Do Social à Questão Social: Hannah Arendt entre a Zoologia e a Teologia da Compaixão
Authors: de Almeida Cleber Ranieri Ribas 
Published: April 2024

In this dissertation, I propose a distinction between Hannah Arendt’s description of the social presented in The Human Condition (1958) and the social question that she presented in On Revolution (1963). In doing so, I argue that both the social and the social question should be regarded as phenomenon rather than just as concepts. Each of these two terms have their own historical and institutional origins. I will discuss Arendt’s definition of the social as a group of ongoing experiments with human issues. Such experiments unfolded into anonymous and, as A. N. Whitehead calls it, concrescent processes whose original purpose was to abolish individual political action. This allows me to articulate how, in the last three centuries, the European scientific elite has continuously experimented with the biological needs of mankind (ἀναγκαῖά) by deploying experimental and processual scientific methods that have developed through the development of social phenomenon itself. Regarding the social as a process that cannot be fully grasped if described into a static structure, I will also demonstrate that Arendt proposes to grasp it through a phenomenology of fluency. I show that Arendt would have drawn this concrescent image of the social on A. N. Whitehead’s philosophy of the organism presented in his work Process and Reality (1929). Likewise, the thesis on experiments with human issues would have been drawn on Karl Polanyi’s political anthropology, in particular in his work The Great Transformation (1944). Considering, on the one hand, the historical narratives Arendt proposed to the social, in which this particular phenomenon would have surfaced as such upon a secular pact between the modern European nation-states and the royal scientific societies, I look into textual evidences left by Arendt to contend that the social question, on the other hand, is a whole distinct phenomenon unfolded from the Cartesian doubting process which, in its turn, allowed the expansion the European critic mentality as well as gave birth to the so called public opinion. Since Descartes, the criticism on the natural and theocentric origins of poverty and social inequality has become increasingly public. From the 18th-century on, this criticism has been taken on by revolutionaries imbued with the libre-pensée principle of the Enlightenment mindset, that is, the free thinking emancipated from the limits of experience, tradition, and Christian faith. With this at stake, I will pose that the interpretation of the social in Hannah Arendt’s work followed two separate paths: one based on her zoologic-scientific interpretation of the social found in The Human Condition; and another based on her cartesian-theological interpretation of the social question found in On Revolution. Moreover, I intend to offer evidence that Arendt’s dialogue with poet W. H. Auden (1907-1973) was essential to Arendt’s realization of the social question as a revolutionary attempt to not only bring up Christian compassion into the public debate but also instrumentalize it for political purposes. At last, I will explore how Arendt has set yet ambiguously two distinguished modes of political action: the traditional action inherited by Hellenic political experience, and the scientific-processual modern action (or Whiteheadean processual action). Drawing on excerpts of The Human Condition, I will contend that the particular characteristics of these two modes of action are in fact antithetical and therefore mutually exclusive.