Arendt and nietzsche on responsibility and futurity

Philosophy and Social Criticism

Volumn 34, Issue 6, 2008, Pages 617-642

  Diprose, Rosalyn ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES   (Australia)

Author keywords

Conscience; Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche; Futurity; Hannah Arendt; Normativity; Responsibility; Somatic reflexivity; Totalitarianism

Indexed keywords

EID: 44849134084     PISSN: 01914537     EISSN: 1461734X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0191453708090331     Document Type: Article

References (57)

1. Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future (Harmondsworth Mx: Penguin, 1977), pp. 6-7, hereafter referred to as BPE Abbreviations of other Arendt works are as follows:
2. HC: The Human Condition, intro. Margaret Canovan (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998[1958]).
3. LM: Life of the Mind, vols I and II (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, 1978).
4. OT: The Origins of Totalitarianism, new edn with added prefaces (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, 1994[1968]).
5. PRD: 'Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship' (long version), in Responsibility and Judgment, ed. and intro. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2003);
6. short version published in The Listener in 1964.
7. SQMP: 'Some Questions of Moral Philosophy', in Responsibility and Judgment, ed. and intro. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2003).
8. TMC: 'Thinking and Moral Considerations', in Responsibility and Judgment, ed. and intro. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2003);
9. originally published in Social Research 38(1971): 417-46.
10. Dana R. Villa, 'Beyond Good and Evil: Arendt, Nietzsche and the Aestheticization of Political Action', Political Theory 20(2) (1992): 274-308 (275).
11. While Villa does not address the notions of responsibility or conscience, his comparison of Arendt's and Nietzsche's ideas of political action does raise some related issues. For an extended version of this paper see Dana R. Villa, Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of the Political (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), ch. 3.
12. The juridico-moral code to which my responsibility refers can be in the form of explicit laws or implicit moral or social norms of behavior, or a mixture of both. While explicit laws and implicit moral norms may engender different and sometimes conflicting responsibilities (in term of the duties, persons or entities for which one is responsible), the juridical concept of responsibility renders them equivalent with respect to the state of being-responsible. Under the juridical concept I assume responsibility (and so am accountable to others) or blame (attribute responsibility to) others on the basis of the same capacity for responsibility whether the code of conduct to which my responsibility refers is legal, moral, explicit or implicit.
13. While the laws produced by juridical instruments of democratic governments are not reducible to social norms, customs and morals, these all interact in complex ways and would be compatible insofar as they share the same implicit normative base. I am suggesting that crisis of conscience occurs when there is a felt conflict between the laws and programs of government and the normative base of one's moral sensibility.
14. '"Schedule 4 - Control Orders" and 'Schedule 7 - Sedition"' of the AntiTerrorism Act (No. 2) 2005, Commonwealth of Australia. The anti-sedition provisions were amended slightly by the time this part of the Act became law in 2006 - 'urging disaffection' against the government was amended to 'urging . . . overthrow by force or violence'. The full Act can be accessed at: http://www.comlaw.gov.au
15. The background and possible causes of this riot are complex. Nevertheless, it is more than mere coincidence that it erupted the week after the shortlived publicity about the anti-terrorism legislation which, while not explicitly directed against Lebanese Australians or even 'people of middle-eastern appearance', did raise concerns that these would be the most likely target groups. As for the legislation itself, while draconian on the government's own admission and intensely opposed by some academics, lawyers, civil rights activists and Muslim community leaders, it met little effective opposition within government or from the population at large. Various media reports of the riot can be accessed by a Google search of 'Cronulla riot'. For analyses of the riot that simularly tie it to trends in national government policy see Scott Poyning, 'What Caused the Cronulla Riot?', Race & Class 48(1) (2006): 85-92,
16. and Amelia Johns, 'White Tribe: Echoes of the Anzac Myth in Cronulla', Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 22(1) (2008): 3-15.
