DATA OF INTEREST

GUEST:
Elisa Goyenechea

HOST:
Juliana Rabelo


Synopsis:

A talk about Hannah Arendt´s vision of political theory, political friendship and civil disobedience.

A reflection on what politics is, the meaning of politics, was a constant ambition of Hannah Arendt. Politics, as a meeting space of equals, is imperfect. However, it has its own light permeated by the traditions where it inserts itself. This light stems from exchange, debate, good argumentation, mutual enlightenment. It implies an attitude of openness, of listening, a capacity to negotiate (in the positive sense of the word), to yield positions, to reach agreements and make accords.

Politics is not a means to avoid men killing one another; it is not a practical science that tells you what to do; not a production technique; not a strategy for guaranteeing productivity and consumption; but rather an end in itself, that is worth practicing. Elisa Goyenechea concludes that thinking and doing political theory independent from what philosophers say, is Arendt´s great contribution.

On the topic of civil disobedience Arendt asks: what reason do citizens have to obey the law in a society based on consent? Do we obey the law or do we consent to it? When we say, in free societies, that we obey the laws, we are in fact consenting to the laws. In any society that is based on consent there is always the latent potential capacity of the right to dissent. Any time there is not open and public dissent, I take for granted that there is a tacit agreement. What keeps bodies politic alive are the citizens, the new generations, participation. It is a balance between permanence and change. The political bodies are not artifacts but rather human artifices.

Democracy should not be understood as the government of the majority, but rather as the government of the majority subject to rules that imply a sensible respect and space for minorities. An unrestricted government of the majorities such as can be achieved through fraud, through a single party dictatorship, through bank monopolies, by taking over the institutions of justice, is tyrannical.

Hannah Arendt defends civil disobediences based in the tradition of association for a common, free and sincere opinion (rather than a common end). Arendt presents civil disobedience as a political figure, not a moral figure (as in the conscientious objector). The person who does civil disobedience is worried about the health of his nation, the health of its institutions, not about his moral conscious. The objector is always an isolated individual who is thinking of his moral integrity. The objector is one and his worry is about himself, while civil disobedience adds numbers to their cause, joins consciences. Arendt says: when an isolated conscious manages to gather many for the same cause it changes in nature, it stops being moral and becomes political.

The success of a cause is directly proportional to the number of people associated with that cause because that is how power is generated. Minorities unite to confront majorities because the decisions made by the majority are not necessarily binding; they need not be laws because the law is outside of the majority. We cannot let ourselves be complacently governed by the majority´s decisions because majorities left to their own internal logic are tyrannical (because they violate the rights of those who think differently).

Arendt interprets Aristóteles´s philia politike. This model of citizen bond would make justice superfluous, says Aristotle. Although we associate friendship with warmness of feeling, Arendt interprets the philia politike as a mundane bond; not private but artificial, it does not bring brothers together, does not make us brothers (in a common belief), it does not make us members of a fraternity (common profession of faith), it is not a blood relationship, or a familial one, nor are they associations based on emotion and sentiment.

For Arendt public space or bodies politic do not necessarily propose a common goal that all should work towards. That is, if we advocate for and respect plurality, multiple confessions of faith, diverse ways in which we want to associate or how to fill the hours and the days, the eighteenth century nation model does us no good in a world of massive migrations and encounters between differences.

In a plural public space we have to share a basic sense of justice, but not necessarily share all our convictions, loyalties or axiomatic principles. When I have evidence that others think differently comes the long task of debating, arguing and persuading. We have to become friends, reconcile, get on good terms with this world that is populated with divergent people.

Political friendship is a bond between dissimilar people. The bond of the citizen is not in the plane of affectivity and emotionality, it is in the plane of logos, of prudential decisions, of discerning, and what unites us is the public good.

Bio:

Elisa Goyenechea is a Doctor in Political Science with a graduate degree in Philosophy from the UCA with a postdoctoral grant from the Department of Social Science, as well as a professor and researcher.

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Hannah Arendt: Praxis and Freedom

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