Mark Button. Social Theory and Practice. Volume 31, Issue 2, April 2005.
Over the past several decades, a general consensus has taken shape among a diverse group of scholars concerning the moral and political significance of public reason as a standard for political dialogue between citizens in pluralistic liberal democracies. While the modern notion of public reason can be traced back most immediately to Kant, contemporary theorists have pressed this idea into the service of establishing the guidelines and values in accordance with which citizens of diverse and incommensurable moral, religious, and philosophical perspectives may nonetheless come to stable and mutually acceptable agreements about the basic institutions of political society and concerning the most fundamental questions that confront democratic societies. Working with the (Kantian) ideal that any action or judgment that will affect others, to be morally legitimate, must be acceptable (or capable of being made acceptable) to all those affected, public reason claims to offer the procedural means and the substantive values by which the moral validity of political judgments can be vouchsafed. In this regard, public reason has been closely identified with standards like reciprocity, impartiality, the “moral point of view,” and democracy itself.
To be sure, a host of contemporary thinkers have offered numerous critiques of public reason in recent years, raising doubts about the coherence, plausibility, and fairness of this standard for liberal justification. One central question that is raised by this general turn to public reason in contemporary political thought is what role, if any, religious or other equally comprehensive doctrines or perspectives should play in public political argument and decision-making. How far are citizens appropriately guided by their religious or moral convictions when they enter the public domain and address important political questions with others in a condition of extensive religious, moral, and philosophical diversity? One of the basic issues at stake here is whether there are good moral and civic reasons (not just wise prudential ones) for thinking that certain limits or restrictions should be attached to the use of religious arguments/reasons in the public political domain. A wide range of liberal theorists have made compelling answers to this question in the affirmative, arguing that citizens in pluralistic democracies have a moral and political duty to conduct their public political discussions in accordance with principles and values that it would be reasonable to expect other free and equal citizens to accept.
In this paper I draw on an unlikely source, the political thought of Hannah Arendt, to challenge the idea of public reason as a normative standard for the conduct of political discourse in pluralistic liberal democracies and to outline the beginnings of an alternative to it. I refer to Arendt as an unlikely source for help in these matters because, as most readers of Arendt are aware, she makes some rather stem distinctions between what are for her properly public/political activities and what must be kept private. Yet it would be a mistake to presume that Arendt’s demarcations between the public and private participates in or can be grafted onto the secular-religious distinction that is such a prominent feature of the debates surrounding contemporary political liberalism. Indeed, it is precisely because Arendt’s political thinking cannot be mapped out in relation to the ongoing theoretical-political dispute between liberalism and religion that her political thought can provide important new insights into the contemporary controversy that surrounds the idea of public reason.
While Arendt’s conception of politics is in its own unique way bound up with a series of seemingly rigid demarcations (between the political and the social or economic, for example), her approach to the self and political action, as well as her understanding of the stakes of sustaining an open political realm more generally, create a critical space in which to challenge the basic conceit of liberal public reason: that participation in the grammar of public reason is the sign of one’s moral standing as a good and reasonable democratic citizen. Yet the purpose of this paper is not only critical, but constructive. I will argue that by turning to Arendt’s appreciation for the role of self-disclosure in political speech and action, we are provided with a model of political dialogue that can expand in powerful ways the meaning and significance of “the public use of reason.”
Before making my case for this Arendtian alternative, I discuss briefly John Rawls’s conception of public reason, because it represents one of the most persuasive accounts of how contemporary liberal philosophy responds to the question of religious and other so-called comprehensive doctrines in politics. By addressing a particularly influential version of public reason, I will show how an Arendtian perspective raises critical questions about the operation of such a standard, while accounting for many of the values that liberals rightly cherish without the kinds of constraints and limitations that they propose. This is not to say that there are no limits to public discourse, but rather that the nature of the boundaries of the public realm need to be fundamentally rethought and ultimately expanded. In this regard, I will also indicate in the conclusion to this paper how Arendt’s political theory can be marshaled to challenge some of her own, in my view unsustainable, distinctions between the political and the non- or pre-political. After presenting the liberal case for public reason, I will show what is potentially lost from an Arendtian view by the operation of such a standard and why this matters for contemporary politics. I will then turn to a discussion of mutual respect, civic friendship, and the challenges of truth claims in the political domain in an effort to address some of the normative goods of public reason without sacrificing the practical conditions necessary for what Arendt calls the political disclosure of humanitas and with it the preconditions for valid political judgments.
Rawls and Public Reason: The Grammar of Liberal Citizenship
For Rawls, public reason provides the guidelines in accordance with which citizens and public officials should apply the principles of a political conception of justice to specific questions of law and policy, most especially those issues that Rawls refers to as “constitutional essentials” and issues of “basic justice.” Public reason is, quite self-consciously, an idea whose purpose is to bridge the ever-looming gap between theory (and specifically, a liberal political conception of justice) and the tumultuous world of political practice and public inquiry. As such, liberal public reason contains both substantive (liberal) principles, such as the values of equal liberty and equality of opportunity, and procedural standards that seek to specify the type of reasoning and the form of public argumentation that is appropriate for a diverse democratic society committed to liberal legitimacy.
