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Vol. LX, No. 3: AUTUMN 2007
Grease, Balance, and Point of View in the
Work of Anthony Trollope
Skating Upriver; A Wedding in Maine;
Ring Effect
Bald Spot
The Interpreters;
In Tide Pools
CHRONICLES
Art
At the Galleries:
Toronto & New York
Theatre
International Theatre
Dance
Cunningham's Collaboration
REVIEWS
The Long and the
Short of Robinson
The Art of What Remains
How Dosty Did It
Another Wharton
If Lucky Jim Could
See Him Now
Jim Crace's
Violent Verities
COMMENT
Letter from India
Hannah Arendt was probably the most formidable public intellectual in postwar America. Some of the many kudos she won were genuine and thoughtful, accorded by those who had read her work deeply and considered her philosophical and moral conclusions with care. Some, though, were merely automatic, fealty paid to her obvious brainpower and to her prestige as the representative of a European and specifically Germanic Kultur that had long since ceased to exist in the United States.
It is possible that Arendt was overvalued on the one hand yet misunderstood on the other. Some of her high reputation surely came from a sycophantic and uncritical acceptance of her own serious self-presentation, for of course one of the most important lessons life has to offer is that other people tend to take you exactly as seriously as you take yourself. Isaiah Berlin privately expressed the opinion that Arendt was the most overrated philosopher of the century. Yet the outrage created by Eichmann in Jerusalem, particularly among the Jewish community, seems misplaced. Many accused her of having betrayed her own people and there was, as Konrad Kellen wrote at the time, “a feeling that Hannah Arendt has wronged the victims, added insult to their injury and given food for glee and future mischief to the enemies of the Jews.” 1
Arendt may have made mistakes and misjudgments, but the importance of Eichmann in Jerusalem lies in her very genuine and honest attempt to think, without being fenced in by the traditional barriers of ideology, opinion, and political bias. Opinions, Arendt very persuasively argues, obstruct true thought; true thought banishes opinions.
It is in [the nature of thought] to undo, unfreeze as it were, what language, the medium of thinking, has frozen into thought—words (concepts, sentences, definitions, doctrines), whose “weakness” and inflexibility Plato denounces so splendidly. . . . The consequence of this peculiarity is that thinking inevitably has a destructive, undermining effect on all established criteria, values, measurements for good and evil, in short on those customs and rules of conduct we treat of in morals and ethics.This comes close to Arendt’s ideas about “passionate thinking.” “Thinking as pure activity—and this means impelled neither by the thirst for knowledge, nor by the drive for cognition—can become a passion which not so much rules and oppresses all other capacities and gifts, as it orders them and prevails through them.”
It was the simple inability of men like Adolf Eichmann to think, she posited, that turned them into killers and destroyers. Instead of thoughts they had opinions, customs, “morality” imposed by society. Their society did not encourage its citizens to think (and perhaps no society ever does). Those who adhered to the accepted and imposed “ethical” code (and Arendt always reminds us of the Greek origin of the word “ethics,” which referred to habit and custom rather than independent moral judgment) were the “good citizens,” and these good citizens who formed the habit of following such a code found it relatively easy to accept a new code, just as unquestioningly. Thus when in Hitler’s Germany the edict “Thou shalt not kill” almost overnight became “Thou shalt kill,” it was the good citizens, the Eichmanns, who were able to change their ethical system with the least amount of mental effort, while the misfits, those who had always been in the habit of questioning the codes of their society, found themselves unable to participate in the new “moral order” imposed by the Nazis. It is the banal people—the natural conformists—who become the instruments of evil.
