Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition (1958)

the junkie move on you Hannah Allen cool aha you know what we got don't really give you the idea to do a Hawaii I know that data download known as gelatin lord only see Han are you in human so you can see how hard a whole majority of jontron idea initially I would do all aha ok so good afternoon everyone it's my great honor to introduce professor drunken to the audience today Jon's co-founder of the Sydney democracy Network and professor of politics at the University of Sydney his current research interests include China the asia-pacific region and the future of global institutions and the 21st century enemies of democracy so during his many years of residence in Britain The Times of London newspaper ranked him as one of doors leading political thinkers and writers in our time so today his lecture is on Hannah Arendt and her Fame book the human condition Aaron was convinced by her analysis of totalitarianism that many in the modern world were eager to abdicate their civic freedom and responsibility thereby relieving themselves of the burden of independent action and judgment in the celebrated chapter our action in the book she emphasized the frailty boundlessness and unpredictability of political action this emphasis on the contingency of political action will strengthen our sense that politics is an unpleasant burden when taken up only by hyper responsible individuals yet errant celebrated this very contingency seeing it as an authentic expression of the tangible freedom the actor experiences when he or she initiates a new and unpredictable sequence of events in the public realm so in this book Hannah Arendt aimed at providing a philosophical account of the meaning of political action in the total economy of human existence we look forward to learning more on this fine book from John today so I hand you the podium John thank you and I wanted to say that yeah I think it's still still Sarang Powell and I also wanted to say she's here light sounds yeah thank you very much for coming today you will know friends and and colleagues ladies and gentlemen that this four-part series of lectures on the concept of Juncker and challenger shop war political life and politics is based on four classic books and for those of you who didn't come on Monday you missed you missed a very fine lecture yeah I want to just say something about what happened in the first lecture when you may know if you were at the lecture I forgot to use my powerpoint I was so excited and nervous so I just wanted to remind you of lecture 1 which was about Carl Schmitt one of the great political thinkers and constitutional thinkers in Germany in the first half of the 20th century the crown jurist of the Third Reich as he's called we looked at we looked at several of the core themes in his work his critique of liberalism his thesis that a crisis of liberalism a spiritual crisis of liberals is happening in the 1920s that the key reason for this spiritual crisis is the advance of men true democracy by which he understood the advancement of social forces that demand not only the right to vote but the right to a job the right to social security through the state and according to Schmitt and this leads to the development of what he called the two towers that the the total state that is a very strong state whose job is not only policing and and military defense of the state and the population that lives inside the territory but a state that also takes on many social functions a kind of welfare state that deals with on class conflicts trade unions Social Democratic parties by integrating are those social forces into the state and according to Schmidt is this growth of the total state that as it were put on the table it reminds us of the fundamental and unavoidable importance of the political in human life what is the political you will recall from that lecture that Schmitt thinks that we human beings for all of our niceness for all of our civility for all of our friendship have the capacity to be evil to be wolfish to be acquisitive to be egoistic and it is exactly that tray of human nature that means that in the human condition there is the ever possibility of friends and foes that division between foes and friends between enemies and friends developing and that push MIT you'll recall from the lecture is the quintessence of politics it's the essential feature of politics that politics is a process whereby enemies are defined and friends are constructed to protect people against their enemies and this happens inside states so that the function the key function of states in these years of the early 20th century sentiment is that the state protects its population from enemies enemies at home and enemies abroad and it expects the population of those states to be obedient this is the famous protection obedience principle in car Schmitt and of course he quotes from Thomas Hobbes and he is often called as we discussed on Monday he is often called the Thomas Hobbes of the early years of the 20th century this leads Schmitt just to carry on with the summary to the idea of a state of emergency what happens we can say if a state begins to crumble that it begins to get caught up in deep antagonisms with the danger of civil war at home or a military invasion from abroad it's under those circumstances sir Schmidt that the assertion of sovereignty is of fundamental importance the protection of the state because the function of the state is to protect the population from violence and this is a very famous definition sovereign is