Rawls introduces the idea of public reason as an “ideal conception of citizenship for a constitutional democratic regime.” For Rawls, the notion of a properly public form of reasoning is fundamentally about how to conceive the type of relationship and the kinds of moral duties that exist for citizens in a democracy, citizens who, at least in theory, hold ultimate political power and who, again in theory, are ultimately responsible for the exercise of coercive public laws over one another. Rawls argues that the ideal of citizenship, as expressed by the requirement of public reason, “imposes a moral, not a legal, duty—the duty of civility.” As Rawls conceives of it, this duty of civility imposes a moral obligation on citizens to be ready and able to offer explanations as to the basis of one’s public arguments, political advocacy, or vote in terms that others can reasonably be expected to endorse. Specifically, legitimate forms of public justification require that citizens “appeal only to presently accepted general beliefs and forms of reasoning found in common sense, and the methods and conclusions of science when these are not controversial.”
Rawls’s position is frequently interpreted as one that seeks to exclude or otherwise privatize religion or other comprehensive moral and philosophical views. Yet it is not quite accurate to refer to public reason as an effort to privatize or “bracket” religious or other comprehensive modes of expression, and this is because far more is involved here. Rawls’s last contributions to these questions show that he sought to expand his view of public reason to allow for the inclusion of comprehensive doctrines in public argument. The crucial “proviso” that he attached to this liberalization (or widening) of public reason is that
reasonable [comprehensive] doctrines may be introduced in public reason at any time, provided that in due course public reasons, given by a reasonable political conception, are presented sufficient to support whatever the comprehensive doctrines are introduced to support.
By putting it in just this way, Rawls shows on the one hand that he is concerned to have public discourse reflect a commitment to general accessibility for all citizens in a pluralistic society even as the modes of public argument are diversified; on the other hand this proviso also suggests that the real argumentative weight in public deliberations must be carried by liberal public reason since this stipulated limitation strives to make redundant (or rather superfluous) the religious views whose content must be fully accounted for by nonreligious (or non-comprehensive) values in order to stand up to liberal scrutiny—that is, to be deemed reasonable and publicly justifiable. The reason for this type of moral and political weighting is that there “are many nonpublic reasons but only one public reason.” The nonpublic status of “comprehensive doctrines” does not mean that they are essentially private, but their presumed nongeneralizability (and/or nonaccessibility) renders the public political employment of such views deeply problematic, and absent certain liberal impediments (i.e., the proviso) these claims are judged potentially coercive.
At its core, then, the idea of public reason claims to provide a moral standard of reciprocity and mutual respect that instructs citizens of a pluralistic democracy to eschew those forms of reasoning and modes of argument that they cannot reasonably expect others to endorse or assent to; or, in accordance with Rawls’s proviso, one should always be ready and capable of supplementing those claims or “grounding reasons” with nontheistic, nonsectarian public reasons. This is how contemporary liberalism understands what respect for persons requires. If a stable political consensus under conditions of ethical and philosophical pluralism is the goal, then (shadowing Rawls’s own move away from “metaphysics”) public dialogue (and political philosophy) should avoid or seek to minimize long-standing philosophical controversies. As Rawls makes plain, this criterion “imposes very considerable discipline on public discussion”—a point many of Rawls’s defenders seem to have overlooked, with a few notable exceptions. The idea of public reason applies not only to institutions like the U.S. Supreme Court (which Rawls calls an “exemplar of public reason”), but also to citizens in a wide range of public political activities like advocacy, campaigning, voting, and so on. Additionally, while Rawls is most concerned to establish the operation of public reason on matters of “constitutional essentials,” where basic issues of rights and liberties are at stake, he is admirably forthright in acknowledging that “it is usually highly desirable to settle political questions by invoking the values of public reason.”
One useful way to understand public reason is to view it as a kind of language requirement for liberal citizenship. To adopt and practice the moral duty of citizenship that is conveyed by public reason is to “adopt a certain form of discourse.” Political liberals seek to institutionalize public reason as the official language for public political argument. It is not the only language you will hear in politics, but it should of right be the dominant one at the end of the day. Not everyone will be a native speaker, but everyone will be expected to learn it and use it, “in due course,” as it were. In this respect, the Rawlsian proviso is a requirement that compels a moral duty on citizens who would draw on comprehensive doctrines in public argument to be fluent in more than one language. More directly, liberal public reason is a kind of political Esperanto that aims to help citizens live on “the surface” of their political relations with one another, providing a necessary second tongue for properly public (i.e., moral and civil) engagement. Other “nonpublic” languages drawn, for example, from churches, sacred texts, or moral philosophy must either be set aside or readily translated in the public domain according to the rules of liberal grammar. But secular (that is, non-sectarian and non-comprehensive) political translation itself is a moral duty of citizenship, not a task that can be sloughed off to others, at least if one desires to be judged a reasonable and civil person. Since no language is really separable from the broader culture of which it is an integral part, public reason represents more than just the form of reasons and the kinds of arguments that are employed in public, but also highlights a specific way in which citizens are to understand themselves and relate to one another over time.
