Reading Arendt in the Russian Context
Study of theoretical concepts of H. Arendt, the influence of her dogmatism on the solution of political problems. Arendt's interpretation of freedom and totalitarianism, an analysis of Russia's transition from post-totalitarian to quasi-liberal society.
| Рубрика | Политология |
| Вид | статья |
| Язык | английский |
| Дата добавления | 17.08.2020 |
| Размер файла | 40,6 K |
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Her decision to expose deductive logic as a vehicle of total domination was biased because her entire school of thought distrusted rationality. Her argument was supported by neither her analysis in previous chapters of the book nor by what we may find in the Soviet material. Earlier, in line with Schmitt, she presented the movement as the most exceptional component of the novel form of government. Consistency would require her to conclude that the movement was literally the motor of total domination. However, the complex nature of the movement -- with the cover of faзade organizations and the “fluctuating hierarchy” which she so brilliantly described in the 11th chapter of The Origins -- makes the chance of any logical deductive process uniformly proceeding through the different layers of access and initiation implausible. Deduction was always paired with hermeneutics, science with prophecy, propaganda with indoctrination, and rationality with mystery. Arendt compared the core of the movement to a secret society, worshipping the leader's “dynamic will” (365). When she explained totalitarian domination through terror and the deductive logic of ideology, she neglected a considerable portion of the totalitarian experience, which was defined by mass enthusiasm and mysterious belonging. Soviet propaganda of the 1930s, exemplified in movies such as Road to Life (1931) directed by Nikolai Ekk or the comedies of director Grigori Aleksandrov, reached the audience through emotion and the promise of a new life rather than through terror or cold logic. Totalitarianism was characterized by this juxtaposition of terror and enthusiasm and logic and mystery. Therefore, an excess of freedom may be partly responsible for the rise in total domination, rather than the tyranny of normative thinking.
At this point, Arendt's curious hermeneutical strategy should be recalled; she interpreted statements by Stalin or Hitler quite literally, regarding them as anchoring truths of totalitarian reality. These statements were also free expressions of the leaders' perverse imaginations. At the zenith of their power, neither Stalin nor Hitler had any reason to not to reveal their true colors. They certainly had to remain mysterious and unpredictable, as arcana imperii is always the greatest reservoir of power. However, although destroying freedom for millions, totalitarian rule created spaces for unprecedented discretion and arbitrariness for those in power. Identifying this unlawfulness with freedom is seemingly illogical, unless, as in Arendt's theory, the law cannot be used as a canon for what freedom entails. For Arendt, freedom transcends the law. However, for the same reason, totalitarian power is a radical manifestation of freedom. Arendt recognized this problem; she wanted to define freedom as non-sovereignty, thereby excluding this kind of unlimited arbitrary power from the concept of freedom. However, her circumscription of freedom means that sovereignty is a form of freedom, although a bad one. If freedom and sovereignty were two completely different things, thinking of freedom as non-sovereign would not have been difficult. Arendt did not want to concede that her concept of freedom as a miracle had the same intrinsic issue, for it allowed alternative readings. The miracle was the working means of totalitarian propaganda; the miracle and mystery of extraordinary politics rather than textbook deductive reasoning was the primary cause that millions of people, including many artists, engaged with totalitarian movements. To adequately describe the logical repertoire of totalitarianism, along with the radical power of consecutive reasoning, the power of questioning, destroying, and creating assumptions about human existence that is exercised to a previously unimaginable scale is worth mentioning.
The Loss of Self
At the individual level, Arendt employed the concept of loneliness as additional evidence of the fatal role played by deductive reasoning (1958a: 474). M. Shuster, who promises to give a systematic account of her remarks on loneliness, disputes her de-scription of logical reasoning as unaffected by and related to the totalitarian condition (2012: 494). That her argument is convincing only so far follows from how Descartes memorably challenged the self-evident aspect of mathematical truths in his Meditations. She contrasted loneliness with isolation and solitude. Unlike isolation, which relates to the political condition of human beings, loneliness relates to their social intercourse. However, loneliness is not solitude, which is simply the condition of being alone. Arendt insisted that loneliness is most keenly felt in the company of others. Unlike solitude, which allows for inner dialogues, the condition of loneliness is defined as the loss of self. She wrote that “What makes loneliness so unbearable is the loss of one's own self which can be realized in solitude, but confirmed in its identity only by the trusting and trustworthy company of my equals” (477). She concludes that, in the terrifying condition of loneliness, a human being who is deprived of himself or herself, may rely only on purely logical truisms (e.g., two plus two equals four).i4 Thus, formal logic is exposed as the ultimate foundation of the terror and ideology that prey on human loneliness. This is another example of Arendt's structural thinking, which sounds convincing when applied to Germany rather than Russia. In fact, throughout this argument, Arendt refers to German thinkers such as Hegel, Nietzsche, and Luther (in addition to Cicero, Epictetus, and Augustine).
