Beyond Authenticity: Hannah Arendt's final unfinished work

[nonrandomstring]

Th idea of "will", especially from the German side, got a bad rap for obvious reasons. But I like Arendt's picture of it as an uncomfortable inner tension when we simultaneously see what what we want to be (or should morally do), and an alternative path set out by habit and company.

To me, will is a very important component in security, it's that tense feeling you get just before you;

  - decide the video conference with your boss urging you to transfer
    $1m into a Swiss account might not be as it seems, and pull the
    plug (risking being fired)

  - walk out of the shop that stubbornly refused to take cash (risking
    social embarrassment)

  - refuse a significant discount in exchange for giving personal
    information (taking financial loss on principle)

  - tell someone in a more authoritative position, no you won't be
    joining them via Teams/Zoom because of its security risks (risking
    unpopularity)

What we find in cybersecurity incident autopsies is that people say "I knew X wasn't right. All my spidery feelings and heckles were on red alert, but I didn't act, and I don't know why."

So in another piece I wrote;

    Our culture is now about to split into two camps; the normative
    and the secure. Instead of "the haves and have-nots", there will
    be "the will, and the will-nots". Those who will compromise and
    those who will not compromise security. Those who choose security
    over convenience. Those who choose security against the nagging
    "advice" of corporations and governments to adopt a weaker
    position favourable to "markets".

[vinnyvichy]

Thanks! Seems your adjacent concept should be relabelled "moral insecurity".

"Ethics today means not being at home in one's house." --Adorno

So that, the choice of moral freedom can still be the (more) ethical tradeoff

[lo_zamoyski]

The problem with incorrect emphasis on "will" in our culture is that it takes you to voluntarism. The will is the appetite of the intellect, oriented toward the good (real or apparent), and so one cannot just will anything, but rather, only of the things that the intellect first apprehends. (Of course, the will can also turn the intellect away from things we'd rather not know or have due awareness of, and this is the essence of the evil act; an act of self-blinding in order to move the will toward what we know we should not choose.) So freedom is in choosing or willing the good, what one ought, and for that, as the article notes by way of Augustine, we need the right habits, and this is what we call virtue. Here, the virtue of being able to choose the good is prudence. And since freedom classically understood is found in the ability to will the good, only a virtuous person is free. Compare this with the liberal (as in Hobbes, Locke, Mill) notion of freedom as the absence of external limitation. It becomes apparent what lunacy that is, as choosing anything but the good is, again to draw from Augustine, nothing short of the worst kind of slavery, a slavery to passions and vice. Thus, this modern notion of "authenticity" is, frankly, total bullshit, and a completely destructive notion at that.

[motohagiography]

I also got the sense the way authentic self was presented was kind of morally nullifying, a variation that reduced to "do what thou wilt," where the animal chaos is the true self, instead of the active exercise of choosing good. What Arendt was clearly onto has been said elsewhere as something along the lines of, nothing short of indefatigable exertion can induce the habit of virtue, where she notes Augustine emphasized it was this regular exercise of virtue that would render the soul pure, where Heidegger appears to be taking it for granted as a base state we need to strip away our experiences to find.

I've been down both roads and have spent a lot of time alone in the woods at night to find the fears that only exist without others around, and really, it's dwelling on the past. The search for Heideggers authentic self is a substitute for engaging the present and the real. Worse, it's neutralizing. If you want prevail over hell, it's other people, and engagement the necessary condition.

[vinnyvichy]

The giant pachyderm in the room of modernism (arguably the largest pachyderm):

any post-liberal program of self-moderation needs to account for the magic of intragenerational QoL improvements (even if we restrict ourselves to considering only the inner life).

We can all go Greek, Latin, Pali, or Classical Chinese in search of questions and answers, but those civilizations didn't have either mass literacy or tech.

Once upon a time (last century) we had to contend with the Eastern Bloc's moral positioning, but since the end of That no one who suggests putting personal growth (of the psychological kind) ahead of the economic one has been taken seriously.

(And this is why @nonrandomstring above gets upvoted, even though I like your post better)

[Bluestein]

> Compare this with the liberal (as in Hobbes, Locke, Mill) notion of freedom as the absence of external limitation

You put your finger methinks on one of the reasons for the slippage downhill of our society: Everybody wants to be the "wrong" kind of free. (Also: All rights. No duties ...)

[bbor]

Just to save people some time, since it’s halfway through: the article is about The Life of the Mind. It’s an incredible work - cannot recommend it enough! The completion of Kant’s project, in her own way.

[lysecret]

Everyone who even vaguely cares about psychology should read Eichmann in Jerusaelm from her.

[lukeasrodgers]

I believe the consensus now is that her analysis of Eichmann was wrong, he had fooled her (and others). Personally I still think the concept of the “banality of evil” overall still has merit.

[hiatus]

Could you elaborate on your recommendation?

[slowhadoken]

Yeah she was a genius.

[39896880]

Arendt makes a compelling case, but unfortunately one that does not stand up to our advances in neuroscience. The will as described here does not exist. There is nothing beyond conditioning.

[phreeza]

Not sure how you come to this conclusion, neuroscience is nowhere near advanced enough to have clarity on such a thing, it could well be an emergent property of neural activity.

[heresie-dabord]

The compelling case, as you say, is simply that we can find ourselves for various reasons choosing to resist conditioning and conformity. And this resistance can be enlightening to the individual and to broader society.

The personal search (self-examination) can of course be beneficial. There's no need to slip into nebulous metaphysics to understand that any challenge to a power structure may have an enlightened outcome or a disastrous outcome.

The article is hagiographic and is reaching for something deep, but this passage is perhaps the essence:

    "But for Arendt, the will was the means to our freedom [...] The will is a space of tension inside the self where one actively feels the difference between where they are and where they would like to be. [...]

    "Willing is the mental activity that goes on between thinking and judgment. It has the power to shape us by drawing us into conflict with ourselves. Without inner conflict, there is no forward movement. These are the basic principles of willing:

    Willing is characterised by an inner state of disharmony.
    Willing is experienced as a felt sense of tension within the body where the mind is at war with itself.
    Willing makes one aware of possible decisions, which creates a feeling of being pulled in multiple directions at once.
    Willing can feel very lonely. Decisions and choices are shaped by one’s environment, by the everydayness of being, but ultimately the responsibility for deciding is up to oneself.
    Willing makes one aware of the tension that exists between oneself as a part of the world, and oneself as an individual alone existing in relationship to the world.
    Willing is the principle of human individuation.
    Willing relates to the world through action.
    The will is the inner organ of freedom.
"

[goatlover]

Conditioning is a behavioral term from when the brain was treated as a black box, and they wanted to come up with general principles of behavior in the absence of good neurological models. Things have advanced a bit since the 1950s.

[leobg]

Changes nothing.

Thief: I’m not guilty. There is no free will, so I couldn’t have acted otherwise. Judge: I sentence you anyway. Because my actions, too, are predetermined.

[nonrandomstring]

> but unfortunately

Says one who does not believe in will but believes in fortune.