{"id":954,"date":"2016-11-08T15:32:32","date_gmt":"2016-11-08T20:32:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/?p=954"},"modified":"2016-11-08T20:41:29","modified_gmt":"2016-11-09T01:41:29","slug":"seyla-benhabib-preliminary-notes-on-an-exploration-of-arendt-and-nietzsche","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/seyla-benhabib-preliminary-notes-on-an-exploration-of-arendt-and-nietzsche\/","title":{"rendered":"Seyla Benhabib: Preliminary Notes on an Exploration of Arendt and Nietzsche"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Seyla Benhabib<\/strong><\/p>\n

Hannah Arendt\u2019s familiarity and engagement with Nietzsche\u2019s work are deep and pervasive.\u00a0 Nietzsche certainly belongs among the canon of philosophers that she most wrote about \u2013 the others being Aristotle, Augustine, Kant, Machiavelli and Marx and to a lesser extent Plato, Hegel and Descartes.<\/p>\n

Yet Arendt\u2019s engagement with Nietzsche cannot be characterized as a whole-hearted embrace of his thought nor can it be adequately analyzed in terms of Nietzsche\u2019s \u201cinfluence\u201d on Arendt. [i]<\/a> Unlike the interpretation or recovery of Nietzsche in French thought by Bataille, Deleuze and Blanchot, Arendt\u2019s reading is neither epochal nor melodramatic. It marks no caesura in her work of one kind or another.\u00a0 If I may be permitted a musical analogy, I will say that Nietzsche was a major chord in Arendt\u2019s orchestra of philosophers but neither the Konzertmeister<\/em> nor the first violinist!!<\/p>\n

Let me begin by recalling a number of broad themes against the background of which I will read Arendt\u2019s most intense engagement with Nietzsche in The Life of the Mind, vol. 2, Willing.<\/em>[ii]<\/a><\/p>\n

    \n
  1. The Greeks<\/em> \u2013 common appreciation of Greek celebration of great action (to kalon), immortality, agonism, focus on appearance and self-revelation; to be is to appear- Heidegger, \u201cBeing as Erschlossenheit<\/em>\u201d (as unconcealment). Rejection of two-world metaphysics in Plato and Kant.<\/li>\n
  2. The Polis<\/em> – Yet Arendt is an appreciator of the political order of the polis; while Nietzsche hearkens back to an earlier, archaic period when the Dionysian spirit has not been crushed by the rationalism of the life of politics. Nietzsche\u2019s \u201cpublic sphere\u201d is not political but Dionysian \u2013 or the relation between the Dionysian and the Apollonian synthesis is contentious and unclear (at least to me). Arendt does not share the celebration of the Dionysian and remains a decided admirer of Socrates contra Nietzsche\u2019s critique. Socrates is the paradigmatic moral thinker for\u00a0 Arendt (see, \u201cThinking and Moral Considerations,\u201d[iii]<\/a>). The \u201cdialogue of the soul with itself,\u201d or \u201cthe two-in-one,\u201d which the young Nietzsche considers to be the origin of guilt, self-repression and the ruse of the weak over the strong (Genealogy of Morals<\/em>), is celebrated by Arendt as that activity of the soul without which a consideration of right and wrong would be impossible.\u00a0 (Thinking is not moral judging and the relationship of thought to moral doing remains to be explored in Arendt).<\/li>\n
  3. Modernity<\/em>: Nietzsche\u2019s claim that \u201cModernity is the Age of Suspicion\u201d is shared by Arendt. She characterizes modernity as a process of \u201cworld alienation,\u201d inaugurated by Cartesian doubt and also by the privatization of public life.\u00a0 The second stage of modernity (the age of full automated technology) leads to \u201cearth alienation,\u201d when the process of human technology triumphs over and penetrates nature through the availability of the atomic bomb and the possibility of destroying life on earth. Nonetheless, the rise of modern, mass capitalist society and the dual processes of world- and earth-alienation do not lead Arendt to a speculative history of Being that sees the overall project of western reason as one of \u201cGestell,\u201d as in Heidegger. Arendt is a reluctant modernist<\/em> who still believes in retrieving \u201cpearls\u201d from the tradition such as to guide the human mind and action for the future.\u00a0 Walter Benjamin\u2019s influence on Arendt\u2019s understanding of history and political thought as an activity of \u201cpearl-diving\u201d cannot be underestimated (See Benjamin\u2019s Thesis on the Philosophy of History<\/em>). If there is a \u201ctransvaluation of values\u201d for Arendt, it involves a rejection of nihilism through an affirmation of our capacities for \u201cnatality\u201d and \u201cbuilding new institutions.\u201d This calls attention to the remarkable ending of her discussion of Nietzsche in The Life of the Mind,<\/em> with the Hebrew and Roman founding of news institutions \u2013 a novus ordo seclorum <\/em>(pp. 195-207)<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Let us now turn to The Life of the Mind<\/em>, called \u201cConclusions,\u201d (pp. 149-219). This section is also one of the most extensive commentary and re-engagement with Heidegger on Arendt\u2019s part. Her rejection of Heidegger\u2019s own interpretation of the \u201cKehre, (p. 181 ff ) is remarkable and repudiates the idea that Arendt simply \u201cforgave\u201d Heideger his mistake after her famous essay, \u201cMartin Heidegger is achtzig Jahre alt\u201d was first published in 1971 in the NYR.<\/p>\n

