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

12. Otherwise Than Convention: Responsibility and Judgment

170 12 Otherwise Than Convention Responsibility and Judgment Adopting the notion of persona . . . the masks or roles which the world assigns us . . . [permits us] to take part in the world’s play. —Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment This chapter examines essays penned mainly within the last decade of Arendt’s life, pieces centered upon two major metaphors, responsibility and judgment. Arendt’s impetus for this series of essays was to provide a response to critics; her scholarship was and is controversial and required her own defense. The questioning of her work obligated her to offer pragmatic counters, and her scholarship continues to invite an audience interested in thinking otherwise than convention.1 She wanted to think well—not just to follow an argument but also to make a judgment on an argument , discerning the best options available. Responsibility requires the ability to judge; otherwise, one simply becomes a follower of convention. Arendt offers insight into existential ambiguity that shapes judgment and calls forth communicative acts of responsibility. All but one of the essays were written in the last decade of Arendt’s life, which ended with a heart attack in 1975. For gathering a sense of this era, I will concentrate on 1969 and 1970, the halfway point of Arendt’s final decade. In 1969, Al-Fatah leader Yasser Arafat took over as chairman of the Palestine Liberation 171 Otherwise Than Convention Organization, and Richard Nixon looked for a way out of Vietnam with the assumption that a clear victory was no longer possible. California governor Ronald Reagan brought in the National Guard to address the Berkeley campus riots; Henry Kissinger began his peace mission under the directive of Nixon; an extreme radical group, the Weathermen, was formed in the United States; and the British Parliament outlawed the death penalty. With 1970 came much of the same news: the Weathermen were again in the headlines, and the unforgettable events at Kent State resulted in four students losing their lives and nine wounded in thirteen seconds of gunfire by the National Guard. There was a desire for change and a lack of clarity over what that change should be, with agreement on the fact that the world was changing, and what it would be was simply not yet. Arendt’s series of essays provides a lesson in the doing of interpretive inquiry. Each begins with a question from a critic followed by Arendt’s provision of a response that seeks to clarify her position. The following discussion of her essays illustrates Arendt as a thinker who is willing, able, and driven to make sense out of the human condition, rejecting the impulse to rid us prematurely of darkness. Instead, she accepts ambiguity and works to find temporal answers as an interpretive existential thinker. The Story: The Call to Responsible Judgment Arendt was the 1975 Sonning Prize winner in Denmark; the award went to a major contributor to European civilization. Her remarks at that occasion serve as the prologue to this series of essays. She states that she had left Europe thirty-five years earlier, not voluntarily but in response to the Nazis rising to power. Arendt immigrated to the United States, with its history of diversity, with the objective of not belonging to a single people; Arendt professes that there was no place in which she had lived in which belonging was key to her happiness—whether her place of birth in Germany , her eight and half years in France, or her life in the United States. Arendt admires the Founding Fathers of the United States and also the Danish people for their resistance against Hitler; the Danes had earned the right to give such an award. Nearly all the Jews on Danish soil were saved. She confesses the irony of a person known for writing about the public domain but who had conscientiously hidden from the public sphere much of her life; such is one of the reasons she studied philosophy at an early age: “Philosophy is a solitary business.” Arendt reflects upon the 1920s, an era when the public domain had lost its power; there were simply “lost generations.” Today’s generation, she said in 1975, lives in a “crisis of identity,” a product of an earlier era better understood not as a public domain but as a place filled with a “society of celebrities.”2 172 Otherwise Than Convention Arendt reluctantly admits that at this time...