he it could be also she who decides on the exception meaning in a crisis someone to protect the state to protect the political water has to take a decision and this is usually not something that a parliament can do the people cannot do it usually a small group can only do that and that assertion of sovereignty we could say is thoroughly undemocratic that is the way in which states protect themselves and this finally led us to talk about Schmidt's theory of dictatorship two kinds of dictatorship one of them the Bolshevik kind he called sovereign dictatorship it's over the languages that have been confusing but the idea is that there are dictatorships by small groups who transform the political order their revolutionary they change the Constitution they change the structures of the state to build a new political order that's a sovereign dictatorship and Schmitt understands and and feels quite so there's a comfortable with that although he is on balance a defender of what he called commissar EO dictatorship of the kind that was a surgeon at the end of the Bible Republic in Germany and at the beginning of the Nazi dictatorship Commissario dictatorship is when the police and the army an executive power crush the opponents of the state important to preserve the status quo so this friends colleagues ladies and gentlemen was a brief summary if you missed it of my opening lecture on it and today I want to cause some confusion probably by switching to an entirely different understanding of of the concept of chunk true of politics and I want to talk about Hannah Arendt and I want to talk about this book the human permission which is considered to be one of her greatest works probably that book published published in the late 1950s and the origins of totalitarianism published in the early 1950s are usually considered to be key works born in 1906 died in New York City born in Hanover near Hanover in Germany died in New York City in 1975 you may know that she is one of those rare political thinkers who becomes famous you may know that an asteroid in our space is named after her I have never seen it but it's asteroid 1027 and it's called Hannah Arendt there is a train in Germany called the Hannah Arendt Express if you go to Berlin there is Hannah Arendt Trotter which is a street that joins this remarkable abstract modern or postmodern monument huge monument to the murdered Jews of Europe Hannah Arendt Rose is there there are Hannah Arendt praises as the Hannah Arendt Center at the New School for Social Research and recently 2012 I don't know if it was released in China but there is a film called Hannah Arendt which I urge you to have a look at it's it's about her reporting for The New Yorker magazine of the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem a report that she wrote for The New Yorker magazine that caused a great controversy especially among the Jewish community because of not only her documenting of evidence of Jewish collaboration with the Nazis but the really shocking thing about Eichmann in Jerusalem is that according to her Eichmann was actually a normal guy though he was he was certified by a dozen psychiatrists as normal he swore that he didn't hate Jews he was a formas former salesman of the vacuum oil company he said he never read anything but newspapers he was kind of cuddly uncle probably you have relatives like and of course he was responsible for administering the final solution which murdered at least six million Jews and many groups as well and Hannah Arendt trying to capture that in this wonderful work or Eichmann in Jerusalem and this film is about that experience colourant I think in order to understand the human condition and her unusual understanding of John Drewe you have to understand the tremendous impact on her thinking that the experience of totalitarianism had on when she uses that category she doesn't speak about on Japan she speaks about Stalinism and she speaks about narcissism already that was controversial but according to her the world had never seen before a political order or political disorder and chaos and violence on this scale not only that but the logic of totalitarianism was entirely unfamiliar to us and according to her it's that unfamiliarity that forces us or should force those who are interested in political thinking to think of game to think with fresh eyes and ears and minds and as she put it in a very often quoted expression we are now confronted with the task of thinking without a family you know a banister is the rail when you were going down stairs that you hold as you're going down stairs so according to our n what's now required is that we have no secure guidelines for how to think we have to think in fresh ways and her conception of the political you will see is an expression of that this is the first point thinking without a banister after the experience of totalitarianism which for our ends is not over it can happen again and indeed during the McCarthyism years in the United States she worried in a number of essays she worried that that experience of totalitarianism could happen also in the United States so her whole political thinking is haunted by the experience of totalitarianism and she tries to think in fresh ways about that experience and about modernity modernity you will see in our rents what is not the picture is not very pretty there is a kind of anti modernism that runs through the work why because according to my rent the modern world which she roughly dates from the beginning of the 17th century until today modernity is marked by certain tendencies that all