SUJETS DANGEREUX

Hannah Arendt. (1906-1975). Philosopher, self-described as a political theorist. Like Adorno, she was an original thinker. I have great respect for controversial original thinkers, kindred spirits. Although I do not concur with her thinking on totalitarianism, I admire her courage in using this rather unpopular (unless used as a blatantly thoughtless propaganda slogan) word, and in tackling this subject at all, in raising the issue of the banality of evil, in her explosive approach to the role of certain Jewish leaders in the Holocaust, and in other unconventional things, such as comparing Thomas Jefferson’s townships to the Russian Soviets. (Delightful!)

I am however staying away from the details. Here is another primarily informative entry ad maiorem reader edification. May the readers be encouraged to dig up these details on their own. In this sense, this entry is definitely worth posting, even though it is short on my original comment.

Despite her objections, she is often described as a political philosopher, but she always refused this label on the grounds that philosophy is concerned with “man in the singular.” She described herself instead as a political theorist, because her work centers on the fact that “men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world.” She was born in Linden, Germany, in 1906, the only child of secular Jews. During her childhood, she moved first to Königsberg, and later to Berlin. In 1923, she began her studies in classics and Christian theology at the University of Berlin, and in 1924 she entered the University of Marburg, where she studied philosophy with Martin Heidegger, with whom she started a long, stormy romantic relationship, which was criticized because of Heidegger’s membership in the Nazi party, her first, but by no means last controversy. In the wake of one of their breakups, Arendt moved to Heidelberg, where she wrote her dissertation on the concept of love in the thought of St. Augustine, under the supervision of Karl Jaspers, Heidegger’s friend. She remained close to Jaspers throughout her life, although the influence of Heidegger’s phenomenology was to prove of greater influence on her work.

In 1929, she met the young Jewish philosopher Günther Stern (Anders), with whom she was romantically involved, and later married. In the same year, her dissertation (Liebesbegriff bei Augustin) was published, but she was prevented from habilitating, because she was Jewish. She worked for a while researching anti-Semitism before being interrogated by the Gestapo, and then fled Germany for Paris. There she met her first husband’s cousin, the literary critic and Marxist philosopher Walter Benjamin. While in France, she worked to support and aid Jewish refugees. In 1936 she met with Heinrich Blücher, a Marxist philosopher and poet, divorced Stern, and in 1940 married Blücher.

In 1941 she escaped the Nazis again, fleeing with her husband and mother to the United States. Living in New York, she served as research director of the Conference on Jewish Relations, executive director of the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, Inc., wrote a column for the German-language Jewish newspaper Aufbau, and was editor of Schocken Books. She published What is Existenz-Philosophy in 1946, and worked, since 1944, on her first major political book The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951. In it, she related totalitarianism, wrongly, in my judgment, to 19^th century anti-Semitism and imperialism as an outcome of the disintegration of the traditional nation-state. Needless to say, my own analysis of totalitarianism, being the centerpiece of the Collective section, paints a very different picture, and my disagreement with her, on this subject, could not be greater. However, I applaud her for raising this issue in a serious and thoughtful manner, a far cry from the politicized and manipulative treatment of totalitarianism by the likes of certain American scholars, mentioned in my discussions of totalitarianism in the Collective section.

After World War II, she returned to Germany, and worked for Youth Aliyah. Later, she resumed relations with Heidegger, and pluckily testified on his behalf in a German denazification hearing. She developed a deep intellectual friendship with Jaspers and his wife, and began a correspondence with Mary McCarthy.

She became a US citizen in 1950, and started a sequence of visiting fellowships and professorial positions at American universities, serving as a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, Princeton, Columbia, and Northwestern University. She also worked at the University of Chicago, at the New School in New York, as a fellow at Yale and Wesleyan University. In 1959 she became the first woman appointed to a full professorship at Princeton.

