Hannah Arendt: Politics, Opinion, Truth

Corinne Enaudeau Hannah Arendt: Politics, Opinion, Truth THE DIVERGENCE BETW EEN PHILOSOPHICAL TRUTH AND POLITICAL opinion has solidified into a “political philosophy” that, for Arendt, lacks legitimacy. The Platonic victory over the Sophists—a victory for which Socrates was fraudulently credited—elicited a misconception of politics. And without hesitation, the W estern world has unfurled all the destructive power of that misconception. Far from enlightening the world, truth has claimed to be its driving force and, in so doing, it has underm ined the world’s foundation. By imposing an absolute norm, it has crushed the plurality of perspectives thanks to which the world is a network of relations—that is, a “relative” matter. Such is the terrible victoiy of philosophy. It somehow stole the world away from us, substituting its unsteady ambivalence for a systematic regulation of conduct. Rejecting truth in favor of opinion is still no easy task. It is not so much that science as a whole should be invalidated as a result, for science aims to give a ruling on what is, not on what must be. But in order to decide on what should be done, politics must “know” how to decide. The mere impulse to justify such decisions inscribes praxis within the sphere of truth. If politics is to be just, justice must first be found in its attempt to legitimate itself, to seek some “true” principle that regulates its practices. The politics of doxa are no exception, for they need a touchstone eliciting choices between opinions. In this regard, Arendt does not dismiss the true from the sphere of action. She seeks to comprehend which uses of truth cancel political social research Voi 74 : No 4 : Winter 2007 1029 lucidity and which, conversely, warrant political lucidity. What shapes Arendt’s position is a battle waged on several fronts, pointing to three distinct goals that I propose to address successively: first, the ambi­ tion to rescue politics from any “true law of history” that would aim at governing them; second, the ambition to rescue politics from the political lies in charge of their rewriting; and third, the ambition to rescue politics from a value relativism that would be irresponsible or cynical. Rational truth, factual truth, and opinion are all successively implicated, even though one cannot simply dissociate them from each other. THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN POLITICS AND TRUTH IS PARADOXICAL because the sphere of hum an action is simultaneously most alien to true knowledge and most prone to the desire for truth, insofar as truth qualifies a particular kind of discourse: the cognitive kind, which consists in determining its object (whether empirical or ideal) and subjecting its theses to procedures of formal (logical) validation or material (experimental) validation.1Such a definition oftruth is restric­ tive, granted, but it is the definition accredited by modern science and retained as such by Arendt (Arendt, 1978: 54-55). Because it aims at constructing the future of “hum an living-together” (Arendt, 1968: 141), politics concerns forthcoming events, “contingent futures” that are in principle undeterminable because they might either fail to take place or they might come to pass very differently from what was antici­ pated. The “calamity] of action” (Arendt, 1958:220) lies in the fact that it sets off a chain of reactions that is in principle infinite and uncon­ trollable (Arendt, 1958: 191, 236-237). Consequently, the rule of truth according to which, out of two contradictory propositions, one is true and the other false, does not apply to statements regarding the future.2 How collective life is led is in the grips of indeterminacy regarding the future, so much so that knowledge of the future is thwarted. This situation is all the more humiliating since politics engages the human adventure in the most general terms and the history of societies hangs 1030 social research in the balance. As a result, there is a strong wish to “bind” actions together, to subject them to a law of derivation that would make the future predictable. For politics, two solutions are thus available to curtail the “melan­ choly haphazardness”3of history. The first, inaugurated by Plato, would consist, according to Arendt, in thinking that the human community is...