However, the Russian material seems to contradict her attempts to establish a correlation between the excessive use of deductive logic and the totalitarian condition. Indeed, Stalin allowed logic to be taught in Soviet schools, though to a limited degree, no earlier than 1947. Before 1947, in pre-Revolutionary Russia and immediately after the Revolution, the main obstacle to finding oneself was the “trusting and trustworthy company of my equals”, whether in the form of a peasant community or kolkhoz or another kind of social environment, rather than an uprooted individuality that blindly relied on deductive reasoning. In general, Arendt's concept of mass atomization which was directly linked to the mechanism of self-loss was inconsistent; adding specifics on the Russian side of the story is just another way of making the same point about her theory which has already been achieved through different means (Baehr, 2007).
The quest for one's own self cannot be accomplished by simply relying on or rejecting the laws of textbook logic. Apparently, neither option was tenable for Socrates, who, in observing the Delphic oracle's mission, continued searching for himself until his dying breath. The trustworthy company of the Athenian citizens was not helpful either. The unlikely parallel between the fate of the ancient Greek philosopher, whom Arendt always admired, and Russian history, in which Arendt was never really interested, helps my argument to become less historically and geographically limited than it might have initially seemed.
Straddling Europe and Asia, Russia is the furthest imaginable object of comparison with the inaugural experience of Western civilization in ancient Greece; however, this comparison remains sufficiently meaningful. Russia was influenced less by the Roman Empire than the majority of Western Europe; it inherited its Western legacy from the Greeks through the Byzantine Empire, not ancient Greece. In a sense, finding invariants that have survived the historical process of translation from ancient Greece to contemporary Russia is similar to tracing the outer limits of the Western world. Disorientation is almost the only real feature shared by ancient Athenian society at the end of the 5th century BC, Europe after the Second World War, and post-Soviet Russian society; this disorientation could not and cannot be compensated by any amount of knowledge of its genealogy and roots. Under such conditions, the Greek answer suggested by Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle consisted of two parts. The first part was to know oneself, which does not quite match Arendt's negative strategy of demonizing deductive reasoning. The classical logic of the Greek philosophers was the cornerstone of the second part of their answer -- the establishment of a common language -- which was fundamental in providing justice to others. When we find ourselves in the same invariant human condition of disorientation today, blaming deductive reasoning for totalitarianism does not restore any meaning to the world, but knowing oneself and being just toward others can.
Conclusion
Arendt was a great political realist because she had a gift for clearly identifying political problems. For example, compare her acute sense of reality to the political blindness of her mentor, Heidegger. However, while clearly recognizing such problems, Arendt did not always offer realistic diagnoses and solutions because of the dogmatism intrinsic to her entire school of thought which permeated her theoretical approach. The consistent features of this dogmatism include a distrust of the normative reasoning in all its forms, from legislation to science and textbook logic. In many cases, this stance resulted in Ar- endt's extraordinary theoretical breakthroughs, such as her brilliant exposition of the novel form of the typical political organization of totalitarian movements which could hardly have been achieved without her ability to think of politics in terms similar to those of thinkers such as Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger.
However, this approach was flawed because it relied, although in a unique way, on the structural features of reality, thereby dispensing with its political meaning. The structural interpretation of phenomena such as freedom and totalitarianism is problematic because it requires the introduction of an external method for reading the findings. For Arendt, this drawback was not an issue because she interpreted the immediate past; her angle was predetermined by the clear understanding that we encounter evil in its most radical form in totalitarianism. Such an unbearable but effective truth is not always given to interpret other historical periods.
