The Decline of the Public: Arendt's Aristotelian Attack on Modernity

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The Decline of the Public:

Arendt’s Aristotelian Attack on Modernity

Travis Murray

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Introduction

     Hannah Arendt is one of the few political theorists in recent times to use ancient Greece as point of reference for contemporary analysis. In her work, The Human Condition, she focuses on the pre-philosophical Aristotelian notion of the polis in order to offer a critique of modernity.  This critique is focused on her belief that modern man has been cut off from the polis by the rise of the social to a point where it has been subsumed.  The result of the decline of the public is a condition of thoughtlessness, which dominates the modern era.  She employs the Aristotelian notion of the primacy of the public realm to justify her critique of modernity, which she suggests is void of the freedom provided by the public life, which she terms vita activa.  Man’s distinctiveness from animals, Arendt argues, is expressed only through the public realm and thus our alienation from that realm has caused our de-evolution into a social animal with slavic tendencies.

     This essay will attempt to highlight the similarities between Aristotle’s and Arendt’s  notions of the private and public sphere and then show how their arguments are used as a critique of modern society.

   

Aristotle’s Highest Good

 Aristotle argues that the ruling principle of the polis is that the polis itself provides for all of man’s higher activities. Aristotle’s assertion that public life in the polis is more important by nature to the private life of the individual rests on his rational linear analysis of  human development. That development, he holds, occurred in the context of nature, which inherently pursues only that which is good for it in the interests of self-sufficiency.  Because the purpose of all life is self-sufficiency or self-preservation, Aristotle argues, the first and most primary action of individual humans was to associate in the interests of securing that self-sufficiency. Procreation is the natural impulse of humanity to leave behind something of themselves after their finite existence is over. It is facilitated through association of male and female within a household, which men dominate because they are the natural ruling element singularly endowed with foresight, while women and slaves are relegated to permanent domination. 

     According to Aristotle, the family compact then begins to associate with other families forming villages in the interest of providing more than daily recurrent needs. The village maintains the monarchical structure of the family for it is based on the family compact and when combined with other villages forms the polis, which Aristotle assumes to be the ultimate goal of humanity. This assumption is based on Aristotle’s assertion that the polis is:

…the end or consummation to which associations move, and the ‘nature’ of things consists in their end or consummation, for what each thing is when it’s growth is completed, we call the nature of that thing, whether it be a man, a horse or family.

    So while the private life of the individual comes first, temporally speaking, according to Aristotle, followed by the village and polis, he assigns primacy to the public life of the polis because it is the ultimate fulfillment of the good life for humanity.  Aristotle defines the good life as a condition of complete self-sufficiency where humans want for nothing and have all the resources necessary for full and complete human development. Alone, man is not self-sufficient so he must naturally pursue associations, which culminate in the polis. Because nature only pursues the best and the polis is natural, the polis must be the best and highest form of humanity. 

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     Aristotle furthermore argues that only through the polis, is humankind able to define good and evil and thus justice. Humans are born without a conscious ability to define justice or virtue in the absence of the group perspective offered by the polis and so outside the polis, Aristotle suggests, humans are little more than gluttonous and lustful animals.  The full nature of man can only be realized by virtue of the village and polis, which afford individuals the extra time necessary for considerations outside those relating to daily recurrent needs.  The individual is incomplete without the polis and ...

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