Hannah Arendt

Simon Swift

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781134093557
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Filosofia
• Categoría: Filosofia etica e morale

Hannah Arendt's work offers a powerful critical engagement with the cultural and philosophical crises of mid-twentieth-century Europe. Her idea of the banality of evil, made famous after her report on the trial of the Nazi war criminal, Adolf Eichmann, remains controversial to this day.

In the face of 9/11 and the 'war on terror', Arendt's work on the politics of freedom and the rights of man in a democratic state are especially relevant. Her impassioned plea for the creation of a public sphere through free, critical thinking and dialogue provides a significant resource for contemporary thought.

Covering her key ideas from The Origins of Totalitarianism and The Human Condition as well as some of her less well-known texts, and focussing in detail on Arendt's idea of storytelling, this guide brings Arendt's work into the twenty-first century while helping students to understand its urgent relevance for the contemporary world.

1
BIOGRAPHY, THEORY AND POLITICS

This chapter will narrate some of the important events in Arendt’s life-story, before introducing a number of her key ideas about politics and society. However, Arendt’s ideas and her life-story (or biography) are not completely distinct concerns for this study of her. I will suggest in what follows some of the ways in which Arendt’s biography and her ideas are in fact constantly intertwined. It is a key tenet of Arendt’s own work that the life-story of a thinker, artist or politician provides a crucial context in which to understand his or her thought.

Before looking at Arendt’s life-story, it might be worthwhile to pause and think about what is at stake in the very idea of telling the story of a critical thinker’s life (something that a critical introduction to a thinker’s work might very reasonably be expected to do, but that often, in practice, is done with a degree of reluctance by the authors of such introductions). A preoccupation with (auto) biography has, since Arendt’s death, become rather unfashionable. More recent critical thought has suggested that a focus on the biography of an author or thinker can in fact distract from a rigorous reading of their texts. Arendt’s teacher Martin Heidegger once claimed that the biography of the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle could be summed up in a single sentence: he was born, he thought, he died. Everything else, according to Heidegger, is mere anecdote. Heidegger’s hostility to biography has had a particularly powerful impact on literary theory in the last thirty or so years, as it has sought to liberate literary critics from a dependence on the biography of the author as the source of an authoritative account of the meaning of a literary text. As the semiologist and cultural critic Roland Barthes (1915–80) wrote in 1967 in his essay ‘The Death of the Author’:

The author still reigns in histories of literature, biographies of writers, interviews, magazines, as in the very consciousness of men of letters anxious to unite their person and their work through diaries and memoirs. The image of literature to be found in ordinary culture is tyrannically centred on the author, his person, his life, his tastes, his passions [ … ] The explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it, as if it were always in the end, through the more or less transparent allegory of the fiction, the voice of a single person, of the author ‘confiding’ in us.

(Barthes 2001:1466)

Barthes was struck, in his essay, by the reader’s desire for an intimate relationship with the author. He thought of the biography industry as a symptom of the modern reader’s desire to seek out in the author’s life-story something personal or hidden, such as his tastes or his passions, and to define this intimate knowledge as the real source of meaning in the author’s writing. For Barthes, the belief that we can gain intimate knowledge of the author’s inner life is in fact an illusion, the product of a trick that is played on the reader by consumer capitalism. Barthes argued that in capitalistic modernity, literary texts have been turned into commodities. The text-as-commodity plays its trick by suggesting to the reader that the author has singled him out, that the author confides the secret, intimate meaning of his life to that reader alone and to no-one else. Barthes wanted to shatter this illusory, narcissistic relationship between reader and writing by claiming that the author is just another fiction that has been invented by a capitalist system that wants to attribute ownership to all commodities, literary texts among them.

