Levinas and Arendt

It is possible to consider Emmanuel Levinas and Hannah Arendt as complementary thinkers. In this approach, the strengths of Arendt complement the weaknesses of Levinas. And conversely, the work of Levinas can make visible the blind spots in the work of Arendt.

For a weak spot in Levinas one can point to his political theory, or better: the complete lack of it. That is not to say that Levinas does not care about the rule of law, parliamentary democracy, or the public debate. On the contrary, he makes clear at several places the importance he attaches to these achievements, which he often refers to as ‘Institutions’.

But perhaps his frequent use of that term indicates the boundary of his interest. The existence of those institutions is of immense importance for him, but essentially related issues such as power play, public speaking and performance, or rhetorical communication can captivate him less. In any case, he did not write about them.

However, these latter elements constitute precisely the area where Hannah Arendt feels at home. The political praxis in the public space is for her a stage on which we realize ourselves and the communal life. At the political scene everyone gets a chance to show who he is, and there a multitude of voices can shape politics.

This is a catchy vision, especially because it assigns to democratic politics the task of doing justice to the individuality of people. And instead of arriving at a simplistic thinking in terms of majority-versus-minority it seeks after true pluralism.

But at the same time she perhaps has a bit too much faith in the possibilities of noise-free communication and of presenting oneself to others. That has to do with her deep-rooted confidence in reason to which mature, educated people have access and which can serve as infallible tool for the organization and content of the required communication.

Apart from the caveat that can be made that Arendt’s utopia requires highly skilled individuals, Levinas shows us this other blind spot in Arendt. Namely the fact that reason is perhaps not as reliable as she thinks it is. Because according to Levinas reason permanently produces illusions and therefore misunderstandings. Not because the people participating in politics and debates are malicious (although that could in addition be the case), but because reason according to Levinas has a somehow autistic character, which one cannot, again with the help of reason, eliminate just like that.

For unmasking of these illusions Levinas refers to the appearance of the Other, because he – the injured one – can make us aware of them. Maybe not necessarily by his appearance in public space, and with less glare than Arendt attributes to ‘showing yourself’. But with at least as much power and an equally large contribution to the plurality of the community.

Also see Totalitarianism is with us and Why Heidegger doesn't bring us any further

Totalitarianism is with us

Hannah Arendt showed in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem that totalitarian Germany partly relied on organizational skills and an oiled bureaucracy. Could this statement possibly be reversed by saying that organizations have a totalitarian character? This suggestion is frequently aroused indeed, even by myself. But how exact is that statement?

To begin with one must conclude that a number of parallels is absent. And fortunately so, because I’m talking about the physical violence, the murderousness and the racial discrimination which made Hitler’s Germany the criminal state it was.

But there is also a number of parallels which dó exist, too obvious so to declare the association of organization with totalitarianism as nonsense. And in many cases those parallels refer to aspects which Arendt mentions as characteristic of totalitarian Germany.

A key aspect which she points at is ‘thoughtlessness’. Frankly, I encounter that in organizations with frightening frequency. Too often I hear - otherwise sane-thinking - people say that they get rather unsympathetic or nonsensical things assigned from within the organization. And that they have unlearned to ask critical questions thereabout because they were punished for that already too often.

Thus, on a daily basis many people practice what according to Arendt provides the foundation for any totalitarian regime: thoughtlessness. They practice ignoring their own or other people’s critical voice.

And that happens in an environment which simultaneously is full of rhetoric. It’s all about transparency, making the most of yourself, following your passion, empowerment and other pep talk. Also in this respect a parallel may be discovered with a totalitarian regime: the ubiquitous presence of sweetly colored or inciting propaganda that in the last resort mainly serves to strengthen the grip of the bosses – serving the common good, of course. This rhetoric is an essential part of the control system.

A third parallel is located in the dire situation in which people may find themselves. “Resistance was impossible for the Jews”, Hannah Arendt says in the film about her that recently appeared, “but there is something between resistance and cooperation”. Though in organizations one’s life is not at stake, one’s mortgage, income, or pension may be. So a feeling of being clamped-in may definitely be there, and the job is to seek the vital room for maneuver. Perhaps we have too much to lose, especially in terms of rights and expensive houses. Maybe we are therefore more blackmailable than necessary, and we therewith unintentionally strengthen the totalitarian grip organizations have on us.

