What Happens When We Theorists Cease to Believe in What We Are Doing

07-02-2024

by Ronald Beiner

“CHRISTIAN BAY: I have a very different concept of the calling of a political theorist from that of Hannah Arendt. I should say that I read Hannah Arendt with pleasure, but out of esthetic pleasure. She is a philosopher’s philosopher. I think it is beautiful to follow her prose, and her sense of unity in history, and to be reminded of all the great things the Greeks have said that are still somehow pertinent today. I think, however, from my point of view, there is a certain lack of seriousness about modern problems in much of her work.

HANNAH ARENDT: The unwillingness of people who actually are thinking and are theorists … to believe that [thinking] is worthwhile, and who believe instead that only commitment and engagement is worthwhile, is perhaps one of the reasons why this whole discipline is not always in such very good shape. People apparently don’t believe in what they are doing.”

Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the Public World, ed. Melvyn A. Hill (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979), 307 and 309.

I doubt that many students of Hannah Arendt asked to choose a memorable Arendt quote would select the one that I’ve selected. In fact, I’m pretty sure that I’m the only one who would think to do so. It’s drawn from a transcript (published in the book edited by Arendt’s student, Melvyn Hill) of a set of discussions between Arendt and various critics at a conference devoted to her work that was held in Toronto (the city in which I live) in November of 1972. This Arendt-Bay exchange has stayed with me throughout my intellectual career. Christian Bay was my University of Toronto colleague for a number of years. On several occasions subsequent to my arrival in the Department of Political Science in 1984, Christian and I had a version of the same exchange that he had had with Hannah Arendt. On these occasions I always continued this debate with him with his tense 1972 exchange with Arendt in mind.

However things may have stood in 1972, I believe that the key issue at stake in the Arendt-Bay exchange is even more relevant today than it was then. It seems clear (or at least seems clear to me) that the broad view of people in the academy has swung relentlessly and decisively in Bay’s direction. That is, it’s more and more the case that academics are committed to the view that intellectual activity is justified by “engagement” in the sense of helping to solve the world’s problems. They are less and less committed to the life of the mind as something that is self-justifying, as something that is humanly essential whether or not it’s successful in addressing “modern problems.” The instrumentalist view embraced by Bay has continually gained ground; the non- or anti-instrumentalist view defended by Arendt has steadily lost ground. If the implications for “this whole discipline” (philosophy and social and political theory) looked worrisome in 1972, they look positively dire in 2024. If those who are supposed to be the standard-bearers of an intellectual existence “don’t believe in what they are doing” because they have come to the view that theory has meaning only as the servant of praxis, then intellectual life becomes merely a simulacrum, and the whole meaning of the university gets progressively hollowed out.

In the Postscriptum to Thinking, Arendt claimed that the themes she intended to explore in the Judging section of The Life of the Mind were important, among other reasons, on account of “their relevance to a whole set of problems by which modern thought is haunted, especially to the problem of theory and practice.” Arendt doesn’t spell out here what she associates with the problem of theory and practice, but one can assume that she was alluding to the tendency of theorists, and intellectuals more generally, to yearn to elevate themselves to the status of philosopher-kings, presuming a competence in the political sphere superior to that of ordinary citizens. Arendt, throughout her work, was especially sensitive to the fact that from Plato to Heidegger, disaster has always ensued when philosophers let themselves be driven by the ambition to be philosopher-kings, and one of the many attractions of her contribution as a theorist is that there was no trace of this ambition in Arendt. Implicit in Arendt’s response to Bay was the suggestion that it would be better for everyone involved (both theorists and citizens) if theorists could temper their urge to provide authoritative instruction for citizens, and simply concentrate on their primary business as theorists: intellectual reflection as an end in itself.

An interesting paradox underlies the Arendt-Bay exchange. Bay presents himself as an advocate of theory in the service of praxis. Arendt, by contrast, champions theory in the service of itself. But if one were to ask oneself which of these two theorists actually had a more consequential impact on the world of political practice, it is virtually certain that one would have to say Arendt. Despite her reluctance to tell non-theorists what to think and how to act, it should be evident to all readers of Arendt that a fair bit of what she wrote was written in the role of a public intellectual; moreover, she had far-reaching influence in that role. We know for instance that when Arendt gave her essay “Home to Roost” as a lecture at the Boston Centennial Forum, Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. felt moved to write to her requesting a copy. (The actual letter, dated May 28th, 1975, is on the Amor Mundi website.) In April of 1983, I traveled to Prague to give a series of lectures on Arendt to a gathering of purged academics who were then working as bricklayers, street sweepers, and furnace-stokers. A few short years later, these persecuted intellectuals composed the new political class of a post-Velvet-Revolution Czech Republic. I went there to present these lectures in 1983 because they felt that Arendt’s works (available to them as samizdat) were important to them as inspiration for the new political order that they were hoping to build. I suspect that Arendt was able to contribute to worldly praxis in this way precisely because she conceived theory not as primarily oriented to praxis but as primarily engaged in for its own sake. To the extent that Arendt was right to believe that thinking is an activity worth pursuing as an end in itself, this is perhaps something worth thinking about.

About the Author
Ronald Beiner is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Toronto. He edited Hannah Arendt’s Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy. In a recent visit to the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College, Professor Beiner discussed the origins and the influence of the Kant lectures (watch the interview here). His recent books include Civil Religion; Political Philosophy: What It Is and Why It Matters; and Dangerous Minds: Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the Return of the Far Right. Follow him on X @ronald_beiner.