While these ideas might make Hannah Arendt seem, at first glance, to be retrograde and unfashionable, in fact she shared her generation’s suspicion of the biography industry. Like Barthes, she was suspicious of the cult of individuality that sought to attribute all meaning to the single consciousness of an author. For her, stories are always the work of a community, and the teller of the story is no more the ‘owner’ of its meaning than the audience, or the hero of the story itself. She also shared Barthes’s critical attitude towards the reader’s desire for intimacy with the author. Throughout her life, she remained suspicious of the desire to pry into an author’s private life that typifies the work of biography as Barthes describes it. In her essay on the writer Isak Dinesen, Arendt wrote:

The connection of an artist’s life with his work has always raised embarrassing problems, and our eagerness to see recorded, displayed, and discussed in public what were once strictly private affairs and no body’s business is probably less legitimate than our curiosity is ready to admit.

(MDT: 98)

The key words here are ‘public’ and ‘private’. There is a certain zone in the life of any human being, the zone of ‘intimacy’ or the private world that should never, for Arendt, appear in public, and only ever does so with dire consequences. This separation of public and private spheres is a key idea in her thought as a whole.

A healthy scepticism about biography does not mean that we must abandon any interest in the life of a thinker, Arendt’s included. Arendt wanted to imagine a different kind of biography, a different kind of life-story, from the one that Barthes attacks. She was, in particular, committed to the idea of a life lived in public, which can and indeed must be recorded in order to grasp the ways in which a thinker’s thought is conditioned by and conditions the world around them. This chapter will now narrate the story of Arendt’s own life, and in particular the story of her effort to live her life in public and the problems that she encountered in trying to do this, before introducing in a more precise way what is at stake in her distinction between ‘public’ and ‘private’ lives.

ARENDT’S LIFE-STORY

Arendt was born in the German city of Hannover in 1906, to an assimilated Jewish family, and brought up mainly in the east Prussian city of Königsberg, now part of Russia. She recalled in a television interview in 1964 that ‘the word “Jew” was never mentioned at home. I first encountered it [ … ] in the anti-Semitic remarks of children as we played in the streets’ (Young-Bruehl 2004:11). As Arendt remembers it, ‘Jew’ was an identity that was imposed onto her from the outside, a label given to her, as a child, by non-Jewish children. ‘Jew’ was, from the start, an identity that in some way ‘belonged’ to anti-Semites, a label that was put on to assimilated Jews who did not necessarily recognise themselves in it. Arendt’s relation to her Jewishness, and her understanding of the social status of Jews in European society, is a complex and important issue that informed her treatment of totalitarianism (see Chapter 6).

Arendt studied at the universities of Heidelberg and Marburg, where she came under the influence of perhaps the most powerful intellectual presence of her life, the philosopher Martin Heidegger, who supervised the early stages of her doctoral work on the medieval theologian and philosopher St Augustine (354–430). Heidegger was himself the student of another crucial figure in the history of the development of critical thought, Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), who had pioneered the philosophical method known as phenomenology. Although Heidegger, at the time of his first contact with Hannah Arendt, was breaking away from Husserl’s influence and plotting new and uncharted territory in his thinking as he worked towards the publication of his book Being and Time (1927), the phenomenological revolution is a crucial background both for his and for Arendt’s thought.

PHENOMENOLOGY

Phenomenology might be compared to psychoanalysis, and Husserl’s work might be compared to that of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), as two pioneering attempts to offer scientific accounts of human consciousness. But where psychoanalysis was preoccupied with offering an account of the relation between the conscious and unconscious mind, phenomenology became preoccupied with the attempt to offer a scientific account of how we see things in the world. This involved the phenomenologist in the act of ‘digging down’ in an attempt to unearth the fundamental structures of human consciousness that determine the nature of perception. In the process, phenomenology was able to offer a radically strange and unfamiliar account of everyday experience. One of the key interests of phenomenology is in how human beings experience time, and what relation time has to their perception of the world. In the work of Heidegger, and then in the work of Arendt, Husserl’s ideaswere applied to questions about culture and history, and in particular to core human experiences such as birth, death and the experience of art. Phenomenology made possible an exhilarating suspension of our fundamental and habitual ways of understanding ourselves, the world around us and the relation between the two. In Heidegger’s words, ‘At bottom, the ordinary is not ordinary; it is extra ordinary’ (Heidegger 1993:179).