What is important to stress here is that Rawls and other contemporary liberals encourage the adoption of the standards of public reason and a form of liberal bilingualism because it not only addresses the essential question of how to justify coercive laws in a pluralistic social environment under various “burdens of judgment,” but also because it casts the political relation of citizens in a constitutional democratic regime as one of “civic friendship.” The “civic” side of this “civic friendship” is contained by public reason’s injunction to appeal only to political values (not comprehensive philosophic or religious values, or at least not exclusively) when it comes to public political discourse. The rather surprising notion of “friendship” here comes from the norms of reciprocity, civility, and trust that Rawls believes will proliferate with the deployment and cultivation of liberal public reason. Public reason, then, is not just a matter of specifying the legitimate (epistemic) grounds for arguments that address questions of basic justice or the use of coercive power, it is a normative (moral) model of citizenship that seeks to shape the contours and dimensions of the public political sphere, the language and arguments heard therein, and the dispositions and character of all those who participate in democratic political argument. In sum, to understand and comport oneself as a democratic citizen, in accordance with this liberal frame, means that one has absorbed the values and procedures of public reason. In this sense, the “proviso” is not just a task of (epistemic) supplementation—or a test of valid public arguments—but also fundamentally a project of moral/civic preparedness.
With political liberalism’s commitment to an “ideal of citizenship” and a specific form of civic friendship in mind, it isn’t accurate to claim that Rawlsian liberalism and public reason express a commitment to “epistemic abstinence” or to “higher order impartiality.” We might more accurately refer to this commitment as one of moral and civic transformation via the linguistic/moral thrust of public reason. I raise this point not to rehearse the familiar charge that contemporary liberalism is only another sectarian political doctrine traveling under the specious guise of official neutrality. That contemporary liberals are committed to (or are at least now more willing to acknowledge) the political consequences and the cultural-transformative effects of their conception of moral citizenship is a qualified advance in the coherence of liberal political theory. Yet a central question remains, and that is whether qualities like civic friendship, mutual respect, and reciprocity are adequately accounted for or generated by political liberalism and public reason so understood. In my view, these important civic qualities are seriously constrained and potentially jeopardized by liberal accounts of public reason. I what follows I draw on certain features of Hannah Arendt’s political thought to indicate why public reason might have a constraining effect on values of civic friendship and norms of reciprocity, and to show that there is an alternative way of conceiving these political goods that does not depend on the restrictions of liberal public reason.
Arendt, Humanitas, and the Relevance of the Public Realm
Within the extensive scholarship dedicated to Hannah Arendt’s political thought, there is significant disagreement concerning both how her theory of action and the public sphere should be understood, and what political consequences (if any) might follow from adopting one or another privileged interpretive reading of Arendt’s theory. There are many excellent analyses of these interpretive battles and the issues at stake within them. The one thing that nearly all of Arendt’s interpreters have been able to agree upon is that there are significant tensions within her theory of action and the public sphere. These tensions (for some, contradictions) have been explored along a number of different axes: the expressive and the communicative models of action, the communicative and the instrumental-strategic, the agonal versus the narrative, and elitist/heroic versus democratic/participatory. Doubtless these and many other interpretive divisions will continue to mark the study of Arendt’s political thought for the foreseeable future, and some of this (at least where scholars recognize that the tensions in Arendt’s thinking are themselves a partial reflection upon the very conditions of contemporary democratic political life, requiring exploration, not resolution) is all to the good. Yet my aim in what follows is not to engage Arendt’s critics, but rather to consider what consequences and what alternative possibilities Arendt’s political theory might hold for us when focused upon the question of the relationship between religion and liberal public reason.
In contrast to Rawls and political liberalism more generally, political speech and action for Arendt are not solely or ultimately about the reasoned justification of one’s pre-existing positions to others in a public forum. Rather, according to Arendt, the raison d’etre of public words and deeds is self-disclosure, the disclosure of one’s unique humanitas to others in a plural, political context. “In acting and speaking, men show who they are, reveal actively their unique personal identities and thus make their appearance in the human world.” This is, to be sure, a complicated and difficult way of thinking about political speech, for while it does not deny the importance of common decision-making, such a view takes the essential significance of politics out of the domain of the strictly instrumental mode of interest articulation/acquisition, means-ends rationality, or consensus formation. Instead, Arendt’s vision of politics emphasizes the intangible “web” of human inter-relationships that are created between people when they enter a public political space. Public words and deeds are always, of course, about some objective, material concern or reality, but what is of equal importance for Arendt are the immaterial webs of relationships that form whenever people gather in a public political context. As the metaphor of the “web” suggests, this quality of the political is somewhat intangible and exceedingly fragile and perishable:
Its peculiarity is that, unlike the spaces which are the work of our hands, it does not survive the actuality of the movement which brought it into being, but disappears not only with the dispersal of men … but with the disappearance or arrest of the activities themselves. Whenever people gather together, it is potentially there, but only potentially, not necessarily and not forever.
An important feature of Arendt’s understanding of the nature and value of public speech and action is that she does not think that actors within a plural public sphere have full or autonomous control over the self that is ineluctably disclosed or revealed through their words and deeds. Drawing upon a connection to both Ancient Greek religion and Roman sources, Arendt argues that the disclosure of “who” someone is,
in contradistinction to “what” somebody is…. is implicit in everything somebody says and does. It can be hidden only in complete silence and perfect passivity, but its disclosure can almost never be achieved as a willful purpose … On the contrary, it is more than likely that the “who,” which appears so clearly and unmistakably to others, remains hidden from the person himself, like the daimon in Greek religion which accompanies each man throughout his life, always looking over his shoulder from behind and thus visible only to those he encounters.
