Hannah Arendt: Banal or twee?

I've never attempted at reading any of her books. Isn't she rather controversial?

Did she make people angry? Yes.

She is one of those "life's work distilled into one throwaway and largely meaningless phrase" people, yarp?

From the Prologue of Vita Activa/ The Human Condition, 1958:

"The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition, and earthly nature, for all we know, may be unique in the universe in providing human beings with a habitat in which they can move and breathe without effort and without artifice. The human artifice of the world separates human existence from all mere animal environment, but life itself is outside this artificial world, and through life man remains related to all other living organisms. For some time now, a great many scientific endeavors have been directed toward making life also "artificial," toward cutting the last tie through which even man belongs among the children of nature.
It is the same desire to escape from imprisonment to the earth that is manifest in the attempt to create life in the test tube, in the desire to mix "frozen germ plasm from people of demonstrated ability under the microscope to produce superior human beings" and "to alter [their] size, shape and function"; and the wish to escape the human condition, I suspect, also underlies the hope to extend man's life-span far beyond the hundred-year limit.
This future man, whom the scientists tell us they will produce in no more than a hundred years, seems to be possessed by a rebellion against human existence as it has been given, a free gift from nowhere (secularly speaking), which he wishes to exchange, as it were, for something he has made himself. There is no reason to doubt our abilities to accomplish such an exchange, just as there is no reason to doubt our present ability to destroy all organic life
on earth. The question is only whether we wish to use our new scientific and technical knowledge in this direction, and this question cannot be decided by scientific means; it is a political question of the first order and therefore can hardly be left to the decision of
professional scientists or professional politicians [...] If it should turn out to be true that
knowledge (in the modern sense of know-how) and thought have parted company for good, then we would indeed become the helpless slaves, not so much of our machines as of our know-how,
thoughtless creatures at the mercy of every gadget which is technically possible, no matter how murderous it is".

Her letter prompted a warning from Jaspers that she was close to describing “a guilt that goes beyond all criminal guilt [which] inevitably takes on a streak of ‘greatness’—of satanic greatness,” whereas it was neces- sary “to see these things in their total banality, in their prosaic triviality, because that’s what truly characterises them.” Replying, Arendt accepted that her words might have invited this understanding, but that she totally rejects such a view, and that she was in fact trying to make a different point:

But still, there is a difference between a man who sets out to murder his old aunt and people who without considering the economic usefulness of their actions at all . . . built factories to produce corpses. . . . [I]ndividual human beings did not kill other individual human beings for human reasons, but . . . an organised attempt was made to eradicate the concept of the human being.

Arendt’s comments can be aligned with the problem we have identified in Kant and Hegel, both in its subjective and objective dimensions. Subjectively, she is arguing that the Nazis had fallen below a level of normal human intercourse, had developed a wholly distorted sense of right and wrong, had carried out acts only attributable to persons who had lost essential elements of their humanity. There was something just lacking in their moral psychology, something psycho- or socio-pathological in their actions, which made them unpunishable according to modern moral-legal protocols.

In Arendt’s account, Nuremberg negotiated an uneasy path between conflicting problems. The first two categories of crime were vulnerable to criticism on the basis that the allies, who had set up the tribunal, were themselves guilty of such crimes. This is the tu quoque argument: that the Russians had themselves attacked Finland and divided Poland, that the Americans had dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that more generally modern war conducted by any party does not separate soldier and civilian. Accordingly, there was an incentive to distinguish Nazi guilt by focusing on those crimes carried out during the war where “gratuitous brutality” or “a deliberate inhuman purpose could be demonstrated.”32 However, this led to the most radical and novel criminal charge at Nuremberg, the “crime against humanity,” which in principle had nothing to do with existing war crimes. Such a crime was “in fact independent of the war,” involving “a policy of systematic murder to be continued in time of peace.” It took as its focus “the blotting out of whole peoples, the ‘clear- ance’ of whole regions of their native population.” It involved, most importantly, a “crime against the human status.”

