Joshua, Y: The Case of Human Plurality

In looking for an answer to the utter disregard for human life she witnessed during the Holocaust, Hannah Arendt found herself drawn to the ideas of individualism developed in Enlightenment and Romantic thinking. She wanted to understand how these ideas might have contributed to the problems she saw for modern society and politics. Ultimately, she rejected the Enlightenment concept of an abstract man because she saw it as nothing more than a phantom concept, with no basis in reality. But she also rejected the notion of an introspective self found in Romantic thought, where reality is given meaning only through self-consciousness. At the center of Arendt‘s thought is the idea that human beings exist as a plurality, that we exist together with each other and not just as a groups of individuals. She accuses the twin concepts of an abstract man and introspective self of trying to replace human plurality with radical individualism. For Arendt, such thinking is detrimental to the very foundation of politics. Politics cannot exist, she argues, without human plurality. Arendt wants to rescue the notion of human plurality and elevate it to a primal position in Western thought.