Hannah Arendt and Human Rights: The Predicament of Common Responsibility

FOUR: The Predicament of Common Responsibility

Natality’s archaic principle is double: the principle of beginning and the principle of givenness. Consequently, the animating affection is itself double: pleasure in the company of others and gratitude for givenness. Arendt especially celebrates pleasure, understanding it to be the animating affection of public life. In On Revolution, she approvingly quotes John Adams: “Wherever men, women, or children, are to be found, whether they be old or young, rich or poor, high or low, wise or foolish, ignorant or learned, every individual is seen to be strongly actuated by a desire to be seen, heard, talked of, approved and respected by the people around him.” This desire to be seen and heard by others gives “a feeling of happiness they could acquire nowhere else” (OR, 119). Following Adams, Arendt locates the ethical dimension of public life in this desire: “The virtue of this passion he called ‘emulation’, the ‘desire to excel another’, and its vice he called ‘ambition’ because it ‘aims at power as a means of distinction.’ And, psychologically speaking, these are in fact the chief virtues and vices of political man” (120). Arendt locates the source of this desire in the archaic event of natality itself: the event of natality carries with it the desire to appear. She goes so far as to call this desire an “innate impulse” as compelling as the fear that accompanies the urge for self-presentation: “It is indeed as though everything that is alive—in addition to the fact that its surface is made for appearance, fit to be seen and meant to appear to others—has an urge to appear, to fit itself into the world of appearances by displaying and showing, not its ‘inner FOUR The Predicament of Common Responsibility It is precisely because the tyrant has no desire to excel and lacks all passion for distinction that he finds it so pleasant to rise above the company of all men; conversely, it is the desire to excel which makes men love the world and enjoy the company of their peers, and drives them into the public business. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution self” but itself as an individual” (LMT, 29). Drawing on the research of Swiss biologist and zoologist Adolph Portmann, Arendt argues that this urge to appear cannot be explained in functional terms. Instead, she suggests , the urge to appear is gratuitous, having to do with the sheer pleasure of self-display. Human beings, who have a concern with an enduring image, transform this urge to self-display into a desire for self-presentation that she argues involves a “promise to the world, to those to whom I appear, to act in accordance with my pleasure” (36). The gratuitousness of this pleasure indicates that appearance itself carries the double affection of gratitude and pleasure. Public happiness, therefore, is the pleasure of appearing in a common world that delivers us from obscurity. It is the pleasure of being visible—being seen and recognized by equals; it is the pleasure of our own image granted only through the perspectives of others. Finally, this pleasure is the animating bond of the “we”; it provides an animating or dynamic basis for the political bond, or what Arendt calls “the solidarity of all peoples” (OT, 161). This animating double affection of pleasure and gratitude is for Arendt at the very heart of the right to have rights. At the same time, Arendt’s formulation of human rights emerges out of a reflection on radical evil. Speechless horror, not beauty or pleasure, marks the contemporary experience of wonder.1 This horrifying wonder (thaumazein) at the human capacity for evil animates her entire thought. Paradoxically, a thinking that has its origins in the horror of the twentieth century concludes by insisting on a notion of public happiness. This tension between the horror in the face of what humans are capable of and the human capacity for pleasure in the company of others is for Arendt the predicament of common responsibility and is the subject of this final chapter. In what follows, I first examine Arendt’s analysis of radical evil in The Origins of Totalitarianism, arguing that her analysis of “totalitarian hell” is essential to understanding the hellish violence of radical evil. Julia Kristeva ’s recent work on Arendt (Hannah Arendt) is especially important because her concept of abjection illuminates Arendt’s claim that the super- fluousness of the modern human being accounts for the emergence of radical evil. Kristeva’s concept of abjection...