle that saves the world” (Arendt, 1958, p. 247).

Archbishop Tutu speaks about responsibility in the context of the African notion

of ubuntu, understood as the outpouring generosity or bonds of a caring humanity.

Ubuntu is grounded in the fact that “we are made for togetherness, for friendship, for

community, for family, that we are created to live in a delicate network of

interdependence” (Tutu, 1999, p. 202). This solidarity is not only shown to those who

are still living, but also to those who have died particularly because of violences. Here

Tutu is against Jankélévitch’s refusal of forgiveness on the basis of the fact that nobody

has the right to apologize, repent and ask for forgiveness on behalf of the dead. As Tutu

mentions in his book, this is Simon Wissenthal’s attitude, who refused a Nazi soldier’s

request because despite his (Wissenthal’s) being a Jew, he was not a victim.

Jankélévitch’s and Wissenthal’s acts of refusal are grounded in the idea that others have

no right to make an apology or repentance for the dead criminals (German society) and


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also to accept apology on behalf of dead victims (Jewish survivors). It seems that for

him repentance and forgiveness should come from the evildoers and victims themselves,

respectively.

Tutu disagrees with this idea because for him repentance is not a necessary

precondition for forgiveness. “If the victim could forgive only when the culprit

confessed, then the victim would be locked into the culprit’s whim, locked into

victimhood, whatever her own attitude or intention” (Tutu, 1999, p. 201). Like Derrida,

Tutu claims that the state can act on behalf of the dead perpetrators whether to make an

apology or to request forgiveness.47

True, TRC has no right to request forgiveness from

the victims, but it has the right to grant amnesty on the basis of evidences collected

before and during the public hearings. The granting of amnesty indirectly implies that

the state as a political community has the right to forgive individuals who committed

politically motivated crimes. The fascinating thing abouth the South African TRC’s

amnesty is that it was not meant, at least in short run, to forget human rights abuses, but

rather to disclose them through a public acknowledgement. In South Africa, as Schaap

puts it, “amnesty was not conditional on a perpetrator showing remorse but, rather, on

his making a full disclosure of the truth and demonstrating that his wrongs was

associated with a political objective” (Schaap, 2005. P. 106).

47

A good example of this is St. John Paul II’s gesture in 2000, declaring mea culpa for the transgressions

committed by the Roman Catholic Church and its followers. In this gesture, John Paul II not only renewed

expressions of regret for the sorrowful memories that mark the history of the divisions among Christians,

as Paul VI and the Second Vatican Council had done, but also extended a request for forgiveness to a

multitude of historical events in which the Church or individual groups of Christians, were implicated in

different respects. He writes: “As the Successor of Peter, I ask that in this year of mercy the Church,

strong in the holiness which she receives from her Lord, should kneel before God and implore forgiveness

for the past and present sins of her sons and daughters” (John Paul II, 2000).


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Although amnesty and forgiveness go through two different processes, both are

related (Young-Bruehl, 2007, p. 115).48

In this context, forgiveness is no longer personal

but communal through the granting of amnesty because the amnesty’s process itself is

public and it is intended mainly for the good or health of that community. It is in the

view of its common or political responsibility for the future of the South African state

that TRC undertook and granted amnesty to the human rights abusers. In other words,

Government has the right to ask to be forgiven for past collective offenses and offers

collective pardon as an expression of responsibility for the state.

This is exactly Arendt’s point when she discusses forgiveness and reconciliation.

If Arendt’s discussion of forgiveness is related to her notion of responsibility for the

world, her discussion of reconciliation is related to the idea of solidarity. However, it

does not mean that Arendt leaves out the idea of responsibility as the result of

forgiveness. Rather, she extends the burden of responsibility because “in one form or

another men must assume responsibility for all crimes committed by human beings and

that all nations share the onus of evil committed by others” (Arendt, 1994, p. 131). This

becomes the foundation of solidarity. In other words, Arendt extends the idea of

responsibility to solidarity.

48

Historically, amnesty and pardon are similar because both are granted by the states, but by definition

the two are distinct. If pardon is granted on a case-by-case basis to a single individual who has been

convicted of a crime, amnesty refers to a collectivity since it is a collective decision and granted to a class

of individuals. In other words, if pardon can be granted by the president alone in virtue of having an

executive privilege, amnesty is granted by the legislature or a truth commission. But the more significant

difference between amnesty and pardon is that the latter is granted after judgment and sentencing and does

not eradicate the sentence. It only enlightens or lifts sentence. Whereas the former can occur before,

during or after the legal procedures. The danger of amnesty is that it intervenes in the process by bringing

to an end the process of thinking and judging an offense. It means that amnesty wipes out the very

memory of offense. Amnesty is a genuine forgetting of an offense on a national scale (Suleiman, 2006, p.

218).


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It is already in the Origins of Totalitarianism that Arendt reminds us of the

danger of concentration’s camps that make impossible not only the assumption of

responsibility but also the building of the solidarity among the people. Concentration

camps, Arendt claims, creates “a monstrous equality without fraternity and without

humanity” (Arendt, 1951, p. 430). In the German version of The Origins of

Totalitarianism, as quoted by Grunnenberg, Arendt states that concentration camps

“have disrupted the continuity of occidental history because in reality nobody can

assume responsibility for them. At the same time they pose a threat to the solidarity

among people...” (Grunnenberg, 2002, p. 374). As much as solidarity has been

suspended by radical crime, so our human existence is not possible without this

solidarity. Here Arendt relates solidarity to inter-subjectivity, which is a necessary

condition of human existence in the world.