It is an utterly arresting theory, and a credible one, and it is easy to see why it made Arendt’s name world–famous, though many have not been persuaded and others are persuaded only up to a point. Her friend J. Glenn Gray for example, Heidegger’s American editor, who had interrogated hundreds of Nazi functionaries after the war, pondered the issue: “That [evil] has no metaphysical reality or depth is something I shall want to challenge when I see you. It strikes me as more Platonic than most of your thought. Though you established it to my satisfaction in the case of Eichmann, I wonder if you would have used such a subtitle [for your book] had Goebbels been in the dock”—a very good question. Karl Jaspers, Arendt’s mentor and lifelong friend, puzzled over the question too. “I think: the notion is illuminating, and as a book title it is striking. It means: this man’s evil is banal, not evil is banal . . . ‘What is evil’ still stands behind the phrase as it characterizes Eichmann.”
Two new books have recently appeared that will rekindle interest in Arendt and her ideas: Letters 1925–1975: Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger,2 and Responsibility and Judgment, a collection of writings from the last decade of her life. 3 The Letters, published here for the first time, prove unsatisfactory on almost every level. Those seeking gossip, titillation, or even a modicum of romantic inspiration from these two distinguished and consummately intelligent lovers will be sadly let down, for as “love letters” the missives are as banal (to co-opt her own word) as those of any pair of bourgeois adulterers. And those who are familiar with other biographical material on the two protagonists will be dismayed not only at the banality but also by the letters’ opacity and dishonesty.
Arendt first met Heidegger in 1924, when she was an eighteen-year-old student at Marburg University and he, a thirty–five–year–old professor, was “the hidden king [who] reigned in the realm of thinking.” Heidegger, married to a conventional (and conventionally anti-Semitic) upper-middle-class woman, Elfride, fell in love with his gifted pupil, and the two embarked on an affair which went on for four years and a friendship which lasted, in spite of countless disappointments, a lifetime.
Arendt idolized the glamorous Heidegger during her youth, but her hero–worship could never have withstood his all–too–human behavior. His year as a Nazi party member was, of course, fatal to his international reputation, but Arendt was perhaps less shocked than others: she understood the German university system in which he hoped, by joining the party, to retain his influence; she understood the pressures he was under; and she also understood, by then, the personal flaws and weaknesses that would sully his name and his philosophy.
Among these weaknesses was excessive mysticism: “In the categorical opposition of the man (public opinion in the largest sense [das Man]) against the self, in which public reality has the function to hide the true realities and to prevent the appearance of truth, the old hostility of the philosopher toward the polis is only too apparent,” she commented; his work, in other words, represented a general and unfortunate trend among the philosophers of that time to turn away from the classic philosophical questions that in their era had become more important, perhaps, than ever before in history: “what is politics? who is man as a political being? what is freedom?”
Another of Heidegger’s flaws, in Arendt’s eyes, was a quality that most people would call sexism (though Arendt did not use this term, being as skeptical of feminism, sixties and seventies style, as she was of every other formal creed). Still, even as a besotted young girl she must have on some level resented a letter like this one (dated Feb. 10, 1925): “the way of genuineness and seriousness . . . [is] not in the forced academic activity of many of your sex—activity that one day somehow comes apart, leaving them helpless and untrue to themselves. For it is at the point when individual intellectual work begins that the initial preservation of one’s innermost womanly essence becomes divisive.” Innermost womanly essence! Was it such a very great leap from this to Kinder, Küche, Kirche?
Arendt’s gender can only have intensified Heidegger’s jealousy and resentment when her own name became nearly as famous as his. “I know that it is intolerable for him that my name appears in public, that I write books, etc. I have really fibbed to him about myself all the while, behaving as though none of this existed and as if I, so to speak, could not count to three, except when it came to giving an interpretation of his own things; in that case it was always gratifying to him when it turned out that I could count to three and sometimes even to four.” Arendt complied with his wish for intellectual dominance by not publishing criticism of his work, though his mannerisms and vanity as well as his mysticism irritated her: “I was reading yesterday the latest piece from Heidegger,” she wrote in the early fifties, “on Identity and Difference, which is of great interest, but—he cites himself and interprets himself, as though he had written a Biblical text. I find it simply insufferable.”
The caustic humor of which both protagonists were capable makes no appearance in the Letters, which are filled with sunshine, bird song, springtime, and other conventional props of romance. They are written in self-consciously elevated language in which sexual facts are hidden behind conventional phrases and ideas.
