Arendt on the Limits of Mutuality
Julia Zaenker
“Thus action and reaction among men never move in a closed circle and can never be reliably confined to two partners.” (The Human Condition (HC), The Frailty of Human Affairs, 190)
„Es gibt kein auf einen bestimmten Kreis zu begrenzendes Agieren und Re-agieren, und selbst im beschränktesten Kreis gibt es keine Möglichkeit, ein Getanes wirklich zuverlässig auf die unmittelbar Betroffenen und Gemeinten zu beschränken, etwa auf ein Ich und ein Du.” (Vita Activa (VA), Die Zerbrechlichkeit menschlicher Angelegenheiten, 182)
Scenarios of two persons facing each other in mutual encounters are prevalent in modern social and political philosophy. They negotiate social contracts, struggle for recognition or engage in open consensus-oriented dialogue. From Hobbes, Fichte and Hegel to Taylor, Habermas and Honneth, mutual encounters have served as paradigms. Yet, Hannah Arendt is somewhat wary of making mutual encounters central to her phenomenology of acting and speaking with one another. Arendt might want to insist on a subtle but crucial difference: It is one thing to mutually understand each other in relations of personal affinity and another thing to share experiences and perspectives on our common reality of human affairs.
It is possible to override Arendt’s wariness of mutuality. In her monograph Situating the Self, Seyla Benhabib, for example, has fruitfully introduced the Arendtian emphasis on spontaneity, participation, empowerment, performance and storytelling into a framework of mutual action and recognition. One of her central concerns is to address issues of social justice and concrete gender and group identities that have been neglected in Arendt’s work. According to Benhabib, Arendt’s agonistic, anti-modernist view of public space in The Human Condition can be contrasted with an associational view in her later work on totalitarianism (Benhabib, 1992, pp. 93–95). She considers the latter view much better suited to address the concerns of modern politics.
Interestingly, both views proposed by Benhabib imply that acting and speaking in public are enabled by processes that involve mutuality — either as an against-one-another or as a for-one-another. According to the agonistic view, the public space “is a competitive space in which one competes for recognition, precedence and acclaim; ultimately it is the space in which one seeks a guarantee against the futility and the passage of all things human” (ibid., p. 93). This is the public stage of the Greek polis where a homogenous group of elite men competes against each other at the cost of excluding everyone else. Against this, the associational view suggests that public space emerges wherever “emerges whenever and wherever, in Arendt’s words, ‘men act together in concert.’” (ibid.) According to Benhabib’s reading, sites of power emerge from acting in concert through speech and persuasion. The power “emanates from action, and it comes from the mutual action of a group of human beings” (ibid.). It does not need the big political stage to emerge. In fact, these sites of power are particularly likely to appear wherever groups of activists gather — whether it is in a private dining room or for a form of public protest. On this reading, Arendt shifts from viewing the public as a competitive, strategic struggle for recognition by political agents vying for excellence to viewing it as a group-based effort for mutual recognition that lets a particular kind of “We” emerge. Benhabib holds that the latter “We” is particularly relevant for the concerns of modern politics because it can account for concrete group identities.
Now, neither of the views proposed by Benhabib pays particular attention to a somewhat intangible but no less real aspect of human interrelatedness and togetherness in The Human Condition. Since it is so intangible, Arendt finds the metaphor of the web (German Bezugsgewebe, literally woven fabric of relations/references) most appropriate for it. With this she is trying to capture the peculiar experience of boundlessness when we speak and act with one another. In this context, Arendt remarks that action and reaction among men can never be reliably confined to two partners (HC 190). This means, as she elaborates in her parallel German rendition of the same point in Vita Activa1, that there is no possibility to reliably restrict deeds to those directly affected and directly addressed, for instance, an I and a You. Importantly, this is not because there are quantitatively too many humans on this planet for us to determine the consequences of our actions (VA 182). Instead, we experience our actions as boundless because what just now seems predictable as a particular constellation of the web of human relations can be radically changed by a single word or gesture. Therefore, there is no way to fix the fleetingness and fragility of the web of relations, even if we restrict our interactions to smaller and smaller groups. In a first instance, acting and speaking are both irrevocable — since we cannot just undo our deeds — and unpredictable.
