Botstein is equally
misguided in this appraisal of
Arendt's attempt
to
separate pol–
itics from ethics, which I argued
was characteristic of the political
existentialist position in general.
Botstein takes issue with this
contention by claiming that her
politics did indeed contain a
"profound concern for ends."
The evidence he adduces comes
from her essay "What is Free–
dom?" which he reads to be
arguing that principle and vir–
LUe are necessary elements in
political action. The "princi–
ple" that she discusses, however,
is explicitly derived from Mon–
tesquieu, who used it
to
mean
the dominant inspiration of ac–
tion for a government, which is
not equivalent to an ethical
norm. The examples she gives of
principle show how far removed
from Bostein's reading she was:
"honor or glory, love of equal–
ity, which Montesquieu called
virtue, or distinction or excel–
lence ... but also fear or distrust
or hatred." As for the virtue he
claims she advocates, in the very
next paragraph, she praises Ma–
chiavelli's notion of
virtu
the
meaning of which, she claims,
"is best rendered by 'virtuosity,'
that is, an excellence we attrib–
ute
to
the performing arts." For
Arendt, it is
virtu
and not virtue
that best illustrates what she
means by "freedom as inherent
in action."
311
Botstein further argues that
Arendt's ethical concerns are
best demonstrated in her belief
that Kant's categorical impera–
tive should be the basis of poli–
tics. But in the several places in
her work where she discusses
that injunction, Arendt specifi–
cally rejects its usefulness for
political action. In
The Human
Condition,
she sees it as the
"greatest expression" of "the
anthropocentric utilitarianism
of
homo faber,"
which she
found antithetical to politics,
and argues that Kant wrongly
identified politics with the mak–
ing inherent in legislation. In
Between Past and Future,
she
argued that the categorical
imperative was "based upon the
necessity for rational thought to
agree with itself," which relates
it to that monological search for
a coercive truth she attacked as
antipolitical in "Truth and Pol–
itics." It is thus not in Kant's
second
Critique,
Arendt insisted,
that his true political theory can
be found, but in the
Critique of
Judgment,
where he outlined his
aesthetics. In fact, she explicitly
commended the faculty of taste,
based on the anticipation of
communicative consensus, as
the truly political, and not the
categorical imperative. And fi–
nally, in
Eichmann in Jeru–
salem,
she concluded that de–
spite Eichmann's pathetic
distortions in his attempt to
