Hannah Arendt

The Phenomenological Approach

Arendt herself admitted that the approach adopted by her does not belong to any ‘school and
hardly uses any of the officially recognized or officially controversial instruments’. Within social
sciences the common methods are empirical-quantitative tools used to measure and process
data. In case of non-empirical humanities, regularities are constructed through logic and
argumentation – generalization, abstraction, drawing analogies and deduction.

Arendt’s distinct approach as a political thinker can be understood through a phenomenological

understanding of being. She proceeds neither by an analysis of general political concepts such
as state, sovereignty etc. nor by aggregative accumulation of empirical data as in the behavioral
tradition. Instead, she starts from focusing on the experiential character of human life. She
attempts to uncover the fundamental structures of political experience.

In fact, Arendt sees the conceptual core of traditional political philosophy as an impediment as
it inserts presuppositions between the observer and the political phenomenon in question. She
was opposed to any such dogmatic treatment of human nature or experience such as in the
work of Hobbes.

Phenomenology is an anti-metaphysical philosophical method or school of thought. It was

developed first by Edmund Husserl in early 20th century and later on by philosophers like Karl
Jaspers and Martin Heidegger.

Phenomenology concerns with the descriptive analysis of phenomenon – the way in which
things appear to us in lived experience. It says that there is no use bothering about
metaphysical abstractions which cannot be perceived by human beings. Reality consists of
objects and events as they are perceived or understood in the human consciousness. There is
no relevant reality beyond our experiences.

Phenomenology is a study of experience and of how we experience. It studies structures of

conscious experience as from a subjective or first person point of view. Experience here does
not merely include passive sensory perception but imagination, thought, emotion, desire and
action. It includes everything that we live through and perform. What makes an experience
conscious is a certain awareness that a person has of the experience while living through it or
performing it.

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Thus, phenomenology is the study of appearances as opposed to the study of reality. It can be
held in contrast to the Socratic school of thought which considered our experiences only as
‘imperfect opinions’ and treated reality as we perceive only a ‘shadow of ideas’. In contrast,
phenomenology is concerned only in dealing with the subjective consciousness and
experiences.

Phenomenologists focus their attention on the phenomenon or appearance. They view human
beings as situated selves, distinct from the natural world of objectivity. They are critical of a
belief in a typical human nature or essentialism which is most closely observed in the
metaphysical tradition. Arendt distinguishes between what we are and who we are. What we
are is the sum total of all our objectifiable features such as – race, caste, class, physical
appearances. Who we are is what Arendt is interested in, symbolizing our situated, non-
objectifiable and unique life stories.

Arendt’s approach of hermeneutic or interpretive phenomenology is evident from her

introductory remarks to The Human Condition: ‘what I propose is very simple, it is to think what
we are doing’.

In the Origin of Totalitarianism, she writes, “This book is an attempt at examining and bearing
consciously the burden that events have placed upon us - neither denying their existence nor
submitting meekly to their weight as though everything that in fact happened could not have
happened otherwise”.

For Arendt, experiences remain the true and the only reliable teachers of political scientists as
they are the most trustworthy source of information for those engaged in politics. Any research
should remain bound to experience as circle is to its center.

Arendt’s explication of the constitutive features of the vita activa in the Human Condition can
also be viewed as the phenomenological uncovering of the structures of human action as
experienced rather than as abstract conceptual constructions.

The Origins of Totalitarianism

Arendt’s first major work on totalitarianism was published in 1951 as a response to Nazism,
Fascism and Stalinism. She insisted that these manifestations of political evil could not be
understood as mere extensions of already existing precedents. They rather represented a
completely ‘novel form of government’, one built upon terror and ideological fiction. Older
despotisms had used terror as an instrument for attaining or sustaining power. In modern
totalitarian regimes, terror was no longer a means to a political end. It had become an end in

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itself. Terror within a totalitarian state takes the form of dominating human beings from within.
Not only must one avoid expressing dissenting thoughts; merely possessing such thoughts itself
constitutes as a crime.

Totalitarianism was essentially bureaucratically centralized violence made possible by 20th

century technology in the service of 19th century ideology. Tracing the roots of the totalitarian
government, Arendt argued that it all had started with the Napoleonic post-revolutionary
threat of disintegration of nation-state. For many centuries, since the times of Charlemagne,
people had been moving to a notion of shared occupation of territory. The Enlightenment
represented the pinnacle of evolution of a civic society with its emphasis on universalization of
the role of reason.

However, the turbulence caused in early 19th century due to changing national borders and
official liaisons made people turn once again to various identities other than citizenship. They
began to revert to older notions of clan, race, family or tribe. The Enlightenment’s genuine
tolerance and curiosity for everything human was being replaced by a morbid lust for the
exotic, abnormal and different as such.