On the ground of her direct experience as an unfortunate person, a member of a

persecuted and suffering minority, Arendt knew what it means to desire for respect and

that it implies solidarity. Solidarity is not a passive expression of either sympathy or

mercy, but rather an active fight or struggle for justice and freedom. She writes: “We do

not want promises that our sufferings will be ‘avenged’, we want to fight, we do not

want mercy, but justice” (Arendt, 2007, 263). For Arendt, to be in solidarity means to

share in the fate and identity of an oppressed group either by taking an action or having

an opinion about the oppression. Already in the 1940s, in her article published in

Aufbau, Arendt has shown her solidarity with other Jews who were being persecuted. As

a Jewish refugee, she took part in campaigning for the establishment of a Jewish army in


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order to fight for the equal rights of the Jewish people and call for justice. In her first

Aufbau article, entitled “The Jewish Army—the Beginning of A Jewish Politics?”

Arendt writes: “The formation of a Jewish Army with volunteers from around the world

will make clear to those in honest despair that we are no different from anyone else, that

we too engage in politics” (Arendt, 2007, 138). Here Arendt emphasizes the need for

equality and solidarity in a political struggle which is the new beginning of a political

condition for the Jewish people. The solidarity with Jewish people is required because

for almost two hundreds years they have been blinded by the history of assimilation and

thus lack a national consciousness. Arendt believes that through her ability to think and

judge before, during or after the Holocaust, as put forth in her writings, that she is able

to assume responsibility and show solidarity with the Jewish people. In this context,

solidarity is a kind of awareness of one’s belongingness to a political community that is

deeper and prior to the bonds of family, love or friendship. In other words, the solidarity

is grounded in the fact of membership or of belonging to a political group.

In the context of reconciliation, Arendt extends the notion of solidarity to include

the awareness of the vulnerability or possible harms and liabilities that have to be

assumed collectively. This is the reason why she claims that it is only reconciliation that

“posits a new idea of solidarity’ (Arendt, 2002, p. 6). Here Arendt speaks about the

importance of coming to terms with the wrongs or crimes in the spirit of togetherness. In

reconciliation, Arendt argues, the victims resolve themselves to be co-responsible with

the wrongdoer and his wrong. This means that in reconciling themselves to the world,

along with the perpetrators, the victims take action to form a new world and preserve it.


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The victims and perpetrators commonly assume responsibility for the shared world. It is

obvious that Arendt’s idea surpasses the truth commissions’ understanding of

responsibility that is applied only to perpetrators. In reconciliation, it is not only the

perpetrators who are responsible for what have been done to the world but also the

victims who share the same world and their common fate.

There is a solidarity between victims and perpetrators that is formed in the view

of the common world. “In act of reconciliation, the reconciler asserts his solidarity with

the wrongdoer and the world in which such wrongs can happen, but does so without

equating himself with the wrongdoer” (Berkowitz, 2011, p. 8). This is the reason why

Arendt claims that reconciliation is the proper way of responding to the wrongdoings not

only for the sake of enacting and preserving the common world, but also for building a

new concept of solidarity. This solidarity, Arendt argues, is “not the foundation of

reconciliation (as the solidarity of being sinful is the foundation of forgiveness), but

rather the product of reconciliation” (Arendt, 2002, p. 6). Solidarity is founded on our

willingness to reconcile ourselves with the wrongdoers, carry the burden with them and

with the inflicted world, a world that has its own traumatic history.

From Arendt’s description of forgiveness, reconciliation and the role of

judgment in both, as described above, the striking point is that political reconciliation

can only be achieved when victims are willing to publicly forgive and perpetrators to

publicly acknowledge the wrongs they have committed. This means, there is a close

relationship between political forgiveness and reconciliation in the sense that the latter

necessarily presupposes the former. Forgiveness is required for the good of both the


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forgiver and the forgiven, as Arendt claims that in contrast to vengeance, forgiveness

liberates the forgiver and the one who is forgiven from the consequences of past deeds

(Arendt, 1958, 41-42). In other words, it is only when victims and perpetrators come to

the shared understanding that there is a burden of the past deeds that needs to be publicly

alleviated through forgiveness that political reconciliation is attained.

This shared understanding points to another striking point of Arendt’s that can

improve or shed light on the contemporary discourse on forgiveness and political

reconciliation. In contrast to the common practice as seen in the work of truth

commissions, for Arendt, the responsibility is not only placed upon the wrongdoers

whose wrongs have endangered the world in common, but also upon the victims who

share the same world. Both parties should assume responsibility for the world. However,

it is necessary to note that the assuming of responsibility is not for the sake of the past

world that has been inflicted, but rather of a new world of relationships that is re-enacted

in the present and the future. It is in the view of this new world that the responsibility

should be assumed by both the victims and the wrongdoers.


