Zeitschrift für Kulturphilosophie 2019/2: Hannah Arendt

Tim-Florian Steinbach: Nach dem Anthropozän: Trostlosigkeit statt Trostbedürftigkeit. Philosophieren nach dem Ende der Metaphysik. Anne Döring und Ralf Köhne: Aufklärungs-Kritik und Aufklärungs-Mythen. Ein Sammelband eröffnet philosophiehistorische Perspektiven auf die Dialektik der Aufklärung. Carl Corleis: Bergson in den Spiegeln deutscher Philosophie. Die Geschichte eines philosophischen Kulturtransfers. Melanie Reichert: Ghost in the machine. Erscheinungen des Avantgardismus. Dirk Westerkamp: Das narrative Selbst. Charles Taylors sprachphilosophische Summe.

The Political in Hannah Arendt’s view is a realm of relationships, a certain connection between people and the world, as well as between individuals and their peers. In my paper, I explore how emotional phenomena can be meaningfully inserted into the political space: How do affects shape this specific web of human relation- ships? When do they become destructive? How can they provide worldly inspiration for the establishment of a political value system? By analyzing Hannah Arendt’s implicit affect theory, I argue that human affectability has a prominent role in her thinking. To illuminate linkages between affects and the Political, I high- light six main characteristics inherent to the latter. I further demonstrate how we can integrate emotional phenomena into the Political in the Arendtian sense by protecting both human affectability and the political realm itself.

The essay focuses on a point in Hannah Arendt’s work which – though of great importance whenever the systematic outlines of her thinking should be taken into regard – has not yet attracted much attention: After having faced the challenge of evil (Eichmann in Jerusalem. A report on the banality of evil, 1963), in her New York Lectures on Some Questions of Moral Philosophy (ed. by Jerome Kohn in 2003) in 1965 Arendt turned with equal energy towards the notion of moral goodness. Starting from the astonishing example of those very few men and women who refused to surrender to the spirit of public crime in Nazi Germany, she rediscovers the features of a moral self-understanding with constant reference to Plato’s Socrates. In this essay, Arendt’s reflections are taken in earnest as genuine elements of a moral groundwork.

The paper claims that Arendt’s conception of the public implies an understanding of the cultural that she herself has never really made explicit and which is far more complex than the dominant opposition of poetic and practical activities, that characterizes her work in general. On the one hand, Arendt’s understanding of the public is connected to different modes of political interaction in the public sphere that are also of decisive importance for all cultural life. On the other hand, the hermeneutical methodology, which is characteristic of both her work and her concept of judging, is intertwined with her understanding of the public realm and thus also of some importance from a cultural-theoretical perspective. The article elaborates on the connections between these aspects of Arendt’s work.

For Hannah Arendt, the public is the realm where individuals show themselves to their fellow human beings. They do this by relating to each other through speaking and acting together. Both speaking and acting are only possible if men acknowledge each other as independent, autonomous individuals but at the same time keep a common interest, a reference point for their speaking and acting together. In or- der to recognize each other as equal yet unique, individuals must gain distance – to themselves, to others and to the objects they speak of. They are only able to do this in public. Helmuth Plessner has developed a concept of publicity which ensures the individual’s »right to distance«. This »right to distance« can contribute to a better understanding of Hannah Arendt’s often misinterpreted separation of the private from the public realm and furthermore allows a better understanding of how Arendt envisioned a culture within which the political can be established.