Arendt and Cassirer on the Aporia of Human Nature

Ernst Cassirer and Hannah Arendt both considered the question of “human nature” to be a modern aporia. Ernst Cassirer wrote in his An Essay on Man (1945) that ”Man has no ‘nature‘—no simple  or homogeneous being. He is a strange mixture of being and nonbeing. His place is between these two opposite poles” (I.2, p. 13). Cassirer knew that “man may be described and defined only in terms of his consciousness” (I.1, p. 5), which led him to define the human being as “a symbolic animal” (II, p. 28), a meaning-making being that constructs meaning through symbolic forms like myth, religion, art, and history, which instantiate universal meaning in a system of sensory signs. Cassirer’s philosophical anthropology can therefore be understood as a semiotic approach to the aporia of human nature.

In The Human Condition (1958), Arendt also famously avoided any “misunderstanding” of her project as describing human nature by stating that “the human condition is not the same as human nature, and the sum total of human activities and capabilities which correspond to the human condition does not constitute anything like human nature” (I.1, pp. 9-10, emphasis mine). Arendt attempted to approach the aporia of human nature by investigating the fundamental conditions (natality, mortality, earth, life, worldiness, and plurality) and activities (labor, work, action) of human existence, and so her philosophical anthropology can thus be understood as a pragmatic approach to the aporia of human nature.

Both Arendt and Cassirer follow Augustine and Kant in conceiving human nature as an aporia. In the Confessions, Augustine described his Self as an immense query (magna quaestio)” (IV.iv.9). Our nature—who we are ultimately—is epistemologically off-limits for Augustine, and as Arendt pointed out in The Human Condition, “…if we have a nature or essence, then surely only a god could know and define it, and the first prerequisite would be that he be able to speak about a ‘who’ as though it were a ‘what’ (I.1, p. 10). Similarly,in the first Critique, Kant limited the epistemological description of the Self by saying, “…we cannot even say that this is a concept, but only that it is a bare consciousness which accompanies all concepts. Through this I or he or it (the thing) which thinks, nothing further is represented than a transcendental subject of the thoughts” (A346/B404). For Kant, any Self that is objectively known, is not a Self; the transcendental subject cannot be turned into an object because it would be akin to jumping over one’s own shadow.

The recent work of Ned Curthoys has made a compelling argument for Arendt’s intellectual engagement with Cassirer. Arendt and Cassirer shared a desire to rethink philosophical anthropology, and both took Kant as their modern starting point. What is especially interesting about the relationship between Arendt and Cassirer is their shared concern for human dignity. Both recognized in the wake of 20th century atrocities that human dignity needed to be thought anew in order to secure it politically, and recognized that this reconsideration would require rethinking philosophical anthropology in a new register.

Felony Disenfranchisement and the Politics of Forgiveness: An Arendtian View

The Sentencing Project’s recent report “State-Level Estimates of Felon Disenfranchisement in the United States, 2010” issued in July, just prior to the 2012 presidential election, revealed that 5.85 million Americans (1 out of every 40 Americans) were ineligible to vote as a result of prior felony convictions that rendered them politically disenfranchised (p. 1). This statistic is even more startling, when it is recognized that “1 out of every 13 African Americans of voting age is disenfranchised, a rate more than four times greater than non-African Americans. Nearly 7.7 percent of the adult African Americans population is disenfranchised compared to 1.8 percent of  the non-African American population” (p. 1-2). The retributivist focus of current felony disenfranchisement laws in the United States has led to substantive violations of The Civil Rights Act of 1964.

But felony disenfranchisement laws have not only barred convicted felons from voting, but significantly reduced their chances for employment and housing. Applications for employment and lease agreements in most states require the disclosure of criminal convictions, and this information is typically used to deny employment and housing. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission recently released new guidelines for employers regarding the use of background checks in determining employment eligibility. The Commission found that the use of criminal records in hiring practices, when not directly related to the job being applied for, adversely affected a disproportionate number of African American and Hispanic citizens, and therefore constituted a violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Title VII) (EEOC Enforcement Guidance, 915.002, p. 3). This has led many advocates for convicted felons to ask states to “ban the box.”

