T W Adorno and M Horkheimer Dialectic of Enlightenment (Verso Classics, 1997 Edition)
H Arendt Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (Penguin Books, 2006 Edition)
A Kolnai, Ethics, Value, and Reality: selected papers of Aurel Kolnai (University of London, Athlone Press 1977) 0 485 11169 1 Chapter 2: ‘The Sovereignty of the Object: Notes on Truth and Intellectual Humility.’
B Nyhan and J Reifler, ‘When Corrections Fail: The Persistence of Political Misperceptions’ Political Behaviour <http://www.springerlink.com/content/064786861r21m257/fulltext.html> published online 30 March 2010, accessed 11 June 2010.
A Sen Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (Penguin Books, 2006) 978-0-141-02780-7
On the Subjective
There is one piece of information missing from Kolnai, and that information was forever missing to him since the study by Nyhan and Reifler lies outside his time on this earth. This is the eternal trap of the present as it appears to humanity; we can know nothing that no-one before us has not known and communicated to us, and any new information comes to us only in the present and never from the future – the entirety of human social and political experience is tied to history. There are many philosophers who saw this fact and tried either to work around it, or to work directly with it – among them Hegel, Kant and Heidegger; but the one who tried to address it in classical terms (going back to Socrates and then forward again), linking it most strongly with the alienation of humanity from itself or the world was Hannah Arendt.
Arendt strongly proposed the concept of natality; the insertion of the new and unique into the old with each human arrival – something that has been linked to birth but is most properly (in Arendtian terms) set alongside political life, not the natural place (or biology) of humankind. Arendt’s particular use of natality in the political sense and her use of the concept of world alienation as a removal (disengagement) from the political realm was my first reason to choose her work to guide my own thoughts.
The Nyhan and Reifler study is necessarily limited – it is a single study of certain aspects of political belief and news reporting; showing the specific ability in certain circumstances of persons with entrenched beliefs to carry on believing those things in the face of all available evidence to the contrary. It is however tangible evidence of the kind of thinking that Arendt examines at several points when looking at the political failures that led directly to the establishment of Totalitarian regimes in the twentieth century – a study that she carried out through the subjective, as a German Jewish intellectual who fled Germany before Krystallnacht, but which was done in such a way that she was also accused of being ashamed of her own Jewish identity – she achieved objectivity in her descriptions against her own subjective involvement. As a gay man studying Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender rights I am also subjectively tied to my work – to attempt to achieve the same level of objectivity as Arendt was my second reason to choose her work.
Adorno and Horkheimer also questioned rationality as against the enlightenment principle of an ‘age of reason’ – there are several problems with enlightenment theory as it stands; that the thinkers who proposed it (particularly Rousseau and Kant) assumed that mankind was rational as a base-line; assumed that rationality was achievable by all persons at all times and all together (transcendence – for example the ‘phenomenology’ of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin); and assumed that a rational mind would always find common sense to be objective (assuming that common sense could be objective). Having Heidegger as a teacher and colleague in common with Adorno, Arendt sees many of the same problems with enlightenment thought as the Frankfurt school of philosophy; but in different ways – and although she rejects many of both Rousseau and Kant’s assumptions or conclusions she engages with their work. In particular the issue of a ‘sense that is common to all’ qua common sense within her work on the human condition and human thought was another reason I chose her work.
On Being in Touch with the World
Clearly to be in touch with the world means being in touch with both oneself and society – as Arendt says, thinking is the only singular thing that we can do: It is a withdrawal from the world; but the judgments we form through thought remain with us when we return to the world and communicate those thoughts through action and speech.
There is a problem when identifying any minority as a singular group – both Sen and Arendt point to singular, subjective definitions as carrying danger; Sen in the creation of cultural identities which appear at variance to one another and Arendt in defining a small part (the what) of a person as their identity rather than the entirety (the who) – it is Arendt’s absolute rejection of identity on a subjective basis as rational within the realm of the political which fascinated me the most; her work on Totalitarianism and in particular those political journal articles which she wrote prior to the holocaust on Imperialism, Race and Antisemitism and how those thoughts later influenced her work on the human condition and the self as a creation of various narratives rather than a singular identity set her work apart from the struggle to find an identity that seemed to lie at the heart of the origins of Queer Theory in the particular form of liberation studies.
Of course, it is also necessary as a part of the focus on LGBT rights to consider the work of Queer Theory and the roots of that discourse in academic terms as lying within Foucault and the work of Judith Butler on gender and identity; but rather than looking for the least conditional universal it is the search for the narrative self in the widest possible sense – the kind of extension of self that Antonia Cavarero has taken from Arendt, keeping in mind Butler’s criticisms of that method of descriptive analysis, that is being undertaken here. The description sought is of a narrative self which could be accorded the ‘common sense’ label in terms of being common to all.
