Power, Judgment and Political Evil

In Conversation with Hannah Arendt

Danielle Celermajer, Andrew Schaap, Andrew Schaap

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317076773
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In an interview with Günther Gaus for German television in 1964, Hannah Arendt insisted that she was not a philosopher but a political theorist. Disillusioned by the cooperation of German intellectuals with the Nazis, she said farewell to philosophy when she fled the country. This book examines Arendt's ideas about thinking, acting and political responsibility, investigating the relationship between the life of the mind and the life of action that preoccupied Arendt throughout her life. By joining in the conversation between Arendt and Gaus, each contributor probes her ideas about thinking and judging and their relation to responsibility, power and violence. An insightful and intelligent treatment of the work of Hannah Arendt, this volume will appeal to a wide number of fields beyond political theory and philosophy, including law, literary studies, social anthropology and cultural history.

Part I Thinking, Judging and Responsibility

Chapter 1 Hannah Arendt's Philosophy of Plurality: Thinking and Understanding and Eichmann in Jerusalem

Michael Mack

DOI: 10.4324/9781315601854-2

You ask about the effects of my work on others. If I may wax ironical, that is a masculine question. Men always want to be terribly influential, but I see that as somewhat external. Do I imagine myself being influential? No. I want to understand. And if others understand – in the same sense that I have understood – that gives me a sense of satisfaction, like feeling at home. (EU, 3)

This chapter attempts to delineate Hannah Arendt's philosophy of diversity by connecting her ideas about thinking with her analysis of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. Through his genocidal undertakings, Eichmann and his fellow perpetrators undermined the very foundations of human diversity. Eichmann did what he did because he was, as Arendt put it, ‘thoughtless’. Arendt's notion of thoughtlessness may be misleading because it could be taken to denote ignorance (EJ, 5). In this context, Devin O. Pendas (2007) has recently argued that Arendt's thought about ‘thoughtlessness’ is closely related to what she understands by the term ‘banality of evil’:

This is the foundation of the great insight of Arendt's notion of banal evil. In explaining Eichmann's evil, she claims that not only did he not have malicious motives for his action – the kind of motives that German law at least makes the sine qua non of the reproachability that grounds guilt – but that he in fact had ‘no motives at all’, that he simply ‘never realized what he was doing’. Again, this is not a claim that Eichmann was ignorant of the fate of the Jews he was deporting, in which case he could not have been criminally liable. Instead, what Eichmann failed to realize was the moral dimension of what he was doing. It was this that made his evil banal. The incapacity for judgment was no idiosyncratic glitch in Eichmann's personality but an inherent potential within the moral structure of modern life itself. (Pendas, 89)

Arendt's term ‘thoughtlessness’, and her application of this term to her analysis of Eichmann, can only be accurately understood if we study it in the context of her larger philosophy of plurality. This is precisely what this chapter sets out to do.

Significantly, Arendt's writing about diversity is closely bound up with her thought about ‘thought’ and ‘thoughtlessness’. How is Hannah Arendt's celebration of plurality related to her work about what it means to think and to understand? This chapter will address this issue by focusing mainly on her controversial book Eichmann in Jerusalem. Where can we find a philosophy of plurality in Arendt's work? First of all, it is central to her critique of philosophy as a monolithic discipline that is hostile to the sometimes illogical and confusing world of diverse actions, which Arendt associates with what she understands as politics. As we shall see, Arendt objects to being called a philosopher. At the same time, much of her work focuses on the question of what it means to think. Her ideas about what it means to think constitute an original and complex investigation into the way in which thinking is consubstantial with her understanding of ‘understanding’.

How is all of this related to Eichmann in Jerusalem? In this book Arendt discusses the philosophical and social implication of the Nazi genocide and she defines one of the major repercussions of the Nazi genocide as a devastating attack on human plurality. Arendt emphasizes that Eichmann was a perpetrator and facilitator of genocide because he was hostile to human plurality. Most importantly, his hostility to human plurality originates from his inability to think. Arendt does not intend this inability to think to denote stupidity. Rather than being the opposite of stupidity, thought describes the capacity to take cognizance of the infinite diversity of human life as it expands through past, present and future. In Between Past and Future, Arendt writes about ‘this small track of non-time which the activity of thought beats within the time-space of moral men and into which the trains of thought, of remembrance and anticipation, save whatever they touch from the ruin of historical and biographical time’ (BPF, 13). Thought saves what would otherwise fall prey to the transitory and thus destructive work of time. Arendt makes clear that Eichmann was not mentally handicapped: he was quite capable of efficient organization and administration. What she means by Eichmann's inability to think is the complete absence of understanding. Like thinking, understanding is the faculty that makes us aware that we are not monolithic entities but that, on the contrary, we live in a plural world.