Banning the box is in the state’s best interest. The Pew Research Center released their report “The State of Recidivism: The Revolving Door of America’s Prisons” in April 2011, which indicated that 1 out of every 31 adult Americans is either in prison, on parole, or on probation, with 4 out of every 10 returning to prison within three years of their release (p. 1). The price tag for this high level of recidivism is $52 billion dollars (p. 1). When felons are released from prison and find it difficult to find employment or adequate housing because of felony disenfranchisement laws, recidivism rates increase. Add to this, the racial and ethnic character of the political disenfranchisement, and states could be facing not only a financial crisis, but a social crisis, as well.

Hannah Arendt argued in The Human Condition that “Without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover; we would remain the victims of its consequences forever, not unlike the sorcerer’s apprentice who lacked the magic formula to break the spell” (V.33, p. 237). Felony disenfranchisement laws confine convicted felons to “one single deed from which [they can] never recover,” but this is inconsistent with American democratic ideals. Barring convicted felons from voting, employment, and housing, violates the democratic principle of a participatory government. If society releases felons from prison (and the majority of incarcerated adults are released), then there must be a mechanism in place for reintegrating these persons into society, a kind of political forgiveness. Without this forgiveness, American society will likely continue to see a growing and costly prison and parole system, and an emerging mass of disenfranchised, jobless, and homeless persons, who are citizens only in name.

 

New Article: “A Difficult Redemption: Facing the Other in Woody Allen’s Exilic Period”

My first major article, “A Difficult Redemption: Facing the Other in Woody Allen’s Exilic Period,” will be published in A Companion to Woody Allen (Wiley-Blackwell), edited by Peter J. Bailey (St. Lawrence University) and Sam B. Girgus (Vanderbilt University). The book is due out in April 2013 and can be pre-ordered on Amazon.

The article examines the themes of exile and redemption in Allen’s recent films by deploying a method of film analysis developed from the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. The article focuses on Allen’s 2005 film Match Point as an example of the ethical turn in his film art during what I call his “exilic period.” I look forward to hearing from those of you who have a chance to read the article.

 

Getting a Clue: Three Books I Wish I Had Read 5 Years Ago

All graduate students eventually have to face the fact that although we should know what we’re doing in graduate school, and are doing our best to act like we know what we’re doing, more often than not, we haven’t got a clue. The use of the third-person plural should indicate that I count myself among the throng of uninitiated graduate students who continually fumble around with building CVs, forming professional relationships, trying to get published, presenting at conferences, teaching, and searching for that elusive tenure track job at a major university, where we can finally settle into the scholarly life. The truth is, like most graduate students, I don’t have a clue about getting to where I want to be.

While some departments devote time and energy to the professional development of their graduate students, others are slow to recognize the need for such a project. Luckily, my department is finally getting around to taking professional development seriously and has developed a new program to guide graduate students in developing scholarly excellence and professionalism. Through this new initiative, I have been introduced to three books that I wish I had been reading 5 years ago.

The first one is Gregory M. Colón Semenza’s immensely helpful Graduate Study for the Twenty-First Century: How to Build an Academic Career in the Humanities. This book covers just about everything you need to know from the beginning of your graduate studies to landing your first job. The Table of Contents offers an excellent overview of the topics that are covered.

1. The Culture of a Graduate Program
2. The Structure of Your Graduate Career: An Ideal Plan
3. Organization and Time Management
4. The Graduate Seminar
5. The Seminar Paper
6. Teaching
7. Exams
8. The Dissertation
9. Attending Conferences
10. Publishing
11. Service and Participation
12. The Job Market

The next book, The Chicago Guide to Your Academic Career: A Portable Mentor for Scholars from Graduate School to Tenure, was recommended by my colleague Cynthia R. Nielsen, who blogs at Per Caritatem. This book begins earlier than Semenza’s book and looks at the prerequisites for entering graduate school and the necessary skills and orientations that will lead to the successful completion of the Ph.D. It also reaches further into the future and offers advice on seeking and attaining tenure. Of particular interest for female graduate students is the authors’ attention to the role of gender in the academic life. This book can be read in tandem with Semenza’s book with considerable profit.

