6:08:00 PM
DR.H.Nurudin Siraj.MA.MSi
“Hannah Arendt”
Hannah Arendt
(lahir di Linden,
Hannover, 14 Oktober 1906 – meninggal
di New York City, 14 Desember 1975
pada umur 69 tahun) adalah seorang teoretikus
politik Jerman. Ia seringkali digambarkan seagai
seorang filsuf, meskipun ia selalu menolak label
itu dengan alasan bahwa filsafat berurusan dengan "manusia dalam
pengertian singular." Ia menggambarkan dirinya sebagai seorang teoretikus
politik karena karyanya berpusat pada kenyataan bahwa "manusia pada
umumnya, bukan Manusia saja, hidup di muka bumi dan menghuni dunia ini."
Arendt
dilahirkan dalam keluarga Yahudi sekular di kota Linden
yang waktu itu merupakan kota independen (kini bagian dari Hanover) dan dibesarkan di Königsberg (kota tempat tinggal
pendahulunya yang dikaguminya, Immanuel Kant) dan Berlin. Ia belajar filsafat di bawah Martin Heidegger di Universitas Marburg,
dan lama menjalin hubungan romantik yang sporadis dengannya. Hal ini telah
banyak dikritik karena simpati Heidegger terhadap Nazi.
Suatu kali ketika hubungan mereka terputus, Arendt pindah ke Heidelberg untuk menulis disertasi tentang
konsep cinta-kasih dalam pemikiran Santo Augustinus,
di bawah bimbingan filsuf-psikolog eksistensialis Karl Jaspers.
Disertasi
itu diterbitkan pada 1929, namun Arendt dihalangi ketika ia ingin menyusun
tulisan habilitasi
- karya tulis sesudah penulisan disertasi yang merupakan prasyarat untuk
mengajar di universitas Jerman - pada 1933 karena ia seorang Yahudi. Setelah
itu ia meninggalkan Jerman dan pergi ke Paris. Di sana ia berjumpa dan
bersahabat dengan kritikus sastra dan mistikus Marxis Walter Benjamin. Sementara di Prancis,
Arendt bekerja untuk mendukung dan membantu para pengungsi Yahudi. Namun,
karena sebagian wilayah Prancis diduduki militer Jerman setelah Prancis menyatakan perang pada Perang Dunia II, dan dideportasinya
orang-orang Yahudi ke kamp-kamp konsentrasi,
Hannah Arendt harus melarikan diri dari Prancis. Pada 1940,
ia menikah dengan penyair dan filsuf Jerman Heinrich
Blücher. Pada 1941, Hannah Arendt
melarikan diri bersama suami dan ibunya ke Amerika Serikat atas bantuan diplomat
Amerika Hiram
Bingham IV, yang secara ilegal mengeluarkan visa untuknya dan
sekitar 2.500 orang pengungsi Yahudi lainnya. Kemudian ia menjadi aktif dalam
komunitas Yahudi-Jerman di New York dan menulis untuk mingguan Aufbau.
Setelah
Perang Dunia II ia melanjutkan hubungannya dengan, dan memberikan kesaksian
untuknya dalam pemeriksaan denazifikasi
Jerman. Pada 1950, ia menjadi warga negara AS
berdasarkan naturalisasi, dan
pada 1959 menjadi perempuan pertama yang diangkat ke dalam jabatan profesor
penuh di Universitas
Princeton.
Karya-karya
Arendt membahas hakikat kuasa,
dan topik-topik politik, wewenang,
dan totalitarianisme.
Banyak dari tulisannya terpusat pada pengukuhan konsepsi tentang kebebasan yang
sinonim dengan aksi politik kolektif. Dalam argumentasinya melawan asumsi
libertarian bahwa "kemerdekaan dimulai ketika politik berakhir,"
Arendt menyusun teorinya tentang kemerdekaan yang bersifat publik dan
asosiatif, dengan mengambil contoh-contoh antara lain dari polis Yunani,
kota-kota Amerika, komun Paris, dan gerakan hak-hak sipil pada tahun 1960-an
untuk menggambarkan konsepsi tentang kemerdekaan. Dalam laporannya mengenai
pengadilan Eichmann
untuk The
New Yorker, yang kemudian berkembang menjadi buku Eichmann
in Jerusalem, ia mengangkat pertanyaan apakah kejahatan itu bersifat radikal ataukan
sekadar suatu fungsi dari keluguan -- kecenderungan orang biasa untuk menaati
perintah dan mengikuti pandangan masyarakat tanpa berpikir secara kritis
tentang akibat dari tindakan atau kelalaian mereka untuk bertindak.
Ia
juga menulis The Origins of Totalitarianism, yang menelusuri akar-akar komunisme dan nazisme dan kaitan mereka dengan anti-semitisme.
Buku ini kontroversial karena membandingkan dua pokok yang sebagian orang
percaya tidak dapat dipertemukan.
Ketika
meninggal dunia pada 1975, Hannah Arendt dikebumikan di Bard
College di Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, tempat
suaminya mengajar selama bertahun-tahun.
Hannah Arendt
(1906—1975)
Hannah
Arendt is a twentieth century political philosopher whose writings do not
easily come together into a systematic philosophy that expounds and expands
upon a single argument over a sequence of works. Instead, her thoughts span
totalitarianism, revolution, the nature of freedom and the faculties of thought
and judgment.
The
question with which Arendt engages most frequently is the nature of politics
and the political life, as distinct from other domains of human activity.
Arendt’s work, if it can be said to do any one thing, essentially undertakes a
reconstruction of the nature of political existence. This pursuit takes shape
as one that is decidedly phenomenological, a pointer to the profound influence
exerted on her by Heidegger and Jaspers. Beginning with a phenomenological
prioritization of the experiential character of human life and discarding
traditional political philosophy’s conceptual schema, Arendt in effect aims to
make available the objective structures and characteristics of political
being-in-the-world as a distinct mode of human experience. This
investigation spans the rest of Arendt’s life and works. During its course,
recurrent themes emerge that help to organize her thought–themes such as the
possibility and conditions of a humane and democratic public life, the forces
that threaten such a life, conflict between private and public interests, and
intensified cycles of production and consumption. As these issues reappear,
Arendt elaborates on them and refines them, rarely relaxing the enquiry into
the nature of political existence. The most famous facet of this enquiry, often
considered also to be the most original, is Arendt’s outline of the faculty of
human judgment. Through this, she develops a basis upon which publicly-minded
political judgment can survive, in spite of the calamitous events of the 20th
century which she sees as having destroyed the traditional framework for such
judgment.
The
article proceeds by charting a roughly chronological map of her major works. It
endeavours to illuminate the continuities and connections within these works in
an attempt to synchronize them as a coherent but fully-functioning body of
thought.
Table of Contents
8. Influence
The
political philosopher, Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), was born in Hanover, Germany,
in 1906, the only child of secular Jews. During childhood, Arendt moved first
to Königsberg (East Prussia) and later to Berlin. In 1922-23, Arendt began her
studies (in classics and Christian theology) at the University of Berlin, and
in 1924 entered Marburg University, where she studied philosophy with Martin
Heidegger. In 1925 she began a romantic relationship with Heidegger, but broke
this off the following year. She moved to Heidelberg to study with Karl
Jaspers, the existentialist philosopher and friend of Heidegger. Under Jasper’s
supervision, she wrote her dissertation on the concept of love in St.
Augustine’s thought. She remained close to Jaspers throughout her life,
although the influence of Heidegger’s phenomenology was to prove the greater in
its lasting influence upon Arendt’s work.
In
1929, she met Gunther Stern, a young Jewish philosopher, with whom she became
romantically involved, and subsequently married (1930). In 1929, her
dissertation (Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin) was published. In the subsequent
years, she continued her involvement in Jewish and Zionist politics, which
began from 1926 onwards. In 1933, fearing Nazi persecution, she fled to Paris,
where she subsequently met and became friends with both Walter Benjamin and
Raymond Aron. In 1936, she met Heinrich Blücher, a German political refugee,
divorced Stern in ’39, and the following year she and Blücher married in 1940.
After
the outbreak of war, and following detention in a camp as an “enemy alien,”
Arendt and Blücher fled to the USA in 1941. Living in New York, Arendt wrote
for the German language newspaper Aufbau and directed research for
the Commission on European Jewish Cultural Reconstruction. In 1944, she began
work on what would become her first major political book, The Origins
of Totalitarianism. In 1946, she published “What is Existenz Philosophy,”
and from 1946 to 1951 she worked as an editor at Schoken Books in New York. In
1951, The Origins of Totalitarianism was published, after which she
began the first in a sequence of visiting fellowships and professorial
positions at American universities and she attained American citizenship.
In
1958, she published The Human Condition and Rahel
Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess. In 1959, she published “Reflections on
Little Rock,” her controversial consideration of the emergent Black civil
rights movement. In 1961, she published Between Past and Future,
and traveled to Jerusalem to cover the trial of Nazi Adolf Eichmann for
the New Yorker.
In
1963 she published her controversial reflections on the Eichmann trial, first
in the New Yorker, and then in book form as Eichmann in
Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. In this year, she also
published On Revolution. In 1967, having held positions at Berkeley
and Chicago, she took up a position at the New School for Social Research in
New York. In 1968, she published Men in Dark Times.
In
1970, Blücher died. That same year, Arendt gave her seminar on Kant’s
philosophy of judgement at the New School (published posthumously as Reflections
on Kant’s Political Philosophy, 1982). In 1971 she published “Thinking and
Moral Considerations,” and the following year Crisis of the Republicappeared.
In the next years, she worked on her projected three-volume work, The
Life of the Mind. Volumes 1 and 2 (on “Thinking” and “Willing”) were
published posthumously. She died on December 4, 1975, having only just started
work on the third and final volume, Judging.
Hannah
Arendt is a most 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 and diverse topics, spanning issues such as
totalitarianism, revolution, the nature of freedom, the faculties of “thinking”
and “judging,” the history of political thought, and so on. A thinker of
heterodox and complicated argumentation, Arendt’s writings draw inspiration
from Heidegger, Aristotle, Augustine, Kant, Nietzsche, Jaspers, and others.
This complicated synthesis of theoretical elements is evinced in the apparent
availability of her thought to a wide and divergent array of positions in
political theory: for example, participatory democrats such as Benjamin Barber
and Sheldon Wolin, communitarians such as Sandel and MacIntyre,
intersubjectivist neo-Kantians such as Habermas, Albrecht Wellmer, Richard
Bernstein and Seyla Benhabib, etc. However, it may still be possible to present
her thought not as a collection of discrete interventions, but as a coherent
body of work that takes a single question and a single methodological approach,
which then informs a wide array of inquiries. The question, with which Arendt’s
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 attempts to explicate an answer to this question and, inter
alia, to examine the historical and social forces that have come to
threaten the existence of an autonomous political realm, have a
distinctly phenomenological character. Arendt’s 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.
The
phenomenological nature of Arendt’s examination (and indeed defense) of
political life can be traced through the profound influence exerted over her by
both Heidegger and Jaspers. Heidegger in particular can be seen to have
profoundly impacted upon Arendt’s thought in for example: in their shared
suspicion of the “metaphysical tradition’s” move toward abstract contemplation
and away from immediate and worldly understanding and engagement, in their
critique of modern calculative and instrumental attempts to order and dominate
the world, in their emphasis upon the ineliminable plurality and difference
that characterize beings as worldly appearances, and so on. This is not,
however, to gloss over the profound differences that Arendt had with Heidegger,
with not only his political affiliation with the Nazis, or his moves later to
philosophical-poetic contemplation and his corresponding abdication from
political engagement. Nevertheless, it can justifiably be claimed that Arendt’s
inquiries follow a crucial impetus from Heidegger’s project in Being
& Time.
Arendt’s
distinctive approach as a political thinker can be understood from the impetus
drawn from Heidegger’s “phenomenology of Being.” She proceeds neither by an
analysis of general political concepts (such as authority, power, state,
sovereignty, etc.) traditionally associated with political philosophy, nor by
an aggregative accumulation of empirical data associated with “political
science.” Rather, beginning from a phenomenological prioritization of the
“factical” and experiential character of human life, she adopts a
phenomenological method, thereby endeavoring to uncover the fundamental structures
of political experience. Eschewing the “free-floating
constructions” and conceptual schema imposed a posterioriupon
experience by political philosophy, Arendt instead follows phenomenology’s
return “to the things themselves” (zu den Sachen selbst), aiming by such
investigation to make available the objective structures and characteristics of
political being-in-the-world, as distinct from other (moral, practical,
artistic, productive, etc.) forms of life.
Hence
Arendt’s explication of the constitutive features of the vita activa
in The Human Condition(labor, work, action) can be viewed as the
phenomenological uncovering of the structures of human action qua existence
and experience rather then abstract conceptual constructions or empirical
generalizations about what people typically do. That is, they approximate with
respect to the specificity of the political field the ‘existentials’, the
articulations of Dasein‘s Being set out be Heidegger in Being
and Time.
This
phenomenological approach to the political partakes of a more general
revaluation or reversal of the priority traditionally ascribed to philosophical
conceptualizations over and above lived experience. That is, the world of
common experience and interpretation (Lebenswelt) is taken to be primary
and theoretical knowledge is dependent on that common experience in the form of
a thematization or extrapolation from what is primordially and pre-reflectively
present in everyday experience. It follows, for Arendt, that political
philosophy has a fundamentally ambiguous role in its relation to political
experience, insofar as its conceptual formulations do not simply articulate the
structures of pre-reflective experience but can equally obscure them, becoming
self-subsistent preconceptions which stand between philosophical inquiry and
the experiences in question, distorting the phenomenal core of experience by
imposing upon it the lens of its own prejudices. Therefore, Arendt sees the
conceptual core of traditional political philosophy as an impediment, because
as it inserts presuppositions between the inquirer and the political phenomena
in question. Rather than following Husserl’s methodological prescription of a
“bracketing” (epoché) of the prevalent philosophical posture, Arendt’s
follows Heidegger’s historical Abbau or Destruktion to
clear away the distorting encrustations of the philosophical tradition, thereby
aiming to uncover the originary character of political experience which has for
the most part been occluded.
There
is no simple way of presenting Arendt’s diverse inquiries into the nature and
fate of the political, conceived as a distinctive mode of human experience and
existence. Her corpus of writings present a range of arguments, and
develop a range of conceptual distinctions, that overlap from text to text,
forming a web of inter-related excurses. Therefore, perhaps the only way to
proceed is to present a summation of her major works, in roughly chronological
order, while nevertheless attempting to highlight the continuities that draw
them together into a coherent whole.
Arendt’s
first major work, published in 1951, is clearly a response to the devastating
events of her own time – the rise of Nazi Germany and the catastrophic fate of
European Jewry at its hands, the rise of Soviet Stalinism and its annihilation
of millions of peasants (not to mention free-thinking intellectual, writers,
artists, scientists and political activists). Arendt insisted that these
manifestations of political evil could not be understood as mere extensions in
scale or scope of already existing precedents, but rather that they represented
a completely ‘novel form of government’, one built upon terror and ideological
fiction. Where older tyrannies had used terror as an instrument for attaining
or sustaining power, modern totalitarian regimes exhibited little strategic
rationality in their use of terror. Rather, terror was no longer a means to a
political end, but an end in itself. Its necessity was now justified by
recourse to supposed laws of history (such as the inevitable triumph of the
classless society) or nature (such as the inevitability of a war between
“chosen” and other “degenerate” races).
For
Arendt, the popular appeal of totalitarian ideologies with their capacity to
mobilize populations to do their bidding, rested upon the devastation of
ordered and stable contexts in which people once lived. The impact of the First
World War, and the Great Depression, and the spread of revolutionary unrest,
left people open to the promulgation of a single, clear and unambiguous idea
that would allocate responsibility for woes, and indicate a clear path that
would secure the future against insecurity and danger. Totalitarian ideologies
offered just such answers, purporting discovered a “key to history” with which
events of the past and present could be explained, and the future secured by
doing history’s or nature’s bidding. Accordingly the amenability of European
populations to totalitarian ideas was the consequence of a series of
pathologies that had eroded the public or political realm as a space of liberty
and freedom. These pathologies included the expansionism of imperialist capital
with its administrative management of colonial suppression, and the usurpation
of the state by the bourgeoisie as an instrument by which to further its own
sectional interests. This in turn led to the delegitimation of political
institutions, and the atrophy of the principles of citizenship and deliberative
consensus that had been the heart of the democratic political enterprise. The
rise of totalitarianism was thus to be understood in light of the accumulation
of pathologies that had undermined the conditions of possibility for a viable
public life that could unite citizens, while simultaneously preserving their
liberty and uniqueness (a condition that Arendt referred to as “plurality”).