Placing the fragility of the web of human relationships at the center of an account of acting and speaking together has implications for how we imagine its power. Just because we experience acting and speaking with one another as boundless does not make it by default an experience of powerlessness. In the same chapter on “action,” Arendt illustrates this for the human capacities to forgive and to promise and their peculiar powers to shape the temporal structure of the web. She claims that the remedy against the irrevocability of our actions springs from the faculty of forgiving, the remedy against their unpredictability from the faculty to make and keep promises (HC 236). To trace Arendt’s wariness of mutuality and why she insists that the political power of mutual encounters is limited, it is helpful to consider her account of forgiving. This can highlight that insisting on the limited political force of mutual encounters is not to dismiss the role of mutuality and close personal social relations for human interrelatedness entirely.
In order to spell out how forgiving is an elementary and authentic political experience (HC 236–243), Arendt considers two models of forgiving — love-based and friendship-based forgiving. An exclusive focus on love-based notions of forgiving is problematic for Arendt because it does not allow us to consider the political possibilities of the experience2. But why should love rule out a political experience of forgiving?
One way to read Arendt here, is to take her to illustrate a characteristic tendency of experiences of love. “Love” as a mutual encounter of the purest form comes with the tendency to close two partners off from the world. The resulting account of forgiving describes an intimate task to nurture back care, appreciation and esteem between an I and a You within their confined circle of two. All that matters in this sphere is You and Me. In the special form of self-forgiveness, love-based forgiving can even be entirely self-revolving. Arendt outright denies the possibility of self-forgiveness as a meaningful, authentic experience (HC 237). I do not think that we need to follow her blindly on her rather harsh dismissal of self-forgiveness as nonsense and mere role play. In certain contexts, it might very well be meaningful and important. According to contemporary mental-health and well-being literature, for example, self-forgiveness refers to practices of self-love to overcome overly self-critical and self-depreciating attitudes. But although we might want to be more careful here, considering self-forgiveness as an extreme case of love-based forgiving can highlight an important and valid point in Arendt’s analysis: Love-based forgiving, whether interpersonal or entirely self-referential, has the tendency to close itself off from the world of human affairs beyond its confined circles and thus to political experience and judgement.
This is particularly interesting because Arendt proposes friendship-based forgiving as an alternative. It is not always the case that we need to establish a closed-off, intimate sphere in order to forgive and to experience forgiveness. Whereas love in its purest form highlights the tendency of mutual encounters to close us off from the world, what Arendt means by “friendships” highlights that it is possible to maintain an openness to the world while we engage in meaningful relations with one another. Of course, our everyday experiences of friendship are personal and intimate experiences. They do require love and tend to flourish in private spaces — for example Benhabib’s dining room where activists gather in secret. However, unlike love it does allow for worldly concerns and point of views to enter the intimate sphere of personal relationships. It thus creates space and distance between the subjects. In the larger domain of human affairs, friendship tends towards a minimal form of mutual personal relation — a political friendship without intimacy and closeness: “[I]t is a regard for the person from the distance which the space of the world puts between us, and this regard is independent of the qualities which we may admire and the achievements which we may highly esteem” (HC 243). For her account of forgiveness as a political experience she concludes that such a minimal mutual relation of respect towards another person “is quite sufficient to prompt forgiving of what a person did, for the sake of the person” (HC 243). It is this experience of distance with a mere regard for the other’s humanity and personhood that enables political experience in the strict Arendtian sense. “Friendship” has a tendency to open up to the world because it creates space for an in-between. It is this actual space between subjects that is crucial for enabling an exchange of perspectives and experiences of the world that goes beyond the closely confined circles of small and smallest affinity groups and thus for a political capacity to consider perspectives beyond these circles in our judgments.
