Hannah Arendt: Critical Essays

PART II: Narrative and History

PART II Narrative and History Throughout her career, Arendt remained fascinated by the alchemy of time. Human life, she said, arises within the context of sempiternal cycles and rhythms-processes that, by virtue of their repetitive, recurrent character, are ultimately meaningless. For the most part, people themselves remain locked within the realm ofthe necessary, normal, and predictable. But alone among the species, we possess a seemingly miraculous ability to initiate new sequences ofevents. Unique, unrepeatable actions performed in public settings allow people to break free, as it were, from nature's economy. Such actions, insofar as they establish a "rectilinear temporal movement," form the stuff of history. Arendt understood history as a tissue of enacted stories, a record ofconduct so exceptional that it deserves to endure in human memory. In conscious opposition to most philosophers of history, she maintained that history is defined by deeds rather than by forces, trends, or laws of development, that it lacks an overall direction or "plot," and that neither an author nor a collective subject (e.g., humankind) hides behind the curtain. There are simply discrete narratives, framed by traditions of discourse and constructed retrospectively by those who ruminate on the course of events. And as storytellers rescue the past from oblivion, they simultaneously help infuse human life with meaning. The articles paired in this section emphasize Arendt's conviction that the thread of tradition has been broken and a new approach to the past is required. David Luban focuses on those periods of axiological and epistemological confusion that Arendt (following Bertolt Brecht) called dark times. Such periods occur when people no longer believe that the public world, as consti75 76 Part II tuted, will outlive them. As the public realm atrophies, people retreat to private pursuits and satisfactions. Arendt contended, however, that these could never attain the robust, three-dimensional sort of reality enjoyed by things that transpire in public. One consequence is that people begin to lose their ability to make sense ofexperience, which becomes increasingly opaque to them. Luban shows that in the twentieth century, what has broken down along with the public "space of appearances" is not only traditional modes ofexplanation; the very possibility ofexplanation as such has collapsed. Treating Arendt's scattered and fragmentary remarks on mainstream social science as a coherent theory, Luban attributes to her the argument that social scientists' abstract nomological constructs efface the noveltyand the abyss-of modernity. Where empirical generalization fails, however, narrative may succeed in making sense of "dark times." It involves telling stories about particular actions, facts, and events without falling victim to either a sweeping ideology or the cult of method and empty empirical correlation. Concurring with Luban that storytelling is Arendt's characteristic mode of doing political theory, Seyla Benhabib argues that she learned to appreciate narrative in her early attempts to understand totalitarianism. This strategy set Arendt apart from mainstream social science, for it rejected as false and even dangerous the effort to generalize, to find regularities across space and time, to make events seem inevitable and predictable. The concept of narrative, as Benhabib demonstrates, was central not only to Arendt's approach to the past but also to her views of public space (understood as a more "discursive" than "agonistic" arena) and of personal identity. Benhabib attributes Arendt's interest in narrative, and her perception of historical continuity as having been ruptured by twentieth century horrors , to the influence of Walter Benjamin. Yet she argues that it sometimes alternated with a different and less satisfactory approach, derived from Husserl and Heide:gger. This second approach tried to determine the essences of phenomena by privileging original practices, understandings, and usages and then assessing the extent of historical deviation from them. It led Arendt to commit various errors, the most serious of which was her persistence in distinguishing, unconvincingly, between the social and the political. Narrative and History 77 Further Reading Lisa J. Disch. "More Truth Than Fact: Storytelling as Critical Understanding in the Writings of Hannah Arendt." Political Theory 21, no. 4 (1993): 665-94. Eric Heller. "Hannah Arendt as a Critic of Literature." Social Research 44, no. 1 (1977): 147-59. Melvyn Hill. "The Fictions ofMankind and the Stories ofMen." In Melvyn Hill, ed., Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the Public World. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1979, pp. 275-300. Richard King. "Endings and Beginnings: Politics in Arendt's Early Thought." Political Theory 12, no. 2 (1984): 235-5l. Bhikhu Parekh. Hannah Arendt and the Search...