In
this early work, it is possible to discern a number of the recurrent themes
that would organize Arendt’s political writings throughout her life. For
example, the inquiry into the conditions of possibility for a humane and
democratic public life, the historical, social and economic forces that had
come to threaten it, the conflictual relationship between private interests and
the public good, the impact of intensified cycles of production and consumption
that destabilized the common world context of human life, and so on. These
themes would not only surface again and again in Arendt’s subsequent work, but
would be conceptually elaborated through the development of key distinctions in
order to delineate the nature of political existence and the faculties
exercised in its production and preservation.
The
work of establishing the conditions of possibility for political experience, as
opposed to other spheres of human activity, was undertaken by Arendt in her
next major work, The Human Condition (1958). In this work she
undertakes a thorough historical-philosophical inquiry that returned to the
origins of both democracy and political philosophy in the Ancient Greek world,
and brought these originary understandings of political life to bear on what
Arendt saw as its atrophy and eclipse in the modern era. Her goal was to
propose a phenomenological reconstruction of different aspects of human
activity, so as to better discern the type of action and engagement that
corresponded to present political existence. In doing so, she offers a
stringent critique of traditional of political philosophy, and the dangers it
presents to the political sphere as an autonomous domain of human practice.
The
Human Condition is
fundamentally concerned with the problem of reasserting the politics as a
valuable ream of human action, praxis, and the world of
appearances. Arendt argues that the Western philosophical tradition has
devalued the world of human action which attends to appearances (the vita
activa), subordinating it to the life of contemplation which concerns
itself with essences and the eternal (the vita contemplativa). The
prime culprit is Plato, whose metaphysics subordinates action and appearances
to the eternal realm of the Ideas. The allegory of The Cave in The
Republic begins the tradition of political philosophy; here Plato describes
the world of human affairs in terms of shadows and darkness, and instructs
those who aspire to truth to turn away from it in favor of the “clear sky of
eternal ideas.” This metaphysical hierarchy, theôria is placed
above praxis and epistêmê over mere doxa.
The realm of action and appearance (including the political) is subordinated to
and becomes instrumental for the ends of the Ideas as revealed to the
philosopher who lives the bios theôretikos. In The Human
Condition and subsequent works, the task Arendt set herself is to save
action and appearance, and with it the common life of the political and the
values of opinion, from the depredations of the philosophers. By systematically
elaborating what this vita activa might be said to entail, she
hopes to reinstate the life of public and political action to apex of human
goods and goals.
In The
Human Condition Arendt argues for a tripartite division between the human
activities of labor, work, and action. Moreover, she arranges these activities
in an ascending hierarchy of importance, and identifies the overturning of this
hierarchy as central to the eclipse of political freedom and responsibility
which, for her, has come to characterize the modern age.
Labor
is that activity which corresponds to the biological processes and necessities
of human existence, the practices which are necessary for the maintenance of
life itself. Labor is distinguished by its never-ending character; it creates
nothing of permanence, its efforts are quickly consumed, and must therefore be
perpetually renewed so as to sustain life. In this aspect of its existence
humanity is closest to the animals and so, in a significant sense, the least
human (“What men [sic] share with all other forms of animal life was not
considered to be human”). Indeed, Arendt refers to humanity in this mode
as animal laborans. Because the activity of labor is commanded by
necessity, the human being as laborer is the equivalent of the slave; labor is
characterized by unfreedom. Arendt argues that it is precisely the recognition
of labor as contrary to freedom, and thus to what is distinctively human, which
underlay the institution of slavery amongst the ancient Greeks; it was the
attempt to exclude labor from the conditions of human life. In view of this
characterization of labor, it is unsurprising that Arendt is highly critical of
Marx’s elevation of animal laborans to a position of primacy in his
vision of the highest ends of human existence. Drawing on the Aristotelian
distinction of the oikos (the private realm of the household) from
the polis (the public realm of the political community), Arendt
argues that matters of labor, economy and the like properly belong to the
former, not the latter. The emergence of necessary labor , the private concerns
of the oikos, into the public sphere (what Arendt calls “the rise
of the social”) has for her the effect of destroying the properly political by
subordinating the public realm of human freedom to the concerns mere animal
necessity. The prioritization of the economic which has attended the rise of capitalism
has for Arendt all but eclipsed the possibilities of meaningful political
agency and the pursuit of higher ends which should be the proper concern of
public life.
If
labor relates to the natural and biologically necessitated dimension of human
existence, then work is “the activity which corresponds to the unnaturalness of
human existence, which is not embedded in, and whose mortality is not
compensated by, the species’ ever-recurring life-cycle.” Work (as both technê
andpoiesis) corresponds to the fabrication of an artificial
world of things, artifactual constructions which endure temporally beyond the
act of creation itself. Work thus creates a world distinct from anything given
in nature, a world distinguished by its durability, its semi-permanence and
relative independence from the individual actors and acts which call it into
being. Humanity in this mode of its activity Arendt names homo faber;
he/she is the builder of walls (both physical and cultural) which divide the
human realm from that of nature and provide a stable context (a “common world”)
of spaces and institutions within which human life can unfold. Homo
faber‘s typical representatives are the builder, the architect, the
craftsperson, the artist and the legislator, as they create the public world
both physically and institutionally by constructing buildings and making laws.
It
should be clear that work stands in clear distinction from labor in a number of
ways. Firstly, whereas labor is bound to the demands of animality, biology and
nature, work violates the realm of nature by shaping and transforming it
according to the plans and needs of humans; this makes work a distinctly human
(i.e. non-animal) activity. Secondly, because work is governed by human ends
and intentions it is under humans’ sovereignty and control, it exhibits a
certain quality of freedom, unlike labor which is subject to nature and
necessity. Thirdly, whereas labor is concerned with satisfying the individual’s
life-needs and so remains essentially a private affair, work is
inherently public; it creates an objective and common world which
both stands between humans and unites them. While work is not the
mode of human activity which corresponds to politics, its fabrications are
nonetheless the preconditions for the existence of a political community. The
common world of institutions and spaces that work creates furnish the arena in
which citizens may come together as members of that shared world to engage in
political activity. In Arendt’s critique of modernity the world created
by homo faber is threatened with extinction by the aforementioned
“rise of the social.” The activity of labor and the consumption of its fruits,
which have come to dominate the public sphere, cannot furnish a common world
within which humans might pursue their higher ends. Labor and its effects are
inherently impermanent and perishable, exhausted as they are consumed, and so
do not possess the qualities of quasi-permanence which are necessary for a
shared environment and common heritage which endures between people and across
time. In industrial modernity “all the values characteristic of the world of
fabrication – permanence, stability, durability…are sacrificed in favor of the
values of life, productivity and abundance.” The rise of animal
laborans threatens the extinction of homo faber, and with it
comes the passing of those worldly conditions which make a community’s
collective and public life possible (what Arendt refers to as “world
alienation”).
So,
we have the activity of labor which meets the needs that are essential for the
maintenance of humanities physical existence, but by virtue of its necessary
quality occupies the lowest rung on the hierarchy of the vita activa.
Then we have work, which is a distinctly human (i.e. non-animal) activity which
fabricates the enduring, public and common world of our collective existence.
However, Arendt is at great pains to establish that the activity of homo
faber does not equate with the realm of human freedom and so cannot
occupy the privileged apex of the human condition. For work is still subject to
a certain kind of necessity, that which arises from its essentially instrumental
character. As technê andpoiesis the act is dictated by and
subordinated to ends and goals outside itself; work is essentially ameans
to achieve the thing which is to be fabricated (be it a work of art, a building
or a structure of legal relations) and so stands in a relation of mere
purposiveness to that end. (Again it is Plato who stands accused of the
instrumentalization of action, of its conflation with fabrication and
subordination to an external teleology as prescribed by his metaphysical
system). For Arendt, the activity of work cannot be fully free insofar as it is
not an end in itself, but is determined by prior causes and articulated ends.
The quality of freedom in the world of appearances (which for Arendt is
the sine qua non of politics) is to be found elsewhere in the vita
activa, namely with the activity of action proper.
The
fundamental defining quality of action is its ineliminable freedom, its status
as an end in itself and so as subordinate to nothing outside itself. Arendt
argues that it is a mistake to take freedom to be primarily an inner, contemplative
or private phenomenon, for it is in fact active, worldly and public. Our sense
of an inner freedom is derivative upon first having experienced “a condition of
being free as a tangible worldly reality. We first become aware of freedom or
its opposite in our intercourse with others, not in the intercourse with
ourselves.” In defining action as freedom, and freedom as action, we can see
the decisive influence of Augustine upon Arendt’s thought. From Augustine’s
political philosophy she takes the theme of human action as beginning:
To
act, in its most general sense, means to take initiative, to begin (as the
Greek word archein, ‘to begin,’ ‘to lead,’ and eventually ‘to rule’
indicates), to set something in motion. Because they are initium,
newcomers and beginners by virtue of birth, men take initiative, are prompted
into action.
And
further, that freedom is to be seen:
as
a character of human existence in the world. Man does not so much possess
freedom as he, or better his coming into the world, is equated with the
appearance of freedom in the universe; man is free because he is a beginning…
In
short, humanity represents/articulates/embodies the faculty of beginning. It
follows from this equation of freedom, action and beginning that freedom is “an
accessory of doing and acting;” “Men are free…as long as they act,
neither before nor after; for to be free and to act are the same.”
This capacity for initiation gives actions the character of singularity and
uniqueness, as “it is in the nature of beginning that something new is started
which cannot be expected from whatever happened before.” So, intrinsic to the
human capacity for action is the introduction of genuine novelty, the
unexpected, unanticipated and unpredictable into the world:
The
new always happens against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their
probability, which for all practical, everyday purposes amounts to certainty;
the new therefore always appears in the guise of a miracle.
This
“miraculous,” initiatory quality distinguishes genuine action from mere
behavior i.e. from conduct which has an habituated, regulated, automated
character; behavior falls under the determinations ofprocess, is
thoroughly conditioned by causal antecedents, and so is essentially unfree. The
definition of human action in terms of freedom and novelty places it outside
the realm of necessity or predictability. Herein lies the basis of Arendt’s
quarrel with Hegel and Marx, for to define politics or the unfolding of history
in terms of any teleology or immanent or objective process is to deny what is
central to authentic human action, namely, its capacity to initiate the wholly
new, unanticipated, unexpected, unconditioned by the laws of cause and effect.
It
has been argued that Arendt is a political existentialist who, in seeking the
greatest possible autonomy for action, falls into the danger of aestheticising
action and advocating decisionism. Yet political existentialism lays great
stress on individual will and on decision as “an act of
existential choice unconstrained by principles or norms.” In contradistinction,
Arendt’s theory holds that actions cannot be justified for their own sake, but
only in light of their public recognition and the shared rules of a political
community. For Arendt, action is a public category, a worldly
practice that is experienced in our intercourse with others, and so is a
practice that “both presupposes and can be actualized only in a human polity.”
As Arendt puts it:
Action,
the only activity that goes on directly between men…corresponds to the human
condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and
inhabit the world. While all aspects of the human condition are somehow related
to politics, this plurality is specifically the condition – not
only theconditio sine qua non, but the conditio per quam –
of all political life .
Another
way of understanding the importance of publicity and plurality for action is to
appreciate that action would be meaningless unless there were others present to
see it and so give meaning to it. The meaning of the action and the identity of
the actor can only be established in the context of human plurality, the
presence others sufficiently like ourselves both to understand us and recognize
the uniqueness of ourselves and our acts. This communicative and disclosive
quality of action is clear in the way that Arendt connects action most
centrally to speech. It is through action as speech that
individuals come to disclose their distinctive identity: “Action is the public
disclosure of the agent in the speech deed.” Action of this character requires
a public space in which it can be realized, a context in which individuals can
encounter one another as members of a community. For this space, as for much
else, Arendt turns to the ancients, holding up the Athenian polis
as the model for such a space of communicative and disclosive speech deeds.
Such action is for Arendt synonymous with the political; politics is the
ongoing activity of citizens coming together so as to exercise their capacity for
agency, to conduct their lives together by means of free speech and persuasion.
Politics and the exercise of freedom-as-action are one and the same:
…freedom…is
actually the reason that men live together in political organisations at all.
Without it, political life as such would be meaningless. The raison
d’être of politics is freedom, and its field of experience is action.
From
the historical-philosophical treatment of the political in The Human
Condition, it might appear that for Arendt an authentic politics (as
freedom of action, public deliberation and disclosure) has been decisively lost
in the modern era. Yet in her next major work, On Revolution (1961)
she takes her rethinking of political concepts and applies them to the modern
era, with ambivalent results.
Arendt
takes issue with both liberal and Marxist interpretations of modern political
revolutions (such as the French and American). Against liberals, the disputes
the claim that these revolutions were primarily concerned with the
establishment of a limited government that would make space for individual
liberty beyond the reach of the state. Against Marxist interpretations of the
French Revolution, she disputes the claim that it was driven by the “social
question,” a popular attempt to overcome poverty and exclusion by the many
against the few who monopolized wealth in the ancien regime.
Rather, Arendt claims, what distinguishes these modern revolutions is that they
exhibit (albeit fleetingly) the exercise of fundamental political capacities –
that of individuals acting together, on the basis of their mutually agreed
common purposes, in order to establish a tangible public space of freedom. It
is in this instauration, the attempt to establish a public and institutional
space of civic freedom and participation, that marks out these revolutionary
moments as exemplars of politics qua action.
Yet
Arendt sees both the French and American revolutions as ultimately failing to
establish a perduring political space in which the on-going activities of
shared deliberation, decision and coordinated action could be exercised. In the
case of the French Revolution, the subordination of political freedom to
matters of managing welfare (the “social question”) reduces political
institutions to administering the distribution of goods and resources (matters
that belong properly in the oikos, dealing as they do with the
production and reproduction of human existence). Meanwhile, the American
Revolution evaded this fate, and by means of the Constitution managed to found
a political society on the basis of comment assent. Yet she saw it only as a
partial and limited success. America failed to create an institutional space in
which citizens could participate in government, in which they could exercise in
common those capacities of free expression, persuasion and judgement that
defined political existence. The average citizen, while protected from
arbitrary exercise of authority by constitutional checks and balances, was no
longer a participant “in judgement and authority,” and so became denied the
possibility of exercising his/her political capacities.
Published
in the same year as On Revolution, Arendt’s book about the Eichmann
trial presents both a continuity with her previous works, but also a change in
emphasis that would continue to the end of her life. This work marks a shift in
her concerns from the nature of political action, to a concern with
the faculties that underpin it – the interrelated activities of thinking
and judging.
She
controversially uses the phrase “the banality of evil” to characterize
Eichmann’s actions as a member of the Nazi regime, in particular his role as
chief architect and executioner of Hitler’s genocidal “final solution” (Endlosung)
for the “Jewish problem.” Her characterization of these actions, so obscene in
their nature and consequences, as “banal” is not meant to position them as
workaday. Rather it is meant 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 Arendt 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 judgement. From Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem
(where he had been brought after Israeli agents found him in hiding in
Argentina), Arendt concluded that far from exhibiting a malevolent hatred of
Jews which could have accounted psychologically for his participation in the Holocaust,
Eichmann was an utterly innocuous individual. He operated unthinkingly,
following orders, efficiently carrying them out, with no consideration of their
effects upon those he targeted. The human dimension of these activities were
not entertained, so the extermination of the Jews became indistinguishable from
any other bureaucratically assigned and discharged responsibility for Eichmann
and his cohorts.
Arendt
concluded that Eichmann was constitutively incapable of exercising the kind of
judgement that would have made his victims’ suffering real or apparent for him.
It was not the presence of hatred that enabled Eichmann to
perpetrate the genocide, but the absence of the imaginative
capacities that would have made the human and moral dimensions of his activities
tangible for him. Eichmann failed to exercise his capacity of thinking,
of having an internal dialogue with himself, which would have permitted
self-awareness of the evil nature of his deeds. This amounted to a failure to
use self-reflection as a basis forjudgement, the faculty that would have
required Eichmann to exercise his imagination so as to contemplate the nature
of his deeds from the experiential standpoint of his victims. This connection
between the complicity with political evil and the failure of thinking and
judgement inspired the last phase of Arendt’s work, which sought to explicate
the nature of these faculties and their constitutive role for politically and
morally responsible choices.
