Hannah Arendt
1) Her Biography:
Born in Hanover in 1906, Arendt was one of the most influential political theorists of the twentieth century. Martin Heidegger taught her at Marburg University in 1924, after she finished high school. It had a long-lasting impact on her thinking because she met Heidegger, with whom she had a passionate but short love affair. Edmund Husserl’s lectures at Freiburg University piqued her interest after a year of study at Marburg. She moved to Heidelberg University in the spring of 1926 to study with Karl Jaspers, a philosopher with whom she formed a long-lasting intellectual and personal bond. It was under Jaspers’ supervision that she finished her PhD dissertation, entitled Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin (hereinafter LA).
While in Prague and Geneva, she worked for Jewish refugee organizations in Paris for six years (1933–39). She was forced out of Germany in 1933 due to Hitler’s ascension to power. It was in 1936 that she began living with Heinrich Blücher after divorcing her first husband, Günther Stern. She worked on her biography of Rahel Varnhagen while she was in Paris, but it wasn’t published until 1957. Due to wartime restrictions, she and her family were forced to flee France in 1941. A group of prominent authors and intellectuals grouped around the Partisan Review periodical in New York and rapidly embraced her.
She was a professor of political philosophy at the New School for Social Research until her death in 1975, where she spoke in Princeton, Berkeley, and Chicago throughout the post-war era. After publishing The Origins of Totalitarianism, a key examination of the Nazi and Stalinist regimes, in 1951, and The Human Condition, her most important philosophical book, in 1958, she achieved classic status. In 1961, while working as a correspondent for The New Yorker, she travelled to Jerusalem to cover the Adolf Eichmann trial. Two years later, she wrote Eichmann in Jerusalem, which sparked outrage among Jews.
On Revolution, a comparison of the American and French revolutions, was published the same year. Between Past and Future (BPF), Men in Dark Times (MDT), and Crises of the Republic (CCR) were all notable collections of essays released in the 1960s and early 1970s . At the time of her death in 1975, she had completed the first two volumes on Thinking and Willing of her last major philosophical work, The Life of the Mind, which was published posthumously in 1978. The third volume, on Judging, was left unfinished, but some background material and lecture notes were published in 1982 under the title Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy.
2) Main Works:
Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin (1929), Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewish Woman(1974), The Origins of Totalitarianism (1973), The Human Condition (1958), Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), On Revolution (1963), Between Past and Future (1961), Men in Dark Times (1968), On Violence (1970), Crises of the Republic (1972), The Jew as Pariah (1978), The Jewish Writings (2007), The Life of the Mind (1978), Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy (1982), Essays in Understanding: 1930–1954 and Responsibility and Judgment (2003).
3) Main Themes in her Work:
Totalitarianism:
In her debut book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951, Arendt investigated both the political movements of Hitler and Stalin in order to better understand how they came to power. According to her, society as a whole must confront the ideological underpinnings of these modern-day authoritarian leaders’ ascendancy. Even as Arendt strove to comprehend, she was outspoken in her condemnation of such totalitarian governments. The book’s ideas are a reflection of the author’s intelligence and the pain she has endured.
It was thought by Arendt that the emergence of totalitarianism was due to a combination of two reasons. A widespread belief in antisemitism brought together a large number of people who harbored anti-Semitic feelings toward the Jews. Rather than a means of exterminating Jews, she saw it as a tool for the Nazis to display their dominance. Once they gained control over other countries, they were able to exert more influence. Arendt opined that the advent of totalitarianism was enabled by the mass manipulation of emotions.
What if you were living in an area that had just been taken over by an authoritarian regime? Resentments that you already hold about a group of individuals are bolstered by this regime. After then, you’re informed that you’ve joined an exclusive group. Disagreeable voices are kept at bay. You’re terrified to speak out, so you opt to go along with the government’s orders instead, hoping for the best.
