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Confines of Democracy

Essays on the Philosophy of Richard J. Bernstein

Edited by

Ramn del Castillo, ngel M. Faerna, and Larry A. Hickman

LEIDEN | BOSTON

For use by the Author only | 2015 Koninklijke Brill NV


CONTENTS

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

ONE A Tale of Two Dicks 3


Robert Westbrook

TWO A Conversation between Friends:


The Ironist and the Pragmatic Fallibilist 25
Santiago Rey

A Reply to Robert Westbrook and Santiago Rey 43


Richard J. Bernstein

THREE Two Tales about Pragmatism and European Philosophy


(With an Introductory Family Tale) 47
Carlos Thiebaut

A Reply to Carlos Thiebaut 60


Richard J. Bernstein

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FOUR Bernstein on the Narrative and Identity of
Pragmatism in America 63
Gregory Fernando Pappas

A Reply to Gregory Fernando Pappas 75


Richard J. Bernstein

Part Two:
EPISTEMOLOGY AND HERMENEUTICS 79

FIVE Beyond Objectivism and Relativism (Again) 81


John Ryder

A Reply to John Ryder 93


Richard J. Bernstein

SIX Relativism, Good and Bad.


Bernstein on the Pragmatic Conception of Objectivity 95
ngel M. Faerna

A Reply to ngel M. Faerna 108


Richard J. Bernstein

SEVEN An Engaged Fallibilistic Pluralism 111


Juan Carlos Mougn

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EIGHT Hermeneutics, Practical Philosophy and the Ontology
of Community: Wittgenstein, Gadamer and Bernstein 125
Nria Sara Miras Boronat

A Reply to Juan Carlos Mougn and


Nria Saras Miras Boronat 135
Richard J. Bernstein

Part Three:
GOOD, EVIL AND JUDGMENT 139

NINE Pragmatism, Westerns and Evil.


Remarks on Richard J. Bernstein and Forgiveness 141
Federico Penelas

A Reply to Federico Penelas 154


Richard J. Bernstein

TEN Critical Common Sense, Exemplary Doubting,


and Reflective Judgment 157
Heidi Salaverra

A Reply to Heidi Salaverra 169


Richard J. Bernstein

ELEVEN Enlightenment, Utility and Terror 171


Antonio Gmez Ramos

A Reply to Antonio Gmez Ramos 183


Richard J. Bernstein

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Part Four
DEMOCRATIC VISTAS 185

TWELVE Bernstein on Deweyan Democracy 187


James Campbell

A Reply to James Campbell 197


Richard J. Bernstein

THIRTEEN Reconstruction of Democratic Experience 199


Alicia Garca Ruiz

A Reply to Alicia Garca Ruiz 211


Richard J. Bernstein

FOURTEEN Bernstein between Habermas and Rorty:


A Deweyan Reconstruction 213
Larry A. Hickman

A Reply to Larry A. Hickman 223


Richard J. Bernstein

FIFTEEN Listening Without Banisters.


Bernstein and Habermas on Democratic Ethos 227
Ramn Del Castillo

A Reply to Ramn del Castillo 243


Richard J. Bernstein

ABOUT THE AUTHORS 245

Index 251

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Eleven

ENLIGHTENMENT, UTILITY AND TERROR

Antonio Gmez Ramos


Introduction

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.

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172 ANTONIO GMEZ RAMOS

In Thinking, Hannah Arendt interprets this parable as describing the time


sensation of the thinking ego. The scene is a battleground where the forces of
past and future clash with each other in the present. The one who Kafka calls
He can only jump out of the fighting line and come to the position of
umpire through the act of thinking, which liberates him from the time
continuum and from the necessity of the moment. In thinking, man a He,
as Kafka calls him gets away from everyday life, he is not in the world.
Insofar as he thinks, and that is, insofar as he is not, according to Paul
Valery, man lives in the gap between past and future, in this present which is
timeless.2 That gap is not a historical datum; it is coeval with the existence of
man on earth, but it is not on the earth where people are living their everyday
life. Rather, it is the path paved by thinking, a non-time space in the very
heart of time that unlike the world and culture we are born into cannot be
inherited or handed out by tradition. It is something every new generation,
and every new human being, must discover anew.
He, a thinking ego, opens the gap between past and future, he opens
the possibility of time in spite of his timelessness. Arendt makes it very
clear that she is not describing some metaphysical essence of man as a
thinking, rational being. She wants to stress that such reflection on the
thinking he is only motivated by or has as its basic assumption the fact
that the thread of tradition is broken and we shall not be able to renew it.
Historically speaking, what actually has broken down is the Roman trinity
that for thousands of years united religion, authority and tradition.3 The
continuity of the past as it seemed handed out from one generation to the
next has been lost, and we are left with a fragmented past. It is with this
fragmented past that we have to deal, and if we are able to use it, to rescue
their corals and pearls from the bottom of the sea, we owe it to the timeless
track that thinking beats into the world of space and time.4
Who is this He, born out of a historical breakdown of tradition and a
dream of jumping out of the fighting line? My point will be that only after we
have explored the breakdown of tradition might we be able to say who this
He is, to identify Him.5 Here it might be worth paying attention to
Hegels narrative on the rupture with tradition, if only because we can find
unexpected affinities with Arendts interpretation of political Modernity.

