Filosofische beschouwingen

Introduction The Jewish stress on human relations profoundly shaped four major twentieth-century thinkers, but not in a uniform way. In Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, and Emmanuel Levinas, the influence is explicit and philosophical-theological: relation to the human other becomes the privileged site of relation to God. In Hannah Arendt, the influence is indirect, historical, and secularized: Jewish experiences of exclusion, statelessness, pariahhood, and collective vulnerability become the basis for a political philosophy of plurality, public action, and the “right to have rights” (Arendt, 1951/1973; Bernstein, 1996). The central claim is therefore not that these thinkers simply “applied” Judaism to philosophy. Rather, each transformed Jewish relational ethics into a distinctive political-philosophical grammar: dialogue in Buber, revelation and redemption in Rosenzweig, ethical responsibility in Levinas, and plural public action in Arendt. A necessary assumption should be made ex...

Introduction Hannah Arendt ’s (1906–1975 CE) “ Introduction into Politics ,” posthumously published in The Promise of Politics , is not a conventional introduction to political science. It does not begin with the state, sovereignty, law, legitimacy, rights, interests, or distributive conflict. It begins instead with a deceptively simple ontological claim: “Politics is based on the fact of human plurality” (Arendt 2005, 93). This formulation is the key to the essay. Hannah Arendt’s question is not merely what politics does, but what kind of human experience politics makes possible. Her answer is that politics is the worldly space in which human beings, equal yet irreducibly distinct, appear to one another in speech and action. Politics is therefore not primarily rule, administration, violence, collective self-preservation, or the technical management of society. Properly understood, it is the realm in which freedom becomes manifest. In this analysis I want to argue that Hannah Arendt’s ...