Political theory and philosophical system:
Although Arendt never created a cohesive political theory and her work does not readily lend itself to classification, the lineage of thought most strongly associated with Arendt is that of civic republicanism, from Aristotle to Tocqueville. Her political ideology is based on the idea of active citizenship, which stresses the importance of participating in the democratic process and discourse with others. As long as she held that contemporary societies tend to turn away from democratic freedom and its inherent disorder in favor of administrative bureaucracy, she maintained that government would never be able to eliminate human freedom. With an ever less-free world, she has left behind a significant political legacy. Rather of adhering to a particular systematic philosophy, she explores topics such as totalitarianism, the essence of freedom and cognition and judgement in a variety of ways.
While she is most renowned for her writings on “dark times,” the nature of tyranny, and evil, she infused this with a glimmer of optimism and belief in the essence of humanity: “That even in the darkest of times we have the right to expect some illumination, and that such illumination might well come less from theories and concepts than from the uncertain, flickering, and often weak light that some men and women, in their lives and their works, will kindle under almost all circumstances and shed over the time span that was given to them.”
Modernity:
When it comes to the development of modernity, Arendt sees two distinct stages: one from 1650 until 1800 is characterized by the growth of socialism; the other from 1900 forward is characterized by earth alienation and the triumph of animal laborans. Her other theories include the discovery of America and its subsequent diminution of Earth’s surface area, waves of expropriation that began during the Reformation, the development of telescopes that challenged traditional notions about human senses, modern science and philosophy’s rise and subsequent adoption of a humanistic conception of nature and history as well as an increase in economic activity, production, and accumulation.
By “losing the world,” Arendt implies restricting or eliminating public action and speech in favor of private contemplation and the pursuit of private economic interests in the contemporary world. To define modernity as we know it now, we have to look at how animal laborans have triumphed over homo faber, and how classical conceptions of human nature have been replaced by a more inclusive view of humanity as a social animal. Instead of politics and action, we live in a time of bureaucratic administration and anonymous work, of elite dominance and public opinion manipulation. Terrorism and violence have been institutionalized to such an extent that totalitarian regimes like Nazism and Stalinism have formed. Homogeneity and uniformity have overtaken multiplicity and freedom; human solidarity has been supplanted by isolation; all types of spontaneous living have been undermined by isolation and loneliness in our era. For those who have lost their traditional standards and values due to the collapse of civilization, modernity is the era in which they must find new ground for human community as a whole.
This is Arendt’s image of modernity, a picture that looks bleak and unredeemable at first glance. Arendt’s unfavorable view of modernity was molded by her experience with totalitarianism in the twentieth century, but her work offers some key insights that may help us solve certain problematic aspects of the modern age, so it’s worth noting that. Arendt argued in her political works, most notably in The Origins of Totalitarianism, that the rise of totalitarianism had disrupted the continuity of Western history and made useless the vast majority of our moral and political categories in the process. The sad events of the twentieth century and the success of totalitarian forces in the East and West have rendered the rupture in our heritage irreversible. Totalitarianism, manifested in the fascist regimes of Stalinism and Nazism, has shattered our historical continuity by upending long-held political and moral norms.
It is impossible for us to return to pre-Holocaust notions and ideals, so as to explain or understand the unfathomable by means of precedents, or to comprehend the unfathomable by means of familiarity. As Arendt famously put it, “without a bannister,” the weight of our time must be addressed alone (RPW, 336). It is now necessary to reconstruct the meaning of the past free of any tradition, as no tradition has preserved its original validity in light of contemporary political events that have shattered our inherited notions and standards for judgement. Arendt is attempting to protect the past, not tradition, from the current time-consciousness schism. Reappropriating the past via “the deadly impact of new thoughts” (MDT, 201) is the only way to reclaim the present and shed light on the current predicament.
Theory of Action:
The two most important aspects of action are freedom and plurality. Arendt does not use the term “freedom” in the sense of the liberal tradition’s reverence for “freedom of choice” or the Christian doctrine’s “liberum arbitrium” faculty, which says that we were given free will by God. What Arendt really means by freedom is the inherent ability that every human being has only by virtue of their birth: the ability to start something new, to do something unexpected. Because each birth marks a fresh beginning and the introduction of novelties in the world, action as the achievement of freedom is thus founded in natality.
