In today's lecture, I want to talk about some
themes both from The Human Condition and fromThe Origins
of Totalitarianism.I'll start with some ideas
from The Human Condition.
For Arendt, it's important to talk about the human
condition rather than human nature, because humans don't
have an essential nature that is unchanging over time.
Rather, we condition our environment and are
conditioned by it in a reciprocal fashion.
There is no fundamental essence to human nature
because we are always both shaping and being shaped
by what surrounds us.
We all partake in a shared human condition, but
there's no kind of bird's eye view of an unchanging
nature outside of history.
This is probably a familiar concept to us by now
because it picks up on some of the themes from Hegel
and Marx about the way that humans are shaped in
relation to our environment.
For Arendt as well.
Humans are a who rather than a what.
We help define ourselves and we help define each other.
The human condition is characterized by what
Arendt calls, using a Latin term, the Vita
Activa, or the active life.
Now the Vita Activa has three primary levels,
we might say, to it.
The first is labor.
And labor refers to our activity in terms of
biological processes, creating and sustaining life, taking
care of our physical needs.
Now the second level is work, which is activity in
terms of the life of humans, the things that we create,
the sort of environments or worldliness that we establish.
So this vase is the product of work, not of
labor in Arendt's sense.
So she's using labor and work in pretty specific ways.
Art is also an expression of work for a rent.
The third level of the Vita Activa is action.
And this refers to activity in the sense of the
social life of humans.
The life of action is undertaken by humans as a
collective or as a plurality.
The life of thinking the life of politics are part
of this domain of action.
So thinking is action for Arendt and action
is the political activity par excellence.
What characterizes humans is that we have this capacity
to be what Aristotle calls political animals.
Let's connect this idea of the Vita Activa to the
Origins of Totalitarianism because in this text, Arendt
seems extremely concerned that we have given up
taking on the challenges of the life of action, of
real political activity and engagement with one another,
and just sort of lapsed into this laziness of
accepting the status quo and allowing our sort of
baser impulses to take over.
Arendt talks about how one of the origins of totalitarianism
is isolation when the .Political sphere of life,
which for her means acting together in pursuit of a
common goal, is destroyed,
and we start to pit ourselves against each other, we feel
lonely in a political sense.
We don't want to talk politics with each other.
We don't feel like it's important for
us to be political.
We feel a sense of powerlessness to
change the status quo.
And this isolation in a political sense can breed
loneliness about human life as a whole, which she discusses
on pages four 74 and four 75.
We have this experience of not belonging to the world
at all, which she says is a common ground for terror.
This experience of loneliness and isolation,
perhaps paradoxically, is actually a shared experience
of the ever-growing masses, she says on 478.
So what is the mass and how is it that we live in an era
of the masses, even as we live in an era of extreme
loneliness and isolation?
Arendt describes the mass as not being held
together by any sense of common interest or goals.
They might actually have common interests and goals,
but they don't recognize themselves as such.
And she describes how both the Nazi and communist
movements recruited members from the mass of people who
are apparently indifferent.
These people that the mainstream parties had given
up on because they saw them as indifferent, maybe even as
lazy as lacking motivation.
And I want to just know for you here that you probably
have already picked up on some disturbing parallels
to the present time, and there are more to come.
Arendt is trying to figure out here how Germany
in the 1930s became a bastion of the Nazi party,
when previously there had been a republic.
And here are a few of the many, many elements
that she draws on.
So she says that totalitarian movements end the illusions
of a democratic society.
And there are two in particular that she
focuses on on page 313.
The first is the illusion that the people as a
majority had taken an active part in government.
The reality was, she says, that a democracy functions
according to rules that are actively recognized
only by a minority.
So majority rule is often not the actual case in
a democratic society, but democratic society
pretends that it is.
And the second illusion is that the indifferent masses,
people who were politically apathetic, didn't matter.
Right?
It's like, Oh, you know, There are plenty of folks
who don't really have strong political affiliation.
They're just sort of apolitical, they don't do
politics, and they don't want to discuss them.
Democratic society functioned under the illusion that
those people didn't matter.
But what actually totalitarian movements such as that
of national socialism recognized was that these
people could be enlisted for totalitarian projects
because of their feelings of isolation and loneliness.