of which push towards the destruction of politics here there's a parallel with Carl Schmitt because you know that Carl Schmitt was convinced that liberalism was the culprit that liberalism was responsible for depoliticizing life of thinking that life could be about money and torque and of course he is a strong critical is inerrant has a similar critique although the content of Liberty is different why the destruction of politics under modern conditions she lists a number of forces Christianity the tremendous grip on Europe of Christianity and of course North America and of course Spanish America why Christianity because Christianity preachers in her view that life on Earth is relatively unimportant by comparison with the future and that Christians should prepare themselves on earth either by being saved by the Catholic Church or through their good works if they are Protestant Christians should pay attention to their lives in preparation for the afterlife and this render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's a famous sentence from the Bible this leads to actually Christianity helping to destroy politics in her view the spread of bureaucracy is another force that is responsible for for the deep politicization of modernity and here this is max favors a thesis that the spread of bureaucracy is one of the organizing prints the organizing principle of modernity I've mentioned totalitarianism if you read her origins of totalitarianism which is translated into Chinese I understand you will find that for her totalitarianism is a system of power and decision-making and violence that totally destroys politics I still not defined what she means by politics but that is and then she wants to say that the modern world is preoccupied with with labor holding out a job in a factory in order to buy a BMW or a fox farmer and living in your family and paying no attention to the public realm and politics maternity is actually a recipe for homogeneity people become the same through consumption through their induction to laborers for example in a factory or an office and they become conformists and it's a very bleak picture I think it's actually inaccurate but one thing on the sand writing in the 1950s why Hannah Arendt are adopted she embraced what was at that time called math society theory there was a great fear that modernity that totalitarianism was not a traffic accident on the highway of modern progress but that totalitarianism tells us much about the very dynamics the structures and dynamics the ethos of modernity so totalitarianism requires conformity it requires homogeneity of people she goes on to say that there are other forces at work in modernity it's a very bleak picture earth alienation if you read this book you will find the opening pages are about the successful space launch and that leads eventually to the landing of men on the moon and she says this tells us that actually the modern world is alienated from the earth I mean our fantasy is to go and live on another planet and this is an anti political sentiment world alienation is a concept that is confusing but what in a sense she means by this a feature of modernity is the destruction of common sense the destruction of commonly shared public norms and institutions there's a kind of privatization that goes on under modern conditions and it leads to mass society now what has to be done about this one of the features of Hannah Arendt political thinking that's important to understand is the way that she looks backwards but put it crudely modernity is a lost cause modernity contains nothing very little of value so in order to recover a sense of politics that is very different than the sense of politics of Carl Schmitt her technique the methodology is to look over her shoulder backwards at the Roman Republic and the early greedy democracies what she wants to say is that the past can be retrieved there are things in the past that are they resemble pearls and at one point she says that what she's engaged in is kind of pearl diving you know she is diving deeply into the waters of the past in order to recover this these beautiful thoughts these beautiful principles that have been destroyed by modernity and here she is under the influence of her teacher Martin Heidegger she's also she met Walter Benjamin in Paris when she was fleeing from Germany with the rise of the Nazis and these influences encouraged her to look for what she called The Forgotten treasure the lost or The Forgotten treasure of the past I mean you know this principle in John Wall because in John Ward today there is a very big push as I understand it to recover a sense of the depth and the greatness of ancient Chinese civilization there's a kind of hermeneutics of rich of recovering the past in order to bring it back to life so to say in the present to to guarantee my good future the same kind of strategy you can find in Hannah Arendt's the human condition notice that she is not an antiquarian she's not interested in the past because she likes collecting you know old things all jewelry old pottery you know old photographs this is not what she is doing she wants to say that the past contains beautiful treasures that we must not allow to slip away from us to permanently forget and this leads her to a theory of action a theory of politics as we'll see that counts as a second standing of politics and puts her a considerable distance and in great tension with Carl Schmitt how does she do it well her concept of action is outlined in this book at length it's not an easy book to read but if you read nothing else you