Arendt on Humanity

Source: Globe Jotters

By Kazue Koishikawa

“[T]he public realm has lost the power of illumination which was originally part of its very nature.—[W]hat is lost is the specific and usually irreplaceable in-between which should have formed between this individual and his fellow men.”

-- Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times

Arendt often points out that we live in a dark time in which the public realm is deteriorating. To be sure, the primal meaning of the public realm isn’t a town, city, state, or nation for her. Rather, it is a space that emerges and is sustained only when we express our opinions, views, and concerns and share them with others. It exists between us. Our sense of reality owes to such in-betweeness, and that is the reason why Arendt puts so much emphasis on the importance of the political life. In other words, “politics” and the “political” have a much wider meaning for Arendt than what we usually understand in our daily lives.

[caption id="attachment_15906" align="alignleft" width="300"] Source: Known is a Drop, Unknown is an Ocean[/caption]

According to Arendt, the human (our) sense of reality doesn’t rest on quantitative measurements, as is the case with science. Reality for us goes beyond scientific facts and objectivity. To be sure, it is one thing to arrive at a new scientific finding, but it is quite another thing to place it in the human world. Suppose the racial theories of the Nazis “could have been convincingly proved,” Arendt proposes, Would this have justified the extermination of the Jews?

Her example may appear to be an extreme case, but these types of questions pervade our history. Just a few examples: Can we justify the use of nuclear power when the half-life of nuclear waste easily exceeds the durability of any earthbound political body to ever come into being? Can any corporation file a patent on the human genome based on their research? Why do we recognize a person with severe cognitive and intellectual disability as a person and treat her with dignity? Why is abortion permissible or impermissible? Why is killing other human beings during a war allowed but forbidden during peacetime?

We can see that all of the questions posed above are not only contentious issues but also public concerns. As such, they demand that we discuss them, that we harbor an attempt at navigating their intricacies in order to be a part of our world. This exchange of opinion, which includes the decision on what is proper for us to share, makes these issues of political significance. In other words, a political matter is a matter that concerns all of humanity. As Arendt notes, “For the world is not humane just because it is made by human beings, and it does not become humane just because the human voice sounds in it, but only when it has become the object of discourse.—We humanize what is going on the world and in ourselves only by speaking of it, and in the course of speaking of it we learn to be human.”

[caption id="attachment_15907" align="alignright" width="300"] Source: Found in Antiquity[/caption]

Arendt recognizes the characteristics of such political discourse in the Aristotelian sense of friendship, i.e., philia. It is an open discourse in the sense that it originates out of our concerns for the well being of the common world. As a result, all opinions are welcome as long as they are formed from and uttered out of a sincere interest for the common.

But in Arendt’s mind, the public realm, the world between us, is diminishing. Even though we have plenty of heated exchanges on a lot of issues, from child immunization to intervention in instances of ethnic and/or international conflict somewhere far away from home, it is often the case that our opinions are formed out of a particularly limited interest. In cases of foreign policy, we summon forth our national interests. And in terms of domestic politics, we project the perspectives we’ve gleaned from a particular socio-economic class experience. Both exercises are shortsighted. Indeed, we need to look around and ask ourselves some questions. How often do we have open conversations with people from different classes? Why are we afraid of expressing our political views and opinions? How is social media affecting our ability to talk to one another? As we pose these questions, we need to be cognizant of how we feel when we witness someone else openly expressing their opinions on “political” matters. Do we find ourselves welcoming others’ political opinions? Or are we irritated by them? Only then may we hope to understand why the light of the public realm is diminishing.