After Hitler became the chancellor of Germany in 1933, Arendt was briefly detained by the German authorities for gathering information, on behalf of the German Zionist Organisation, about how anti-Semitism was becoming official German policy. She felt compelled to leave Germany, first for France, where she worked for a Jewish refugee agency in Paris that was helping Jewish children and young people to make their way to Palestine, before being briefly interned in a concentration camp at Gurs at the foot of the Pyrenees after the German invasion of France in the summer of 1940. She ultimately made her escape to the USA in 1941. America would remain her home for the rest of her life.

It is possible to date Arendt’s loss of faith in traditional philosophy and its institutions from the time of Hitler’s rise to power. To this extent, but also in other ways, it became the key and defining event in her life as a public figure. Her brief experience of life in Nazi Germany was important to her intellectual development because it had presented Arendt with a shocking realisation about the unwillingness of German intellectuals to resist Nazi rule. As she recalled in an interview in 1964:

Many people think these days that the shock undergone by the Jewsin 1933 was a function of Hitler’s seizing power. As far as I and those of my generation are concerned, this is a curious misunderstanding. That was, of course, terrible. But it was political, it wasn’t personal [ … ] the general political realities transformed themselves into personal destiny as soon as you set foot outside of the house […] I lived in an intellectual milieu, but I also knew many people who did not, and I came to the conclusion that cooperation was, so to speak, the rule among intellectuals, but not among others. And I have never forgotten that. I left Germany guided by the resolution – a very exaggerated one – that ‘Never again!’ I will never have anything to do with ‘the history of ideas’ again. I didn’t, indeed, want to have anything to do with this sort of society again.

(Cited in Young-Bruehl 2004:108)

A key aspect of Arendt’s effort to understand the period of totalitarian rule is her challenge to certain lazy assumptions about the nature of totalitarianism that were forming and solidifying very quickly in the years after the victory over Nazi Germany. What was shocking for her about this period was not the ‘political’ fact of Hitler’s rise to power, which had seemed inevitable for several years anyway, but the personal shock of how the German intellectual class, many of them friends and acquaintances, had cooperated with the new regime. Once again, her work is governed by an awareness of the distinction between the public and the private, the political and the personal. Arendt wants to maintain an awareness of this distinction, but she is also aware of how the two can easily become entangled in a particular life-story.

Perhaps the most famous – or infamous – example of the cooperation that Arendt describes here came when Heidegger was appointed rector of Freiburg University in the spring of 1933, after his predecessor was dismissed for refusing to cooperate with the new official policy of excluding Jewish academic staff. In a speech given as the new rector, Heidegger famously referred to ‘the greatness, the nobility of this national awakening’, effectively condoning the Nazi rise to power (cited in Young-Bruehl 2004:108). (It must be noted that Heidegger quickly became aware that he had been misled in his support for the Nazis.) Arendt was struck, in her brief experience of Nazi rule, by how intellectuals, those committed to the life of the mind, seemed incapable of seeing through the Nazi regime in the heady, exciting days of the early 1930s. For Arendt, this awareness of the naivety of intellectuals in relation to the public world became a defining insight.

Arendt’s vow to abandon the world of ideas in 1933 was, as she says, exaggerated. But even so, she never became a permanent member of a university faculty in North America. For much of her life in America she remained a kind of freelance journalist and social and political thinker. From 1944, she took on a role directing research for the Commission of Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, a role that took her back to Europe after the war, and back into contact with Heidegger. Arendt also took on various roles as a visiting professor at institutions of higher education such as the New School for Social Research in New York and the Committee on Social Thought at Chicago University, and she was the first woman at Princeton University to become a professor. But Arendt remained, to borrow a phrase from the feminist thinker Gayatri Spivak (1942–), ‘outside in the teaching machine’. This perhaps shows her distrust for traditional methods of thinking and its institutions, as well as her desire to carve out a new, independent role for the intellectual in public culture. No doubt this was partly informed by Arendt’s experience of the depressing way in which many faculty members in German universities had shown little resistance to Hitler’s rise to power in the 1930s, and scant support for their Jewish colleagues who were banned from teaching.

