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 19th 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.
