政治开端中的恶性循环问题——对阿伦特政制思想的一项研究

The Aporia of Vicious Circle in the Political Beginning——A Study of Hannah Arendt ’ s Thought on the Foundation of Polity

美国革命和法国大革命标志着一个新的政治开端。作为建立新政治秩序的开端,革命以及与之共属一体的建基行动必然要面对内在于一切开端的恶性循环问题。这一问题如果被放置在近现代政治经验的背景中看,就是现代政治如何自我奠基、如何重建权威的问题。本文试图通过对阿伦特相关文本的解读与分析,对政治领域中有关开端与原则的恶性循环问题进行考察,并指出,阿伦特借助美国革命的经验讲述了一个开端与原则互生的故事,将这一所谓的恶性循环转变成了原则借助开端行动从隐到显的解释学循环。

The American Revolution and the French Revolution that happened on both sides of the Atlantic in the eighteenth century marked a new political beginning.They brought the aporia of how to establish a new body politic to broad daylight for the first time.Revolution as the beginning of founding a new political order , along with the act of foundation integrated with it , has to confront the vicious circle inhered in all beginnings : in so far as it is the beginning , where does its principle come from ? Or if there is no principle , how could the beginning establish one ? Set in the context of modern political experience , the aporia is just the problem of how modern politics can be self-grounded or how to reestablish political authority in modernity.By an exploration into the relevant writings of the modern political thinker Hannah Arendt , this article tries to investigate the vicious circle of beginning and principle in the political realm , and to point out that Arendt , in the light of the experience of the American Revolution , has told a story about the mutual generating of beginning and principle , turning the so-called vicious circle into a hermeneutic circle in which those implicit principles become explicit through the performance of founding actions.