On Arendt’s Conception of “Factual Truth”

Practices of Truth, 2023

The chapter investigates the role of truth in our formation as political agents. Instead of endorsing the assumption of fully-fledged political participants with fixed and set values who decide according to their narrow and short-term self-interests, it will show the transformative aspect of political participation, which itself can create political agents that focus on shared concerns that matter to us all—climate change, refugee crises, labor—to name a few examples. It is in our conversations together that we can project a future that acknowledges not only facts of the past or present but also the values that may need to be created or maintained for the future. The argument defended within the chapter is threefold: first, the formation of political space through Hannah Arendt’s political paradigm will be examined; next, we will explore the role of truth and the process of opinion-formation in relation to political judgment; finally, we will argue that politics (along with the stuff of politics) or political participation is a transformative experience that may assuage the agonistic or partisan views of politics that seem to be in the background of most political discussions.

Democracy and Fake News. Information Manipulation and Post-Truth Politics, 2021

This chapter considers relevant concepts and paradigms elaborated in Hannah Arendt’s works, which have been at the centre of modern and contemporary Western political thought even beyond Arendt. It explores the relation between truth, lying, and politics in contemporary democracies. In her reflection on Truth and Politics, Arendt distinguishes between factual truths and rational truths to specify the different relations they have with the political debate in a plural society and to investigate the consequences of their negation or mystification. Factual truths, while being at odds with the political debate, are necessary for the exercise of democratic power in a plural society. Also, this is the category which acquires critical relevance today with reference to the problem of fake news: it is factual truths that fake news denies. Arendt is quite optimistic about the fact that, as long as there are witnesses and truth-tellers, in the long run truth will outlive organised lying.

Revista de ciencia política (Santiago), 2006

Hannah Arendt is no straightforward realist. But in her writing we do find a form of 'realism' in which attentiveness to reality itself and the cultivation of a character trait in which to face and enlarge one's sense of reality are ends in themselves with serious ethical implications. She did not develop a systematic theory of reality. Rather she argued that there is a direct relationship between the political, public realm, the necessary condition of all politics, which is plurality, and our ability to comprehend what is real. This is not a question of reality versus ethics. Arendt offers an ethic of reality. Indeed, she points us in the direction of ethical grounds for action in a world in which reality is in danger of being eclipsed. She offers a tough-minded and 'attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality - whatever that may be'. This chapter sets out Arendt's engagement with, but distance from, realist understandings of politics, power, and ethics. The fundamental divergence between Arendt and Weber's idea of the 'ethic of responsibility' hinges on her rejection of the categories of means and ends in the political, public sphere and her entirely different understanding of the meanings of politics, power, and violence. The chapter then shows how, by Arendt's account, the public world is constituted by a not fully tangible but nonetheless real inter-subjectivity that emerges between individuals as they speak and act in the public realm. As she put it, 'our feeling for reality depends utterly upon appearance and therefore upon the existence of a public realm into which things can appear'. Finally, we move from one of Arendt's case studies in the avoidance of reality, the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, to her distinctive grounds for action against what she took to be the greatest mortal sin of politics, genocide or wars of annihilation. However, the grounds for action are not found in the moral imperative to end massive human suffering as such. The effort to destroy a particular group cannot be countenanced because it is a threat to the reality of the public, political world which requires a plurality of peoples.

2010

Sympathetic readers of Arendt might be surprised by Rancière‟s claim that Arendt‟s political thought, in fact, represses politics in a way paradigmatic of the tradition she sought to escape from. On the contrary, it might appear that rather than offering a rival view of politics, Rancière actually amends and extends an Arendtian conception of politics. I want to caution against such an interpretation. It is true that Arendt is an important influence on Rancière, despite his polemic against her. Arendt's understanding of praxis seems to resonate within Rancière‟s work. However, those apparently Arendtian notions that Rancière make use of are fundamentally transformed when transposed within his broader thematization of dissensus. To develop this argument I first examine Arendt‟s own account of the tension between philosophy and politics in order to understand the phenomenological basis of the political theory that she sought to develop. I then consider how persuasive Rancière‟s characterization of Arendt as an archipolitical thinker is. In the final section, I discuss some key passages in Disagreement in which Rancière alludes to Arendt. These passages highlight how those Arendtian concepts that do seem to find their way into Rancière's thought are transformed when displaced from her ontology.

This paper attempts to find the locus of Hannah Arendt's conception of the political and the anti-political. In doing so, the paper identifies Arendt's essential qualifications of the political and the anti-political and attempt to find concrete spaces where we can more or less locate these events. However, this does not mean, as this paper tries to show that these said loci are uncontroversial, incontestable, and an ideal representative of Arendt's articulation of such activities, most especially the political. Despite this, the paper dares to find the spaces whereby the political and the anti-political could possibly be thought to thrive. The space where anti-political resides can be thought easily, whereas, the political is not. In Arendtian sense, the political is elusive and fragile that it can easily be overwhelmed by anti-political activities. The insights are coming mostly from her two major oeuvres namely: The Human Condition and The Origins of Totalitarianism. This paper is divided into two major sections: firstly, an exposition of Arendt's concept of the political explicated in The Human Condition and of anti-political in The Origins of the Totalitarianism and secondly, an attempt to find their loci in our everyday affairs.

Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 2019

This article argues that Hannah Arendt's thought can offer significant insights on political judgement for realism in political theory. We identify a realist position which emphasises the need to account for how humans judge politically, contra moralist tendencies to limit its exercise to rational standards, but which fails to provide a sufficient conception of its structure and potential. Limited appeals to political judgement render the realist defence of the political elusive, and compromise the endeavour to offer a meaningful alternative to the moralist tendency to displace politics. The potential and limitations of realist discussions on judgement are made visible in relation to proto-realists Judith Shklar and Isaiah Berlin. In seeking to enrich the realist conception of the political, the article introduces the displacement critique found in the neglected Arendtian 'realism'. It also provides the foundations for a distinctly realist account of political judgement which, we argue, requires elaboration along two dimensions: the social coding of political judgement and the political capacities that help judgement build a suitable political sphere.