Regime Militar, por Boris Fausto

Historia do Brasil por Bóris Fausto, Documentário exibido pela TV ESCOLA em 2002

Direito à Memória, à Verdade e à Justica!

Desaparecidos Polí­ticos

Brasil: primeiro processo contra torturadores da ditadura

Pluralizar o universal: guerra e paz na obra de Hannah Arendt

Verena Stolcke

“O que matou os dinossauros? Perguntas enquanto cravas na minha pupila a tua pupila azul. Ou quem? Tu mesma, um meteoro, uma erupção vulcânica? Morreram apunhalados ou foram vítimas de um súbito e calculado extermínio?” (José Ángel Valiente, “Anotaciones para un Fin de Siglo”, em Cabo de Gata)

“É próprio da história dos assuntos humanos que todo ato, uma vez executado e inscrito nos anais da humanidade, continue sendo uma possibilidade muito depois de sua atualidade ter passado a fazer parte da história. Jamais houve castigo com suficiente poder de dissuasão para impedir que se cometam delitos.” (Arendt 1999:412, tradução minha)

Durante o século XX, o poder político passa por profundas transformações. Surgem a sociedade de massas, as catástrofes totalitárias. Hannah Arendt não foi mera observadora, mas vivenciou e observou os horrores de seu tempo, o aniquilamento organizado e tecnicamente refinado dos judeus europeus, a que levou a Segunda Grande Guerra, e dedicou toda a sua vida a compreender essa “assustadora novidade”, com singular paixão e autonomia de julgamento. Sua obra é, hoje, imprescindível para se refletir sobre os nossos tempos, dilacerados por guerras “locais”, guerras estas inspiradas em novos ¾ ainda que tão antigos ¾ nacionalismos.

O pensamento de Hannah Arendt é indissociável de sua experiência pessoal enquanto judia alemã, expulsa de seu país quando Hitler chega ao poder na Alemanha, implantando a forma mais extrema do nacionalismo moderno. A própria autora assinalaria mais tarde: “não pode haver processo de pensamento que não seja o resultado de uma experiência pessoal. Todo pensamento é um ‘repensar’: pensa-se depois da coisa” (Gaus 1964:28).

A força motriz de Hannah Arendt foi, portanto, essa inevitável necessidade de compreender o fato inaudito e sem precedentes na história da humanidade do aniquilamento sistemático dos judeus europeus. Costuma-se insistir nas tensões, não resolvidas na obra de Arendt, entre liberdade e ação política. No entanto, encontrei na autora uma excepcional sensibilidade para as contradições, próprias à modernidade, entre o ideal ilustrado da dignidade humana em liberdade e as adscrições primordiais e exclusivas, assim como os engajamentos políticos convencionais. Compreender, para Arendt, significava enfrentar sem preconceitos e com atenção a própria realidade, qualquer que fosse, e resistir a ela, em vez de negar a atrocidade ou atribuí-la a precedentes históricos (Birulés 1997). Se, para compreender, é necessário evitar os preconceitos, essa compreensão tampouco pode produzir uma verdade absoluta, já que consiste em um empreendimento sempre inacabado, mediante o qual, ao estarmos submetidos a constantes mudanças, nos reconciliamos com a realidade e procuramos estar no mundo (Arendt 1953). Em lugar de esquivar-se das tensões entre liberdade e compromisso político, ou de privilegiar um lado do dilema moderno, Arendt buscou, ao longo de toda a sua vida, uma forma de conciliar a liberdade individual de movimento e pensamento com a percepção de um mundo, ao mesmo tempo, plural e compartilhado.

Duas interrogações político-morais fundamentais constituem o eixo e estabelecem uma unidade entre as análises históricas e os escritos políticos e teóricos de Arendt. Por um lado, ela não deixa de indagar-se sobre como pode ter ocorrido algo tão inimaginavelmente assustador quanto a “fabricação sistemática de cadáveres” pelos nazistas nos campos de concentração (Gaus 1964). Esta questão fundamental, por sua vez, conduziu a autora a buscar uma resposta mais global para a seguinte pergunta: qual seria a ação política que, na sociedade moderna burocrática de massas, permitiria recuperar uma cultura cívica do público, sem que isto colocasse em jogo a liberdade e a responsabilidade individuais.

A experiência do desenraizamento

Hannah Arendt pertenceu à geração de intelectuais judeus, pensadores que anteciparam uma crítica cultural do racionalismo moderno, proveniente da Europa Central, mas formada no seio da cultura alemã, como Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, Elias Canetti, Norbert Elias, Rosa Luxemburgo, e que, à exceção de Kafka, vivenciaram, como ela, o desterro, ou pereceram, vítimas do regime nazista .

