Facing and Resisting Reality with Hannah Arendt
Marilyn Nissim-Sabat
Comprehension, in short, means the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality ̶ whatever it may be or might have been.
Hannah Arendt, Preface to Part One: Antisemitism, The Origins of Totalitarianism, (New York: Harcourt, 1968), xiv.
The frequency with which this evocative sentence is quoted suggests that it evinces latent meanings. Like many of Hannah Arendt’s sentences, it has heuristic value: it challenges us to make latent meaning manifest, in this instance by interrogating its striking juxtapositions: What exactly does it mean to “face up to” reality, particularly if doing so must be simultaneously “attentive” and “unpremeditated”? Can we be attentive without premeditation, absent, that is, a prior motive and conscious decision to be so? Further, why must we “resist” reality, and do so, moreover, “whatever it may be or might have been,” even if, for example, political reality is presently constitutional democracy? And, what exactly are we doing when we “resist” reality? Rather than resist, shouldn’t we foster, and improve upon, such a reality? Confronting these conundrums head on, as it were, will render the latent import of the quoted sentence manifest, hopefully potentiating an edifying discourse, one that might just be vital to humanity’s well-being.
In the four opening paragraphs of the Preface that immediately precede the quoted sentence, Arendt differentiates between “religious Jew-hatred,” the “hostile antagonism of two conflicting creeds,” and “antisemitism, a secular nineteenth century ideology.” Arendt points out that, contrary to received opinion, the historical separateness of Jews from the societies within which they lived was not primarily a consequence of Jew-hatred, but was owing to the Jews desire to preserve their culture: “…Jewish dissociation from the Gentile world…has been of greater relevance for Jewish history than the reverse, for the obvious reason that the very survival of the people as an identifiable entity depended upon such voluntary separation and not, as was currently assumed, upon the hostility of Christians and Jews.” Jews themselves, Arendt points out, came to believe that the antagonism with Gentiles was racial in nature, whereas Gentiles adopted this view only mid-nineteenth century when antisemitism began to rise. Antisemitism intensified, Arendt adds, when Jews decided that they wanted to assimilate into the cultures in which they existed.
This heterodox, and possibly for some, shocking, but for Arendt correct understanding ̶ that antisemitism became a cultural and political force as recently as the mid-nineteenth century ̶ does not at all commit her to denial of the merciless attacks visited upon Jews throughout our existence, enslavement, for example, or the destruction of temples, exile, the deadly ferocity of pogroms, ghettoization, accusations of blood libel, and other such extreme manifestations of Jew-hatred. Arendt’s decisive point, the importance of which cannot be overestimated, is that antisemitism, unlike Jew-hatred, is an ideology.
In chapter 14 of The Origins of Totalitarianism (OT), “Ideology and Terror,” Arendt explained that ideology is a state of mind such that a premise, e.g., ‘Jews are vermin,’ is taken to be axiomatically true and therefor unquestionable, and that all acceptable laws, rules, and behaviors are to be logically deduced from that premise and obeyed. For example, from the premises, ‘All Jews are vermin,’ and ‘All vermin must be exterminated,’ one can logically deduce that ‘All Jews must be exterminated.’ The conclusion of this syllogism, though false, is nonetheless validly deduced from two universally affirmative, false premises. However, soundness, not validity, is the logical, and rational, ideal: the conclusion of a sound argument is validly drawn from two true premises. This disregard of the truth or falsity of premises and conclusion illustrates the crucial characteristic of ideology that Arendt identified as its “emancipation from reality and experience.”
It is precisely as an ideology ̶ (which is, it seems to me, and I believe for Arendt, a deformation of consciousness that eradicates the ability to experience human plurality and the common world as such) ̶ that antisemitism facilitated the Nazis’ creation of Auschwitz and enactment of The Final Solution. Their “criminality,” Arendt wrote of the Nazis, “was not due to simple aggressiveness, ruthlessness…, but to a conscious break of that consensus iuris” ̶ (consent to the rule of positive law) ̶ “which…constitutes a ‘people.’”
For Arendt, Jew-hatred and antisemitism differ factually, and factual difference is a matter of neither opinion nor rational or scientific truth. One cannot have an opinion about the existence of, or rationally deduce, or scientifically negate either past or extant facts. Reality, the phenomenally experienced world given in and through human plurality, is factual. It is a fact that Jews are not vermin. What we must “attentively face up to,” in the present instance, is the factual reality of ideology and its capacity, if unchecked, to threaten the well-being, even the very existence, of humanity.
What, then, did Arendt mean when she wrote that “attentive facing up to” reality must be “unpremeditated”? Unpremeditated generally means without forethought. In this Arendtian context it means without unquestioned prejudgments which can compromise our ability to directly experience reality. Put another way, Arendt’s term ‘unpremeditated’ suggests that we adopt facing reality as a habit of mind, as our default attitude towards reality such that judgment does not precede, but follows the experience of factual reality as such, its givenness. Thus, facing up to reality is unpremeditated in that it does not require instantiation anew for every experience.
Why does Arendt hold that comprehension requires not only that we face up to reality, but that we also resist it, and do so “whatever it is or may have been”? This juxtaposition is the most paradoxical of all in that we are asked to resist reality unconditionally. However, what Arendt means is that resistance to reality is concomitant with awareness of contingency, awareness, that is, that reality need not have been what it was, and is, and need not become what we expect, dread, or hope for. On this account, resisting is an integral aspect of our unpremeditated, attentive facing up to reality: it is resistance to the notion that reality is always already determined by known or unknown forces, e.g., ‘nature’ (Nazis), or ‘history’ (Stalinists), or ‘human nature,’ or ‘fate,’ or Evil.
The judgment, or belief, according to which reality, whatever it is, is deterministically produced is so pervasive that facing up to reality as it actually is requires conscious resistance to deterministic prejudgment. For Arendt, we can only experience actual reality through acute awareness of its self-evident givenness as radically contingent. Most importantly, this awareness allows us to realize that entirely unanticipated, radically new, events have occurred ̶ totalitarianism, for example, or the American and Hungarian Revolutions, and can occur in the future. Human consciousness, free from dehumanizing ideological deformations, experiences factuality as existentially given, which entails openness to the new, to human freedom, to action, that can birth a world that Arendt hoped for, one more worthy of human beings.
Hannah Arendt teaches us that combating the totalitarian forces that abound in our present world necessitates facing up to and eliminating dehumanizing conditions, for example those that give rise to “superfluous” people, that are precursors of ideologically propelled movements perpetrated by those who are “emancipated from facts and reality.”
Marilyn Nissim-Sabat is professor emeritus, philosophy department, Lewis University. She is the author of Neither Victim nor Survivor (Rowman, 2009) and Creolizing Hannah Arendt, co-edited with Neil Roberts (forthcoming,Rowman, June 2024), and numerous writings in philosophy, psychoanalysis, literature, and political theory.
