Arendt on Ancient and Modern Concepts of History
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Monday 14 October 2024 is the 118th anniversary of the birth of Hannah Arendt (14 October 1906–04 December 1975), who was born in Linden, a borough of Hanover, then part of Prussia, on this date in 1906.
Arendt was a student of Husserl, a student and the lover of Heidegger, and a student and later lifelong correspondent with Karl Jaspers, so with that background she was very much in the midst of existential phenomenology, but it’s a tribute to her independence of mind that no one calls her philosophical work existential phenomenology. It is also a tribute to her independence of mind that she wasn’t a Marxist, given her intellectual milieu where this was more common than not. Despite keeping her distance from popular philosophical movements, or perhaps because of it, Arendt has been enormously influential.
There are institutions dedicated to her memory. I occasional go to the website for the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities, and it seems that they are focused on parroting every luxury belief of the ruling class. Arendt herself was made of sterner stuff, and she showed her independence of mind in ways that sometimes alienated others. She lost friends over her book Eichmann in Jerusalem, which was first published serially as reportage from the trial of Adolf Eichmann, and later turned into a book. She made a number of historical claims that many considered controversial, and she did so in a spectacularly public way that drew widespread condemnation, but she didn’t bend. There is a 2012 film about Arendt that largely covers this period of her life, which is, as far as my knowledge extends, historically accurate, and I recommend seeing it.
Arendt’s political thought is no doubt where she has been most influential, but she also wrote many books of general philosophical interest, and many of these touch on philosophy of history. I personally find it difficult to read Arendt. There are times I have gone over some of her texts repeatedly and I still feel like I’m missing something essential, so I go over it again, but they’re not all like this. The Origins of Totalitarianism is an historically dense book, densely packed with footnotes, and on a typical page there is as much footnote as text — still, I could follow the argument without difficulty. Eichmann in Jerusalem I found to be entirely straight-forward, and I didn’t feel I had any trouble understanding it, though to appreciate the book and the controversy it stirred up, a considerable background knowledge is necessary. Both books are as much histories as political works, and as such they supply material for philosophy of history.
In particular, The Origins of Totalitarianism develops the idea of mass man, who is product of mass society. The final section of the book makes careful distinctions among solitude, loneliness, and isolation so as to clarify the distinctive isolation of mass man. The individual in mass society, the mass man, is isolated even as he lives in a crowd. There is both a left wing and a right wing critique of mass man. While Arendt’s book is a work of political philosophy, she doesn’t force her political views, as distinct from her views on political philosophy, on the reader, but if you read between the lines it it’s obvious that her understanding of the emergence of mass man is the leftist critique of mass man. I said earlier that Arendt wasn’t a Marxist, but she does adopt some of the conceptual framework of the left, and one example of this is her use of the idea of social classes in her development of the concept of mass man.
For Arendt, the traditional institutions that are demolished by mass society are traditional classes, and without this traditional class membership, the individual falls prey to, “…passionate inclination toward the most abstract notions as guides for life, and the general contempt for even the most obvious rules of common sense.” We could compare this statement to Edmund Burke’s criticism of the overly-abstract ideas of the Enlightenment philosophes, and with this we glimpse the connection to the right wing critique of mass man. However, right wing thinkers don’t use the language of mass man, but they do criticize the modern demolition of traditional institutions that mediated between the individual and the state, leaving the individual to enter into a relationship with the state alone. Here the emphasis isn’t on class membership, but on tradition. In any case, both those on the left and those on the right see in common a problem with the mass societies that emerged in the twentieth century in the wake of industrialization, but they express this problem in distinct terms. If we took the trouble, we could translate the leftist critique of mass man into the right wing critique of the loss of tradition, and vice versa. I’m not going to develop this idea here, but even the solutions the two sides offer to the problem of mass man are inter-translatable, but each is incapable of seeing themselves in the other.
In Eichmann in Jerusalem Arendt develops the idea of the banality of evil, which appears once in the subtitle and only once at the end of the book, but the theme is present throughout the book. The idea of the banality of evil is sufficiently intuitive that it shouldn’t require much exposition, but when we expect evil to be wearing horns and carrying a pitchfork, banal evil that looks like your next door neighbor can be both disconcerting and disarming. In a mass society, banal evil can gain a following in virtue of its banality, which is assumed to be inoffensive to everyone and therefore safe. I’m not familiar with anything in Arendt’s work that attempts to demonstrate a systematic relationship between mass man and the banality of evil, but it’s easy to see both as the product of mass society.