In a public laudatio for Karl Jaspers, given in the same year as the publication of The Human Condition, Arendt makes an explicit connection between this idea of an overseeing God or spirit and an individual’s unique humanitas, which Arendt tends to treat as non-subjective personality or distinct humanness:
This daimon … this personal element in a man, can only appear where a public space exists; that is the deeper significance of the public realm, which extends far beyond what we ordinarily mean by political life. To the extent that this public space is also a spiritual realm, there is manifest in it what the Romans called humanitas.
For Arendt, this non-subjective (non-controllable) humanitas is risked, acquired, and ultimately extended as a gift to others when we make our “venture into the public realm.”
What light does Arendt’s stress on the revelatory, nonmanipulatable dimensions of political action and public identity throw on liberal efforts to construct forms of public justification to govern and discipline political discourse and citizenship? One immediate consequence of entertaining this Arendtian stress on the disclosive dimensions of speech/action is that liberal attempts to secure substantive and procedural standards of public/secular reason, in advance of public engagements on questions of common concern, will likely mean that the full revelatory potential of public political life will have been significantly diminished. The kind of guidelines that political liberals offer by way of disciplining citizens into an appropriate form of political reasoning represents, from an Arendtian perspective, an attempt to respond to the conditions of human plurality in ways that ultimately condition and constrain that pluralism in accordance with a certain set of (liberal) standards. Of course, contemporary liberal theorists like Rawls and Macedo fully acknowledge this. If Arendt were to counsel something different, on the basis of her understanding of the self and the requirements for a public space of appearance, so much the worse for political action as implicit self-disclosure, political liberals would likely say. But what are the consequences of short-circuiting the disclosive aspects of speech and action upon which Arendt put so much significance?
One way to address this question is to first note that a primary assumption at work in political liberalism is that religious adherents (as the holders of fixed “comprehensive doctrines”) speak from their position as believers with a telos attached to them like a chain. The doctrines are fixed, their political identities stable, their voices sectarian and univocal. Contemporary liberal theory often treats opinion as something that is formed prior to entering the political domain (in the “background political culture”), and public reason comes into play as a particular mode of discourse by which to safely regulate the reciprocal exchange of these pre-established points of view. Two points of contrast with Arendt should be made here. The first, drawing on her own unique reading of Kant, emphasizes that thought and opinion formation themselves depend upon conditions of publicity, and critical publicity in particular. This is a condition in which the testing of one’s position arises from the critical interaction with other people’s form of thinking. Such a condition, Arendt argues, “presupposes that everyone is willing and able to render an account of what he thinks and says.” Yet rendering an account and taking responsibility for what one thinks is not a process of proof or rational justification, and it is not a process that can really get off the ground if publicity itself is already defined and given distinct normative value in accordance with one pre-given standard or logic of reasoning. In the following reply that Arendt gave Mary McCarthy when pressed to defend her own partitioning of the social and the political, Arendt speaks to the historical and institutional variability of the standard of publicity, and with it the importance of keeping that standard open to a variety of concerns and voices, including questions of religious faith:
Life changes constantly, and things are constantly there that want to be talked about. At all times people living together will have affairs that belong in the realm of the public-“are worthy to be talked about in public.” What these matters are at any historical moment is probably utterly different. For instance, the great cathedrals were the public spaces of the Middle Ages. The town halls came later. And there perhaps they had to talk about a matter which is not without any interest either: the question of God. So what becomes public at every given period seems to me utterly different.
The point then is not only that publicity is never a singular quality, something that can be affixed to one pre-political standard (science or “common sense”) without sacrificing the potential meaning and power of publicity, but also that its status as an open field (a living potentia) is a constitutive feature of a free political life in common with others.
The second point of contrast that needs to be made is that if we grant, with Arendt, that it is never simply the case that an individual’s comprehensive view speaks in a clear, unidirectional way to issues in the public domain, but rather that the self is also ineluctably spoken or revealed in the pubic exchange of words and deeds, then accounts of public discourse that continue to treat subjects as discrete carriers of fixed pre-political claims (and fashion rules of engagement in accordance with this view of political actors) will inevitably lead us astray. By misconstruing or simply flattening the complicated relationship between the self and the self’s public/political identity, political liberals treat the “fact of reasonable pluralism” as a condition that always exists outside of the self, on the surface, and hence containable. Yet the essential “boundlessness” and agent-revealing quality of public speech and action suggests, at the very least, that these standards will always be frustrated. For Arendt, “[l]imitations and boundaries exist within the realm of human affairs, but they never offer a framework that can reliably withstand the onslaught with which each new generation must insert itself.” Historically speaking, it is by contesting the limitations and boundaries of what passes as “public” that new interests and constituencies become political subjects as well as the subjects of liberal-democratic justice. More normatively, what is at stake, according to Arendt, “is the revelatory character without which action and speech would lose all human relevance.” That is to say, it is humanitas and its related values that are at stake with public reason and the moral regulation of the public political domain, not simply religion or comprehensive doctrines as such.