The final book that I would like to recommend for getting a clue about graduate school and the academic career is related to the dissertation. There are a lot of books that purport to be “Guides” to the dissertation, but they are usually long on theory and short on practice. Lawrence A. Machi and Brenda T. McEvoy have written a stellar guide to the first stages of the dissertation that will get you focused and writing immediately. The book is called The Literature Review: Six Easy Steps to Success. While the focus is on the literature review stage of the dissertation, the ultimate aim is a quality dissertation. The authors walk you through a six-step process of selecting a topic, searching the literature, developing the argument, surveying the literature, critiquing the literature, and writing a review of the literature on your topic. By the time you finish working your way through these steps, you will be on the fast-track to a completed dissertation that is interesting, substantive, and executed with scholarly rigor.

While this post has had little to do with philosophy, it has everything to do with doing philosophy well. I have spent most of my graduate career trying to figure out how to be a professional philosopher, mostly through trial and error. I have been privileged to receive wise counsel from professors at my university and outside of it, but these three books have given me the practical tools to make use of that counsel. I hope other graduate students find this post helpful. If you have further suggestions, or advice, leave them in your comments below.

NEH Seminar: Day 13: Totalitarian Domination: The Stages of Human Destruction

In her essay, “Social Science and Concentration Camps” (1950), Hannah Arendt wrote that “The supreme goal of all totalitarian governments is not only the freely admitted, long-range ambition to global rule but also the never-admitted and immediately realized attempt at the total domination of man (Arendt, Essays in Understanding, p. 240).” Totalitarianism sought not just to conquer the world, but to fundamentally change humanity. As Arendt pointed out in the final part of Origins, 

Total domination, which strives to organizes the infinite plurality and differentiation of human beings as if all of humanity were just one individual, is possible only if each and every person can be reduced to a never-changing identity of reactions, so that each of these bundles of reactions can be exchanged for any other. The problem is to fabricate something that does not exist, namely, a kind of human species resembling other animal species whose only ‘freedom’ would consist in ‘preserving the species.’… The camps are meant not only to exterminate people and degrade human beings, but also serve the ghastly experiment of eliminating , under scientifically controlled conditions, spontaneity itself as an expression of human behavior and of transforming the human personality into a mere thing, into something that even animals are not; for Pavlov’s dog, which, as we know, was trained to eat not when it was hungry but when a bell rang, was a perverted animal. (Arendt, OT, 565)

The concentration camps were barbaric laboratories in which human beings were transformed into ‘perverted animals,’ living corpses. How did this happen? Arendt suggests that the process was carried out in three stages. First, the juridical person was destroyed by an arbitrary arrest, not for what the person believed or did, but simply for who they were. This stage rendered the person stateless and removed them from the protection of the law, excluding them from the common human community. Next, the moral person was destroyed by separating the person from the rest of the world and placing them in the concentration camp where both their life and death become meaningless, and the capacity for spontaneous speech and action was extinguished through the instrument of fear. Finally, the individual was destroyed by the constant, bureaucratic implementation and normalization of torture. The uniqueness of the individual was completely destroyed (Arendt, “Social Science and Concentration Camps,” in Essay in Understanding, p. 240).