These two books, The Origins of Totalitarianism and Eichmann in Jerusalem are reasonably straight forward, as I’ve said. I’ve had more difficulty following Arendt in her book On Revolution and in the eight essays collected together in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought. I want to emphasize that the difficulty I have in following Arendt isn’t because she’s unclear. Arendt is a remarkably clear writer, which is surprising given her relation to Heidegger. She didn’t pick up any of Heidegger’s opaque and oracular style. What I find when I read Arendt is that my mind wanders, and then I lose the thread of the argument. Arendt develops detailed historical arguments that run through entire chapters, so if you lose the thread, as I often do, you have to go back to the beginning and start over.
It’s in the first two essays of Between Past and Future, “Tradition and the Modern Age” and “The Concept of History: Ancient and Modern” that we find Arendt’s most concentrated thought on history. Some of this material in history from Between Past and Future is echoed in her more deliberately philosophical treatise, The Life of the Mind, which discusses the same ideas in an overtly philosophical context, and at some points goes deeper into exposition. Arendt’s argument for her distinction between an ancient and a modern conception of history is subtle, it consists of several steps, and develops over fifty pages. For Arendt, the ancient and the modern concepts of history both follow from a concept of nature, but, in each case, the concept of nature is distinct, so it gives rise to a distinct concept of history. This is familiar from Spengler. Arendt doesn’t cite Spengler anywhere in this book, but Spengler made a distinction between the world as nature and the world as history. We can think of each as alternative formulations of the other.
In classical antiquity, nature was understood to be cyclical. History appeared when human beings engaged in actions that interrupted natural cycles. Human history is thus the exception to the rule natural cycles. Natural cycles will always re-assert themselves as the prevailing order of the world, but human deeds, being exceptional, will fade from memory and be lost unless we record them as history. Thus Arendt begins by citing Herodotus’ interest to preserve the deeds of both Greeks and barbarians.
This ancient concept of history is subject to numerous changes and transformations, which occupy the bulk of Arendt’s essay. One of these transformations was the rise of Christianity, but Arendt treats this in a distinctive way that I haven’t found in any other philosopher of time or history. A familiar talking point in philosophy of history is that ancient societies had a predominantly cyclical conception of history, whereas Western civilization since the Middle Ages has had a linear conception of history, and this linear conception of history is the result of the Christianization of Western society. Arendt argues that Christianization is not what it appears to be in terms of its impact on history. I think she was right about this, and it was gratifying to find this argument in Arendt because I had felt the same, but hadn’t brought it to explicit consciousness before I read this.
Arendt’s argument doesn’t take a chronological form. Before her discussion of the apparent Christianization of Western history, Arendt begins to break down the barriers between natural science and history — she doesn’t call this the distinction between nomothetic natural science and ideographic historical science, but the distinction she is breaking down is in this spirit. The origins of the modern concept of history she locates in what she calls the world-alienation of modern science. She doesn’t use the term “scientific revolution,” just as she doesn’t use the term “industrial revolution,” but she singles out prominent figures in the scientific revolution, in particular, Copernicus and Descartes. Copernicus showed us that our perception of the apparent fixity and stability of the world is an illusory artifact of our perception and our point of view in observing the universe. Descartes showed us that we cannot trust of our senses. Cartesian doubt undercuts any straight-forward relationship between the individual and the world, and while it took time for this to fully dawn, the double whammy of Copernicus and Descartes transformed our relationship to the world.
Vico also plays a significant role in her exposition of the difference between the ancient and modern conceptions of history. Vico’s verum-factum principle holds that human beings cannot understand nature because we haven’t created nature, but we have created human history, so that we can understand it. Arendt’s undercutting of the distinction between the natural sciences and the social sciences puts Vico in a new light, and suggests that we can, in fact, know nature, because human beings now “act into” nature, as Arendt says. By this she means that human beings not only work on natural processes, which we have always done, but we now initiate natural processes. The only example she gives of this is nuclear science — “splitting the atom” as she calls it — but once we adopt the framing of Arendt’s arguments, we can apply this much more generally. Nuclear science is neither the end point of science, to which all previous science has been leading up to as a telos, nor is it the beginning of something absolutely novel in history. With this realization, we can see that human beings have been working toward what Arendt calls “acting into” nature, but this process has accelerated with the technological capacities we now possess.
