Hannah Arendt and Bearing with Strangers
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Hannah Arendt and Bearing with Strangers1 Phillip Hansen Department of Philosophy and Classics, University of Regina, Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada. E-mail: [email protected]
This paper examines Hannah Arendt’s claim from ‘Understanding and Politics’ that we need to determine what ‘makes it bearable for us to live with other people, strangers forever, in the same world and makes it possible for them to bear with us’. From the vantage point of bearing with strangers, it analyses in detail two of Arendt’s essays not often treated extensively: ‘Reflections on Little Rock’ and ‘On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts about Lessing’. Some implications of Arendt’s position for current debates about the construction of otherness are identified and assessed. It is argued that bearing with strangers offers unique insights into questions of personal identity and the nature of appropriate political and social bonds. Ultimately, the paper suggests that the idea of bearing with strangers puts Arendt’s political thought and her key concepts in a new light and offers elements of a distinctively Arendtian account of politics. Contemporary Political Theory (2004) 3, 3–22. doi:10.1057/palgrave.cpt.9300124 Keywords: strangerhood; otherness; plurality; worldliness; judging; solidarity
In ‘Understanding and Politics,’ Hannah Arendt makes an intriguing, indeed extraordinary claim: that a fundamental human characteristic that allows us to get along is the ‘gift’ of an understanding heart, which ‘makes it bearable to live with other people, strangers forever, in the same world, and makes it possible for them to live with us.’ (Arendt, 1994, 322) In what follows, I argue that the idea of bearing with strangers puts Arendt’s political thought in a new light. With this idea, she was on to something important about how we live, and ought to live, our lives together in a way that respects the demands of plurality, the fact that ‘we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who lived, lives, or will live.’ (Arendt, 1958a, 8) To bear with others as strangers involves qualities distinct from those associated with intimate personal ties. However, terms reserved for more distant bonds, tolerance, for example, do not seem to fit, either. ‘Bearing with strangers’ suggests more than mutual indifference. It therefore involves a mental capacity appropriate for an active relation to that which is distant. I argue that this capacity is judging, and that bearing with strangers offers an enriched view of what, for Arendt, is our most political of mental faculties. I focus on two essays whose arguments appear informed by the idea of bearing with strangers, although Arendt does not specifically draw the
Phillip Hansen Bearing with Strangers
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connection in either case. One of these is her controversial 1959 article, ‘Reflections on Little Rock.’ The other is ‘On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts about Lessing,’ her 1959 Lessing prize lecture to the city of Hamburg. I assess their implications for Arendt’
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