While a Jewish state could in Arendt’s view try crimes against Jewish people,38 the idea of a crime against humanity makes it clear that this is a universal crime, one against the sta- tus of being human, that is perpetrated on a particular group, “the body of the Jewish people.”

Norrie, Alan W., Justice on the Slaughter-Bench: The Problem of War Guilt In Arendt and Jaspers (2008). New Criminal Law Review, Vol. 11, No. 2, pp. 187–231, Spring 2008 . Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1512578

It is for this reason that Arendt suggests that any justification for execut- ing Eichmann must fall short of modern ethical expectations for justice. While a modern moral sensibility refuses what we might call an “Old Testament” sense of vengeance as a sufficient basis for punishment, and indeed considers it “barbaric,” just such a rationale has to underlie his exe- cution.47 Justice at Jerusalem meant addressing the defendant in terms of a “premodern,” biblical understanding that “guilt and innocence before the law are of an objective nature, and even if eighty million Germans had done as you did, this would not have been an excuse for you.” The court was only concerned with “what you did, and not with the possible noncriminal nature of your inner life and of your motives or with the criminal potential of those around you.”48 Even if it was only misfortune which made you a part of mass murder, you were still a part of it, and are to be punished for this fact.

Take the idea, put forward by the defense in Eichmann, that he was just a cog in a machine. Arendt confesses that she attached no importance to this idea at the time of the trial, because “the whole cog theory is legally pointless.”56 In a trial, “all the cogs in the machinery, no matter how insignificant, are in court forthwith transformed back into perpetrators, that is to say, into human beings.” For a criminal to claim to have been a cog is as if he “pointed to the statistics on crime . . . and declared that he only did what was statistically expected of him.”57 However, the cog theory remains essential to political scientists for whom it is the essence of totalitarian government, and of bureaucracy, “to make functionaries and mere cogs . . . out of men, and thus to dehumanise them.”58 Thus there is a gap between the understanding of lawyers and that of social scientists. Here, Arendt displays an ambivalence about the workings of social theory and its relation to law. On one hand, she is in her own work committed to understanding the effects of bureaucracy and totalitarianism on human actions, and therefore sees law as outmoded under modern conditions. On the other, she draws back from the conclusions to which her own under- standing takes her. In the following passage, she hedges her bets.

True, we have become very much accustomed by modern psychology and sociology, not to speak of modern bureaucracy, to explaining away the responsibility of the doer for his deed in terms of this or that kind of deter- minism. Whether such deeper explanations of human actions are right or wrong is debatable. But what is not debatable is that no judicial procedure would be possible. . . , and that the administration of justice, measured by such theories, is an extremely unmodern, not to say outmoded, institution. When Hitler said that a day would come in Germany when it would be considered a “disgrace” to be a jurist, he was speaking with utter consistency of his dream of a perfect bureaucracy.59

This is a lacuna for me - this gap which refuses to bridge the space between a psychological/sociological/deterministic explanation of sin and moral/*legal* --

I err on the side of moral/legal - I often feel like I want to make a moral intervention in a modern discourse. I suspect it's a deeply conservative streak.

This Jasper bit is pretty great too - he reminds me of Dante; a taxonomy of guilt.