    In this volume, Arendt rejects the psychology of \u201cfaculties\u201d which would see the will as one among the many faculties such as reason, desires etc. Her orientation is phenomenological: the question is not, \u201cwhat\u201d or \u201cwhere\u201d is the will but which human experiences lead us to believe in the \u201cwill\u201d? <\/em>\u2013 The Greeks had no concept for it (except possibly, thymos); the will \u00a0emerges with the experience of Christianity \u2013 St. Augustine \u2013 \u201cthe spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.\u201d<\/p>\n

    Two dimensions of the will: choice- liberum arbitrium<\/em> (choice between means to ends; and alternatives); initiating the new, starting a \u201cnew series\u201d in time and this appears either illusory (one thinks one is free to do or not to do) or impossible (whatever happens, happens for a cause).\u00a0 Nietzsche, for Arendt, is the philosopher who is most acutely aware of the experiences that correspond or engender the human belief in the \u201cwill.\u201d\u00a0 Pp.20-21 from the Introduction are important here.<\/p>\n

    The illusion that we are free derives \u201cfrom a sensation of pleasure,\u201d writes Nietzsche, because we believe that it is the I, the Ego that is \u201cwilling and performing, willing and acting\u201d (quoted on p. 161). This is a trick of the \u201cI\u201d that enables it to \u201cescape conflict by identifying itself with the commanding part\u2026\u201d (161) and to shift from I-will to the I-can.\u00a0 Arendt interprets this \u201cshift\u201d from the \u201cI-will and cannot<\/em>\u201d of Paulinian ethics to the \u201cI-will\u201d and \u201cI-can,\u201d \u201cas an unqualified Yes to Life, that is, to an elevation of Life as experienced outside all mental activities to the rank of supreme value by which everything else is to be evaluated.\u201d (163)<\/p>\n

    That life is the supreme value cannot be demonstrated; it is a mere hypothesis.\u00a0 Arendt then turns to the second story in Nietzsche\u2019s disquisition on the will, which she calls, following Nietzsche, a \u201cthought-experiment.\u201d (166)\u00a0 On the whole, Arendt\u2019s reading of Nietzsche is remarkable for its judicious and balanced tone and for her great sensitivity to the use of aphorisms, parables, metaphors and thought-experiments in Nietzsche. This avoids a certain na\u00efve literalism in interpreting Nietzsche\u2019s politics as well.<\/p>\n

    The most daunting thought-experiment of all, \u201cdas gr\u0151sste Schwergewicht,\u201d is that of \u201ceternal return.\u201d (166)\u00a0 Let us read from Nietzsche.<\/p>\n

    Arendt discusses this passage at great length because the fact that \u201cthe will cannot will backwards,\u201d that it cannot stop the wheel of time gives rise to a feeling of impotence and\u00a0 from this impotence, \u201cNietzsche derives all human evil \u2013 resentment, the thirst for vengeance (we punish because we cannot undo what has been done), the thirst for power to dominate others.\u201d (168)\u00a0 If the will is shown to be an illusion, if one repudiates willing, one would be freed from an unbearable responsibility, \u201cif nothing that was done could be undone.\u201d<\/p>\n

    The time-consciousness of willing, which Arendt places at the center of her reading of Nietzsche here \u2013 (\u201cthe Will\u2019s clash with the past\u201d, 168) \u2013 is one that pre-occupies her throughout this volume. She also reads Heidegger\u2019s concept of \u201cSorge\u201d as a surrogate for \u201cwilling\u201d and in terms of its future-orientation (176). Both Care and Willing are about what one intends to bring about but which one cannot control. In these processes of caring and acting one is delivered to forces which one cannot predict or wholly govern. For Arendt, this uncontrollability of the future is inherent in action\u2019s creativity as well as its vulnerability. No one controls the narrative of their actions, the stories that will be told of one when one acts. The actor is both the doer and the victim.\u00a0 In The Human Condition<\/em> Arendt will develop her own theory of the temporality of action; its becoming part of a \u201cweb of narratives,\u201d which are always plural and perspectival and conflictual. The same impotence that Nietzsche and Heidegger see as characterizing Sorge and the Will, Arendt reads as the risk and unpredictability at the heart of the human condition insofar as acting and speaking agents.\u00a0 Inserted we are thrown into the \u201cweb or narratives\u201d of the human life-world, but we seek to reduce their fragility through two activities: promising and forgiving.<\/em><\/p>\n

