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Anurag Chauhan
Between Past and Future: Hannah Arendt on Tradition and the Modern Age
How Kierkegaard, Marx, and Nietzsche refined the human understanding of philosophy, religion and life.
What are Revolutions? Saïd Amir Arjomand tries to explain in his “Revolution: Structure and Meaning in World History” that, “Revolution itself is history in the making, and its conception is intimately connected with the understanding of history. Its meaning and emergent norms take shape as it historically unfolds.”
It boils down to the sense of striving that goes into “Thoughts” and their pragmatic impacts or “Actions”, when we really try to come to terms with all the chaos ever happened. And then come those who make their life all about understanding and formulating the concepts of “practice of theory” in society. Many greats have come to take part in this endeavor, but not everyone has been able to claim to have succeeded in bringing all the dirt to one place.
Hannah Arendt, philosopher and the author of “The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)” expounds at length in her “Between Past and Future”, how intricately the greats have strived to burn themselves into the process of progress of the collective humankind. And what we get to see and learn from the imaginary battles between them that goes within our minds.
How the “today” exists the way it does and has passed through the “yesterdays” of passion, conflicts and the revolutions.
Karl Marx and The Political Philosophy
In the opinion of Hannah Arendt, “The beginning and the end of the tradition have this in common: that the elementary problems of politics never come as clearly to light in their immediate and simple urgency as when they are first formulated and when they receive their final challenge.”
Arendt describes giving an instance from the Plato's work that the beginning was made when, in The Republic's allegory of the cave, ”Plato described the sphere of human affairs all that belongs to the living together of men in a common world in terms of darkness, confusion, and deception which those aspiring to true being must turn away from and abandon if they want to discover the clear sky of eternal ideas.”
“The end came with Marx's declaration that philosophy and its truth are located not outside the affairs of men and their common world but precisely in them, and can be "realized" only in the sphere of living together, which he called "society," through the emergence of "socialized men" (vergesellschaftet Menschen).“
Political philosophy necessarily implies the attitude of the philosopher toward politics; its tradition began with the philosopher's turning away from politics and then returning in order to impose his standards on human affairs. The end came when a philosopher turned away from philosophy so as to "realize" it in politics.
This was Marx's attempt, expressed first in his decision (in itself philosophical) to abjure philosophy, and second in his intention to "change the world" and thereby the philosophizing minds, the "consciousness" of men.
Once again Plato seems to enlighten us with a random remark which he made in his last work: ”The beginning is like a god which as long as it dwells among men saves all things” is true of our tradition; as long as its beginning was alive, it could save all things and bring them into harmony. By the same token, it became destructive as it came to its end — to say nothing of the aftermath of confusion and helplessness which came after the tradition ended and in which we live today.
Marx's own attitude to the tradition of political thought was one of conscious rebellion. In a challenging and paradoxical mood, he as a result framed certain key statements containing his political philosophy, underlie and transcend the strictly scientific part of his work (and as such curiously remained the same throughout his life, from the early writings to the last volume of Das Kapital).
Crucial among them are the following: “Labor created man” (in a formulation by Engels, who, contrary to an opinion current among some Marx scholars, usually rendered Marx's thought adequately and succinctly), “Violence is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one.“
Finally, there is the famous last thesis on Feuerbach:
“The philosophers have only interpreted the world differently; the point is, however, to change it.”
Resolving on Marx, Hannah Arendt goes on to untie the stress around the expressions and explains that,
“Labor created man” means first that labor and not God created man; second, it means that man, insofar as he is human, creates himself, that his humanity is the result of his own activity; it means, third, that what distinguishes man from animal, his differentia specified, is not reason, but labor, that he is not an animal rationale, but an animal laborans; it means, fourth, that it is not reason, until then the highest attribute of man, but labor, the traditionally most despised human activity, which contains the humanity of man. Thus, Marx challenges the traditional God, the traditional estimate of labor, and the traditional glorification of reason.
“That violence is the midwife of history” means that the hidden forces of development of human productivity, insofar as they depend upon free and conscious human action, come to light only through the violence of wars and revolutions. Only in those violent periods does history show its true face and dispel the fog of mere ideological, hypocritical talk. Again, the challenge to tradition is clear. Violence is traditionally the ultima ratio in relationships between nations and the most disgraceful of domestic actions, being always considered the outstanding characteristic of tyranny.
To Marx, on the contrary, violence or rather the possession of the means of violence is the constituent element of all forms of government; the state is the instrument of the ruling class by means of which it oppresses and exploits, and the whole sphere of political action is characterized by the use of violence.
In Marx, as in the case of other great authors of the last century, a seemingly playful, challenging, and paradoxical mood conceals the perplexity of having to deal with new phenomena in terms of an old tradition of thought outside of whose conceptual framework no thinking seemed possible at all.
