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.