Arendt’s
concern with thinking and judgement as political faculties stretches back to
her earliest works, and were addressed subsequently in a number of essays
written during the 1950s and 1960s. However, in the last phase of her work, she
turned to examine these faculties in a concerted and systematic way.
Unfortunately, her work was incomplete at the time of her death – only the
first two volumes of the projected 3-volume work, Life of the Mind,
had been completed. However, the posthumously publishedLectures on Kant’s
Political Philosophy delineate what might reasonably be supposed as her
“mature” reflections on political judgement.
In
the first volume of Life of the Mind, dealing with the faculty of
thinking, Arendt is at pains to distinguish it from “knowing.” She draws upon Kant’s
distinction between knowing or understanding (Verstand) and thinking or
reasoning (Vernunft). Understanding yields positive knowledge – it is
the quest for knowable truths. Reason or thinking, on the other hand, drives us
beyond knowledge, persistently posing questions that cannot be answered from
the standpoint of knowledge, but which we nonetheless cannot refrain from
asking. For Arendt, thinking amounts to a quest to understand the meaning
of our world, the ceaseless and restless activity of questioning that which we
encounter. The value of thinking is not that it yields positive results that
can be considered settled, but that it constantly returns to question again and
again the meaning that we give to experiences, actions and circumstances. This,
for Arendt, is intrinsic to the exercise of political responsibility – the
engagement of this faculty that seeks meaning through a relentless questioning
(including self-questioning). It was precisely the failure of this capacity
that characterized the “banality” of Eichmann’s propensity to participate in
political evil.
The
cognate faculty of judgement has attracted most attention is her
writing on, deeply inter-connected with thinking, yet standing distinct from
it. Her theory of judgement is widely considered as one of the most original
parts of her oeuvre, and certainly one of the most influential in
recent years.
Arendt’s
concern with political judgement, and its crisis in the modern era, is a
recurrent theme in her work. As noted earlier, Arendt bemoans the “world
alienation” that characterizes the modern era, the destruction of a stable
institutional and experiential world that could provide a stable context in
which humans could organize their collective existence. Moreover, it will be
recalled that in human action Arendt recognizes (for good or ill) the capacity
to bring the new, unexpected, and unanticipated into the world. This quality of
action means that it constantly threatens to defy or exceed our existing
categories of understanding or judgement; precedents and rules cannot help us
judge properly what is unprecedented and new. So for Arendt, our categories and
standards of thought are always beset by their potential inadequacy with
respect to that which they are called upon to judge. However, this aporia
of judgement reaches a crisis point in the 20th century under the repeated
impact of its monstrous and unprecedented events. The mass destruction of two
World Wars, the development of technologies which threaten global annihilation,
the rise of totalitarianism, and the murder of millions in the Nazi death camps
and Stalin’s purges have effectively exploded our existing standards for moral
and political judgement. Tradition lies in shattered fragments around us and
“the very framework within which understanding and judging could arise is
gone.” The shared bases of understanding, handed down to us in our tradition,
seem irretrievably lost. Arendt confronts the question: on what basis can one
judge the unprecedented, the incredible, the monstrous which defies our
established understandings and experiences? If we are to judge at all, it must
now be “without preconceived categories and…without the set of customary rules
which is morality;” it must be “thinking without a banister.” In order to
secure the possibility of such judgement Arendt must establish that there in
fact exists “an independent human faculty, unsupported by law and public
opinion, that judges anew in full spontaneity every deed and intent whenever
the occasion arises.” This for Arendt comes to represent “one of the central
moral questions of all time, namely…the nature and function of human
judgement.” It is with this goal and this question in mind that the work of
Arendt’s final years converges on the “unwritten political philosophy” of
Kant’s Critique of Judgement.
Arendt
eschews “determinate judgement,” judgement that subsumes particulars under a
universal or rule that already exists. Instead, she turns to Kant’s account of
“reflective judgement,” the judgement of a particular for which no rule or
precedent exists, but for which some judgement must nevertheless be
arrived at. What Arendt finds so valuable in Kant’s account is that reflective
judgement proceeds from the particular with which it is confronted, yet
nevertheless has a universalizing moment – it proceeds from the operation of a
capacity that is shared by all beings possessed of the faculties of reason and
understanding. Kant requires us to judge from this common standpoint, on the
basis of what we share with all others, by setting aside our own egocentric and
private concerns or interests. The faculty of reflective judgement requires us
to set aside considerations which are purely private (matters of personal
liking and private interest) and instead judge from the perspective of what we
share in common with others (i.e. must bedisinterested). Arendt places
great weight upon this notion of a faculty of judgement that “thinks from the
standpoint of everyone else.” This “broadened way of thinking” or “enlarged
mentality” enables us to “compare our judgement not so much with the actual as
rather with the merely possible judgement of others, and [thus] put ourselves
in the position of everybody else…” For Arendt, this “representative thinking”
is made possible by the exercise of the imagination – as Arendt
beautifully puts it, “To think with an enlarged mentality means that one trains
one’s imagination to go visiting.” “Going visiting” in this way enables us to
make individual, particular acts of judgement which can nevertheless claim a
public validity. In this faculty, Arendt find a basis upon which a
disinterested and publicly-minded form of political judgement could subvene,
yet be capable of tackling the unprecedented circumstances and choices that the
modern era confronts us with.
We
can briefly consider the influence that Arendt’s work has exerted over other
political thinkers. This is not easy to summarize, as many and varied scholars
have sought inspiration from some part or other of Arendt’s work. However, we
may note the importance that her studies have had for the theory and analysis
of totalitarianism and the nature and origins of political
violence. Similarly, her reflections on the distinctiveness of modern
democratic revolutions have been important in the development of republican
thought, and for the recent revival of interest in civic mobilizations and
social movements (particularly in the wake of 1989′s
‘velvet revolutions’ in the former communist states of Eastern and Central
Europe).
More
specifically, Arendt has decisively influenced critical and emancipatory
attempts to theorize political reasoning and deliberation. For example, Jürgen
Habermas admits the formative influence of Arendt upon his own theory of
communicative reason and discourse ethics. Particularly important is the way in
which Arendt comes to understand power, namely as “the capacity to agree in
uncoerced communication on some community action.” Her model of action as
public, communicative, persuasive and consensual reappears in Habermas’ thought
in concepts such as that of “communicative power” which comes about whenever
members of a life-world act in concert via the medium of language. It also
reappears in his critique of the “scientization of politics” and his
concomitant defense of practical, normative reason in the domain of life-world
relations from the hegemony of theoretical and technical modes of reasoning.
Others (such as Jean-Luc Nancy) have likewise been influenced by her critique
of the modern technological “leveling” of human distinctiveness, often reading
Arendt’s account in tandem with Heidegger’s critique of technology. Her theory
of judgement has been used by Critical Theorists and Postmoderns alike. Amongst
the former, Seyla Benhabib draws explicitly and extensively upon it in order to
save discourse ethics from its own universalist excesses; Arendt’s attention to
the particular, concrete, unique and lived phenomena of human life furnishes
Benhabib with a strong corrective for Habermas’ tendency for abstraction, while
nonetheless preserving the project of a universalizing vision of
ethical-political life. For the Postmoderns, such as Lyotard, the emphasis
placed upon reflective judgement furnishes a “post-foundational” or
“post-universalist” basis in which the singularity of moral judgements can be
reconciled with some kind of collective adherence to political principles.
It
is worth noting some of the prominent criticisms that have been leveled against
Arendt’s work.
Primary
amongst 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 pointed out 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 experiences of subjection from legitimate politics.
Marxists have likewise pointed to the consequences of confining matters of
material distribution and economic management to the extra-political realm of
the oikos, thereby delegitimating questions 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 the Frankfurt School Critical Theorist Albrecht
Wellmer, regarding her distinction of the “political” and the “social,” and its
consequences. Arendt pronounced that housing and homelessness (themes of the
conference) were not political issues, 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
may be said that Arendt’s attachment to a fundamental and originary
understanding of political life precisely misses the fact that politics is intrinsically
concerned with the contestation of what counts as a legitimate public concern,
with the practice of politics attempting to introduce new, heretofore
‘non-political’ issues, into 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 the delegation,
specialization, expertise and extensive divisions of labor needed to deal with
their complexity. Her elevation of politics to the apex of human good and goals
has also been challenged, demoting as it does other modes of human action and
self-realization to a subordinate status. There are also numerous criticisms
that have been leveled at her unorthodox readings of other thinkers, and her
attempts to synthesize conflicting philosophical viewpoints in attempt to
develop her own position (for example, her attempt to mediate Aristotle’s
account of experientially-grounded practical judgement (phronesis) with
Kant’s transcendental-formal model).
All
these, and other criticisms notwithstanding, Arendt remains one of the most
original, challenging and influential political thinkers of the 20th
century, and her work will no doubt continue to provide inspiration for
political philosophy as we enter the 21st.
- The
Origins of Totalitarianism, New York,
Harcourt, 1951
- The
Human Condition,
Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1958
- Between
Past and Future,
London, Faber & Faber, 1961
- On
Revolution.
New York, Penguin, 1962
- Eichmann
in Jerusalem: a Report on the Banality of Evil,
London, Faber & Faber, 1963
- On
Violence,
New York, Harcourt, 1970
- Men
in Dark Times,
New York, Harcourt, 1968
- Crisis
of the Republic,
New York, Harcourt, 1972
- The
Life of the Mind,
2 vols., London, Secker & Warburg, 1978
- Lectures
on Kant’s Political Philosophy, Brighton,
Harvester Press, 1982
- Love
and St. Augustin,
Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1996
- Benhabib,
Seyla: The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt. London, Sage,
1996
- Bernstein,
Richard J: ‘Hannah Arendt: The Ambiguities of Theory and Practice’,
in Political Theory and Praxis: New Perspectives, Terence Ball
(ed.). Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1977
- Bernstein,
Richard J: Philosophical Profiles: Essays in a Pragmatic Mode.
Cambridge, Polity Press, 1986
- Critchley,
Simon & Schroeder, William (eds): A Companion to Continental
Philosophy. Oxford, Blackwell, 1998
- d’Entrèves,
Maurizio Passerin: The Political Philosophy of Hannah Arendt.
London, Routledge, 1994
- Flynn,
Bernard: Political Philosophy at the Closure of Metaphysics.
New Jersey/London: Humanities Press International, 1992
- Habermas,
Jürgen: ‘Hannah Arendt: On the Concept of Power’ in Philosophical-Political
Profiles. London, Heinemman, 1983
- Hinchman,
Lewis P. & Hinchman, Sandra K: ‘In Heidegger’s Shadow: Hannah Arendt’s
Phenomenological Humanism’, in The Review of Politics, 46, 2,
1984, pp 183-211
- Kielmansegg,
Peter G., Mewes, Horst & Glaser-Schmidt, Elisabeth(eds): Hannah
Arendt and Leo Strauss: German Emigrés and American Political Thought
after World War II. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995
- Lacoue-Labarthe,
Philippe & Nancy, Jean-Luc: Retreating the Political,
Simon Sparks (ed). London, Routledge, 1997
- Parekh,
Bhikhu: Hannah Arendt & The Search for a New Political
Philosophy. London & Basingstoke, Macmillan Press, 1981
- Villa,
Dana: Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of the Political.
Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1996
- Villa,
Dana (ed): The Cambridge Companion to Arendt. Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 2000
Author Information
Majid
Yar
Email: m_yar@hotmail.com
Lancaster University
United Kingdom
Email: m_yar@hotmail.com
Lancaster University
United Kingdom
The World of Hannah Arendt
by Jerome Kohn, Director, Hannah Arendt Center, New School University
by Jerome Kohn, Director, Hannah Arendt Center, New School University
 Hannah Arendt with her grandfather, Max Arendt, undated. Courtesy of the Hannah Arendt Trust. |
 Portion of Print Page 448 from the Eichmann in Jerusalem typescript for the version published in the New Yorker, 1963. The Hannah Arendt Papers (The Library of Congress Manuscript Division). |
To
enter the world of Hannah Arendt is to encounter the political and moral
catastrophes of the twentieth century. Her life spanned the convulsions of two
world wars, revolutions and civil wars, and events worse than war in which
human lives were uprooted and destroyed on a scale never seen before. She lived
through what she called "dark times" whose history reads like a tale
of horrors in which everything taken for granted turns into its opposite. The
sudden unreliability of her native land and the unanticipated peril of having
been born a Jew were the conditions under which Arendt first thought
politically, a task for which she was neither inclined by nature nor prepared
by education. Insecurity and vulnerability are the general conditions, as she
came to realize, in which an urgently experienced need to think is
political, though not, to be sure, in a conventional sense. For the traditional
view of politics, which may be summarized as the perceived usefulness of
government in securing the people's private interests, is in times of crisis
precisely what has failed. In her determination to think through the darkness
of the twentieth century Arendt discerned a radically different meaning of
politics, whose source was the original clearing, in the midst of a plurality
of human beings living, speaking, and interacting with one another, of a public
space that was brought into existence not for utility but for the sake of
human freedom.
There
is abundant evidence that Arendt's understanding of what it means to think
politically has struck a responsive chord in the contemporary world. In recent
years increasing numbers of people have turned to her as a guide they trust in
their need to understand for themselves and realize in their own lives the
courage it takes to be free. One result of this current interest in Arendt is
that, because of constant handling, important components of the literary estate
that she bequeathed to the Library of Congress have become fragile and almost
illegible. The Arendt collection comprises family papers and personal
documents; extensive correspondence with individuals and organizations; notes,
background information, transcripts, and court rulings pertaining to the trial
of Adolf Eichmann; reviews of her book Eichmann In Jerusalem: A Report on
the Banality of Evil and articles and letters that reflect the bitter,
emotional controversy generated by that work; reviews and manuscript drafts of
most of her books; and numerous typed and handwritten notes, poems, articles,
speeches, lectures, and essays. The earliest of Arendt's writings in the
collection dates from 1925 when she was nineteen, and the latest from 1975, the
year she died; by far the greater part of them comes from the period after her
emigration to the United States in 1941 as World War II raged in Europe. Now,
thanks to a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Library of Congress
has digitized her papers, which in itself may be considered a political as well
as a philanthropic act, at once preserving her legacy and through electronic
media making it accessible to a far wider reading public than was previously
possible.
Born
in 1906 into a well-established, nonreligious German Jewish family, Hannah
Arendt was raised in Königsberg, the ancient capital of East Prussia. At the
end of World War II that strategic port on the Baltic Sea was ceded to the
Soviet Union, its name changed to Kaliningrad after the Russian revolutionary
M. I. Kalinin, and its German population dispersed. The fate of Königsberg,
today an all but unrecognizable ruin, was sealed when it fell under the sway of
not one but two totalitarian regimes, first Hitler's and then Stalin's. Unlike
the city of Königsberg, however, Arendt could and did move. As a young Jew
working for a Zionist organization she was arrested, escaped, and fled her
homeland in 1933. By way of Prague and Geneva she made her way to Paris and
from that moment on was in effect stateless, a woman without a country, and was
to remain so for eighteen years. She knew from her own experience how "the
infinitely complex red-tape existence of stateless persons," as she wrote
to Karl Jaspers in 1946, fetters free movement, and from that experience came
her insight that the denial of the right to citizenship, prior to any specific
rights of citizenship, is integral to the rise of totalitarianism.
Arendt
believed that the right to citizenship, the right of a plurality of
people "to act together concerning things that are of equal concern to
each," is not only denied by totalitarianism, as it is by every despotism,
but stands opposed to the principle that guides the acts of destruction that
characterize totalitarian systems (see "On the Nature of Totalitarianism")
That principle is an ideology explaining the entire course of human
affairs by determining every historical event and all past, present, and future
deeds as functions of a universal process. Looking deeper into the phenomenon
of totalitarianism Arendt saw that the "idea," the content, of the
ideology matters less than its "inherent logicality," which was
discovered separately and prized by both Hitler and Stalin. In broad outline
ideological logicality operates like a practical syllogism: from the premise of
a supposed law of nature that certain races are unfit to live it follows that
those races must be eliminated, and from the premise of a supposed law of
history that certain classes are on their way to extinction it follows that
those classes must be liquidated. Arendt's point is that the untruth of the
ideological premises is without consequence: the premises will become
self-evidently true in the factitious world created by the murderous acts that
flow from them in logical consistency.