17. For an assessment of the anti-terrorism legislation see Annie Pettitt and Vicki Sentas, 'Terrorism: Laws for Insecurity (Lawyering, Dissent and the Surveillance State)', Alternative Law Journal 30(6) (December 2005): 283-5.
18. Arendt's most precise definition of totalitarian government is a government that, through this all-pervasiveness and a popular 'mass movement', seeks, not to replace one set of laws with another by consensus or other means, but to achieve security by making 'mankind itself the embodiment of law', where law is understood to flow from 'Nature or History', such that there will be no need for either dictatorship or coercion (OT 460-2). The reversal of some laws and of moral standards of conduct toward others arises through measures required to achieve this end. While I am not suggesting any contemporary liberal democratic polity exactly fits this definition, there are elements of the conduct of government in some that come sufficiently close to Arendt's description to raise concerns.
19. Arne Johan Vetlesen, 'Hannah Arendt on Conscience and Evil', Philosophy & Social Criticism 27(5) (2001): 1-33 (12, 25). Vetlesen's focus is not on the failure of responsibility or Arendt's relation to Nietzsche's thought, but on the relationship between Arendt's thoughts on conscience and doing evil and those of Augustine in particular. He thereby provides an interesting account of why Arendt found Heidegger's philosophy enlightening on the issue of the dictatorship of the 'they' but inadequate with respect to the question of evil.
20. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. W. Kaufmann (Harmondsworth, Mx: Penguin, 1978), cited as Z followed by book number, then chapter/section title. I use the usual abbreviations for the English translations of other Nietzsche texts followed by the aphorism or section number (unless otherwise indicated):
21. BGE: Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth, Mx: Penguin, 1973).
22. EH: 'Ecce Homo', in On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, trans. W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1967), cited as EH followed by the chapter title and section number.
23. GM: 'On the Genealogy of Morals', in On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, cited as GM followed by the essay number and section number.
24. GS: The Gay Science, trans. W. Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1974).
25. HAH: Human, all too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, trans. M. Faber with S. Lehmann (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984).
26. TI: 'Twilight of the Idols', in Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth, Mx: Penguin, 1968), cited as TI followed by chapter title and section number.
27. WP: The Will to Power, ed. W. Kaufmann, trans. W Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1967).
28. See also Arendt, BPF 13.
29. Vasti Roodt provides a comprehensive analysis of this point through a comparison of Arendt's and Nietzsche's shared notions of the historicity of the self; see Vasti Roodt, 'Amor Fati, Amor Mundi: History, Action and Worldliness in Nietzsche and Arendt', Tijdschrift voor Filosofie 63(2001): 319-48.
30. Roodt's concern is not with a crisis of conscience and a failure of responsibility but with the related idea of how a polity's problematic relation with the past along with 'totalitarian' government can, in destroying the capacity for judgment, jeopardize human plurality. See also Vasti Roodt, 'The Loss of the Human: Nietzsche and Arendt on the Predicament of Modernity', Ethical Perspectives 9(1) (2002): 31-47.
31. Bat-Ami Bar On also finds Arendt's neglect of affect and feeling a problem, in her particularly interesting account of Arendt's thoughts on restoring critical thinking and political action in societies ruined by political violence: Bat-Ami Bar On, 'Ruin, Repair, and Responsibility', International Journal of Philosophical Studies 10(2) (2002): 195-207. She makes good this lack by supplementing Arendt's strategy of forgiveness with a 'political therapy' derived from combining Derrida's work on mourning and his idea of deconstructive critique. Such a combination, she claims, makes for an appropriate affective politics.
32. Arendt discusses this point in several places including PRD 44-5, SQMP 86 and 97,TMC 181-8.
33. Arendt, while agreeing with Nietzsche that conscience is not guided by particular values and norms, is critical of him for coming up with 'Life itself or the maintenance of 'living organisms' as the 'highest good' or the only normative standard of conscience (SQMP 51). I am suggesting that somatic reflexivity, understood in the way I will outline, rather than 'Life itself is Nietzsche's alternative criterion of conscience.
34. Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. A. Lingis (The Hague: Marianus Nijhoff, 1981), p. 123.
35. I mention Levinas because in Otherwise Than Being he admires Nietzsche for what he had described earlier as making this 'feeling for the body ... the basis for a new conception of man' (and hence what I have called somatic reflexivity becomes the basis of value and normativity) - see Emmanuel Levinas, 'Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism', trans. S. Hand, Critical Inquiry 17 (Autumn 1990): 62-71;
36. originally published in Esprit in 1934.
37. Levinas departs significantly from Nietzsche, however, on the question of how this affective self-relation or responsiveness grounds responsibility: for Levinas it grounds responsibility for the other; for Nietzsche, it is the basis of self-responsibility. Here I will pursue the issue of responsibility for the other via Arendt rather than Levinas. For an analysis of the relation between Nietzsche and Levinas on the question of responsibility see Rosalyn Diprose, 'Nietzsche, Levinas and the Meaning of Responsibility', in 'After the Death of a Certain God': Nietzsche and Levinas, ed. Jill Stauffer and Bettina Bergo (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).
38. This is not just in her explicit discussions of moral responsibility, but throughout her work. She makes the point at the end of The Human Condition (e.g. pp. 324-5). The opposition between the solitary activity of thinking and collective action also underlies her distinction between philosophical and 'factual' truth and the claim that the former has no place in politics while the latter is essential to the preservation of the 'reality' of human affairs - see 'Truth and Polities', BPF 227-64, especially 259-60.
39. These sections are overlooked or viewed as unproblematic in recent, otherwise attentive, commentaries of the Second Essay. See, for example, Mathias Risse, 'The Second Treatise in On the Genealogy of Morality: Nietzsche on the Origin of the Bad Conscience', European Journal of Philosophy 9(1) (2001): 55-81;
40. and Brian Leiter, Nietzsche: On Morality (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), ch. 7. While Risse provides an impressive account of the oppressive and punitive origins of guilty or 'bad' conscience, in bypassing the first three sections he and Leiter miss Nietzsche's thesis about the corporeal affective basis of reflexivity, normativity and responsibility and therefore what is at stake, for Nietzsche, in both 'bad' and 'good' conscience.
41. The idea that being responsible, in the juridical sense, requires both reflective memory and anticipation can be traced back to at least Locke, for whom reflective consciousness, including memory, is given. See especially his chapter 'Identity and Diversity' in John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 328-48.
42. Robert Bernasconi, in his comprehensive analysis of the history of the usage and changing meaning of the term 'responsibility', points out that Locke's use of the adjective 'responsible' reflects 'the need with the rise of capitalism to place more emphasis on promising, calling for an increased focus both on the constancy of a person over time . . . and on being as good as one's word'; see Robert Bernasconi, 'Before Whom and for What? Accountability and the Invention of Ministerial, Hyperbolic, and Infinite Responsibility', in Difficulties of Ethical Life, ed. Shannon Sullivan and Denis Schmidt (New York: Fordham Press, forthcoming 2008).
43. Nietzsche's other descriptions of the corporeal basis of the self indicate this reflexive element. For example, there is his idea that the self consists of competing, commanding and obeying drives or corporeal 'wills' (BGE 19). Robert Gooding-Williams provides an interesting alternative account of Nietzsche's thoughts in Thus Spoke Zarathustra on the role of the body in both the incorporation of existing norms and the revaluation of value; see Robert Gooding-Williams, Zarathustra's Dionysian Modernism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), chs 3 and 4. Where our accounts differ is that Gooding-Williams bases his on Nietzsche's ontology in Birth of Tragedy, which involves a dialectical relation between Dionysian chaos of affect and matter and Apollinian cultural forces of representation and individuation. I do not think that this ontology survives changes in Nietzsche's thinking by the time he wrote On the Genealogy of Morals. Nevertheless, Gooding-Williams and I would agree on the importance to Nietzsche of some sort of affective responsive body in revaluation of value and ethics.
44. Hence, Nietzsche's descriptions of will to power as the force whereby 'whatever exists, having somehow come into being, is again and again reinterpreted to new ends' (GM II 12).
