Hannah Arendt and the Political Dangers of Emotion

By Johannes Lang

“Whatever the passions and the emotions may be, and whatever their true connection with thought and reason, they certainly are located in the human heart. And not only is the human heart a place of darkness which, with certainty, no human eye can penetrate; the qualities of the heart need darkness and protection against the light of the public to grow and to remain what they are meant to be, innermost motives which are not for public display.”

–Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (1963)

Since September 11, 2001, historians and social scientists have rediscovered the political relevance of emotion. In the current climate of war and terror, public discussion is suffused with references to fear, hatred, and patriotism. But what are the moral and political consequences when such passions enter the public sphere? One of the most famous political thinkers of the twentieth century, Hannah Arendt, worried about the entry of emotion into politics. She scolded the French revolutionaries for having been carried away by their compassion for the poor and praised the American Founding Fathers for their aloof commitment to universal ideals and for their detached attitude to the suffering masses. Emotions may be important as subjective motives for individual action, Arendt granted, but they should neither be aired in public nor be made the basis for collective action. Emotions disfigure politics; political movements should be based on rational argument, not passion. Yet, as Volker Heins has pointed out, there was one thing Arendt feared more than the intrusion of emotions into politics: a politics completely devoid of emotion. The “ice-cold reasoning” and bureaucratic rationality she discerned behind the Holocaust was infinitely more terrifying than any other political pathology known to man. Arendt’s deep ambivalence toward emotions confronts us with a fundamental question: What is the proper place of emotion in politics?

[caption id="attachment_15454" align="alignleft" width="300"] "Have We Entered the Biopolitical Age?" (Source: io9)[/caption]

It is not coincidental that Arendt metaphorically located the emotions in the human heart. Like so many thinkers before her, she relied on a distinction between thought and emotion, mind and body, associating the former with reason and culture, the latter with a more general human nature. Emotions are private, she insisted, closely connected with biological life, and “no more meant to be shown in their unadulterated state than the inner organs” of our body. Writing in the aftermath of Nazi genocide, Arendt called for a strict distinction between the public and the private. The privacy of a person’s intimate sphere must be defended against politics, just as politics must be defended against private interests. The hallmark of Nazism had been a complete disregard for this distinction between private and public, ending in a nightmarish version of what Foucault would later call biopolitics: the attempt to make subjective experience and ultimately biological life itself the object of politics. In this context, Arendt’s definition of the emotions as private and personal made them inherently off-limits to politics.

It was precisely the private and subjective quality of emotions that made them such a threat to what Arendt saw as responsible politics. Arendt associated an emphasis on emotion both with the Romantic cult of subjectivity and with modern self-obsession. But the “ruthless individualism of romanticism,” she wrote, “never meant anything more serious than that ‘everybody is free to create for himself his own ideology.’” Because emotions are intensely subjective, in Arendt’s view, they work to impose their singular perspective on politics, holding plurality hostage to the particularities of subjective experience. Nazism was the starkest expression of such Romantic subjectivism. “Nazism,” in the words of Modris Eksteins, “took as its point of departure the subjective self, feeling, experience, Erlebnis, and not reason and the objective world.” The result, Arendt concluded, was an “emotion-laden insensitivity to reality.” For reality is intersubjective; we need others to confirm and challenge our perception of the world and confer meaning on our actions. The totalitarians of the twentieth century lost touch with reality precisely at that moment when they disallowed plurality, suppressed free public discourse, and subjected politics to one universal perspective. By depriving themselves of their ability to see and hear others, Arendt asserted, the Nazis had imprisoned themselves in “the subjectivity of their own singular experience.” The consequence was a drastic distortion of moral and political judgment.

[caption id="attachment_15455" align="aligncenter" width="520"] Parade of the SS Guard, the Nazi elite, at a Party rally in Nurmberg in the late 1930s. (Source: Slate)[/caption]

For someone who is regularly referred to as “the theorist of new beginnings” and defender of “spontaneity,” Arendt was remarkably apprehensive about the creative and disruptive potential of emotion. Where historians and social scientists have begun to emphasize the importance of collective emotions in bringing about historical change, Arendt cautioned against the sheer energy and uncertainty that emotions can unleash in politics. Prefiguring an argument currently being made within affect theory, Arendt observed how the politicization of emotion decouples emotion from its object. Genuine emotions, she claimed, are always intra- or interpersonal, directed toward concrete individuals or objects. In the process of becoming political, however, emotions become depersonalized and de-individualized, no longer directed at particular individuals but at whole collectives. Lifted out of the subjective realm where they belong, emotions become “boundless”: unrestrained by interpersonal reality. “Since the days of the French Revolution,” Arendt wrote, “it has been the boundlessness of their sentiments that made revolutionaries so curiously insensitive to reality in general and to the reality of persons in particular.” Ideological abstractions—like the “Aryan race,” the “working class,” the “people,” or the “Jew”—become vested with intense emotional significance. And these objects of depersonalized emotion, Arendt believed, can be changed at “a moment’s notice.”

In the end, Arendt’s critique of the emotions encountered its limitations in her own analysis of Nazi genocide, for while Nazism as a movement was passionate and sentimental, the perpetrators of the Holocaust had preached the suppression of sentiment. “[H]uman emotions seemed almost like treason against the Führer,” the commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss, recalled in his memoires. The killers, Arendt remarked, had reserved their pity for themselves: how heavily their duties had weighed upon their shoulders! When Arendt reported from her postwar travels in Germany, she linked the apparent lack of popular outrage and shame to the same political pathology. She seemed to be suggesting that emotions (as a form of moral outrage) might play a necessary role in the political pursuit of justice.

[caption id="attachment_15094" align="alignright" width="300"] Pluralism (Source: PaTimes)[/caption]

But such a concession to the political relevance of emotion raises an inevitable question: If the call for justice requires emotional outrage, then why would not all moral and political principles require some form of emotional investment? While we may arrive at political principles through rational argument, is it not through emotion that we become committed to these ideas? Indeed, perhaps it is the other way around: that we use rational argument to justify our emotional commitments. The latter possibility greatly diminishes the power of argument to eliminate political differences. In fact, these ineliminable differences are part and parcel of what Arendt described as “the human condition of plurality”—the “fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world.” Yet, if “this plurality is specifically the condition” of “all political life,” as Arendt claimed, then why did she not see a greater role for emotion in politics? The partial, partisan, subjective qualities of emotion seem essential to political plurality. The challenge for politics is to tolerate and sustain this plurality: to remain committed to—indeed, as Arendt put it, to love—a shared world of contradiction and conflict, and not be swept away by the “one voice” of any single outlook or emotion. As Arendt reminds us, the dangers of the latter are all too apparent.

(Featured Image: "Waves of Emotion"; Source: HD Wallpapers)