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CONCLUSION AND SUMMARY

In her writings, Arendt places creative human beings in the center of her political

inquiry. She emphasizes the significance of the active participation of full members of

the community in the activities of debate and deliberation about the nature, tasks, and

possibilities of politics. This emphasis plays a central role in the contemporary debate

concerning the reasonable disagreements in a pluralistic society, which is also central in

the discourse on political reconciliation. Therefore, in concluding this dissertation, I

would like to draw the relationship between Arendt’s politics and deliberative

democracy and between deliberative democracy and political reconciliation.

A. Arendt’s Political Theory and Reasonable Agreements

In a pluralistic society where people are divided by belief, social class, culture,

and religion, disagreements always arise. These disagreements arise due to the fact that

there are many distinct and incompatible philosophies of life which each individual or

group holds to be valid and reasonable. John Rawls refers to this condition as reasonable

pluralism because each view is the result of the free exercise of human reason. For

instance, in formulating the concept of political justice, each individual or group “starts

from within their own comprehensive views and draws on the religious, philosophical,

and moral grounds it provides” (Rawls, 1996, p. 144). For Rawls, each view is limited

and it is only through public reasoning that this view gains moral legitimacy and


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becomes more reasonable and comprehensive. It is only when everyone has internalized

public reason that their view becomes a reasonably comprehensive doctrine.

This reasonable pluralism, meanwhile, is referred to by Chantal Mouffe as

agonistic pluralism because in politics there always exists a struggle, conflict or contest

about issues concerning all.49

Politics is democratic only if it consists in domesticating

enmity by allowing the competing views to exist in human relations. Thus, the

significance of democratic politics is not the overcoming of diversity but rather the

recognition of differences (Mouffe, 1999., p. 755).

Since the reasonable or agonistic pluralism in society is irreconcilable, the

question is raised as to how are people supposed to conduct themselves in the public

realm if they constantly disagree with each other especially about the legitimacy of

certain public policies? Or, how is a public policy to be recognized as legitimate, right or

just at the level of politics in a pluralist society? It is widely accepted that the best way

to settle disagreements, conduct public life, and carry through social changes in a

pluralistic society is through the democratic process in which disagreement is expected

to be resolved in the spirit of majority rule. The majority consensus is reached after fair

opportunity is given to all to express their views freely and equally. The problem is that

democracy can come in many forms. There are two basic conceptions of the ideal model

of democracy (Salkever, 2002, p. 343). On the one hand, there is a liberal model which

49

Mouffe distinguishes between ‘the political’ and ‘politics. ‘The political’ refers to the inherent

antagonism in human society which can take different forms and arise from diverse social relations.

Meanwhile ‘politics’ points to the practices, discourses, or institutions that attempt to establish order and

organize human coexistence in a conflictual condition (Mouffe, 1999, p. 754). Based on this distinction,

Mouffe then claims that the democratic politics presupposes the acknowledgement of an antagonism that

does not need to be overcome.


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considers ideal democracy as a contract or bargain among individuals to protect their

efforts to live their own lives. On the other hand, there is a deliberative model which

considers democracy as a shared deliberation or discussion among equals about matters

concerning them all. Which of these two models of democracy could properly describe

Arendt’s political theory? Based on my reconstruction of Arendt’s ethics of worldliness

and its contribution to political reconciliation throughout this dissertation, I argue that

the deliberative democratic approach which emphasizes the importance of public

deliberation has already existed in Arendt’s political thought. In fact, her idea has

influenced the contemporary political philosophers in their attempt to promote political

reasoning and deliberation.

According to Arendt, acting in concert points to the conviction that when people

get together in a public space to act and speak, power arises. In other words, public

action and speech are the precondition for power. Consequently, power is the

characteristic of political community: “Power is never the property of an individual; it

belongs to a group and remains in existence only so long as the group keeps together”

(Arendt, 1972, p. 143). In On Revolution, Arendt discusses this power in the context of

making promise because she believes that making promise is powerful in the sense that

it enables people to reach an agreement which is necessary in founding and preserving a

political community (Arendt, 1965, p. 175).

For Arendt, power is the product of action because it emerges from the agreed

activity of a plurality of actors. Power also rests on persuasion and not on violence

because it depends on the ability to get the other’s approval through a free discussion


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and debate. In this context, power, in Arendt’s view, is neither strength nor force nor

violence. Power is not similar to strength because it is not an individual property but

arises out of a plurality of actors. It is not force because power is not a natural

phenomenon released by a physical or social movement but created by human beings

through collective active participation. Finally, power is not violence because it is not

based on forces but on agreement and rational persuasion (ibid., p. 143-155). Here,

Arendt argues that power and violence are antithetical and distinguishable. “When

power reigns, there is persuasion, not violence. And when violence reigns, it destroys

power” (Bernstein, 2013, p. 80-81).

In distinguishing power from strength, forces, and violence, Arendt offers a

distinctive concept of power that is not vertical or hierarchical—where power refers to

control or domination over others—but, rather, horizontal because it only arises when

individuals act together, persuade each other and treat each other as political beings

(ibid., 84). In other words, power exists only when people act and speak together in the

spirit of solidarity for the common purpose. It is a communicative power, actualized in

action and speech (Arendt, 1958, p. 200). Arendt offers the communicative structure of

action in which deeds require a reasoned linguistic expression to become a human

condition in the world. For Arendt, speech cannot be separated from the actor’s deed.

