Arendt on Plato: The Politics of Philosophy, and Judgment

• In Event: Arendtian Politics

Abstract

Few thinkers in the twentieth century have thought more deeply about the relationship between philosophy and politics, than Hannah Arendt. It was, in many ways, the main theme in her writings. The subject matter of political philosophy, she agreed, is the relation between philosophy and politics.
The tradition of political philosophy, she argued, was born out of Plato’s opening of a gulf between truth and opinion, in response to the trial and death of Socrates. From its beginning, the tradition yoked philosophy and politics in a way that obscured their respective objects and aims, as well as their mutual relation. It reduced philosophy to the pursuit of truth—as opposed to the pursuit of meaning—thereby reorienting it toward what she deemed an incongruent quest for truth-based standards; it failed to value, or even acknowledge, a whole array of political experiences that exceed or transcend questions of truth, and it misunderstood the relation between philosophy and politics because it reduced it to the application of philosophy’s standards to politics. In short, philosophy reduced politics instead to the rule of philosophy.
Arendt’s interpretation of the relationship between philosophy and politics in the entire Western tradition is based on her interpretation of Plato, who, in her view, achieved the unprecedented separation between opinion and truth through a willful manipulation of his own philosophy for political purposes. This manipulation consisted in three steps: 1) the introduction of the unprecedented opposition between opinion and truth, which Plato presented nonetheless as axiomatic, 2) an attempt to transform the current Athenian conception of politics, by questioning the validity of persuasion and denouncing opinion as a form of untruth, and 3) the manipulation of his own philosophy, the “deformation” of the doctrine of the ideas, in order to present the latter as capable of providing truth-based standards applicable to human affairs.
The problem with Arendt’s interpretation of Plato is that it is wrong. Every aspect of it. There is no opposition between opinion and truth in Plato’s writings. The former is never equated with untruth, and nor is persuasion. Moreover, there is in Plato no “deformation” of the doctrine of ideas, or even a doctrine, for that matter. Instead, the ideas are always presented tentatively as an opinion. Arendt’s opposition between what she calls Plato’s “original philosophy”—conceived as the speechless contemplation of the true essence of Being—and Platonic “political philosophy”—conceived as the speechless, coercive imposition of a model of an idea—is merely an iteration of the confrontation in Heidegger between truth as unconcealment and truth as correctness. And Heidegger, as has long been established, was wrong too.
What I would like to propose this year is the culmination of a years-long research; a paper that addresses the political and philosophic consequences of Arendt’s misreading of Plato, as reflected in her highly problematic theory of judgment.
Much has been said about Arendt’s unfinished theory of judgment, in part because scholars believe that, drawing mainly from her recent lectures on Kant’s Critique of Judgment, and the “subjective” kind of validity that aesthetic judgment facilitated, Arendt would have finally been able to address the question of the relationship between philosophy and politics without falling into the anti-political Platonic “trap” of making ultimate appeals to truth. Whether this is even possible has long been a contentious point. Jürgen Habermas observed that “Arendt sees a yawning abyss between knowledge and opinion that cannot be closed with arguments,” which he attributed to “an antiquated conception of theoretical knowledge.” Similarly, Ronald Beiner considered Arendt’s “interesting account of judgment” to have an “evil twin”: her “misleading and obfuscating account of truth.” Arendt, Beiner noted, felt that “in order to give judgment and opinion the dignity that are appropriate to them, she needs, as it were, to slander truth as ‘coercive,’ ‘tyrannical,’ and so on.”
What seems to have escaped Arendt scholars, however, is the extent to which her contested theory of judgment, and the concept of “enlarged vision” on which it is based, ultimately derives, not from her highly idiosyncratic reading of Kant, but from her investigations on Socrates. And that what Arendt praised in Socrates – that he had nothing to teach, that he possessed no truth, that he cared about human affairs and simply meant to improve the opinions of others ¬– all these elements, which are also the basis of what her readers have found most problematic about her approach to judgment, are in fact the reverse image of her (mis)portrayal of Plato. The shortcomings of her critique of Plato are the shortcomings of her defense of Socrates (which she simply presents as the exact opposite), which in turn are the shortcomings of her theory of judgment.

Author

• Lucas Entel, Yale-NUS College