자료: Existenz, Volume 1, Nos 1-2, Fall 2006. http://www.bu.edu/paideia/existenz/volumes/Vol.1Nichols.pdf
By Craig M. Nichols, University of Rhode Island
Abstract:
In this essay, I explore the possibility and desirability of finding a middle ground between the
ideologies of liberalism and conservatism as brought to light in the intersection of political theory,
philosophical reflection, and Christian theology within the thought of Hannah Arendt, Karl Jaspers, and Reinhold Niebuhr. I argue that only in the opening of such a mediate space of freedom, defined in the relation of human nature to Transcendence via the revelatory power of ciphers of being, can human beings discover their own individual and collective meaningfulness and summon the wherewithal to transform the world through communicative action. Within this context, I also reflect on the role of education as a vehicle for actualizing authentic or inauthentic modes of being.
Liberal and Conservative: Sources of Light or the Same Black Hole?
Whenever it attempts any sort of actualization, or concretization, of its potential, in action, the human social condition always seems to find its bearings only by negotiating the middle ground between two monstrous extremes. The bodily image of a torso, legs, and head situated between the left and right arms (or "wings") of a creature that acts in the world implies symbolically the desirability of living "in the middle" while deriving a functional orientation from the outer limits of livable space by reaching out on either side to the extremes in order to navigate the middle course. If we add to these "left" and "right" spatial orientations the color designations common to American political discourse, we further consider the middle ground between liberal and conservative ideologies as a negotiation between blue and red, respectively, which the media commonly throws like a bucket of paint over entire states (as in our typical election ritual) or even the entire nation (through the modern mythology of "statistical trends"). But the extreme boundaries that limit the actual human sphere of speech and action are not blue and red, but equally colorless vacuities—black holes, empty abysses in which the freedom required for all human flourishing, including political discourse and common initiative, disappear entirely.
More to the point, when the respective liberal and conservative ideologies represented by blue and red in our system are pushed to their furthest extremes, they ironically coalesce to form the same black hole of totalitarianism, with communist totalitarianism on the left and fascist totalitarianism on the right.[1]
The point I wish to make here, if I may be allowed to mix these several metaphors, is that the light necessary for carving out a meaningful space to live without compulsion – i.e., a space governed by freedom–must come from a source that transcends the ideological organizing structural principles at either the left or right ends of the political spectrum. Either extreme, by itself – that is, qua ideology – provides only darkness, coercion, bondage, necessity, enslavement, the heteronomy of tyranny. The twentieth century attempt to combine the two extremes has shown itself to be a ruinous solution — an unthinkable, horrifying "final solution" in which light and life are stamped out. To comprehend the nature of the transcendent light that allows the graduated spectrum between blue and red (or any other colors signifying the diversity of human actualization) to appear as genuine possibilities for collective human action, I turn to three key thinkers who understood the necessity (ironically, paradoxically) of the appeal to Transcendence for the conceptualization and actualization of freedom: Hannah Arendt, Karl, Jaspers, and Reinhold Niebuhr. They each recognized not merely the need to invoke a programmatic conception of Transcendence as the actuating impetus for human freedom, but this accompanied by a formulation of freedom woven together with a reckoning with human nature, or, alternately posed, the human condition (through which categories we obtain a "dialectical circumscription" of both the inner and outer limitations of humanity).