Under different circumstances, the shortcomings of her approach are exposed. Her engagement with Soviet history which holds an authoritative place in contemporary Russian political discourse reveals these flaws. In the Russian context, her distrust of normative reasoning and the problem of justice -- far from being eye-opening -- becomes part of a long-standing tradition of neglecting the rule of law which is equally shared by most loyalists and opposing parties; the performative concept of freedom, introduced by Arendt and even shared by some of her Russian critics, is ultimately indifferent to major political changes, such as Russia's transition from a post-totalitarian society to a quasiliberal society from 1990-2000, and then its reversal which the country is beginning to experience today. Arendt's idea that we can acquire an understanding of politics by returning to the beginning of the Western political experience in ancient Greece should definitely be preserved from her rich theoretical legacy.
The Russian parallel may seem out of place here; however, rather than their institutions and philosophical doctrines, the Greeks gave us their way of questioning reality in such a way that asking and giving answers becomes meaningful. In this sense, returning to the Greeks even more than what Arendt accomplished may be the best way to faithfully preserve her legacy.
References
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Annotation
Reading Arendt in the Russian Context. Alexei Gloukhov, Candidate of Philosophical Sciences, Associate Professor, School of Philosophy, National Research University -- Higher School of Economics. Hannah Arendt is well-studied in Russia; her legacy is noticeable in academic discussions. However, her theoretical positions can hardly bring about a significant change in the present state of local political and philosophical affairs. The reason is the same for both the unusual popularity of her theoretical concepts and their lack of practical relevance. Her non-traditional approach to politics seamlessly fits into recurrent patterns of Russian social life which are no-less distant from the established forms of Western political culture. Being uncritically transplanted into different soil, her unorthodox way of thinking about politics found an immediate enthusiastic reception in Russia, but not at the same level of scrutiny as was in the West. Paradoxically, this proves that Arendt's views may confirm the local status-quo, rather than challenging it. In this paper, I will try to explain this paradox by presenting both the elements of her theory that remain under-appreciated by her Russian followers, and her dogmatic positions shared with her school of thought, which can be elucidated by reading them against the Russian context. Arendt's theory features hidden, but distinct, elitist, and liberal tendencies; to some degree, her theory goes well with the Machiavellian character of contemporary Russian politics. However, at the exact point when she finds an unlikely ally in Isaiah Berlin, her normative solutions mostly go unnoticed. On the other hand, reading her texts against the Russian experience exposes some of her preconceptions about human existence, the meaning of political life, and our relations to history, all of which weaken the practical relevance of her thoughts.
Keywords: Arendt, Russia, reception, totalitarianism, freedom, normativity
Аннотация
Читая Арендт в российском контексте. Алексей Глухов. Кандидат философских наук, доцент Школы философии Национального исследовательского университета «Высшая школа экономики»
Наследие Ханны Арендт в России достаточно хорошо изучено, в академических дискуссиях чувствуется влияние ее мысли. Но ее теоретические позиции едва ли помогают существенно изменить сегодняшнюю локальную ситуацию в политике и философии. В силу одной и той же причины ее идеи популярны в России и не ведут к практическим переменам.
Ее оригинальный подход к политике прекрасно ложится на традиционные шаблоны российской политической жизни, которые не менее далеки от устойчивых форм западной политической культуры.
Некритически пересаженный на иную почву, ее нетрадиционный способ мышления о политике встречает в России непосредственный и живой отклик, но не столь же суровую критическую проверку, как в странах Запада.
Парадоксальным образом это доказывает, что взгляды Арендт могут скорее подтверждать, чем оспаривать локальный статус-кво.
В этой статье я привожу объяснение этому парадоксу, указав как элементы ее теории, ускользающие от внимания ее российских последователей, так и догматические положения, присущие в целом ее школе мысли, которые можно выявить благодаря прочтению ее текстов в контексте российской истории.
Так, неявно, но различимо в теории Арендт содержатся элитистские и либеральные тенденции, что отчасти согласуется с макиавеллиевским характером современной российской политики.
Но как только ее взгляды неожиданно сближаются с позицией Исайи Берлина, эти нормативные решения по большей части оставляются без внимания.
В то же время чтение ее текстов в свете российского опыта позволяет выявить ее собственные презумпции относительно человеческого бытия, смысла политического существования и нашего отношения к истории, ослабляющие практическую релевантность ее размышлений.
Ключевые слова: Арендт, Россия, рецепция, тоталитаризм, свобода, нормативность
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