In the first Brown Bag seminar of the semester we discussed Hannah Arendt’s view on human rights and tried to delve deeper into her ideas by reading Part 1 in the first volume Thinking, and chapter 16 in volume 2 Willing, of her book The Life of the Mind, together with Serena Parekh’s (2004) article A meaningful place in the world: Hannah Arendt on the nature of human rights, Journal of Human Rights, 3:1, 41-52. This text builds upon those three works.
In The Life of the Mind, Volume 1 “Thinking” Arendt addresses the concepts of being and appearance. While it has been common among philosophers to distinguish the two, Arendt wants to show that they are connected. She builds upon her earlier work on Action and Speech (in The Human Condition) and show us how Being and Appearance, and Action and Speech, actually coincide. It is through action and speech that we create our individual identities and reveal who we are. Without this we cease to be complete people. Action needs a plurality of people to be meaningful. It is in need of interaction and response, because this is how people form opinions. Action and speech thus create a political space and this is the space, or the stage as Arendt also calls it, for appearance. Appearance is also dependant upon other people, as it merely means to be seen by others (p. 21). The distinctiveness of being human is addressing the question “who and what am I?”, and through action establishing and appearing in the political space (polis).
Arendt’s view on human rights builds on this political understanding of what it means to be human. The traditional view on human rights tend to regard its subjects as “the people” i.e. the people of the national state. This means that human rights actually isn’t inalienable rights, but civic rights that can only be claimed within a political community (Parekh 2004). When people after the first world war were made stateless, they also lost their rights and their place in the world, says Hannah Arendt. When deprived of a place in the world, people also loose their space for action and speech, they loose access to this stage where they can appear. They can’t show who they are. This, Arendt says, is to become completely rightless and be deprived of humanity.
Everyone has a right to have rights, a right to a place in the world. But how does Arendt think that these rights can be guaranteed? Only, she says, by a mutual promise of rights to each other. She doesn’t give us any optimistic solution, because that isn’t her agenda. She claims that anticipation from the illusion of how things should be (the solution), prevents to see the reality and the actual nature of things. Arendt wants to make us think, and for us to free ourselves from the illusion that there can be a solution.