Hannah Arendt: About violence. The human condition
Introduction
The concept "violence", in its most literal meaning refers to the "intentional use of strength or physical power, in fact, or as a threat, against oneself, another person or a group or community, which causes or has many probabilitiesto cause injuries, death, psychological damage, developmental disorders or deprivations ”, that is, it refers to the effective and verifiable damage that is exercised by one another in a particular context.
This definition of violence, which responds to the logical criteria through which this phenomenon is measured, significantly extended its relevance and its interpretive spectrum through the twentieth century, more specifically, during the various totalitarian experiments that affected the different societies. At this time, violence became a concept endowed with an unprecedented and unprecedented intensity in history. It is within this context, that the work of the thinker and author Hannah Arendt takes special force.
The position adopted by the author in her work "On violence, the human condition" positions us within the framework of a thorough analysis of political violence in its various forms in the context of the contemporary world, brilliantly instituting fundamental notions about thePolitics and community life, complementing it with a powerful criticism of the State as a monopoly of violence, the conception of sovereignty as the center of political activity, centralization and bureaucracy.
In the following analysis, there will be a review of the already individualized work of Arendt, more specifically as regards its vision of power, revolution and violence itself, with the objective of highlighting the importance of philosophical and critical thinkingof the author when thinking the phenomenon of the constant appearance of new political agents in public and political space, and how they make it possible for the circle of violence to be enhanced in societies until today.
Hannah Arendt. Brief biography of the author
From what has been registered with its history, the life of Hannah Arendt was no different from that of all the children of their time, so delving into those aspects of its history does not concern us in the present opportunity. He was born in 1906 and it was not until his adolescence that his interest in philosophical thinking began to arouse with a force that motivated her to become one of the most important thinkers of the contemporary era.
In this period of passage between your childhood and youth, access to reading various philosophical works contained in the Family Library, offered a relevant space in which to develop your academic interest. In this way, he concluded that in philosophy was the only way to satisfy his "immense desire for understanding, the deeply felt need that emerged from understanding the world, things, human life".
He studied the Philosophy career in Marburg, Friburg and Heidelberg, where his most influential professors were thinkers like Rudolf Karl Bultmann – theology – Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers. After his doctoral thesis, he began to write what would become his first work, a biography of the German Jew Rahel Varnhagen that only concluded in the fifties. In this work, Arendt, coinciding with the rise of National Socialism, was introduced into the study of the problematic insertion of the Jews into the Germany of the nineteenth century, in the confusing and often tortuous paths that traveled from assimilation to rejection, and inThe peculiar life of so many Jews who, "emancipated" of Jewish faith, never became accepted as Germans more than occasionally and discontinuously.
Hannah was an important activist and thinker of the rights of Jews at the time when Adolfo Hitler made his rise to power, especially in circumstances in which she found that the social situation had limited the ability of contemporary philosophers, since they had settled with total ease to the conditions imposed by the regime.
This extreme life experience crossed by the author, determined what would be the current of her critical and philosophical thinking, and that would be demonstrated with certainty in her most important works, such as the one we will review below.
About violence. Work review.
Hannah Arendt’s work that inspires this analysis, corresponds to a relatively short text compared to his other works, and is divided into three parts. In the first part, the political thinker contextualizes the relevance of the issue of violence in the context of the socio -political scenario, and advances some ideas about violent action. In the second part, Arendt analyzes the relationship between power and violence and states the main thesis of the book, to finally propose in the last part, address the nature and causes of violence.
According to the author, in the modern era, the meaning of politics, understood as the "exercise of freedom through action and the word" [Footnoteref: 3], suffered a radical change product of an overestimation of the ability tomanufacture of man. This would have excluded the premise that politics was over other facets of human behavior, at the same time that violence would have acquired relevance in the political sphere from which, from the Greek world, it was excluded.
This initial analysis from the perspective of the Greek world becomes relevant to understanding Arendt’s work, since, in his words, for the Greeks, violence and politics they formed two totally opposite and not compatible poles of each other: while in thePrivate space violence could be justified, because the relationships that were established there were rather asymmetric, that is, in interpersonal relationships a relationship of command and obedience was generated, an issue that in the public-political space should necessarily be excluded, becauseThe man who entered the polis interacted with peers through action and discourse in order to persuade them, and not govern them:
“Being a political, living in a polis, meant that everything was said through words and persuasion, and not with strength and violence. For the Greek thinking, forcing people through violence, sending instead of persuading, they were pre -political forms to deal with people whose existence was outside the polis, home and family life, with thattype of people in which the head of the family ruled with despotic and indisputed powers ”.
In this way, the author recounts how the Greek political experience was constituted, based on the concepts of equality (located at the time it is about) and freedom. It was, on the one hand, equal to word, that is, that all members of the polis had the same right to talk about political affairs and, on the other hand, an equality before the law, which granted the right toAll men to act.
This preliminary analysis that Arendt performs, makes sense and becomes relevant when in the course of the work the review of the establishment of modern policies is given, both the totalitarian, but above all those that it would call revolutionary, then, by virtue ofIts interpretation, these suppose the appropriation of violence and the implement. In his opinion, if the meaning of politics is given, from the Greek world, for the ability to act of man, through the use of persuasion in human affairs, thus excluding violence, remains to ask ourselves ifRevolutions can be considered political events since in them the use of violent and not persuasion action prevails.
Although violence and power usually appear jointly in the political sphere and, above all, in modern revolutionary bursts, Arendt defines them as two opposite elements. While violence in its opinion is linked to the environment, power is linked to the field of plurality. In this sense, the work establishes that violence must always be justified, due to its instrumental character, while power, on the contrary, does not need justification but legitimation.