The world is now no longer mine and yours—but ours— . . . what we do and achieve belongs not to you and me but to us. Only that gable and paths and May morning and scent of flowers—are ours. And only that all kindness to others and every unforced, authentic act is our life. Only that the joyful struggle—and the definite commitment to something chosen—are ours.—Ours. That can never be lost—but can only become richer, clearer—more certain, so as to develop into a great passion for existence.This is Heidegger speaking, believe it or not, and here as elsewhere in the correspondence it seems that his capacity for “passionate thinking” could desert him. It is his voice that predominates in this volume, for Arendt was more careful to keep his letters than vice versa, and more than three–quarters of those included here are from him to her.
The sickly tone of the above letter pervades nearly every page of the book and forces the curious reader to devote most of his attention to the space between the lines. The letters which speak of Elfride are especially amusing, with Heidegger insisting that a spiritual bond between the two beloved women must exist: he was, in the clueless way of innumerable men, forever trying to bring wife and mistress together and force them into friendship.
“In no way did my wife want to infringe on the fate of our love,” Heidigger insisted in 1950. “All she wanted to do was free this gift of the taint that had necessarily marked it because of my silence. This silence was not simply an abuse of her trust. In fact, it was because I knew that my wife would not just understand but also affirm the joyousness and the richness of our love as a gift of fate that I pushed her trust aside.” The truth, as any woman would know, was that Elfride was wild with rage when she discovered her husband’s dalliance; even in old age she never forgave her husband’s former lover, and her hatred of her sexual rival was intensified by her anti-Semitism. Arendt, in turn, was disgusted by Elfride’s vulgarity and limited mental powers, and her husband, Heinrich Blücher, shared this disgust: “How uniquely an empty wife can destroy everything,” he said apropos of Frau Heidegger. “Das Nichts nichtet” (the Nothing nothings).
For the most part, only Heidegger or Arendt specialists will take much of an interest in these letters—they are both too conventional and too personal (in that they deal very little with the public events and “interesting times” that so affected the correspondents’ lives) to attract special notice. There are, however, a few passages that point to the two very different moral, intellectual, and philosophical paths Arendt and Heidegger would take and help us to understand why the two of them, in spite of their mutual sympathy and romantic bond, had necessarily to diverge. Consider these statements, all from Heidegger’s letters to Arendt:
[J]ustice is not a function of power, but rather the ray of goodness that is one’s salvation. (1950)
The individual does not see into the eye of the world hurricane; the more it spins him around, the less he sees. (1950)
The essence of history keeps getting more and more enigmatic. The rift between man’s most essential efforts and his immediate ineffectuality is becoming increasingly uncanny. All this suggests that our habitual notions are limping behind the situation and will not catch up with it again. (1952)
Unlike you, I am only slightly interested in politics. For the most part, the state of the world is clear, after all. The power inherent in the essence of technology is scarcely recognized. Everything moves along at a superficial level. The individual can no longer do anything to oppose the arrogance of the “mass media” and the institutions. . . . (1974)
Heidegger’s defeatism, at least on a political level, is unmistakable. “The individual can no longer do anything”; Arendt devoted her professional life to affirming that the individual can oppose both media and institutions, even if in fact he seldom does so. “The individual does not see into the eye of the hurricane”; “The essence of history keeps getting more and more enigmatic.” Heidegger seems to be saying that where one does not understand the forces of history, one is compelled to move along with them, as indeed he did in the 1930s. Arendt said, many times, that the individual’s responsibility is to try to understand.
And what about “justice is not a function of power, but rather the ray of goodness that is one’s salvation”? This is both overly mystical and, in real terms, horrifyingly defeatist. If justice exists at all outside of a theological (and hence theoretical) context, it can only be based in power—in our own case, in the power of the judiciary system which derives from our polis. And as Arendt points out over and over in her writings, the judiciary system is the pillar of justice in our world, the guarantor that each individual will be examined and judged purely as an individual—not as a cog in a machine or an abstract reflection of some social ill. We are all equal, and personally responsible, before the law. Human rights that we like to think of as “inalienable” are actually anything but that: they only become “rights” when they are enforced by a system of justice upheld by political power.