In her interview with Günter Gaus, Arendt says that what motivates her to write what she writes is her specific attempt at understanding a specific problematic. In this context she makes clear that she ‘is not interested in how my work might affect people’ (EU, 3). On the face of it this may sound like a rather solipsistic motivation. A more nuanced reading, however, sheds light on Arendt's non-solipsistic approach towards thought. Even though the activity of understanding (like those of thinking and writing) is often performed in a quasi-solipsistic manner – on one's own and possibly without any regard to its effect on people – its very subject matter is nevertheless the world of others. It is the life of others which one tries to understand if one engages in the activities of thinking and ‘understanding’. In the same interview with Gaus, Arendt underlines that ‘understanding’ is a prime factor in all of her work as a writer and thinker: ‘What is important for me is to understand. For me, writing is a matter of seeking this understanding, part of understanding’ (EU, 3). Significantly, in Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt sets out to understand someone who is incapable of understanding and thus hostile to human plurality. This paradox accounts in some measure for the ironic tone that permeates the book.

Criminal Guilt and Metaphysical/Moral Guilt

In Eichmann in Jerusalem Arendt discusses criminal guilt but, as we shall see, she does not refrain from engaging with larger philosophical issues. Why does she feel the need to refer to her philosophical expertise in what is after all a journalistic report? The focus on criminal guilt is not enough, because the Nazi genocide distorted legal and moral standards by which one could judge crimes in the past. The unprecedented nature of the atrocities under discussion requires philosophical reflection.

At first sight, however, Arendt concentrates on criminal guilt. She begins and ends her account with a critique of the Jerusalem House of Justice. She criticizes the prosecutors for their concern with the general phenomenon of anti-Semitism rather than with the specific actions of the defendant:

Justice demands that the accused be prosecuted, defended, and judged, and that all the other questions of seemingly greater import – of ‘How could it happen?’and ‘Why did it happen?’, of ‘Why the Jews?’ and ‘Why the Germans?’, of ‘What was the role of other nations?’ and ‘What was the extent of co-responsibility on the side of the Allies’, of ‘How could the Jews through their own leaders cooperate in their own destruction?’ and ‘Why did they go to their death like lambs to the slaughter?’ – be left in abeyance. (EJ, 5)

This concern with actions is of course of a legal nature but it is also related to Arendt's differentiation between Christian and Jewish approaches to matters of guilt, revenge and reconciliation.

One can better understand Arendt's analysis at this point by returning to an earlier essay where she discusses the difference between Jewish reconciliation and the Christian ‘politics’. Critics have so far neglected the relevance of an early untitled essay (June 1950) in Arendt's Denktagebuch on what she understands as the Jewish notion of reconciliation, which is premised on a preoccupation with action. She contrasts what she sees as the Jewish understanding of reconciliation with a Christian type of politics that is divided into either forgiveness or revengefulness:

Within the Christian world there is indeed the inevitable (unausweichlich) alternative of either forgiveness (Verzeihung) – i.e. a Christian renunciation of any kind of action in the world (christlichem Verzicht auf irgendein Tun in der Welt) – or revenge (Rache). (DTB, 6)¹

1 ‘Innerhalb der christlichen Welt ist in der Tat die Alternative zwischen Verzeihung – d. h. christlichem Verzicht auf irgendein Tun in der Welt – und der Re-aktion der Rache unausweichlich’ (DTB, 6. My translation).

This limited choice between two opposed extremities – i.e. forgiveness and revenge – presupposes ‘a fundamental suspicion of human nature’ (gegründet auf dem fundamentalen Misstrauen in die menschliche Substanz) (DTB, 6).

Arendt's approach is highly idiosyncratic: she associates the very Christian notion of reconciliation not with Christianity but with Judaism. According to Arendt, the Jewish notion of reconciliation stipulates human beings who act and sometimes act unjustly, but it does not posit a ‘poisoned humanity’ (keine vergifteten Menschen) (DTB, 7). The term ‘poisoned humanity’ refers to the sinful motivation of the ‘old Adam’ which Pauline theology contrasts with the salvation achieved through belief in Jesus Christ (i.e. the new Adam). Clearly, Arendt here wishes to emphasize action and not inner motivation (i.e. an inner motivation determined by the extremities of either sin or salvation). In other words, a Christian form of politics that is based on the alternative of either forgiveness or revenge focuses on a predetermined inner motivation, whereas Judaism's concern with reconciliation allows for a non-foreclosed, open-ended form of intersubjectivity that is premised on the unpredictable, and not to be prejudged, nature of action.