One of the first signs of breakdown of the party
system in a democracy is the failure to recruit members
from the younger generations.
Younger generations come of age and they're like, what
do I care about politics?
That's just not my deal!
Another is the lack of silent support of unorganized masses.
A mass of furious individuals who seemingly have nothing
in common start to develop.
What they have in common is precisely their sense that
party members are doomed and that the powers that be
are stupid and fraudulent, she discusses on page 315.
The self-centered bitterness of the masses develops
hand in hand with their increasing lack of care for
their own self preservation.
The masses sort of start to go haywire and self-destruct,
and they're okay with destroying themselves
and others around them.
These are extremely dangerous conditions
for totalitarianism.
Arendt gives a very useful summary of totalitarian
government on page 460.
Totalitarian government transforms
classes into masses.
It also supplants the party system by a mass movement.
Importantly, Arendt says the origins of totalitarianism
aren't so much in a one party dictatorship as they
are in a mass movement that's not really driven
by any particular goal.
Totalitarian government also shifts the center of power
from the army to the police.
And in addition, it establishes a foreign policy
that is openly directed towards world domination.
She says on page 462, that totalitarianism is
lawfulness without legality.
One thing that totalitarian governments tend to do is
supplant legality with laws of history and or laws of nature.
For instance, the idea that our particular people.
Is destined to dominate the world, right?
In the case of national socialism.
In this sense, humans are taken to be swept along by
a force outside of them.
And Arendt mentions actually Darwin and Marx
here, as examples of this very troublesome idea.
Actual laws that are context specific begin to
be replaced by total terror, which she says translates
into reality, the law of nature and or of history.
This idea that you are being swept along by forces, and you
can either be at the bottom or you can be at the top.
Terror is the essence of totalitarian domination.
She says on page 464, Terror makes us think
that we are nothing but the pawns of nature or
the pawns of history.
We are not free.
Terror eliminates freedom and the source of freedom.
One of the many ways it does this is through
undermining our capacity for action, which is the
third level and the highest level of the Vita Activa.
Recall that thinking is one of the components of action.
For Arendt, totalitarianism undermines our capacity
for free thinking in part because it causes us to
question the distinction between reality and fiction.
And to conclude that there is no valid
distinction to be made.
So on page 474, she says that the ideal subject of
totalitarian the rule is not the convinced dogmatist,
it's not the person who says "national socialism
is the best political philosophy out there.
I'm going to hang my hat on it."
And that's that.
No.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is
the person for whom fact and fiction, true and
false, no longer have any relevant meaning.
They don't have any relevant distinction such
that somebody can say, this is the right view,
or this is the wrong view.
I want to close by saying something briefly
about ideologies, which Arendt addresses here.
She says that ideologies are not inherently
totalitarian, but they do have totalitarian elements.
And an ideology is an -ism that can explain
everything by deducing it from a single premise.
Ideologies draw from the scientific approach
and they pretend to be a scientific philosophy, right?
Everything is organized around a particular principle,
say spirit in Hegel.
Ideologies pretend to know the mysteries of the
entire historical process.
And for ,Arendt they're extremely troublesome because
they reduce our freedom
by replacing it with a straitjacket of logic.
Everything can be explained-- and not just explained,
but explained away.
The claim to total explanation that we find in ideologies
intersects with ideologies' independence from experience.
An ideology doesn't think it needs to draw on the
evidence of experience,
because all it does is explain phenomena by deducing them
from overarching abstract a priori principles.
So for instance, something like that, alternative facts,
I think Arendt hints at on page 471, where she says that
in ideology, different facts can change their reality in
accordance with their claim.
You might think about the way that a supporter of Q Anon
is always going to be able to fit in a particular belief
that seems to contradict their belief system with
another belief that makes sense of the apparent
contradiction and says, no, actually this can fit back
in to the Q Anon narrative.
In the end, ideologies have an unreal consistency
as Arendt describes them.
Reality, she notes, is not itself consistent.
And so anytime we're able to find a perfectly consistent
picture, whether of history or of nature, we are
finding ourselves in a very troubling situation where
we're not letting ourselves be taught by reality.
We're trying to slot everything in to a
predetermined set of principles deduced from one
overarching principle, but that doesn't do justice to the
messy nature of reality of the world as it is, including the
inconsistent and unpredictable character of human freedom.