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

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Enlightenment, Utility and Terror 173

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

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174 ANTONIO GMEZ RAMOS

meaning than does chopping off a head of cabbage or swallowing a mouthful


of water.
Hegel then proceeds to analyze the logic of revolutionary Terror. The
government is merely the winning faction, to whom every difference is
simply something that stands in the way of the government, and as such,
becomes suspect, and becoming suspect takes the place of being guilty, or it
has the same significance and effect as being guilty, and the only
conceivable external reaction to it, to the inwardness of its intention, consist
in the arid destruction of that existing, supposedly opposing self, in which
there is nothing left to take away but merely its existence (Sein) self.10
Hegel is describing the Reign of Terror of 1793. He also reaches the
next stage, when consciousness learns that absolute freedom means nothing
but an abstract self-consciousness, which destroys all difference, and
eventually returns to more stable institutional forms that correspond to the
consolidation of the French Revolution under Napoleon. Hegel is quite clear
on Napoleon who, in spite of restoring aristocracy and crowning himself as
emperor, does not restore the Ancien Rgime; rather he reaffirms the
destructive work of the Revolution and consolidates the institution of the new
bourgeois world inhabited by absolutely free individuals, as they emerged
from Enlightenment and the principle of utility.
Hegels analysis of Napoleon and his institution is very sparse. But what
interests us more, in his narrative, is that the stage of Terror and absolute
freedom is not succeeded by another political constitution, as though the work
of French Revolution, that is, absolute freedom of the selves in a groundless
world, was actually the last political stage of the spirit, of alienation and
culture. Instead, Hegel moves forwards to a new shape of consciousness,
which is moral spirit and Gewissen. Even more strikingly, both moral spirit
and conscience (Gewissen) are taken, as it were, into a private, or at least non-
political, world.
Such is Hegels narrative for the birth of modernity and the break with
tradition. Enlightenment or the 18th century resulted in utilitarianism,
which led to absolute freedom, which led to Terror. And the elements we find
in Terror are a totality which enforces unity all individual wills unified in
one individualized general will, and annihilates any kind of difference. The
form of this destruction is a relentless dynamic of making every one suspect,
emptying every self, reducing it to a mere existence which can be killed
through a cold and trivialized death.

3.

When Hannah Arendt undertakes her analysis of modernity, it is 150 years


later, spanning two World Wars as well as the immediate experiences of

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Enlightenment, Utility and Terror 175

Nazism and Stalinism. Nevertheless, her analysis of modernity bears some


resemblances with Hegels and it is worth dwelling on.
The Modern world is explained by Arendt as the ascent of the social, the
decline of action and the closing of the public realm. Labor that is, the
cyclical metabolism of the human body merely for the preservation of
biological life becomes the only significant human activity, obliterating the
possibility of action, the activity corresponding to the human condition of
plurality and of all political life. Between action and labor there is work, the
making of durable things that are different from the natural surroundings and
provide a housing, a world, for human life. The activity of working, the homo
faber, supplies that durable structure where meaningful action can take place,
but, being a merely instrumental activity, work itself lacks any meaning: it is
always embedded in a chain of means and ends, where the end is the utility of
the means, but no one can say what use it is being put to and its utility-end,
apart from being the means for another subsequent end. That is why a
utilitarian society based on homo faber craftsmanship is unable to state the
use of the use, and can only fall into meaninglessness. The real break with
tradition, then, comes when the homo faber is succeeded by the animal
laborans, and we have society and labor, without action and without politics.
In this process, the French Revolution is a landmark in that in it, the
emerging possibility of a real political life which did succeed in the
American Revolution was frustrated by the urgency of the social question.
Arendts account of the French Revolution properly, of the events taking
place, is distinct from Hegels the themes she picks up and the whole
approach are very different. She was always very scornful of Hegels
emphasis on necessity.11 But as for the meaning of the Revolution itself, in
what had been before and what went on afterwards, they both agree.
Before, it was utility or, in Arendts view, it was the homo faber and
his inherent utilitarianism. Then, there came absolute freedom and its first
realization in Terror. In Arendts account, there came the ascent of the social,
predominance of labor, the hegemony of society a society of jobholders,
the elimination of the public and the reduction of human activity to a quasi
natural, cyclical process of production and consumption subjected to a sort of
biological metabolism, where there is no place for political action and for the
judging and meaningful human interaction it requires.
There also came totalitarianism and Terror. Unlike what she read in
Hegel, she never contended that there is an unavoidable chain in the course of
events and phenomena. But she was convinced that there is an essential
connection between the ascent of the social in modernity and what gave rise
to totalitarianism in Europe, and that totalitarianism does reveal some truth
about modernity, so the true predicaments of our time will assume their
authentic form though not necessarily the cruelest only when
totalitarianism has become a thing of the past.12 To become a thing of the