In
their adherence to the logicality of two utterly distinct ideologies, one that
originated on the far right and the other on the far left, Arendt found Nazism
and Stalinism to be more or less equivalent totalitarian systems. If the ruined
city of Königsberg could speak after having witnessed the terror, the killings
by torture and starvation under the regimes of both Hitler and Stalin, it is
doubtful that it would point out significant differences between those regimes.
To focus on the different content of racist and communist ideologies
only blurs what Arendt at first thought of as the "absolute" and
"radical" evil they both brought into the world. Her emphasis on the
logical deduction of acts from ideological premises, moreover, is linked to her
later understanding of evil, stemming from the trial of Adolf Eichmann, as
"banal," "rootless," and "thought-defying." The
logicality of totalitarian movements accounts for their appeal to the atomized
and depoliticized masses of mankind without whose support those movements could
not have generated their immense power. Thus Hitler's "ice-cold
reasoning" and Stalin's "merciless dialectics" contribute to
Arendt's uncertainty as to whether any other totalitarian regimes have
existed--perhaps in Mao's China, but not in the despotisms of single party or
military dictatorships (see The Origins of Totalitarianism,
"Introduction," third edition, 1966).
In
1941, after France fell to the Nazis, Arendt escaped from an internment camp in
unoccupied Vichy first to Spain, then to Lisbon, and finally to New York with
little money and practically no English, once again a refugee from totalitarian
persecution. But in America she found more than refuge: within a year and
consistently thereafter she published articles of a political nature, in a new
and at first only half-mastered language, unlike anything she had written
before leaving Germany (see "From the Dreyfus Affair to France Today,").
Only ten years later, after assiduous work, she published The Origins of
Totalitarianism, her first major book and a tremendously complicated one.
That it was first conceived as a study of imperialism suggests that when she
started it Arendt saw Nazism and Bolshevism as a radical development of the
nineteenth-century European phenomenon of colonization and as what she then
called "full-fledged imperialism." The book, however, grew and
shifted ground as it was written, and in its final form totalitarianism
appeared as an entirely new form of government, one that had no historical
precedent, not even in the harshest of despotisms. The book also underwent
major revisions in subsequent editions. Its original conclusion was replaced by
an essay written in 1953, "Ideology and Terror: A Novel Form of
Government;" an epilogue on the Hungarian Revolution was added in 1958 and
later deleted; and substantial new prefaces were written in 1966 and 1967.
Although
shortly after its publication The Origins of Totalitarianism was hailed
as a justification of the Cold War, that was not Arendt's intention. By that
time the Cold War was being fought against the Soviet Union and its satellites
and not against totalitarianism, which according to Arendt had ended in the
Soviet Union, or at least had begun to end, with Stalin's death in 1953.
Furthermore, the Cold War obscured the fact that the historical elements that
had coalesced in totalitarian movements remained intact throughout the world
and by no means only behind the Iron Curtain. Arendt's portrait appeared on the
cover of The Saturday Review of Literature, a popular American literary
magazine of the day, and her fame, which at times approached notoriety,
increased with her subsequent publications and has continued to grow
posthumously. Today her place among a handful of profoundly original,
influential, and controversial political thinkers of the twentieth century is
secure. In 1951, the same year that The Origins of Totalitarianism was
published, Arendt became an American citizen, formally marking a new beginning
in her life.
This
new beginning in America and its political orientation, while constituting a
break with the tradition of Western thought, has been misunderstood as a
break with the past itself. Arendt made a decisive distinction between a
fragmented past that can be retrieved to give depth to the present and the
continuity of a past handed down from generation to generation (traditio)
across many centuries. She did not deconstruct the past but dismantled its
traditional structure as a uniform stream or unbroken thread that leads
progressively from the past to the present and from the present into the
future. She was convinced that the advent of totalitarianism in the twentieth
century had irreparably ruptured the continuity of history and that the
complacency of the idea of historical progress is deleterious to
political life. Arendt saw the present as a "gap between past and
future" in which every individual's active recollection and deliberately
selective retrieval of the "no longer" fosters responsibility for the
"not yet." While the ability to respond to the past does not
determine the future, it does throw light on it. In her seminars, which always
had a historical dimension and which she conducted as if they were miniature
public spaces, she urged her students to participate: "Insert
yourself," she would say, "and make the world a little better."
Arendt
never forgot her foundation in the German language and in German philosophy,
particularly in the thought of Immanuel Kant. She was only fourteen when she
first read Kant, who in the eighteenth century had also lived in Königsberg
and, despite serious controversy with the Prussian autocracy over his teaching
of religion, never experienced a need to leave it. The differences in the
external circumstances of their lives notwithstanding, Arendt's appreciation of
Kant deepened as she grew older. She increasingly came to esteem the subtlety
of his philosophically radical distinctions, the role of imagination in his
critical philosophy, his equanimity in destroying the shibboleths of
metaphysics, and his recognition of human freedom as spontaneity. To her he was
more than the philosopher who reconfigured the European tradition by
discovering the conditions prior to experience that make experience possible in
our knowledge of the world, in our moral conduct, and in our capacity to judge
the beautiful and sublime. He was present to her--she used to say she
sensed him looking over her shoulder as she wrote--as the last and greatest
champion of humanity and human dignity.
To
plumb the depths of her fundamental concept of plurality as the essential
condition of political life requires some familiarity with her unorthodox
approach to Kant (see "Kant's Political Philosophy"). In
Kant's late work on aesthetics Arendt discovered the political significance of common
sense, the world-orienting sense that both unites what appears to the
private senses and fits what is thus united into a common world. That
discovery was crucial, for the agreement of common sense realizes a world that
lies between human beings, keeping them distinct and relating them, a
shared world in which they can appear and be recognized as unique beings. In
the last analysis recognition of human uniqueness is the same thing as equality
in freedom, which for Arendt is the raison d'être of political life.
Kant not only revealed to Arendt a way of seeing the crisis of the twentieth
century, i.e., the refusal of totalitarian regimes to share the world with
entire races and classes of human beings and before that the superfluousness of
the world-alienated masses who supported those regimes, but also pointed a way
to go beyond that crisis by accepting the challenge of restoring a common
world.
The
humanistic education to which Arendt was naturally drawn and received at the
universities of Marburg and Heidelberg also deepened throughout her life. She
studied philosophy, ancient Greek literature (poetry and history as well as
philosophy), and Christian theology because she loved wisdom and tragic beauty
and was puzzled less by the existence than the exactions of a transcendent God
of love. The teachers who exerted the greatest influence on her were Martin
Heidegger and Karl Jaspers, whose "existential" philosophies were
considered revolutionary by their peers and by themselves. With Heidegger and
Jaspers Arendt studied the tradition of philosophic thought from the vantage
point of its self-conscious conclusion, and with them both she developed
lifelong personal and intellectual relationships, equally meaningful but
different in kind.
Heidegger
awakened in Arendt a passion for thinking and that awakening, sometimes
acknowledged and sometimes not, pervades her work. With him she experienced the
awestruck wonder of pure existence that begins the activity of thinking.
What Heidegger called the "facticity" (Faktizität) and
"thrownness" (Geworfenheit) of human being, the "naked that
it is," not how or what or where it is, at one time led Arendt to think
that a new political philosophy might be developed from the shock of
"speechless horror," akin to "speechless wonder," at the
crimes of totalitarianism. She thought then that Heidegger indicated a way to
"directly grasp the realm of human affairs and human deeds," which no
philosopher had ever done (see "Concern with Politics in Recent European Political
Thought"). She gave up that idea, or at least altered it beyond
recognition, because of what she also learned from Heidegger: philosophical
thinking is "out of order" in the everyday world of common
sense from which the thinker, the thinking ego, withdraws. Although
habituated to the activity of thinking, Arendt was haunted by this withdrawal.
In the end she turned away from philosophy because she did not believe its
truths were relevant to the realm of human affairs. Not their truth but the
ever changing meanings of the phenomena of the actual world were the
"products" of thinking that increasingly concerned her. A philosopher
like Heidegger may dwell in a "land of thought," withdrawn
from the world, but a political thinker like Arendt returns to the world
where every nonanalytical truth becomes a meaning, in her case an often
controversial meaning, an opinion among the opinions of others.
 Karl Jaspers, 1961. Courtesy of the Hannah Arendt Trust. |
Karl
Jaspers introduced Arendt to a trans-historical, public realm of reason where
it was possible to exist in the present and think in living communication with
thinkers of the past, which is one important way that she retrieved the past.
From Kant via Jaspers she derived her notion of an autonomous faculty of
judgment, and through active, public participation in the realm of reason she
developed her own formidable power of judgment. If anything did, it was her
exercise of that faculty that eventually reconciled her to what she once
referred to as "this none too beautiful world of ours". That
remark, made in 1944 at the height of the war against Hitler, is tempered by
her belief that "all sorrows can be borne" if, like the Chorus in a
Greek tragedy, their witness sufficiently distances himself from them, fits
them into a story, and tells and retells that story. Dramas are made to be
repeated, stories to be recounted and retold, in order to keep their meaning
alive. Although she did not write fiction, Arendt believed that stories and not
the methods of social, political, and historical science capture the
contingency of human events; and like all great storytellers she realized that
the meaning of a story can never be entirely abstracted from it. What
she said in 1944 also differs markedly in mood from what she wrote almost
thirty years later toward the end of her life about our natural fitness to
perceive the diversity and the beauty of the world's appearances. That too is
ultimately a function of judgment, of its "disinterestedness" or
disinclination to evaluate appearances according to the standard of their
usefulness.
 Walter Benjamin, undated. Courtesy of the Hannah Arendt Trust. |
Arendt
examined the intricacies of St. Augustine's concept of love in her dissertation
written under Jaspers's direction, an extremely personal work composed in the
dense style typical of German scholarship of the period. Although her
dissertation bears no indication of any interest in contemporary politics (see Love
and Saint Augustine), a decidedly nontraditional Augustine, less Christian
than Roman, would later play a vital role in her rediscovery of the
prephilosophical, political conception of action. In his De Civitate Dei
Arendt found the perfect representation of her view of human beings as
beginnings: Initium ut esset homo creatus est ("that a beginning be
made man was created") not only concludes The Origins of Totalitarianism
but resonates as a leitmotif throughout her work. Nor is any political concern
explicit in her second, ambiguously subjective book, on Rahel Varnhagen, in
which she dealt historically and critically with the question of Jewish social
assimilation, in this case the vicissitudes of the life that an extraordinarily
intelligent German Jew elected to live at the end of the eighteenth and
beginning of the nineteenth centuries. Arendt wrote most of the book while
still in Germany and completed it during the Paris years at the urging of
Walter Benjamin and Heinrich Blücher-- "rather grumpily," presumably
because its subject had become "remote" to her. By that time Arendt,
as a Jew, had endured a rude political awakening, and the failure of Rahel
Varnhagen to establish "a social life outside of official society"
would take on a far darker aspect in The Origins of Totalitarianism.
Arendt
met Heinrich Blücher in 1936 in Paris, where he was a non-Jewish political
exile, and married him there in 1940. Under his influence her mind was opened
not just to Jewish politics but to the political as such. At the end of World
War I in 1918, Arendt was only twelve years old, but Blücher, seven years her
senior, had fought in that war, experienced its devastation, and at its
conclusion became an active leftist participant in the riots, strikes, and
street battles that led to the establishment of the German Republic. A member
of the Berlin working class who had a limited formal education, Blücher was
politically savvy and aware, as Arendt could hardly have been at that time, of
the fundamental changes taking place in those postwar political upheavals.
Blücher revealed to Arendt a realm of political reality at the core of
the actual world, a realm capable of generating human freedom and, when
corrupted, human bondage. Although Arendt consistently avoided situating
herself on the left, right, or center of the political spectrum, Blücher became
her political conscience, not only when she wrote The Origins of
Totalitarianism, which she dedicated to him, but throughout their life
together.
The
intellectually and spiritually rarefied world of Hannah Arendt's youth was to
be shattered by the rise of Nazism in Germany. It is not possible to grasp
Arendt's meaning when she writes of the newness of totalitarianism
without realizing that not only her own world but the greater German world of
which hers was a part--the world of inherited religious beliefs and moral and
legal standards thought to be eternal--would be swept away. It must have been
as difficult for her as it is for us to comprehend totalitarianism as neither
necessary nor entirely accidental, as something brought forth by human beings
of her own country and her own generation right in the heart of European
civilization and not as some monstrous thing that attacked it from the outside.
It must have been difficult for her to write about what she wanted to destroy
rather than preserve. And it must have been difficult for her to think about
the evil of totalitarianism since, as she eventually came to see, that evil
defies thought.
But
Arendt did think, write, and try to understand what for her was the real
turning point of the twentieth century. As she put it in the preface to the
first edition of The Origins of Totalitarianism: "The subterranean
stream of Western history has finally come to the surface and usurped the
dignity of our tradition. This is the reality in which we live." As her
thought expanded beyond the framework of that work her concern with the entire range
of phenomena she associated with totalitarianism grew broader and deeper. Among
the most valuable and interesting features of the Arendt Papers at the Library
of Congress is the presentation of her lecture notes and manuscripts, including
those ostensibly dealing with Karl Marx but which in fact reach back to the
beginnings of political philosophy. These documents furnish indisputable
evidence that Arendt's effort to understand totalitarianism continued in the
early 1950s (see "The Great Tradition and the Nature of Totalitarianism;"
"The Impact of Marx;" "The Spiritual Quest of Modern Man;"
"Totalitarianism"). Other documents
make clear that her search for understanding continued beyond that period and
underlies much of what she wrote in The Human Condition and On
Revolution--which when read apart from the archival material in her papers
have frequently been seen as distinct from that search (see "Freiheit und Politik;" "Action and the 'Pursuit of Happiness';"
"Revolution and Freedom;" "Labor, Work, Action"). Indeed, it can
now be said that Arendt's effort to understand totalitarianism continued to the
end of her life. Her work on the faculty of judgment, just begun at the time of
her sudden death, was to have dealt with the way individuals bereft of moral
rules and legal strictures can recognize evil and stand up and say
"No" to it.
Totalitarianism: The Inversion of
Politics
by Jerome Kohn, Director, Hannah Arendt Center, New School University
by Jerome Kohn, Director, Hannah Arendt Center, New School University
 Portion of photograph "Hannah Arendt, Manomet, Mass., 1950." Courtesy of the Hannah Arendt Trust. |
When
Hannah Arendt published The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951, World
War II had ended and Hitler was dead, but Stalin lived and ruled. Arendt wanted
to give her readers a sense of the phenomenal reality of totalitarianism, of
its appearance in the world as a terrifying and completely new form of
government. In the first two parts of the book she excavated hidden elements in
modern anti-Semitism and European imperialism that coalesced in totalitarian
movements; in the third part she explored the organization of those movements,
dissected the structure of Nazism and Stalinist Bolshevism in power, and
scrutinized the "double claim" of those regimes "to total
domination and global rule." Her focus, to be sure, is mainly on Nazism,
not only because more information concerning it was available at the time, but
also because Arendt was more familiar with Germany and hence with the origins
of totalitarianism there than in Russia. She knew, of course, that those
origins differed substantially in the two countries and later, in different
writings, would undertake to right the imbalance in her earlier discussion (see
"Project: Totalitarian Elements in Marxism").
The
enormous complexity of The Origins of Totalitarianism arises from its
interweaving of an understanding of the concept of totalitarianism with the
description of its emergence and embodiment in Nazism and Stalinism. The scope
of Arendt's conceptual objectives may be glimpsed in the plan she drew up for
six lectures on the nature of totalitarianism delivered at the New School for
Social Research in March and April of 1953 (see "The Great Tradition and the Nature of Totalitarianism").
The first lecture dealt with totalitarianism's "explosion" of our
traditional "categories of thought and standards of judgment," thus
at the outset stating the difficulty of understanding totalitarianism at all.
