Understanding Solidarity as “Thinking without a Banister”: Revisiting
Hannah Arendt’s Thoughts
by Karolin-Sophie Stüber (Munich School of Philosophy)
How to make thought and judgment actually matter in the common world was one of Hannah Arendt’s major interests. She was convinced that even in dark times, where all formerly known traditions, rules, principles, and categories are lost, we are still able to understand and judge anew. She placed hope in conceptualizing this capacity as a form of political engagement itself: thinking without a banister.
In my contribution, I want to propose a new approach to understanding solidarity in terms of thinking without a banister. Drawing on Arendt’s accounts on political action and her interpretation on Kant’s reflective judgment, I invite to consider solidarity as a form of complex practice: It consists of individual or collective re-thinking and re-judging the world and, simultaneously, performing solidary actions based on those reflections on the world.
I attempt to examine those interrelations, namely the conditions of possibility of solidarity to actually emerge: Why would we consider judgement to be the origin of solidarity? And if so, what kind of judgement should be embraced for it to eventually leading to solidary actions?
In politics, Arendt claims, we are frequently confronted with something we might neither know nor understand at first. As “new beginnings” are the core of politics, we seem to need ‘a banister’ to make sense of it. Therefore, we try to rely on given generals, like laws, principles or categories, connecting them to the particular: This x (particular) belongs to y (general). Yet, often enough, we cannot find the appropriate general: financial crisis, Brexit, right-wing movements, questions on migrations etc. Re-learning the art of self-thinking and re-judging is especially crucial in those times. In solidarity, I argue, reflective judgments are at work: On the basis of a particular new, a general is being searched for, invented, modified etc. While the concrete solidary action refers to the particular, it also addresses an understanding of a general and generates a political question.
Reflecting on solidarity in such way could shed light on the European framework: Using the example of the issues regarding migration, I want to show how solidarity not only unfolds through direct action but also through addressing a broader political level. When sea rescuers are saving people from drowning, they are acting on a particular matter, surely. Yet, they are also confronting the European Union on different levels: the lack of official structures, the need for safe harbours, new laws etc. Since their action is simultaneously directed on the particular rescue while re-judging the political conditions and demanding change, they are practising solidarity with migrants whose lives are at risk, simply, because the political framework is failing them.
Thus, through solidarity the interplay between particular matters and general principles, categories or laws is made visible and being questioned, contested, argued about – in short: being open for public debate. Fostering such debates instead of insisting on the alleged generals might establish a shared appreciation of (European) politics, “where the world is at stake”, as Arendt puts it, and where we can actively interfere. Thinking without a banister could be the first step.
In my contribution, I want to propose a new approach to understanding solidarity in terms of thinking without a banister. Drawing on Arendt’s accounts on political action and her interpretation on Kant’s reflective judgment, I invite to consider solidarity as a form of complex practice: It consists of individual or collective re-thinking and re-judging the world and, simultaneously, performing solidary actions based on those reflections on the world.
I attempt to examine those interrelations, namely the conditions of possibility of solidarity to actually emerge: Why would we consider judgement to be the origin of solidarity? And if so, what kind of judgement should be embraced for it to eventually leading to solidary actions?
In politics, Arendt claims, we are frequently confronted with something we might neither know nor understand at first. As “new beginnings” are the core of politics, we seem to need ‘a banister’ to make sense of it. Therefore, we try to rely on given generals, like laws, principles or categories, connecting them to the particular: This x (particular) belongs to y (general). Yet, often enough, we cannot find the appropriate general: financial crisis, Brexit, right-wing movements, questions on migrations etc. Re-learning the art of self-thinking and re-judging is especially crucial in those times. In solidarity, I argue, reflective judgments are at work: On the basis of a particular new, a general is being searched for, invented, modified etc. While the concrete solidary action refers to the particular, it also addresses an understanding of a general and generates a political question.
Reflecting on solidarity in such way could shed light on the European framework: Using the example of the issues regarding migration, I want to show how solidarity not only unfolds through direct action but also through addressing a broader political level. When sea rescuers are saving people from drowning, they are acting on a particular matter, surely. Yet, they are also confronting the European Union on different levels: the lack of official structures, the need for safe harbours, new laws etc. Since their action is simultaneously directed on the particular rescue while re-judging the political conditions and demanding change, they are practising solidarity with migrants whose lives are at risk, simply, because the political framework is failing them.
Thus, through solidarity the interplay between particular matters and general principles, categories or laws is made visible and being questioned, contested, argued about – in short: being open for public debate. Fostering such debates instead of insisting on the alleged generals might establish a shared appreciation of (European) politics, “where the world is at stake”, as Arendt puts it, and where we can actively interfere. Thinking without a banister could be the first step.
