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

1. The Derivative Self and the Responsive Turn: Love and Saint Augustine

6 1 The Derivative Self and the Responsive Turn Love and Saint Augustine Augustine never extirpated this impulse [philosophical questioning] from this thinking. —Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine Love and Saint Augustine is the result of Arendt’s dissertation on Augustine , a major cornerstone in her scholarly foundation and a fulcrum point for her philosophical and practical engagement with unchallenged assumptions of modernity. Arendt’s work with Augustine began her scholarly struggle with the messiness of existence. Arendt considered Augustine the first existentialist who foreshadowed the postmodern critique of agency.1 He understood the neighbor engaged through impersonal understanding of “well-ordered love,”2 which began Arendt’s stress upon “the third”3 or the “neighbor”4 who is not directly part of a given conversation . For Augustine, it is the self in relation with existence in God’s world that properly orders the self in engagement in the love of Others. Arendt’s interest in this medieval scholar began with her assumption that Augustine does not align with modern conceptions of the human condition, moving the conversation back to existence and an alternative to a stress on agency, an originative “I,” offering as a substitute a derivative and responsive “I.”5 The Derivative Self and the Responsive Turn 7 Introduction Arendt outlines the connection between existence and its impact on the shaping of the human person, framing identity as derivative and emergent from the responsive meeting of existence from her initial scholarship on Augustine. Arendt turned to Augustine in her beginning questioning of the presuppositions of modernity. Augustine, one of the most influential philosophers and theologians in the West, points to the phenomenological foundations of the human condition, which are forgotten, bypassed, and eclipsed by modernity.6 This derivative understanding of identity is one of the fundamental building blocks of Arendt’s later framing of the human condition, situated in Augustine’s famous existential quotation, “I have become a question to myself.”7 Arendt completed her dissertation, Love and Saint Augustine, in 1929. Arendt begins with the assumption that existence meets us, with or without our approval or liking, with the resultant interaction of existence and communicative responsiveness forming a derivative self. The power of human responsiveness manifests itself as a defining characteristic of the human condition, engaging both existence and the ongoing construction of a derivative self, shaping who we are and what we may become. Existentially, what we call identity takes shape in the meeting of response and existence.8 The question of identity has fascinated us for centuries as we attempt to make sense of our place in the human condition. In Love and Saint Augustine , Arendt has a major hermeneutic bias—the interplay of existence and human responses shape identity. Virtually every academic discipline seems to be on an identity quest, examining this question, which goes back to the late fourth and early fifth centuries. For instance, Ronald L. Jackson continues this important conversation in his editing of the Encyclopedia of Identity.9 Existentially, what we call identity takes shape in the meeting between human responses and existence.10 Arendt began with a thinker from the fourth and fifth centuries as the foundation of her distinguished career that questions the modern assumption of individual autonomy, framing the phenomenological reality of a derivative self. Arendt garnered this insight during her university experiences. At that time (1923–24), Germany, Arendt’s homeland, was in a seemingly unstoppable crisis: inflation was at record levels; it took four trillion German marks to equal one U.S. dollar.11 In this time of economic chaos, Hitler attempted his famous march on Berlin with supposed agreement from the Kahr government, only to have Gustav von Kahr turn the government against the protesters. Hitler was wounded and then sent to prison; he was sentenced to up to five years in prison but was released early in 1925, the year he published the first volume of Mein Kampf.12 In the same year, 8 The Derivative Self and the Responsive Turn Gustav Stresemann negotiated a treaty with France and Britain. All efforts at peace, however, could not stem Germany’s economic collapse in 1927, which was followed by the beginning of the Great World Depression of 1929. It was in this historical situation of change and increasing tumult that Arendt finished her dissertation. Existence in Germany was beginning to become genuinely dark while masquerading as light worthy of claiming public...