should have a look at the the long section about about action what she wants to say is that we human beings engage in three types of activity three types of action one is labor what she calls labor labor is for example working in a factory on a production line producing let's say packaged foods that are sold in a supermarket according to her labor is a type of activity that is necessary for human life to reproduce itself without food we are nothing there's a there's a second type of activity what she calls our work vac is the German word when we refer in English and in other European languages to work it has a complicated meaning but for example we speak about a work of art a great work of art what is work work is for example a craftsman who makes a beautiful chair which survives through time is very useful to sit on in a living room and where the craftsman takes pride in his or her work that he or she has fabricated this says Canara this type of activity is being crushed by modern capitalist industrial bureaucracy she has in this book though she doesn't put it like this something of a picture of work being reduced to what Charlie Chaplin made fun of you know if you if you look at his modern times film I'm how many of you have seen Charlie Chaplin's modern times yeah a few of you have a look at it you will find it on baidu.com I'm sure it's it's a picture of a worker who's reduced to like a machine and there's nothing very creative about his or her work well according to a rent work is destroyed by modernity modernity makes a fetish off it universalized as the experience of labour and the cost of this is great the cost is high because what it does is destroy action action in the sense of public speech and action that involves joining with others to decide how they are going to live together on earth I'll say more about it in a moment this is her understanding of politics politics is a process where individuals join together as citizens as gone who then use words and take decisions together to decide how they will live on earth and how they will live better how they can improve their lives according to Arendt the concept of human nature should be set aside she says I think correctly that when we talk about human we suppose that we're gods you know if Cal Schmidt says human nature is potentially violent and evil she says you'd have to be a god to be able to say that because human beings changed through time and space at one point she says in the human condition to make statements about the human about human nature requires jumping over our shadows try it sometime that's very difficult jump over your shadow so she doesn't like the category of human nature because she wants to say that human beings living in the world that being in the world is constant self transformation through labor through work and through politics what I'm going to do now is speak only about politics what is politics well I'm going to Ourense politics is not a means to an end it's not something we have to do in order to achieve higher goals in life and politics is an end in itself it's a type of activity that is not just about life couch mitt it's about the good life politics and the good life are twins when people gather together in public and they discuss and argue and disagree and agree and reach compromises and so on this act of politics is always about according to Arendt it's always about how do we want to live our lives can we improve our lives and in this sense she says lots of political thinking has actually missed that point you know the the belief that government the role of government is merely to protect private property this is anti political thinking and she's as you will see in this book she's strongly critical of Hobbes because Hobbes has understood of politics is that politics is the art of strong state protecting individuals who are prone to fall into civil war this is this is a this is a miserable understanding of the human condition and it ignores according to my rent the possibility of politics as the as the production of visions of a better life she's also strongly critical of Karl Marx for this reason she thinks that we should discuss it but she thinks that Marx's political thinking is actually anti political thinking that what Marx envisions is a future communist society where there's no politics anymore I mean the young Marx would say we humped in the morning and we fish in the afternoon we've all rune dance and we have good dinners but notice that there's no public discussion of this nope there's no politics according to our rent Marx is a part of the problem and not the solution she wants to say that when we engage with others publicly when we become political it is a way of actually living freely as equals what she wants to say it's a very profound point I think is that when people become involved in a group situation and consider each other as equals and set about trying to decide how to reach the decision about how they are going to live in the future together then the very act of joining in is the capacity to begin be is very important for hannah arendt and notice that the struggle for freedom and equality through politics according to her is the non violent act violence is the enemy of politics and here we have a very big gap between Carl Schmitt and hollering for Carl Schmitt violence is inherent in the political for Hannah Arendt violence is its opposite why because violence as she says is not only the destruction of someone's life the taking away of life in the extreme act of murder and rape but violence is also the taking away