Arendt identified two factors behind the rise of this exclusionary tribalism which culminated in
20th century totalitarianism – romanticism and racialism. Rousseau’s romantic idealism was
much popular in European circles in 1920s and 1930s and just as it had inspired Robespierre, it
continued to inspire many other despots as well.

The racial ideology was developed by Gobineau who put forth the historical doctrine of the
spiritual superiority of the Aryan race. In his opinion, the reason behind fall of all civilizations
was the inter-mixing of blood, especially with the inferior races such as Africans and Jews. Thus,
Jews were turned to a race from a people following a religion.

To this potently explosive ideological mix was added the experience gained by colonial
domination in exploiting aboriginal populations. The administrative machinery for suppression
developed for the colonies in imperialism had only to be turned towards the people in
totalitarian regimes.

Arendt saw pan-Germanic Nazism and pan-Slavic Communism as very similar. Both of them had
originated from romantic idealism and were based on identical pseudo-scientific theories of
history. While Nazism cited race as the defining characteristic of humanity, Communism
substituted class. Although Communism had humanitarian ends, the very nature of its
totalitarian program ensured that the end will always be overwhelmed by the dehumanizing
means employed.

Arendt believed that totalitarian movements gain ground most rapidly where the public is both
gullible and cynical about democratic institutions. While the public generally has a mob
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mentality in such society, the intelligentsia also happens to have a similar mindset. The popular
appeal of totalitarian ideologies with their capacity to mobilize population rests on the
devastation of ordered societies in which people live. The impact of Great War, Depression and
the spread of revolutionary unrest left people open to such messianic ideas which promised
deliverance from their woes, enabling the rise of Fascism in Europe.

On Revolution

Arendt considered that the use of term revolution should be reserved to denote fundamental
change in human ways of thinking and relating. She was convinced that in the same way as ‘just
wars’ can no more be tolerated, so too are violent revolutions no longer justifiable, no matter
how good their cause.

Her primary objection was to the inevitable long term desensitizing effects of violent means on
the people who resort to them. It prepares such leaders and followers only for totalitarianism.
She deplored the glorification of violence in the pursuit of social change. For this, she criticized
Sartre and Fannon who had granted theoretical legitimacy to the use of violence in resisting
colonialism.

Like John Dewey, Gandhi and many other idealist thinkers, she recognized a continuity of
means and ends. She believed that we are shaped irrevocably by the path we follow in the
pursuit of our goals. Our goals might be lost if we opt for an unsuitable path. This is the reason
she does not regard the French Revolution high in its ideals.

She disagrees with both liberals and Marxists in their analysis of the two revolutions of modern
times – American and French. She disputes the liberal claim that these revolutions were meant
to establish a limited government which would make individual liberty non-violable. Whereas,
she also does not agree with the Marxist justification that revolutions are primarily meant to
address socio-economic questions.

Arendt claims that what sets apart revolutions is the fact that they exhibit an exercise of
fundamental political capacities by people acting together, on the basis of mutually agreed
common purposes in order to establish a public space of freedom. In this attempt to establish a
public and institutional space of civic freedom and participation, these revolutionary moments
stand out at best examples of action.

However, Arendt finds both American and French revolutions as incomplete in establishing an
enduring public space in which coordinated action could be exercised. In the case of French
Revolution, the questions of political freedom were overshadowed by social question of
meeting basic necessities of life. Arendt believes that the distribution of goods and resources
properly belongs to the oikos or the private sphere and not to the public realm. Moreover, the
French Revolution degenerated into violence and anarchy which only managed to destroy all
legitimate power that people had.
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The American Revolution did manage to found a constitution based on common assent, yet
even it failed to create a common space in which every citizen could participate in the
government. The average citizen, although protected from the exercise of an arbitrary
authority, was not a participant in judgment and authority.

The only real revolution in modern times, she believes, has been that of secularism whereby
humans are slowly freeing themselves from the fears engendered by mythologies.

Theory of Action: The Human Condition

In her work The Human Condition, Arendt introduces the term vita activa (active life) by
distinguishing it from a contemplative life (vita contemplativa). She categorizes the vita activa in
three categories of labor, work and action which are in an ascending hierarchy of importance.

Labor: Man as Animal Laborans

Labor is that activity which corresponds to the biological processes and necessities of human
existence, the practices which are necessary for the maintenance of life itself. Labor is
characterized by its never-ending character. It does not lead to the creation of something
permanent. Its efforts are quickly consumed and it must be performed anew everytime. While
performing labor, humanity is closest to animals and is the least human.

The activity of labor is commanded by necessity and the human being as laborer is equivalent
to the slave. Labor is characterized by unfreedom. Thus, Arendt was highly critical of Marx in
whose opinion labor represented creative freedom and an end of human alienation.

