Hannah Arendt considered today: Totalitarianism, genocide and the need for thought

By Cynthia Haven

The 20th century world of philosophy did not, as a rule, create superstars.

Hannah Arendt was an exception – almost from the time she coined the phrase that has become a cliché, “banality of evil,” to describe the 1961 trial of Nazi Adolf Eichmann in a series of articles for The New Yorker. She acquired a cult status that her mentors, philosophers Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger, could hardly imagine.

Thirty-five years after her death, the German-Jewish political theorist, author of Eichmann in Jerusalem, Origins of Totalitarianism, The Human Condition and Life of the Mind, among other works, is an international industry, with new letters, commentaries and biographies published every year. But perhaps her message has been obscured by celebrity.

A scholarly conference at Stanford attempted to redress the imbalance in its own way with a recent two-day workshop, “Hannah Arendt and the Humanities: On the Relevance of Her Work Beyond the Realm of Politics,” sponsored by the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. Scholars from around the world discussed the life and thought of one of the most seminal and influential political philosophers of the last century.

A friend remembers

In a surprise appearance, Stanford University President Emeritus Gerhard Casper spoke of his friendship with Arendt, from their meeting in 1961 until her death in 1975.

“Why Arendt? Why Arendt now?” asked Professor Amir Eshel, director of the Forum on Contemporary Europe. He said that in the humanities, her “insights about the link between the past and the future” can “address the predicaments of our time, specifically such manmade disasters as genocide and mass expulsion.”

Arendt fled Germany when Hitler rose to power in 1933, immigrating in 1941 to the United States, where she taught at a number of universities. Her works, particularly The Origins of Totalitarianism, a study of the Nazi and Stalinist regimes, spurred a wide-ranging debate on the nature and history of totalitarianism. Her books analyzed freedom, power, evil, political action – and, always, thought.

Stanford professor Robert Harrison, chair of the Department of French and Italian, made the conference’s most spirited address in a talk on “passionate thinking.” He considered Arendt’s notion of friendship and thought as rooted in solitude and the ability to commune with oneself – that “plurality begins with the individual.”

The “overwhelming question” in the humanities, he said, is “How do we negotiate the necessity of solitude as a precondition for thought?”

“What do we do to foster the regeneration of thinking? Nothing. At least not institutionally,” he said. “Not only in the university, but in society at large, everything conspires to invade the solitude of thought. It has as much to do with technology as it does with ideology. There is a not a place we go where we are not connected to the collective.

“Every place of silence is invaded by noise. Everywhere we see the ravages of this on our thinking. The ability for sustained, coherent, consistent thought is becoming rare” in the “thoughtlessness of the age.”

Harrison decried the public fascination with Arendt’s youthful affair with Heidegger, a Nazi sympathizer; the publication of Arendt’s personal letters; and her biographers’ invasive use of private material – although at least one biographer, Thomas Wild of Berlin, author of Hannah Arendt, attended the workshop.

Casper said that he had to be “cajoled into coming” as Arendt was “a very private person.”

“She would not have approved of videos, being taped at all times and put out on the web,” he said, indicating the camera that was filming the event.

He noted that “she liked to gossip – very much so.” However, he said, “What she would have been appalled by is the industry. Cottage industry? This is hardly a cottage industry anymore.”

Guarded her solitude

Casper reinforced the notion of Arendt as a guardian of her own solitude: attending conferences infrequently and “always thinking … always fiercely independent,” protecting her “private time, time for study, time in her apartment on Riverside Drive.”

“She was forceful, opinionated, never had any doubts about her views,” he said. “In certain circumstances she was willing to listen carefully and be convinced she was wrong. Those were rare.”

Casper said he considered her best book to be Eichmann in Jerusalem, a book that concluded, famously, with a direct address to Eichmann:

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 right to determine who should and who 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, you must hang.

“She was incredibly good when she observed, when she told what she saw,” Casper  said. “She was incredibly suggestive and artistic – she was not definitive, not scientific,” he said. “That’s why she’s not popular among philosophers, nor among political scientists. She was putting forward a kind of truth, not definitive, about the human condition. That was her great strength.”

Arendt is more than another talking head; Eshel said that she forms a formidable counterpoint German philosopher Walter Benjamin’s view of the past “as one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage at the feet of the angel of history.”

Arendt instead “wants us to acknowledge our ability to set off, to begin, to insert ourselves with word and deed into the world. Arendt seemed to have sensed that if we do not do so there may be indeed no future for us to share.”

