Between Past and Future. Eight Exercises in Political Thought , translated into French under the title the Crisis of the culture. Eight exercises of political thought , is a work of Hannah Arendt. The first edition, published in 1961, was made up of six tests. The French translation is based on the 2nd edition, is appeared in 1968 and is composed of eight supplemented tests of an important foreword.

Preface: The breach enters the past and the future

In this foreword, Hannah Arendt explains what legitimates in its eyes the publication of these " eight exercises of thought politique" (the subtitle of the collection) in a coherent book.

It is a question of knowing how to be driven in the breach enters the past and the future: whereas it is not possible any more to rest on the tradition or the history, Hannah Arendt defends a design of the authority and freedom, which enables him to study various topical questions: the crisis of education, the crisis of the culture, the question of the bond between truth and political, philosophical stakes of the space conquest.

I. the tradition and the modern age

Hannah Arendt studies in this test the report/ratio of Marx, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche with the Tradition. It reproaches them for being opposed to the tradition while continuing to borrow the concepts of them. More still than this failure in the dispute of the tradition, it is a common set of themes which brings closer these three philosophical: they dispute the tradition as it implies an abstract design too of philosophy. Kierkegaard preaches the taking into account of the Souffrance, Marx of the work, Nietzsche of the Vie. The effect of the modern age , of which they are three representatives, is that there is no more Vérité on which to rest but only:

… of simple values whose validity is given not by one or more men but by the company like totality in its functional requirements in perpetual change.

II. The concept of history: antique and modern

This test prolongs the preceding reflection on the tradition: Hannah Arendt analyzes the recourse by the philosophers to the concept of Histoire like the attempt to reconstitute a new tradition.

In this version by Marx of the derivation of the policy starting from the history, or rather, of the political conscience starting from the historical conscience - which is by no means the privilege of Marx in particular, nor even of pragmatism in general - we can easily find the old attempt to escape from disappointments and brittleness from the human action by building it with the image from manufacture.

In opposition with the design of the history suggested by Marx, strongly inspired by that of Hegel, Hannah Arendt proposes a design of the action built around the concept of brittleness .

This concept appears at the end of an argumentation where Hannah Arendt starts by comparing the speech on the history with that on the natural , both resting on the concept of process (1). It continues by analyzing the interest of the speech on the history: it allows the Sécularisation Christian concept of Immortalité by the appearance of the concept of immortality terrestrial (2). She concludes then by saying that the speech on the history makes it possible to give a direction to the political action, if not too fragile (3).

II.1 History and nature

Hannah Arendt considers that the currently existing close link between the history and nature is not the same one as that of antiquity. In antiquity, the report/ratio of the men to nature and the history was characterized by a concern of immortality: nature has without effort this characteristic, which it is a question for the men of acquiring in “immortalisant” . For example, for Plato it is the thought which allows immortaliser as it is allowed to be diverted human businesses.

There is today also a root common to the Sciences of nature and historical sciences: it is this time about a method of thought which is the same one. Vis-a-vis the doubts concerning the capacity of the directions revealing the truth, sciences of nature claim to discover the truth while passing from the simple observation to the Expérimentation. As for them, historical sciences (and for Hannah Arendt, social sciences are only one variation) claim to reveal the truth by the reconstitution of the course which led to the current location. In both cases the concept of process appears: this concept takes the form of the “Développement” in sciences of nature, and the “Progrès” in historical sciences. Hannah Arendt considers that this concept of process does not make it possible to know the truth: to seek to identify processes makes lose the capacity with being sensitive to the events and with brittleness who characterizes them.

(...) connection between the concepts of nature and history such as they appeared with the birth of the modern time in XVIe and XVIIe centuries (...) its place in the concept of process has: both imply that we thought and considered all in terms of process and we do not occupy any more of the singular étants or the particular events and their special and separate causes. The key words of modern historiography - “development” and “progress” - were, at the XIXe century, also the key words of the branches then new of the science of nature.

The bringing together suggested between the history and nature is also the occasion for Hannah Arendt to explain why with modern technologies the man claims from now on to make nature like it makes the history. This denunciation of the danger of the Technologie is more detailed in the eighth test of this collection devoted to the '' the space conquest ''.

II.2 history and terrestrial immortality

Once explained the modern bond between nature and the history, Hannah Arendt analyzes the construction of the modern concept of history. She interprets this construction like the secularization of the Christian concept of individual immortality.

