Bireyin Sessizliği Üzerine: İbn Bâcce’nin Yalnız Bilgesi ile Hannah Arendt’in Eylemsiz Öznesi Arasında Etik-Politik Bir Diyalog
On the Silence of the Individual: An Ethical and Political Dialogue Between Ibn Bājjah’s Solitary Sage and Arendt’s Non-Acting Subject

Summary/Abstract: This study offers a comparative philosophical analysis of two distinct intellectual figures to question the ethical meaning of silence: Ibn Bājjah’s mutawaḥḥid (solitary sage) and Hannah Arendt's concept of the “non-acting subject”. While both thinkers problematize the individual's withdrawal from the political sphere, they conceptualize this withdrawal in different epistemological and ethical contexts. Ibn Bājjah, who wrote during the period of political and social disintegration in al-Andalusia, considerssolitude in Tadbīr al-Mutawaḥḥid as a necessary condition for achieving philosophical and moral perfection. In his thought, a solitary life is based on istiklāl al-ʿaḳl (rational self-sufficiency) and is considered a process of purification of the soul and attainment of true knowledge. In this context, silence is a conscious self-construction that enables metaphysical elevation as an existential orientation and form of knowing. Hannah Arendt, however, considers silence a much more problematic ethical and political stance in the context of the modern age, marked by totalitarianism and mass destruction. In her works The Human Condition and Eichmann in Jerusalem on the Banality of Evil, the weakness of public action, the disappearance of political discourse, and the rise of thoughtlessness form the basis of Arendt's critical analysis. Arendt's "non-acting subject" is a figure who, passive and incapable of considering the perspective of others, unwittingly becomes the agent of moral evil. In this sense, silence, for Arendt, is not perceived as ethical depth but rather as a paralysis of responsibility and the capacity for judgment. This article questions the viability of silence as a form of ethical resistance and discusses these two approaches within a conceptual comparison. Methodologically, the study brings together Ibn Bājjah's ethical understanding, grounded in the tradition of classical Islamic philosophy, and Arendt's modern political thought on a dialogic plane. The differences between the meanings attributed to silence by these two thinkers are also revealing in terms of understanding the tension between rational and ethical development and public political responsibility. For Ibn Bājjah, silence is valued as the possibility of authentic subjectivity and philosophical contemplation; for Arendt, silence/inaction represents the individual's withdrawal from ethical and political responsibility along with the collapse of the public sphere. However, rather than producing a binary opposition, this opposition opens up a space that enables rethinking the meaning of withdrawal in moments of political and moral rupture. Within this framework, the following question arises: Can silence, nourished by reflection and conscious withdrawal, still be an ethical position capable of resistance? Or does meaningful resistance no longer come from solitude, but from visibility and the courage to take the public floor? Ultimately, this study argues that the ethical status of silence is not fixed but contextual, intentional, and variable depending on philosophical orientation.

• Details
• Contents