She writes: “Speechless action would no longer be action because there would no longer

be an actor, and the actor, the doer of deeds, is possible only if he is at the same the

speaker of words” (ibid., p. 178-179).


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Arendt insists that politics should be an ongoing discussion or deliberation

among equals. This insistance is drawn from Aristotle who claimed that deliberation

involves a special kind of thinking, called phronesis or practical wisdom, the ability to

exercise thinking at the practical level. For Aristotle, deliberation is an intellectual

activity in which we consider the instruments or means for the good life called happiness

(Aristotle, NE 1112a-1113a). Following Aristotle’s phonesis, Arendt claims that, as

Habermas puts it, deliberation in the public sphere is practical because it establishes

mutual understanding among equals (Habermas, 1996, p. 151). However, unlike

Aristotle, Arendt contends that the object of deliberation is not the means but the ends

which is politics itself.50

She even radically argues that deliberation or what she calls

political speech characterizes politics. From Arendt’s perspective, politics refers to, as

Villa puts it: “speech-making and decision-taking, the oratory and business, the thinking

and the persuading” (Villa, 1996, p. 32). This implies that in debating the possible

course of action in the political sphere, citizens are involved in deliberating about the

good. In other words, the good to be achieved is articulated when citizens deliberate

about the actions that need to be taken. It means that the end is the constitutive element

of political deliberation itself. The end does not stand apart from the process. Villa

writes: “Genuine political deliberation does not move at the level of ‘in order to’, but

50

The end or the good life itself is not subjected to deliberation; but only the means to attain it is. We have

certain ends and start deliberating about how to attain those ends. For instance, a doctor does not

deliberate whether he will cure or not because his being a doctor sets up curing as a permanent end for

him. The procedure of reasoning is to begin with the end and to work back to what is needed for the end to

be accomplished. Here deliberation means the process of choosing the best means after considering all

options or means that are available. In order to do so, we need to have what he calls phronesis or practical

wisdom (Aristotle, NE 1112a-1113a).


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rather at the level of ‘for the sake of’: it ultimately is concerned with the meaning of our

life in common (ibid., p. 32).

In emphasizing the essence of politics as action and speech, Arendt wants to

show that the activities of debate, deliberation and participation in decision-making are

necessary elements of politics. Thus, what is needed in politics is to maintain the

plurality of perspectives by letting all political actors to express their opinions because

Arendt believes that citizens have the ability to fight openly about things that really

matter without fanaticism or without seeking to exterminate one’s opponents (Arendt,

1972, p. 266). Lisa Disch is correct in concluding that the quality of Arendt’s political

speech is that it does not generate any result. In fact, for Arendt, the plurality of

perspectives or differences is not a problem and not simply an asset but a necessity for

democratic politics (Disch, 1992, p. 16). Or, as Honig puts it: “...politics never gets

things right, over and done with. This conclusion is not nihilistic but radically

democratic” (Honig, 1993, p. 210).

Since differences are necessary in politics, then the significance of political

speech lies in the fact that it is able to provide a space for political contestation. Here,

contestation is not ruthless because those who are involved in it have the passion for

articulating their ideas or arguments and for taking the risk of being criticized by others.

The contestation appears not because people create conflict but because conflict is

inherent in difference. Thus, for Arendt the public realm is never neutral or a place

where people avoid differences in order to live in universal peace. Conversely, what

Arendt envisions is a public realm in which different people argue, deliberate matters


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concerning all, with passion, vehemence and integrity (Roberts-Miller, 2002, p. 589).

Therefore, it is true that there is an agonistic element in Arendt’s concept of political

speech. In other words, there will be a perpetual struggle, conflict or contest in a

pluralistic society (Honig, 1993, p. 16).

Unfortunately, by emphasizing the reality of contestation, both Disch and Honig

deny the deliberative element in Arendt’s notion of speech. Disch argues that from

Arendt’s perspective, in order to be public, an event does not require deliberation, but

rather, needs to be seen and heard by “everybody who is or could be involved and to

engage their plurality of contending viewpoints” (Disch, 2002, p. 118). Honig, in

interpreting Arendt’s political action from the perspective of feminism called agonistic

feminism, argues that Arendt’s defense of the plurality and difference is only intended to

reveal the identity of individuals or groups, such as feminism. Consequently, it is not

only being with others but also being against others that is required for resisting

hegemonization and thus allowing the possibility of revealing a new identity. For Honig,

instead of deliberation, Arendt’s politics should be thought as a perpetual “practice of re-

founding, augmentation and amendments” (Honig, 1995, p. 160).

In contrast to Disch and Honig’s interpretation, I argue that Arendt’s idea of

political speech actually gives the insights to the proponents of deliberative approach in

dealing with reasonable pluralism. The recognition of the agonistic aspect in Arendt’s

concept of politics does not eliminate deliberation but, conversely, agonism can take

place within the deliberative process or what Samuel Chambers calls ‘the agonistic

discourse’. Drawing from the Greek notion of agon that originally points to a contest


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which emphasizes the importance of a struggle, an agonistic discourse is marked “not

merely by conflict but, just as importantly, by mutual admiration” (Chambers, 2013, 10).

