Samnotra On Arendt (Excerpt)

 “Sensitive to Shame”: Hannah Arendt on Becoming Worldly*

            Manu Samnotra

 “and only our dreams have not been humiliated” 

         Zbigniew Herbert: Report from the Besieged City

Introduction 

This essay explores the role of shame in Hannah Arendt’s political thought. Drawing chiefly on Arendt’s writings on the Jewish experience in Europe, I argue that shame appears in Arendt’s texts in three guises. First, the shame of her social origins pushes the parvenu1 into seeking acceptance from gentile society and, being perceived as a deeply personal obstacle, precludes the emergence of a political consciousness. This much is fairly obvious to any student of Arendt’s writings on ‘the Jewish Question’ and, specifically, on Rahel Varnhagen, the eighteenth century figure on whom Arendt wrote her Habilitationsschrift under the guidance of the philosopher Karl Jaspers. However, to the degree that Arendt identifies pathways out of the constrained position of the parvenu, she does so by using shame as a temporal device that helps the parvenu narrativize and, thereby, gain an understanding of political realities.2 In other words, in its second guise, shame becomes the very medium through which the parvenu recognizes her subservient position, feels the absence of political community, and is moved to address this lack. In its third form, Arendt invokes shame as a boundary condition,3 that is, as an antidote to “social atomization”4 and, especially in the aftermath of the Holocaust, as the remaining thread that tethers human beings to each other. In The Human Condition, Arendt identifies hubris as the “political temptation par excellence.”5 The central concern shaping Arendt’s arguments is man’s alienation from the world. Although she provides powerful distinctions between the various modes of vita activa as antidotes to the decay of the public world, to the degree that the recovery of the public/political space can help us ward off the anti-political temptations of modernity – that is, overcome the hubris of modern society – a relationship to shame as a guarantee against hubris would certainly have to be part of any solution, as it was for the ancient Greeks.6 In other words, just as there is an important role for shame in the Greek experience of politics, Arendt’s theoretical vision is also hospitable7 to a role for shame in political action. More specifically, Arendt wanted safeguards against the tendency to quit the world as it arises between human beings, and she employs shame as a boundary that encloses the various modes of vita activa. Take Arendt’s description of political action: Although the most fascinating feature of political action is its non sovereign nature, actions only lose their sovereign character over time. Politics – that is, the fact of plurality – deprives the actions of an actor of their sovereign intentions by refracting them from a multiplicity of interpretive perspectives. Arendt highlights this transformation of sovereign design into non sovereign action by referring to action as both doing and suffering.8 To experience political freedom in doing and suffering requires that the political actor not quit the world – either in suicide, in the hubris of a tyrant, or in the search for scientific omnipotence – when his sovereign intentions are not realized, and this requires sensitivity to shame. As I argue presently, absent the bonds of tradition that once provided political continuity, for Arendt this continuity is accessible in the shame of the Holocaust. That is, we discover the last remaining thread connecting humanity in the shame that overcomes us when we realize what transpired in the concentration camps. Note, however, that this shame cannot dictate the content of politics. Rather, as an existential condition, shame motivates and encloses post Holocaust political experiences. There is also another dimension of shame in Arendt’s writings, and this concerns the process through which oppressed persons/peoples acquire a political consciousness. Following Arendt, we are used to thinking of political revolutions in oppressive societies as spontaneous eruptions of political power. This is indeed correct. But the question that still remains to be answered is how this spontaneity arises in societies committed to suppressing it in every instance? At this point, we might advance natality – namely, the innate human capacity for new beginnings – as a theoretical concept, but even the appearance of natality requires hospitable conditions. For example, Arendt thought that anti-Semitism shared attributes with totalitarianism, insofar as both depended on the atomization of society, and each rewarded political quietude. If this interpretation is correct, then how would the cognitive dissonance between ideology (of assimilation, of Stalinism, Nazism, et cetera) and concrete experience transform itself into a political movement, especially if the very participants in this movement had become incapable of recognizing the dissonance?