For the ancient concept of history, nature was a cyclical process, and human deeds stood outside nature. What changes with the modern concept of history is that everything becomes a process, and this is, moreover, a linear process in which repetition is impossible. There are several consequences to the conceptualization of both nature and history as linear processes. One of the consequences is the apparent similarity to the linearity of Christian history, which I noted above. This strands us in an infinitistic time continuum that stretches both into the past and into the future. In the preface to the essay she says that man in the full actuality of his concrete being lives in the gap of time between past and future, and that:
“This small non-time-space in the very heart of time, unlike the world and the culture into which we are born, can only be indicated, but cannot be inherited and handed down from the past; each new generation, indeed every new human being as he inserts himself between an infinite past and an infinite future, must discover and ploddingly pave it anew.”
This is an image that she employs frequently, of human beings sandwiched between an infinite past and the infinite future, and it is one of themes she also elaborates in her book The Life of the Mind.
A moral consequence of both nature and history conceived as processes is the apparent degradation of the historical process. Arendt twice characterized the transition to the modern conception of history as a form of degradation. Of the idea of nature as a process she wrote: “Invisible processes have engulfed every tangible thing, every individual entity that is visible to us, degrading them into functions of an over-all process.” And in making a distinction between meaning and ends, she says of the distinction: “…the moment such distinctions are forgotten and meanings are degraded into ends, it follows that ends themselves are no longer safe because the distinction between means and ends is no longer understood, so that finally all ends turn and are degraded into means.”
Hauke Brunkhorst writes of Arendt’s philosophy of history that: “…Arendt’s theory of political freedom is embedded in a narrative philosophy of history about the decline of man as a political animal, a narrative derived, for the most part, from the first (Graeco-Roman and elitist) concept of freedom…” Brunkhorst is critical of this, and I can agree in light of Arendt’s characterization of modern developments as a degradation that this is about the decline of man as a political animal. But Arendt is neither single-mindedly nor simple-mindedly declensionist. We gather the decline of man as a political animal only from oblique hints that are never quite made explicit.
Another consequence of the conception of nature and history as a process is what Arendt calls funcationalization. The world as a process renders everything that is a part of the world a function of that process. Nothing stands alone, as a singular existent, as did the ancient deeds of ancient heroes the Herodotus wanted to celebrate and remember.
In the third essay in Between Past and Future, “What is Authority?” she takes on — again, obliquely, and with considerable subtly — the idea of surrogates for traditional institutions. Things are not to be reduced to their functions, and the simple observance of distinctions will disabuse us of their inter-changeability. We’ve seen this functionalism previously in my episode on Eric Voegelin, who criticized what he identified as the Gnostic movements of the modern world as being what we called Ersatz religions. Ersatz religions function like religions, and in other contexts I have many times mentioned how Bertrand Russell characterized communism as a surrogate religion. Arendt is skeptical of these claims of institutional surrogacy, and it is a rare philosopher who makes this contrary argument against surrogate institutions fully explicit.
She is, in effect, saying that everything is what it is and not another thing, which is what Bishop Butler said, which puts Arendt closer to the tradition of the English moralists than to continental philosophy. Analytical philosophers during the twentieth century rather liked this slogan from Butler, and appealed to it with some regularity. Another English moralist, H. A. Pichard, writing long after Bishop Butler, made a similar point. What Arendt and Butler and Prichard object to is what twentieth century philosophers came to call ontological reduction, which analytical philosophers also liked, despite their appeals to Butler’s everything is what it is and not another thing.
Arendt was also skeptical of secularization. Again, the objection seems to be that everything is what it is and not another thing. Modern concepts are not secularized bastardizations of medieval religious ideas. The two may share a similar function, but they are not the same thing. It’s interesting to me that Arendt didn’t mention Karl Löwith in this connection, or indeed anywhere in this book, but it seems impossible that she didn’t have him in mind when she criticized secularization.
At the end of her essay on the concept of history, Arendt reveals the connection between the modern concept of history and the origins of mass man. This brings us back to The Origins of Totalitarianism, which we now see as a consequence of the development of the modern concept of history.