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176 ANTONIO GMEZ RAMOS

past: one is tempted to think: aufgehoben, suppressed and somehow


preserved. In any case, Richard Bernstein has shown how Arendts
conception of politics (spontaneity, natality, action, freedom and plurality)
was, above all, the conceptual finding of what effectively went lost in the
experience of totalitarianism.13
Hegels insightful, anticipatory analysis of Terror shows all its accuracy
when we find every single one of its elements in Hannah Arendts book on
totalitarianism. What Hegel calls the fury of disappearing comes to a point
of paroxysm when, in Arendts words, all social, legal and political
traditions are destroyed14; totalitarianism promises to release the fulfillment
of law from all action and will of man; and it promises justice on earth
because it claims to make mankind itself the embodiment of the law.
Through this identification of man and law, it seems to cancel the
discrepancies between legality and justice. Like the general will, which was
one with the law and needed no institution at all, and which annihilated any
difference or anything outside of it, Terror becomes total when it becomes
independent of all opposition, and it rules supreme when nobody any longer
stands in its way. It is just movement and, as such, the realization of the law
of a movement which cannot stop, so that, as in Phenomenology, Guilt and
innocence become senseless notions; guilty is he who stands in the way of
the natural historical process.15 The individuals are eliminated for the sake of
the whole, and there are no channels of communication between them, but
only one band of iron which hold them so tightly together that is as though
their plurality had disappeared into One Man of gigantic dimensions.16
By the end of the book, Hannah Arendt is very clear on how this
totalitarian domination had been prepared by profound changes in modern
consciousness. In 1951, those changes are accounted for by the fact that
loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal
social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience of the
overgrowing masses of our century.17 So, loneliness, in itself a higher grade
of isolation, is the common ground for terror, the essence of totalitarian
government.18 The point is that this loneliness is not an accident bound to
totalitarianism, but, as Arendt stresses, organized loneliness is the mark of
the modern world. She can trace its origins to the formation of society
previous to mass-society, and she follows it up to the thoughtless animal
laborans who lives in administrated societies controlled by statistics and
doomed to superficiality and political inaction. This lonely man is the
inhabitant of the modern world, in totalitarian as much as in a democratic
mass society. If you look closely at him, you will find the same attributes that
Hegel found in the remains of the individual left by Terror: an empty self, a
mere existence (just biological life, nude life), and a trivialized death.

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Enlightenment, Utility and Terror 177

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.

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178 ANTONIO GMEZ RAMOS

Arendt had to make her learning in political philosophy through the


personal experience of being herself stateless for more than 15 years and
became so aware that in the case of the Jewish people, the condition of
parapolitical rightlessness was prior to post WWI. The Jews were precisely
those who historically had been always excluded from political community.
They represented in their very existence this primordial deprivation of rights.
They had always been that which stateless people in post WWI were learning
to be: abstract nakedness of human being, mere unqualified existence,
where nothing of the sacredness of Human Rights could be found.
Ironically, her occupation in her early years with the very people she
considered the most apolitical of all was what gave her the key to political
thinking and also, I contend, basic political subjectivity. Inasmuch as they
were excluded from the political, the Jews were the pariah of modern
Europe.22 History has shown how senseless it was for Jews to assimilate to
society and forget about their origin. In the end, every assimilated Jew, every
parvenu, was to be tragically reminded of her being Jewish. And to this
parvenu, whose efforts aim at not being a pariah, she opposes the hidden
tradition of those like Heine, Lazare, Kafka or Chaplin, who preferred the
status of conscious pariah.
The conscious pariah recognizes herself as pariah, as a social outcast,
and enters the political arena as such, not trying to negate herself through
assimilation to normality and become indistinguishable from other abstract
individuals. As such, out of their personal experience, Jewish poets, writers
and artists have been able to evolve the concept of the pariah as a human type,
a concept of supreme importance for the evaluation of mankind in our day,
and which has exerted upon the gentile world an influence in strange contrast
to the spiritual and political ineffectiveness which has been the fate of these
men among their brethren.23
In fact, this conscious pariah which Bernstein describes as a rebel
and an independent thinker was to be the character where Hannah Arendt
found her political subject. Certainly, the conscious pariah does not appear
again in her mature political writings from The Human Condition to the
Lectures on Kants Political Philosophy. But in him we find all the elements
that conform the political in Arendts view. First, he is someone who thinks
by himself, independently. Thinking, she says, is the only weapon with
which the pariah is endowed at birth in his vital struggle against society.24
And then, Arendt thought that her outsider pariah status provided her with an
advantage to look at something from outside. She considered herself, quite
rightly, a sort of privileged spectator. On the rebelling pariah who insists on
telling the truth, and for whom, in her own words, history is not a closed
book anymore, and politics is not a privilege of the gentiles.25
Thinking, actor, spectator the latter implying judgment: these are
the threads the conscious pariah is woven with; but also the notions which