All of this leads to the second book under consideration, Responsibility and Judgment. While the blurb claims that this volume “gathers together unpublished writings from the last decade of Arendt’s life, as she struggled to explicate the meaning of Eichmann in Jerusalem,” the eight essays are not actually unpublished but simply uncollected: several of them will already be familiar to Arendt’s readers and one, “Reflections on Little Rock,” is a famous piece of journalism that made a strong impact in its day (1959) and has already been anthologized, notably in the Penguin Portable Hannah Arendt.
But the editor of this volume, Jerome Kohn, has done a good job of turning essays on different subjects and from different periods of the author’s life into a unified whole. Arendt was always dissatisfied with the terms “ethics” and “morals,” drawing her readers’ attention to what “for want of a better term we call morality.” “In one way or another,” Kohn comments, “all the pieces in this collection can be read as tales of the missing ‘better term.’”
That is as good a way as any of describing Responsibility and Judgment. Central to the book are two essays, “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship” and “Some Questions of Moral Philosophy,” both based on lectures Arendt delivered during the 1960s. Here she attempts to clarify some of the issues raised in Eichmann in Jerusalem, in particular her frequently contested assertion that judgment is both correct and necessary. She remarks on “the outcry that greeted [Rolf] Hochhuth’s accusation of Pope Pius XII and also my own book on the Eichmann trial” and “the incredible moral confusion these debates have revealed, together with an odd tendency to take the side of the culprit whoever he might be at the moment. There was a whole chorus of voices that assured me that ‘there sits an Eichmann in every one of us.’. . . The only true culprits, it frequently was felt and even said, were people like Hochhuth and myself who dared to sit in judgment. . . .”
Are these voices right? Is there indeed an Eichmann in every one of us, and have we any right to judge? Arendt’s decision was that judgment was not so much a right as a necessity. She centered her arguments not within the Judaeo-Christian moral code but in Socrates’ dictum that it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong, tracing the rationale for the dictum to the Socratic idea of the individual who is two–in–one:
[E]ven though I am one, I am not simply one, I have a self and I am related to this self as my own self. This self is by no means an illusion; it makes itself heard by talking to me—I talk to myself, I am not only aware of myself—and in this sense, though I am one, I am two–in–one and there can be harmony or disharmony with the self. If I disagree with other people, I can walk away; but I cannot walk away from myself. . . . [I]f I do wrong I am condemned to live together with a wrongdoer in an unbearable intimacy; I can never get rid of him.Therefore, the greatest evildoers we know are not the classic, self-tormenting villains as imagined, for example, by Shakespeare—Richard III, Iago—but those, like Eichmann, who never bother to become acquainted with their own “selves.”
Philosophy (and also great literature . . .) knows the villain only as someone who is in despair and whose despair sheds a certain nobility about him. I am not going to deny that this type of evildoer exists, but I am certain that the greatest evils we know of are not due to him who has to face himself again and whose curse is that he cannot forget. The greatest evildoers are those who don’t remember because they have never given thought to the matter, and, without remembrance, nothing can hold them back.
This leads naturally to another Arendt essay, “Collective Responsibility.” The idea of collective guilt seems instinctive: two or three generations of Germans have grown up doing penance for the sins of their parents and grandparents, and in our own country recent political leaders have felt the need to tender official apologies to Native Americans and to the now–distant descendants of slaves. The idea of collective virtue, of course, also holds sway: witness the general resentment Americans feel for the “ungrateful” French who refuse to acknowledge that “we” won World War II for them—while of course it was not “we” who won it, but our fathers and grandfathers and their contemporaries in many other countries. Collective innocence, too, as in the case of the European Jews during the Holocaust, is more or less an article of faith.