For her, the problem with Eichmann was that he was in so many ways a normal member of a community, yet one with whom no process of judgment could have moral connection. He was both a normal human being and morally beyond the pale, a moral out- cast. Punishment should involve a moral communication, but how could you communicate with someone who held his views? In this regard, he was like an animal who had mauled a child, or a sexual psychopath who had committed a terrible crime, though these analogies only take one so far. Precisely what was so chilling about him was that Eichmann was neither of these and remained throughout a competent human being. Worse, nor was his problem an individual one but that of a whole community, of which he was a normal member. Arendt’s answer was, as we have seen, to treat Eichmann as a “general enemy of humanity” (hostis generis humani), but because of his alienation from humanity’s general norms, he could not be punished according to the accepted moral rationale. Punishment could not be based on individual guilt, but rather on a valid social expunging on other grounds, a more simple refusal to share the earth. Arendt’s solution to the problem of how one punishes an Eichmann is to treat him as one who lacks the full moral capacities of the human being, but this acknowledges the lack of moral community that otherwise makes justice possible. The moral communication between more or less equally placed human beings that lies at the core of modern justice is discarded in favor of a con- descension faute de mieux. Eichmann and his kind appear to extract a bitter revenge against their judges: they seem to bring them down to their level.

Arendt's Eichmann project redeems Heidegger bc if Eichmann = just :/ then Hedeigger is at the very least !!! )ecstatic(

regarding what jasper supposedly introduces to arendt's flawed analysis (transcendent guilt) - that is precisely what could not leave her off the hook - transcendence is too leaky and everyone shares in the guilt

this final split -> the need to make graduations (individual guilt - the foot soldier v. eichmann) and the "difficulty of any differentiation of categories-" "Justice operates between the conditioned and the unconditional, so it always starts in relation to those categories of judgment already in existence," which is i guess partially to say that history bends towards justice but also that "Western law is marked by the individualization of responsibilities within social relation" and that is certainly better than the alternative

Historically, the hiatus between the late Middle Ages and the modem age with respect to Jewish affairs is even more marked than the rift between Roman antiquity and the Middle Ages, or the gulf-frequently considered to be the most important turning-point of Jewish history in the Diaspora-that separated the catastrophes of the First Crusades from earlier medieval centuries. For this hiatus lasted through nearly two centuries, from the fifteenth to the end of the sixteenth, during which Jewish-Gentile relations were at an all-time low, and Judaism became "more than ever'a closed system of thought." It was at this time that Jews, without any outside interference, began to think "that the difference between Jewry and the nations was fundamentally not one of creed and faith, but one of inner nature" and that the ancient dichotomy between Jews and Gentiles was "more likely to be racial in origin rather than a matter of doctrinal, dissension."2

Without any outside interference at all? This is something of a conspiracy itself, but at the same time I admit it's true. I'm sympathetic to this national judgement on the Germans for their participation (even among those that only went along w/ things and didn't protest) bc I believe not any nation would do this. I think this is also a major argument in modern liberalism - that actually everyone would do this - a drone attack is not unlike Katyn, Gaza is not unlike Chelmo, etc.

Maybe that's a link between rationalism/determinism and leftism; the political project of indicating that everyone is culpable to apologize for the failures of law.

mordy, what are you reading?

of arendt, i've only read eichmann in jerusalem, which was wonderful. i recently ordered on totalitarianism, but i haven't started it yet.

the first bunch was from the piece i linked to above- the Norrie piece. that last bit is arendt her in "on totalitarianism" the intro to antisemitism

the bolded pieces in the Norrie piece are him quoting arendt

This is a remarkable century which opened with the Revolution and ended with the Affaire! Perhaps it will be called the century o f rubbish.
ROGER MARTIN DU GARD

I wonder if there's any century such a thing couldn't be said about.

Arendt’s solution to the problem of how one punishes an Eichmann is to treat him as one who lacks the full moral capacities of the human being, but this acknowledges the lack of moral community that otherwise makes justice possible. The moral communication between more or less equally placed human beings that lies at the core of modern justice is discarded in favor of a con- descension faute de mieux. Eichmann and his kind appear to extract a bitter revenge against their judges: they seem to bring them down to their level.

this is an interesting passage, but isn't "modern justice" in essence impersona and thus not administered on a symmetrical basis of "moral communication" but more like a machine a la kafka or whatever. the point being that the legal system's does not derive its ability to punish Eichmann from individual people but from its sense of its own protocols?

dropped an l: impersonal

According to Tocqueville, the French people hated aristocrats about to lose their power more than it had ever hated them before, pre- cisely .because their rapid loss of real power was not accompanied by any considerable decline in their fortunes. As long as the aristocracy held vast powers of jurisdiction, they were not only tolerated but respected. When noblemen lost their privileges, among others the privilege to exploit and oppress, the people felt them to be parasites, without any real function in the rule of the country. In other words, neither oppression nor exploita- tion as such is ever the main cause for resentment; wealth without visible function is much more intolerable because nobody can understand why it should be tolerated.

