#kohn

For Arendt, all destructive force, even when it is unavoidable, is in itself anti-political: what it destroys is not only our lives but also the world that lies between our lives and makes them human. A human and humanizing world is not manufactured and no part of it that has been destroyed can ever be replaced. To Arendt, the world is neither a natural product nor the creation of God; it can only appear through politics, which in its broadest sense she understands as the set of conditions under which men and women in their plurality, in their absolute distinctness from each other, live together and approach each other to speak in a freedom that only they can grant and guarantee each other…Arendt [also] writes of a metaphoric desert-world, with life-giving oases of philosophy and art, of love and friendship. These oases are subject to ruin by those who attempt to adjust themselves to the conditions of desert-life, as well as by those who attempt to escape from the desert into the oases. In both cases the desert-world encroaches upon and devastates the oases of their private lives. The desert is a metaphor that ought not to be taken literally as a wasteland, or wasted land, envisioned as the final product of unleashed industrial expansion that depletes the earth’s natural resources, pollutes its oceans, warms its atmosphere, and destroys its capacity to nourish life. The desert is a metaphor for our increasing loss of the world, by which Arendt means our ‘twofold flight from the earth into the universe and from the world into the self.’ She is not thinking, as she does elsewhere in these pages, of a catastrophe in whose aftermath only the ‘vestiges’ of a destroyed civilization would remain. That could happen quickly, as the result of thermonuclear war or a new totalitarian movement rising from the conditions of the desert that are indeed most propitious to it. The desert is a metaphor for something that already exists, and in the world’s constant need of renewal, of being ‘begun anew,’ always exists. So far from being caused by public political life, the desert is the result of its absence…Though the desert is not [the evil that is the reduction of plural human beings to one single massed man, as under Nazism or Bolshevism], today, insofar as we have become increasingly estranged from the public world, we are well positioned to fall into evil as into hell; into empty interminate space, where nothing, not even the desert, surrounds us, and where there is nothing to individuate us, to either relate or separate us. This is our predicament, in which only the roots we are free to strike, providing we have the courage to endure the conditions of the desert, can make a new beginning. In analogy to the way trees in the natural world reclaim arid land by sinking their roots deep into the earth, new beginnings can still transform the desert into a human world. The odds against that happening are overwhelming, yet the ‘miracle’ of action is ontologically rooted in humankind, not as a unique species but as a plurality of unique beginnings. The promise inherent in human plurality provides perhaps the only answer to Arendt’s chilling question: ‘Why is there anybody at all and not rather nobody?’

Random progress update! Boo!