In the second lecture she considered the different kinds of government as they
were first formulated by Plato and then jumped many centuries to Montesquieu's
crucial discovery of each kind of government's principle of action and the
human experience in which that principle is embedded. In the third lecture she
explicated three important distinctions: first, between governments of law and
arbitrary power; secondly, between the traditional notion of humanly
established laws and the new totalitarian concept of laws that govern the
evolution of nature and direct the movement of history; and, thirdly, between
"traditional sources of authority" that stabilize "legal
institutions," thereby accommodating human action, and totalitarian laws
of motion whose function is, on the contrary, to stabilize human beings so that
the predetermined courses of nature and history can run freely through them.
The fourth lecture addressed the totalitarian "transformation" of an
ideological system of belief into a deductive principle of action. In the fifth
lecture the basic experience of human loneliness in totalitarianism was
contrasted with that of impotence in tyranny and differentiated from the
experiences of isolation and solitude, which are essential to the activities of
making and thinking but "marginal phenomena in political life." In
the final lecture Arendt distinguished "the political reality of freedom"
from both its "philosophical idea" and the "inherent
'materialism'" of Western political thought.
From
"On the Nature of Totalitarianism: An Essay in
Understanding," n.d. The Hannah Arendt Papers (The Library of
Congress Manuscript Division).
|
In addition to its complexity the
stylistic richness of The Origins of Totalitarianism lies in its
admixture of erudition and imagination, which is nowhere more manifest than in
the particular examples by which Arendt brought to light the elements of
totalitarianism. These examples include her devastating portrait of Disraeli
and her tragic account of the "great" and "bitter" life of
T. E. Lawrence; other exemplary figures are drawn from works of literature by
authors such as Kipling and Conrad (see The Origins of Totalitarianism,
chapter 7). A single, striking instance of the latter is Conrad's Heart of
Darkness, which Arendt called "the most illuminating work on actual race
experience in Africa," her emphasis clearly falling on the word
"experience." Engaged in "the merry dance of death and
trade," Conrad's imperialistic adventurers were in quest of ivory and
entertained few scruples over slaughtering the indigenous inhabitants of
"the phantom world of the dark continent" in order to obtain it. The
subject of Conrad's work, in which the story told by the always ambiguous
Marlow is recounted by an unnamed narrator, is the encounter of Africans with
"superfluous" Europeans "spat out" of their societies. As
the author of the whole tale as well as the tale within the tale, Conrad was
intent not "to hint however subtly or tentatively at an alternative
frame of reference by which we may judge the actions and opinions of his characters."1 Marlow, a character twice removed
from the reader, is aware that the "conquest of the earth, which mostly
means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly
flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing." It is in the person
of the "remarkable" and "eloquent" Mr. Kurtz that Marlow
seeks the "idea" that alone can offer redemption: "An idea at
the back of [the conquest], not a sentimental pretense but an idea; and an
unselfish belief in the idea."
As
Marlow's steamer penetrates "deeper and deeper into the heart of
darkness" in search of Kurtz's remote trading station, Africa becomes
increasingly "impenetrable to human thought." In a passage cited by
Arendt, Marlow observes the Africans on the shore:
The prehistoric man was cursing us,
praying to us, welcoming us--who could tell? We . . . glided past like
phantoms, wondering and secretly appalled, as sane men would be, before an
enthusiastic outbreak in a madhouse. We could not understand because we were
too far and could not remember, because we were traveling in the night of the
first ages, of those ages that are gone leaving hardly a sign--and no memories.
. . . The earth seemed unearthly . . . and the men were . . . No, they were not
inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it--this suspicion of their not
being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled and leapt and spun and
made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their
humanity--like yours--the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and
passionate uproar.
The
next sentence spoken by Marlow consists of one word, "Ugly," and that
word leads directly to his discovery of Kurtz, the object of his fascination.
He reads a report that Kurtz, who exemplifies the European imperialist
("All Europe contributed to [his] making"), has written to the
"International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs." It is
a report in the name of progress, of "good practically unbounded,"
and it gives Marlow a sense "of an exotic Immensity ruled by an August
Benevolence." But at the bottom of the report's last page, "luminous
and terrifying like a flash of lightning in a serene sky," Kurtz has
scrawled "Exterminate all the brutes!" Thus racism is revealed as the
"idea" of the mad Kurtz and the darkness of his heart becomes the
counterpart of the not inhuman but "uncivilized" darkness of Africa.
The horrific details follow, the decapitated heads of Africans stuck on poles,
facing inward toward Kurtz's dwelling. Marlow rationalizes Kurtz's "lack
of restraint": "the wilderness . . . had whispered to him things
about himself which he did not know," a whisper that "echoed loudly
within him because he was hollow at the core." It is questionable whether
Marlow is less hollow when, at the end of the work, he attempts in
"fright" to lie about Kurtz's last words, "The horror! The
horror!" The experience of race is now complete; even the shadowy narrator
of Marlow's story is left before "the heart of an immense darkness"
in which the image of Kurtz's racism looms in the consciousness of Conrad's
readers and of the world.
Arendt,
however, is not saying that racism or any other element of totalitarianism caused
the regimes of Hitler or Stalin, but rather that those elements, which include
anti-Semitism, the decline of the nation-state, expansionism for its own sake,
and the alliance between capital and mob, crystallized in the movements
from which those regimes arose. Reflecting on her book in 1958 Arendt said that
her intentions "presented themselves" to her "in the form of an
ever recurring image: I felt as though I dealt with a crystallized structure
which I had to break up into its constituent elements in order to destroy
it." This presented a problem because she saw that it was an
"impossible task to write history, not in order to save and conserve and
render fit for remembrance, but, on the contrary, in order to destroy."
Thus despite her historical analyses it "dawned" on her that The
Origins of Totalitarianism was not "a historical . . . but a political
book, in which whatever there was of past history not only was seen from the
vantage point of the present, but would not have become visible at all without
the light which the event, the emergence of totalitarianism, shed on it."
The origins are not causes, in fact "they only became origins-
antecedents--after the event had taken place." While analyzing, literally
"breaking up," a crystal into its "constituent elements"
destroys the crystal, it does not destroy the elements. This is among the
fundamental points that Arendt made in the chapter written in 1953 and added to
all subsequent editions of The Origins of Totalitarianism (see
"Ideology and Terror: A Novel Form of Government"):
If it is true that the elements of
totalitarianism can be found by retracing the history and analyzing the
political implications of what we usually call the crisis of our century, then
the conclusion is unavoidable that this crisis is no mere threat from the
outside, no mere result of some aggressive foreign policy of either Germany or
Russia, and that it will no more disappear with the death of Stalin than it
disappeared with the fall of Nazi Germany. It may even be that the true
predicaments of our time will assume their authentic form--though not
necessarily the cruelest--only when totalitarianism has become a thing of the
past.
According
to Arendt the "disturbing relevance of totalitarian regimes . . . is that
the true problems of our time cannot be understood, let alone solved, without
the acknowledgment that totalitarianism became this century's curse only
because it so terrifyingly took care of its problems" (see
"Concluding Remarks" in the first edition of The Origins of
Totalitarianism). The rejection of the totalitarian answer to the question
of race, for instance, does not solve but reveals the problem that arises when
race is viewed as the origin of human diversity. Totalitarianism's destruction
of naturally determined "inferior" races or historically determined
"dying" classes leaves us on an overcrowded planet with the great and
unsolved political perplexity of how human plurality can be conceived,
of how historically and culturally different groups of human beings can
live together and share their earthly home.
1. As Chinua Achebe says he ought to have
done (C. Achebe, "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of
Darkness" in Heart of Darkness, ed. Robert Kimbrough, 3rd ed.
[New York, 1998], 256).
From
"On the Nature of Totalitarianism: An Essay in
Understanding," n.d. The Hannah Arendt Papers (The Library of
Congress Manuscript Division).
|
Totalitarianism
has been identified by many writers as a ruthless, brutal, and, thanks to
modern technology, potent form of political tyranny whose ambitions for world
domination are unlimited. Disseminating propaganda derived from an ideology
through the media of mass communication, totalitarianism relies on mass
support. It crushes whoever and whatever stands in its way by means of terror
and proceeds to a total reconstruction of the society it displaces. Thus a
largely rural and feudal Russian Empire, under the absolutist rule of czars
stretching back to the fifteenth century, was transformed first by Lenin after
the October Revolution of 1917 and then by Stalin into an industrialized Union
of Soviet Socialist Republics; a Germany broken after its defeat in World War I
was mobilized and became the conqueror of most of Europe in the early 1940s
less than a decade after Hitler's assumption of power; and in China the
People's Republic, by taking the Great Leap Forward in 1958 followed by the
Cultural Revolution beginning in 1966 and ending with Mao Zedong's death in
1976, expunged much of what remained of a culture that had survived for more
than three thousand years.
Such
achievements require total one-party governmental control and tremendous human
sacrifice; the elimination of free choice and individuality; the politicization
of the private sphere, including that of the family; and the denial of any
notion of the universality of human rights. In diverse areas of the world where
political freedom and open societies have been virtually unknown or untried,
totalitarian methods have been seen to exert an ongoing attraction for local
elites, warlords, and rebels. Such well-known phenomena as "brain washing,"
"killing fields," "ethnic cleansing," "mass
graves," and "genocide," accounting for millions of victims and
arising from a variety of tribal, nationalist, ethnic, religious, and economic
conditions, have been deemed totalitarian in nature. Totalitarianism, moreover,
is frequently employed as an abstract, vaguely defined term of general
opprobrium, whose historical roots are traced to the political thought of Marx
or in some instances to Rousseau and as far back as Plato. But because of what
has been called its "inefficiency," which Arendt attributes to its
"contempt for utilitarian motives," totalitarianism rarely occurs in
the political analyses of those who consider the function of politics in terms
of "utilitarian expectations." Recently, however, prominent political
theorists such as Margaret Canovan in England and Claude Lefort in France have
seen in the decline of communism and the diminished intensity of left and right
ideological debates an opportunity for an impartial and rigorous reassessment
of the concept of totalitarianism. Although Arendt may have experienced a
similar need to understand Nazism after its defeat in World War II, for her
impartiality was the condition of judging the irreversible catastrophe of
totalitarianism as "the central event of our world."
When Arendt noted that causality, the
explanation of an event as being determined by another event or chain of events
which leads up to it, "is an altogether alien and falsifying category in
the historical sciences," she meant that no historical event is ever
predictable. Although with hindsight it is possible to discern a sequence of
events, there is always a "grotesque disparity" between that sequence
and a particular event's significance. What the principle of causality ignores
or denies is the contingency of human affairs, i.e., the human capacity to
begin something new, and therefore the meaning and "the very
existence" of what it seeks to explain (see "The Difficulties of Understanding" and
"On the Nature of Totalitarianism"). It
is not the "objectivity" of the historical scientist but the
impartiality of the judge who perceives the existence and discerns the meaning
of events, of which the antecedents can then be told in stories whose
beginnings are never causes and whose conclusions are never predetermined.2 The rejection of causality in
history and the insistence on the contingency, unpredictability, and meaning of
events brought about not by nature but by human agency inform Arendt's judgment
of the incomprehensible and unforgivable crimes of totalitarianism. In regard
to such crimes the old saying "tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner"
(to understand everything is to forgive everything)--as if to understand an
offense, say by its psychological motive, were to excuse it--is a double
"misrepresentation" of the fact that understanding seeks
reconciliation. What may be possible is reconciliation to the world in which
the crimes of totalitarianism were committed (see "The Difficulties of Understanding"),
and a great part of Arendt's work on totalitarianism and thereafter is an
effort to understand that world. But it should be noted that the outrage that
pervades her judgment is not a subjective emotional reaction foisted on a
purportedly "value free" scientific analysis.3 Her anger is impartial in her
judgment of a form of government that defaced the world and
"objectively" belongs to that world on whose behalf she judged
totalitarianism for what it was and what it meant.
2. The concept of history derives from the
Greek verb historein, to inquire, but Arendt found "the origin of
this verb" in the Homeric histor, the first "historian,"
who was a judge (see Thinking, "Postscriptum"; cf. Illiad
XVIII, 501).
3. Such a view, as Arendt points out,
accurately describes many historical accounts of anti-Semitism, none more so
than D. J. Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and
the Holocaust (New York, 1996).
Even
before she wrote The Origins of Totalitarianism Arendt spoke of the
desperate need to tell the "real story of the Nazi-constructed hell":
Not only because these facts have
changed and poisoned the very air we breathe, not only because they now inhabit
our dreams at night and permeate our thoughts during the day -- but also
because they have become the basic experience and the basic misery of our
times. Only from this foundation, on which a new knowledge of man will rest,
can our new insights, our new memories, our new deeds, take their point of
departure. (See "The Image of Hell.")
The
beginning called for here, if there were to be one, will arise from individual
acts of judgment by men and women who know the nature of totalitarianism and agree
that, for the sake of the world, it must not occur again--not only in
the forms in which it has already occurred, which may be unlikely, but in any
form whatsoever.
The
significance of the story Arendt went on to tell and retell lies entirely in
the present, and she was fully aware that her "method," a subject
which she was always loath to discuss, went against the grain not only of
political and social scientists but also, more importantly to her, of those
reporters, historians, and poets who in distinct ways seek to preserve, in or
out of time, what they record, narrate, and imagine. Reflecting later on the
moment in 1943 when she first learned about Auschwitz, Arendt said: "This
ought not to have happened." That is no purely moral "ought"
based in ethical precepts, the voice of conscience, or immutable natural law,
but rather as strong as possible a statement that there was something
irremissibly wrong with the human world in which Auschwitz could and did
happen.
Reconciliation to that world requires
understanding only when totalitarianism is judged, not by subsuming it
under traditional moral, legal, or political categories but by recognizing it
as something unprecedented, odious, and to be fought against. Such judgment is
possible for beings "whose essence is beginning" (see "The Difficulties of Understanding")
and makes reconciliation possible because it strikes new roots in the world.
Judgment is "the other side of action" and as such the opposite of
resignation. It does not erase totalitarianism, for then, thrown backward into
the past, the historical processes that did not cause but led to
totalitarianism would be repeated and "the burden of our time"
reaccumulated; or, projected forward into the future, a never-never land
ignorant of its own conditions, the human mind would "wander in
obscurity."4 A quotation from Karl Jaspers that
struck Arendt "right in the heart" and which she chose as the
epigraph for The Origins of Totalitarianism stresses that what matters
is not to give oneself over to the despair of the past or the utopian hope of
the future, but "to remain wholly in the present." Totalitarianism is
the crisis of our times insofar as its demise becomes a turning point for the
present world, presenting us with an entirely new opportunity to realize a
common world, a world that Arendt called a "human artifice," a place
fit for habitation by all human beings.
Arendt's
papers provide many interesting opportunities to study the development of her
thought. For instance, in "The Difficulties of Understanding,"
written in the early 1950s, judgment is conjoined with understanding. As late
as 1972, in impromptu remarks delivered at a conference devoted to her work,
she associated it with the activity of thinking. But Arendt was working her way
toward distinguishing judgment as an independent and autonomous mental faculty,
"the most political of man's mental abilities" (see "Thinking and Moral Considerations").
Although the activities of understanding and thinking reveal an unending stream
of meanings and under specific circumstances may liberate the faculty of
judgment, the act of judging particular and contingent events differs from them
in that it preserves freedom by exercising it in the realm of human affairs.
That distinction is critical for her view of history in general and
totalitarianism in particular and has been adhered to in this introduction.
4. The Burden of Our Time is the
title of the first British edition of The Origins of Totalitarianism
(London, 1951). Arendt frequently cited Tocqueville's remark in the last
chapter of Democracy In America: "As the past has ceased to throw
its light upon the future, the mind of man wanders in obscurity" (see
"Philosophy and Politics: The Problem of Action after
the French Revolution" and Between Past and Future, "Preface").
Arendt's
judgment of totalitarianism must first and foremost be distinguished from its
common identification as an insidious form of tyranny. Tyranny is an ancient,
originally Greek form of government which, as the tragedy of Oedipous
Tyrannos and the historical examples of Peisistratus of Athens and
Periandros of Corinth demonstrate, was by no means necessarily against the
private interests and initiatives of its people. As a form of government
tyranny stands against the appearance in public of the plurality of the
people, the condition, according to Arendt, in which political life and
political freedom--"public happiness," as the founders of the
American republic named it--become possible and without which they do not.