Arendt briskly repudiates these concepts. “There is such a thing as responsibility for things one has not done; one can be held liable for them. But there is no such thing as being or feeling guilty for things that happened without oneself actively participating in them. . . . [T]he cry ‘We are all guilty’ that at first hearing sounded so very noble and tempting has actually only served to exculpate to a considerable degree those who actually were guilty. Where all are guilty, nobody is.” This statement is, I think, undoubtedly true and just; but the sense of collective guilt seems impossible to dislodge, and perhaps in the end it serves a noble purpose: that of reminding us how very easy it is to do wrong in spite of the “moral codes” to which we think we adhere. Perhaps each of us could be an Eichmann, even though most people never become one; the idea of collective guilt, therefore, functions as a salutary warning of our constant potential for sin. Arendt argues with Christ’s injunction to “Judge not, that ye be not judged”: her own advice would seem to be “Judge; judge others, and judge yourself.”
Arendt’s forays into American life and culture are always of interest, though readers will find much to argue with her about. “Reflections on Little Rock,” in which she questioned whether the public schools were an appropriate locus for so many central battles of the civil rights struggle, caused a furor not only because, as Jerome Kohn says, it “struck a raw liberal nerve,” but because Arendt seemed, and still seems, just not to have got it. Her legalistic reasoning, persuasive on the page, is less so when one considers one’s own and one’s friends’ experiences. Her analysis of one of the famous photographs of the period—that of a teenaged black girl being escorted into the newly–integrated school—is subjective, bringing with it the baggage of her own childhood memories as a German Jew; these memories, it turns out, are not exactly applicable in this case. Did we hear the girl herself speak? Do we know what she might say? Only a few weeks ago I heard another subject of an equally famous integration photograph, a tiny girl who is now a middle-aged woman, being interviewed on NPR. She spoke a little bit about her fear but mostly about the pride and determination her parents and community had inculcated in her, the support she received from them, and the sense that she was playing a vital role in an historic scene. Arendt might have changed her mind if she had heard this woman; she was, in fact, somewhat shaken in her views after hearing Ralph Ellison’s dismayed reaction to her lack of understanding of the black community’s “ideal of sacrifice.”
When Arendt deals with the civil rights struggle, a subject of which contemporary American readers like ourselves will have more direct and personal knowledge than we do of the Holocaust, the fallacies of her thought and the rather arrogant confidence with which she expressed herself become more evident to us. These qualities had always been apparent to her earlier, European readers, and as various people noticed, it was often not so much Arendt’s opinions that raised hackles as the hectoring tone in which she expressed them.
In any case, while Arendt was undoubtedly a brilliant woman who performed the invaluable service of making us reexamine worn-out ideas about evil, conformity, and totalitarianism, she was no oracle. Walter Laqueur wrote:
The Holocaust is a subject that has to be confronted in a spirit of humility; whatever Ms. Arendt’s many virtues, humility was not one of them. “Judge not, that ye be not judged”—but Hannah Arendt loved to judge, and was at her most effective in the role of magister humanitatis, invoking moral pathos. And thus she rushed in where wiser men and women feared to tread, writing about extreme situations which she in her life had never experienced, an intellectual by temperament always inclined to overstatement, most at ease when dealing with abstractions, at her weakest when dealing with real people in concrete situations.True? Possibly. Theory on its own is always inadequate; but the unprecedented event of the Holocaust has demanded new attempts to apply abstract ideas to grim realities. Arendt’s have proved both useful and durable.
1 Elisabeth Young–Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (New Haven, 1982), p. 356.
2 LETTERS 1925–1975: Hannah Erendt and Martin Heidegger, by Hannah Erendt and Martin Heidegger. Trans. by Andrew Shields. Harcourt. $28.00.
3 RESPONSIBILITY AND JUDGMENT, by Hannah Erendt. Ed. and with an introduction by Jerome Kohn. Schocken Books. $25.00
The Hudson Review Vol. LVII, No. 2 (Summer 2004)
Copyright © 2004 by The Hudson Review