Hannah Arendt famously insisted that any politics that attended to the demands of “life” was doomed to descend into factional strife. How to understand her argument on these matters has troubled her readers ever since she first articulated this view in 1957’s The Human Condition and, more forcefully, in 1962’s On Revolution. It doesn’t help matters that the critique of a life-based politics in the former book is replaced (augmented) by a differently inflected argument in On Revolution: namely, that politics must avoid addressing “the social question.” Just how Arendt’s disdain for “the social” connects to her insistence that “life” should never be the principal motive for “action” is hard to parse.
Let me start with life. Arendt’s argument (derived from Aristotle in ways that resonate with Agamben’s adoption of the distinction between “bios”—bare life—and “zoe”—a cultivated life) is that life belongs to the realm of “necessity.” What is needed to sustain life (food, shelter, etc.) must be produced and consumed. The daily round of that production and consumption is inescapable—but the very opposite of freedom.
Politics exists in order to provide freedom, to provide a space for action that is not tied to necessity. As countless readers have pointed out, Aristotle’s polity relies on slaves to do the life-sustaining work tied to necessity—and Arendt seems nowhere more mandarin than in her contempt for that work. While it is going too far to say that she endorses slavery, there is more than a little of Hegel’s master/slave dialectic in Arendt. She seems at times to accept that the price of freedom, the price of escaping slavery, is an heroic, aristocratic disdain for life that allows the master to achieve his (it’s almost always a “he”) position of mastery in the life/death struggle that creates slavery in the Hegelian story. Those tied to “life” are slavish in disposition; they have bargained away their freedom because they have valued life too highly—have, in fact, taken life (not freedom or mastery) as the highest (perhaps even the sole) value. This contempt gets carried over into Arendt’s deeply negative views of “the masses.”
Arendt’s disdain for “life” has often been seen as a critique of bourgeois sensibility. The bourgeoisie is focused on “getting and spending” which it deems “private”—and is, consequently, uninterested in politics. That’s one way of interpreting Arendt’s lament that politics is in danger of disappearing altogether in the modern world. In a liberal society, all the focus is on “private” pursuits—the religion of personal salvation, economic pursuits, family and friends. It is reductive, but not altogether inaccurate, to link Arendt to figures like Tocqueville who lament the loss of an aristocratic focus on “honor” even as they both admit that aristocratic virtues are lost forever. If the triumph of “life” is to be overcome, it won’t be through a revival of either Aristotle’s or Machiavelli’s worlds.
Arendt’s prescription (especially in The Human Condition) appears to be the attempt to substitute amor mundi (a love of the world) for the love of life. My student Martin Caver wrote a superb dissertation on the concept of amor mundi in Arendt—and had to contend mightily with how slippery and vague that notion is in her work. Pushed into thinking about this all again by Matt Taylor’s essay—and by a subsequent email he wrote to me in response to my post on his essay—here is how I would pose the contrast world/life today.
The problem with “life” from Arendt’s point-of-view is that life is monolithic. Its demands appear to be everywhere the same: sustenance. To maintain a life is a repetitive grind that Arendt depicts as a relentless “process” that never allows for individuation. There are no distinctions within life. Every living thing is the same in terms of possessing what we can call “bare life.” Paradoxically, life renders everyone the same even as it also renders everyone selfish. Unlike politics, which for Arendt offers the possibility of individuation, selfishness just makes everyone alike. The bourgeois self is focused on “getting his”—which is why “life” is antithetical to amor mundi. We humans are in a sorry condition unless we can generate some care (think of Heidegger on Sorge at this point) for the world that we share. When everyone is pursuing only his own interest, the world falls apart. (Certainly sounds like a pretty good description/diagnosis of American society in 2020.)
What is this “world” that Arendt calls us to love? She insists that it is the fact of “plurality” (the fact that we are with others on this planet) and that it is what lies “between” the various actors who inhabit it. The modern retreat into the private is making the world recede. We no longer (at least as intensely) live and act together in a shared world, in a public space. That public space is the scene of politics for Arendt. And politics is where one distinguishes oneself (i.e. where one can achieve a distinctive identity). Politics is also where the world is produced through “acting in concert.” The notion here (although Arendt never articulates it in this way and is way too vague about the particulars of “acting in concert”) is that a public space is created and maintained by the interactions of people within that space—just as a language is created and maintained by people using it to communicate. The ongoing health and existence of the language is a beneficial, but not directly intended, by-product of its daily use by a community of speakers. Our common world is similarly produced.
Love of that world thus seems to mean two things: caring for its upkeep, it preservation, and a taste, even a love, for plurality. I must cherish the fact that it is “men,” not just me, who constitute this world. In Iris Murdoch’s formulation: “Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.”