In
a tyrannical political realm, which can hardly be called public, the tyrant
exists in isolation from the people. Due to the lack of rapport or legal
communication between the people and the tyrant, all action in a tyranny
manifests a "moving principle" of mutual fear: the tyrant's fear of
the people, on one side, and the people's fear of the tyrant, or, as Arendt put
it, their "despair over the impossibility" of joining together to act
at all, on the other. It is in this sense that tyranny is a contradictory and
futile form of government, one that generates not power but impotence. Hence,
according to Montesquieu, whose acute observations Arendt drew on in these
matters, tyranny (which he does not even bother to distinguish from despotism,
malevolent by definition, since he is concerned with public rather than private
freedom) is a form of government that, unlike constitutional republics or
monarchies, corrupts itself, cultivating within itself the seeds of its own
destruction (see "On the Nature of Totalitarianism").
Therefore, the essential impotence of a tyrannically ruled state, however
flamboyant and spectacular its dying throes, and whether or not it is despotic,
and regardless of the cruelty and suffering it may inflict on its people,
presents no menace of destruction to the world at large.
In
their early revolutionary stages of development, to be sure, and whenever and
wherever they meet opposition, totalitarian movements employ tyrannical
measures of force and violence, but their nature differs from that of tyrannies
precisely in the enormity of their threat of world destruction. That threat has
often been thought possible and explained as the total politicalization of all
phases of life. Arendt saw it, and this is crucial, as exactly the opposite: a
phenomenon of total depoliticalization (in German Entpolitisierung [see
"Freiheit und Politik"]) that
appeared for the first time in the regimes of Stalin after 1929 and Hitler
after 1938. Totalitarianism's radical atomization of the whole of society
differs from the political isolation, the political "desert," as
Arendt termed it, of tyranny. It eliminates not only free action, which is
political by definition, but also the element of action, that is, of
initiation, of beginning anything at all, from every human activity. Individual
spontaneity--in thinking, in any aspiration, or in any creative
undertaking--that sustains and renews the human world is obliterated in
totalitarianism. Totalitarianism destroys everything that politics, even the
circumscribed political realm of a tyranny, makes possible.
In
totalitarian society freedom, private as well as public, is nothing but an
illusion. As such it is no longer the source of fear that in tyranny manifests
itself not as an emotion but as the principle of the tyrant's action and the
people's non-action. Whereas tyranny, pitting the ruler and his subjects
against each other, is ultimately impotent, totalitarianism generates immense
power, a new sort of power that not only exceeds but is different in kind from
coercive force. The dynamism of totalitarianism negates the fundamental
conditions of human existence. In the name of ideological necessity
totalitarian terror mocks the appearance and also the disappearance, both the
lives and the deaths, of distinct and potentially free men and women. It mocks
the world that only a plurality of such individuals can continuously create,
hold in common, and share. It mocks even the earth insofar as it is their
natural home. The profound paradox that lies between the totalitarian belief
that the eradication of every sign of humanity, of human freedom, of all
spontaneity and beginning, is necessary, and the fact that its possibility
is itself something new brought into the world by human beings is the core of
what Arendt strove to comprehend.
Arendt's
judgment of totalitarianism must first and foremost be distinguished from its
common identification as an insidious form of tyranny. Tyranny is an ancient,
originally Greek form of government which, as the tragedy of Oedipous
Tyrannos and the historical examples of Peisistratus of Athens and
Periandros of Corinth demonstrate, was by no means necessarily against the
private interests and initiatives of its people. As a form of government
tyranny stands against the appearance in public of the plurality of the
people, the condition, according to Arendt, in which political life and
political freedom--"public happiness," as the founders of the
American republic named it--become possible and without which they do not.
In
a tyrannical political realm, which can hardly be called public, the tyrant
exists in isolation from the people. Due to the lack of rapport or legal
communication between the people and the tyrant, all action in a tyranny
manifests a "moving principle" of mutual fear: the tyrant's fear of
the people, on one side, and the people's fear of the tyrant, or, as Arendt put
it, their "despair over the impossibility" of joining together to act
at all, on the other. It is in this sense that tyranny is a contradictory and
futile form of government, one that generates not power but impotence. Hence,
according to Montesquieu, whose acute observations Arendt drew on in these
matters, tyranny (which he does not even bother to distinguish from despotism,
malevolent by definition, since he is concerned with public rather than private
freedom) is a form of government that, unlike constitutional republics or
monarchies, corrupts itself, cultivating within itself the seeds of its own
destruction (see "On the Nature of Totalitarianism").
Therefore, the essential impotence of a tyrannically ruled state, however
flamboyant and spectacular its dying throes, and whether or not it is despotic,
and regardless of the cruelty and suffering it may inflict on its people,
presents no menace of destruction to the world at large.
In
their early revolutionary stages of development, to be sure, and whenever and
wherever they meet opposition, totalitarian movements employ tyrannical
measures of force and violence, but their nature differs from that of tyrannies
precisely in the enormity of their threat of world destruction. That threat has
often been thought possible and explained as the total politicalization of all
phases of life. Arendt saw it, and this is crucial, as exactly the opposite: a
phenomenon of total depoliticalization (in German Entpolitisierung [see
"Freiheit und Politik"]) that
appeared for the first time in the regimes of Stalin after 1929 and Hitler
after 1938. Totalitarianism's radical atomization of the whole of society
differs from the political isolation, the political "desert," as
Arendt termed it, of tyranny. It eliminates not only free action, which is
political by definition, but also the element of action, that is, of
initiation, of beginning anything at all, from every human activity. Individual
spontaneity--in thinking, in any aspiration, or in any creative
undertaking--that sustains and renews the human world is obliterated in
totalitarianism. Totalitarianism destroys everything that politics, even the
circumscribed political realm of a tyranny, makes possible.
In
totalitarian society freedom, private as well as public, is nothing but an
illusion. As such it is no longer the source of fear that in tyranny manifests
itself not as an emotion but as the principle of the tyrant's action and the
people's non-action. Whereas tyranny, pitting the ruler and his subjects
against each other, is ultimately impotent, totalitarianism generates immense
power, a new sort of power that not only exceeds but is different in kind from
coercive force. The dynamism of totalitarianism negates the fundamental
conditions of human existence. In the name of ideological necessity
totalitarian terror mocks the appearance and also the disappearance, both the
lives and the deaths, of distinct and potentially free men and women. It mocks
the world that only a plurality of such individuals can continuously create,
hold in common, and share. It mocks even the earth insofar as it is their
natural home. The profound paradox that lies between the totalitarian belief
that the eradication of every sign of humanity, of human freedom, of all
spontaneity and beginning, is necessary, and the fact that its possibility
is itself something new brought into the world by human beings is the core of
what Arendt strove to comprehend.
Evil: The Crime against Humanity
by Jerome Kohn, Director, Hannah Arendt Center, New School University
by Jerome Kohn, Director, Hannah Arendt Center, New School University
 Hannah Arendt at the University of Chicago, undated. Courtesy of the Hannah Arendt Trust. |
In
1963 Hannah Arendt said that she had "been thinking for many years, or, to
be specific, for thirty years, about the nature of evil." (see Grafton document in Eichmann file) It had
been thirty years since the Reichstag, the German parliament, was burned
in Berlin, an event followed immediately by the Nazis' illegal arrests of
thousands of communists and others who opposed them. Though innocent of any
crime, those arrested were taken to concentration camps or the cellars of the
recently organized Gestapo and subjected to what Arendt called
"monstrous" treatment. With his political opposition effectively
forestalled, Hitler could establish as a matter of policy the Jew-hatred that
in his case was obvious to anyone who read Mein Kampf (My Struggle), the
diatribe he dictated in prison and published in 1925. Which is to say that with
the consolidation of Nazi power anti-Semitism ceased to be a social prejudice
and became political: Germany was to be made judenrein,
"purified" by first demoting Jews to the status of second class
citizens, then by ridding them of their citizenship altogether, deporting them,
and, finally, killing them. From that moment on Arendt said she "felt
responsible." But responsible for what? She meant that she, unlike many
others, could no longer be "simply a bystander" but must in her own
voice and person respond to the criminality rampant in her native land.
"If one is attacked as a Jew," she said, "one must defend
oneself as a Jew. Not as a German, not as a world-citizen, not as an upholder
of the Rights of Man."
The
year was 1933. Within a few months Arendt was arrested, briefly detained for
her work with a Zionist organization, and, when the opportunity presented
itself, left Germany abruptly. After her stay in France and upon arriving in
America in 1941, she wrote more than fifty articles for the German-Jewish
weekly Der Aufbau addressing the plight and duty of Jews during World
War II.1 Arendt first heard about Auschwitz
in 1943, but with Germany's defeat in 1945 incontrovertible evidence of the
existence of Nazi "factories" of extermination came to light, and at
that time information concerning slave labor installations in the Soviet Gulag
also gradually emerged. Struck by the structural similarity of those
institutions Arendt turned her attention to the function of concentration camps
under totalitarian rule. Her analysis has to be read to be fully appreciated
and only a few indications of its power and originality, and fewer of its
subtlety, can be given here. (see The Origins of Totalitarianism,
chapter 12, "Totalitarianism in Power"; "Concluding
Remarks" from the first edition of The Origins of Totalitarianism;
"Social Science Techniques and the Study of Concentration Camps";
"Die Menschen und der Terror"
["Mankind and Terror"])
The
camps haunted Arendt's writing until Stalin's death in 1953. Then, after she
published The Human Condition in 1958, a theoretical study of the three
activities of active life (labor, work, and action) and their career in the
modern age, and embarked on an analysis of the American, French, and Russian
Revolutions, the camps reappeared on the horizon of her thought when she
attended the trial of Adolf Eichmann (the chief coordinator of the
transportation of Jews to the death camps) in Israel in 1961. In one way or
another the Nazi camps played a major role in the controversy that followed the
publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil in
1963, and, although she ceased to write directly about them after 1966, it is
fair to say that what she called the "overpowering reality" of
totalitarian concentration camps lay behind her preoccupation with the problem
of evil, a concern that lasted until the end of her life.
1. While in France she wrote essays on the
Jewish Question and the Minority Question, and began a historical study of
modern anti-Semitism (see "Judenfrage," "Zur Minderheitenfrage," and "Antisemitismus").
|
From
Eichmann in Jerusalem, "Epilogue," The Hannah Arendt Papers
(The Library of Congress Manuscript Division).
|
As
was her wont Arendt offers an "elemental" account of the development
of bureaucratically administered camps in which whole segments of populations
were interned, and it is against that background that the unprecedented evil of
the role of the camps in totalitarian systems of domination becomes manifest.
Concentration camps were not invented by totalitarian regimes but were first
used in the late nineteenth century by the Spanish in Cuba and the British
during the Boer War (1899-1902). The equivocal legal concept of
"protective custody"--referring to the protection either of society
from those interned or of those interned from "the alleged 'wrath of the
people'"--which has always been used to rationalize and justify their
existence was invoked by British imperial rule in India as well as South
Africa. In World War I enemy aliens were regularly interned "as a
temporary emergency measure," (see "Memo: Research Project on
Concentration Camps") but later, in the period between World Wars I and II,
camps were set up in France for non-enemy aliens, in this case stateless and
unwanted refugees from the Spanish Civil War (1936-39). Arendt also noted that
in World War II internment camps for potential enemies of democratic states
differed in one important respect from those of World War I. In the United
States, for instance, not only citizens of Japan but "American citizens of
Japanese origin" were interned, the former maintaining their rights of
citizenship under the Geneva Conventions while the latter, uprooted on ethnic
grounds alone, were deprived of theirs by executive order and without due
process.
Although
the containment and brutal elimination of political opposition was a factor in
the camps established during the revolutionary stages of the rise to power of
totalitarian movements, it is in the post-revolutionary period, when Hitler and
Stalin had become the unopposed leaders of huge populations, that Arendt
brought the camps into focus as entirely new phenomena. Their newness consisted
in the determination of so-called "objective" enemies and
"possible" crimes, and is borne out by the fact that not their
existence but the conditions under which the camps operated were kept hidden
from the German and Russian populations at large, including most members of the
regimes' hierarchies. She called the knowledge of what actually transpired in
the camps the true secret of the secret police who in both cases administered
them, and she wondered, disturbingly, about the extent to which that secret
knowledge "corresponds to the secret desires and the secret complicities
of the masses in our time."
Arendt
was not a victim of the camps, nor did she write in "empathy" (to her
an ethical and cognitive presumption) with those who had actually experienced
their terror. She wrote, as always, at a mental distance from events that makes
judgment possible. In a revealing passage she said: "Only the fearful
imagination of those who have been aroused by [firsthand] reports but have not
actually been smitten in their own flesh, of those who are consequently free
from the bestial, desperate terror which . . . inexorably paralyzes everything
that is not mere reaction, can afford to keep thinking about horrors,"
adding that such thinking is "useful only for the perception of political
contexts and the mobilization of political passions."
The
trouble with most accounts from recollection or by eyewitnesses is that in
direct proportion to their authenticity they are unable "to communicate
things that evade human understanding and human experience." They are
doomed to fail if they attempt to explain psychologically or sociologically
what cannot be explained either way, that is, to explain in terms that make
sense in the human world what does not make sense there, namely, the experience
of "inanimate men" in an inhuman society. Moreover, survivors who
have "resolutely" returned to the world of common sense tend to
recall the camps as if they "had mistaken a nightmare for reality."
The "phantom world" of the camps had indeed "materialized"
with all the "sensual data of reality," but in Arendt's judgment that
fact indicates not that a terrifying dream had been experienced but that an
entirely new kind of crime had been committed. One of the underlying reasons
for the controversy created by Arendt's study of Eichmann was and remains the
failure of many readers, both Jews and non Jews, to make the tremendous mental
effort required to transcend the fate of one's own people and see what was
pernicious for all humanity. The notion of a "crime against humanity"
was introduced in the Nuremberg trials of major war criminals in 1946, but in
Arendt's opinion the crime was confused there with "crimes against
peace" and "war crimes" and had never been properly defined nor
its perpetrators clearly recognized. To Arendt the genocide of the Jews
throughout Nazi-controlled Europe was a crime against the human status,
a crime "perpetrated on the body of the Jewish people" that
"violated the order of mankind . . . and an altogether different
community," the world shared in common by all peoples and the comity of
all nations (see Eichmann in Jerusalem, "Epilogue" -- part one and part two). Not only distance but courage
are required to grasp what Arendt meant by the absolute evil of
totalitarianism, to see that, in the case of the Nazis, what is attributable to
"the long history of Jew-hatred and anti-Semitism" is "only the
choice of victims [and] not the nature of the crime."
|
From
"Ideology and Propaganda," The Hannah
Arendt Papers (The Library of Congress Manuscript Division).
|
Both
Hitler and Stalin discovered in the camps the means to realize their belief in
total power, a belief that meant not only that "everything is permitted"
but implied the far more radical proposition that "everything is
possible." The camps were designed as "laboratories" in which
"experiments" were conducted to test that proposition, and what those
experiments demonstrated was that "the omnipotence of man" is bought
at the price "of the superfluity of men." (see "Ideology and Propaganda") In the camps
all men were remade into one man, all human beings into one utterly predictable
"living corpse," a body permanently in "the process of
dying." Human beings were reduced "to the lowest common denominator
of organic life," (see "The Image of Hell") rendered
"equal" in the sense of being interchangeable which, it should be
noted, is exactly the opposite of political equality. Arendt understood
political equality as the equality of peers, the achievement of a plurality of
distinct individuals who join together in freedom to generate power and take responsibility
for their common world.
Human existence, according to Arendt,
is in part conditioned and in part free, but the terror induced in the
concentration camps corrodes from within the part that is free. Unlike fear
that is intelligible in its relation to an object in the world, or to the
objectivity of a threatening world, terror conditions human beings in much the
same way that the behavior of animals is conditioned by such means as electric
shock. Pavlov's dog, which Arendt called a "perverted" animal, was
conditioned to salivate not when it was hungry but when a bell was rung, and
systematically starved men and women were likewise conditioned to behave
inhumanly in the hope of being fed.2 In the contrived world of the camps
the categories of right and wrong, virtue and vice, individual innocence or
guilt, and almost everything else that since time immemorial has been
associated with the specific nature of human beings ceased to make sense. As
yet, at least so far as is known, totalitarian camps are the only places on
earth where the total domination of the human person was
"scientifically" implemented and accomplished.
