Arendt on the break in ideas and the break in history

Plato's cave created a separation between philosophy and human affairs that was encouraged by Aristotle but regretted by Socrates.
 

Arendt sees the rise of modernism in the 19th century as creating the ground in which the weed of Totalitariansim could take root. It did this by untethering our adherence to past intellectual authorities, making us vulnerable to new, human-created ideologies and regimes. Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Marx all independently recognised this vulnerability, but were powerless to prevent the consequences. Her description of how this unfolded is as follows.

Since antiquity, ideas of how we should live together had been devised by political philosophers in contemplation and at a distance from human affairs. Truths would be revealed to philosophers and people would go along with their prescription, unknowingly accepting the intellectual authority of the philosopher king. This hierarchy carried over to religion, where revealed truths also held sway.

With the arrival of the modern world, the supremacy of the revealed philosophical truth was called into question. First, because Modern Science accumulated knowledge not through revelation but by experiment, dealing a blow to the moral authority of religion. Second, the unbridled success of the Industrial Revolution seemed to prove that the ideas that were right were the ones that worked. So society should be organised based on real world economic success rather than political ideas devised in in social isolation.

Truth had gone from being absolute and extrinsic to humanity, to being human-created and subject to constant revolution, never settled. Our relationship to truth had been fundamentally reshaped. Nietzsche wrote "God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him" and Marx, "[...] all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned".

Marx, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard not only diagnosed this new state of affairs, but also recognised its dangers. They saw that an unsettled truth meant a relativisation of value. Political and moral beliefs could become mere opinions or social norms, without any deeper foundation, and therefore unavoidably fragile. Desperate for solid ground on which to combat the slipperiness of modern truth, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Marx asserted respectively the sacredness of faith, labour and the sensuous, claiming these as essential to being human.

These were radical ideas fueled by a feeling of deep apprehension. However, they fell short of the "new beginning and reconsideration of the past" that was needed and that could begin only once the seismic shift in our beliefs had given way to a seismic shift in events. When it came, Totalitarianism superseded completely the break in ideas with an irrevocable break in history. Political, legal and moral frameworks were rendered obsolete by human acts and a mode of government that had no precedent. Any reliance on past ideas could not be tolerated as everything that had led to that point was put into question. Stripped of a tradition we could trust, and with even the worthiness of humanity put in doubt, we were left in a state of confusion and helplessness.

Arendt sees this state of affairs as destabilising, but ulitmately a chance to view the past with fresh eyes and to start anew. She does not regret modernism's destruction of the separation between the philosopher and human affairs. She fears though that its collapse may be accompanied by the loss of the philosophical mode of thinking. That modernity's attack on a truth revealed through contemplation means we lose remembrance, depth of human experience and our capacity for surprised wonder. That without that, we will be unable to step outside the realm of human affairs and rather than Plato's cave having crumbled it will actually turn out to have enclosed us all.

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