Artikel

Theorie versus illuminatie: Hannah Arendt en de oorsprong van het totalitarisme

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Abstract

Theory versus illumination : Hannah Arendt and the origins of totalitarianism - The article provides a synopsis of Arendt’s main theses in The origins of totalitarianism. We argue that this work placed Arendt before considerable methodological problems. These problems give rise to Arendt’s conception of political theory as ’storytelling’. Like Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt employs a series of techniques, especially the scattering of chronology, in order to save the content of the story from attacks of historicist interpretation which the thinking ego inevitably construes. The practice of storytelling in favour of traditional inductivistic theory leads to Arendt’s diagnosis of the present period as ’dark times’. Storytelling fills in the role of traditional theory, which in modernity has become impotent. Unlike theory, storytelling does not content itself with a cognitive result or classic narrative (history, science, theory), but wants to give an answer to questions of Being (metaphysics, illumination). Arendt finds illumination in the narrative of the work of art which, if well done, carries within itself a metaphor. The metaphor is the form in which the unspeakable, the question of Being, can find a proper location in the world of everyday reality. With this Arendt anticipates her findings on the nature of thinking, the metaphysical fallacies and the unity of the world of The Life of the Mind by nearly three decades.

How to Cite:

Denayer, W., (1993) “Theorie versus illuminatie: Hannah Arendt en de oorsprong van het totalitarisme”, Tijdschrift voor Sociale Wetenschappen 38(2), 141–170. doi: https://doi.org/10.21825/tvsw.95136