When
compared with its "insane end-result"--the realization of hell in the
midst of life without pretense to "an absolute standard of justice"
or recourse to "the infinite possibility of grace"--the assault on
human nature in the camps was methodological and threefold. The "first,
essential step" is the destruction of juridical or political man by
disfranchisement; secondly, the moral person is destroyed by rendering his or
her conscience impotent; and thirdly, the "unique identity" of the
individual is obliterated by annihilating the human capacity for spontaneity in
thought and action. Disfranchisement means the elimination of every legal
status, including even that of the criminal. Human beings are subjected to
torment not only unfit for any conceivable crime but also unrelated to anything
they have done; they are punished for having been born a Jew, for being the
representative of a dying class, for being "asocial," or mentally
ill, or the carrier of a disease. New categories would be invented when old
categories became exhausted, or victims would have to be selected at random, as
in fact they finally were in Stalin's "more perfect" system. The
arbitrariness of the choice of victims aims at destroying "the civil
rights of the whole population," and such destruction is by no means a
matter of brainwashing since it is not "consent" that is wanted but
only absolute "discipline." In the camps every legal right and
political institution that for centuries had been wrought to stabilize the
world and clear a space for human freedom, including the expression and debate
of diverse opinions, is swept away as if it had never existed. In this sense
the destruction of juridical or political man "is a prerequisite for
dominating him entirely."
Next,
the ability to make a conscientious choice is negated. Prisoners are made to choose
not between good and evil but between evil and evil. When a mother is forced to
choose one of her children to be murdered in order to save the life (or
postpone the death) of another, she is implicated in the crime committed
against her. Martyrdom was not possible since the camps were what Arendt called
"holes of oblivion," places completely cut off from the outside world
in which a martyr's story might be told, remembered, and become an example for
others. The dead are immediately forgotten "as if they had never
existed," their deaths as superfluous as their lives had been. Finally,
the concentration of human beings, massing them together and binding them in
terror's "band of iron," destroys every relation to and distinction
from one another, obliterating not only their individual place in the world but
their individuality itself. They are submitted to torture, not to learn what
they know but to so hurt them that they became bundles of insensate flesh. Far
from being able to act spontaneously, to begin anything new by acting or
thinking, they walk "'like dummies to their death'" (David Rousset, Les
jours de notre mort [Paris, 1947], quoted by Arendt). In the slave labor
camps of the Gulag, with their supposed economic "rationale," the
laborers are starved or frozen to death, at once replaced by others whose lives
and deaths are no less superfluous than those of their predecessors.
2. Arendt quotes the Polish poet Tadeusz Borowski
on his experience in Auschwitz: "Never before was hope stronger than man,
and never before did hope result in so much evil. . . . We were taught not to
give up hope. That is why we die in the gas oven." Agreeing that hope
"stronger than man" is "destructive"of humanity, she added
that the victims' innocence, "even from the viewpoint of their
persecutors," further dehumanizes them: that their "apathy"
toward their own death is "the almost physical, automatic response to the
challenge of absolute meaninglessness" (see "Why Did the World
Remain Silent?" reprinted in The Jewish World 2 [September 1964]).
To
confront the evil of totalitarian criminality requires a way of thinking that
reflects the human experience of being superfluous, the futility and
meaninglessness of "not belonging to the world at all." That
experience was forced by terror upon the inmates of the camps, but Arendt also
saw that the "laboratories" of slave labor and extermination changed
the nature of those who wielded the instruments of destruction. It was not a
matter of choice but "an accident of birth [that] condemned" some to
life and some to death, and both "functioned to the last moment . . .
frictionlessly." (see "The Image of Hell") Furthermore, having
"no place in the world recognized and guaranteed by others" was the
experience of the uprooted, unemployed, and unwanted masses of mankind which
did not cause but made possible the "lying" world of totalitarianism.
More than any other single factor, the failure of "the Rights of
Man," "formulated" and "proclaimed" in the American
and French Revolutions but never "politically secured" or
"philosophically established," enabled a form of government to appear
that, though made by men, denied humanity and in which the meaninglessness of
life and indifference towards death was the primary common experience. As
Eichmann put it: "We did not care if we died today or only tomorrow, and
there were times we cursed the morning that found us still alive." (see Eichmann
in Jerusalem, chapter 6, "The Final Solution: Killing")
Arendt
was of course aware of the gulf in human suffering that separates the oppressed
from their oppressors, but her point was different. Contrary to popular
accounts that seek to "demonize" the oppressors, Arendt saw the
totalitarians themselves, often in their own estimation, as superfluous human
beings. S.S. officers (the black-shirted Schutzstaffel or security
service) were selected by photographs, by "objective" racial
characteristics, and not by interviews in which their inclination or
disinclination, their psychological suitability or unsuitability for the
horrendous tasks they were called upon to perform, could be assessed. The S.S.
was as far beyond the reach of law as its prisoners, for although the Nazis
never formally revoked the constitution of the German Republic, its laws had no
authority when they conflicted with the Führer's will. The slave labor and
extermination camps succeeded in extirpating the moral being of the destroyers
as well as those they destroyed. Heinrich Himmler, the chief of the complex
Nazi police and security forces, told S.S. officers that they had to become
"superhumanly inhuman," that is, to cease being human if they were to
carry out the "great task that occurs but once in two thousand
years." Obedience and devotion are required but conviction and agreement
despised, since the latter imply at least the possibility of a last remnant of
spontaneous thought and action. Eichmann, who evinced no spontaneity, spoke in
his defense of "the obedience of corpses (Kadavergehorsam)."
(see Eichmann in Jerusalem, chapter 8, "Duties of a Law-Abiding Citizen")
Those
who support a totalitarian system, according to Arendt, may be "bearers of
orders" or "bearers of secrets" but in the eyes of the movement
they bear no responsibility for what they do. Without the structure of
responsibility the reality of the world becomes "a mass of
incomprehensible data." Human beings "can be tortured and
slaughtered, and yet neither the tormentors or the tormented . . . can be aware
that what is happening is anything more than a cruel game." The supporters
are pawnlike "embodiments" of the will of the leader who, as the sole
repository of "responsibility," is infallible. That infallibility has
nothing to do with truth or trustworthiness, however, as Stalin's faithful
servants discovered when they became his victims in the Great Purge trials of
the mid-1930s. The accused had not, as charged, betrayed the Party, but were
defenseless and remained largely passive when confronted with Stalin's
inexorable will. In much the same sense, when facing certain defeat Hitler did
not consider surrendering to save German lives but on the contrary declared the
entire German nation unfit to go on living, unfit to be members of the
"Aryan" race, if and when it failed to enact his will. And yet Hitler
and Stalin, unlike ordinary dictators, were as much the "products" as
the leaders of their respective movements, their directions as much as their
directors. "All that you are, you are through me; and all that I am, I am
through you alone," Hitler said to the S.A. (the brown-shirted Sturmabteilung
or storm troopers) who preceded the "elite" S.S. in the ever changing
"hierarchies" of Nazism. He spoke of himself as a "magnet"
that attracted the "steel" of the German people. As the will of a
totalitarian movement the leader is irreplaceable; as a function of that
movement, however, he is replaceable by virtually any of his henchmen, and both
Hitler and Stalin knew that. Hence Arendt referred to them both as
"non-persons" or "non-entities."
|
From
"Ideology and Propaganda," The Hannah
Arendt Papers (The Library of Congress Manuscript Division).
|
For
Arendt the principal consideration was not the amount of suffering or the
number of victims, but the fact that in the camps human beings were destroyed
without cause or reason. "Just as the victims in the death factories or
the holes of oblivion are no longer 'human' in the eyes of their executioners,
so this newest species of criminals is beyond the pale even of solidarity in
human sinfulness." The crimes that were committed had no humanly
comprehensible motives. The sheer, irresponsible momentum of this new kind of
criminality was like a juggernaut or fireball that, if unchecked, might ravage
the human world and reduce it to ashes until there was nothing left for it to
consume but itself. Its capacity for total destruction was the reason, in
Arendt's judgment, that totalitarian terror was radically evil. It was as if
for the first time the root of evil appeared in the world from wherever it had
been kept hidden by laws, conscience, and such principles as honor and
excellence, and even the fear which individual human beings manifest when they
are still free to do so.
The
"total domination of man" was radically evil, in Arendt's eyes, not
only because it was unprecedented but because it did not make sense. She asked:
Why should lust for power, which from
the beginning of recorded history has been considered the political and social
sin par excellence, suddenly transcend all previously known limitations of
self-interest and utility and attempt not simply to dominate men as they are
but to change their very nature; not only to kill whoever is in the way of
further power accumulation but also innocent and harmless bystanders, and this
even when such murder is an obstacle, rather than an advantage, for the
accumulation of power?
(see "Ideology and Propaganda")
(see "Ideology and Propaganda")
There
is no ready answer to that question. In Hitler's case it is well known that his
unrelenting dehumanization and destruction of those who presented no threat to
him hindered his ability to fight effectively against his real enemies at the
end of World War II. What is the point of dominating men at any cost, not as
they are but in order "to change their very nature"? If it is for the
sake of "the consistency of a lying world order," as she went on to
suggest, what is the point of a system that even if it succeeded in destroying
the human world would not end in the creation of a "thousand-year
Reich" or "Messianic Age" but only in self-destruction? Arendt,
to be sure, never thought the suicidal "victory" of totalitarianism
likely. That would first require global rule by one totalitarian power,
and in that regard she believed that Hitler's invasion of Russia in 1941 was
symbolically significant in spite of his pact with Stalin two years earlier and
in spite of the two leaders' mutual admiration which she emphasized. Moreover,
she saw that "no system has ever been less capable [than totalitarianism]
of gradually expanding its sphere of influence and holding on to its conquests."
Most important of all, because plurality is the inescapable condition of human
existence--"not Man but men inhabit this planet"--Arendt increasingly
came to consider farfetched the notion that a single totalitarian regime could
ever destroy the entire world.
That
totalitarianism appeared in two countries at almost the same time is an
irrevocable fact, and its recurrence is more easily imagined than its first
occurrences ever were. There are certainly important lessons to be pondered
about its origins, the "elements" out of which totalitarian movements
arose. Today the widespread existence of masses and mass societies, alienated
from the world and attracted not only to ideologies but to isms of any
kind as answers to their sense of homelessness, constitutes such a lesson. Yet
Arendt stated over and over that the evil of totalitarian domination
confounds human understanding, that it explodes "our categories of
political thought and our standards for moral judgment." (see "The Difficulties of Understanding")
That such evil cannot be encompassed by conventional categories of thought,
that it has no humanly comprehensible motives, is its radicality. It is one
thing to understand the "idea" of totalitarianism, but coming to
terms with "actions [that] constitute a break with all our
traditions" is another. Having pondered that impasse for years, Arendt
turned her attention to a critique of the entire tradition of Western political
thought (see "Karl Marx and the Tradition of Western Political
Thought") and experimented with rethinking such basic political
concepts as action, power, and law. She asked herself such questions as
"What is authority?" "What is freedom?" and "What is
politics?" (see "What Is Authority?" and "What Is Freedom?" in Between Past
and Future, "Was Ist Politik?" and "Einführung in der Politik I, II") It
was then that she encountered Adolf Eichmann.
When
Eichmann was taken captive in Argentina by agents of the Israeli government and
brought to trial in Jerusalem, Arendt saw an opportunity, unusual for
philosophers, to confront the "realm of human affairs and human deeds . .
. directly." (see "Concern with Politics in Recent European Philosophical
Thought") She reported on the trial for The New Yorker
magazine and shortly after Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality
of Evil was published in 1963, prompted by questions submitted by a
journalist, she reflected on why she, "a writer and teacher of political
philosophy . . . had . . . undertaken a reporter's job." It was, she said,
because the trial offered her the opportunity to encounter "in the
flesh" a notorious Nazi criminal, and she was eager to grasp, if possible,
his individual guilt, why he had done what he did, which, she
added, was "not relevant" to her more theoretical considerations in The
Origins of Totalitarianism. In the earlier work she had dealt with the
"type" of totalitarian criminals, but now she sought to know
"Who was Eichmann?" and "What were his deeds, not insofar as his
crimes were part and parcel of the Nazi system" but insofar as he was a
distinct human being? She had, she said, "the wish to expose myself--not
to the deeds which, after all, were well known--but to the evildoer
himself." That was "the most powerful motive in my decision to go to
Jerusalem."3 (see Grafton document)
 Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, 1960s. Courtesy of the Hannah Arendt Trust. |
 Mary McCarthy with Hannah Arendt, Aberdeen, Scotland, ca. 1974. Courtesy of the Hannah Arendt Trust. |
There are ways in which Eichmann in
Jerusalem recalls the last sections of The Origins of Totalitarianism,
but there are also important respects in which it differs. Arendt laid
considerable emphasis on these differences in a number of letters. To Mary
McCarthy she mentioned three of them. She wrote first that she no longer
believed in "holes of oblivion" because "there are simply too
many people in the world to make oblivion possible." Secondly, she
realized that "Eichmann was much less influenced by ideology" than
she would have assumed before attending the trial. What had become clear to her
was that "extermination per se" did not depend on ideology. Thirdly,
and this was by far the most important difference, the phrase banality of
evil "stands in contrast to . . . 'radical evil.'" This last
distinction is developed in more detail in a letter to Gershom Scholem (see letter to Scholem, July 24, 1963). There
she wrote: "It is indeed my opinion now that evil is never 'radical,' that
it is only extreme." "Thought tries to reach some depth, to go to the
roots, and the moment it concerns itself with evil, it is frustrated."
That there is nothing in evil for thought to latch onto is what Arendt meant by
the banality of evil. Not the murderous deeds but the evildoer she faced in
Jerusalem and the massiveness of the evil he inflicted on the world are banal
in that sense.4 The realization that the most
extreme evil has no meaning that the human mind can reveal, that it is not only
senseless in its own terms but meaningless in any terms, was momentous; to say
the least it afforded Arendt relief from a burden she had borne for many years.
In
a later letter to McCarthy, who had written of the moral exhilaration that
reading Eichmann in Jerusalem afforded her, Arendt noted: "you were
the only reader to understand what otherwise I have never admitted--namely that
I wrote this book in a state of euphoria." In a letter to a German
correspondent (see letter to Meier Cronemeyer, July 18th, 1963)
she said that twenty years after she had learned of the existence of Auschwitz
she experienced a cura posterior, i.e., a healing of her inability to
think through to its root the evil of totalitarian criminality. In style Eichmann
in Jerusalem is unlike anything else in the corpus of Arendt's writings. As
the account of a trial of criminal action it is dramatic. In an interview
Arendt said: "That the tone of voice is predominantly ironic is completely
true," adding that "the tone of voice in this case is really the
person," i.e., herself, the dramatist. She might have remained silent and
not written the book at all, she said, but she could never have written it
"differently." The posterior or later cure is important in another
sense, for here, in a trial whose only purpose was to mete out justice, the
terrible injury inflicted on the Jewish people would, at least in her judgment,
at long last be vindicated as a crime against humanity.
3. The entire Eichmann file is among the
most important components of the collection of Arendt's papers in the Library
of Congress. It is a treasure of documents, including notes by Eichmann,
transcriptions, and accounts of the proceedings. There are many letters both
pro and contra Arendt which testify to the depth and the bitterness of the controversy
that sprang up immediately after the publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem.
4. From the first the notion of the banality
of evil proved highly contentious and it is still a stumbling block for
some of the most astute and sympathetic expositors of Arendt's thought.
|
From
Eichmann in Jerusalem "Epilogue". The Hannah Arendt Papers
(The Library of Congress Manuscript Division).
|
Arendt
saw Eichmann, on trial for his life, as a "buffoon" whose
inability to speak was closely
connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the
standpoint of somebody else. No communication was possible with him, not
because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all
safeguards against the words and the presence of others, and hence against
reality as such . . . [It was] proof against reason and argument and
information and insight of any kind (see Eichmann in Jerusalem, chapters
3 and 5).