In: http://news.stanford.edu/pr/2010/pr-hannah-arendt-conference-052510.html

Martin & Hannah, amor nas ruínas

Sai nos EUA um livro esclarecedor sobre o affair de Heidegger e Arendt

Ricardo Cohen – O Estado de S.Paulo

Por volta de 1924, o professor seduziu sua aluna. Ele tinha 35 anos e era casado. Ela tinha 19 e era solteira. Ele era um filósofo importante, e ela uma garota precoce, destinada a grandes feitos pessoais. Ele viria a se tornar nazista e ela era judia – Martin Heidegger e Hannah Arendt. Quem puder compreender ambos, como casal e individualmente, compreenderia o mundo e todos os seus mistérios. E poderia também nunca mais pegar no sono.

O affair Heidegger-Arendt é uma história muito contada que nunca perde o interesse para escritores. Mas surgiu um novo livro, Stranger From Abroad, de Daniel Maier-Katkin, que foi resenhado, junto com um livro separado sobre Heidegger, na primeira página do New York Times Book Review de domingo – um lugar de honra apropriado para esses dois gigantes intelectuais, para não mencionar seu muito estranho e, em termos afetivos, duradouro affair. Após a 2ª Guerra Mundial, Arendt defendeu Heidegger e retomou sua amizade.

O affair é bastante fácil de entender. Ela era uma jovem atraente, e ele um homem robusto com grandes realizações intelectuais, uma espécie de celebridade antes daquela imposta autoflagelação na TV. É mais difícil, muito mais difícil, seja compreender seja desculpar a determinação de Arendt – ou seria necessidade? – de continuar o relacionamento depois da guerra. Afinal, Heidegger não era um nazista em algum tipo de sentido passivo. Ele cumulou Hitler de elogios e, como reitor da Universidade de Freiburg, ajudou a expurgar os judeus do corpo docente – seus próprios colegas.

Celebridade. Quanto a Arendt, no anos do pós-guerra, ela se tornou absolutamente famosa. Seus relatos sobre o julgamento de Adolf Eichmann para a revista New Yorker – e depois no livro Eichmann in Jerusalem – se tornaram uma sensação e uma causa célebre. Ela formulou a expressão “a banalidade do mal”, tão apropriada que sofreu o destino de todos os truísmos, virando um clichê. Ela foi celebrada e odiada por acusar alguns de seus colegas judeus de cumplicidade no Holocausto – um juízo duro e perverso.

Hannah Arendt não foi uma mera “garota” que não conseguiu superar seu primeiro amor – a menos, é claro, que fosse. Seja como for, sua estrutura emocional me interessa menos que a de Heidegger. A dele era um brilho só, um filósofo cujas obras ainda estão sendo discutidas. No entanto, seu nazismo não foi um produto de mero oportunismo – como foi, por exemplo, o de Werner von Braun, que precisava de um empurrão de Hitler para dispara seus foguetes, ou o de Herbert Von Karajan, que não permitiria que a mera moralidade se interpusesse entre ele e uma ilustre carreira. A carreira de Heidegger já estava estabelecida. Ele não precisava ser nazista; ele quis ser nazista.

No conjunto, esse é um casal totalmente assustador – dois dos grandes filósofos do século 20, seu gênio contradito por suas vidas inexplicavelmente estarrecedoras: um abraçou o nazismo, a outra o desculpou por fazê-lo. Numa área crítica, deveria haver estátuas para eles em cada praça de cidade, e outdoors deles olhando para os ingênuos que acham, como Alan Greenspan um dia achou romanticamente dos mercados financeiros, que o homem é racional.

Uma opinião. Houve um tempo em que eu combati o conceito de mal. Quando Ronald Reagan chamou a União Soviética de “império do mal”, eu franzi a testa. “Mal” não sugeria nenhum motivo, uma força que não poderia ser compreendida. Isso, por sua vez, descartava uma acomodação, e isso era apenas puro pavor.

Mas Reagan estava certo sobre o sistema soviético, enquanto George W. Bush, alguns anos depois, estava errado e foi oportunista quando ofendeu Reagan rotulando três regimes disparatados e desconexos de “eixo do mal” – um absurdo mecânico, uma abominação gramatical. Cuidado com aqueles que lhe dizem para não pensar.

