Is Hannah Arendt the First Ethnographic Philosopher? Research Time, 26/11/2013

As I’ve studied Hannah Arendt’s work on and off over the years, I have noticed one mainstream interpretation of her openly political works. This is that there is a significant break between her analysis of totalitarian philosophy and culture between The Origins of Totalitarianism and Eichmann in Jerusalem. I most recently read Daniel Maier-Katkin’s biography of Arendt, Stranger From Abroad, which described Origins as a book about totalitarianism as a mass radical fanaticism. This, for a start, simplifies the ideas of Origins to an absurd degree. But he says there was a radical break between this conception and Eichmann, where Arendt focusses on the pettiness and small mind of those who do evil, the horrible acts that come when people do not think. 

Now, that distinction is definitely correct, but Arendt’s thinking is really far more complex. I think the interpretation of a radical break between these works comes from misinterpreting them as being more similar than they really are. Origins and Eichmann are works with similar themes that refer to the same historical period, that of the totalitarian dictatorships of Europe. But they are books in entirely different philosophical domains.

Origins was published in 1951, and although the chapter “Ideology and Terror” was a 1958 edition and some changes were made over the editions leading up to 1968, it has a markedly different focus from Eichmann, which was published in 1963. Origins is a wide-ranging study, attempting to describe the essence of totalitarian movements themselves by analyzing all their peculiar articulations. Their innovations in the secret police, the creation of death camps, the universalization of a climate of fear and terror, the reduction of individuals to constituents of a unified nation-state alone, these are descriptions of what makes that new political system unique. 

This philosophical specimen, labelled
Adolf Eichmann, was collected in 1960
and preserved in glass.

Eichmann in Jerusalem has a different domain entirely. And I’m not talking about the difference between political/historical scholarship and journalism, though that difference of style is important. Eichmann is a case study, and an extrapolation of philosophical ideas about an individual’s relation to political and social movements, how an individual negotiates moralities in a political context that has already been described. It constitutes an example of what I’ve called in earlier posts philosophical ethnography, a technique of philosophical research I want to explore in the utopias project. Eichmann in Jerusalem is itself a case study of a particular individual who held a position of power in a totalitarian regime. Adolf Eichmann himself is this case study, the empirical basis for a series of philosophical reflections. 

I think of Arendt’s work as fitting into two categories, depending on their emphasis in subject matter. There are the philosophical works like The Human Condition, The Life of the Mind, and the Kant lectures that focus on political philosophy in straightforwardly conceptual terms. These works refer to the philosophical tradition explicitly and position themselves as contributions to that tradition. 

Then there are the political works like The Origins of Totalitarianism and Eichmann in Jerusalem. These are more often called history or journalism and are the works that a doctrinally conservative voice would say disqualifies Arendt from being included in the canon of philosophical writers. But these works, despite their thorough historical empirical method in the earlier book or the journalistic style of the latter (a necessity when your first commissioner is The New Yorker), are just as philosophically creative. Origins and Eichmann are both works of political and moral philosophy. 

The only difference between these and most other philosophical works is that Arendt does not restrict her analyses to an abstract level of pure concepts. Empirical research informs her philosophical thinking and stimulates her to pursue particular lines of inquiry and reasoning. In the mid-twentieth century especially, all divisions of philosophy kept empirical research and information out of their reasoning so as to keep their thought purely universal. But Arendt’s philosophical originality depends on her looking to the world of particulars in which she lived to spur thinking that operated outside traditionally-accepted prejudices. Only with the stimulus of the everyday world can we understand when that which everyone so obviously believes to be true has actually become an outdated prejudice.

Ethnographic Philosophy? Jamming, 15/10/2013

I understand how weird it might have been to see my Assignment: Earth fiction exercise post the day after such a depressing argument on Friday. The truth is, last month, I wrote four of those posts in a night, and spread their uploads over several weeks, because no one reads the weekend posts anyway.

As I’ve been thinking about some of the central ideas of the utopias project, it occurred to me recently that the key tradition for me to engage with isn’t Marxism, but anarchism. I am, of course, talking about the political philosophy describing hypothetical societies who survive by building institutions of everyday mutual aid on community-sized scales without the necessity of a large bureaucratic state requiring heavy taxes to sustain. 

Peter Kropotkin and Mikhail Bakhunin are the theorists I’m most familiar with, and even here I’m rusty. There doesn’t seem to be that sense of historical inevitability in anarchist thinking that appears in so many Marxisms. There appears to be much more faith in nonviolent action in close-knit communities of people working together to improve the conditions of their lives. What could be a more foolish dream than that?

Think about anarchism of this type, the ideology that says local communities can organize among themselves, and use the various talents of each person in a neighbourhood to work as a team to provide essential, or at least pleasant and beneficial, services. Yet much of mainstream political theory emerging from the last few decades has focussed on liberalism and critiques of liberalism, a typical move given that modern political philosophy in North America was literally revived from the dead by John Rawls when he published A Theory of Justice. The main reason I think anarchism isn’t a word that’s considered seriously in political philosophy is because there were actual anarchist terrorists in the late nineteenth century in Europe, and because the obvious public image of anarchism are the window-smashing people at political protests.* 

*Speaking of conspiracy theories, these black-clad hyper-violent protestors are the object of rumours that they’re undercover police officers who are assigned to damage property to turn the public against protest movements. Speaking at least from my anecdotal experience, at every gathering of anti-violence political activists, there’s at least one person who presumes this of every marcher who throws a brick through a window. I can’t say for sure. None of the black-block protestors at the Toronto G20 ever showed me their IDs.

One problem with pursuing this line of research now is that I have a lot of work to do. I’m very rusty on the anarchist tradition, having left much of my thinking in that branch of political philosophy behind when I began focussing on philosophy of mind research (yes, it’s been that long). So while I have a long way to go, I need to know the best places to start, not just to examine the classics, but who is thinking along these lines now, if anyone.

One interesting way to investigate anarchist philosophy is to look at examples of this kind of community organizing in real life, interviewing actual people working today, who, practically speaking are anarchists, whether or not they call themselves by the title. It amounts to doing political philosophy with a grounding in direct political action, using the tools of ethnography to build a conceptual starting point for a more complex set of inquiries and arguments that move in the abstract and theoretical directions philosophy can contribute to understanding. 

Steven Stitch and Jonathan Weinberg are two philosophers who incorporate laboratory techniques into our discipline, investigating how people tend to think in intuition pumps, exploring how civilian humans use the tools of philosophy, and seeing how general purpose our reasoning really is. Stitch and Weinberg’s work is very important as a critique of philosophy itself, but their most important conclusion so far applies to the limitations of common philosophical tools like intuition pumps. I’d be using the methods of ethnography to collect raw material for philosophical reasoning.

After all, there are quite a few histories of philosophy that describe the discipline as a once-broad subject that other disciplines develop inside, then diverge from. It’s time we took a couple of ideas and methods from other disciplines instead.