To be sure, political liberals are not naive about the difficulties entailed by a criterion like public reason, but there is little evidence that they have taken a full accounting of the ways in which politics depends upon, or simply is, the space of appearance that rises directly out of people acting together, rather than the derivative, manipulable condition for coming to decisions about the legitimate use of coercive power (as important as those decisions are). Yet, political liberals endeavor not only to give political standards and guidelines for public reasoning, they also seek to fashion the deeper self-understanding of citizens qua citizens after these justificatory standards. What I am stressing, by way of contrast, is the deep (at times, tragic) sense in which, as figures as diverse as Sophocles, Marx, Oakeshott, and Arendt argue, the political is not fully within rational human control or contrivance. For Arendt, the sources of unpredictability and contingency in politics have nothing to do with the role of something like fortuna or an Hegelian Geist, and everything to do with the revelatory features of public speech and action. The “who” of the speaker, one’s distinctive personal identity, or humanitas, of which religious convictions are ineluctably a part, will always find public expression whenever and wherever people act politically. Hence, from an Arendtian perspective, it is both fruitless and inhuman (in Arendt’s sense of that term) to define one’s religious and/or moral conceptions as part of one’s “nonpublic identity,” as Rawls does. As Arendt argues:
To dispense with this disclosure, if indeed it could ever be done, would mean to transform men into something they are not; to deny, on the other hand, that this disclosure is real and has consequences of its own is simply unrealistic.
The revelatory, nonsovereign, and tragic dimensions of the self and political action may simply be taken as an instance of Arendt’s irreducible difference from liberalism. And that, of course, would be right, as numerous scholars have shown. Yet it would be a mistake to suppose that nothing else might follow from placing this Arendtian perspective into conversation with political liberalism and to forgo a critical reflection upon how her understanding of public speaking and acting under conditions of pluralism might challenge and amend the liberal standard of public reason that has reached such a position of prominence today.
Common Sense/Sensus Communis
The above discussion of the essential and ineluctable role of self-disclosure in public life bears directly upon further problems with the liberal idea of public reason because it suggests that, among other things, the disclosive dimension of political agency, which political liberalism short-circuits and constrains, is fully wrapped up with both our sense of reality and the formation of something like a sensus communis, or common sense. Recall that in seeking to give content to public reason in a way that would not run afoul of the basic condition of “reasonable pluralism,” Rawls argues that in making public justifications about issues of basic justice citizens are to appeal, “only to presently accepted general beliefs and forms of reasoning found in common sense.” Rawls runs into a certain amount of trouble by incorporating the idea of common sense into his standard for public justification, because it introduces both an historical and cultural dimension into his theory that doesn’t otherwise mesh well with his analytic categories. As he seems to recognize, what passes for generally accepted beliefs and “common sense” in the antebellum American South is not what most political liberals would want to endorse. Hence, Rawls has to undertake some rather significant addenda to make his idea of public reason work for figures like the abolitionists or Martin Luther King, Jr., who might otherwise be taken as the perfect counterfactuals to the principles of public reason, since they advocated for political change at different historical moments in ways that freely and effectively drew upon “comprehensive” religious views.
By contrast, Arendt held a clear sense of the power imbalances and the disproportionate effects on ethno-religious minorities in accepting something like appeals to common and historically/culturally conditioned standards of sense and belief. In discussing the terms and constraints of Jewish emancipation in Europe in the nineteenth century, Arendt argued that Jews could only achieve real emancipation if they were accepted as Jews, not as “parvenus,” or Jews acting or being secular. In her biography of Rahel Varnhagen, Arendt exposes the underlying political and cultural dynamics that renders assimilation for religious and ethnic minorities a process of interiorizing self-hatred. In a context of anti-Semitism, secularization or assimilation into dominant “public standards” of being entails a powerful measure of self-renunciation for many Jews. At the same time, such “public” standards and beliefs demand a degree of self-guardianship that is nearly impossible to sustain, but which nonetheless can have disproportionate and disfiguring effects on a personal life.
Yet the notion of “common sense” still plays a powerful role in Arendt’s thinking, but one that, unsurprisingly, depends on the condition of a political space that allows for the self-disclosure of citizens. For Arendt common sense is an open, revisable political product of multiple perspectives focusing together upon one common issue or concern.
Common sense … discloses to us the nature of the world insofar as it is a common world; we owe to it the fact that our strictly private and “subjective” five senses and their sensory data can adjust themselves to a non-subjective and “objective” world which we have in common and share with others. Judging is one, if not the most, important activity in which this sharing-the-world-with-others comes to pass.
In short, it is hard to see how a standard like “common sense,” as an operative quality in the political act of common judging—as both Arendt and Rawls see it—can be confidently held as a source of justice if that principle does not seek to maximize the fullest expressions of as many people as possible. To keep such a standard from functioning as merely an ideological construct of a particular historical-cultural moment, to minimize the possibility that appeals to “common sense” are little more than a disciplinary norm of political-discursive domestication, common sense has to be figured as the sensus communis, that is, something that cannot exist apart from the activity of judging, acting, revealing persons. Hence, common sense cannot be understood as a set of fixed “general beliefs” if it is to sustain an enabling relationship to democratic citizenship, but rather should be seen as a set of common practices or ways of life that are constantly subject to what Arendt calls the “incessant talk” of politics. In this regard, an Arendtian sensus communis seems closer to what Hans-Georg Gadamer calls an historical horizon, which is always in motion and never closed, than it does to Rawlsian common sense.
Mutual Respect, Reciprocity, and Philia Politike
Up to this stage in the argument I have sought to show what might be lost, from an Arendtian perspective, by the adoption of a standard of public reason for determining the legitimate grounds and guidelines for the conduct of political discussion in pluralistic democracies. In the remainder of this paper I want to show how Arendt’s political theory seeks to address some of the basic values that political liberals like RaMs want to establish—such as equal freedom, mutual respect, and civic friendship-but does so without the kinds of restrictions and sacrifices that public reason introduces into the public political forum.
