Communication Ethics in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt's Rhetoric of Warning and Hope

11. Recovering Human Meaning, the Silent Side of Speech: Essays in Understanding

146 11 Recovering Human Meaning, the Silent Side of Speech Essays in Understanding Preliminary understanding . . . will certainly more effectively prevent people from joining a totalitarian movement than the most reliable information. —Hannah Arendt, Essays in Understanding Meaningfulness is derivative of the capacity to understand a particular phenomenon. Understanding is the key to meaningfulness. The criterion for proper understanding, however, does not rest with the person but with existence. There is a demand from existence that we understand things properly; when we do not, the human agent is likely to confess confusion when existence does not conform and behave as the communicative agent so stipulates. Arendt takes us to existential understanding , furnishing insight into the importance of understanding in both its contemplative and pragmatic dimension. Arendt offers insight into the first act of judgment; she uses these essays to underscore the connection among silent speech or self-talk, understanding, and human meaning as prerequisites for avoiding action grounded in thoughtlessness. Arendt does not focus upon the philosophical importance of understanding ; she stresses the doing of understanding through active contemplation . In Essays in Understanding, she takes us from one important issue 147 Recovering Human Meaning after another—forty-one essays in all, ranging from three to thirty-three pages in length, each attentive to questions that emerge within a given historical moment and requiring interpretive engagement. We are the ones who must make sense of a given historical question. We do so with the communicative gesture of understanding. Our involvement with a given question begins with the effort to understand, restraining the impulse to tell or proclaim an unexamined answer prematurely. This series of essays displays the doing of understanding, making the silent communicative gesture of understanding fundamental and prior to judgment and action. The span of Essays in Understanding ranges from 1930 to 1954, beginning one year after the start of the Great Depression and coinciding with Gandhi’s burgeoning civil disobedience against the British in the campaign for Indian independence. In 1930, Europeans made up 27 percent of the world’s population, compared to 11 percent in 2009, and the world was in a global depression.1 On November 23, 1954, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 382.74, the first time it had reached the all-time high since before the crash of 1929—twenty-five years earlier. Essays in Understanding frames individual lessons on the pragmatics of understanding. Arendt’s existential position necessitates the importance of thinking and contemplation prior to, during, and after action. The primacy of understanding guides the discussion of each essay. One witnesses Arendt at work as she attempts to comprehend a given issue, with some of the essays originally delivered as speeches and others emerging as short responses to given questions. The Story: Arendt on Understanding Arendt unites contemplation and action in her stress on story, reminding us of an existential demand requiring our response if we are to be a participant and be swept up in the waves of existential momentum. We must understand in order to meet existence in a participatory fashion. Understanding is part of a contemplative life that permits one to comprehend the activity needed in the meeting of existence. “What Remains? The Language Remains”: A Conversation with Günter Gaus Included with this volume of essays spanning from 1930 to 1954 is an interview of Arendt by Günter Gaus, which was recorded later, on October 18, 1964. Gaus at that time was a well-known journalist and later a high official in Willy Brandt’s government. Gaus later received the Adolf Grimme Prize for the interview, an award given in the name of a former minister for education and cultural affairs in Lower Saxony who established adult education centers in Germany. Gaus began by stating 148 Recovering Human Meaning that Arendt was the first woman philosopher he had interviewed, with Arendt immediately protesting that she did not belong to a group known as philosophers; she found much more kinship with those who sought to understand political theory. Arendt claimed that by 1931, she knew the Nazis would take total control . Their use of illegal arrests and the burning of the Reichstag, the first German parliament, on February 27, 1933, made it clear that something terrible was being unleashed, and with that knowledge she left Germany. When Hitler took power in 1933, the Nazis had been an enemy of the Jews for the previous four...