If we want to build and sustain a society in which new human beings are continuously being born, we must engage in both labor as well as work, as Arendt points out. Because people re-enact their birth’s miracle of beginnings via their own actions, action is most directly linked to natality. Every time we act, that is, every time we begin anything new, we realize the beginning that each of us symbolizes by virtue of our birth. Because only the newcomer is able to start anything from scratch, that is, to act, can “the new beginning inherent in birth make itself felt in the world” (HC, 9).
Since action is the actualization of freedom, Arendt also emphasizes the fact that it has the power to accomplish miracles, that is, to introduce the completely unexpected, since it is anchored in natality as a beginning. In the nature of beginnings, “she says, “something new is started which cannot be expected from whatever may have happened before. All beginnings have such a stunning unexpectedness about them… When a human being is capable of action, it indicates that he is capable of doing things that are impossible. The fact that each man is unique makes it possible for a new thing to be born into the world with each birth” (HC, 177–8).
We may now shift our attention to the second important aspect of action, which is pluralism. In other words, if acting implies taking action, introducing new and surprising ideas into the world, it also means that it cannot be done without the presence of other actors who can evaluate the quality of what is being performed from their own viewpoints. Action, like performance art, needs the presence and acknowledgement of others if it is to have any value. It is only in a setting of plurality that action may take place, in which one must emerge in public, make oneself known, and solicit the support of others.
Arendt uses an anthropological argument to link action with plurality. Similarly to how life and worldliness are conditions that correspond to labor, she believes that plurality is a condition that corresponds to action, and vice versa. Preferring to refer to humanity as a whole as “human in such a way that nobody is ever identical to anybody else who has ever lived, exists, or will live,” she states that “we are all the same — that is, human” (HC, 7–8). Both equality and differentiation may be found in the concept of pluralism, which refers to the reality that all human beings share some degree of similarity but that no two of them are ever the same since each of them has a unique life story and viewpoint on the world.
Individuals’ ability to behave and relate to one another in ways that are both unique and distinctive is made possible by the fact that we are all a part of this vast, interconnected web of interactions and connections. Individuals interact directly with each other in a language-based
domain known as human affairs, where there is no middleman of objects or matter — that is, via language. A quick look at the relationship between action and words is warranted.
Action and Speech as Disclosure:
According to Arendt’s The Human Condition, one of action’s most important purposes is to reveal one’s identity to others. She asserts that through action and speech, people expose themselves as unique individuals, revealing their own personalities to the world. When seen via Arendt’s prism, their actions reflect “who” they are, as opposed to “what” they are, which refers to a person’s unique strengths and talents as well as their faults and shortcomings, which are characteristics that all humans share. Individuals cannot show their true identity via their job or work, nor can they reveal “who” they are apart from “what.” Because of the limitations imposed by biological existence, the uniqueness of workers is subsumed within a web of natural requirements. The fact that we are all members of the human race and so have a responsibility to take care of our physical requirements is all that we can demonstrate when we work.
All of us are “behaving” and “performing roles” in this arena because we all follow the same rules. It’s easier to express one’s uniqueness at the workplace since each piece you manufacture has your name on it. But even with that, you’re still subservient to the final result because you’re following a model and the product will outlive you. It also doesn’t tell anything about the creator other than the fact that they were capable of making it. Only that the creator has particular skills and abilities is all that is revealed about him or her. Because of this, it is only through connecting with others via words and acts that people are able to show the world who they are. “Who are you?” is a question every newcomer is asked, and both action and words answer that inquiry. Deeds and words both contribute to the discovery of “who,” but it is speech that has the closest relationship to revelation. An action’s significance would be diminished if it weren’t accompanied by the sound of a voice. It would be devoid of the prerequisites for assigning agency.
Judgment and the Wind of Thought:
Arendt revisited this topic in The Life of the Mind, a book intended to include the three powers of thinking, willing, and judging. According to her preface to the first book of her vita activa series, she was inspired to create it after witnessing Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem and because she felt there was a void in her earlier work about our mental activity. She was especially disturbed by Eichmann’s “thoughtlessness” since she believed it was the reason he was unable to make a proper decision in the most critical situations. “It was this absence of thinking,” she wrote, “that awakened my interest. Is evil-doing … possible in default of not just ‘base motives’ … but of any motives whatever … Might the problem of good and evil, our faculty for telling right from wrong, be connected with our faculty of thought?” (LM, vol. I, 4–5).