As we have seen, public reason in RaMs and other contemporary liberal thinkers represents more than just an attempt to justify the legitimate grounds for legal coercion under conditions of pluralism, but also seeks to fashion, in tandem with this former project, a specific conception of normative (moral) citizenship. This can be seen clearly when Rawls argues that the criterion of reciprocity expressed in public reason is designed to “specify the nature of the political relation in a constitutional democratic regime as one of civic friendship.” Hence the question is not whether the (very old) category of civic friendship is sustainable under “the fact of reasonable pluralism” and the “burdens of judgment,” but rather how civic friendship is to be cultivated in a society marked by extensive and incompatible religious and philosophic differences. We want to insist on the importance of mutual respect, tolerance, and fairness in free, pluralistic societies, but how are these values cultivated and stabilized over time? As we have seen, liberal public reason gives a particular answer to these questions. Yet we need to ask the following: Does mutual respect and civility under conditions of extensive religious and philosophical diversity require the operation of Rawlsian public reason, understood as appeals to standards that are already well-accepted as “general beliefs” and provided by “common sense”? Is the duty of reciprocity violated, as RaMs and others argue, by invoking the “grounding reasons” or deepest values that animate and motivate one’s participation in politics? Does the kind of civility and mutual respect that is generated by the observance of public reason provide an adequate conception of democratic citizenship and democratic politics?
By taking Arendt’s political theory seriously and marshaling it in this setting, the answer to these questions is no, and the reasons for this negative response are drawn from her understanding of the importance of the revelatory qualities of political speech and action. In Arendt it is clear that both mutual respect and civic friendship fully depend upon the disclosure of one’s humanitas, the “who” of the person—the very qualities we have already seen that political liberalism seeks to do without. As she argues in The Human Condition:
What love is in its own, narrowly circumscribed sphere, respect is in the larger domain of human affairs. Respect, not unlike the Aristotelian philia politike, is a kind of “friendship” without intimacy and without closeness; it is a regard for the person from the distance which the space of the world puts between us.
What Arendt compels us to ask of political liberalism and of the idea of public reason is how mutual respect, let alone friendship, could ever be thought to arise between people who see it as an incumbent feature of that relationship to withhold, avoid, detach, or transfigure what may well be the most significant thing about them—their faith, their conception of the good, their sense of values and the source of those values. Is public reason a necessary and appropriately chastened way of understanding the prospects of civic friendship and the nature of the duty of civility under conditions of pluralism? For Arendt the answer is clearly no, and yet I don’t think that Rawls and Arendt are simply talking past one another on these important points. This is important to stress because, like Rawls, Arendt is committed to the values of democratic constitutionalism, pluralism, and modern (negative) rights. Yet (again like Rawls) she does not want to forgo qualities like civility, mutual respect, and civic friendship in our political life. Still, to understand the differences here we will have to take our cues for the conceptualization and practice of these virtues from a source other than liberalism, and for Arendt this means the Greeks and Romans. What comes out of her reading of these traditions (among other things) is a powerful sense of the political relevance of friendship. The essence of this friendship consisted (as one might expect of the Greeks) in talking. “[The Greeks] held that only the constant interchange of talk united citizens in a polis. In discourse the political importance of friendship, and the humanness peculiar to it were made manifest.”
By repeatedly stressing the interconnections between friendship, political discourse, and humanitas, Arendt helps us to see that there is something essentially self-defeating about any model of respect or civic friendship that depends on a “method of avoidance” to come about. It is self-defeating because it overlooks or denies the inevitable role of disclosure and humanitas in our political relationships—a factor that must be accounted for in our political lives even when those associations are concentrated upon “reaching an altogether worldly, material object.” Hence, friendship—political friendship for Arendt—consists in addressing what stands between people, in the sense of what both unites and separates people. The idea here is not that in doing so everyone will necessarily come to like everybody else, nor of course that everyone will come to some kind of agreement about a particular conception of the good, but rather that in “talking about what is between them, it becomes ever more common to them.”
What is important for Arendt is that this idea of making things common between plural selves, and forming bonds of civic friendship in turn, requires a space of critical publicity in which one’s “truths” can be disclosed and engaged by others. “The political element in friendship is that in the truthful dialogue each of the friends can understand the truth inherent in the other’s opinion … This kind of understanding—seeing the world from the other fellow’s point of view—is the political kind of insight par excellence.” From an Arendtian perspective, values like mutual respect and the norms of reciprocity are not violated or harmed by citizens invoking their comprehensive religious or philosophic views in public; to the contrary, the conditions for mutual respect and civic friendship are provided by individuals honestly speaking, as far as they are able, their “truths” as they see them. This is not a sufficient condition for the endurance of a common public world, but it is a necessary one. Whereas the criterion of reciprocity is ultimately constrained by a particular form of reason-giving in political liberalism, reciprocity for Arendt is a cultivated sentiment that is ultimately concerned with sustaining an open, common world between plural subjects.