    Through the \u201cmental exercise\u201d of the \u201ceternal return\u201d Nietzsche seeks \u00a0to \u201crecreate all \u2018it was\u2019 into a \u2018thus I willed it\u2019,\u201d and concludes \u201cthat alone should I call redemption.\u201d (169)\u00a0 Together with the celebration of the fullness of life (die F\u00fclle des Lebens<\/em>) in all its becoming, and a celebration of Being as sheer Becoming, this would lead, in Arendt\u2019s view, to \u201can art of living one\u2019s life,\u201d in the tradition of the great Stoic, Epictetus.\u00a0 She concludes that the \u201cpsychologically powerful trick consists in willing that to happen which happens anyhow.\u201d (170).<\/p>\n

    Arendt\u2019s coup de grace,<\/em> however, consists in her conclusion that Nietzsche\u2019s last aphoristic remarks, thought-experiments etc collected in The Will to Power, <\/em>clearly spell out \u201ca\u00a0 repudiation of the Will and the willing ego.\u201d (172) The internal experience of willing and its conflicts led one to think that there are such things as \u201ccause and effect, intention and goal.\u201d\u00a0 For Arendt, these conclusions derive from the fallacy of thinking about \u201caction\u201d from the standpoint of the thinker rather than of the \u201cmen of action;\u201d of thinking about freedom as a philosophical problem rather than as the experience of \u201cpolitical liberty.\u201d<\/p>\n

    I will conclude these remarks by returning to Arendt\u2019s own analysis of \u201cpromising\u201d and \u201cforgiving\u201d as two human activities that counter the unpredictability of the realm of human affairs- not through a repudiation of the will- but through the capacity to bind oneself into the future via promising and to have the past lose its grip on one not through resentment but through forgiveness.<\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n

    Notes<\/h2>\n

    [i]<\/a> I have to admit that my judgment is not shared by all Arendt scholars: there were intense disagreements among myself, George Kateb, Dana Villa, and Bonnie Honig in the 1990\u2019s which concerned primarily situating Arendt\u2019s thought in the spectrum between Kant and Nietzsche.\u00a0 I emphasized and continue to do so, the \u201ccommunicative\u201d versus the \u201cperformative\u201d model of action in Arendt\u2019s thought, and the democratic\/deliberative vs. the \u201cagonistic\u201d conceptions of the political.\u00a0 There is little question, however, that both dimension are present in her thought and it is a matter of hermeneutic strategy to choose which perspective permits us to render coherent Arendt\u2019s work as a whole, and in particular, her much-neglected Jewish writings, which are hard to reconcile with the agonistic paradigm.<\/p>\n

    See George Kateb,\u00a0 Hannah Arendt: Politics, Conscience, Evil<\/em> (New Jersey: Rowman and Allanheld, 1984); Dana Villa, \u201cBeyond Good and Evil: Arendt, Nietzsche and the Aestheticizaton of Political Action,\u201d Political Theory, 20, no. 2 (1992): 274-309; Dana Villa, Arendt and Heidegger. The Fate of the Political (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); Bonnie Honig, \u201cArendt, Identity and Difference,\u201d Political Theory, 16, no. 1 (1988): 77-99; Seyla Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt <\/em>(Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1996; reissued with a new Introduction and Afterward [New Jersey: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003)<\/p>\n

    [ii]<\/a> Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind. Vol. 2, Willing<\/em> (New York and London: Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich, 1978).<\/p>\n

    [iii]<\/a> H. Arendt, \u201cThinking and Moral Considerations: A Lecture,\u201d Social Research (1971); reprinted in the 50th<\/sup> Anniversary issue of Social Research<\/em> (Spring\/Summer 1984)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    By Seyla Benhabib Hannah Arendt\u2019s familiarity and engagement with Nietzsche\u2019s work are deep and pervasive.\u00a0 Nietzsche certainly belongs among the canon of philosophers that she most wrote about \u2013 the others being Aristotle, Augustine, Kant, Machiavelli and Marx and to… Continue Reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1641,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[52428],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-954","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts-5-13"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/954","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1641"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=954"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/954\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=954"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=954"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=954"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}