Hannah Arendt takes time to explain why this secularization is not the effect of a progressive transformation of individual immortality into a terrestrial immortality for humanity. It is rather the loss of confidence in the individual immortality which led to the search for an alternative, the history then comes to fill the lack left by the loss of the tradition:

Our concept of the history, although it is primarily a concept of the modern time, owes its existence at the transitional period when religious confidence in the immortal life had lost its influence on the secular one and where the new indifference with the question of immortality had not been born yet. (...) It was thus during its search for a strictly secular field of durable permanence that the modern time discovered the potential immortality of the mankind.

II.3 History and policy

Hannah Arendt analyzes finally the bonds between the history and the policy. She denounces the design of the policy like a derivation of the history ( cf the text referred to above), which is for her:

the refusal (...) to accept the conviction of old according to which the significance of the political actions is independent of their historical situation.

She regards the political philosophy of Kant as particularly representative of this movement of thought. Vis-a-vis the loss of direction of the action, it refers about it to the History. On the contrary, this test makes it possible Hannah Arendt to invite to assume the brittleness of our actions, i.e. impossibility of envisaging all the effects of them and of including/understanding the direction of them.

III. What authority?

Hannah Arendt analyzes in this test the “crisis of the Autorité”. Starting from an explanation of the concept of authority according to the model of Rome, it estimates that the modern attempts at restoration of an authority are in fact only one manner of repairing the foundations of the Tradition.

After conceptual distinctions, on the one hand with the constraining force and the Persuasion by the Argumentation, and on the other hand with the tyranny and the totalitarian modes, Hannah Arendt explains in what the Greek thought influenced the Roman concept of authority, and in particular the myth of the cave of Plato:

In the parabola of the cave, the philosopher leaves the cave in search of the genuine gasoline of the Être without any ulterior motive as for the applicability of what it will seek. It is only later, when it is again captive of the darkness and of the uncertainty of the human businesses and runs up against the hostlity of its similar, that it starts to think of its “truth” in terms of standards applicable to the behavior of other people.

Contrary to this legitimation of the authority by the thought, the Roman concept of authority rests on the concept of foundation, in the direction where the authority, contrary to the capacity ( potestas ), had its roots in the last .

The various attempts to reiterate a constitutive instrument, to restore the authority and the tradition, by the Christian Church or at the time of various the revolutions, put aside the American revolution, according to it missed a decisive aspect, for the Romans:

The foundation was the central political action, the large single act which established the publico-policy field and made the policy possible

IV. What freedom?

Hannah Arendt claims in this test to clarify the very obscure philosophical debates around the concept of Liberté:

It is the thesis of the following considerations which the reason of this darkness is that the phenomenon of freedom appears at all in the field of the thought, that neither freedom, nor its opposite are not tested in the dialog between me and myself during which the great philosophical questions and metaphysics emerge

For Hannah Arendt, freedom is not the fruit of the Entendement and the Volonté. Political freedom is not thus to compare with creative arts (sculpture, painting, etc):

Arts of execution, on the other hand, present a great affinity with the policy; the artists who occur - the dancers, the actors of theater, the musicians and their similar need an audience to show them virtuosity, exactly as the men who act need the presence of other men in front of whom they can appear; both need a space publicly organized for their “work”, and both depend on others for the execution itself.

Freedom thus does not suppose the Souveraineté, but rather the capacity to carry out a beginning, to produce one “miracle” - i.e. something with what one could not expect.

V. the crisis of education

This test is based on the design of the freedom developed in the preceding test: Hannah Arendt analyzes there the crisis of the education to the the United States like element particularly representative of the crisis of the current society.

The important component of freedom is the birthrate, the capacity to begin the new one. From this point of view Hannah Arendt denounces three measurements of reform of education which do not make, according to it, which to precipitate the catastrophe: will to teach a method more than one contents, which make disappear legitimacy from the authority of the professor, the Pragmatisme who brings to the substitution of making learn it, and the autonomy granted to the groups of children:

Freed from the authority of the adults, the child was thus not released, but subjected to an authority much more alarming and really tyrannical: the tyranny of the majority. In any case, it results from it that the children were so to speak banished world of the adults. They either are delivered to themselves, or delivered to the tyranny of their group, against which, because of his numerical superiority, they cannot revolt, with which, being children, they cannot discuss, and of which they can escape for no other world, because the world of the adults their is closed. The children tend to react to this constraint either by the Conformisme, or by the youthful Délinquance, and often by a mixture of both.

