Hannah Arendt, 1906-1975

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Hannah Arendt, 1906-1975
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• Hannah Arendt was born in 1906 in Hanover and
  died in New York in 1975.
• In 1924, she went to Marburg University to study
  with Martin Heidegger, with whom she had a brief
  but intense love-affair. After a year of study in
  Marburg, she moved to Freiburg University. In the
  spring of 1926 she went to Heidelberg University
  to study with Karl Jaspers. She completed her
  doctoral dissertation, entitled Der Liebesbegriff
  bei Augustin under Jaspers's supervision in
  1929.
• She was forced to flee Germany, and after a brief
  stay in Prague and Geneva she moved to Paris
  where for six years (193339) she worked for a
  number of Jewish refugee organizations. In 1936
  she separated from her first husband, Günther
  Stern, and started to live with Heinrich Blücher,
  whom she married in 1940.).
• In 1941 she was forced to leave France and moved
  to New York with her husband and mother.
• Taught at Princeton, Berkeley and Chicago, but
  was most closely associated with the New School
  for Social Research, where she was a professor of
  political philosophy until her death in 1975.
• Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)
• The Human Condition (1958)
• Eichmann in Jerusalem (1961)
• On Revolution 1961)
• Between Past and Future (1972)
• Men in Dark Times (1975)
• The Life of the Mind (Thinking Willing) 1975
• (

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Arendt Basic Concepts

• Recall the cave in Plato
• Appearance is bad or lesser
• Arendt wants to contest this
• Redeem appearance and action
• What is the experience of the political like
• Cf introductory lecture
• We are conditioned

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What are the basic concepts of human life? The
Human Condition

• 1. Labor Humanity as animal laborans
• Unfree realm of necessity
• 2. Work Humanity as homo faber
• The making of our world
• 3. Action Humanity as zoon politikon
• The realm of beginning the realm of freedom

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• A manifestation of action is speech
• 'Action is the public disclosure of the agent in
  the speech deed'. (cf remarks about Eichmann and
  speech)

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reminder

• The political and politics (recall first class)
• Political is what is a simultaneous answer to the
  questions What am I? and What are we?
• Not economics, religion, psychology, love
• Not a necessarily permanent part of the human
  condition (?)

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• For HA FREEDOM is exclusively located it he
  political realm
• THE RISE OF THE SOCIAL
• The tendency to think of the public realm as a
  large household that need to be taken care of.
• Rule by nobody (bureaucracy)
• rise of statistics as kind of equality
• different form of equality in modern world
• WHAT THEN DOES PUBLIC MEAN
• Everything that appears in public can be seen and
  heard
• The world is in common (shared by all and
  separating each from each
• Have something in common (ordinary, vulgar and
  together)
• for something to be in common it must transcend
  one generation (must be immortal
• this means a multiplication of perspectives THE
  ONLY WAY FOR ME TO GET OUTISDE OF MY PERSPECTIVE
  IS FOR ME TO SHARE YOURS (EXTENDED SELF)
• what then does private mean
• PROPERTY
• Mastery over necessities is consequence of having
  property and the privateprivacy is here the
  precondition for there being a public (

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Truth and Politics

• Political thought is representative. I form an
  opinion by considering a given issue from
  different viewpoints, by making present to my
  mind the standpoints of those who are absent
  that is I represent them. This process of
  representation does not blindly adopt the actual
  views of those who stand somewhere else, and
  hence look upon the world from a different
  perspective this is a question neither of
  empathy, as though I tried to be or to feel like
  somebody else, nor of counting noses and joining
  a majority but of being and thinking in my own
  identity where actually I am not. The more
  peoples standpoints I have present in my mind
  the stronger will be my capacity for
  representative thinking. (PHA 556)

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Eichmann in Jerusalem

• Background of the case
• Details of the Final Solution cooperation of
  some of the leaders of various Jewish ghettoes
  (313ff)
• Eichmann
• Not particularly anti-semitic
• Showed no evidence of remorse as he was doing his
  job. HA"He did his duty... he not only obeyed
  orders, he also obeyed the law."