Arendt responded by establishing a dual link between the activities of thinking and judgement. As a first step, thinking — the quiet debate between myself and myself – dismantles our ingrained ways of thinking and social norms, allowing us to evaluate details independently of
pre-established universals. But it’s not that thinking supplies judges with new criteria for subsuming specifics beneath generalizations. Instead, the universal hold on the specific is loosened, allowing judgement to be freed from stifling paradigms and customary standards of evaluation. Thought becomes a crucial activity in times of crisis because it undermines all established standards and norms, allowing the individual to evaluate for themselves rather than being influenced by the majority’s actions and ideas.
Another method in which Arendt linked thinking and judgement is by demonstrating that thinking, by actualizing the conversation between myself and myself that is provided in awareness, develops conscience as a byproduct. Although this conscience does not provide us any good advice, it does inform us what we should avoid doing and what we should repent of. This is unlike the voice of God or what subsequent philosophers dubbed the “natural light.” According to Arendt, the Socratic maxim “It is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong” and the proposition “It would be better for me to have my lyre or a chorus I directed be out of tune and loud with discord and that multitudes of men disagree with me, rather than that I myself should be out of harmony with myself and contradict me” stem from the idea that there is a silent partner within ourselves to whom we owe our behavior. We are most afraid of our companion (i.e., our conscience) waiting for us at the end of the day.
4) Importance of Her Works in Our Times:
One of the most influential political theorists of the twentieth century, this German immigrant became an American citizen. To honor Hannah Arendt, the German Historical Museum in Berlin has mounted a show. Anti-Semitism, colonialism and racism, the Nazis and Stalinism were among the topics she tackled in her direct writing style, proving that critical thought could be adventurous and enjoyable.
Adolf Eichmann’s former SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann was put on trial in Jerusalem in 1961 by journalist Hannah Arendt. He was in charge of the mass slaughter of Jews in the Nazi death camps. The New Yorker published Arendt’s piece on the trial in 1963, and a book with the subtitle “A Report on the Banality of Evil” was published later that year. It is her opinion that Adolf Eichmann was nothing more than an opportunistic technocrat who was only interested in serving his superiors.
Arendt invented the expression “the banality of evil,” which she defined as “organized thoughtlessness and irresponsibility” in her writings. Eichmann’s insistence on “unconditional” obedience was a manifestation of this carelessness and recklessness. It wasn’t only the title or the subject of “banality” that prompted debate over Arendt’s report; she also questioned the “Judenräte” (Jewish Councils)’ response to the events in Germany at the time. Was there collusion amongst the members of these organizations?
With Hannah Arendt’s examination of 20th-century challenges, curator Monika Boll hopes to stimulate debate. Our goal is not to convince visitors that Hannah Arendt is always correct, but rather to inspire them to establish their own beliefs by passing on her zest for critical thought.” It’s safe to say that Hannah Arendt, who saw critical thinking as fundamentally political in nature, would endorse this approach. National Socialism, according to Boll, was a total
disintegration of moral norms and the capacity to make judgments, he points out. By promoting the use of the collective “we” rather than the individual “I,” Boll claims that personal responsibility was delegated to impersonal authority.
In 1931, Hannah Arendt predicted that the Nazis would take power. Unlike the majority of Germans, she realized two years later that the country’s citizens must actively oppose the dictatorship. In the same year, she left for France and began working for Zionist groups in Paris while still attending university. When World War II broke out, she, her husband, and her mother made their way to New York City through Lisbon. In 1951, Arendt became a naturalized American citizen.