It is as though Marx, not unlike Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, tried desperately to think against the tradition while using its own conceptual tools. Our tradition of political thought began when Plato discovered that it is somehow inherent in the philosophical experience to turn away from the common world of human affairs; it ended when nothing was left of this experience but the opposition of thinking and acting, which, depriving thought of reality and action of sense, makes both meaningless.
Dawn of the Modern Age
Hannah Arendt identifies, on the whole, two broad points in time, or rather history, in which men are conscious and over-conscious of the fact of tradition, identifying age as such with authority. This happened, first, when the Romans adopted classical Greek thought and culture as their own spiritual tradition and thereby decided historically that tradition was to have a permanent formative influence on European civilization.
And then, the discovery of antiquity in the Renaissance was a first attempt to break the fetters of tradition, and by going to the sources themselves to establish a past over which tradition would have no hold.
Delineating the "traditional" reality and how the transition took place over the temporal plane and the role many greats played on either side of the journey, Arendt says, “The end of a tradition does not necessarily mean that traditional concepts have lost their power over the minds of men.”
On the contrary, it sometimes seems that this power of well-worn notions and categories becomes more tyrannical as the tradition loses its living force and as the memory of its beginning recedes; it may even reveal its full coercive force only after its end has come and men no longer even rebel against it.
This at least seems to be the lesson of the twentieth-century aftermath of formalistic and compulsory thinking, which came after Kierkegaard, Marx, and Nietzsche had challenged the basic assumptions of traditional religion, traditional by consciously inverting political thought, and traditional metaphysics of the traditional hierarchy concepts.
However, neither the twentieth-century aftermath nor the nineteenth-century rebellion against tradition actually caused the break in our history. This sprang from a chaos of mass-perplexities on the political scene and of mass-opinions in the spiritual sphere which the totalitarian movements, through terror and ideology, crystallized into a new form of government and domination.
Totalitarian domination as an established fact, has broken the continuity of Occidental history. The break in our tradition is now an accomplished fact. It is neither the result of anyone's deliberate choice nor subject to further decision.
“Kierkegaard, Marx, and Nietzsche stand at the end of the tradition, just before the break came. Their immediate predecessor was Hegel. He it was who for the first time saw the whole of world history as one continuous development, and this tremendous achievement implied that he himself stood outside all authority-claiming systems and beliefs of the past, that he was held only by the thread of continuity in history itself." Hannah Arendt talks of the great socio-political thinkers the world has ever seen.
The thread of historical continuity was the first substitute for tradition; by means of it, the overwhelming mass of the most divergent values, the most contradictory thoughts and conflicting authorities, all of which had somehow been able to function together, were reduced to a unilinear, dialectically consistent development actually designed to repudiate not tradition as such, but the authority of all traditions.
“Kierkegaard, Marx, and Nietzsche are for us like guideposts to a past which has lost its authority. They were the first who dared to think without the guidance of any authority whatsoever; yet, for better and worse, they were still held by the categorical framework of the great tradition.“ Arendt adds further.
To most people today, this culture looks like a field of ruins which, far from being able to claim any authority, can hardly command their interest. This fact may be deplorable, but implicit in it is the great chance to look upon the past with eyes undistracted by any tradition, with a directness which has disappeared from Occidental reading and hearing ever since Roman civilization submitted to the authority of Greek thought.
Religion, Philosophy & Modernity
Hannah Arendt propounds that the destructive distortions of the tradition were all caused by men who had experienced something new which they tried almost instantaneously to overcome and resolve into something old. She becomes quite more assertive in respect to illustrate and individually expand the notions of the conceptual as well as the empirical nature of perceptions of the three great philosophers of human condition.
“Kierkegaard's leap from doubt into belief was a reversal and a distortion of the traditional relationship between reason and faith. It was the answer to the modern loss of faith, not only in God but in reason as well, which was inherent in Descartes' de omnibus dubitandum est, with its underlying suspicion that things may not be as they appear and that an evil spirit may willfully and forever hide truth from the minds of man.”
Marx's leap from theory into action, and from contemplation into labor, came after Hegel had transformed metaphysics into a philosophy of history and changed the philosopher into the historian to whose backward glance eventually, at the end of time, the meaning of becoming and motion, not of being and truth, would reveal itself.
Nietzsche's leap from the non-sensuous transcendent realm of ideas and measurements into the sensuousness of life, his "inverted Platonism" or "trans-valuation of values," as he himself would call it, was the last attempt to turn away from the tradition, and it succeeded only in turning tradition upside down.
