Phenomenology of Plurality by Sophie Loidolt

Author:Sophie Loidolt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

Notes

1. Arendt preferred the German title of the book, Vita activa (cf. LM 6), because she saw activities and their constitutive force in the center of her project.

2. My interpretation is partly inspired by an excellent study by Martin Braun (1994: esp. 13–37), who has worked out a systematic reconstruction of Arendt’s notion of activity with respect to Heidegger’s and Jaspers’s approaches.

3. In his critical but very elucidating essay, Bernasconi (1996) also points out how this leads to difficulties in Arendt’s political theory when it comes to confronting racism, especially with regard to her infamous “Reflections on Little Rock” (Arendt 2003a, 193–213) and her appraisal of the American Revolution in On Revolution (Arendt 1963). Cf. also Barber (2001).

4. Or, at least, having been able to hear once and being able to actualize this experience in imagination.

5. This quote is from the German essay “Natur und Geschichte,” which was only partly included in BPF (cf. Young-Bruehl 1982: 536).

6. At first sight, Sartre’s position is close to Arendt’s, since he also regards it as “impossible to find in every man a universal essence that could be said to comprise human nature” while insisting that “there is nonetheless a universal human condition” (Sartre 2007: 42). While concrete historical situations may vary, “[w]hat never varies is the necessity for him [man] to be in the world, to work in it, to live out his life in it among others, and, eventually, to die in it.” But in contrast to Arendt, Sartre (2007: 42) takes conditions to be mere “limitations” that are surpassed by man’s radical freedom. For Sartre, conditions have “an objective as well as a subjective dimension: objective, because they affect everyone and are evident everywhere; subjective because they are experienced and are meaningless if man does not experience them—that is to say, if man does not freely determine himself and his existence in relation to them” (Sartre 2007: 42).

7. Arendt’s “modes of the encompassing” qua enactment of life, worldliness, and plurality are thus not written in stone like eternal or logical truths, but are the result of elucidating the tradition and drawing from it different fundamental modes of Being (Marx: animal laborans, Heidegger: homo faber and Aristoteles: zoon politikon and zoon logon echon).

8. In a footnote, Benhabib (2003: 167) indeed points to Joan W. Scott and her “good theoretical statement of the ‘essentialism/constructivism’ divide, in particular as it applies to the issues of gender.” However, this conceptual pair can neither be applied to Husserl’s eidetics (rather dealing with eidetic propositions like that color never goes without surface) nor to Heidegger’s existential categories of BT without further ado.

9. For a closer examination, see Crowell’s excellent study on Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning (2001).

10. A “dispositive” in the Foucaultian sense is a “dynamic net” with a certain strategic function, which can comprise discourses, institutions, architectonic establishments and facilities, regimenting decisions, laws, administrative measures, propositions/declarations, philosophical and moral doctrines, and much more (cf. Foucault 1980). Examples for dispositives are: sex/sexuality, the control of madness, internment, and “episteme” as a discursive dispositive.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.