This distance-based in-between enables a kind of togetherness that neither emerges from an associational for-one-another nor an agonistic against-one-another. In order to share perspectives and experiences we do not necessarily have to identify with the other standpoints or feel a particularly strong affinity towards them. Rather, the fragile possibility to share perspectives on a common world in a more minimal sense is dependent on our ability to actively see the same aspect of the world in a plurality of different ways3. In addition to an openness to engage in this activity to see and feel things differently, this only requires a basic regard and respect for other persons and their humanity. The feeling of connectedness that emerges on the basis of this mere political capacity to share perspectives on human affairs is different from the identity-based Wes that emerge from mutual action and struggles for recognition.
Why might this difference be important for concerns of modern politics? As Benhabib and many other feminist and critical thinkers have highlighted, being sensitive to concrete historical and material identities is important for issues of social justice. And, as many have pointed out, the historical Arendt was certainly blind to a range of issues that concern social justice. She did not grasp the full severity of racial injustice and was not particularly concerned about feminist struggles for gender equality. However, this does not necessarily make her wariness of mutuality a mere by-product of a conservative enamorment with Greek notions such as philia politiké.
It is frighteningly easy to ignore issues of social justice, even for those who are politically invested in a particular struggle for justice and recognition. The history of feminist activist practice has shown that the power that emerges from mutual concerted action just as quickly turns into a desire to build up walls around what has been achieved at the cost of denying others their right to full human existence. Take for example racist tendencies in the suffrage movement or, for a pressing issue in today’s feminist activism, trans-exclusionary tendencies by those who have once been at the forefront of second-wave feminist struggles. A minimal experience of connection with others, not despite concrete differences, but exactly on the very basis of our different perspectives on worldly human affairs is important but cannot be taken for granted. Without the openness to engage in a constant effort to share perspectives and experiences, the for- and against-one-another that certainly is a key driving force of struggles for justice and recognition becomes aimless and loses its emancipatory power. Struggles for mutual recognition turn into reactionary efforts on confined islands of sovereignty.4
Julia Zaenker is a PhD fellow at the Center for Subjectivity Research at the University of Copenhagen. She specializes in phenomenology with a particular interest in Husserlian phenomenology and feminist and political phenomenology. Her dissertation project investigates the relation of second-person address, recognition and communication in their role for sharing experiences and perspectives. Her project is affiliated with the ERC-project “Who are We”.
Footnotes:
1 Arendt first published The Human Condition in English in 1958. Her own translation of the text to German was published later in 1960. She opted to change the title of her translation to Vita Activa. She later remarks in The Life of the Mind that she prefers the “more modest” title Vita Activa over the title “wisely” chosen by her American publisher because it highlights the problem of action as central to her inquiry (LM 6). Notable differences between the two versions of the text are Arendt’s creative choice of words — she does not always go for the most literal translation of her original wording — and subtle changes in the structure of some passages and sentences. As the example of this quote of the week shows, considering both the English and the German version of the text can highlight certain nuances and help to elaborate on some of Arendt’s thoughts.
2 The exclusive focus on love-based forgiving is a tendency Arendt finds in the Christian doctrine. According to the Christian teaching, only love can forgive because it is assumed that “only love is fully receptive of who somebody is” (HC 242). If this were true, Arendt writes, “forgiving would have to remain altogether outside our considerations.” (HC 243)
3 For readings of Arendt that support this interpretation see Zerilli’s (2016) Wittgensteinian proposal and Loidolt’s (2018) phenomenological proposal.
4 This work has been supported by funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research.
Bibliography:
Arendt, H. (2018a). The Human Condition [=HC] (2nd ed.). University of Chicago Press.
Arendt, H. (2018b). Vita Activa. Oder vom tätigen Leben [=VA] (19th ed.). Piper.
Arendt, H. (1978). Life of the Mind [=LM], Harcourt.
Benhabib, S. (1992). Situating the Self. Gender, Community, and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics. Polity Press.
Loidolt, S. (2018). Phenomenology of Plurality: Hannah Arendt on Political Intersubjectivity. Routledge.
Zerilli, L. M. G. (2016). A Democratic Theory of Judgment. University of Chicago Press.