Kierkegaard, jumping from doubt into belief, carried doubt into religion, transformed the attack of modern science on religion into an inner religious struggle, so that since then sincere religious experience has seemed possible only in the tension between doubt and belief, in torturing one's beliefs with one's doubts and relaxing from this torment in the violent affirmation of the absurdity of both the human condition and man's belief.
No clearer symptom of this modern religious situation can be found than the fact that Dostoevsky, perhaps the most experienced psychologist of modern religious beliefs, portrayed pure faith in the character of Myschkin "the idiot," or of Alyosha Karamazov, who is pure in heart because he is simple-minded.
Marx, when he leaped from philosophy into politics, carried the theories of dialectics into action, making political action more theoretical, more dependent upon what we today would call an ideology, than it ever had been before.
Hannah Arendt puts Marx up with Hegel and Descartes, ”Since, moreover, his springboard was not philosophy in the old metaphysical sense, but as specifically Hegel's philosophy of history as Kierkegaard's springboard had been Descartes' philosophy of doubt, he superimposed the "law of history" upon politics and ended by losing the significance of both, of action no less than of thought, of politics no less than of philosophy, when he insisted that both were mere functions of society and history.”
Hannah Arendt's voice on Friedrich Nietzsche seems to be broader and more inclusive in the sense of looking at the subject of transitional tradition, “Nietzsche's inverted Platonism, his insistence on life and the sensuously and materially given as against the suprasensuous and transcendent ideas which, since Plato, had been supposed to measure, judge, and give meaning to the given, ended in what is commonly called nihilism.”
Yet Nietzsche was no nihilist but, on the contrary, was the first to try to overcome the nihilism inherent not in the notions of the thinkers but in the reality of modern life.
What he discovered in his attempt at "trans-valuation" was that within this categorical framework the sensuous loses its very raison d'etre when it is deprived of its background of the suprasensuous and transcendent.
”We abolished the true world: which world has remained? perhaps the world of appearances? . . . But no! together with the true world we abolished the world of appearances.”
This insight in its elementary simplicity is relevant for all the turning-about operations in which the tradition found its end.
From Tradition to Science: The Leap of Faith
Hannah Arendt takes a sacrilegious leap and narrates the scenic series of metamorphosis of the human fate, “The traditional oppositions of fides and intellectus, and of theory and practice, took their respective revenges upon Kierkegaard and Marx, just as the opposition between the transcendent and the sensuously given took its revenge upon Nietzsche, not because these oppositions still had roots in valid human experience, but, on the contrary, because they had become mere concepts, outside of which, however, no comprehensive thought seemed possible at all.“
Kierkegaard knew that the incompatibility of modern science with traditional beliefs does not lie in any specific scientific findings, all of which can be integrated into religious systems and absorbed by religious beliefs for the reason that they will never be able to answer the questions which religion raises.
“Modern science“, in Marx's words, would “be superfluous if the appearance and the essence of things coincided.“
“Because our traditional religion is essentially a revealed religion and holds, in harmony with ancient philosophy, that truth is what reveals itself, that truth is revelation, modern science has become a much more formidable enemy of religion than traditional philosophy, even in its most rationalistic versions, ever could be.“
Marx knew that the incompatibility between classical thought and modern political of his political conditions lay in the accomplished fact of the French and Industrial Revolutions, which together had raised labor, traditionally the most despised of all human activities, to the highest rank of productivity and pretended to be able to assert the time-honored ideal of freedom under unheard-of conditions of universal equality.
Nietzsche's devaluation of values, like Marx's labor theory of value, arises from the incompatibility between the traditional "ideas," which, as transcendent units, had been used to recognize and measure human thoughts and actions, and modern society, which had dissolved all such standards into relationships between its members, establishing them as functional "values".
Values are social commodities that have no significance of their own but, like other commodities, exist only in the ever-changing relativity of social linkages and commerce. Through this relativization both the things which man produces for his use and the standards according to which he lives undergo a decisive change: they become entities of exchange, and the bearer of their "value" is society and not man, who produces and uses and judges.
Hannah Arendt furthers the point that the "good" loses its character as an idea, the standard by which the good and the bad can be measured and recognized; it has become a value which can be exchanged with other values, such as those of expediency or of power.
The holder of values can refuse this exchange and become an "idealist," who prices the value of "good" higher than the value of expediency; but this does not make the "value" of good any less relative.
Nietzsche seems to have been unaware of the origin as well as of the modernity of the term "value" when he accepted it as a key notion in his assault on tradition. But when he began to devaluate the current values of society, the implications of the whole enterprise quickly became manifest.
Ideas in the sense of absolute units had become identified with social values to such an extent that they simply ceased to exist once their value-character, their social status, was challenged.