These three stages of total domination destroyed what Arendt referred to as the three basic conditions of human life on earth: life, worldliness, and plurality (Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 7).  The condition of life is the base line for human existence, the biological processes that make human life possible and express themselves in drives toward self-preservation, reproduction, and growth, all of which are framed by birth (natality) and death (mortality). The condition of worldliness is the artificial environment that human beings co-create and inhabit and is made up of human artifacts. Human beings are world-builders, in contrast to animals who simply inhabit their natural environments. The last condition of plurality is what Arendt sees as the fundamental political condition, without which, politics would not be possible, and it serves as the law of the earth, “the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world.” Human beings are unique and diverse individuals that cannot be reduced to a “single individual,” as the Nazis tried to do in the concentration camps (Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 7). The systematic destruction of the juridical, moral, and individual person, destroys the basic conditions that make life possible on earth: life, worldliness, and plurality. This is why Arendt can say in Eichmann in Jerusalem, “There exist many things considerably worse than death, and the S.S. saw to it that none of them was ever very far from their victims’ minds and imagination (Arendt, EJ, p. 12).”

NEH Seminar: Day 12: Propaganda and Story

What is the difference between propaganda and story? In Part III of The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt wrote, “Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself; the masses have to be won by propaganda (Arendt, OT, p. 450).” Propaganda is tool for persuading the masses, who are characterized by gullibility and cynicism. As Arendt pointed out, “In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything was possible and that nothing was true (Arendt, OT, p. 499).” Totalitarian propaganda exploits this epistemological paradox of the masses by shrouding the propaganda with two key characteristics: mysteriousness and consistency. Mysteriousness provides a portal through which to escape reality and consistency provides the necessary mechanism to insure that reality will never be returned to. These two factors made Nazi propaganda especially effective in persuading the masses, as Arendt explains:

The effectiveness of this kind of propaganda demonstrates one the chief characteristics of modern masses. They do not believe in anything visible, in the reality of their own experience; they do not trust their eyes and ears but only their imaginations, which may be caught by anything that is at once universal and consistent in itself. What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably apart…. What the masses refuse to recognize is the fortuitousness that pervades reality. They are predisposed to all ideologies because they explain facts as mere examples of laws and eliminate coincidences by inventing an all embracing omnipotence which is supposed to be at the root of every accident. Totalitarian propaganda thrives on this escape from reality into fiction, from coincidence into consistency (Arendt, OT, pp. 462-463).

Totalitarian propaganda works because the masses do not trust “their own experience,” and because it can make all apparent contradictions disappear by appealing to an “all embracing omnipotence,” like a Jewish world conspiracy. In this since, propaganda is always driven by a single, all encompassing narrative. It is characterized by a universality and consistency that eliminates contingency. It is a warm refuge from reality for the atomized and despairing masses.

Story is of a different order all together. Stories arise from the personal experience of particular individuals, but as Arendt points out in The Human Condition, no one is the sole author of her story,

Although everybody started his life by inserting himself into the human world through action and speech, nobody is the author or producer of his own life story. In other words, the stories, the results of action and speech, reveal an agent, but this agent is not an author or producer. Somebody began it and is its subject in the twofold sense of the word, namely, its actor and sufferer, but nobody is its author. (Arendt, HC, p. 184)

Stories are enacted in the world with others, not authored, they emerge from the lived experiences of human existence, through speaking and acting in the world with others. Stories, unlike propaganda, do not insulate one from reality, but rather confront one with reality. The particularity of stories preclude an all embracing omnipotent narrative that could subsume inconsistencies into a single narrative, and holds open the plurality of human experience that resists universal consistency. There is an inherent contingency in story that distinguishes it from propaganda, as Arendt suggests:

That every individual life between birth and death can eventually be told as a story with beginning and end is the prepolitical and prehistorical condition of history, the great story without beginning and end. But the reason why each human life tells its story and why history ultimately becomes the storybook of mankind, with many actors and speakers and yet without any tangible authors, is that both are the outcome of action. For the great unknown in history, that has baffled the philosophy of history in the modern age, arises not only when one considers history as a whole and finds that its subject, mankind, is an abstraction which never can become an active agent; the same unknown has baffled political philosophy from its beginning in antiquity and contributed to the general contempt in which philosophers since Plato have held the realm of human affairs. The perplexity is that in any series of events that together form a story with a unique meaning we can at best isolate the agent who set the whole process into motion; and although this agent frequently remains the subject, the ‘hero’ of the story, we never can point unequivocally to him as the author of its eventual outcome. (Arendt, HC, pp. 184-185)

Story is the unauthored ongoing narrative of human plurality. There is no single story written by a single author that provides an omniscient view of history. The meaning of human history is under constant negotiation. This is precisely what the masses cannot accept, and whenever political and economic uncertainty arise it is always possible that movements will form that produce propaganda as a warm overcoat for disenfranchised masses seeking to come in from the cold of reality.