The mutual admiration here arises during the discourse because of the commonality

among diverse perspectives or ideas. It is undeniable that most of Arendt’s works

contain agonism, but the significant of conflict actually, for Arendt, lies in the fact that

conflicts can reveal the commonality of the social world (Schaap, 2007, p. 58). The

acknowledgment of commonality presupposes the inter-subjectivity, the horizontal

relationship among people involved in a dialogue. In fact, as Villa argues, Arendt’s

broad concept of politics is grounded in the unique character of deliberative speech,

which requires not only plurality or the difference of perspectives, but also equality and

commonality (Villa, 1996, p. 33).

Roberts-Miller argues that Arendt’s agonism has two forms, namely, persuasive

and polemical that requires substantive debate in a long and recursive process. However,

both forms are different in the sense that persuasive agonism is intended to persuade

others; whereas polemical agonism is meant to make public one’s view in order to test it.

In the former, the success depends on persuasion and in the latter on the quality of

subsequent controversy (Roberts-Miller, 2002, p. 595). This is exactly what deliberative

democrats offer as an alternative to the liberal approach. For deliberative democrats, a

collective decision must be the outcome of a democratic process which involves all

those who will be affected by a decision and by means of arguments offered by and to

participants who are committed to the values of rationality and impartiality.


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It is Habermas and Benhabib who particularly attempt to promote the

deliberative democratic approach from the perspective of Arendt’s theory of action and

judgment, as an alternative to the liberal approach. Drawing from Arendt’s notion of

power, Habermas develops a theory of communicative action in which he offers the

dialogical rationality as an alternative in order to achieve consensus among diverse

views about a public policy. In contrast to force, power arises out of communication and

thus produces consensus. He writes: “The power of agreement-oriented communication

to produce consensus is opposed to this force, because seriously intended agreement is

an end in itself and cannot be instrumentalized for other purpose” (Habermas, 1977, p.

5). According to Habermas, Arendt’s concept of power is built up in communicative

action because power has to do with the formation of a common will in a

communication that is directed to reaching agreement and not to their respective

individual gain. Thus, for Habermas, coming from Arendt’s perspective, power refers to

“a collective effect of speech in which reaching agreement is an end in itself for all those

involved” (ibid. p. 6). The dialogue or intersubjective communication takes place in the

public spheres either in parliamentary bodies or civil societies and thus communicative

power actually springs from the interactions of both. Habermas writes:

Informal public opinion-formation generates ‘influence’; influence is

transformed into communicative power through the channels of political

elections; and communicative power is again transformed into administrative

power through legislation (Habermas, 1996b, p. 28).

Habermas claims that the consensual rationality is implicit in speech and it can

be exercised in political life. This implies that rationality is public only if it obeys the

rules of an ideal speech situation in which the parties are committed to reaching


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agreement through communication. It is public and discursive in a decision-making

process may require an ideal speech situation in which all who are affected by decision-

making be permitted to participate and that the input of all participants receive equal

consideration. Habermas argues that a rational basis for collective life would be

achieved only when social relations were organized according to the principle that the

validity of every norm of political consequence be made dependent on a consensus

arrived at in communication free from domination. In other words, the power of

communication springs from “structures of undamaged inter-subjectivity” (Habermas,

1996, p. 151). The hallmark of an ideal speech situation is that it aims at consensus

through rational and voluntary discourse and not through compromise, barter or

manipulation. The ground of consensus is rational persuasion in the sense that during the

process of deliberation the rational element is expected to enter into and permeate the

discourse because of the equality, honesty, and openness of the participants.

Meanwhile Seyla Benhabib emphasizes the importance of the deliberative

approach for Arendt’s appropriation of Kant’s reflective judgment. Focusing on

Arendt’s categorization of action in terms of plurality, natality and narrativity, Benhabib

considers Arendt’s judgment as a moral faculty that enables us to think from the others’

points of view (Benhabib, 1988, p. 31). Political action and deliberation depends on

reflective judgment. For Arendt, action and deliberation involve and are mediated by the

exercise of our mental capacity for reflective judgment, which is not restricted to

aesthetics but rather it is the most political faculty. It is in the context of this reflective

judgment that the collective deliberation should be done for legitimating rationally a


258

public policy. For Benhabib, a collective decision making process is legitimate and

rational only if “the institutions and their interlocking relationship are so arranged that

what is considered in the common interest of all result from processes of collective

deliberation conducted rationally and fairly among free and equal individuals”

(Benhabib, 1994, p. 30-31). In the process of deliberation, all who participate in it must

have an equal opportunity to initiate speech acts or issues to be discussed or debated; the

right to question the assigned issue; and the right to offer reflexive arguments about the

procedure of discourse and how these reflexive arguments are applied (ibid. p. 31).

Benhabib suggests a process in which the free public deliberation among equals

could take place. She gives three reasons why a collective decision making process is to

be rational. First, individuals who take part in deliberation cannot anticipate diverse

perspectives coming from others and cannot possess all information about a given issue.