Hannah Arendt: The Black Hole of Sameness and the Nihilism of Animal Laborans
In The Human Condition, Arendt characterizes modern industrial society as almost entirely bereft of the potential for speech and action, or even genuine craftsmanship (humanity as authentic homo faber, the creative maker who produces works and establishes an enduring world) due to the reduction of all human purposes to an artificial metabolism of production and
consumption, a twisted model of the original, organic survival condition of the human metabolic labor-relationship with the surrounding environment of the earth (animal laborans). The possibility of transcending the technologized, mechanized, artificial condition of labor and consumption in genuine speech and action (the vita activa) becomes an Herculean task in the
modern age — far more difficult than the original human struggle of labor with nature, for now the struggle has become a vicious, self-consumptive, and impersonal cycle of humanity devouring itself. There appears to be no exit from the nausea of this solipsism in which human individuality is leveled, or flattened, to appear "the same." Arendt describes this loss of individuality with military and mechanistic allusions:
The sameness prevailing in a society resting on labor and consumption and expressed in its conformity is intimately connected with the somatic experience of laboring together, where the biological rhythm of labor unites the group of laborers to the point that each may feel that he is no longer an individual but actually one with all others. To be sure, this eases labor's toil and trouble in much the same way as marching together eases the effort of walking for each soldier. It is therefore quite true that for the animal laborans "labor's sense and value depend entirely upon the social conditions," that is, upon the extent to which the labor and consumption process is permitted to function smoothly and easily, independent of "professional attitudes properly speaking" [Alain Touraine]; the trouble is only that the best "social conditions" are those under which it is possible to lose one's identity.[2]
In modern labor society, which has now attained global reach, the only meaningful activities are "jobs" that sustain and perpetuate the totalizing economic machine. The purpose of education is simply to get a good paying job. Knowledge pursued for its own sake, along with artistic pursuits, are little more than frivolous hobbies, parasitic behaviors with respect to the purposes of mass society. The quasi-totalitarian sameness of our labor society is governed by a "communist fiction," as Arendt puts it,[3] in which political equality is no longer conceived as "an equality of
unequals who stand in need of being 'equalized' in certain respects for certain purposes," such as the farmer and the physician who require a common public sphere in which to join together for common purposes (Arendt cites Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics 1133a16).[4] Rather, the question of the nature and purpose of humanity (or the "nature and destiny of man," to put it in Niebuhr's terms) is itself suppressed by a systematic deadening of the native drive of human
beings to seek out the meaning of their existence — the very drive to question the compulsive illusions of mass society; that is, the questioning that is the only real avenue of escape. Without this deadening, the global economy as we now know it would collapse. The concluding portions of Arendt's Human Condition carefully chart the modern path of the collapse of genuine speech and action to the "flat world," (as Thomas Friedman has recently described it[5]), of the mere animal laborans (from Galileo's telescope to Marx's communist vision to the relativistic Archimedean point somewhere in the Universe beyond the natural world of the earth and sky of human experience). Although the universalization, or totalizing, of humanity as a mere animal laborans began with a complex web of forces in the modern age, too numerous to discuss here, significant light can be shed on the matter by considering what are perhaps the two chief external engines driving our modern social addiction to the artificial cycle of labor and consumption: a degenerate,
mandatory public educational system and a seductive, all-pervasive visual media driven largely by the hidden agendas of advertising.
Serious consideration should be given to the question of whether the actual functioning of our
compulsory, government-run, public school system is in fact closer to the ideology o totalitarianism than to the ideal of free, autonomous, democratic citizenship. It is one of the chief goals of totalitarian institutions to condition the minds and wills of youth to accept and follow predetermined patterns of behavior, thereby stamping out the unwelcome interference of new, power destabilizing social initiatives, which Arendt aptly characterizes as the phenomenon of "natality." The chief goal of public education in America today is not to learn how to think creatively for the achievement of human flourishing – what the Greeks knew as eudaimonia – but to train youth in the warped virtues of a labor/consumption society, as well as to acclimate
them to the tedium of this nihilistic treadmill. After spending one's entire youth incarcerated in the "cells" conceived by late nineteenth and early twentieth century social planners to fit the needs of the rising industrial economy, the average American citizen can hardly dare to imagine an alternative mode of being. And that is precisely the desired outcome of a labor society whose entire economic system depends on accelerated consumption, which in turn depends on
immature, unfulfilled consumers who do not know how to find satisfaction and repose in organic
processes, but who now live in the constant attention deficit of sound-bite consciousness and momentary, serial gratification. Advertiser driven television in particular (but reinforced through other media outlets like radio, internet, and popular films) accelerates the process by informing the empty vessels created by the methods of modern schooling of the new needs they