Possibly other parallels can be found in the ways in which unwanted persons are systematically blackened, isolated and ostracized. All these parallels together make the question of the relationship between totalitarianism and modern organizational life certainly relevant. Especially since they come together in a frequently encountered cynical view of organizations: these are simply inhuman machines and you better adapt to them. A daily training in this cynicism does not seem to be harmless to me.

Also see Levinas, Bauman and Business Ethics

The heroic cosmopolitical Individual

To think in complete independence, free from bonds of a national or religious nature, recognizing no collectivity except humanity as a whole.

That’s what Hannah Arendt wanted, and she rightly may be called an icon of autonomous humanistic individuality and uncompromising universality. In the film Hannah Arendt which I saw the other week these features are dramatically expressed when she tells her old friend and Zionist Kurt Blumenfeld on his deathbed that for her the Jewish people means nothing, but his friendship does. He turns off hurt.

In intellectual circles in the Netherlands such a radically individualistic stance as Arendt’s for decades was viewed as an ideal. It was the image progressive Dutch people used to cherish about themselves. That image we, as universally oriented ethical missionaries, coúld have of ourselves because we in those days ignored the fact that also Holland is organized according to the arbitrary principle of the nation state. The underlying illusion – facilitated by our geopolitical insignificance – was that universal values and nationality can merge in an unproblematic way.

But for the attentive onlooker that idyll was pierced with some regularity. Thus, strictly humanistically spoken, a thinker in terms of global citizenship can have no peace with strangers quotas. Because a policy based on the inalienable rights and dignity of every individual can not distinguish between refugees, or view borders as absolute. However, that’s precisely what we do already for years, also because the streams of refugees are getting bigger.

Another example of persistent national-Dutch defensiveness concerns our loitering in acknowledging our guilt to Indonesia. Making excuses for our colonialist behaviour may be considered as the least that such a progressive minded people can do, but to this day it remains problematic. And not necessarily because of any financial implications.

Hannah Arendt definitely cannot be blamed for such double standards. She was not held back by any loyalty to say painful things about Jews or Americans or other groups, if her reasoning led her there. She braved the scorn and hate campaigns she then had to endure from those groups and took the loss of old friends for granted.

What you possibly cán reproach her is that she made such an independence of mind to the standard to which every thinker should comply. In this requirement show up, in my opinion, a form of utopian impatience and a deficient appreciation of the extent to which people simply need group identities.

For it is not that easy for people and populations to break free from ordering principles like ‘nation’ or ‘people’ or ‘religion’, and it is a serious question whether that actually is not too much to ask. You don’t have to be fascistic when you can only limitedly identify with an abstract, cosmopolitan citizenship. It could very well be an existential necessity for many people to primarily identify with a local or ethnic group, before the rest of the world is covered.

Besides, there are pragmatic motives for drawing boundaries. If you do not want to immediately take the suffering of the world on your shoulders, a clear unity like the nationstate provides the most effective scale for organizing (more or less) sustainable arrangements of social security, health insurance and wealth distribution.

From that perspective Arendt could be blamed for a certain severity. She wanted, despite her efforts to practice thinking within context, not to be disturbed too much by historically developed, or pragmatic and therefore random elements. Even though for its bearers these could be of great significance.

I honestly think that Arendt aims a bit too high. That does not mean that attachment to nations or peoples should still have the stone-carved shape of classical Zionism or German or British nationalism. Actually, partly due to the scale of migration and globalization, the rise is observable of various forms of multiple identity in which one culturally focuses on more than one country or nation.

This trend seems to me a valuable correction or addition to traditional identities and nationalisms. Indeed, I would say double – preferably conflicting – passports for one person is a good thing. But that’s still different from the boundless, almost abstract universalism that Hannah Arendt had in mind. Also see Why Heidegger doesn't bring us any further and Hannah Arendt's Heroes

Parrhesia

If parrhesia is a virtue than the Jewish people may be called virtuous indeed. Because parrhesia can be translated as ‘frankness’, or ‘outspokenness’ or as ‘saying what you think’. Well, that uses to come easy to a lot of Jews.

Yet the word does not stem from the Jewish tradition but from the Greek. The word parrhesia first appears in Euripides and continues to appear from the end of the fifth century before the common era in the writings of classical Greek antiquity.