For the rest of her life, she remained faithful to herself, never straying from her own beliefs or traditions. According to Monika Boll, her way of thinking is difficult to categorize, which is part of what makes it so intriguing. “It’s impossible to place her in a single political party since her thought contains liberal, conservative, and left-wing aspects.” The term “thinking without a bannister” was coined by Hannah Arendt. Additionally, she was a talented writer. Boll explains that “that’s why people prefer to dig into her life and job” since it all adds to her charm. Her tales from the aftermath of World War II, her views on the refugee crisis, racism in America or worldwide student activism always manage to surprise people. We should reevaluate our own beliefs in light of what she has to say.
5) Eichmann in Jerusalem:
It was in 1960 that Hannah Arendt contacted The New Yorker and promised to cover Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Israel when it commenced on April 11, 1961. After reading The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt was eager to test her beliefs and observe how justice was given to the guy she had written about. In addition, she had previously observed “little of the Nazi regime directly,” and here was a chance to see an agent of tyranny in action. When the offer was accepted, Edna Brocke, her young Israeli cousin, joined her for the last two weeks of the five-month trial. Golda Meir and the trial’s presiding judge Moshe Landau welcomed her like a star upon her arrival. Following this, in 1963 she wrote a report, based on her notes, transcripts, and interviews, which became the book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (Eichmann in Jerusalem).
Arendt notably created the term “the banality of evil” to characterize the phenomena of Eichmann in her writings. She, too, was taken aback by his benign manner and diminutive stature, which contrasted starkly with the heinous acts for which he was being held responsible. He was “terribly and terrifyingly normal,” according to her. Her investigation focused on the issue of whether evil is radical or a product of thoughtlessness, a propensity of ordinary people to accept commands and conform to popular opinion without critically evaluating the implications. A key part of Arendt’s argument was that Eichmann was not, in her view, a monster, despite the enormity of his deeds. “He expected his captors to understand him,” she said of Eichmann, who claimed to be a Zionist after first opposing anti-Semitism.” His acts were not motivated by malice, but rather by a desire to fit in and be accepted as a “joiner” by the dictatorship.
Arendt would later write, “We were quite enough to make the greatest of all crimes conceivable by going along with the others and wishing to say ‘we.'” This is what Arendt saw throughout the trial: A middle-class shopkeeper with an important place in the Nazi cause. In her assessment, she remarked that he was unable to “think” because of his reliance on clichés and bureaucratic morality. That’s when she came up with her most famous and much controversial dictum: “the lesson that this lengthy course in human cruelty had taught us — the lesson of the terrible, word- and thought-defying banality of evil. She didn’t mean to suggest that Eichmann was unaware of his actions when she said he “didn’t think,” but rather that he lacked the reflective reason indicated by the word “thinking.”
As a “show trial” having ulterior purposes other than just trying evidence and giving justice, Arendt criticized the Israelis’ handling of the trial as a “show”. Israelis’ portrayal of Eichmann’s crimes was also criticized by Arendt, since she felt that they framed them as attacks on Israel rather than on humanity. According to her, she was against the concept that a strong Israel was vital to preserve global Jewry from being “slaughtered like sheep” once again, remembering a biblical expression. She painted Attorney General Gideon Hausner as using exaggerated language to further the political objectives of Prime Minister Ben-Gurion.
For Arendt, who was confident that she could preserve her moral values in the face of anger, Hausner’s “parade of survivors” had “no obvious impact on the case” and disappointed her. When Hausner continually questioned, “Why did you not rebel?” rather than questioning the role of Jewish leaders, she was especially alarmed. Jewish Councils (Judenräte) leaders, such as M. C. Rumkowski, worked “nearly without exception” in cooperation with Eichmann “in the extermination of their own people,” according to Arendt.
Prior to the trial, she had voiced her worries about this issue. As she put it, this was a “moral disaster.” While her point was not to assign blame, rather she grieved what she deemed a moral failing of violating the requirement that it is better to endure wrong than to commit evil. As she puts it, “This participation of the Jewish leaders in the annihilation of their own people is without a shadow of a doubt the worst episode in the whole terrible saga.” This sparked even more controversy and resentment against her in the Jewish community and in Israel, which was widely misinterpreted. The Eichmann trial was a watershed moment in Arendt’s last decade of life, when she became more interested with moral philosophy.
