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Speaker Name: Patricia Feise (Gerda Henkel Visiting Professor, German Studies)

Abstract: Hannah Arendt, author of seminal works in the study of totalitarianism and anti-Semitism, also developed a highly original modern philosophy that combines anthropological, ethical, and political aspects. The phenomenological character of this work has not yet been sufficiently recognized. At the center of Arendt's thinking, which she had wrested from the gaze into the abyss of inhumanity opened up by the Nazis, is the realization that humanity, not understood as a species, but as a personal “who” that “has the right to have rights,” is not a given. Rather, it must be established through political interaction between free, equal people endowed with the power of initiative. When negotiating, the personal „who(s)” should bear in mind that humanity only exists in the plural. The ability to take on/change perspectives reciprocally is therefore crucial. According to Arendt, reflective judgment in the Kantian sense and free variation in the phenomenological sense proves beneficial. Against this background, Arendt's political anthropology is a phenomenology of plurality. The role that Arendt's own experiences played in the development of her thinking cannot be underestimated (as a German-Jewish woman who had been dehumanized and disenfranchised by the Nazis, Arendt welcomed the constitutional republican form of government of her new home, the United States of America, as the exact opposite of an unjust state). In the writings of Franz Kafka, Arendt recognized essential characteristics of human life under inhuman and disenfranchising conditions. This applies in particular to the novel fragment The Castle (1926), which Arendt explicitly includes in her reflections in an essay from 1948. Taking these reflections into account, the lecture illuminates Arendt’s political anthropology as a phenomenology that is relevant from a historical and contemporary perspective.