Hannah Arendt analyzes this situation like the fruit of the confusion of the private field and the public domain, design at greater length developed in Condition of the modern man:

More the modern society removes the difference between what is deprived and what is public, between what can open out only in the shade and what requires to be shown with all in the full light of the public world, in other words more the company intercalates between the public and private social sphere where the private one is made public and vice versa, more it makes the things difficult to his/her children who by nature need a sure shelter to grow without being disturbed.

Hannah Arendt thus invites the adults to assume to them responsibility while not renonçant to show authority with respect to the children:

It is precisely to preserve what is new and revolutionist in each child who education must be preserving; it must protect this innovation and introduce it as a new leaven into an already old world which, so revolutionary that can be its acts, is, from the point of view of the following generation, out of date and close to the ruin.

VI. The crisis of the culture: its social and political range

In this test Hannah Arendt analyzes the Mass culture, transformation of the cultural object into a Loisir, for then proposing the attitude to be adopted with respect to the Art not to subject it to logic consumer society.

Hannah Arendt begins its matter by explaining why the diverting of the Culture does not result from its massification. Even when the culture was reserved for a social elite, the relationship between company and culture was utilitarian:

Philistine scorned initially objects cultural like useless, until the cultivated Philistine seizes as of a currency with which it bought a higher position in the company, or acquired a higher level in its own regard.

The massification of the culture is not a mechanism different but only the extension from this mechanism to all the company: The mass culture appears when the company of mass seizes cultural objects. This massification of the consumption of the cultural objects supposes the normal replacement of the objects to be consumed, which gradually reduces all the works of art to objects of consumption:

The result is not, of course, a mass culture which, strictly speaking, does not exist, but a leisure of mass, which nourishes cultural objects of the world.

Hannah Arendt continues by explaining what should be a report/ratio more appropriate to the culture. She studies for that the bond between art and policy: The element common to art and the policy are that both are phenomena of the public world. She specifies this design while resting on the Jugement of the taste such as defines by Kant in the Critique of faculty to judge. The taste is the faculty Politique which creates the culture:

Culture and policy between belong then, because it is not the To know or the Vérité which are concerned, but rather the judgment and the Décision, the judicious exchange of opinions relating to the sphere of the public life and the common world, and the decision on the kind of action to be undertaken there, as well as the way in the future of seeing the world, and the things which must appear there.

In other words, cultivated being supposes to be interested in art neither as with an object of consumption nor as to an object of knowing, but in a political way while being:

somebody who can choose his companions among the men, the things, thoughts, in the present as in the past

VII. Truth and policy

This test has as an aim the bonds between Vérité and Politique. The conflict to which Hannah Arendt sticks relates to the damages which the policy carries to the truths of facts. She denounces the attack carried to the factual truths by the transformation of the facts into opinion. The defense of the opinions and the refusal of the tender to the truth are explained by the will to be able to show persuasion, where the truth does not suffer any discussion.

Hannah Arendt analyzes the Mensonge political like impotent founding a new reality. The capacity of the lie being unlimited, it is impossible to guarantee stability in time of it:

The capacity, by its nature even, can never produce a substitute for stability assured the factual reality, which, because it passed, grew until a dimension out of our range. The facts continue themselves by their obstinacy, and their brittleness is curiously combined with a great torsion strength - this same irreversibility which is the seal of any human action. In their obstinacy, the fact are higher than the capacity; they are less momentary than the formations of the capacity, which occur when men are assembled for a goal, but disappear as soon as the goal is reached or missed. This transitory character makes capacity a highly dubious instrument to conclude a permanence of any kind, and, consequently, not only the truth and the facts are not in safety between its hands, but as well the not-truth and the not-facts.

The respect of the truth, i.e. the acceptance of the limitation of political freedom by the factual truths, is thus the condition of the political action. To be faithful to the truth is the only attitude with respect to the past which makes it possible to make of it a ground from which to build the future.

VIII. The space conquest and the dimension of the man

In this test, very near to the reflections of Günther Anders, Hannah Arendt disputes that the conquest of the space is suitable for increase the dimension of the man. More still, she fears that the pride of the man, by the claim to handle the Nature, leads to the destruction of the mankind.