Hannah Arendt cresceu sem ter consciência do crescente clima anti-semita da Alemanha. Nasceu em 1906, em Linden, próximo a Hannover, na Alemanha guilhermina. Educada em Königsberg, cidade de Kant, a quem leu ainda adolescente, foi filha única de Paul e Martha (Cohn) Arendt, ambos procedentes de antigas famílias judias russas de empresários, abastadas, assimiladas e liberais. Seu avô paterno fora presidente da municipalidade liberal de Königsberg. Aos sete anos, seu pai, um engenheiro, morre de sífilis. Sua mãe, que se casou novamente em 1920 e era simpatizante do movimento social-democrata, protege Arendt, durante a infância, do difuso anti-semitismo, fomentando nela um saudável senso de dignidade pessoal (Gaus 1964). Em 1924, Arendt inicia seus estudos de teologia e filosofia na Universidade de Marburgo, onde conhece o jovem filósofo Heidegger, ainda que essa relação tenha sido interrompida por sua mudança para Freiburg, e depois para a Universidade de Heidelberg, onde vai estudar com Karl Jaspers, o psicólogo convertido à filosofia, com quem Heidegger desenvolvia uma filosofia da existência: a indagação sobre como os seres humanos chegam à ¾ ou fracassam na ¾ realização de suas possibilidades humanas (Young-Bruehl 1993:98-ss.). Com Jaspers, Arendt conclui sua dissertação sobre “A idéia do amor em Santo Agostinho” .

Sua sensibilidade para o judaísmo e o modo de entender sua própria identidade judia passam por uma profunda transformação na cidade de Berlim, para onde se muda em 1929, casando-se com o filósofo judeu Günther Stern (antes Anders), enquanto o anti-semitismo se vai tornando abertamente hostil. Arendt começa a duvidar da assimilação enquanto possibilidade real para os judeus alemães, diante dos altos custos psicológicos que comporta. Como ela constata, não resta aos judeus assimilados sequer a opção de serem párias ou parvenus, frágeis adventícios (Mommsen 1986). Ao reconhecer a impossibilidade da assimilação da condição judia à cultura alemã, ela se distancia progressivamente dos ideais ilustrados igualitários e humanistas (Benhabib 1993).

Arendt plasma suas inquietudes sobre o dilema da identidade dos judeus alemães em um estudo de extraordinária sensibilidade e empatia, no qual retrata as vicissitudes sociais e emocionais de que padeceu a célebre escritora romântica judia Rahel Varnhagen, e seu salão berlinês. Desde seus tempos de estudante em Heidelberg, Arendt interessava-se pelo romantismo alemão e pelos salões judeus, onde os românticos alemães costumavam reunir-se no final do século XVIII. Também em Heidelberg, ela conhecera Karl Blumenfeld, líder sionista alemão, que a iniciou na “questão judia”, fomentando nela a consciência de sua identidade judia . Em Berlim, Arendt articula ambos os fios temáticos, o romantismo e a questão judia, através de pesquisa biográfica sobre a escritora Rahel Varnhagen (Arendt 1958a). A partir do relato da excêntrica e exposta vida escolhida por Rahel Varnhagen em sua incessante busca pela assimilação à boa sociedade aristocrática prussiana ¾ condenada irremediavelmente a amargos fracassos ¾, Arendt dá início à reflexão sobre sua própria condição de Aussenseiterin (pessoa estranha, não-pertinente, fora de lugar), de pária, como ela denominaria. Mostra, ainda, como o fato de ser mulher limitava as possibilidades de aceitação social de Rahel Varnhagen. Não existia para ela outra via, senão o casamento com um aristocrata alemão, para despojar-se de sua procedência judia .

A biografia de Rahel Varnhagen, que apresenta traços quase autobiográficos, é premonitória da trajetória de vida de Arendt, exceto em um aspecto crucial: ela não cometerá o mesmo erro de sua protagonista de investir esforços na busca pela assimilação. Ao contrário, sempre optará, de modo irrevogável, pela liberdade de pária, própria às pessoas não assimiladas. Segundo Arendt, os verdadeiros seres humanos, autenticamente livres, são os/as párias (Young-Bruehl 1993).

Quando, na Alemanha de 1933, Hitler chega ao poder e ocorre o incêndio do Reichstag, seguido de uma onda de prisões “preventivas” pela Gestapo (a polícia secreta do Estado), Hannah Arendt decide-se, pela primeira e única vez, pelo ativismo político. Sente-se responsável!, como explicará mais tarde (Gaus 1964). Arendt oferece seus serviços à Organização Sionista Alemã através de Karl Blumenfeld, seu presidente. A decisão é, antes de tudo, política, mais do que o resultado de uma inquietação pessoal enquanto judia alemã, provocada pelas circunstâncias políticas vigentes: “Quando nos atacam como judeus, temos que defender-nos como judeus” (Gaus 1964). Arendt insiste na distinção entre o compromisso político e a identidade pessoal. Não cabia reduzir a “existência judia” a um problema pessoal nem, portanto, pretender solucioná-lo no plano individual. O que estava em jogo era uma questão eminentemente pública e, como tal, política. Uma opção pessoal, como aquela adotada por Rahel Varnhagen, teria significado, pelo contrário, ignorar as importantes diferenças sociopolíticas entre os próprios judeus europeus ¾ desobrigando-se, portanto, do destino dos judeus não assimilados de classe baixa ¾, assim como tolerar o anti-semitismo, ao curvar-se perante ele na tentativa de livrar-se da condição de judia.