In our time the word was revitalized by the French philosopher Michel Foucault who in 1983/84 gave lectures on parrhesia as the phenomenon whereby a speaker frees himself and speaks out boldly. In modernity, when man is increasingly thrown back upon himself, Foucault considers it important to be faithful to oneself and to one’s own thoughts.

The most recent plea for parrhesia I read comes from the British Professor Frank Furedi. He advocates parrhesia under the admonition “Man, dare to judge”. Therewith he counters the tendency to lukewarm tolerance in our society, as a feeble instrument of non-judgment, of keeping a safe distance. Hannah Arendt sees the unwillingness to judge as a sign that one is inclined to withdraw from public life. While by actually judging a dialogue with other people may arise.

It is true, Furedi says, that expressing a value judgment can be a form of psychological violence - but a complex society just can not do without judgment and comparison. Therefore courage is needed, because freedom of expression and the pursuit of knowledge will usually want to take their own unpredictable course.

In ancient Athens, the cradle of democracy, they possessed that courage: there, according to Furedi, that risky attitude got its first appreciation. “Daring and freedom for the Greeks were values that reinforced each other. Something similar is seen in Renaissance Italy, where ideas of freedom were accompanied by courage and zeal for discovery”.

What annoys me in a presentation of things like Furedi’s is the adoration of Greekness and Renaissance combined with the total absence of attention to the Jewish contribution to fearless speech in the course of history. That is an imbalance in the presentation of our cultural heritage that bothers me already from my high school. Also then the adoration of Antiquity raged large and I felt that something was missing.

Indeed, as far as frankness is concerned, the Jews had already earned their spurs when the Athenians had yet to establish their democracy. Abraham had been bargaining with God about Sodom and Gomorrah, and Jacob had fought with the angel.

And the Jews did not stop behaving that way when in Athens the democracy got defunct and Socrates and Plato pleaded for censorship of poetic and other expressions of the soul that could undermine the pure morale. The author of the book of Job lets his feelings speak freely and goes far in questioning God’s justice.

In the Mishnah and the Talmud the rabbis continued rewarding intellectual courage by taking halachic decisions by majority vote and by nevertheless including the rejected ideas and their authors in the texts and preserving them for centuries. Very different from their surroundings where the dissidents of Catholic councils were excluded from the annals of the church.

It may be true that at the time of the Renaissance, the balance shifted. Then in the surrounding world came the frank and critical humanists, while the rabbinic tradition was in danger of becoming bogged down in a formalistic straitjacket.

But the degree of parrhesia, not to say the brutality, which Eli Wiesel describes in his story about the rabbis in a concentration camp who sue God for the misery he lets pass, has old testimonials. From before Greek democracy.

Also see Greek and Jew and Authority

Greek and Jew

Hannah Arendt's observations about Eichmann remain to the point. They show it is not necessarily far-fetched to see a connection between totalitarian thinking, bureaucracy and our common desire for the creation of order. If such connections exist indeed, honest family men just can become schreibtischmörder à la Eichmann and evil can get a somehow banal character.

But occasionally Arendt could be off and run on. At such moments she had ideas in her head and she was only interested in events that corresponded with those ideas. One of the prosecutors in the Eichmann trial, Gabriel Bach, recounts: “A few days before the trial at once a philosopher arrived, who only used the testimonies and documents which fitted her ideas. With us, the prosecutors, she never even wanted to talk”.

Moreover Arendt could be very severe in her opinion, especially when she speaks about the attitude of the Jews during World War II. According to Bernard Wasserstein she divides Jews roughly into two categories: on the one hand, the passive majority that let itself be led to the slaughter, and on the other hand the members of the collaborationist Jewish councils.

I am inclined to link Arendt's harsh assessment of the Jewish attitude during the Second World War to her predilection of the autonomous, sovereignly acting subject. This predilection is associated with a certain disregard towards people in situations in which their free agency is seriously hampered or absent. That is: people in a tight corner, for example by persecution, poverty, or other kinds of dependency. This contempt is there despite the fact that Arendt, as a German Jew, experienced firsthand what it means to be unwanted. She had to flight to France and finally to America to find safe shelter.