NEH Seminar: Day 11: Arendt, Greece, and the Rise of the New Mob

An article in today’s New York Times reports a rise in attacks on immigrants in Greece by extremists associated with the far right. What is especially frightening about these attacks is the response of the police and government.Victims of the recent attacks have contacted police and encouraged the government to intervene, but their requests have been met with indifference.

The widespread political apathy of the masses in Greece and the use of violence as a means of political expression by far right extremists are reminiscent of the twentieth-century proto-totalitarian movements in Europe that Hannah Arendt identified in Part III of The Origins of Totalitarianism, in which she described the rise of a violent “mob” from the disenfranchised and indiffernet “masses” of post-war Europe. Totalitarian movements succeeded, Arendt said, because of the failure of “two democratic illusions”:

The first was that the people in its majority had taken an active part in the government and that each individual was in sympathy with one’s own or somebody else’s party. On the contrary, the movements showed that the politically neutral and indifferent masses could easily be the majority in a democratically ruled country, that therefore a democracy could function according to rules which are actively recognized only by a minority. (Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 415)

The political apathy and inaction of the masses provided the soil for growth of totalitarian movements. Economic issues and private interests took precedence over political issues and the masses exited from the political arena, creating a vacuum, which the mob sought to fill. Arendt’s description could be easily applied to the situation in Greece, where the ultra right part Golden Dawn has won 18 of the 300 seats in the Greek Parliament. The mob is now beginning to emerge from the indifferent masses in Greece, who have been displaced and disenfranchised by the European financial crisis.

The second democratic illusion that failed was that “the indifferent masses did not matter”:

…they were truly neutral and constituted no more than the inarticulate backward setting for the political life of the nation. Now they made apparent what no other organ of public opinion had ever been able to show, namely, that democratic government had rested as much on the silent approbation and tolerance of the indifferent and inarticulate section of the people as on the articulate and visible institutions and organizations of the country. Thus when the totalitarian movements invaded Parliament with their contempt for parliamentary government, they merely appeared inconsistent: actually they succeeded in convincing the people at large that parliamentary majorities were spurious and did not necessarily correspond to the realities of the country, thereby undermining the self-respect and the confidence of governments which also believed in majority rule rather than their constitutions. (Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 415)

The mob became the leader of the aimless, atomized, and apathetic masses. While Golden Dawn is denying any connection to the recent surge in violence in Greece they are not attempting to stop it. They are silently becoming the leaders of the marginalized masses in Greece. Fortunately, national organizations like Expel Racism and international groups like Human Rights Watch are embedded in the communities to resist the rise of the “new mob,” but more needs to be done.

What might be on the horizon in Greece? Although it is perhaps spurious to speculate on what might happen, the recent violence in Greece could, if unchecked and with the support of wider political forces in Greece, turn into terror. Arendt identified terrorism as the preferred means of political expression by the mob. She explains:

What proved so attractive was that terrorism had become a kind of philosophy through which to express frustration, resentment, and blind hatred, a kind of political expressionism which used bombs to express oneself, which watched delightedly the publicity given to resounding deeds and was absolutely willing to pay the price of life for having succeeded in forcing the recognition of one’s existence on the normal strata of society. (Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 439)

The intoxication of violence that the mob experiences becomes a self-perpetuating reign of terror. The recent events in Greece deserve a strong international response, now rather than later, before the violence escalates to terrorism. The resistance on the ground in Greece from national and international organizations is a start, but governments from around the globe need to send a strong message to the Greek government that the emergence of totalitarian movements in their country is unacceptable and must be stopped.