Hannah Arendt e Martin Heidegger representam a velocidade da luz intelectual, o limite absoluto do que a razão pode fazer, e a natureza laboriosa, insidiosa do mal. A pura banalidade de lealdade, de afeição passada, ou, quem sabe, de incapacidade de admitir um erro, cegou Arendt para o mal de Heidegger e o mal deste o cegou para suas consequências. Ele conseguiu separar intelecto de moralidade, e ela não conseguiu separar quem ela havia se tornado de quem ela havia sido.

Logo depois da guerra, ela escreveu que “o problema do mal será a questão fundamental da vida intelectual do pós-guerra na Europa” – e então, alguns anos mais tarde, ela partiu para a Alemanha e telefonou para seu antigo amante. Ocorre que não é o mal que é banal. É o amor.

TRADUÇÃO DE CELSO M. PACIORNIK

Fonte: http://www.estadao.com.br/estadaodehoje/20100515/not_imp552123,0.php

English Version:

When love itself spurs evil

Around 1924, the professor seduced his student. He was 35 and married, she was 18 and single. He was an important philosopher and she was a precocious kid, destined for great things herself. He was to become a Nazi and she was a Jew – Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt.

If you could understand them both, as a couple and individually, you would understand the world and all its mysteries. You might also never sleep again.

The Heidegger-Arendt affair is a much-told tale that never loses its attraction for writers. Yet another book has appeared, “Stranger from Abroad” by Daniel Maier-Katkin, which was reviewed, along with a separate book on Heidegger, on the front of last Sunday’s New York Times Book Review – a place of honor befitting these two intellectual giants, not to mention their very strange, and in terms of affection, enduring affair. After World War II, Arendt defended Heidegger and resumed the friendship.

The affair is easy enough to understand. She was a fetching young woman and he was a robust man of great intellectual achievement, a celebrity of sorts before that entailed dancing or self-abasement on TV. It is harder, much harder, to either understand or excuse Arendt’s determination – or was it need? – to continue the relationship after the war. After all, Heidegger was not a Nazi in some sort of passive sense. He heaped praised on Hitler and, as rector of Freiburg University, helped purge the faculty of Jews – his very colleagues.

As for Arendt, in the postwar years, she became downright famous. Her accounts of the Adolf Eichmann trial for The New Yorker – and later in the book “Eichmann in Jerusalem” – became both a sensation and a cause celebre. She formulated the phrase “the banality of evil,” so apt that it has suffered the fate of all truisms, becoming a cliche. She was also celebrated and loathed for indicting some of her fellow Jews for alleged complicity in the Holocaust – a harsh and altogether malicious judgment.

Hannah Arendt was no mere “girl” who could not get over her first love – unless, of course, she was. Whatever the case, her emotional makeup interests me less than Heidegger’s. His was a unique brilliance, a philosopher whose works are still being discussed. And yet his Nazism was not a product of mere opportunism – as was, say, that of Wernher von Braun, who needed a boost from Hitler to propel his rockets, or that of Herbert von Karajan, who would not permit mere morality to stand between him and an illustrious career. Heidegger’s career was already established. He didn’t have to be a Nazi; he wanted to be a Nazi.

Taken together, this is a thoroughly frightening couple – two of the 20th century’s great philosophers, their genius contradicted by their inexplicably appalling lives: One embraced Nazism, the other excused him for doing so.

In one critical area, they were no different than a goon and his gal. By way of caution, there ought to be statues of them in every city square, and billboards of them looking down on the naive who think, as Alan Greenspan once romantically did of financial markets, that man is rational.

There was a time when I fought against the concept of evil. When Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union the “evil empire,” I winced. “Evil” suggested no motive, a force that could not be understood. This, in turn, ruled out accommodation, and that was just plain scary.

Yet, Reagan was right about the Soviet system, while George W. Bush, some years later, was both wrong and opportunistic when he abused Reagan to label three disparate and unconnected regimes the “axis of evil” – a mechanical absurdity, a grammatical abomination. Beware those who tell you not to think.

Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger represent the intellectual speed of light, the absolute limit of what reason can do, and the plodding, insidious nature of evil. The sheer banality of loyalty, of past affection or maybe of the inability to admit a mistake blinded Arendt to Heidegger’s evil and his evil blinded him to its consequences. He managed to detach intellect from morality and she could not detach who she had become from who she had been.

Right after the war, she wrote that “the problem of evil will be the fundamental question of postwar intellectual life in Europe” – and then, some years later, she went off to Germany and called her old lover. It turns out it is not evil that’s banal. It’s love.

In: http://thetimes-tribune.com/opinion/editorials-columns/national-columnists/when-love-itself-spurs-evil-1.781305