Maybe she found that to be the only dignified way out for independent thinking people. In any event philosophically she felt most at home with the ancient Greeks, who also believed that there is little glory to be gained by carrying out activities directed at earning a living or at creating a minimum of security. Entirely in the classical Greek vein she sees unbound thinking and acting as the most sophisticated and the most pleasant thing a person can do.

It is true the Greeks went a step further and organized things in such a way that servants and slaves performed the lower types of work. Thus free citizens could be completely devoted to the worthy work, such as politics and philosophy. Arendt definitely doesn’t go that far, because in her book The Human Condition she pays much attention to those inferior kinds of work which she calls ‘labor’ and ‘work’. Together with the (political) ‘acting’ which for her embodies the highest species, they constitute the human condition.

Yet Arendt was not unequivocal in this respect, she sometimes contradicts herself. On the one hand she says: one cannot cut up reality, all types of work are part of being human. But elsewhere she argues to sharp distinguish between different types of work, and she puts the lower kinds of work on their place: laboring man is actually an animal laborans, a toiling animal. And no craftsman transcends the result-directedness in the same way as the unbound polismember could. Between the lines it is possible to hear Arendt’s craving for the sovereign existence of the Greek free man.

From that predilection I explain the reserve she shows on more than one occasion towards the Jewish conception of human existence. Because the latter deviates at this point in an important way from the Greek conception. Whereas the Greek view extols a life purified of labor and work, in the Jewish tradition there is no question of such a strive for purity. Sure, a person shall be praised for the time he spends on Torah and study, but the depending economic existence that we lead should be taken fully seriously. Purifying that away would mean, for the Jewish mind, nothing less than a reduction of reality.

Also see Hannah Arendt's Heroes and Levinas and Arendt

Must work be fun

Should work really be fun? Wouldn’t it be enough for work not to be maddening, humiliating, mind-numbing, infantile, or enslaving any longer?

At times the gap may be very large, between the fancy rhetoric about work as selfrealization and the reality that we offer each other in organizations on a daily basis. Probably a more than two and a half thousand years old, classical dichotomy plays us tricks here. Namely the dichotomy between things that are respectable to do and things that are not respectable.

Actually, rather than a dichotomy this is a tripartition, as Hannah Arendt makes clear in her book The Human Condition. It lists 'labor', 'work' and 'action', in which sequence labor stands for activities that always comes back and are never finished, such as cleaning, caring, feeding. Work is the activity of making something, always new: writing a book, building a house, making a deal. Action is done in decision-making and politics.

I take this tripartition as a bipartition because, according to that venerable but overrated classical tradition, two of these activities are more or less respectable, and the third - labor - definitely not. Hence, in our Western culture since antiquity, we do our best to keep the right side of the division line. The white collar is held in higher esteem than the blue collar.

The echo of that hierarchy of values I come across in my own organization, the Amsterdam Municipality. A foremost, widely disseminated striving with us is that people practice their daily work with passion, joy and in full self-realization. Perhaps that striving is precisely the reason why in daily practice the atmosphere within the organization can get so sour. Because by focusing on ‘passion’ we feel justified to ignore labor. Indeed, labor offers little chance for self-realization.

But, of course, such a labor-less situation cannot exist. In Amsterdam streets should be cobbled, bins placed, digital address books cleaned up and invoices sent. Not the right things ‘to make flourish your personality’. But certainly things you really suffer from when they are disregarded.

Actually, in Amsterdam we are hampered a lot by, for instance, messed up digital address books. I am convinced that this situation is rooted in the hierarchy of action-work-labor that Arendt describes. By the way, Arendt in her descriptions can hardly disguise her own aversion to labor. So it is not surprising that people in organizations are trying to escape it. But the impact of that escape remains devastating, because this predilection for fun and self-realization bites in its own tail. If we all just want to have fun the adressbooks get messed up, and the working atmosphere as well.

Also see Nice Work

Nice work

For an explanation of the Holocaust and its streamlined industrial execution some philosophers point to the high flight of rational thinking in our Western culture. Zygmunt Bauman for example, argues that Western rationality may not have caused the Holocaust, but made it possible and in any event did not help prevent it from happening. The historian Philipp Blom follows him when he says that rationalization in our society is potentially problematic.