Antisemitism reached its climax when Jews had similarly lost their public functions and their influence, and were left with nothing but their wealth. When Hitler came to power, the German banks were already almost judenrein (and it was here that Jews had held key positions for more than a hundred years) and German Jewry as a whole, after a long steady growth in social status and numbers, was declining so rapidly that statisticians predicted its disappearance in a few decades. Statistics, it is true, do not necessarily point to real historical processes; yet it is note- worthy that to a statistician Nazi persecution and extermination could look like a senseless acceleration of a process which would probably have come about in any case.

More Arendt (also from Origins of Total.) but sounds like Zizek, no? This is precisely etc.

not for arendt - she sees justice as ultimately arising from a moral community that generates it. even when it fails in that (bc the human being in its gross judgement has condescended) it is bc it is too moral in a sense, no? too human.

Her reading appears to be that the Jew has wealth but not power -- and that this is grotesque bc:

...power has a certain function and is of some general use. Even exploitation and oppression still make society work and establish some kind of order. Only wealth without power or aloofness without a policy are felt to be parasitical, useless, revolting, because such conditions cut all the threads which tie men together. Wealth which does not exploit lacks even the relationship which exists between exploiter and exploited; aloofness without policy does not imply even the minimum concern of the oppressor for the oppressed.

i can see then why Eichmann was such a vexing dilemma then, it's situation which sorta explodes that model.

omg, i think maybe Zizek just stole Arendt's shtick wholsale tbh when i read passages like:

The best illustration-and the best refutation--of this explanation, dear to the hearts of many liberals, is in a joke which was told after the first World War. An antisemite claimed that the Jews had caused the war; the reply was: Yes, the Jews and the bicyclists. Why the bicyclists? asks the one. Why the Jews? asks the other.

right exactly he is not human at all xp

parts of the eichmann book are really, unsettlingly, funny.

i rly rly love hannah arendt -- she is basically the most interesting writer i've ever read. i think she's probably my desert island writer.

i like what greil marcus wrote about her once:

Her books—The Origins of Totalitarianism, On Violence, On Revolution, Men in Dark Times—were often attacked as ahistorical, or even anti-historical. That was because, to many, the stories she told—and she was most of all a storyteller, like a guide in the catacombs of history—were set less within a solid frame of reference, where every seemingly new event has its analogy, than they were anchored—anchored by the Athenians, the philosophers and the dramatists, more than anyone else. And Arendt was often condemned as antihistorical because she knew that sometimes anchors come loose, and the that the ships they were meant to hold to solid ground go adrift. “Thinking without a ground” is how one student of hers characterized her work. She is best known, certainly in the American Jewish community, for her 1961 book Eichmann in Jerusalem, where she wrote these lines which, to me, anyway, sum up her idea of what the human condition is made of.

"It is in the very nature of things human that every act that has once made its appearance and has been recorded in the history of mankind stays with mankind as a potentiality long after its actuality has become a thing of the past . . . Once a specific crime has appeared for the first time, its reappearance is more likely than its initial emergence could ever have been."

