Impartiality and Objectivity

The Hannah Arendt Center Virtual Reading Group is currently reading Between Past and Future. There are a number of reasons Between Past and Future is one of my favorite of Arendt’s books. It is the most Arendtian of her books because it is composed as a series of related essays. At her best, Arendt is an essayist. Her writing follows trains of thoughts rather than offering a systematic philosophy. She begins with a question “What Is Authority?” or a topic “The Crisis in Culture” or a problem, “Truth and Politics.” Her essays are attempts to think through the question, topic, and problem. As an essayist, her writing can meander. It takes us down pathways and byways, often circling toward an eventual insight and argument. Arendt’s way of writing mirrors her way of thinking. It is a practice that requires cultivation. As she writes in the justly famous Preface, the essays in the books are exercises in thinking. Specifically, how can we think after what Arendt calls the “break in tradition,” the fact that since the dual totalitarian regimes in Germany and the USSR and since the Holocaust and the Stalinist show trials, the limits imposed by the western tradition of dignity have fallen away. In a world of totalitarianism and absolute terror, humans have shown that “anything is possible.” In such a world as we now live within, we must think without the banisters of a moral, political, and legal tradition.

Arendt’s exercises in thinking generally have a method: she proceeds by making distinctions. She will distinguish “conservative” from “liberal” and “truth” from “opinion” and also “truth” from “politics.” Public discourse today eschews distinctions. Who knows what “conservative “ or “liberal” mean today? Words and ideas like “democracy” or “capitalism” or “genocide” are expanded in their meanings to the point where they become meaningless slogans. When one says, “but that is not what democracy or capitalism or genocide mean,” the answer is to question stable meanings and the authority to determine meaning. This unwillingness to make meaningful distinctions is the death of thinking because it ensures that we cannot in the end know what we are talking about. If we can’t talk in ways that are publicly comprehensible, there is no possibility of building a publicly meaningful world. 

In her essay “The Concept of History: Ancient and Modern,” Arendt focuses on one of the key distinctions in her work, that between impartiality and objectivity. All thinking and judgment depends on impartiality. Arendt writes that the inventors of impartiality are Homer and Herodotus. Homer is known for the fact that he can view the world from both Achilles’ and Hector's points of view, seeing their battle from both his native Greek perspective and also from the viewpoint of the Trojans. This ability to see from multiple perspectives is what Arendt calls impartiality. For Arendt, “The Greeks discovered that the world we have in common is usually regarded from an infinite number of different standpoints, to which correspond the most diverse points of view.”  The plurality of opinions means that in both art and politics, there is no truth, only opinion or taste, the way the world appears to me, dokoi moi.  The specifically Greek way of looking at the world impartially means that judgment must emerge not as a revealed truth but as the common sense that is produced through conversation and discussion amongst people who are committed to finding a common ground amidst their differences. 

Homeric impartiality looks "with equal eyes upon friend and foe, upon success and defeat.”  When Homer sings equally of Hector's greatness as Achilles, he stands apart from his Greek countrymen and his own partisan perspective and sees the world from multiple points of view. Similarly, Herodotus in his histories aims to avoid "the great and wondrous deeds of the Greeks and the barbarians from losing their due meed of glory.” The insistence upon seeing both sides of the conflict is the demand "for intellectual integrity at any price.” This is the "root of all so-called objectivity" and of all modern science. As exemplified by Homer and Herodotus, Greek impartiality is to think publicly and it is "still the highest type of objectivity we know.” This overcoming of partiality is the mark of the public nature of impartial judgment that the Greeks were the first people to embrace. 
 
In today’s public discourse, impartiality is usually thought to be the same as objectivity, a scientific approach embraced by modern science. But objectivity, as we understand it today, is not the same as impartiality as the Greeks practiced it. Modern objectivity is rooted in modern science and more specifically in what Arendt calls "world-alienation.” When René Descartes announced,  "I doubt therefore I am," he merely expressed the insight of the natural sciences that in man's "search for truth and knowledge" we can "trust neither the given evidence of the senses, nor the 'innate truth' of the mind, nor the inner light  of reason.'” While science is often thought to improve the reliability of the sense, Arendt disagrees. The sciences, she argues, are premised on a profound distrust of the senses, and thus a deep alienation from the public world that we share in common with others. The scientific perspective turns us away from a world and towards our internal mental processes. In objective judgments, we no longer trust our ability to judge publicly in common with others. Instead, we seek absolute foundations for our judgments in universal laws known intellectually, abstracted from our collective world, and thus rooted not in our public lives but our rational inner selves. 
 
In the scientific age, the tree seen with one's eyes is "no longer the tree given in sight and touch, an entity in itself with an unalterable shape of its own.” Instead, the seen tree is transformed in the age of science into an "object of consciousness on the same level with a merely remembered or entirely imaginary thing, it becomes part and parcel of this process itself…”  To understand the tree, we turn to experiments and instruments that we design and that extract the scientifically known tree from the tree we share in a common world with others. We cut, pulverize, and examine the tree under microscopes; we chemically alter the tree to pull its secrets from it; and we cut into the tree and destroy the tree to know it. But in all these scientific efforts to know the tree, Arendt writes, we don't encounter the tree in the world so much as our inquiring selves: "Instead of objective qualities, in other words, we find instruments, and instead of the nature of the universe—in the words of [Werner] Heisenberg—man encounters only himself.”  In a scientific age, we question what appears to us as mere appearance. We want to know the "truth" of what something is according to laws of nature. The material things of the world are dissolved "into energy" and "processes" that transform objects we encounter into "subjective mental processes.”

Arendt’s distinction between impartiality and objectivity matters. What is needed today are not objective judgments that turn us away from the common world, but impartial judgments that aim to understand the plurality of perspectives and to build a shared political world amidst our differences. It is impartiality and not objectivity that is the virtue most in demand in modern politics. 

Between Past and Future is such an essential book because it aims to teach us again how to think amidst the chaos of the break in tradition. You can follow the Virtual Reading group live, here. You can also listen to our podcast Reading Hannah Arendt With Roger Berkowitz here.