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Enlightenment, Utility and Terror 179

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.

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180 ANTONIO GMEZ RAMOS

In fact, there is an inverted connection between the conscious pariah and


this politically inactive moral spirit which Hegel so ironically describes. Both
are characters they sketched at the beginning of their careers, in their late
thirties, more or less, and gave up in later years Hegel, in his Philosophy of
Right, Arendt from the Human Condition on. These political thinkers
happened to find a non-political character: the pariah, who is originally
excluded from politics; and the romantic moral shapes of spirit, who, against
their German background, turned out to be politically insignificant. And this
character was the result of, or an alternative to, their parallel diagnosis of
modernity and the break with tradition.
The conscious pariah at least has a real political significance. On the
other hand, it is true that, since the Eighteenth century, the moral spirit has
never been extended to the political scene. The question of why Hegel and
Arendt have such different, yet not unconnected reactions, remains. Knowing
more about this would shed some light on the meaning of modernity and the
possibility of politics, even of democracy.

NOTES

1. Bernstein, R., Hannah Arendt: The Ambiguities of Theory and Practice, in


Ball, T., (ed.) Political Theory and Praxis. New Perspectives, Minneapolis, UM, 1983,
141-158, p. 150.
2. Arendt, H., The Life of the Mind, Nueva York Harcourt Brace, 1978, I,
Thinking, p.210.
3. Ibid., p. 212.
4. Ibid.
5. Why He and not she is much more than a question of political
correctness. As a matter of fact, the question about she introduces a gender
perspective in the matter, it concerns Hegel`s and Arendt`s thinking equally and
deserves a longer reflection for which there is no room here. Since Kafka writes He
and Arendt follows him, I will maintain the masculine pronoun throughout this paper.
6. Incommensurability and Otherness Revisited in Bernstein, R., The New
Constellation, Cambridge, MIT, 1992, p. 58.
7. Pinkard, T., Hegels Phenomenology. The Sociality of Reason, CUP, 1994,
p.179.
8. I quote after T. Pinkards translation Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 533.
9. Ibid., p. 535.
10. Ibid., p. 538.
11. Ibid., p. 539.
12. Arendt, H., On Revolution, London, Penguin Books, 1990, p. 113.
13. Arendt, H., Origins of Totalitarianism, Nueva York, Harcourt, 1976, p. 470.
14. Bernstein, R., Radical Evil, London, Politiy press, 2002, pp. 169 and ff. Also
in Bernstein, R., On Violence. Thinking without Banisters, Cambridge, Polity, 2013.
15. Arendt, H., Origins of Totalitarism, p. 460.
16. Ibid., pp. 465-466.

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Enlightenment, Utility and Terror 181

17. Ibid., p. 478.


18. Ibid., p. 475.
19. Ibid., p. 297.
20. Ibid., p. 291.
21. Ibid., p. 301.
22. Whether Arendt is being just to her Jewish people and to Jewish history is
not the issue at hand now, see Bernstein, R., Arendt and the Jewish Question, London,
MIT Press, 1996.
23. Ibid., p. 33.
24. Ibid., p. 40.
25. We, refugees in The Jew as Pariah, Jew Identity in the Modern Age. Ed.
by R. Fellman, New York, Grove Press, 1978, p. 68.
26. Bernstein, R., Judging, the Actor and the Spectator, en Philosophical
Profiles, Philadelphia, UIP, 1986, pp. 23 and ff.
27. Arendt, H., The Life of Mind, p. 167.
28. Ibid.

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