Thus, in the process of deliberation, new information is made available to inform all

participants. In this context, deliberation is a procedure for being informed. Second, the

ethical and political issue being discussed is complex and one’s own opinion or belief

can be in conflict with the others’ opinions or beliefs. In this context, deliberative

process helps participants to become aware of this conflict and be ready to revise their

own preferences. Third, in a deliberative process, each participant articulates his or her

own opinion and in order to be convincing or compelling one’s opinion needs to be

reflexive in the sense of being thoroughly thought from the points of view of all

involved. In doing so, one can get a clear understanding of his or her own opinion and

also can adopt the others’ views. This is what Arendt calls, drawing from Kant, the


259

‘enlarged mentality’ (ibid. p. 31-33). Like Habermas, Benhabib also considers that the

main purpose of deliberation is to attain consensus or what she calls the formation of

conclusions. She argues that by making information available and allowing the

expression of the reflexive argument of each participant, deliberative process will lead to

the formation of conclusions or consensus (ibid. p. 44-45).

In contrast to Habermas and Benhabib, I argue that Arendt’s political

deliberation is not a consensus-based argument. In fact, deliberation makes no difference

for the outcome. “The purpose of the dialogues is never agreement as such; ... the

process proves dramatically more significant than the endpoints” (Chambers, 2013, p.

9). Deliberation is not meant in the utmost to reach an agreement, but instead create an

environment in which citizens honor a basic duty of civility to one another. This requires

citizens to reason beyond their narrow interests and considers what can be justified by

people who reasonably disagree with them. A deliberative process is legitimate only if

all interests, opinions, and perspectives present in the polity are included in the

deliberation. Quoting Kant, Arendt writes:

You know that I do not approach reasonable objections with the intention merely

of refuting them, but that in thinking them over I always weave them into my

judgments, and afford them the opportunity of overturning all my cherished

beliefs. I entertain the hope that by thus viewing my judgments impartially from

the standpoint of others some third view that will improve upon my previous

insight may be obtainable (Arendt, 1992, p. 42)

Although Arendt uses the term of fight in relation to the deliberative process, her

usage of this term points to the values that are necessary in our common world, such as

fame, glory, and the spirit of fighting. This kind of fight is undertaken not because of the

desire for revenge and hatred but, conversely, for the good of the common world


260

(Arendt, 1972, p. 167). Thus, the main purpose of public deliberation is to transform

one’s view or preference. Transformation means that citizens understand the nature of

their differences. Reaching understanding as such does not imply identification since

understanding the views of others could mean that there has been a successful

expression of their own experience and perspective so that another view is learned.

Furthermore, part of what they understand remains as a background of their own

experience and perspective and helps to transcend their own subjectivity.

The transformation of a view or argument can happen in three ways: firstly,

realize the partiality of his or her interest, view, or position after confrontation with

others. Secondly: knowledge in which people are engaged in confronting and criticizing

each other’s views in order to find common ground for certain problems has power over

the individual to transform his or her interest which appeals to the principle of justice.

Thirdly: the process of expressing, questioning and criticizing different opinions will

eventually bring additional knowledge to all participants. It is through listening to

different arguments that one can come to understand something about how others are

affected by the opinions they hold and therefore gain a comprehensive picture about

social processes in which one’s own partiality is embedded. This comprehensive social

objectivity increases wisdom in all participants that can lead them together to find a just

solution to common problems (Young, p. 128).

From Arendt’s idea of political speech, disagreement in politics must not be

resolved by mere interest of individuals or group bargaining, but by calling all citizens

to act as thinking people. That requires that any policy or action should be arranged in


261

such a way as to encourage citizens to think about it and the product of thinking can be

accepted by others who will be governed by that policy. The main idea of the

deliberative view requires all citizens, in a spirit of togetherness, to find politically

acceptable reasons under the condition of reasonable pluralism. This implies that the

nature of each position is put forward and becomes the subject of deliberation and

through the process of deliberation a new understanding of each position is expected to

be obtained. Therefore, the aim of the deliberative process must be primarily that of

transforming one’s understanding of one’s views and the views of others. In other

words, through examining an issue from diverse perspectives, each individual modifies

and enlarge his or her own view. It is only within the context of public argumentation or

debate that one’s view is formed, tested and enlarged.

B. Deliberative Democracy and Political Reconciliation

The aim of deliberation to attain a shared understanding, as described above, is

essential in comprehending the contribution of Arendt’s ethics to political reconciliation.

In other words, it is only when we see the importance of political speech in the context

of the transformation of views that we will be able to understand Arendt’s idea of

political reconciliation. For her, the reconciliation process is intended to build and

preserve the common world. It means coming to terms with the world and its horrors,

which is attained when the conflicting parties are given the opportunity to tell their

respective stories and forgive each other’s wrongs.

