Lecture 7

Question 1

What is the problem of freedom accoridng to Arendt?

Answer 1

• Philosophically it can can never be proven, because free will cannot be established in the world.
• Kant’s mistake was to push it internally, into the inner recesses of the will.
• Instead, it should be taken into the public sphere.
• In other words, it should be political

Question 2

Why freedom is a question of politics

Answer 2

freedom, which only seldom – in times of crisis or revolution – becomes the direct
aim of political action, is actually the reason that men live together in political organization at all. Without it, political life as
such would be meaningless.

Question 3

Freedom as an escape

Answer 3

Her problem is when freedom becomes the escape from the political domain, rather than a commitment to it.
- She suggests that freedom-as-escape might make you feel free, but this is not real.
This inner feeling remains without outer manifestations
and hence is by definition politically irrelevant

Question 4

What actually is freedom for Arendt?

Answer 4

• Freedom needs political organization.
• A space for politics – i.e. a polis:
  a politically organized world, in other words, into which each of the free men could insert himself by word and deed
• Freedom is a thing that is performed, akin to a performative art, on the political stage:
  [If] we understand the political in
  the sense of the polis, its end or raison d’être would be to establish and keep in existence a space where freedom as
  virtuosity can appear”

Question 5

What isnt freedom?

Answer 5

This, of course, belongs among the fundamental tenets of liberalism, which, its name
notwithstanding, has done its share to banish the notion of liberty from the political realm. For politics, according to the
same philosophy, must be concerned almost exclusively with the maintenance of life and the safeguarding of interests”

Question 6

The I-Will

Answer 6

“Historically, men first discovered the will when they experienced its impotence, and not its power, when they said with
Paul: “For to will is present with me; but how to perform that which is good I find not” … Hence, the will is both powerful
and impotent, free and unfree” (160).
Christian willpower was discovered as an organ of self-liberation and immediately found wanting. It is as though the I-will immediately
paralyzed the I-can, as though the moment men willed freedom, they lost their capacity to be free” (160).
* We should have instead foregrounded potential action in the world (I-can)

Question 7

Sovereignty and Arendt

Answer 7

• Sovereignty means that individuals can be meaningfully considered as things that exist on their own.
• Under human conditions,
  which are determined by the fact that not man but men live on the earth, freedom and sovereignty are so little identical that
  they cannot even exist simultaneously. Where men wish to be sovereign, as individuals or as organized groups, they must
  submit to the oppression of the will, be this the individual will with which I force myself, or the “general will” of an
  organized group. If men wish to be free, it is precisely sovereignty they must renounce”
• So: sovereignty is not identical to freedom but its opposite.

Question 7

Flipping Berlin

Answer 7

• It is actually narrow (liberal) views of freedom that tend towards totalitarianism …
• … because this is the manner of thinking that believes in the sovereign power of the individual over all else.
  Because of the will’s impotence, its incapacity to generate genuine
  power … the will-to-power turned at once into a will-to-oppression.
• So, freedom-of-the-will became will-to-power and finally will-to-sovereignty: Because of the philosophic shift from action to will-power
  … the ideal of freedom ceased to be virtuosity in the sense we mentioned before and became sovereignty, the ideal of free
  will, independent from others and eventually prevailing against them.

Question 7

Freedom is about action

Answer 7

It is men who perform them – men who because they have received the twofold gift of freedom and action can establish a
reality of their own”

Question 8

Miller on Arendt

Answer 8

• So what do we take from Arendt?
• 1) He argues that Arendt makes a strong case for why republican ideals still matter, harkening back to the Greek polis
• 2) But he critiques Arendt as being narcissistic, insubstantial and pessimistic:
• how can freedom be sustained?
• And is freedom-as-virtuosity really freedom?
• 3) And he pits a dichotomy between the thought of Pettit (who de-politicizes republicanism) and Arendt (who foregrounds
  politics).