This may seem like a truism, but in fact it goes directly against the grain of what, in most times and places, intellectual discourse takes itself to be—against what it most often takes its purpose to be. When confronted with what might seem like something new, most intellectual discourse says that what appears new is not: that to the contrary it fits into familiar categories, can be described, explained, and analyzed with familiar concepts, can be fixed with familiar words. Hannah Arendt was on the other side of the mirror. Between Past and Future was the title of one of her books, and the title spoke for her understanding of how the world works, what the human condition is. There can be a breach between past and future, and if there is such a breach, the future must be something new. It may be terrible, formless, incomprehensible, even mute, but it will be new—in truth, every time there is such a breach between past and future, a new event has taken place, for no such breach can be the same. “Originality,” Arendt wrote in 1953, “is horrible, not because some new ‘idea’ came into the world, but because its very actions constitute a break with all our traditions; they have clearly exploded our categories of political thought and our standards of moral judgment.” The past floats away like an unmoored, unanchored ship. We remember it; like a Spanish galleon loaded with Peruvian gold, as it drops over the horizon it carries off our treasure, our memory. As the ship disappears, we can imagine ourselves on it. We can even name it: the Flying Dutchman.

http://www.firstofthemonth.org/9_11/9_11_marcus_nothing.html

She unlocked John Adams for me; she probably did more than anyone to assert his importance in American political theory.

There is no doubt that the nation-state's interest in preserving the Jews as a special group and preventing their assimilation into class society coin- cided with the Jewish interest in self-preservation and group survival.

By the later Middle Ages the Jewish moneylender had lost all his former importance, and in the early sixteenth century Jews had already been expelled from cities and trade centers into villages and countryside, thereby exchanging a more uniform protection from remote higher authorities for an insecure status granted by petty local nobles.12 The turning point had been in the seventeenth century when, during the Thirty Years' War, precisely because of their dispersion these small, insignificant moneylenders could guarantee the necessary provisions to the mercenary armies of the war-lords in far-away lands and with the aid of small peddlers buy victuals in entire provinces. Since these wars remained half-feudal, more or less private affairs of the princes, involving no interest of other classes and enlisting no help from the people, the Jews' gain in status was very limited and hardly visible. But the number of court Jews increased because now every feudal household needed the equivalent of the court Jew.

This seems quite ahistorical to me and Arendt seems to acknowledge herself rhetorically how ahistorical (literally not true to history in this case - like Foucault) in the footnotes:

II Jean Capefigue (Histoire des grandes operations financieres, Torne III: Banque, Bourses. Emprunts. 1855) pretends that during the July Monarchy only the Jews, and especially the house of Rothschild, prevented a sound state credit based upon the Banque de France. He also claims that the events of 1848 rnade the activities of the Rothschilds superfluous. Raphael Strauss ("The Jews in the Econornic Evolution of Central Europe" in Jewish Social Studies. Ill, 1, 1941) also remarks that after 1830 "public credit already becarne less of a risk so that Christian banks began to handle this business in increasing measure." Against these interpretations stands the fact that excellent relations prevailed between the Rothschilds and Napoleon III, although there can be no doubt as to the general trend of the time.

Capefigure 'pretends' and 'claims' but 'against these interpretations stands the fact that,' 'although there can be no doubt as the general trend of the time.' Whatever narrative you need, I guess.

It is still one of the most moving aspects of Jewish history that the Jews' active entry into European history was caused by their being an inter- European, non-national element in a world of growing or existing nations. That this role proved more lasting and more essential than their function as state bankers is one of the material reasons for the new modern type of Jewish productivity in the arts and sciences. It is not without historical justice that their downfall coincided with the ruin of a system and a political body which, whatever its other defects, had needed and could tolerate a purely European element.

in some sense isn't israel the opposite role -- the function of reasserting a sort of pre-contemporary nationhood into a world of self-disavowing nations? if before the critique (articulating by marx, napoleon, etc long before nazism) was "why can't you join the nation?" after the critique is "why do you insist on being a nation?" it's the same desire to reconstitute the other into the self, but recapitulated on a global scale - the body of the jew superimposed onto the collective [which itself mirrors the way that the judgement of the germans is superimposed from the individual onto the national]. maybe this is also why there is an argument/gap in culture about separating anti-israel (anti-zionism) from anti-semitism; these tides of collectivization and individuation are still being played out.

http://movies.nytimes.com/2013/05/29/movies/hannah-arendt-with-barbara-sukowa-and-janet-mcteer.html

http://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/banality-and-brilliance-irving-howe-on-hannah-arendt

there's a terrible movie out about her

kinda would prefer a good documentary -- are there any long filmed interviews with arendt?