Other philosophers, such as Hannah Arendt, offer an entirely different, almost opposite explanation for the functioning of Hitler's extermination machine. They point to the thoughtlessness, the very refusal to use one’s own brainpower on the part of planners like Eichmann and other bureaucrats of the destruction. Such careless stupidity is in the eyes of Arendt the outcome of the banality of evil, or perhaps that banality itself.

I for myself arrive at a position right in the middle between the two mentioned explanations. This can best be formulated as follows: people just want to enjoy working. I mean to say that a person, especially if he also is diligent and wants to do his best, will enjoy having a job, coming up with a strategy, preparing plans and executing them orderly. Banal on the one hand, but with the satisfaction of a certain ordering thought on the other hand.

There is nothing wrong with that, you might say. We use to associate agreeable work quite naturally with working out undisturbed what we have in mind. Without children around, without too many insoluble dilemmas, preferably in an orderly environment, supported by clear goals and adequate resources. That has its own satisfaction.

However innocent that job satisfaction may seem, on closer inspection there are snags to it. Look for instance at what is being done by many executive boards of educational and health organizations and at their inclination to grow and merge, the consequences of which we in some cases very much regret. And by that I do not even refer to those executives who consider those mergers as opportunities for manipulation and personal enrichment, although there certainly are. No, I refer primarily to the bona fide executives among them.

These top executives just enjoy themselves. They come up with one plan after another, dropping them to the level below with the instruction to further roll it out to the underlying levels in order to implement them there. The designers at the top have their fling, but below, and certainly on the work floors, things get clogged up. Or a shadowy maze arises in which people keep each other imprisoned in a web of often conflicting directives and orders. The top prefers not to know too much about those effects because that only would disturb the flow of their zest for work. Viewed from this perspective the objective to ‘just enjoy work’ looks a lot more problematic.

Something similar, but much more horrible and catastrophic, may have played a role in the case of Eichmann and his associates. Besides blinding obedience as a motive for Schreibtischmörder (on which subject Stanley Milgram has written a lot), the simple satisfaction of an orderly performance of duties could have yielded an additional kind of blindness.

’Nice work’ as a blinding motive is perhaps even more banal than is the obedience to - whatever the consequences - just continue the proper performance of an assigned task. What plays a role both in nice work and in obedience, is the influence of the distance between the actor and the person(s) to whom he interacts: the greater the distance, the less you will be distracted from your task by the consequences of your actions. That’s what they have well understood, those executive boards on their upper floors.

The two situations - the one of blind modern management and the one of the blind Nazi extermination bureaucracy – cannot in earnest be compared. But in terms of an underlying pattern they might be comparable. It may be that they both go back to the same source: our desire to come up with plans and our pleasure in working them out straightly and unimpeded. Just being busy nicely and not looking too much at the consequences.

The question is whether the high-minded planners among us could perhaps restrain themselves a bit more and better realize what the actual impact is in reality of their cheerful zeal. And whether street sweepers, youth workers or homeless helpers might perhaps offer us a different model of nice work can offer. In any case, those seem to me to be jobs in which the euphoria of one’s own organizing activity is quickly called to order and in which reality remains soberingly close.

Hannah Arendt's Heroes

Action needs for its full appearance the shining brightness we once called glory, and which is possible only in the public realm.

These are the words of someone who is being fascinated by the desire for light, splendour and immortal fame, for which Ancient Greece from Homer to Alexander the Great had the reputation.

It was Hannah Arendt who wrote this passage in her book The human condition. In the book she discusses three varieties of the active life which as Vita Activa stands in opposition to the Vita Contemplativa, the life of the mind. Those three varieties are: labor, work and action and most of Arendt’s attention goes to the last one.

Arendt describes action as making a new beginning. It is starting processes for which no precedent exists and the outcome of which is uncertain and unpredictable. Acting, according to Arendt, is necessary for the maintenance of a public sphere.

What strikes me in Arendt’s description of acting – and that’s what I want to talk about – is the slightly oldfashioned adoration for ancient classical times which one can perceive. For instance in the above given quote, but also in her stressing “the revelatory character of action as well as its ability to produce stories and become historical, which together form the very source from which meaningfulness springs into and illuminates human existence”. And somewhere else she approvingly cites Pericles when, in his Funeral Oration, he talks about the polis as “a guarantee that those who forced every sea and land to become the scene of their daring will not remain without wittness and will need neither Homer nor anyone else who knows how to turn words to praise them”.