To understand Arendt’s critique of “life” in these terms leads almost too smoothly into her work of Eichmann and, then, to The Life of the Mind. To be thoughtless (as Arendt accuses Eichmann of being) is precisely to be incapable of comprehending otherness, that fact that “something other than oneself is real.” Selfishness is thoughtless, a failure of imagination, a failure to grasp the fact of plurality in its full significance. Soul-blindness. And she reads Eichmann’s blindness in terms of his being entirely focused on climbing the ladder in the bureaucracy within which he works. That’s why his evil is “banal.” It’s the product of his daily round of making his way, not a product of any deeply-held convictions or ideology. He was, in her view, quite literally just doing his job with an eye toward promotion, without any conception of how his actions were effecting other people. (Whether this is a plausible reading of Eichmann is neither here nor there for the more general argument that the modern mind-set, along with the bureaucracies—among which we must count large corporations—in which so many moderns are embedded, generates soul-blindness, the thoughtless inability to see the consequences of one’s actions apart from how those actions contribute to one’s “getting ahead.”)
No wonder, then, that Arendt’s grasps onto the passage in the Critique of Judgment where Kant calls for “enlarged thinking”—and ties judgment to the capacity to see something from the other’s point of view. I must go “visiting,” Arendt says, in order to make a judgment. The person who is focused solely on gaining a “good life” for himself will never encounter “the world,” never grasp plurality.
The problem comes when the critique of “life” in The Human Condition is paired with a critique of “the social”—and that problem becomes a crisis when the full implications of banning the social from politics are articulated in On Revolution. Even Arendt’s most adept readers—Seyla Benhabib, Bonnie Honig, Hanna Pitkin—barely try to defend her position at this juncture. Bluntly put, Arendt says that the polity should never attempt to address or alleviate poverty or material inequities. The necessities of life—and how to secure them—should never be seen as a matter appropriate to politics. To make that mistake is simply to make politics itself impossible while leading to endless strife.
The puzzle has always been how a thinker of Arendt’s power could have been so blind, so stupid, so thoughtless (she is never so close to her caricature of Eichmann as at this point) on this score. How could she think 1) that banishing the endless strife over material resources to “the social” somehow solves the problem of that strife, and 2) that “politics” could somehow (by fiat?) be separated from allocation of resources (where those resources include power and status as well as material goods)? I can only suspect that she harbors the old aristocratic disdain of “trade” and imagines she can erect of field of contention where only distinction, honor, and virtuosity are at stake—and nothing so vulgar as monetary reward. Arendt’s ideal politics are, after all, agonistic. She is not against strife. But she wants a “pure” strife focused exclusively on excellence, unsullied by irrelevant considerations of money or status. She hates “society” because she deplores the standards by which it confers distinction. No surprise that her politics seem so aesthetic—and that she goes to Kant’s Critique of Judgment to discover his politics. What matters in the idealized aesthetic space is the quality of the performance—and nothing else.
So the question Arendt poses for us is: Is it harmful to have this ideal of a practice (or practices) that are divorced (by whatever means are effective) from questions of material necessity and reward? At a time when utilitarian considerations seem everywhere triumphant, the desire to carve out a protected space has a deep appeal. Reduction of everything to what avails life (Ruskin’s formula) very quickly becomes translated into what can produce an income. Various defenses of the university are predicated on fighting back against the utilitarian calculus.
But the danger of taking the anti-utilitarian line (the aestheticist position, if you will) is that it reinforces the bourgeois/classical liberal assertion that “the economic” is its own separate sphere—one that should be understood as “private.” Arendt may be a sharp critic of bourgeois selfishness and how that selfishness diminishes what a life can be even as its blithely denies the necessities of life to others, but she seems to be reinforcing the liberal idea of “private enterprise.”
It is not clear how (or where) economic activities exist at all in the “world” she wants us to love. And we have ample evidence by now that leaving economics to themselves is not a formula for keeping the economic in its place, in preventing its colonizing other spheres of human activity. Just the opposite. Laissez-faire is a sure-fire formula for insuring that the economic swallows up everything else. It accumulates power as relentlessly as it accumulates capital—and thus distorts every thing in the world.
In the realms of theory, then, Matt’s instinct that a monolithic, overarching concept like “life” would be better replaced by a pluralistic reckoning of the needs and desires of “living” seems promising. The thought is that “life” requires (in order for it to be defined) a contrast with “not life” (the world fills that role in Arendt)—and thus to a designation of the enemies of life (or, in Arendt’s mirror image, to a denigration of “life” in favor of another value, amor mundi). In either case, the logic leads to a desire to eliminate something because it threatens what is desired.
The alternative path of pluralism disarms such categorical condemnations. That path returns us to the “rough ground” (Wittgenstein) of tough judgments about what to do in particular cases where we have to attend to the particulars—and not think that generalized formulas are going to be of much (if any) use. There are always going to be multiple goods and moral intuitions in play, with painful trade-offs, and messy compromises. No overarching commitment or slogan—like “reverence for life”—is going to do the work. Similarly, we cannot successfully separate things into separate spheres—the aesthetic in that bin, the economic in another one, and politics in a third. It is just going to be messier than that even as we also struggle to prevent any one type of motive swamp the others. Pluralism is about (among other things) giving multiple motives some room to operate. Which is why I remain so attracted to some version of a universal basic income, some version of supplying the minimal resources required to “flourish” to all. Only when the material necessities can be taken for granted because secured (not disdained because they are bestial or vulgar) can other motives take wing.
One can also expect that others will disagree with, castigate her for, the course of action she does pursue, the positions for which she advocates. Plurality comes with a price—which is why it is hard to love. And why thinkers keep imagining formulas that will enable our escape from it.
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