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March 24, 2005
Charles Bambach's review of Dana Villa's Arendt and Heidegger:The Fate of the Political in Negations (the Winter 1998 issue) highlights a different way of reading Aristotle. It highlights an interpretation that uses Aristotle against Aristotle. Does this imply a Heideggerian destruction of the political philosophical tradition by Arendt? It is quite different to Leo Strauss's return to the origins by re-tieing the broken thread of tradition.
Bambich outlines the interpretative strategy employed by Arendt that she appropriated from Heidegger:
"What Villa does focus upon... is the way that Arendt's whole style of reading and appropriating the Western philosophical tradition is determined by her adherence to two basic modes of interpretation from Being and Time (1927): retrieval (Wiederholung) and de-construction (Abbau). Simply put, like Heidegger, Arendt's fundamental strategy is to read the tradition not in a spirit of reverence or with the aim of repetition; instead, she attempts to dismantle philosophical concepts, to loosen them from their sedimented and hypostatized strata in order to free them up for a radical kind of retrieval that rethinks their essence from an ontological perspective. Or rather, she wishes to dispense with the whole notion of any subject-centered "perspective" and recover not concepts, but a certain way of being-in-the-world."
Bambich then applies this to Arendt's interpretation of Aristotle to show that Arendt argues against Aristotle. Her theory of action attempts a radical reconceptualization of action, one that proceeds through a critique and transformation of Aristotelian praxis. So the stuff of politics is action, not law or institutions as in liberalism.
Bambich then outlines Aristotle:
'Following Aristotle, Arendt defines the essence of politics as "action." But where Aristotle comes to understand political activity on the model of poiesis as a kind of "crafting" of political life, Arendt breaks with him in order to recover the freedom of political action which she finds in the pre-Socratic tradition. For her, both Plato and Aristotle come to see lawmaking and city-building as "not yet action (praxis), properly speaking, but making (poiesis), which they prefer because of its greater reliability." In other words, they come to define politics as a means and not an end.'
Arendt is recovering Aristotle's conception of praxis in response to liberalism's instrumentalist view of politics as the satisfaction of private interests and preferences. Liberalism's tendency is to reduce the political to the economic, favour a proceduralist conception of democracy and backroom bargaining.
But more than a renewal of Aristotle is happening here. Arendt also engages in a deconstructive reading of Aristotle. This overcoming turns to the categories in the Metaphysics, namely the categories of:
'..."full actuality (energeia) effects and produces nothing besides itself and full reality (entelecheia) has no other end besides itself." By virtue of this solid Aristotelian distinction, Arendt comes to define political action as the last realm of activity in which the human being can experience freedom.'
Bambich says that Villa argues that Arendt then attempts to retrieve the power of the vita activa as a way of critiquing both the liberalism of a consumerist social ethic, as well as the totalitarianism of an instrumentalist bureaucracy in modernity.Both are equated with the European project of technical-instrumentalist activity. This is premised on a modernist self-assertion, which converts everything into a means for some subjectively posited end, and leads to a submission to the technological ordering.
There is a big overlap between Heidegger and Arendt's critique of modernity, with Arendt building on Heidegger's deconstruction of Western philosophy to break with the Western tradition of political thought that has its roots in Plato and Aristotle. It is a breaking that is orientated to recovering another way of being-in-the-world to the technological one of modernity.
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Gary
I have often thought that Arendt's analysis of political freedom was very helpful. But her strict segregation of the political and social realms always troubled me. She seems to think social problems can be addressed by civil society, or government technocrats, and economic inequality ought not to be addressed in the political realm. To not address economic inequality, or even "lack of opportunity," seems to be a major deficiency in her analysis.