Having
encountered such a man, Arendt saw that the banality of evil is potentially far
greater in extent--indeed limitless--than the growth of evil from a
"root." A root can be uprooted, which is what she meant to do when
she spoke of "destroying" totalitarianism, but the evil perpetrated
by an Eichmann can spread over the face of the earth like a "fungus"
precisely because it has no root. Furthermore, the case of Eichmann led Arendt
to see that at least one evildoer was not "corruptible." Having
overcome or in his case forgotten any inclination he may have had to halt or
hinder the organization and transportation of millions of innocent Jews to
their deaths, Eichmann boasted that he had done his duty to the end! Unlike
Himmler, his ultimate superior in the chain of command and a chief architect of
the "final solution," Eichmann never attempted to
"negotiate" with the enemy when it became clear that the Nazi cause
was lost. He declared, on the contrary, "that he had lived his whole life
. . . according to a Kantian definition of duty," (see Eichmann in
Jerusalem, chapter 8) and Arendt noted that "to
the surprise of everybody, Eichmann came up with an approximately correct
definition of [Kant's] categorical imperative," though he had
"distorted" it in practice. She admitted, moreover, "that
Eichmann's distortion agrees with what he himself called the version of Kant
'for the household use of the little man,'" the identification of one's
will with "the source" of law, which for Eichmann was the will of the
Führer.
Perhaps the most provocative aspect of Eichmann
in Jerusalem is its study of human conscience. The court's refusal to
consider seriously the question of Eichmann's conscience resulted in its
failure to confront what Arendt called "the central moral, legal, and
political phenomena of our century." The Israeli judges understood conscience
traditionally as the voice of God or lumen naturale, speaking or shining
in every human soul, telling or illuminating the difference between right and
wrong, and this simply did not apply in the case of Eichmann. Eichmann had
a conscience, and it seems to have "functioned in the expected way"
for a few weeks after he became engaged in the transport of Jews, and then,
when he heard no voice saying Thou shalt not kill but on the contrary
every voice saying Thou shalt kill, "it began to function the other
way around." (see Eichmann in Jerusalem, chapter 6) And this was by no means true
only for Eichmann. Arendt was convinced by testimony presented at the trial
that a general "moral collapse" had been experienced
throughout Europe, from which even respected members of the Jewish leadership
were not exempt.5 (see Eichmann in Jerusalem, chapter 7)
And
so the controversy raged. Arendt may have exaggerated the extent to which the
attacks against her were prompted by a "conspiracy" of the Jewish
establishment and leveled against a book that was "never written."
(see "Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship")
Certainly not everyone who disagreed with her, sometimes vehemently, was
malevolent or ill-informed (see letter from Hans Jonas to H.A. marked "etwa
Januar 1964"). Much that was said was indeed preposterous, for
example, that she attempted to exonerate Eichmann when she had done exactly the
opposite; or that she was morally insensitive in asking why Jews had not fought
back, a question raised by the prosecutor but never by Arendt, who understood
that the processes of dehumanization precluded rebellion. Yet many were deeply
disturbed by her depiction of an Eichmann who was not an ideological
anti-Semite nor even criminally motivated--he wanted to rise in rank not by
murdering anyone but by "conscientiously" doing his job. "Intent
to do wrong" was not, in Arendt's opinion, proved against him. He was not
"morally insane" for in his own "muddled" way he
distinguished between right and wrong, and the results of psychological tests
showed that he was not a "monster" but frighteningly normal.
Eichmann
was not stupid; he knew but did not think what he was doing, not in the
past and not in Jerusalem. He contradicted himself constantly, but he did not
lie; his conscience did not bother him; and he did not suffer from remorse:
"He knew that what he had once called his duty was now called a crime, and
he accepted this new code of judgment as if it were nothing but another
language rule" (see "Thinking and Moral Considerations").
Therefore it was important to Arendt that the justice of the death sentence
delivered by the court be seen by all, and for that reason she offered her own
judgment, addressing Eichmann in the following terms:
Just as you supported and carried out a
policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people
of a number of 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 share the world with
you. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang (see Eichmann in
Jerusalem, "Epilogue" -- part one and part two").
The
"Epilogue" to Eichmann in Jerusalem deals with the legality of
the Jerusalem trial, which for the most part Arendt defended, but she thought
it necessary to clarify what the Israeli court's judgment left obscure.
Eichmann was guilty of "an attack upon human diversity as such, that is,
upon a characteristic of the 'human status' without which the very words
'mankind' or 'humanity' would be devoid of meaning." Arendt recognized in
Eichmann, who struck her as "not even strange" (nicht einmal
unheimlich) (see letter from H.A. to Heinrich Bluecher, April 15, 1961),
the exemplary criminal capable of committing "the new crime, the crime
against humanity." He "supported and carried out" the physical
destruction of European Jewry and would have done the same for any group or
anyone at all whom a power higher than himself had decreed unfit to live.
5. A year later (1964), writing about Rolf
Hochhuth's The Deputy, Arendt found that the wartime Roman Catholic
pope, Pius XII, was not exempt either.
|
From
Eichmann in Jerusalem "Epilogue". The Hannah Arendt Papers
(The Library of Congress Manuscript Division).
|
Arendt
saw Eichmann, on trial for his life, as a "buffoon" whose
inability to speak was closely
connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the
standpoint of somebody else. No communication was possible with him, not
because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all
safeguards against the words and the presence of others, and hence against
reality as such . . . [It was] proof against reason and argument and
information and insight of any kind (see Eichmann in Jerusalem, chapters
3 and 5).
Having
encountered such a man, Arendt saw that the banality of evil is potentially far
greater in extent--indeed limitless--than the growth of evil from a
"root." A root can be uprooted, which is what she meant to do when
she spoke of "destroying" totalitarianism, but the evil perpetrated
by an Eichmann can spread over the face of the earth like a "fungus"
precisely because it has no root. Furthermore, the case of Eichmann led Arendt
to see that at least one evildoer was not "corruptible." Having
overcome or in his case forgotten any inclination he may have had to halt or
hinder the organization and transportation of millions of innocent Jews to
their deaths, Eichmann boasted that he had done his duty to the end! Unlike
Himmler, his ultimate superior in the chain of command and a chief architect of
the "final solution," Eichmann never attempted to
"negotiate" with the enemy when it became clear that the Nazi cause
was lost. He declared, on the contrary, "that he had lived his whole life
. . . according to a Kantian definition of duty," (see Eichmann in
Jerusalem, chapter 8) and Arendt noted that "to
the surprise of everybody, Eichmann came up with an approximately correct
definition of [Kant's] categorical imperative," though he had
"distorted" it in practice. She admitted, moreover, "that
Eichmann's distortion agrees with what he himself called the version of Kant
'for the household use of the little man,'" the identification of one's
will with "the source" of law, which for Eichmann was the will of the
Führer.
Perhaps
the most provocative aspect of Eichmann in Jerusalem is its study of
human conscience. The court's refusal to consider seriously the question of
Eichmann's conscience resulted in its failure to confront what Arendt called
"the central moral, legal, and political phenomena of our century."
The Israeli judges understood conscience traditionally as the voice of God or lumen
naturale, speaking or shining in every human soul, telling or illuminating
the difference between right and wrong, and this simply did not apply in the
case of Eichmann. Eichmann had a conscience, and it seems to have
"functioned in the expected way" for a few weeks after he became
engaged in the transport of Jews, and then, when he heard no voice saying Thou
shalt not kill but on the contrary every voice saying Thou shalt kill,
"it began to function the other way around." (see Eichmann in
Jerusalem, chapter 6) And this was by no means true
only for Eichmann. Arendt was convinced by testimony presented at the trial
that a general "moral collapse" had been experienced
throughout Europe, from which even respected members of the Jewish leadership
were not exempt.5 (see Eichmann in Jerusalem, chapter 7)
And
so the controversy raged. Arendt may have exaggerated the extent to which the
attacks against her were prompted by a "conspiracy" of the Jewish
establishment and leveled against a book that was "never written."
(see "Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship")
Certainly not everyone who disagreed with her, sometimes vehemently, was
malevolent or ill-informed (see letter from Hans Jonas to H.A. marked "etwa
Januar 1964"). Much that was said was indeed preposterous, for
example, that she attempted to exonerate Eichmann when she had done exactly the
opposite; or that she was morally insensitive in asking why Jews had not fought
back, a question raised by the prosecutor but never by Arendt, who understood
that the processes of dehumanization precluded rebellion. Yet many were deeply
disturbed by her depiction of an Eichmann who was not an ideological
anti-Semite nor even criminally motivated--he wanted to rise in rank not by
murdering anyone but by "conscientiously" doing his job. "Intent
to do wrong" was not, in Arendt's opinion, proved against him. He was not
"morally insane" for in his own "muddled" way he
distinguished between right and wrong, and the results of psychological tests
showed that he was not a "monster" but frighteningly normal.
Eichmann
was not stupid; he knew but did not think what he was doing, not in the
past and not in Jerusalem. He contradicted himself constantly, but he did not
lie; his conscience did not bother him; and he did not suffer from remorse:
"He knew that what he had once called his duty was now called a crime, and
he accepted this new code of judgment as if it were nothing but another
language rule" (see "Thinking and Moral Considerations").
Therefore it was important to Arendt that the justice of the death sentence
delivered by the court be seen by all, and for that reason she offered her own
judgment, addressing Eichmann in the following terms:
Just as you supported and carried out a
policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people
of a number of 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 share the world with
you. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang (see Eichmann in
Jerusalem, "Epilogue" -- part one and part two").
The
"Epilogue" to Eichmann in Jerusalem deals with the legality of
the Jerusalem trial, which for the most part Arendt defended, but she thought
it necessary to clarify what the Israeli court's judgment left obscure.
Eichmann was guilty of "an attack upon human diversity as such, that is,
upon a characteristic of the 'human status' without which the very words
'mankind' or 'humanity' would be devoid of meaning." Arendt recognized in
Eichmann, who struck her as "not even strange" (nicht einmal
unheimlich) (see letter from H.A. to Heinrich Bluecher, April 15, 1961),
the exemplary criminal capable of committing "the new crime, the crime
against humanity." He "supported and carried out" the physical
destruction of European Jewry and would have done the same for any group or
anyone at all whom a power higher than himself had decreed unfit to live.
5. A year later (1964), writing about Rolf
Hochhuth's The Deputy, Arendt found that the wartime Roman Catholic
pope, Pius XII, was not exempt either.
With
the establishment of the state of Israel Jews were finally able "to sit in
judgment on crimes committed against their own people"; they no longer
needed "to appeal to others for protection and justice, or fall back upon
the compromised phraseology of the rights of man." Arendt had long known
that universal human rights are a chimera for those who lack the power to
defend them. She knew from her own experience that despite any proclamation of
their universality such rights are not "independent of human plurality"
and are not possessed by human beings "expelled from the human
community." (see The Origins of Totalitarianism,
"Imperialism," chapter 9, "The Perplexities of the Rights of
Man") She spoke, therefore, of "a right to have rights," a right
"to live in a framework where one is judged by one's actions and
opinions," and it was that right, denied by totalitarianism, that she
hoped would be seen by all as the basic principle of human solidarity. The
right to have rights, the right of a plurality of people "to act together
concerning things that are of equal concern to each," was for Arendt the
minimum condition of a common human world. That right, the source of the rights
of freedom and justice, would be "politically secured" if and only if
it were set forth as the principal tenet of international law, a law
"above nations," the enforcement of which would be legally binding on
all peoples and all nations, transcending any "rules of sovereignty."6 (see The Origins of
Totalitarianism, first edition, "Concluding Remarks") After
having written of a "right to have rights" but before encountering
Eichmann Arendt spoke of the "thunder" of the "explosion"
of totalitarian crimes that nevertheless leaves us silent when "we dare to
ask, not 'What are we fighting against' but 'What are we fighting for?'"
(see "Tradition and the Modern Age" in Between
Past and Future (originally in "Karl Marx and the Tradition of Western
Political Thought," long manuscript); cf. "The Difficulties of Understanding")
She did not answer that question directly, presumably because she wanted her
readers to think it through for themselves. It seems safe to say that Arendt
herself considered the fundamental right to have rights something worth
"fighting for."
The
difficulty is that the right to have rights, as well as the rights of man, had
never been "philosophically established." Here too the Eichmann
trial, in particular the question of conscience, pointed the direction for the
most challenging part of Arendt's late work. In a sense she deconstructed the
phenomenon of conscience into something like the rules of a changing game or,
better, the changing rules of the same game. She was not satisfied with that,
however, and wanted to find out what we mean when we talk about moral phenomena
insofar as they are not rules, customs, or habits. She found that what
had traditionally been considered the voice of conscience was in fact the actualization
of consciousness in the activity of thinking. Thus the relation of
thoughtlessness to evil became concrete. What is most elusive and difficult to
grasp is that Arendt meant literally the activity of thinking and not its
results, not things thought, from which at best new rules might be derived
which would either dissolve in further thinking or become unthought customs and
habits.
What Arendt meant by the actualization
of consciousness was not consciousness in the psychological sense but a
knowing-with-oneself (con-scientia) that imposes limits when it is
experienced. The crucial point is that the activity of thinking provides an
intense and ineluctable experience of plurality. While thinking, i.e., while
experiencing the silent dialogue of thought, the ego splits in two, disclosing
an inner difference within an apparent identity. At lightning speed these
"two-in-one," as Arendt called them, converse as long as the activity
of thinking lasts. She found that these thinking "partners" have to
be on good terms, essentially in agreement, because they cannot go on or resume
thinking if they contradict one another. Arendt grounded, existentially, the
logical law of non-contradiction in the congeniality of the two-in-one. By the
same token it is in the activity of thinking that the explicitly human
relationship between a plurality, though it be only of two, is first
established. Again, it is not an "idea" but the experience of sheer
activity that makes the one not only respect and relish but refuse to
abrogate at any cost the right of the other to freely exercise the right
to think. Socrates, who never wrote anything, preferred to die rather than live
apart from his thinking "partner" and in Arendt's many references to
him stands forth as the diametric opposite of Eichmann. Eichmann's
contradictions indicated not that he had lost consciousness but that he had no
experience of inner plurality, no contact with himself, and that therefore he
could be relied upon to do anything, anything at all, that his
"conscience" assured him was his duty.7
The
foregoing amounts to no more than a glance at Arendt's late work. It should at
least be added that thinking is only one of three mental activities that
concerned her. Willing depends in a different way on inner plurality. It
is a restless and inharmonious activity in which the willing ego is split two
or more times and pulled in different directions. Willing generates power to
affect the future, yet it is only with the cessation of the activity that the
individuated self "springs" into action. Judging, on which we
do not have Arendt's last word, is politically the most important of these
activities. As its own witness it curbs the willing ego by manifesting in the
world the justness implicit in the relationship of the two-in-one of thinking.
Unlike either thinking or willing judging embraces the plurality of the outer
world, of distinct men and women, of persons. The major texts that
Arendt wrote following Eichmann in Jerusalem revolutionize the meaning
of personal responsibility and the nature of moral judgment. Although with few
exceptions they have played a minor role in the abundant secondary literature
that has grown up around her work, today there are indications, especially
among younger readers and scholars, of a new interest in these texts. In
general Arendt's thought has proved stimulating because of the depth, passion,
and independence of her mind and because she had the courage to write against
the grain of accepted political prejudgments or prejudices. The later works
that are here made accessible (see "Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship,"
"Some Questions of Moral Philosophy,"
"Basic Moral Propositions," "Philosophy and Politics: What is Political Philosophy?"
"Thinking and Moral Considerations,"
"Kant's Political Philosophy," and The
Life of the Mind: "Thinking" and "Willing") add a
different dimension to the attention that in all likelihood will be paid to
Arendt in the future, a philosophic dimension that was there from the
beginning, to be sure, but which she began to articulate only at the end of her
life and did not live to fulfill. Hannah Arendt's legacy to the generations
coming after her is not so much a teaching to be learned as a challenge to be
met.
6. Arendt consistently opposed the idea of
sovereignty as a power above law.
7. It was due to his flagrant
contradictions, which were by no means restricted to moral matters, that Arendt
saw Eichmann as a "buffoon." Speaking for the last time to the
witnesses at his execution Eichmann "began by stating . . . that he . . .
did not believe in a life after death [and] then proceeded: 'After a short
while, gentlemen, we shall all meet again.'" (see Eichmann in
Jerusalem, chapter 15)
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Assalamu'alaikum pa saya siska wulandari administrasi 1D.sudah beberapa minggu ini sangat tertarik tentang biografi Hanna seakan ingin mempelajari dan memahami lebih lanjut mengenai dirinya. Seorang wanita di era abad20 yang sangat kritis dan berani menentang politik yang menyimpang, jiwa sosial yang begitu kuat. Sudah sangat jarang wanita di jaman era modern saat ini yang berjiwa dan berfikiran seperti hanna.