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January 8, 2006
In his "review of Dana Villa's Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of the Political, Charles Bambach says that on Villa's interpretation of Arendt the distinction between praxis and poiesis, acting and making, is absolutely central to Hannah Arendt's theory of political action, her critique of the philosophical tradition and her analysis of modernity. Bambach says that against the vita contemplativa, the Western tradition's privileging of Socrates' ideal of the bios theoretikos and the Augustinian model of contemplative stillness:
Arendt puts forth the possibility of an active life that reverses the hierarchy of contemplation and steadfastly asserts the value of human activity. In both Marx and Nietzsche, Arendt locates the sources for this reversal even as she questions their effect on genuinely changing what she terms "the conceptual framework" of the Western philosophical tradition... Arendt further complicates her analysis of the action/contemplation split by juxtaposing it with categories derived from Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics, explicitly the distinction between praxis and poiesis. Praxis for Aristotle designates the realm of human "action," whereas poiesis can be defined as the realm of "productive activity." As Aristotle sees it, production realizes itself as activity only when it achieves some result or product. In this sense, as Aristotle lays it out in Book Six of the Nichomachean Ethics: "praxis (action) and poiesis (production) are generically different . . . . production has an end other than itself, but action does not.... [Rather] action is itself an end" (NE 1140b). Arendt finds in this fundamental Aristotelian distinction between praxis and poiesis the philosophical basis of her own critique of Western contemplation
Arendt's Heideggerian strategy is to dispense with the whole notion of any subject-centered "perspective" and recover not concepts, but a certain way of being-in-the-world.
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, thereby privileging of poiesis over praxis as a way of determining human affairs. Arendt breaks with him in order to recover the freedom of political action: vita activa as praxis as an activity that has no end outside of itself. Political life is the public sphere, (as distinct from the family and the economy) and is the arena in which we are uniquely able to express our human capacity to jointly address common concerns.
Arendt uses this understanding 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 "the modern age", which she equates with the European project of technical-instrumentalist activity since the seventeenth century). In modernity contemporary life winds up being caught within this instrumentalist mode of being, a mode that leads humanity to desire ever more power and control over the world of nature.
This is usually interpreted in the secondary literature as an updated version of Aristotelian praxis with Arendt interpreting praxis as phronessis. Villa argues that Arendt's conception of poliical life needs be interepretated through Heidegger's critique of Cartesian subjectivity and its corresponding instrumentalism. By deconstructing the Cartesian will to mastery (reconfigured as Nietzsche's will to power), Heidegger pointed to a new ontological sense of freedom--not of the self-grounding subject, but of human Dasein as a form of "being-in-the-world." For Arendt, this implied that human freedom was marked by finitude, contingency, and worldliness-properties that reinforced the public character of existence rather than the privatized, interior, and abstract world of the Cartesian subject.
Bambach then says that:
Villa argues that Arendt "politicizes" Heidegger's existential lexicon by inverting the Heideggerian identification of authenticity with interiority and inauthenticity with the public world of the "they-self." In Arendt's view, Heidegger has offered a brilliant critique of modern subjectivity, but he has, nonetheless, fallen victim to the same invidious privileging of the authentically interior vita contemplativa against the inauthentically public vita activa.
Bambach argues that this account is based on Villa interpreting Heideggerian authenticity as a phenomenon of the "private" realm and inauthenticity as something "public." He then argues that Arendt inverts these categories and manages to wrest free the positive, Aristotelian meaning of public discourse from the Heideggerian realm of "idle talk," "publicness," and the "they-self." He says that this account underplays or misses the deeply political nature, of Heidegger's work after 1935.
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Villa published an early, short essay version of his book in Political Theory with responses from Bonnie Honig and Jeffrey Isaac.