are supposed to have and what new products can satisfy those fabricated needs — for the moment. A selfnarcotizing cycle is thus perpetuated, with the whole of public education continually adjusting itself to establish and feed it. Contemporary education is not designed to
actualize the true native potentiality of unique human Existenz (i.e., it does not exist to nurture natality); children are not taught to think for themselves or to actualize their unique potential for the sake of new constructive initiatives in the world. If they were, one might expect that the entire artificially confining and abysmally ineffectual compulsory school system would collapse of its own weight in a single generation as young people are introduced to genuine encounters
with the true wonders of nature, history, the structures of thought, etc. —encounters for their own sake and in preparation for future engagement with the world. To what extent the coercive, even tyrannical, nature of our educational institutions and the political forces that support them would allow this remains to be seen. But rather than come to the conclusion that the entire
concept of compulsory public education needs to be rethought from the ground up, we are continually inundated by calls from the left for more money to feed the beast and from the right for stricter testing before federal money should be doled out — both of which completely miss the point. The central problem is that the domineering exercise of mental control through
coercive manipulation (both subtle and overt) chokes the native quest for truth and meaning and kills, or at least radically disfigures, that inner potential which alone makes us truly human. The free play of "original seeking" which has inspired every philosophy worthy of remembrance is systematically obliterated in children beginning with their earliest educational experiences.[6]
Our contemporary situation is all the more insidious due to the strange condition that "no one"
seems to be masterminding this quasi-totalitarian strategy — at least no particular someone, no Führer, although perhaps a handful of corporate and government individuals from both the left and the right could be selected for dishonorable mention. But as the inauthentic possibility of hiding one's true involvement and passing the buck in a bureaucratic system of collective rule allows no one but the occasional scapegoat to be called to account, the system itself runs on like a headless Leviathan demanding both liberal and conservative soldiers of the global economy to feed the machine with the souls of their children and train them to make it grow bigger, run smoother, and consume faster. The resulting "clockwork orange" is a vicious monstrosity that, like the more overt totalitarian monstrosities of the twentieth century, can hardly be recognized by the well-trained herd that cannot bring itself to imagine and actualize an alternative to the self-consumptive frenzy of product consumption.
In "The Crisis in Education" – a crisis now roughly half a century older and considerably more acute – Arendt insightfully describes the problem in American education in terms that mirror her distinction between the public and private realms in The Human Condition. She describes the chief problem of American public education as a failure to preserve and protect the
development of children within the private sphere necessary for authentic maturation; instead, they are exposed at a defenseless age to a public sphere for which they are developmentally completely unprepared. The result is an abandonment and betrayal of children to the compulsive forces of mass society, where "no one" in particular takes responsibility for the
world; processes of labor and consumption dictate the meaning of human existence; preparation for mature thought, speech, and action in the adult world is circumvented and instead a perpetual childhood, or perpetual adolescence, is instituted; a world of mass-produced, consumable toys is then offered to the developmentally stunted adults–themselves the "products" of the system – in place of genuine human interaction and a meaningful engagement with the actual world and its potential. Arendt describes a key step in correcting this warped view of modern education as a sort of dialectical middle ground between conservatism and liberalism — more specifically, between conservatism in education, where the very point is to conserve, or preserve, the world that has been established through the work of homo faber and will outlast the individual's sojourn in the world, and on the other hand, liberal progressivism in politics, whereby the natality of childhood can be brought to bear in a fully matured development of its newborn individual potentiality against a conservative preservation of the status quo, which continually requires revision in order to balance the potential injustices in a society of diverse individuals. Arendt states:
The problem is simply to educate in such a way that a setting-right remains actually possible, even though it can, of course, never be assured. Our hope always hangs on the new which every generation brings; but precisely because we can base our hope only on this, we destroy everything if we so try to control the new that we, the old, can dictate how it will look. Exactly for the sake of what is new and revolutionary in every child, education must be conservative; it must preserve this newness and introduce it as a new thing into an old world, which, however revolutionary its actions may be, is always, from the standpoint of the next generation, superannuated and close to destruction.[7]