James Wolcott's review is worth a giggle: http://www.vanityfair.com/online/wolcott/2013/06/hard-hearted-hannah

i'll see it since it's hannah and i'm kinda obsessed and all, but i'm not expecting much. in theory the debate over the eichmann book seems like it could make a good film but i think it's a bit too complex to actually translate well into drama -- it's basically just people writing long, angry, accusative articles at each other.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/07/misreading-hannah-arendts-eichmann-in-jerusalem/

twee?

thanks for the link though, mordy. i love the stone. it's much better than one would expect a nytimes philosophy column would be.

that's a great article. the idea that arendt was somehow excusing eichmann in writing her book kinda floors me, but it's one i've encountered a lot of places.

http://www.zeek.net/709arendt/index.php?page=2

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/nov/21/arendt-eichmann-new-truth/

I read that article at lunch; it stopped me from renting the movie.

is there a right-wing counterpart to arendt, who is, i dunno, kind of like a latter-day marxist who is always saying 'yes but we never did communism right' etc, only about totalitarianism/fascism?

scott reads arendt: http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/01/30/book-review-eichmann-in-jerusalem/

http://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1slc4qj

i wonder how many people that bought The Origins of Totalitarianism on amazon were dismayed upon arrival that it's a fucking brick.

p good piece thx for the link mordy

i must admit i was a little disappointed that link didn't lead to a scott seward article

"arendt's pretty cool, man those nazis sure were crazy! just so mean and hateful. we don't really have that kind of shit around here though, vibe's kinda different. what do I know. Hey check out these reggae 7"s I just got in my store!"

(I kid because I love, scott is awesome)

i must admit i was a little disappointed that link didn't lead to a scott seward article

― for sale: steve bannon waifu pillow (heavily soiled) (bizarro gazzara)

Corey Robin v Chelsea Clinton

http://coreyrobin.com/2017/07/29/yesterday-i-got-into-an-argument-with-chelsea-clinton-on-twitter-about-hannah-arendt/

sincerely feel like this is the best use of robin's time

I read it this morning and wondered why he gave a fuck.

finally getting around to reading Eichmann in Jerusalem

wish me luck

it's good tho the most often quoted insight from it is probably wrong

It's a marvelous read but Mordy otm

yeah well it's not like I was planning to just skip to the last sentence

I'm about halfway through, had forgotten how impenetrably labyrinthine the Nazi bureaucracy was

like, as a kid I was definitely familiarized with the most famous/notorious names in the regime (Goebbels, Goering, Himmler, Eichmann, Mengele, Hess, Speer etc.), I don't think it was until much later that I realized a bunch of those guys were not necessarily the major players/powers in the party and that there were all these competing agendas going on.

Liking the kicking she is getting here and further tweets (not that I read Arendt but I hate how often I hear the "banality of evil" as a phrase)

It’s all a very dodgy story but it definitely benefited certain people in the US to downplay Eichmann as a functionary and I guess it would have helped Kasztner if he wasn’t murdered by that point

— ‏تمار 🌴 თამარ 🌴 תמר (@tamars) April 20, 2024

the banality of the banality of evil

The idea that she "downplayed" Eichmann's evil is madness.

it's sad that Arendt is known today mainly through misreadings of one phrase from one book. I hate the idea that people might avoid The Origins of Totalitarianism or her other work because of an ass-backwards impression that she gave Eichmann some kind of pass. Greil Marcus is mostly OTM about her in the quote upthread.