of of speech and the capacity for action there have been writers and in my own book on violence I have likened an act of violence to drowning under water you know some of you may have had the experience of being violated when someone pulls a gun and when someone threatens to use it but when someone uses it it's as if you drown you can't speak anymore you were petrified by fear you lose your capacity for action so violence is deeply Antti political and she wants to say that it's a very interesting idea that when people join together with others as equals and begin to act and find their freedom in and through their cooperation with others then this is a kind of rebirth it's a kind of rebirth natality it's a perhaps for you a strange idea but we are reborn by being political during the question and answer period I I hope we can talk about whether you whether you have any of you have had this experience I can tell you but I haven't had political experiences where I understand that this point of Hannah rent is profound that when you join with others in some kind of group setting you're actually changed and you feel a different person you feel as though there's been a new birth and what she wants to say is here she's against Kyle Schmidt who's very mocking of words remember in the first lecture Carl Schmitt thinks that liberals can always spot a liberal because they always and hanarete says no this sarcastic negative understanding of words forgets that words eccentric politics that it's through speech and interaction with others that we find ourselves and we have the capacity to become free as equals that is through politics and in this respect when a baby is born Hannah Arendt says is the promise the promise of politics may ask how many of you have ever been present at the birth of a child I mean of your own or men have you ever been present at the birth of a child there's anybody in the room try it sometime I mean I I have to say that I did I was at present at the birth of both of my children and it's a terrifying experience but it's amazing and in the case of my firstborn the first thing that happened is not only that you know my child how could we say urinated all over the place went to the toilet as soon as he came into the world but I let out a shriek a cry words you know wanting to join the world this is a very Arendt experience I mean that's no tality that's the birth of a child who in their first words expresses the possibility when she thinks every human being has the possibility of becoming political words and joining together with others and acting together that is promised in the birth of a child she points out that politics requires courage to become political requires courage I don't know whether again any of you have ever had this experience but I'm not going to tell you the the terrible details but I can tell you the first time I ever stood up at a political meeting and said something and was booed by much of the crowd to stand up in front of other people requires guts it requires courage you have to take a big deep breath and and you you it's a risk can I read says that courage is is essential for understanding what in in politics itself this leads hannah arendt to a very unusual one could say quite radical understanding of power let me backtrack if you ask Couchman what is power cosmic will say that the sovereign power for instance is a group of people who are well-armed and are prepared to use that violence political power grows out of the barrel of a gun Arendt says this is not power at all this is a misunderstanding this is force this is force is a type of a type of activity backed by guns threatening to take someone's life away for example in war or in civil war or in a violent robbery or in a rape this is not politics and this is not power what she wants to say is that power is a very is a very precious category that power comes from people joining together to speak and interact it's that banding together that makes those people feel but actually I can change the world and they can change certainly their own lives that they can change institutional structures now this you may think is it's a very abstract idea here is an image from one month ago in you know from global news that situations like this develop this is the leader of the in media this crowd and the crowds that developed during the course of the number of weeks call on the government to resign because of corruption and eventually this public succeeded the government was forced to resign we call it an English people power and that's exactly our ents idea that people when they come together and when they act politically have tremendous shaping power on the world it is it is an experience for which we should reserve the category of power power is not force power is not manipulation power is their coming together of people in public settings um tolerance was interested and wrote quite a lot on cases of people power revolutions are examples you know she wrote about the French Revolution the American Revolution she was very attached to the American Revolution she thought it was a kind of pure revolution where people the American colonists decided that they'd had enough of the British that they're going to declare independence so they write a declaration of independence and then they begin a group begins to draft a new constitution and it's relatively unveiling it's some type of public action that undermined an empire well this is the point of Hannah Arendt if you think that power is a set of resources that leaders having institutions forget it power always