quare id faciam?

Eugene McCarraher on Hannah Arendt

Eugene McCarraher, toward the end of a long article in Books & Culture (via Arts & Letters Daily):

As with so much of her work, Arendt's repudiation of theology illuminates her insistence on preserving politics from contamination by social issues. In On Revolution, Arendt articulated two competing ontologies of human community. Pointing to the stories of Cain and Abel and of Romulus and Remus, she claimed that the founding stories of "our biblical and secular traditions" conveyed a sobering truth: "whatever brotherhood human beings may be capable of has grown out of fratricide." But if human community originated in bloodshed—"in the beginning was a crime"—salvation commenced in peace: "in the beginning was the Word." Once again, action miraculously saves the world. Yet Arendt never reconciles these two political ontologies. If crime lies at the origin of community—and Arendt seems clearly to think violence the more historically probable ontology—then it is hard to see how words can avoid being tarnished. And if action is as unconditioned and arbitrary as Arendt conceives it, how can it avoid becoming another form of violence?

But if the world and human community are founded in an order of love, peace, and plenty, then we—those rooted in Christian theology—would have to recognize that Arendt's difficulties here stem from her reluctance to join fully in what Charles Taylor has called "the affirmation of ordinary life." Since, as Taylor observes, the modern affirmation of ordinariness can be traced to the Judeo-Christian tradition, Arendt's stratospheric conception of politics can be traced to her rejection of theology. Though clearly inflected by her inordinate regard for an idealized polis of Greek antiquity, Arendt's refusal or inability to see social life as an inherently political realm ultimately stems from her lack of faith in a created order of abundance and love.

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By the way: For more on Hannah Arendt, this short bio at the Jewish Virtual Library – via an interview on the occasion of her centennary at SignandSight – is interesting & seems to be a balanced treatment.)

posted by paul bowman @ 12:10 PM