45. Having defined the 'self as a 'body' Zarathustra says: 'The self says to the ego, "Feel pain here!" Then the ego suffers and thinks how it might suffer no more - and that is why it is made to think. / The self says to the ego, "Feel pleasure here!" Then the ego is pleased and thinks how it might often be pleased again - and that is why it is made to think' (Z I 4 'On the Despisers of the Body'). Similarly, in Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche claims that 'thinking is only the relationship of these drives [desires and passions] to one another' (BGE 36).
46. This criticism is suggested by Nietzsche's descriptions of the 'last man' of Thus Spoke Zarathustra summarized in Ecce Homo, 'Why I am a Destiny' 4.
47. Similarly, those that embody a pre-ordained future prevail 'at the expense of the future'; in sacrificing 'the future to themselves - they sacrifice all man's future' (EH, 'Why I am a Destiny' 4).
48. Levinas, 'Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism': 69.
49. Levinas, 'Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism': 69 ibid.
50. Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism ibid.: 70-1.
51. For example, Nietzsche could, but is unlikely to, mean the sovereign individual of liberalism whose free will is understood to be above concrete existence, beyond history, and separate from and the cause of its acts. Nor can he mean that the sovereign individual ordains his or her future in advance insofar as his or her own meanings and moral values have become flesh. Such a self would be little different to the 'last man' or a thing in one crucial respect: the individual in whom a self-legislated law and tablet of values has become flesh would be a body reduced to and coincident with a fixed form and meaning with no excess, no affect, no somatic reflexivity, no ability to respond creatively. This is one of the problems with those who embody the ascetic ideal that Nietzsche discusses in the Third Essay. With asceticism 'a few ideas are to be rendered indistinguishable, ever-present, unforgettable, "fixed," with the aim of hypnotising the entire nervous and intellectual system' (GM II 3).
52. This is apparent in descriptions of will to power as 'appropriation, injury, overpowering what is strange and weaker . . . imposition of one's own forms' (BGE 259; see also GM II 12) and in Nietzsche's concept of 'great polities' that follows from revaluation of value become flesh: 'politics merged entirely with a war of spirits' and the explosion of 'all power structures of the old society' (EH, 'Why I am Destiny' 1).
53. Useless, unwitnessed suffering, Nietzsche suggests, is what we deem 'evil' (GM II 7). But he also thinks that this suffering is congenital - the passive suffering inflicted on others as a consequence of the deification of cruelty in the figure of the sovereign individual (GM II 6). While in Human All Too Human 588, Nietzsche had suggested that true strength is revealed in the modesty of knowing 'we are not our own creation' rather than expressing that strength by wounding others, in On the Genealogy of Morals that wounding of others seems to be an inevitable, if 'innocent', by-product of the force of revaluation of value become flesh.
54. Daniel Conway usefully distinguishes between two kinds of suffering in Nietzsche's texts, but along different lines to what I have. In his interpretation there is the 'existential', 'involuntary' suffering of 'bad conscience' that accepts its punishment, overlaid by the 'surplus suffering associated with guilt'; see Daniel Conway, Nietzsche and the Political (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 15-16. The 'active suffering' of the creative self to which I am referring is in excess of these two forms of suffering that Conway describes.
55. For an account of why this limited form of generosity is an insufficient guarantee against the imperialism of sovereign 'will to power' see Rosalyn Diprose, Corporeal Generosity: On Giving with Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), ch. 1.
56. While Jean-Luc Nancy is now credited with this idea of 'community' as the disclosure of uniqueness, or what he refers to as the sharing of singularity, arguably it was Arendt, as much as if not more so than Heidegger, who provided the basis of such a concept of the political. See, for example, Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, trans. P. Connor et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991).
57. There is some support for this idea within Nietzsche's texts, for example, in his idea of the 'pathos of distance'. Rendering such an account is beyond the scope of this article, but see, for example, Rosalyn Diprose, 'Nietzsche and the Pathos of Distance', in Nietzsche, Feminism & Political Theory, ed. Paul Patton (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 1-26.