comes from below power always it takes the form of people consenting to existing institutions and the test of this is the moment where people withdraw their their consent and they begin to act as a public independently of those institutions and according to I rent what often happens not always what often happens is that those institutions collapse that's what a revolution is and the example from Armenia is a case in point the Russian Revolution the French resistance to Hitler during the Second World War she wrote also about the Hungarian uprising against the Soviet Union 1956 where for 11 days Hungarian citizens actually managed to paralyze the Soviet empire she could have added sabudana in Poland 1980-81 we're an independent trade union is formed Inga dunks that is the beginning of the end of the Bolshevik Revolution at least in Europe she wants to say that power the power of people gathered at equals finding their freedom is tremendously powerful and she also wants to say that that politics in this sense can be fun joy is a word that she uses quite often to describe the experience of politics and if you haven't had this experience it's hard to convey this point but you know there there are moments in a public space when people are acting together to make some demand where there is tremendous sense of joy it's the moment where the dictator forms there are very many buddha cards for example of the Iranian Revolution where exactly this happens where the news reaches the crowds in many cities that the Shah is giving up and people kiss hug they feel that they even more they feel that they and this event tries to capture she wants to say um these are still qualities of politics she wants to say and I'll go through these briefly she wants to say that it's through politics that plurality flourishes what she means by this is that each individual who joins in a public space and through words and Di's acts politically brings a certain individuality a certain difference to that public space that is politics is a process of pluralization of identities people discover that they're not the same that everybody's different this is a very basic Iranian principle by the way you know she was a great champion of the view that the human condition is very complex and plural heterogeneity is what it is to be human not not similarity and she wants to say as well disclosure that what happens when you on the enter into a public space when you become political is that you disclose who you are when you stand up in front of the crowd and you say my name is John King and I am concerned about this and this and I have children and I have you know a dog I have I'm revealing things about myself to others and someone else stands up and gives a speech where they they say well my name is I don't know my name is Smith and I'm a mother of five children and I am concerned about this so it's through that process there is a disclosure of not what we are but who we are according to Arendt she has an understanding of politics is very fragile she says public's can disappear very quickly people leave the streets people go back to their lives and suddenly there's no more politics it can it can disappear within minutes within hours within days and so in general our view is that we human beings do have the capacity for politics but this capacity for politics has to be renewed it can be lost according to her one of the fruits of politics is remembering memory is very important so when a group of people act politically they bring memories from the past they keep alive traditions and these memories are very important for guiding people to about the future she says at one point that um think about politics as as an attempt to become immortal I mean we human beings each of us die each of us in this room will die there's no known cure for it death that is but it's through politics that in a way we keep a community alive we remember our ancestors we act together in concert through words and deeds and in this way we kind of give ourselves a sense of immortality she would say for instance that the American revolutionaries hand gifts to the future Americans who had not yet been born this was a kind of a giving of immortality to people and mailing them to live their lives thanks to those who came before them fragility I've already mentioned um politics convey can be easily destroyed it can be destroyed for example by a military coup d'etat the tanks can come in guns can fire and that's the end of politics she also says and these are important points that one of the striking things about about politics as I've been describing it is that built into it is uncertainty or and unpredictability we can never be sure when we take decisions in public we can never be sure what the consequences will be only a god should know that therefore built into politics is uncertainty about what we're doing and whether we're taking the right decision politics is risky politics is joining together at one point she likens it to gathering around table in the table joins us together and keeps us apart it's a it's a it's a strange collective experience morality but that very joining together contains within it unpredictability and uncertainty about outcomes and therefore she is very interested in the human condition with these are two types of action forgiving and promising here I think is Hannah Arendt's reply to comments view that people are nasty creatures who are prone to violence and evil and manipulate manipulation and that therefore strong rule political rule is the open way in which order can be maintained