(October 22, 2009)
In response to an October 13, 2009 discussion in the course Fascism and Memory with Eli Zaretsky and Federico Finchelstein ( New School for Social Research) on the influence of evolution and historical materialism upon Arendt’s conceptualization of totalitarianism and natality
For Arendt, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, Marx and Darwin play a special, almost invisible role—not because of the content of their work, per say, but because their presence reminds us that they represent a certain strain of thought in Western philosophy and theory: conceptions of the determination of history and nature.
Arendt does not approach her analysis of totalitarianism from the perspective of a materialist or evolutionist—this is important to keep in mind, because I am not describing her approach to fitting totalitarianism into some linear progression of human history suited to her philosophy; on the contrary, in my reading and understanding of Arendt, she describes and situates the concept of totalitarianism within a history of ideology, in which it is an alternate ideology of the determination of history and nature—one that disdains the presumption that either nature or history are beyond human manipulation or domination. Totalitarianism is deterministic by initial human action (the totalitarian movement), which negates the power of nature and alters the linear conception of naturally progressing history to one dependent upon finalizing human actions found in war, government, or places like concentration camps, where the obsolescence of regard for the human form or existence is sought and possibly attained.
The basic idea, as I read it, is that the totalitarian movement attempts to enact the totalitarian ideology, and, in so doing, attempts to bring about—artificially (though in the totalitarian perspective it would be organic)—an end to history and nature (or at least our conception of the two, and their structural relevance to thought). This can be understood alongside Arendt’s embrace of the Aristotelian discussion of phusis and nomos (in The Human Condition), which derives from Aristotle’s seminal work, Politics; namely, phusis is nature and nomos is law or convention. If totalitarianism seeks to divest humanity of its conception and role in nature, as Arendt argues in “Ideology and Terror,” the final chapter of more recent editions of Origins, then phusis is obsolete. If in totalitarianism, law as we know it (consensus iuris) is destroyed by terror and isolation from the social experience of human life (plurality), and law becomes embodied by the condition and existence of such life, then totalitarianism destroys nomos. Moreover, if humanity is the embodiment of the law, but as a former part of nature is destroyed or made obsolete by the end of phusis, then totalitarianism in theory leads to the end of humanity.
Does this mean that Arendt implies the extinction or total eradication of the species? Hardly—though as we have seen, historically, exterminations did occur, so in a way, physical eradication is a part of the totalitarian program in Arendt’s view; however, what Arendt describes is an end to the conceptualization of humanity as a thinking species identifiable within the standards of our own modern existence and sense of faculty. Arendt understands totalitarianism as something that promises to enact a new vision of humanity of which we cannot entirely conceive, because it does not exist—or did not exist—in our own imaginations of possibility. Her concern is that now that humanity can conceive of such a thing, now that humanity has seen totalitarianism, the future of humanity will always bear some influences of the ideology and its practitioners, for better or (more likely, for Arendt) for worse.
This is a radical vision of humanity that totalitarianism offers in Arendt’s view—radical much in the way that she understood the radical evil of the perpetrators of its actions. Divested of the conventions, the very constitution of human society (or at least how Arendt understood human society) as a plurality, totalitarianism for Arendt was the enactment, effusion, and innovation of the unimaginable, which for her was the greatest nightmare, the most terrifying evil of all. Her one respite was her concept of natality—that human mortality resembles the biological cycle of all life, of birth and decay; moreover, that an ideology that seeks its embodiment in mortal humans lays “the germs of its own destruction” as much in the limitations of its own constructed reality, as in the destructible bodies of the people it must rely upon for its own perpetuation. As Arendt reminds us at the close of Origins, with every birth there is a new beginning, and she writes, “this beginning is the only ‘message’ which the end can ever produce.”
