Arendt and cosmopolitanism: The human conditions of cosmopolitan teacher education

Ethics and Global Politics

Volumn 5, Issue 4, 2012, Pages 239-258

  Hayden, Matthew J ^a  

^a DRAKE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

Action; Humanity; International; Morality; Natality; Plurality; Public; Standardization

Indexed keywords

EID: 84875063374     PISSN: 16544951     EISSN: 16546369     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.3402/egp.v5i4.20271     Document Type: Article

References (72)

1. Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses was targeted by religious fundamentalists for challenging the notion of religious purity and evolution. He once stated that his book 'celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs. .. a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the world.'
2. Salman Rushdie in Jeremy Waldron, 'Minority Cultures and the Cosmopolitan Alternative', University of Michigan Journal of Law and Reform 25 (1992): 751
3. For an examination of cultural preservation, see Kevin McDonough, 'Cultural Recognition, Cosmopolitanism and Multicultural Education', Philosophy of Education Society 28, no. 5 (1997): 127-135.
4. Sharon Todd, 'Living in a Dissonant World: Toward an Agonistic Cosmopolitics for Education', Studies in Philosophy and Education 29, no. 2 (2010): 213-228.
5. This is not to confuse 'standards' with 'standardization.' 'Standards' as general criteria for ascertaining acquisition is different from 'standardization' wherein processes and content are imposed. One might argue that standardization in education, particularly regarding credentials, promotes equity by producing equal outcomes in the educational credential 'market.' This argument does not focus on educational content or procedures but rather on the certification that such processes have reached a level of competency recognized as valid for certification.
6. For a variation of this argument, see Don Weenink, 'Cosmopolitan and Established Resources of Power in the Education Arena', International Sociology 22, no. 4 (July 2007): 492-516.
7. My present focus is on the constitutive substance of education in schooling and not on certification processes
8. Pauline Kleingeld and Eric Brown, 'Cosmopolitanism', Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (May 2006). Accessed July 15, 2011, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cosmopolitanism/, 10.1177/026327640602300290
9. See Sandrine Berges, 'Loneliness and Belonging: Is Stoic Cosmopolitanism Still Defensible?' Res Publica 11 (2005): 7
10. Martha Nussbaum, 'Kant and Stoic Cosmopolitanism,' The Journal of Political Philosophy 5 (1997): 1-25
11. There are enough commonplace uses of 'humanity' to require more clarification. For instance, consider the conception of 'humanity' that indicates a positive trait. I take seriously Sharon Todd's critical analysis of the concept of 'humanity' and its typical adjectival use to denote something good or to represent 'goodness' in opposition to 'inhumanity,' which is something bad and 'evil,' and thus allow for a conception of humanity that is separate from the adjective-form of 'humane.'
12. See Sharon Todd, Toward an Imperfect Education: Facing Humanity, Rethinking Cosmopolitanism (London: Paradigm, 2009)
13. See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1958)
14. Terence, in David Hansen, 'Cosmopolitanism and Education: A View From the Ground', Teachers College Record 112 (2008): 16
15. See Matthew Hayden, 'Cosmopolitan Education and Moral Education: Forging Moral Beings Under Conditions of Global Uncertainty' (Ph.D. diss., Teachers College, Columbia University, 2012).
16. See also David Hansen, The Teacher and the World: A Study of Cosmopolitanism and Education (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2011)
17. A disposition is a power that finds itself in active properties such as capacities and tendencies
18. See Luke Robinson, 'Moral Principles as Moral Dispositions', Philosophical Studies 156, no. 2 (2010): 3.
19. John Dewey, Democracy and Education (New York: The Free Press, 1916): 'Hence, normally, there is an accentuation of personal consciousness whenever our instincts and ready-formed habits find themselves blocked by novel conditions. .. Unless we try to drive our way through by sheer brute force, we must modify our organic resources to adapt them to the specific features of the situation in which we find ourselves. The conscious deliberating and desiring which precede overt action are, then, the methodic personal readjustment implied in activity in uncertain situations' (p. 348).
20. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, trans. George Long, vol. 12, 29th ed. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago, 1987), 267.
21. Phillip Kitcher, The Ethical Project (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 330
22. I recognize that education can and does occur independent from and outside of formal schooling. Throughout this article, I will typically contextualize education as formal and most of the examples given will be the same, but this is done for the clarity of writing rather than to make a distinction that does not exist. Further, moral education does not necessarily occur in nor imply only schooling, but since state-supported or public schooling is educational, it becomes political.
23. See John Dewey, Moral Principles in Education (Cambridge, MA: The Riverside Press, 1909): 'Education is a public business with us, in a sense that the protection and restoration of personal health or legal rights are not.' (p. 1).
24. This does not commit me to the advocacy of democratic governments or institutions. It is possible to conceive of structures that would allow for the processes of ethical and political participation that I describe without the existence of liberal democratic governments or republican democracies.
25. Arendt, The Human Condition, 7
26. The existence of plants, animals, our environment, the physical world, and even future persons compel us to consider them, too, though without the same force. The general prioritization of human considerations over other life forms seems to indicate that we can more easily understand our 'shared humanity' with other persons than we can with other life forms. This is not to say that we should not consider those other life forms more than we do, only that for this project the focus is on the sharing of 'humanity.'
27. We compete for the primacy of certain ends, but our individuality and our agency are premised on our differentiation and are thus complementary
28. Arendt, The Human Condition, 9