the protection of life and the condition of opinions what Miranda says is that no actually through politics things that were done that resulted in justices can be forgiven politics is about forgiveness for instance you know during the transition from apartheid in South Africa to the new government of the South African National Congress Nelson Mandela led by Nelson Mandela you may know that there was a Truth and Reconciliation Commission set up this was a very special process where many tens of thousands of South Africans actually came to this commission and said sorry or ask for forgiveness that says I rent is what happens in politics I mean if you see this is idealized you know she has that she has a normal politics but but good politics politics when it really functions well involves people asking for forgiveness and giving forgiveness at things that went wrong an example it seems to happen less these days but it's when oh I know Harvey Weinstein hashtag me too you may know that just in the past few days he handed himself in to the New York police he's guilty and go to jail for sexual harassment and violation woman that says I rent is what politics is about it's saying sorry it's saying it's acknowledging that I did wrong and I'm asking for forgiveness this 4rn is a kind of similar has a civilizing effects so Schmidt doesn't consider this but sure and then promising what is promising in politics says RN we make promises we make promises to keep our promises what is she actually talking about um agreements we have a Paris climate agreement we have trade agreements there's a certain president at the moment who doesn't like promising you may have noticed otherwise known as Donald Trump but politics is the art of making promises to stick to promises and that um both forgiving and promising are ways of over the unpredictability of politics by promising to agree to carry on to follow rules the olds an element of certainty into politics and it means that the future is in that sense somehow more predictable hype almost ish and I'm sorry I've given you a headache as last Monday to the Q&A I want to say two remaining things just to round out our rents understanding of politics I don't know in Chinese the word for judgment making the judgment awesome so I better explain what a judgment is according to our rent there are no Universal rules in political life rules change through time and space how we should act is always dependent on the context people will say you know there is a God and that God has said this as a no you know I I don't believe making a judgment is reaching a decision on the basis of having no fixed universal rules to put it very simply judgment involves forming opinions and taking a decision which is thought to be the best decision at this point in time and space that is a judgment no universals only particulars so judgments are always complex challenging they make people lose sleep in their beds at night did I decide the right thing did we decide the right I don't know yeah a judgement is reaching a decision taking a decision on the basis of deep uncertainty about whether it's right no it's it's it's taking a decision by without knowing whether it's right or wrong but you have to take a decision judgment upon your Padawan maybe maybe that and one last thing about politics Arendt in several passages says that jerk sham truth is a tyrant a despot and I need to explain this what happens when people join together politically as equals and find their freedom and they take decisions about how they want to live the good life and they do so not violently and they find themselves differentiating themselves they discover pluralism and so on and it takes courage and so on what happens in that context are they finding the truth - and she says not at all actually truth talk of truth is the enemy of politics why because when someone says I know the truth they are behaving like a monarch they are behaving like a tyrant baby like a dictator I know and I'm not compromising I know I'm right you must have friends who do this or maybe new to us she says that ideally politics is only about opinion and what she means is that all opinions are important it's difficult to decide what is right and what is wrong but truth should have no place in the hard sense of shâm truth should not it does not it should not be up that he should not have its home in politics that it should be kept out of politics politics is about interpretation politics is about opinion mental politics is about making judgments whether they are right or wrong in a hundred years from now people say that's very strange they decided this that's the point that politics is about opinions and it is about our collective efforts to live life on the basis of opinions she does say that it's complicated but Joan is what happens in science and engineering I think friends and colleagues and ladies and gentlemen I think it's enough on Hannah Arendt and her conception of politics you can see that in this second lecture we have long way away from the continent if you're confused at this point about Western conceptions of true that's good I'm deliberately trying to confuse men because because you will see that there isn't an agreement in the West about the meaning of politics but please come to the lectures three and four because I'm going to try to throw it together and you will find there's some interesting insights [Applause]

Channel: Sydney Democracy

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Length: 60min 50sec (3650 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 10 2018