Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Political Judgement in the History of Political Thought and the Modern Crisis
- 2 Sartre and Beauvoir: The Ambiguity of Political Judgement and the Challenge of Freedom and Responsibility
- 3 Camus and Arendt: Confronting the Ambiguity of Political Judgement and Illuminating the Limits of the World
- 4 Political Judgement and Narrativity
- 5 Facing Up to the Tragedy of Political Action: The Problem of Dirty Hands
- 6 Times of Transition: Reconciling with the Tragic Nature of Political Affairs
- Conclusion: Reclaiming Wonder at the World of Political Affairs
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - Facing Up to the Tragedy of Political Action: The Problem of Dirty Hands
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Political Judgement in the History of Political Thought and the Modern Crisis
- 2 Sartre and Beauvoir: The Ambiguity of Political Judgement and the Challenge of Freedom and Responsibility
- 3 Camus and Arendt: Confronting the Ambiguity of Political Judgement and Illuminating the Limits of the World
- 4 Political Judgement and Narrativity
- 5 Facing Up to the Tragedy of Political Action: The Problem of Dirty Hands
- 6 Times of Transition: Reconciling with the Tragic Nature of Political Affairs
- Conclusion: Reclaiming Wonder at the World of Political Affairs
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The problem of dirty hands refers to the supposedly unavoidable element of wrongdoing that attends political action – conveying a classical formulation of the recognised ambiguity inherent to political involvement, the roots of which reach far back into the Western tradition of political thought. In the world of politics constituted by a plurality of conflicting values and goals, the argument goes, we are required to do wrong in order to do right and so, on the path towards some greater good, inevitably cause suffering and incur a moral cost. In this respect, the dirty hands problem represents a potent manifestation of the existentialists’ insights into the anguishing experience of human engagement in the world. For not only does it preclude any appeal to an authoritative standard of values that would solve the dilemma of conflicting obligations, confronting the acting subject inescapably with the ‘questionable gift of human freedom’ (Arendt 1978b: 141); it also places the actors face to face with the troubling fact that whichever way they choose, they are likely to become implicated in evil and will have to bear the stain of wrongdoing. Predicated upon the awareness of the spectre of failure, conflict and evil that haunts political action, the problem of dirty hands embodies the recognition of the inadequacy of absolute standards of morality. It importantly gestures at the relevance of the existential understanding of the human judging ability as a situated, ambiguous practice of facing up to the plurality and unpredictability of the world.
If the problematic of dirty hands crystallises the existential thinkers’ insights into the ambiguity of political judgement, however, it at the same time envisions the operation of judging as a complex technical exercise whose main aim is to rationalise and ‘solve’ the intricacies at stake. Thus remaining in the grips of the determinant conception of political judgement, it also risks overlooking the fundamental existential sources of the recognised complexity of political affairs. The upshot is that it renders recognition of the tragedy of political action into a new, inevitable end of political judgement. The existential aesthetic attentiveness to the worldly process of judging offers a valuable lens through which to retain attention on the human reality of the paradox as it arises from the ambiguity of human engagement in the world.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Rethinking Political JudgementArendt and Existentialism, pp. 146 - 182Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2017