Some people may find this respectable and interesting, but my first reaction to this kind of adoration for Ancient Greece is somewhat allergic. I associate that attitude with 19th-century German academic culture which primarily was looking for elevation and stylizing.

But, on second thoughts, the heroism which Arendt applauds, has something beneficial. Those ancient heroes are not always as splendid as the quotes suggest, that’s to say, not in Arendt’s view. For example, she somewhere says that heroic acts do not necessarily have to be sublime. Also one’s bad deeds will survive in remembrance and will contribute to the actor’s immortality. This addition by Arendt makes for a change in the tone of the discourse.

Besides, Arendt uses the word ‘hero’ in a very elastic way. She doesn’t limit its meaning, as is usually the case, to denoting the solitary individual who, thanks to extraordinary power, insight or courage achieves something great. In her writings something seems to exist like wheeling-and-dealing-heroes: peope who, within a network with other people, invest efforts to get things done, without any garanteed outcome: “It is because of this already existing web of human relatonships, with its innumerable, conflicting wills and intentions, that acting almost never reaches its purpose”. Important is that the efforts are being recorded and preserved for posterity. In this view the status of being a hero could come within reach of, say, a local alderman or a dyed-in-the-wool trade union official.

Because of the colouring and nuances which Arendt adds to the concepts of action and hero, an interesting theme enters the scene, which transcends the limitations of the usual hero-concept and the adoration of classical antiquity. Nevertheless Arendt’s rich descriptions do not succeed in completely removing my initial reluctance. Looking at the whole of her text I think a certain contradiction remains.

Most of all the repeated use by Arendt of words like ‘fame’ and ‘splendour’ wrong-foots me sometimes. Isn’t she, at those moments, completely immersed in the exalted German-romantic tradition? At least those words sound, in relation to Arendt’s emphasis on the uncertainty and futility of much of human action, somewhat inadequate. For wheeling-and-dealing-heroes we need other qualifications.

Also see The Heroic Cosmopolitical Individual and Greek and Jew

Why Heidegger doesn't bring us any further

It is very understandable that reflexive managementauthors like Weick, Winograd and Flores look for inspiration towards Heidegger. If you want to stop the thinking about organizations in terms of schemes and diagrams, Heidegger offers a liberating perspective.

Heidegger holds that “knowledge lies in the being that situates us in the world”. That’s to say: we do not learn by taking a distance and by observing phenomena from the outside, but by being actively engaged in the world via work and relations. Heidegger prioritizes praxis and being in the world. By doing so he breaks through the deceit which originates from models and structures. Knowledge always is embedded in an acting way of being which precedes everything.

At the same time it is possible, in relation to the Heidegger oriented managementauthors, to identify two blind spots. The first concerns the unwillingness to communicate, which people - and not just in organizations - at times display. The authors seem not to be acquainted with this phenomenon. The spontaneous active being which they talk about in their writings, for them automatically coïncides with a permanent readiness to communicate.

The second blind spot concerns the difference one person can make with regard to another person. That people may disagree fundamentally about the direction and the goal of their acting is not a theme in the works of the above mentioned authors.

I tend so see a connection between those two blind spots. That connection, in my view, stems from the way in which Heidegger uses the concept of Mitsein. Namely, as a reference to a shared reality in which we humans collectively participate. We share Mitsein as a part of our active being-in-the-world. Communication arises from there almost automatically.

It is certainly true that Heidegger leaves room for individuals to conceive of primary being, where acting finds place, in their own, original way. But by the position he allocates to Mitsein there is a shift in the balance: the portion of collectivity weighs much more heavily than the portion of individual originality. Being is foremost one and collective, even if there is a multitude of personal insights in being.

This explains why plurality of thinking and profound differences between people get so little attention from authors who orientate themselves towards Heidegger. It is as Safranski says: the true nature of political thinking will be exposed by Hannah Arendt – as part of her answer to Martin Heidegger. Such really political thought derives from living communally our differences.

I would like to add that, for an elaboration of the radical difference between the one human person and the other, we can fruitfully turn to Levinas.

Also see Heidegger, Wittgenstein and traffic and Is the world sound?