In the exposition of the importance of storytelling and forgiveness in political

reconciliation, it has been shown that both activities can lead us to reconciliation at the


262

political level only if they involve the reflective judgment. In order to be reflective, a

judgment should fulfill a twofold requirement. First, a judgment must proceed not from

the universal or absolute concept but from the given particulars. Arendt repeatedly

claims that the activity of thinking and judging should be based on the particularity of an

event in the world of appearance. It means that a reflective judgment affirms the

meaningfulness of an event in itself and thus an event can illuminate its own past

(Arendt, 1994, p. 319). Attentiveness to the particulars, Arendt claims, enables us to

discover the commonality of events in the world. In her own judgment of the attitude of

Eichmann during the trial in Jerusalem, she discovers the commonality of Eichmann’s

attitude with other Nazis who participated in the Nazi monstrous policies, that is, they

took part not because of evil’s motives, but simply because they unthinkingly applied

the absolute moral standards that had been changed by Hitler from ‘thou shalt not kill’ to

‘thou shall kill’ (Arendt, 2003, 54). What is common to all Nazis, in Arendt’s view, is

the inability to think and judge in the dark moments.

Second, a judgment is reflective only if it takes into account diverse perspectives.

In appropriating Kant’s ‘enlarged mentality’, Arendt claims that by taking into

consideration the diversity of particular standpoints, one is able to discover the more

general standpoints: “The greater the reach—the larger the realm in which the

enlightened individual is able to move from standpoint to standpoint—the more general

will be his thinking” (Arendt, 1992, p. 43). However, Arendt warns us that this

generality is not the generality of the concept; rather, this generality that is closely


263

connected with a particular condition whose standpoints one has to go through in order

to arrive at one’s own general standpoint.

It is clear that from Arendt’s perspective, a judgment is reflective if it is always

bound to a particular event in the world and its diversity of perspectives. In this way,

reflective judgment can bring about reconciliation at the political level. In other words,

reconciliation with reality or coming to terms with the world and with its past horrors is

possible only if victims and perpetrators exercise their faculty of judgment by

considering a crime from a plurality of diverse perspectives. Arendt believes that

through an enlarged mentality, all will come to see the reality of the crime and

understand or come to terms with it. In this sense, reconciliation with reality refers to the

ability to acknowledge and take into account the troubled past, but at the same not

allowing the past to determine our web of relationships in the present and future

(Berkowitz, 2011, p. 8). This acknowledgment is possible because all conflicting parties

reflectively judge past wrongs in a way that rebuilds coexistence and refreshes the sense

for a common worldly reality. It is in the view of the common world that victims and

perpetrators exercise their ability to think and judge. For Arendt, by judging the past

from the standpoint of worldly plurality, reflective judgment broadens our sense of

reality and enriches the web of human relationships. In fact, as Berkowitz argues,

judging representatively a past wrong inherently implies a new beginning, a bond of

solidarity and the reenactment of a new common world (ibid., p. 8).

According to Arendt, reflective judgment brings about our reconciliation with

the world and its horrors, which is possible, as I explain in part two, through the medium


264

of storytelling and political forgiveness. With regard to telling the story, in Eichmann in

Jerusalem, Arendt is concerned with the failure of judges in the court of Jerusalem to

exercise their capacity for reflective and representative judgment because of their focus

on the victims’ testimonies or stories, which are the survivors of the Jewish people. Of

course, Arendt admits the importance of the victim’s testimony in revealing the

particularity and unprecedentedness of the Nazis’ crimes, but she also warns us not to

focus only on the victims’ suffering because it can draw our attention away from the

particular nature of the crime. This is exactly what happens to the judges who are

overwhelmed with the story of suffering of the Jewish people and fail to delve into the

nature of the Nazis’ crimes and the conditions that have made possible such crimes.

What Arendt wants to show is that Eichmann should be condemned or punished for his

blind participation in Hitler’s evil policy, but this punishment should not be based on the

suffering of the Jewish people, revealed through the victims’ testimonies, but on the

common world and the plurality of perspectives that inhabit it, which necessarily

requires reflective judgment.

In the context of political reconciliation, Arendt is convinced that victims and

perpetrators have the ability to tell the story of the particularity and commonality of a

past wrongs. However, telling the story is primarily meant to reveal not the truth of that

event, but its meaning to the common world. In order to reveal the meaning, a story to

be told must be thoroughly thought by using one’s own imagination and in the context

of inter-subjectivity. In other words, the story should contain the judging element, in the

sense that what victims and perpetrators tell in public hearings or testimonies


265

are‘thought-events’, something they have thought about and judged. This implies that

when one thinks or judges something, including the grave of political violences, he or

she takes into account the plurality of perspectives, as an awareness of his or her

responsibility for the world, shared with others.

Regarding political forgiveness, Arendt claims that a crime is either forgivable or

unforgivable. In order to decide whether to forgive or not to forgive a wrongdoer, one

should exercise his or her faculty of thinking and judging. In other words, it is reflective

judgment that enables people, inflicted by the violence, to decide whether or not to

forgive the wrongdoer and then reconcile themselves to the existing wrongful world. In

The Human Condition, Arendt deals with offenses that can be forgiven. She argues that

forgiveness is directed to the person and not to the person’s deed. It is the person and its

relation to the common world, created and preserved by the plurality of individuals who

possess different perspectives, that becomes the focus of the act of forgiving. Arendt

acknowledges that what has been done cannot be turned around. There is nothing we can

do to revoke past deeds. What we can do is to prevent the past deeds from persisting in

the people’s memory and thus interferring with the web of human relationships. Here,

forgiveness is needed for releasing both the one who forgives and the one who is

forgiven from the burden of past wrongs. In other words, instead of letting past wrongs

to be ta burden to either victims or perpetrators, it is necessary to let go of the burden of

the past in order to allow community’s life to move on.