For Arendt, no humanly meaningful political in-between or commons can take shape between citizens, and no civic friendship can arise, without speech and action that is able—as far as speech can—to reveal the “who” of each person in his unique plurality. Had Arendt lived long enough to witness it, she may well have viewed recent liberal efforts to formulate guidelines of public reason as another one of a long line of understandable but ill-advised attempts to overcome the contingency and unpredictability of political action and plural public spaces, a move that embraces instrumental poiesis over praxis. Whereas the moral burden in public reason requires that one be prepared to translate and/or supplement one’s “comprehensive” views with pre-established forms of reasoning and liberal rules of justification, the moral burdens in Arendt’s conception of public reasoning relate in a distinctly different way to citizens as both speakers and listeners. In the first case, it prompts individuals to speak their “truths” as fully as possible, and does so with the understanding that the public political world can gather and separate people only so long as the commons (and with it the sensus communis) is conceived as a free and plural space of appearance. In the second case, it encourages the formation of sincere listeners, that is, persons who will imaginatively and sympathetically strive to understand the world from the other’s point of view. Hence, reciprocity in an Arendtian frame is both a precondition for and a product of a commitment to an open and shared political world: “For the world is not humane just because it is made by human beings, and it does not become humane just because the human voice sounds in it, but only when it has become the object of discourse.” These ideas introduce the last dimensions of Arendt’s political theory that I will discuss here that bear on the liberal idea of public reason: Arendt’s analysis of the relationship between “truth” claims and the public political sphere.
Truth in Polities, or Learning to be Human
Out of a concern for the potentially coercive dimensions of religious and other comprehensive “truth” claims under conditions of pluralism, liberal public reason encourages certain modes of speech/behavior in an effort to maximize the formation and stability of democratic majorities on fundamental questions of justice. Running throughout Arendt’s writings, from her dissertation on Saint Augustine to her writings on totalitarianism and political judgment, is a no less significant concern with the antagonistic relationship between truth and politics, as well as religious belief and politics. What is usually remembered about this discussion is either Arendt’s anti-foundational assertion that from “the viewpoint of politics, truth has a despotic character,” or her critical assessment of the turn to religious “absolutes” during various political founding moments. Yet Arendt’s treatment of rational, philosophic, or religious truth and its relationship to politics and citizenship is a great deal more interesting and complex than simply declaring such standards either irrelevant for or pernicious to the political sphere and political freedom. Taking creative cues from Socrates and Cicero, as well as Lessing and Jaspers, Arendt mapped out an alternative way of conceiving the relationship between religious or philosophic truths and public political dialogue, an understanding that entails more than simply declaring truth claims above or beyond the political. This alternative understanding highlights another avenue with which to contest the constraints that liberal public reason places on the conduct of political discourse and, more broadly, the moral valences of contemporary citizenship.
For Arendt, all truths, philosophic or religious, necessarily become opinions when they enter the public sphere: episteme becomes doxa moi in the context of the diversity of points of view in a plural public world. If we accept the idea that there is more coercive than persuasive content in truth claims—that is, they are claims that demand recognition, not consent or agreement—the question for Arendt, as with Rawls, is whether there is any place for truth in politics.
The trouble is that factual truth, like all other truth, peremptorily claims to be acknowledged and precludes debate, and debate constitutes the very essence of political life. The modes of thought and communication that deal with truth, if seen from the political perspective, are necessarily domineering; they do not take into account other people’s opinions, and taking these into account is the hallmark of all strictly political thinking.
The problem of religious or philosophical truths from the perspective of contemporary liberalism is likewise that such claims are partisan or sectarian and considered nongeneralizable or nonaccessible under the conditions of pluralism and the burdens of judgment. Given Arendt’s concerns about the nature of truth in relation to the public domain, and in particular truth’s absolutist character in a sphere that is pluralistic and relative by definition, we might suppose that recent liberal efforts to construct fair terms of mutual exchange on questions of common political concern are practical attempts to respond to what Arendt called the “ancient antagonism” between truth and politics. Additionally, Arendt’s concern to preserve the autonomy of the political sphere and to safeguard it from either philosophical rule or instrumental rationality might be seen as roughly equivalent to political liberalism’s approach to overarching conceptions of truth. This, I think, would be a mistake. Arendt’s obvious concern with the coercive dimension of truth claims (the absolute) notwithstanding, the appropriate political response to the presence of such claims is not to avoid, bypass, or transpose them into a liberal key (the Rawlsian proviso), but to “humanize” them through constant public talk.
To say that truth claims or “comprehensive doctrines” can be “humanized” through public engagement is to say, on the one hand, that such claims are not beyond public accessibility, mutual understanding, or critical scrutiny, nor are they a priori non-reciprocal. But this also means, as Arendt argues, that “we humanize what is going on in the world and in ourselves only by speaking of it, and in the course of speaking of it we learn to be human.” Arendt, following Jaspers (but also Socrates and Cicero), saw distinct political value not merely in endless conversation, but in a specific form of “limitless communication,” one that “signifies faith in the comprehensibility of all truths and the good will to reveal and to listen as the primary condition for all human intercourse.” “Truth” can coexist with the political, Arendt insists, but “only where it is humanized through discourse, only where each man says not what just happens to occur to him at the moment but what he ‘deems truth’.” This kind of “truth talk,” with its obvious depth and personal salience, can help establish the common inter-spaces that both link and separate citizens, providing the very conditions for a specifically civic form of friendship. None of this is made possible, however, if we are already predisposed, given certain analytic liberal categories, to see in every philosophic/religious truth claim the inscrutable, non-accessible, or greedy demand for power and unqualified submission.