On Having Common Sense
The search for any element in a political sense of commonality was a major focus of Arendt’s work; and one that often clearly frustrated her. Although she has emerged as a source of philosophy in the context of legal systems, her main focus was not philosophical – she described herself as a political theorist rather than a philosopher and did not particularly engage with law in the sense that we as lawyers or students of law would address it. Her interest lay not in jurisprudence, but in the distinction of the political realm from all others and the equality of persons as they engaged in political action and speech.
In that sense, her absolutism in some ways also obscured her own thoughts – although she is able to articulate very clearly the reasons she has for thinking of (for example) the US Constitution for having been flawed by Franklin allowing slavery she has problems with her own method in finding a solution to ‘the Little Rock problem’ since the political flaw caused a social problem. For her the solution could not be found in law; it had to come from the political but had been placed in the wrong context by having a social outcome – this contextual problem that she creates for herself is another reason to use Arendt. In some ways it serves as a reminder that absolute separation of political, social or biological is neither possible, nor in the context of forming legal theory, a desirable thing to do: Given the way that law works between individuals and state in both domestic and international legal systems; and that rights have always derived entirely from belonging to a polity (as Arendt recognises when she proposes the ‘Right to have rights’ in the Origins of Totalitarianism) then the definition of self and collective must both recognise that not only is humanity as a whole not rational but that all systems that involve persons have to accept and handle this irrationality – the law has to be both objective and subjective to survive the attempt to apply it.
On Instruction and Information
Clearly the ability to follow the thoughts of others was important to Arendt; she covered philosophy in an entirety – from Socrates and Aristotle through Augustine, Aquinas and Hegel, to Kant and Rousseau, Hobbes, Mill, Marx and Nietzsche – a broad ranging and eclectic mixture of all styles of western thought; western here in the sense of excluding Hindu, Muslim or African political perspectives which might have been available to her. In addition to covering a wide range of perspectives she also narrows the focus of her work at points by concentrating on what others might think of as being trivial in context – she criticises Kant for separating thought and reason; not because he did so, but because in her opinion he failed to follow that up and give a valid explanation of why he separated them and what that actually meant to each of those concepts individually. Likewise, although she clearly takes issue with Nietzsche’s conclusions and antisemitism she points to the Second Essay in On the Genealogy of Morals as containing a profound insight into memory and will in the context of the promise.
It is Arendt’s consideration of the ability to promise, which she draws from numerous sources and applies directly to law (for instance as the intention to be bound in good faith when signing treaties, as expressed in the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties) which I saw as the most compelling reason to examine LGBT rights in international law through her reasoning and thought – I could return to her beginnings and conduct the same search through philosophy; or I could accept that her insight was sufficient guide to frame the concepts I would have to address in order to examine the basis of the law that was stated as fact by the Yogyakarta Principles of 2007.
This does not mean that I exclude myself from the return to Nietzsche, Kant or Rousseau – just that I am not forced to return to assure myself that Arendt was correct; I can be humble in accepting her interpretation as being better than the one I might attempt myself. Particularly this acceptance applies in the consideration of time – Arendt took a life-time to apply these questions; I have at this point only the life-span of a PhD and three years is too little time to attempt an answer of that level of complexity.
On the Correction of Errors
Within her own lifetime, Arendt did not consider criticisms of her work to be contentious or something to be ignored – she engaged with critics, to the point of answering a review of the Origins of Totalitarianism with an extension of a question asked by her reviewer in a journal piece. She also returned to the concept of the ‘banality of evil’ with which she described Eichmann at his trial in Israel following criticism of the phrase and expanded what she had meant even though her original intention when using the phrase was merely descriptive rather than categorical.
Of course, Arendt’s absolutism also enters the discussion of error – her rejection of the ability of the US Constitution to recover from the ‘founding crime’ of allowing chattel slavery even through the mechanism of the fourteenth Amendment is an interesting one in the context of the political. It’s an interesting position given that it is fairly clear that her sympathies for the Greek model of polis form the basis of her ideal political system without any recognition of the profound irony that the Greek model of equality in the polis could not have existed without slavery being at the heart of the private realm that allowed the ‘society of equals.’ Not only did certain parts of this slavery approach the same level of ‘chattel’ slavery that she objects to in early US history; but the Greek system also relied heavily on the violent nature of the Athenian state in the way that it conducted itself against those perceived to be ‘enemies.’
Her examination of violence and its effects however did express a total rejection of violence as a valid form of political action – in the same way that Sen sees violence as being based on cultural identities that exist as singular parts of a whole, Arendt rejects the use of force and violence as being valid for any form of liberation. This in particular is a linked issue when considering the early works on liberation professed (for example in Carl Wittman’s Refugees from Amerika) a form of violent or rejective struggle and in the consideration that most forms of oppression in social or political contexts against LGBT persons can be considered as being acts or speech relating to violence against those persons.
