Arendt & Oakeshott III

Dearest Efraim,

Oakeshott does strike me as a particularly relevant philosophical character, despite both my disagreements with his theorizing (that are strictly epistemological and not political) and the oblivion to which a great part of his oeuvre has been condemned by the current 'leading figures' like Benhabib and Habermas; but as you well know they see themselves as the 'heirs' of critical theory, which is something that despite Eveline's inclinations to read Adorno, I cannot share by any possible means and beyond his 'Jargon of Authenticity' which is the only serious critique of the philosophical politics of Heidegger as a whole ever written, there's very little or almost nothing of interest I can find in those Marxist sociologists that call themselves philosophers.

Oakeshott is certainly far from being a tory in the old meaning of the word, and my slight familiarity is some of the classics of British political thought can only confirm on the basis of my suspicions these claims. This can only prove once again true what Arendt says about the controversy stirred by the Eichmann book, which I mentioned to you already: 'There's no discussion as heated as the one on a book no one has read' (an Austrian wit which to my knowledge is originally a Talmudic dictum). People like Rawls and MacIntyre are indeed conservative thinkers that lack the flexibility of Oakeshott when the chips are down and thinkers (but not political men acting in the plurality of contingency - the philosopher might be able to make some predictions about himself, but not unlike Heidegger and Weise he might greatly fail) are summoned to take a position.

I'm happy you agree with on his minimizing the importance of the political, and while I cannot say whether I like this or not, I find it a cunning problem in integrating him into a broader picture of politics, because after all, as you know, despite of not doing metaphysics I do remain highly ontological (that is, doing the sort of metaphysics that one is granted doing, after phenomenology) and share with Arendt (but not with Heller or Goodman-Thau) the imperative necessity of considering and re-considering the foundational aspects of politics. I don't think Oakeshott disregarded at all the 'nature of politics' and also agree with you that in his thinking about politics it is clear that their significance cannot be overstated.

It is certainly a fundamental problem to tackle Arendt's position from an Oakeshottian or even from a 'political-theoretical' stand-point because they certainly do not mean the same with politics nor do they agree with the concensus of the 'traditional schools' on the meaning of the term; and that is why I believe a discussion is most likely a profitable enterprise. With a certain tendency to 'yearn' for the social and political reality of the Polis, Arendt does integrate politics within the realm of culture, meaning in Modernity, as a part of the bridges that enable communication beyond the structures of the imaginary institutions that 'represent' Modernity (here, therefore, her particularly contradictory remarks on the meaning of the private and the public space/sphere, particular in 'The Human Condition') and that upon the demise of religion and the 'community' altogether with world alienation make it impossible otherwise.

At this point (and this is beyond doubt in Oakeshott) I believe there's a great deal of misinformation and misunderstanding in translating these remarks to the discussion going on around the French and American left, trying to hermeneutically compare Arendt with Marx; her concepts of alienation spring from Jaspers' philosophy of existence and only later during her work on Totalitarianism, do they become intertwinted with the Marxist narrative, but yet they never clearly separate again. This is of course, one of my own theses, so you shouldn't take it for what it says but for what it might potentially endeavour. However, where the dialogue with Marx is indeed possible (and this has been overlooked without exception by all the critics) is with Hegel. The 'association' to the political and social reality of the Polis belong in Hegel until the 'Phenomenology of the Spirit' in that institutions become positive and therefore dead if the spirit (of freedom for example) leaves them. This point was made by Heller, by she failed to explain to me its broader implications and I am inclined to believe the problem has much more to do with Heidegger than with Hegel. The 'Philosophy of Right' is a different story and because they read the whole of Hegel's doctrine of the ideal modern state, nor Heller neither Avineri can come to conclusions on this matter in regard to Arendt. There're many heroes in her 'stories', at times Jesus, at times the Polis, at times revolution... one needs to contextualize anew everytime.

She's then leaving the social question out of politics (with a good intention though, but leaving too many gaps in between philosophy and theory) because she believes that politics is not what the mob usually refer to by this (schools, education, social security, institutions) but a rather a realm in itself with primacy in regard to action, so that your remarks are absolutely correct in my opinion. For sure her 'green grass' has very little to do with yours and only because it springs out of the political experience as a 'Jew' and from the sources of 'dark times' I am in fullest agreement with her (except with the definition of culture itself, hers belongs undoubtedly in the Weimar sociology and mine is hermeneutic) and could never compromise with your hedonistic notion, not even one centimeter. There's indeed this aspect of politics being bestowed with some aestheticism, but I think it belongs more to both the 'poetic imagination' of Benjamin and the 'dekonstruktion' of Heidegger (which obviously Derrida misunderstood in each and every possible way) than with classicist nostalgia as found in rather conservative political theoreticians.

Lastly we return to philosophy again. What I mean by ontologizing politics (rooting them therein) is that she is often clustered by many of her followers as an Aristotelian renewer, in particular connected to the concept of praxis; but what she is doing (and in this, completing Heidegger's project to its political dimension) is shifting the hierarchies of political life from 'praxis' and 'poiesis' that Aristotle had, into 'techne' and 'episteme'; this is grounding politics as an indepent realm with ontological validity and this is the 'recovery' out of the sources of the tradition which she attempts not as re-enacting the wisdom of the past (either dialectically as in Hegel or interpretively as in Strauss) but by working on the tradition itself, showing with even more rigour, the gap in between past and future and the irretrievability of the tradition; politics 'ex nihilo', hence the concern with 'beginnings'.

Realist phenomenology means all modern phenomenology (not Lambert and Hegel) in between Brentano and Husserl that with Nicolai Hartmann and Heidegger shifted onto an ontological differentiation in between 'existential' and 'existentiell'; which is in my opinion one of the greatest break-throughs of Heidegger but in the last minute his 'opening' (which I think derives from Simmel) falls back upon the same old categories in its 'turning toward death' (and hereby Heidegger's long exegesis exercises on Greek and German poetry) instead of reaching the plurality of human existence that Arendt and Jonas set out to improve, but only the former with any degree of success. Arendt remains a phenomenologist and at that, whenever she engages in descriptions, they're not a theoretical devise to raise empiricist objections but rather the 'story-telling' is a deciphering of essence each time; and such concepts that obviously postmetaphysics wouldn't dare approach, you can derive from Duns Scotus or Descartes. And this is exactly what she does in politics, which is rather contrary to Aristotle and very Heideggerian indeed; but she doesn't make up her mind entirely on whether the source of this tendency is the notion of plurality she finds in the Hebrew bible or the radical ontology of Heidegger. This is material for a long discussion, thus for now I await your answer and our discussion tomorrow.

Best


Ari