Arendt sees power as the ability to act in concert, this means that the power is never owned by an individual;It belongs to a group and continues to exist only while the group remains united ”. In this sense, the power keeps a link with violence “since the instruments of violence, like all other tools, are designed with the purpose and purpose of multiplying natural power until, in the last stage of its development,be able to replace it ". Although in the revolutions power and violence they act jointly, they cannot be identified, since they would be annihilated, because there, where one of them governs absolutely, the other is absent.
In this sense, and unlike what the revolutionary tradition maintains, Arendt affirms that it is vainThat the importance of these lies in the ability of individuals to group and act, that is, by power and not for violence:
“Violence does not promote causes, history or revolution, neither progress nor reaction;But it can contribute to dramatizing the complaint and calling public attention to violence, contrary to what its prophets support, it is before a reform weapon that of revolution ”.
In the work in analysis, Arendt establishes a distinction between the concepts of reform and revolution and, at the same time, offers a new conceptualization around the way of conceiving power, so it would have a polysemic character. On the one hand, while the reform would form again what would have been deformed or corrupted, the revolutions are irruptions of the totally new, in this sense, every revolution founds a new order. On the other hand, the founding nature of the revolution is linked to power and, more precisely, to what would be called "meeting power".
In a final optics of the author regarding the origin of violence and what becomes this for the practice of politics, is that Arendt makes a unique vision regarding the so -called "social issue", according to the author, problem of the problem of theSocial issue acquired political relevance when men questioned that poverty was something inherent to the human condition, that is, when they tried the distinction between poor and rich. However, if at first the social issue plays a strongly revolutionary role, it must be abandoned at the time of the foundation of a new political order that ensures stability to the new space of freedom and, at the same time, that allows the emergence of newFoundations for that. If not, politics itself was corrupted, because this, in Arendtian thought, deals with the exercise of freedom and, therefore, political subjects must be released from all forms of need.
Critical Comment on Work
From the reading and analysis of Arendt’s text, it has been possible to deduce that the author’s particular interest in modern revolutions is not only given by the use of violence inherent to them, as a unique and possible item to amend,but rather, in the course of reading it can be glimpsed that this essential criticism of innate violence of revolutions is rather as a revolted criticism of the “meeting power”, given by the foundation of new spaces for freedomthat would allow to continue characterizing violence as something essentially pre-political and, thus, analyze the revolutions from a political perspective.
From a general perspective, the meeting power arises when human beings are grouped and burst, for example, in the streets, with a series of claims without the need to have established a previous consensus for it, that is, a form of powerof meeting would be the spontaneous manifestations, where the power of association of individuals is revealed. These associations for the author "are not games, are ad hoc organizations that pursue short -term objectives and disappear when the objective has been achieved". However, these two forms of power share a common nucleus: they suppose a meeting between men and do not hold an instrumental character. The various notions of power can be thought of as phenomena that may appear next to violence, but, in any case, this violence is exercised against "others" that are outside that meeting space that is born from the social issue, andIt does not constitute a form of interaction between the people of that space. In other words, it is the power to group and not violence that, according to the author would allow the emergence of new social actors in the political scene, and in this sense, the intrinsic meaning of the Revolution for Arendt would be given by the presence ofThe social issue, which would allow the grouping of individuals and their irruption in the political scene, and on the other hand of the Foundation, which would allow the establishment of a new political order.
Notwithstanding that the author offers a finished and based on opinion regarding violence, revolution and power, it is possiblemeeting, that is, as long as spaces of freedom are established in which violence itself, in any form and under any pretext no longer takes place. However, due to its restricted conception of the "social issue", Arendt does not seem to distinguish in the context of the revolutions and the social problems themselves to the dominators of the dominated, or to the oppressors of the oppressed, so it does not achieveExplain in a finished way why contemporary political revolutions have failed to establish spaces for freedom free of violence.
In this sense, I consider that a less restricted analysis of what the social issue and effective problems implyof which they are victims, they can effectively exercise fair violence and generate these spaces for freedom to which Arendt refers. Or, in Arendtian terms, only "defeated generations" could be effectively able to exercise subordinate violence to "meeting power", that is, free from instrumental logic.
conclusion
The work of the contemporary philosopher Hannah Arendt, houses, as already mentioned at the beginning of this analysis, numerous great merits that make its comprehensive reading recommended. The author performs an valuable exercise of political philosophy by unraveling the underlying budgets present in the discourse and actions of the defenders of violence, both in the totalitarian regimes, and in the revolutionaries, as well as in political theorists and young rebels.
This work of political philosophy helps us question the concepts we have learned about social phenomena, and above all, it makes us reflect on that violence that is not rational either by its creative capacity or for being an expression of life, and at the same time weinvites you to think about the same constitution of violence in the socio -political field as that which is only rational when it seeks objectives that justify its use, and given that when we act we never know with certainty the eventual consequences of what we are doing, the text invites usTo present a panorama in which violence may or may not be rational, promoting our ability to determine when it is time to differentiate between the violence from the oppressors and violence of the oppressed.
Violence, by itself, does not promote causes, neither history nor revolution, neither progress nor reaction;However, it can serve to dramatize grievances and bring them to public care, it can alert us about the true scope of the phenomenon of the social issue and all those nascent socio -political phenomena of it, to say, inequality, discrimination, power.
It is therefore, that the work analyzed is of great relevance when we propose to carry out a base analysis regarding the evolution of the conception of violence in history. However, and as socio -political conceptions also obey the changes that occur over time, it is necessary to review Arendt’s criticism to violence and the structures of society with a specially critical eye, since the current experience on important occasionsHistorical has shown that a massive emergence of a group of society in public space, in some cases violent, as oppressed and dominated groups, has given rise to the foundation of other stable spaces for action and discourse, and by the way, for the claim of valid struggles.
Leave feedback