She also believes that the prioritization of the economic which has attended the rise of
capitalism has all but eclipsed the possibilities of meaningful political agency and the pursuit of
higher ends which should be the proper concern of public life.

Work: Man as Homo Faber

Work corresponds to the fabrication of an artificial world of things, which can endure beyond
temporarily beyond the act of creation itself. Work creates a world distinct from anything given
in nature, a world which is durable, semi-permanent and relatively independent from the
individual actors.

Humanity in this mode of its activity is termed as Homo Faber by Arendt. Homo Faber is the
builder of walls (both physical and cultural) which divide the human realm from that of nature
and provide a stable context and institutions within which human life can unfold. Homo faber's
typical representatives are the builder, the architect, the craftsperson, the artist and the
legislator, as they create the public world both physically and institutionally by constructing
buildings and making laws.
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Work stands in clear distinction from labor in a number of ways. Labor is bound to the demands
of animality, biology and nature whereas work shapes and transforms nature according to the
plans of humans. Work is a distinctly human activity. It is under human sovereignty and control
and carries some degree of freedom. While labor is concerned with satisfying the individual's
life-needs and so remains essentially a private affair, work is inherently public.

Action: Man as Zoon Politicon

Labor occupies the lowest rung in the hierarchy of vita activa. Then we have work which is a
distinctly human activity which fabricates the enduring world of our common existence.
However, the activity of homo faber does not equate with the realm of human freedom. It
cannot occupy the privileged apex of the human condition. Work is still subject to a certain kind
of necessity, that which arises from its essentially instrumental character.

The quality of freedom is to be found elsewhere in the vita activa, with the activity of action
proper. Action is to be understood as participation in political affairs, an affirmation of
Aristotelian view of man being a political animal. It is the interaction between people without
the intermediary of things or matter.

The two central features of action are freedom and plurality.

According to Arendt, freedom is not an inner, contemplative or private phenomenon. It is

rather active, worldly and public oriented. We are free in our intercourse with others and not in
our intercourse with ourselves. Men are free as long as they act, to be free and to act are the
same.

Plurality refers both to equality and distinction, to the fact that all human beings belong to the
same species and are sufficiently alike to understand one another, but yet no two of them are
ever interchangeable, since each of them is an individual endowed with a unique biography and
perspective on the world. It is by virtue of plurality that each of us is capable of acting and
relating to others in ways that are unique and distinctive, and in so doing of contributing to a
network of actions and relationships that is infinitely complex and unpredictable.

This makes action necessarily political which occurs in the public realm. It creates something
lasting in the world. By viewing action as a mode of human togetherness, Arendt is able to
develop a conception of participatory democracy which stands in direct contrast to the
bureaucratized and elitist forms of politics so characteristic of the modern epoch.

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Eichmann and the Banality of Evil

Arendt introduced the concept of Banality of Evil to show that the most heinous of crimes need
not be committed only by psychopaths and sadists but even by perfectly normal people who
refuse to think about the outcomes of their actions.

She wrote Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil about the trial of Adolf
Eichmann, who was one of the chief architects of Hitler’s Holocaust. Eichmann was captured in
Argentina and brought to Israel for trial.

During his defense, Eichmann gave the defense of ‘befehl ist befehl’ (orders are orders) and
that he was merely following orders of his superiors. He described the orders handed out to
him as a categorical imperative in the Kantian sense. He carried neither regret, nor hatred with
him.

As far as Arendt could discern, Eichmann came to his willing involvement with the program of
genocide through a failure or absence of the faculties of sound thinking and judgement. From
Eichmann's trial in Jerusalem, Arendt concluded that far from exhibiting a malevolent hatred of
Jews which could have accounted psychologically for his participation in the Holocaust,
Eichmann was an utterly innocuous individual. He operated unthinkingly, following orders,
efficiently carrying them out, with no consideration of their effects upon those he targeted.

The human dimension of these activities were not entertained, so the extermination of the
Jews became indistinguishable from any other bureaucratically assigned and discharged
responsibility for Eichmann and his cohorts. This is what made the ghastly act banal or dull. It
carried a cold blooded indifference to the human costs of violence.

Arendt concluded that Eichmann was incapable of exercising the kind of judgment that would
have made his victims' suffering real or apparent for him. It was not the presence of hatred that
enabled Eichmann to perpetrate the genocide, but the absence of the imaginative capacities
that would have made the human and moral dimensions of his activities tangible for him.
Eichmann failed to exercise his capacity of thinking, which would have permitted self-
awareness of the evil nature of his deeds. This amounted to a failure to use self-reflection as a
basis for judgment, the faculty that would have required Eichmann to exercise his imagination
so as to contemplate the nature of his deeds from the experiential standpoint of his victims.