It becomes amply clear that Arendt attempts to differentiate actions from inner motivations when we read her appraisal of Christianity's significance for propounding her theory of action. Arendt does not dismiss Jesus’ teaching of forgiveness as hostile to human diversity. Indeed, in The Human Condition Arendt relates Jesus’ notion of forgiveness to her understanding of politics as action and natality. Whereas revenge is predictable, forgiveness is the radically new: ‘In contrast to revenge, which is the natural, automatic reaction to transgression and which because of the irreversibility of the action process can be expected and calculated, the act of forgiveness can never be predicted’ (HC, 241).² She values Christianity's teaching about forgiveness, precisely because it is the sine qua non for the unpredictability of actions. Actions are ‘unpredictable’ as well as ‘irreversible’. This is why we can only act if we know some unpredictably wrong actions can be remedied through the act of forgiving:

2 Arendt in fact links Jesus’ notion of forgiveness to the Jewish concept of t’shuvah: ‘The original meaning of aphienai is to “dismiss” and “release” rather than “forgive”; metanoein means “change of mind” and – since it serves also to render the Hebrew shuv – “return”, “trace back one's steps”, rather than “repentance” with its psychological emotional overtones; what is required is: change your mind and “sin no more”, which is almost the opposite of doing penance’ (HC, 240 footnote 78).

Without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover; we would remain the victims of its consequences forever, not unlike the sorcerers apprentice who lacked the magic formula to break the spell. (HC, 237)

The Christian concept of forgiveness is so important for Arendt because it outdoes the causal spell of being determined by one's past deeds. According to Arendt, the theological terms forgiveness and reconciliation are of political relevance when they are interpreted not in terms of inner motivation but in terms of making room for further actions.

How is all of this relevant to a more nuanced understanding of Arendt's book on Eichmann? Here it is worth countering the perception that Arendt opted for the notion of banal evil (rather than radical evil), because she wanted to avoid theological topics. Dana Villa (1999, 57) thus argues that ‘Arendt's change of mind on the nature of evil reflected her own awareness that the concept of “radical evil” (at least as she had deployed it in The Origins of Totalitarianism) was irreducibly theological’. Arendt does not exclude theological issues from her understanding of politics. As we have seen, Arendt applies theological terms to a political field of action rather than inner motivation. Her interest in theology is related to her critique of philosophy as an intellectual activity that is disconnected from the plural sphere of actions.

Arendt does not shun theological terms when she attempts to find a valid reply to the question as to how we are able to establish a social and political world where the unpredictability and irreversibility of actions has the capacity to unfold in a non-violent manner. Arendt focuses on Eichmann's actions and it is this focus on action which is bound up with theological terms such as evil and reconciliation. According to Arendt, it is only by analyzing Eichmann's actions that one can pass judgment on his crimes. Arendt's notion of actions is, however, closely linked to her understanding of politics. Her approach to politics has, in turn, a philosophical undertone. She defines herself as a political theorist in order to distance herself from philosophy's hostility toward plurality, which is, according to her, synonymous with politics (see Betz Hull, 2002).

Plurality

At the opening of her interview with Gaus, Arendt objects to being called a philosopher: ‘I am afraid I have to protest. I do not belong to the circle of philosophers. My profession, if one can even speak of it at all, is political theory’ (EU, 1). This demarcation from the circle of philosophers seems to have been a political move in itself, because it was provoked by what – at least according to Arendt – was philosophy's infatuation with Hitler. At the beginning of the Gaus interview Arendt states: ‘I have said good-bye to philosophy once and for all’ (EU, 2). Later on she provides the historical reason for her own version of ‘never again’. She says that she ‘left Germany dominated by the idea – of course somewhat exaggerated: Never again! I shall never again get involved in any kind of intellectual business. I want nothing to do with it’ (EU, 11). This strong reaction resulted from a strange idealization of Hitler on the part of some philosophers:

The worst thing was that some people really believed in Nazism! For a short time, many for a very short time. But that means that they made up ideas about Hitler, in part terrifically interesting things! Completely fantastic and interesting and complicated things! Things far above the ordinary level! I found that grotesque. Today I would say that they were trapped by their own ideas. (EU, 11)

Seeking an alternative to the danger of being trapped by monolithic ideas, Arendt turned to the sphere of politics, which for her was synonymous with the plural world of actions.³ At the beginning of her interview with Gaus, Arendt refers to the ‘vital tension between philosophy and politics…between man as a thinking being and man as an acting being’ (EU, 2). Thinking tends to be monolithic and thus liable to self-entrapment or, in other words, to being trapped by one's own ideas. As a political theorist, Arendt attempts to redefine thinking as a plural rather than isolated and isolating activity. As we shall see, Arendt redefines thinking so that it becomes consubstantial with understanding; that is to say, with the life of others. Arendt insists on a redefinition of thinking in the context of her political inquiry into what thought and philosophy can lead to. Her approach here is not that of abstract metaphysical reflection. Rather it is political: it focuses on the impact of cerebral work on the thinker's life with and concern for others.

3 As Ned Curthoys (in this volume) discusses, Arendt is not alone in her assessment of philosophy's hostility toward the plural world of actions. Ernst Cassirer (1944, 188) describes philosophy's reluctance to...