Arendt continues on Nietzsche, “Nobody knew his way better than Nietzsche through the meandering paths of the modern spiritual labyrinth, where recollections and ideas of the past are hoarded up as though they had always been values which society depreciated whenever it needed better and newer commodities. Also, he was well aware of the profound nonsense of the new "value-free" science which was soon to degenerate into scientism and general scientific superstition.”
The Aftermath of Chaos
The challenges and their significance that Kierkegaard, Marx, and Nietzsche
posed the tradition with, Hannah Arendt goes on to comment on the out-turn of all the striving, “though none of them would have been possible without the synthesizing achievement of Hegel and his concept of history, is that they constitute a much more radical turning-about than the mere upside-down operations with their weird oppositions between sensualism and idealism, materialism and spiritualism, and even immanentism and transcendentalism imply.”
Hegel's basic assumption was that the dialectical movement of thought is identical with the dialectical movement of matter itself. Thus he hoped, to bridge the abyss which Descartes had opened between man, defined as res cogitans, and the world, defined as res extensa, between cognition and reality, thinking and being.
The spiritual homelessness of modern man finds its first expressions in this Cartesian perplexity and the Pascalian answer.
Georg Hegel claimed that the discovery of the dialectical movement as a universal law, ruling both man's reason and human affairs and the inner “reason” of natural events, accomplished even more than a mere correspondence between intellectus and res, whose coincidence pre-Cartesian philosophy had defined as truth. By introducing the spirit and its self-realization in movement, Hegel believed he had demonstrated an ontological identity of matter and idea.
Arendt shows that, “to Hegel, therefore, it would have been of no great importance whether one started this movement from the viewpoint of consciousness, which at one moment begins to “materialize,” or whether one chose as starting point matter, which, moving in the direction of “spiritualization,” becomes conscious of itself.”
Karl Marx, especially in his earlier writings, is quite conscious of this and knows that his repudiation of the tradition and of Hegel does not lie in his “materialism,” but in his refusal to assume that the difference between man and animal life is ratio, or thought, that, in Hegel's words, “man is essentially spirit”; for the young Marx man is essentially a natural being endowed with the faculty of action (ein tdtiges Natitrwesen), and his action remains “natural” because it consists of laboring the metabolism between man and nature.
His turning-about, like Kierkegaard's and Nietzsche's, goes to the core of the matter; they all question the traditional hierarchy of human capabilities, or, to put it another way, they ask again what the specifically human quality of man is; they do not intend to build systems or Weltanschauungen on this or that premise.
Since the rise of modern science, whose spirit is expressed in the Cartesian philosophy of doubt and mistrust, the conceptual framework of the tradition has not been secure.
The dichotomy between contemplation and action, the traditional hierarchy which ruled that truth is ultimately perceived only in speechless and actionless seeing, could not be upheld under conditions in which science became active and did in order to know.
”When the trust that things appear as they really are was gone, the concept of truth as revelation had become doubtful, and with it," Arendt reasons, ”the unquestioning faith in a revealed God. The notion of "theory" changed its meaning. It no longer meant a system of reasonably connected truths which as such had been not made but given to reason and the senses.”
Rather it became the modern scientific theory which is a working hypothesis, changing in accordance with the results it produces and depending for its validity not on what it “reveals” but on whether it “works”. By the same process, Plato's ideas lost their autonomous power to illuminate the world and the universe.
Hannah Arendt explains that, First, they became what they had been for Plato only in their relationship to the political realm, standards and measurements, or the regulating, limiting forces of man's own reasoning mind, as they appear in Kant.
Then, after the priority of reason over doing, of the mind's prescribing its rules to the actions of men, had been lost in the transformation of the whole world by the Industrial Revolution a transformation the success of which seemed to prove that man's doings and fabrications prescribe their rules to reason — these ideas finally became mere values whose validity is determined not by one or many men but by society as a whole in its ever-changing functional needs.
Hannah Arendt reflects upon the cap of limitation that people put on their lives, “These values in their ex- and interchangeability are the only "ideas" left to (and understood by) socialized men.”
These are men who have decided never to leave what to Plato was "the cave" of everyday human affairs, and never to venture on their own into a world and a life which, perhaps, the ubiquitous functionalization of modern society has deprived one of its most elementary characteristics — the instilling of wonder at that which is as it is.
This very real development is reflected and foreshadowed in Karl Marx's political thought. Turning the tradition upside down within its own framework, he did not actually get rid of Plato's ideas, though he did record the darkening of the clear sky where those ideas, as well as many other presences, had once become visible to the eyes of men.
Read and Contemplate on the Rabindranath Tagore's portrait of the voice of a silent girl from her heart, and then the ironical structures of society that humanity has evolved itself into by Geroge Orwell.
Get your own copy of Hannah Arendt's “Between Past and Future” and “The Origins of Totalitarianism” from here.
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