In 1958, came The Human Condition and Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess. In 1959, Reflections on Little Rock, her controversial reflection of the emergent Black civil rights movement was published. 1961 was the year of Between Past and Future, and her travel to Jerusalem to cover the trial of Adolf Eichmann for the New Yorker, which resulted in the publication in 1963 of her most controversial work Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (see below). In that year she also published On Revolution. In 1968, came Men in Dark Times; in 1970, On Violence; in 1971, Thinking and Moral Considerations; and in 1972, Crises of the Republic. In 1970 she gave a seminar on Kant’s philosophy of judgment at the New School (published posthumously, as Reflections on Kant’s Political Philosophy). In the next few years she started her work on the projected three-volume work The Life of the Mind. She died before its completion, in 1975, at the age of 69.

Hannah Arendt is an admittedly challenging figure for anyone wishing to understand the body of her work in political philosophy. She never wrote anything that would represent a systematic political philosophy, a philosophy, in which a single central argument is expounded and expanded upon in a sequence of works. Rather, her writings cover many diverse topics, such as totalitarianism, revolution, nature of freedom, the faculties of thinking, willing and judging, the history of political thought, etc. A thinker of heterodox and complicated argumentation, she drew inspiration from Heidegger, Aristotle, Augustine, Kant, Nietzsche, Jaspers, and others. The question, with which her thought engages, perhaps, above all others, is that of the nature of politics and political life, as distinct from other domains of human activity. Her work, if it can be said to do anything, can be said to undertake a phenomenological reconstruction of the nature of political existence, with all that this entails in way of thinking and acting.

Her work deals with the nature of power, and the subjects of politics, authority, and totalitarianism. Much of it focuses on affirming a concept of freedom synonymous with collective political action among equals. She theorizes freedom as public and associative, drawing on examples from the Greek “polis,” the American townships, the Paris Commune, and the civil rights movements of the 1960’s, to illustrate it. Another key concept is natality, the capacity to bring something new into the world such as creating a government that endures. Arguably, her most influential work, The Human Condition (1958) distinguishes between labor, work, and action, and explores the implications of these distinctions. Her theory of political action is most developed there. Her first major book, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), traced the roots of Stalinist Communism and Nazism in both anti-Semitism and imperialism. The book became controversial, because it suggested an essential identity between the two phenomena, which others have believed to be separate in both origins and nature.

In her report of the Eichmann trial, evolving into the book Eichmann in Jerusalem, she coined the phrase “the banality of evil,” to describe Eichmann. She raised the question of whether evil is radical, or simply a function of banality, the tendency of ordinary people to obey orders and conform to mass opinion, without critically thinking about the results of their actions or inactions. Arendt was extremely critical of the way that Israel conducted the trial. She was also critical of the way that many Jewish leaders acted during the Holocaust, which caused an enormous controversy and resulted in a great animosity directed at her within the Jewish circles. (The book was translated into Hebrew only recently, many decades after being written.) Nevertheless, she ended the book by endorsing the execution of Eichmann, writing: “Just as you supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people, and the people of several other nations as though you and your superiors had any right to determine who should and who should not inhabit the world, --- we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang.”

Arendt published another book in the same year that was controversial in its own right: On Revolution, a study of the two most famous revolutions of the 18th century. Arendt went against the grain of traditional Marxist and leftist thought by contending that the American Revolution was a successful revolution, while the French Revolution was not. The argument echoed that of Edmund Burke, but she also argued that the revolutionary spirit had not been preserved in America, because the majority of people had no role to play in politics, other than voting. She admired Thomas Jefferson’s idea of dividing the counties into townships, similar to the soviets, which rose during the Russian Revolution. Her interest in council system, which she saw as the only alternative to the state, continued all her life.