Arendt’s life in America eventually saw her participating actively in American public life and its debates in the 1950s and 1960s about civil rights, civil disobedience and racial segregation, political corruption and the Vietnam War. In the first years after her arrival in America, though, when the war in Europe was still raging, Arendt took a strong and active role in the Zionist movement, urging the formation of a Jewish army to fight Hitler in her contributions to a German language newspaper published by the Jewish émigré community, Aufbau. Arendt was profoundly resistant to a view of the Jews as innocent victims of the Nazis, a view that she thought the Jews of Europe had taken on about themselves, and that she also thought was very damaging to their self-understanding and their political identity. She wanted to claim, instead, that Jews needed to take responsibility for their actions, rather than simply portraying themselves as innocent victims, or ‘lambs to the slaughter’. Joining the fight against Hitler as a unified Jewish force, thought Arendt, would mean that they took control of their destiny. The formation of a Jewish army might mean, she suggested in the title to one of her articles, ‘the beginning of Jewish politics’.

Arendt was profoundly suspicious of any attempt to understand Jews as innocent ‘scapegoats’ for Germany’s problems, another assumption about totalitarian rule that she wanted to demystify. She nevertheless thought that this was a highly seductive interpretation of what had happened to them under Nazi rule. There is, she writes at the beginning of The Origins of Totalitarianism:

a temptation to return to an explanation which automatically discharges the victim of responsibility: it seems quite adequate to a reality in which nothing strikes us more forcefully than the utter innocence of the individual caught in the horror machine and his utter inability to change his fate.

(OT 1:6)

Arendt’s claim led her to a rather uncomfortable conclusion. If Jews were not innocent victims of Nazi violence, then in some measure they shared responsibility for that violence. This responsibility of the victims of violence needs to be faced and understood if the dignity of the victims, their status as public actors, is to be restored.

Arendt’s arguments about Jewish freedom and responsibility proved to be, and indeed remain, highly controversial. Her fame and notoriety in America were ultimately guaranteed by an event that brought about a definitive break with Zionism on precisely this issue of the responsibility of the victim. In 1961, Arendt filed a series of reports from Israel for New Yorker magazine on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi war criminal involved in the organisation of the Final Solution who had been kidnapped in Argentina by the Israeli secret service and put on trial in Jerusalem. Arendt’s response to the trial offended much of Jewish and, particularly, Zionist public opinion by appearing to suggest that the leadership of the Jewish communities in Eastern Europe during the Second World War bore partial responsibility for the annihilation of their communities. In a brief passage of the book that she developed from her reports, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), Arendt described how the leadership cooperated with the Nazi transportations of Jews to the east, and asked why it was that this leadership didn’t resist or at least make more difficult the administration of the transportations. In this book Arendt also opened up awkward questions about how we set about judging the criminality of the Holocaust according to established legal and moral norms, and in particular about the difficulties of attributing moral responsibility for such a terrible event to bureaucrats such as Eichmann. The accused, who was responsible for organising transportation of Jews to the concentration camps, and who claimed in the trial never to have been directly involved in the killing itself, emerges as a rather pathetic and deluded figure in Arendt’s account of him. To many of Arendt’s observers, her telling of the story of the trial, and of Eichmann’s own life-story, seemed to reserve for him sympathy which should more appropriately have been directed towards those who suffered as a result of his actions.

The Eichmann trial was a crucial episode in Arendt’s life-story. The controversy that arose from her account of it became in some ways the defining event in her formation as a public intellectual, by forcing her to put off books that she had planned to write, and to devote her time and energy to justifying her position. The Eichmann controversy shows how events in the public world can shape the ideas of a thinker.

ARENDT AND THEORY

What kind of a critical thinker was Hannah Arendt? It may at first encounter seem to be excessively difficult to fit her work into an overall genealogy of critical thought. While Arendt was indebted to the work of several key thinkers who have also had an influence on later theoretical writing, particularly Martin Heidegger, Karl Marx (1818–83) and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), she makes use of them in a very different way from later post-structuralist and post-modern thinkers. Arendt produced work that is hard to categorise, and that goes out of its way to explode any settled definition of what ‘theorising’ might ...