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INTRODUCTION L[
Ramn del Castillo, ngel M. Faerna and Larry A. Hickman
PREFACE xYLL
Richard J. Bernstein
Part One:
BERNSTEIN, RORTY AND AMERICAN PRAGMATISM 1
Part Two:
EPISTEMOLOGY AND HERMENEUTICS 79
Part Three:
GOOD, EVIL AND JUDGMENT 139
Index 251
In this paper I want to highlight and discuss a striking parallel between two
philosophers who are both very close to Bernsteins thinking. Hegel and
Hannah Arendt very rarely meet in philosophical debates, since scholars
devoted to one of them are not very interested in the other, and we know that
Hannah Arendt always persisted in reading Hegel critically as the philosopher
of historical necessity. Bernstein, however, being familiar with both of them,
knows that such a critical stance was unjust, and that Arendts opposition to
Hegel is much more subtle than the opposition to historical necessity.1Both
shared a common political conception of freedom and the aim of
comprehension and Begreifen, and also an approach to understanding
through remembrance even if both had a different conception of remembrance
and of polity. I will focus on how Arendt and Hegel, 150 years apart, analyze
Modernitys break with tradition and how Terror and Totalitarianism resulted
from it. Both analyses are strikingly similar but they provoke different,
somehow inverted reactions in Hegel and Arendt. I will suggest that some
teachings concerning the confines of democracy can be drawn from here.
1.
Let us start with a parable in Kafka to which Hannah Arendt returns more
than once:
He has two antagonists: the first presses him from behind, from the
origin. The second blocks the road ahead. He gives battle to both. To be
sure, the first supports him in his fight with the second, for he wants to
push him forward, and in the same way the second supports him in his
fight with the first, since he drives him back. [] His dream, though, is
that some time in an unguarded moment and this would require a
night darker than any night has ever been yet he will jump out of the
fighting line and be promoted, on account of his experience in fighting,
to the position of umpire (Richter) over his antagonists in their fight
with each other.
2.
Let us take just one section in the Phenomenology of Spirit: VI.B.3. Absolute
Freedom and Terror. Richard Bernstein once remarked how important this
chapter is for understanding Hegels position towards totality and difference6.
When Hegel tries to reconstruct conceptually the path from Enlightenment to
Revolution to his time a path he labels as the birth of Modernity, he first
finds that the truth of Enlightenment is the principle of utility. That is, the
pursuit of utmost happiness for most people, which should bring heaven to
earth. When all the battles of Enlightenment against faith and against
tradition are fought, such maximization of happiness proves in fact
groundless, insofar as it has broken every metaphysical essence and has
broken with any old inherited tradition. Freed from the weight of the past
and of history, the new modern man (or human) can look at things in a
detached, unbiased manner and put the world into a rational order.7 Such a
real, utilitarian Humanism appears to be the culmination of Enlightenment. In
fact, utility has no intrinsic value; the principle of utility as such lacks any
criteria on how to determine desires, and the self who has chosen the principle
of utility is thus a detached self, completely free in the sense that it is not
limited by natural hierarchy of ends to choose this or that ordering of
desires. That is, he lives in absolute freedom freedom unconstrained by
nature or by any inherited social roles.
On the other hand, all these absolutely free selves are socialized
individuals. As a result of the enlightening process, they had been marked by
Rousseau as well, and they know that any true self-determination will come
out only from a form of socialization which is itself the result of a self-
legislation. Their will is a socialized one, and can only be conceived as
continuous with the groundless free will of each individual if it is a general
will. Or, as Hegel puts it: In its eyes, the world is quite simply its will, and
this will is the universal will [which is not posited in a silent or in a
representative consent]; rather, it is posited as lying in a real universal will,
the will of all individuals as such.8
General will, Hegel continues, this undivided substance of absolute
freedom elevates itself to the throne of the world without any power capable
of resisting it. This undivided substance, conceived as the sovereign
person, destroys every state and rule from the previous world, and does not
tolerate any fixed and enduring institutionalization, any representation, any
factions or any parties. It is a totality that excludes or negates every
individual, every particular, since there are no more individuals as
independent citizens; in their stead there are only parts of an indivisible
whole. The so-called general will must gather itself up into the oneness of
individuality, and thus it puts an individual consciousness in the leading
position. Hegel has Robespierre in mind, but the point is that the universal,
general Will can only act as an individual, as a single self where no plurality
not to speak of dissent is allowed. The indivisible whole of the general
Will produces neither a positive work nor a positive deed, and there remains
for it merely the negative act. It is merely the fury of disappearing.9
The result is death, a death which has no inner amplitude and no inner
fulfillment, since what is negated is the unfulfilled empty point of the
absolutely free self. It is the coldest and emptiest death, having no more
3.