29. Hannah Arendt, 'Some Questions of Moral Philosophy', in Responsibility and Judgment, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2003), 99.
30. Aaron Schutz, 'Contesting Utopianism: Hanna Arendt and the Tensions of Democratic Education', in Hannah Arendt on Education: Renewing our Common World, ed. Mordechai Gordon, 93-126, (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2001), 99.
31. Aaron Schutz, 'Creating Local "Public Spaces"in Schools: Insights from Hannah Arendt and Maxine Greene', Curriculum Inquiry 29, no. 1 (1999): 90.
32. Arendt does allow for 'anticipated communication' with others that does not require actual interaction with them, but it does involve an active engagement with their ideas or actions. This 'anticipated communication' is a form of judgment that finds its culmination in public action; in concert with others.
33. See Stacy Smith, 'Education for Judgment: An Arendtian Oxymoron?' in Hannah Arendt on Education: Renewing our Common World, ed. Mordechai Gordon, 67-82, (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2001): 69-74.
34. See Smith, 'Education for Judgment', 73
35. See also Richard Bernstein, 'Judging: The Actor and the Spectator', Philosophical Profiles (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986)
36. The scope of this current article is not adequate to develop this argument (education for judgment) completely, nor is it presently necessary. However, it should be clear that students who fail to recognize, accept, and manage the human conditions of plurality, natality, and action will be subject to the actions and judgments of others and ill-equipped to participate in the world and the conditions of their own lives.
37. Arendt, The Human Condition, 176
38. Christine M. Korsgaard, 'Creating the Kingdom of Ends: Reciprocity and Responsibility in Personal Relations', Philosophical Perspectives 6, Ethics (1992): 306.
39. Dana R. Villa, The Cambridge Companion to Hanna Arendt (London: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 80-1.
40. Hannah Arendt, "'What Remains? The Language Remains": A Conversation with Günther Gaus' in The Portable Hannah Arendt, trans. Peter Baehr (New York: Penguin Books, 2000), 19.
41. Arendt's conception of the 'world' underwent a transformation after she wrote The Human Condition, in which she conceived of the world primarily as the space of politics. As she stated in the interview in 1964 with Gaus, 'I comprehend it now in a much larger sense, as the space in which things become public, as the space in which one lives and which must look presentable.'
42. Villa, The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt, 189
43. Hannah Arendt, 'The Crisis in Education', in Between the Past and Future, 173-96, (New York: The Penguin Group, 1961), 174 (emphasis in original)
44. Arendt, 'The Crisis in Education,' 187
45. Arendt, The Human Condition, 177-8
46. I admit that it may be possible, to an extent, to indoctrinate so completely that the indoctrinated might be 'inoculated' adequately enough to prevent an 'intrusion' or corruption of the child by the world, but this would require an almost permanent removal from the world, not only physically, but politically as well. One so inoculated would never engage in a true interaction with another, and so never really 'be' in the world.
47. See Hannah Arendt, 'On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts About Lessing', in Men In Dark Times, ed. Mary McCarthy West (Orlando, FL: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1970), 3-31.
48. Arendt, 'The Crisis in Education', 192
49. Many authors have written about Arendt's educational 'conservatism' but have fallen prey to an equivocation with the political notions of conservation. In addition, there is a common misreading or perhaps selectivity that omits the clear intention of Arendt in 'conservation' that aims to protect all of the inherent qualities extant in the students (their natality and uniqueness), the teachers (their own natality and desire to convey an understanding of an old world to new inhabitants that will alter that world and make it their own), and the world (apprising children of the 'old world' without allowing the old to subjugate the natality of the 'new' in the students/children).
50. Natasha Levinson, 'The Paradox of Natality', in Hannah Arendt on Education: Renewing our Common World, ed. Mordechai Gordon, 11-36 (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2001), 13-14.
51. For more about this frustration, see Levinson, 'The Paradox of Natality.'
52. Arendt, The Life of the Mind (New York: Harcourt, 1978), 176
53. Arendt, On Humanity in Dark Times, 11
54. Hansen, View from the Ground, 23 (emphasis in original)
55. Arendt, The Crisis in Education, 176. In such cases, the new is not new but rather prefigured.
56. Hannah Arendt, 'Tradition and the Modern Age', in Between Past and Future: Six Exercises in Political Thought (New York: The Viking Press, 1961), 17-40
57. Hannah Arendt, 'Thinking and Moral Considerations: A Lecture', Social Research 38, no. 3 (July 15, 1971): 417-446.
58. The 'midwife' metaphor is another recurring theme in Arendt's exploration of Greek life and of the Socratic dialogs
59. Levinson, The Paradox of Natality, 17
60. Arendt, The Human Condition, 7
61. Arendt, The Crisis in Education, 176. In such cases, the new is not new but rather prefigured.
62. For more on these comments about dialog and monolog, see Lev Petrovich Yakubinsky and Michael Eskin, 'On Dialogic Speech', PMLA 112, no. 2 (1997): 243-256.
63. See Bonnie Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993)
64. Honig suggests that such reassurances were sought by the revolutionaries of the American Revolution through their resurrection of ideas, processes, and thoughts from ancient thinkers to support their wholly radical project
65. Korsgaard, Creating the Kingdom of Ends, 323-4
66. See Todd, Toward an Imperfect Education
67. The redemptive potential found in this conception lies at the root of forgiveness, a significant component of social, political, and moral goods as identified by Arendt in a number of her works
68. See Arendt, The Human Condition, 236-42
69. See also Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: The Viking Press, 1964)
70. Particularly the postscript. The concept in Arendt is intriguing but not necessary for this project. It is used here only to show one benefit of a more comprehensive conception of 'humanity' and the implications therein.
71. Arendt, The Human Condition, 178
72. Arendt, 'Karl Jaspers: Citizen of the World', in Men In Dark Times, ed. Mary McCarthy West, 81-94 (Orlando, FL: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1970), 84.