Her posthumous book, The Life of the Mind, remained incomplete. In her study of thinking, she focuses on Socrates, and his concept of thinking as a solitary dialogue between me and myself. This appropriation of Socrates leads her to introduce novel concepts of conscience (giving no positive prescriptions, but warning what I cannot do, if I would remain friends with myself when I re-enter the two-in-one of thought, where I must render an account of my actions to myself) and morality (a totally negative enterprise concerned with non-participation in certain actions in order to remain friends with myself). Willing adopts St. Augustine’s notion of the will, talks of  the will as a totally free mental faculty that makes new beginnings possible. In her third volume, she was planning to engage the faculty of judgment by appropriating Kant’s Critique of Judgment, but did not live to write it. However, she left manuscripts (Thinking and Moral Considerations, Some Questions on Moral Philosophy), and lectures (On Kant’s Political Philosophy), revealing her basic thoughts on this mental faculty.

I will revisit Arendt’s controversial thinking in much greater depth and detail in the next stage of work on this project. It is, however, worth taking note of some of the most prominent other criticisms which have been leveled against Arendt’s work.

Primary among these is her reliance upon a rigid distinction between the private and public, the oikos and the polis, to delimit the specificity of the political realm. Feminists have complained that the confinement of the political to the realm outside the household has been part and parcel of the domination of politics by men and the corresponding exclusion of women’s subjection from legitimate politics. Marxists point to the consequence of confining matters of material distribution and economic management to the extra-political realm of the oikos, thereby keeping issues of material social justice, poverty and exploitation from political discussion and contestation. The shortcoming of this distinction in Arendt’s work is amply illustrated by a well-known and often-cited incident. While attending a conference in 1972, she was put under question by Albrecht Wellmer, Critical Theorist of the Frankfurt School, regarding her distinction of the political and the social, and its consequences. Arendt famously replied that housing and homelessness (which were the key themes of the conference) were not political issues at all, but that they were external to the political, as the sphere of the actualization of freedom; the political is about human self-disclosure in speech and deed, not about the distribution of goods, which belongs to the social realm as an extension of the oikos. It can be said that her attachment to a fundamental and originary understanding of political life precisely misses the fact that politics is inherently concerned with the contestation of what counts as legitimate public concerns with the practice of politics attempting to introduce new, heretofore non-political issues, into the realm of legitimate political concern.

Arendt has also come under criticism for her overly enthusiastic endorsement of the Athenian polis, as an exemplar of political freedom, to the detriment of modern political regimes and institutions. Likewise, the emphasis she places upon direct citizen deliberation as synonymous with the exercise of political freedom excludes representative models, and might be seen as unworkable in the context of modern mass societies, with delegation, specialization, expertise, and wide-ranging division of labor necessary, to deal with their complexities. Her elevation of politics to the apex of human good and goals has also been under criticism, demoting as it does all other modes of human action and self-realization to a subordinate status. There are also many criticisms leveled at her unorthodox readings of other thinkers and at her attempts to synthesize conflicting philosophical viewpoints in an effort to develop her own position (for example, her endeavor to mediate Aristotle’s account of practical judgment (phronesis) with Kant’s transcendental-formal model).

With regard to the greatest controversy over her banality of evil concept, she was legitimately and bravely willing to contest the prevalent depictions of the Nazi's inexplicable atrocities as having emanated from a malevolent will to do evil, a delight in murder. As far as she could discern, Eichmann came to his willing involvement with the program of genocide through a failure, or absence, of the faculties of sound thinking and judgment. Far from exhibiting a malevolent hatred of the Jews, which might have accounted for his participation in the Holocaust, Eichmann was an utterly innocuous individual, who operated unthinkingly, following orders, and carrying them out with no consideration of their effects upon those he targeted. This connection between the complicity with evil and failure of thinking and judgment inspired her last phase of work, seeking to explicate the nature of these faculties, and their role in our political and moral choices.

All these and other criticisms notwithstanding, Arendt remains one of the most original, challenging, and influential political thinkers of the twentieth century, and her work will continue to provide inspiration for the political philosophers of the twenty-first.