4.
Now we may come back to Kafkas He. Although pressed from two
directions, He is not or not only a lonely, trivial existence. One would
not say yet that He is the man/woman in solitude, alone with his/her thinking
and judgment, which Arendt opposes positively to the lonely one.
Nevertheless, we can now try to identify He between these figures.
Before she came to her description of totalitarianism, Arendt had to
tread a long way in order to understand how such a catastrophe could be
possible. It was as much a historical journey as it was conceptual. For her, it
clarified that totalitarianism was only possible after the decline of the nation-
state and the end of the rights of man. This happened after WWI, when
millions of stateless persons appeared in Europe who did not belong to any
polity and, therefore, could not have guaranteed their supposedly natural
human rights. These people deprived even of the right to have rights had to be
created for totalitarianism to be able to challenge the right to live and to carry
out its extermination. The catastrophe of this complete rightlessness was the
requisite for Terror; but it was not an accident in modern time. It was due to a
conceptual inadequacy in the very conception of the rights of man. The loss of
the right to have rights, which meant to be expelled from Humanity by not
belonging to a polity, is a loss that cannot be expressed in the categories of the
eighteenth century.19
For Arendt, there is a paradox in the declaration of inalienable Human
Rights, which reckoned with an abstract human being who seemed to exist
nowhere. So, man hardly appeared as a completely emancipated,
completely isolated being who carried his dignity with himself without
reference to some larger encompassing order, when he disappeared again into
a member of the people.20 In fact, the complete emancipation and the
complete isolation both of them belonging to what Hegel called precisely
absolute freedom could only produce, first, anonymous members of a
whole a people with a general will, and then, mere existences and
trivialized deaths: naked rightless lives.
This parapolitical right to have rights, so to speak, revealed itself
through its absence for those human beings who have been forced out of all
political communities. They were an unqualified mere existence21,
superfluous remains of the historical process. Arendts experience was not yet
that of the destitute immigrants who are coming nowadays to the West, but
that of their predecessors, those stateless persons in Central and East Europe
during the twenties. They raised a question to which democracy and the idea
of the rights of man had no answer. In the case of people who were no longer
a citizen of any sovereign state, the supposedly inalienable rights of man
proved to be simply unenforceable.
constitute Arendts political philosophy. And then, the He, who wants to
jump out of the fighting line and be promoted, on account of his experience
in fighting, to the position of umpire over his antagonists in their fight with
each other. He, the one who wants to judge, who through thinking
liberates himself/herself from the necessity of the moment, from the pressing
from the origin and from the time ahead, both of them threatening to make of
him, of everybody, a mere existence, a nobody: He, the one who has no
name, might be a late name for the conscious pariah.
5.
We can learn a few things when we recognize the true political subject, the
political actor, the would-be citizen, not as an abstract individual, not as the
born member of a whole, but as the He, the conscious pariah who is ready
to assume his original deprivation of the right to have rights, his original
loneliness in the middle of a closing mass, his original not belonging to that
community and, who, through thinking, has attained a view from outside.
A number of questions here remain unanswered. Richard Bernstein has
pointed out that Arendt never explains what the relation could be between
judging and thinking in politics, or whether judgment as a faculty belongs to
the actor or to the spectator.26 And we never know how far the thinking of the
citizen is allowed to go. The thinking ego has to retire from the world of
appearances, as [I]t is a slippery fellow, not only invisible to others, but also,
for the self, impalpable, impossible to grasp.27 Somehow, the thinking He is
not political. But then, as Hegel notes, and Arendt herself quotes, the thinking
ego, as an abstract ego, is liberated from the particularity of all other
properties, dispositions, etc., and is active only with respect to the
general/universal, which is the same for all the individuals.28 That is, in
thinking, it is not an ego, but a He; and that liberation from the particular is
the condition for political judging.
But, then: what about Hegel? We have seen that his diagnosis of terror is
parallel to Arendts. By her diagnosis, she was led to the conscious pariah.
Hegel follows in a different direction. After Terror, the absolute freedom
passes over into another land of self-conscious spirit, whose new shape is
the so-called moral spirit. It is most striking that the political climax of
Hegels first book gives way to the private realm of morality, where a row of
nearly comical shapes succeed each other. It is not of secondary importance
that all these shapes (moral worldview, moral consciousness, the beautiful
soul, conscious, and so on) are meant to reflect real characters from German
Romanticism, and that many of its characteristic motives (evil, reconciliation,
forgiveness, the possibility and the morality of action) were to be picked up
by Arendt in her political thought.
NOTES