Consider the banality of such atrocities in India. Maya Kodnani, MLA from Naroda, handed out
swords to the mobs that massacred 95 people in the Gujarat riots of 2002. She was sentenced
to 28 years in prison. She is a gynecologist who ran a clinic.

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Jagdish Tytler was, allegedly, one of the key individuals in the 1984 pogrom against the Sikhs.
He was born to a Sikh mother and was brought up by a Christian, a prominent educationist who
established institutions like the Delhi Public School.

Evil, according to Arendt, becomes banal when it acquires an unthinking and systematic
character. Evil becomes banal when ordinary people participate in it, build distance from it and
justify it, in countless ways. There are no moral conundrums or revulsions. Evil does not even
look like evil, it becomes faceless.

Arendt’s Conception of Modernity

Arendt had a fairly negative conception of modernity. Modernity is characterized by the loss of
the world, by which she means the restriction or elimination of the public sphere of action and
speech in favor of the private world of introspection and the private pursuit of economic
interests.

Modernity is the age of mass society, of the victory of animal laborans over homo faber and
zoon politicon. It is the age of bureaucratic administration and anonymous labor, rather than
politics and action, of elite domination and the manipulation of public opinion. It is the age
when totalitarian forms of government, such as Nazism and Stalinism, have emerged as a result
of the institutionalization of terror and violence.

It is the age where history as a “natural process” has replaced history as a fabric of actions and
events, where homogeneity and conformity have replaced plurality and freedom, and where
isolation and loneliness have eroded human solidarity and all spontaneous forms of living
together.

Modernity is the age where the past no longer carries any certainty of evaluation, where
individuals, having lost their traditional standards and values, must search for new grounds of
human community as such.

Arendt's negative appraisal of modernity was shaped by her experience of totalitarianism in the
twentieth century.

Concept of Power: On Violence

Arendt says that the popular tendency to confuse and interchangeably use the terms power,
force, violence, authority and strength dictates a deafness to linguistic meanings and a
blindness to the realities they correspond to. She clarifies each of the terms and distinguishes
the notion of power from each of them.

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Force refers to movements in nature or to other humanly uncontrollable circumstances. Power
on the other hand is a function of human relations.

Strength indicates an individual’s capacity. Power never belongs to an individual alone but
always to a group. Plurality is an important feature of power. Power magnifies if it is divided
and spread throughout the entire public space. Strength is simply indivisible.

Authority is a specific source of power. It represents power vested in persons by virtue of their
offices. Its exercise depends on willingness on the parts of others to grant respect and
legitimacy. It depends on a command and obedience relationship. Power does not rest upon
subjugation and obedience but on consent.

Arendt differed from Weber who had acknowledged State’s monopoly over instruments of
coercion as the basis of its foundation. She pointed out that it is not violence but power which
is the essence of government. There was a difference between power and violence. Violence
can destroy power but it can never create it. Violence is the poorest basis on which to build a
government.

Violence arises from work or fabrication. It is the compulsion carried out on the material which
is turned into a compulsion carried out on people as well. Violence is mute. Where violence
reigns, all laws, rules and voices must fall silent. It is an anti-political phenomenon. It destroys
the solidarity of words and deeds which is necessary for action. Where word and deed part
company, way is prepared for violence.

Violence appears when power is threatened or fails but left to itself, violence can only end in
the disappearance of power. By substituting violence for power, the end would be destruction
of all legitimate power.

Power corresponds to the human ability to not just act but to act in concert. It is the capacity to
act in concert for a public-political purpose. For Arendt, power is a sui generis phenomenon,
since it is a product of action and rests entirely on persuasion. Power is what keeps the public
realm. It is the source of legitimacy for public and governmental institutions.

Power lies in the extension of the concept of action in The Human Condition. It can be
considered the closing piece of action. Action and Power mutually define each other. Action
defines the the non-instrumental character of power. Action is not concerned with any goal
outside itself unlike work. Similarly, power is also an end in itself. Power is inherent in political
communities and government is essentially organized and institutionalized power.

She also says that power can only be thought of as an egalitarian and non-hierarchical relation
between people. Power answers to what she calls human togetherness, a life with others. Just
as no man can act alone, power also belongs to a group and remains so long as the group keeps
together. Even the group does not ‘possess’ power, for power is not something which can be

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stored. It exists between people so long as they act together. Power must be understood as
relational, it exists only relationally in a plurality.

Unlike Kenneth Waltz who specified Power in terms of material capabilities, Arendt treated
power as independent of material factors.

By its very nature, power was opposed to tyranny. While power represented all against one,
tyranny was one against all. However, power can also degenerate into ochlocracy when the
weak out of envy and jealousy turn against the strong individual. Then the plurality of unique
beings threatens to turn into a mere numerical plurality, and the group becomes a mob.
Therefore, while painting a positive picture of power, she is also aware of its dangers.

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