“Great and Wonderful Deeds”: Hannah Arendt and Herodotus on History and Judgment

• In Event: Arendt between Past and Future

Abstract

In this paper, I explore the endlessly contested question of whether values can ever be truly universal. History is littered with awful injustices committed in the name of the good; yet it is uncertain whether it is possible to resist oppression and injustice without recourse to any form of universals. This dilemma is given new urgency by its resurgence in the rhetoric of two very different political actors. In western liberal democracies, members of the ‘new right’ or ‘alt right’ increasingly ground their rhetoric, not in appeals to the good, but rather depict differences between cultures as existential battles where the strong survive. Cross-cultural dialogue, understanding, or even toleration thus are rendered as weakness. At the same time, Xi Jinping thought rejects not only so-called western values such as ‘freedom’ or ‘human rights’, but the idea of universal values altogether. These strange bedfellows show the continued relevance of this old debate. To this end, I turn to Hannah Arendt’s influential (yet unwritten) theory of judgment, which attempts to resolve this dilemma by positing judgment as a way of ‘thinking the particular’ in order to avoid the pitfalls of both relativism and universalism. While much attention has been paid to how her reading of Kant informs her theory of judgment, the importance of ancient Greek historiography to her account remains unexplored. And yet, in the post-scriptum to Thinking, which lays out her intention to turn to judgment, only Herodotus is mentioned. This paper will excavate his neglected influence on her thought and argue that her account of judgment is fundamentally shaped by her reading of Herodotus’ Histories. Read in conjunction with her Concept of History, I argue that her reading of Herodotus, which treats him as an impartial chronicler of the ‘self-evidently great,’ plays a formative role in her account of judgment.

Yet turning to Herodotus’ Histories, however, not only clarifies Arendt’s account of judgment, but suggests some of its elisions and assumptions. While both Herodotus and Arendt seek to ‘think the particular’ (Arendt, Lectures on Kant)– and, perhaps surprisingly, depict the faculty of taste as central to good judgment – Herodotus’ practice of historie (the root of the word history, but better translated as ‘inquiry’) records particular acts and deeds as revelatory of how universal capacities are made manifest in vastly different circumstances. Herodotus is thus not, per Arendt’s depiction, a recorder of the “self evidently great” (Arendt, Concept of History). Instead his practice of judgment is informed by a context-sensitive and aporetic inquiry into nature. Resuscitating his theory of judgment (and its influence on Arendt) thus suggests that some of her fears about the stultifying effects of universal claims are misplaced, and judgment need not abjure all universals. In Herodotus’ Histories, appeals to nature foster empathy, humility, and the resistance to tyranny. This explains his defense of vastly different political systems, which all share, in varied and non-ideal ways, a commitment to human equality.

For this reason, reading Arendt and Herodotus together will not only bring forth an underexplored aspect of Arendt’s influential theory of judgment, but will also articulate a theory of judgment responsive to contemporary challenges, one that avoids the dangers of abstract universals not by rejecting universals, but by rooting judgment in a non-ideal vision of human political flourishing.

Author

• Lindsay Mahon Rathnam, Duke Kunshan University