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Arendt has the judges say

• Just as you supported and carried out a policy
  of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish
  people and the people of a number of other
  nations, as though you and your superiors had any
  rights to determine who should and should not
  inhabit the world, we find that no one, that is,
  no member of the human race, can be expected to
  want to share the earth with you. This is the
  reason and the only reason that you must hang.
  (375)

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Why?

• Eichmann repudiates an essential fact of human
  life men not Man live on the earth and inhabit
  the world. (Human Condition, p.7)
• Only in the presence of others do human beings
  exist as human and not as animate things.
• This is because humans can ACT, i.e. bring new
  things of states of affairs into the world.
• For acts to be real, others must acknowledge and
  remember them.

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• Thus the Nazis threaten the possibility condition
  of human beings.
• When are featherless bipeds Plato not human?

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BUT

• Is Arendt not saying the same thing (no one will
  want to share the earth with you) to Eichmann as
  she says he was doing?
• The counter cannot be that Eichmann did something
  wrong
• Arendt asserts that Eichmann did what he did out
  of respect for the law of his land. As did many
  many others.

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In some sense he was un lucky

• You told your story in terms of a hard-luck
  story, and knowing the circumstances, we are, up
  to a point, willing to grant you that under more
  favorable circumstances it is highly unlikely
  that you would have ever come before us or before
  any criminal court. It was nothing more than
  misfortune that made you a willing instrument in
  the organization of mass murder. (375)

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Her response

• Eichmanns crime was formal
• An attempt to destroy the space between people
• An attempt to control who will see what they did.
• Interfere with the past and future
• Orwell he who controls the present, controls
  the past he who controls the past, controls the
  future
• Arendt relates a conversation held by French
  premier Clemenceau after World War I

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WE think that intention is important and reject
the claim that

• A great crime offends nature, so that the very
  earth cries out for vengeance that evil violates
  a natural harmony which only retribution can
  restore that a wronged collectivity owes a duty
  to the moral order to punish the criminal. (373)
• She criticizes the Israeli court for assuming
  that the law expresses only what every mans
  conscience would tell him anyway.

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• But were these not the grounds on which Eichmann
  was brought to trial and condemned?

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• NB we are echoing Schmitt on law and that which
  is not law
• By nature Arendt means only the formal
  conditions that make human life possible.
• Who then is the victim?
• Not primarily the Jews (or Communists, or Poles,
  or gypsies, or homosexuals, or mentally retarded
• The victim is mankind in its entirely.
• The court ignores this

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• Eichmann thus kills not individuals beings, but
  the Being that is human.
• IF the crime is formal, why is Eichmann
  responsible
• Standard notions of responsibility
• Eichmann DID something
• She reminds the judges of Sodom and Gomorrah
  (374)
• Eichmann transcends the realm of human affairs

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In passing

• She notes that Karl Jaspers said it should have
  been an international tribunal (366-368)
• Arendt technical issues make this difficult but
  the Israel court could have waived its right to
  carry out the sentence.

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Problem remains

• For what is he punished?
• She rejects that his death can relieve anyone of
  the consequences of his actions
• That it would take away the pain of those who
  died and the trauma of those who survived
• That it would be a warning to anti-Semites
• That it is a history lesson or a reminder of the
  existence of anti-Semitism
• That is is a demonstration of Jewish/Israeli
  might
• That it might relieve the guilt of the German
  people

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Thus

• His death is not a punishment
• Which is what we do to human beings
• His death does not restore his humanity
• The limit of the law?
• Are there implications for capital punishment?

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To her critics

• I do not love a collective (e.g. The Jewish
  people) (392)
• Radical evil vs banality of evil
• Modernity (396)
• Neither depth nor demonic