ABSTRACT
Arendt’s approach to emotions is novel not so much for her phenomenology of emotions, but for the phenomenology of the connection between politics and emotions: Instead of establishing and maintaining a taxonomy of (political) emotions, Arendt distinguishes systematically between emotions in the political sphere and emotions in the private sphere. While she highly values certain emotions in the private sphere, she argues that the same emotions are bound to wreak havoc in the political sphere. Thus, Arendt’s critique of emotions is a critique in the original sense of the Greek word krinein: to distinguish. She refrains from evaluating emotions by either praising them for their humanistic potential or condemning them as condescending or irrational gestures. (To be sure, for Arendt, emotions generally are irrational, but that is not her primary concern.) Instead, she distinguishes between emotions that occur in the political domain and those that occur in the private sphere, judging them accordingly. Compassion is her prime example: In Arendt’s view, it is pivotal whether compassion occurs in the private realm, where she values it highly, or in the political realm, where she considers it entirely destructive. Herein lies Arendt’s originality. To Arendt, it makes no sense to condemn emotions per se, as Nietzsche does. Neither does it make sense to label certain emotions as “political” and others as “apolitical”, like Nussbaum (Nussbaum 2015) does. Instead, she explores the interconnectedness of emotions and the political in On Revolution (Arendt 1963): If emotions appear in the political field, this affects the emotion and the political alike. Her analysis, however, rests upon very specific and arguably idiosyncratic preconceptions of emotions that ought to be revised. 1 This article explores Arendt’s critique of political emotions, taking compassion in the French Revolution as its vantage point.