What accounts for this significant difference in regard to the role of “truth” in politics? Part of the answer is that whereas both Rawls and Arendt (like Aristotle) give central political significance to logos (or reasoned speech), Arendt views logos itself as subject to productive transformations through critical publicity in a way that public reason does not allow. In doing so, Arendt directs us to an alternative form of public speech and action that might take its basic orientation and ethos from a statement by Lessing, a line that Arendt deems “the most profound thing that has ever been said about the relationship between truth and humanity: ‘Let each man say what he deems truth, and let truth itself be commended unto God.'”
Arendt draws optimism and joy out of Lessing’s recognition of human limitation, or what Rawls calls the “burdens of judgment”: it is precisely because we are never collectively certain of the truth that we are able to have an engaging, vibrant, and meaningful public life, one that can draw upon without needing or believing it possible to settle on one comprehensive view. To be effective, however, one must be willing to undertake what we might call the Socratic requirement—to speak one’s truth as fully as one can, or, put more modestly, to speak one’s doxa truthfully. That is to say, then, that what one deems truth matters to politics and needs to be spoken publicly. This is necessary because the public realm and the moral validity of political judgment depend upon maximizing the innumerable perspectives of others, and focusing these views on each and every question that enters the public domain. To be sure, this process also entails a certain amount of risk, because one must be ready to watch one’s “truths” become one opinion among many in the public, and to risk this disclosure and public consideration is to accept the idea that these “truths” may undergo revision or change. This is, at least in part, why courage and moderation rank so high on Arendt’s scale of political virtues. On these points, Socrates was an exemplar for Arendt: “Socrates wanted to make the city more truthful by delivering each of the citizens their truths. The method of doing so is dialegesthai, talking something through, but this dialectic brings forth truth not by destroying doxa or opinion, but on the contrary reveals doxa in its own truthfulness.” Once again, the end result was not arriving at one acceptable general truth, because “to have talked something through … seemed result enough.” This is the knowledge that friends possess.
Nothing could be more different from liberal “methods of avoidance” or public reasoning requirements than this. As a consequence, and to help highlight what this Arendtian conception of public dialogue is driving at, we might identify two sets of practical lessons that can be derived from the above discussion. First, for contemporary liberals, the point is to stress that there may be more truth in doxa than they suppose, but more importantly, the process of considering these truths helps to constitute our common political world, offers incentives to participate in it, and provides the terms and the spirit of civic friendships. Public reasoning itself will always be plural (never singular) and will ineluctably draw upon a diverse set of ideas, doctrines, and energies whose latent political possibilities we shall never be able to fully predict or control. Second, for the adherents of any particular truth (religious or otherwise), we might counsel the following: truth will become doxa in the political arena and will remain so until, humanized through public discourse, it is turned into something that could be democratically “held” as a truth through open discourse, persuasion, and agreement. For some this will surely be a hard pill to swallow, but this fact alone cannot justify the foreclosure of public political engagement or the curtailment of humanitas.
Conclusion
If reciprocity and civic friendship are what political liberals want, then it is the idea of public reason they should abandon. I have argued that with an appropriate concern for the absolutist dimensions of any truth claim (religious or secular), Arendt provides a perceptive vision of the self and politics that is more open to and critically engaged with the deepest dimensions of persons (humanitas). If we are interested in mutual respect, meaningful forms of toleration, and the cultivation of civic forms of friendship, this perspective provides a first step towards a more promising alternative than liberal public reason. To be sure, adopting this Arendtian conceptual frame, as I have presented it, is not without its own internal problems. Indeed, the Arendtian-inspired perspective that I have utilized here to contest the limits of public reason may also need to be employed against Arendt herself, or at least certain features of Arendt’s own understating of the boundaries of the public realm. Many critics have rightly pointed out that Arendt seeks to limit the conduct of public, political exchange to those matters that are, in her view, properly and authentically political. The critical thrust of these arguments is that the nature of Arendt’s own boundaries on the political are so austere as to foreclose the entry of issues and organized claims that have become essential in modern politics, things like social welfare, economic justice, and education.
There is simply no denying the fact that Arendt views many of these kinds of issues as not appropriately political. This does not mean, however, that such matters are unimportant, or that they are inconsequential for the establishment of a vibrant political sphere according to Arendt. In fact, exactly the contrary is true. Nonetheless, Arendt’s understanding of socio-economic concerns as part of the necessary, pre-political conditions for the full exercise of human freedom holds little persuasive weight for those who recognize that passing the threshold of the political (inclusion on the public agenda) is itself one of the primary conditions for having the so-called “social” question addressed in the first place. Yet if we highlight those dimensions of Arendt’s political thought that have been utilized here to question the restrictions of liberal public reason (self-disclosure, humanitas, and civic friendship), Arendt provides critical resources with which to challenge the coherence and stability of her own exclusions. Indeed, if we give these qualities priority in our understanding of political speech and action, Arendt’s various attempts to fix the political in abstract, non-contextual terms are as unavailing as political liberalism’s fabrication of a monovocal standard of public reason. The possibilities of an open, disclosive space of appearance, taking specific shape within the in-between of plural selves, may thus be seen as virtuously crosscutting, from both a theoretical and practical point of view.