In The Human Condition, Arendt describes the natality that is the potential gift of every child to the adult world – that is, if it is allowed to bloom in the relative protection of the private realm before being faced with the daunting challenges of public life–as a kind of miracle, a gift of Transcendence (and here, she directly invokes Judeo-Christian symbolism). Referring to action in general, but forgiveness (via the symbolism of Jesus of Nazareth) and the ability to make covenants (via the symbolism of Abraham) in particular, Arendt describes this gift of Transcendence as "The miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal, 'natural' ruin," and which furthermore is "ultimately the fact of natality, in which the faculty of action is ontologically rooted." It is, she continues, "the birth of new men and the new beginning, the action they are capable of by virtue of being born."[8] The ontological question thus introduced returns us to the question of human nature, or alternatively, the human
condition (i.e., alternate modes of approaching the question of the human essence and its possibilities). Natality is a symbol of the freedom derived from Transcendence. But in what sense is the potential of human freedom innate and to what extent can human goodness be nurtured through education? And why does it necessarily fall short of the goal of perfection? At the close of "The Crisis in Education," where the phenomenon of natality is described as "the fact that we
have all come into the world by being born and that this world is constantly renewed through birth," Arendt suggests a relative optimism concerning the capacity of education to nurture the quasi-miracle of natality; she writes:
Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it and by the same token save it from that ruin which, except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and young, would be inevitable. And education, too, iswhere we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world.[9]
In what sense does the middle ground between the rigid ideologies of liberalism and conservatism, or, pushed to extremes, between the black hole sameness of totalitarian communism and totalitarian fascism, depend on something beyond ordinary human capacity? Whence comes the freedom that the education of children is ideally meant to nurture and
guide, but does not create, and destroys only at the grave peril of falling headlong into an abyss? For clarification we turn to the thought of Karl Jaspers. (contiuned on the source link at the top of this page)
[1] Arendt famously identified the essential sameness of left and right wing totalitarianism in her definitive postwar study of the subject; see Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
(New York: Harcourt, 1968).
[2] Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2d. ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 214.
[3] Arendt describes the "communist fiction" of modern society in terms that recall Heidegger's famous treatment of Das Man, the inauthentic "they-self," in Being and Time, which is
characterized by "the leveling down of all possibilities of being" [cf., Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, Joan Stambaugh trans. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), §27]; Arendt states: "A complete victory of society will always produce some sort of 'communist fiction,' whose
outstanding political characteristic is that it is indeed ruled by an 'invisible hand,' namely, by nobody. What we traditionally call state and government gives place here to pure administration — a state of affairs which Marx rightly predicted as the 'withering away of the state,' though he was wrong in assuming that only a revolution could bring it about, and even more wrong when he believed that this complete victory of society would mean the eventual emergence of the 'realm of freedom' (Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 45).
[4] Op. cit., p. 215.
[5] The "flat world" concept is optimistically championed by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman in his recent book, The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005). Friedman attempts a "glass is half full" approach to the global domination of corporate capitalism. While he shares with Arendt the positive recognition that modern labor society has increased the standard of living of many who formerly lived in abject poverty, Friedman seems oblivious to the nihilistic effects of the corporatization of the entire globe, and accepts the idea that those who have been recently emancipated from their primitive ways of life are indeed bettered by the constant flow of disposable creaturecomfort
products designed to feed our neurotic obsession with consumption. He thus encourages Americans to work harder at global competition, encouraging more money and effort to be spent educating youth in science and engineering so they can keep up with the universal rat race. This in turn serves to bolster his argument that the corporate offshoring of jobs is a good thing in the long run; however, his faith in this process seems to require a great deal of naivete with respect to the propaganda of corporate leadership, on the one hand, and the purpose of human life,
on the other.
[6] John Taylor Gatto, from whose insights on American public education I have rather freely drawn here, is a former teacher and leading advocate of alternative educational possibilities such as "home schooling," "unschooling," or radically reconceived educational situations. He poignantly argues that even the best of teachers is forced through the institutional structure of the public school environment to communicate inadvertently seven chief "lessons" to students, quite apart from any particular subject matter: "confusion, class position, indifference, emotional and intellectual dependency, conditional self-esteem, and surveillance. All of these lessons are prime training for permanent underclasses, people deprived forever of finding the center of their own special genius" [John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (Gabriola Island, British Columbia: New Society Publishers, 2005), p. 16].
[7] Hannah Arendt, "The Crisis in Education," in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Penguin, 1968), pp. 192–3.
[8] Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 247.
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