In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt deals with a ‘radical evil’ that cannot be

forgiven. After listening to testimonies either from Eichmann or from other witnesses,


266

and after considering the effect of Eichmann’s action to the public realm, Arendt came

to the conclusion that Eichmann deserves no forgiveness because his action has

destroyed the common world, plurality of people and his lack of thinking and judging

has made him show no repentance. For Arendt, Eichmann’s refusal of taking

responsibility for what had happened is a sign that he has no intention to live with

others and to build a new world in the future. Therefore, in Arendt’s judgment,

Eichmann should be made to disappear from the world. It is no longer possible to

rebuild a new web of relationships or world with a person like Eichmann in it. The main

point is that the decision either to forgive or not forgive the wrongdoers should be based

on our reflective judgment. Arendt reminds us that storytelling and forgiveness should

involve the activity of thinking and judging in the sense that it is only after thinking and

judging past events, a story should be told and forgiveness is done. In this way, Arendt

then claims that storytelling and forgiveness are primarily intended to reveal the

meaning of what have happened to the world, created and shared in common.

C. Summary

First, interwoven throughout this dissertation is Arendt’s way of philosophizing

from the standpoint of the human plurality, a condition of equality and difference. It is a

condition of equality-in-difference because human beings are members of the same

species and thus can communicate to one another; and yet, each reveals his or her

distinctiveness through action and speech. In other words, all human beings are

immersed into a condition of plurality. Arendt offers a way of looking at the world from

the vantage point of the periphery in order to revitalize the power of the world and show


267

its meaningfulnes. This way of thinking about the world or the realm of politics requires

a break with the ideological thinking marked by self-referentiality in order to see how

irrelevant many of its obsessions have become in the light of the realities of the world.

For Arendt, modernity has torn the human world by its logic of exclusion, where those

in the margins of society find themselves irredeemably excluded from meaningful

participations in nearly every sphere of society. Arendt’s thinking brings us back to the

reality of the world and encourages us to take action in order to redeem the world.

Second, Arendt’s works do not offer a fixed or final answer to solve problems in

her time. Arendt’s main purpose of writing is to urge people to think. For Arendt, telling

people what to think or to don is a kind of domination and thus despotic because it

destroys people’s faculty of thinking and judging as well as the plurality of perspectives

that is required in judging an action. When people are loaded with fixed or ready-made

answers, they become thoughtless and lose their ability to doubt what they have been

thought to believe in. In her thinking, Arendt urges people to think because she is

strongly convinced that it is only by exercising their faculty of thinking that people are

able to discover the novelty and unprecedentedness of an action taking place in the

world, and particularly to make sense of the past wrongs.

Third, Arendt’s ethics of worldliness improves the work of truth commissions in

their attempt to promote political reconciliation. With regard to storytelling, Arendt

suggests that the main purpose of storytelling is not to discover the truth as commonly

taken for granted by truth commissions, but rather to reveal the meaning of past deeds to

the common world that necessarily presupposes the capacity of thinking and judging. A


268

story is a thought-event. Therefore, in order to really promote political reconciliation, in

the testimonies or public hearings, truth commissions should discern whether or not the

stories told by victims and perpetrators are thought-events, something they have thought

about and judged. When victims and perpetrators think and judge an event, they

consider that event from the diverse perspectives and search for the meaning of that

event to the common world. In this context, thinking and judging prevent victims and

perpetrators from telling a lie. In other words, thinking and judging help victims to avoid

the feeling of anger and the desire for revenge and also perpetrators to avoid the feeling

of self-pity and the desire for gaining protection in telling the stories of what had

happened.

Another interesting point of Arendt’s notion of storytelling and political

forgiveness is that in telling the story and forgiving, both parties, victims and

perpetrators commonly assume responsibility not for each other but for the common

world. It is only when victims and perpetrators come to the shared understanding that

there is a burden of past wrongs that needs to be alleviated through forgiveness and that

there is a common responsibility to rebuild new relationship or new world in the future

that political reconciliation is made possible.


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CURRICULUM VITAE

Fr. YOSEF KELADU, SVD is an Indonesian priest and a member of the

Society of the Divine Word (SVD). After earning Bachelor of Arts (B.A) in philosophy

of religion at the St. Paul’ Major Seminary in Maumere, Flores, Indonesia in 1994, I was

ordained as a Catholic priest in September 8, 1995.

After ordination, I worked as an editor in a local newspaper in Ende, Flores,

owned by SVD for two years (1996-1998). In 1998, I was transferred to the United

Stated of America and asigned to the Carribean District and worked in the parish

ministry for five years. In 2003 I was given the oportunity to pursue higher study at the

Catholic University of America (CUA) and earned Master of Arts in philosophy in 2006

with thesis entitled: “Civil Participation in Aristotle’s Political and Ethical Thought.”

From 2006 to 2011, I was teaching philosophy at the St. Paul Major Seminary, Flores,

Indonesia. I have published several articles in local journals and in 2011 I published a

book in Indonesian entitled: “Partisipasi Politik: Sebuah Analisis atas Etika Politik

Aristoteles.”

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