Mas a distinção de Arendt entre a liberdade pessoal, como ser humano singular que reivindica, e a responsabilidade política que professava como judia, não estava isenta de dificuldades conceituais e políticas, características dos movimentos coletivos de resistência que lutam contra formas de opressão fundadas em exclusões atribuídas a diferenças essenciais organizadas em função desses mesmos critérios de exclusão. O compromisso político de Arendt, em última instância, surgia de sua condição de judia, dada por nascimento, mesmo que ela jamais tivesse aceitado esta condição de origem como determinante de sua responsabilidade enquanto indivíduo.

Arendt nunca conseguirá resolver esta tensão entre o vir a ser judia em razão de circunstâncias políticas e o compromisso com a causa judaica por ser judia. Sua postura com relação à existência dos judeus, enquanto povo, será sempre reservada e ambígua. Como assinalará nos anos 60, quando jovem ela nunca se sentira alemã, enquanto pertencente a um povo, e sim como parte de um Estado alemão (Gaus 1964). E em resposta a uma crítica de Jaspers, segundo a qual, em uma palestra sobre Varnhagen, ela “objetivizava” a “existência judaica” que ele, fiel ao pensamento existencialista, entendia como um fenômeno puramente contingente, acidental, uma mera “forma de falar”, Arendt afirmou que, enquanto a “existência judaica”, por um lado, se tinha transformado para ela em uma questão política em virtude da perseguição aos judeus e ao fato de os intelectuais alemães, muitos deles seus amigos, alinharem-se ao regime nazista, por outro, o ser judia, mais do que um acidente, era uma forma de destino (Schicksalshaftigkeit) que ela assumia, não como simples reconhecimento, mas enquanto pária, como um desafio (Benhabib 1993; Gaus 1964; Mommsen 1986). Seu Bodenlosigkeit (desenraizamento) constituirá, para Arendt, um requisito indispensável para a independência de julgamento, ainda que jamais deixe de identificar-se com o destino do povo judeu e de reconhecer sua própria procedência judia. No entanto, ela nunca se conceberá como sionista e jamais abandonará o ceticismo que lhe inspira a idéia de uma cultura nacional judaica e a criação de um Estado judeu. Como afirmaria, em 1958, em uma carta enviada dos Estados Unidos a Jaspers: “O Fremdheit (estranhamento) e o Bodenlosigkeit (desenraizamento), se bem entendidos, facilitam a vida em nossos tempos [...]. Nada nos aproxima excessivamente; é como uma pele que vai se fechando de fora pra dentro. Desse modo, é possível permitir-se de novo continuar sendo sensível e vulnerável” (apud Nordmann 1993:91).

No verão de 1930, Arendt se vê obrigada a abandonar Berlim. A Organização Sionista Alemã encarregara-lhe de compilar a Greuelpropaganda (as difamações anti-semitas de organizações proletárias alemãs em revistas profissionais e outros veículos) para denunciar, no plano internacional, os métodos que o regime nazista empregava para perseguir os judeus. Acaba sendo detida pela Gestapo (Gaus 1964), mas consegue escapar, refugiando-se em Paris, onde permanece até 1940, momento em que o exército alemão invade a França, trabalhando para organizações sionistas e no resgate de crianças judias do Terceiro Reich levadas à Palestina.

Em Paris, inicia sua amizade com Walter Benjamin, a personificação dessa segurança sonâmbula característica do pária, cujo ceticismo em face de todas as tradições culturais e convenções sociais dota-lhe de uma especial habilidade para perceber as falsidades das identidades sociais. Arendt conhece também Heinrich Blücher, procedente de Berlim, membro refugiado da Liga Espartaquista de Rosa Luxemburgo e filósofo autodidata, com quem se casa em 1940, poucos meses antes da entrada do exército alemão na França.

A minúscula moradia de Benjamin em Paris converte-se em um ponto de encontro de um pequeno grupo de intelectuais refugiados para discussões políticas; Blücher estava entre eles. A partir dessas intensas discussões políticas e intelectuais e de seu estudo dos escritos do dreyfusard judeu-francês Bernard Lazare, Arendt consolida uma concepção política da complexa figura do/a pária, que transcende agora a experiência existencial de Aussenseiterin, transformando-se de um requisito para a liberdade de movimento em uma exigência ineludível da liberdade individual de pensamento. A autenticidade humana da figura de pária reside na sua habilidade em unir o julgamento independente à responsabilidade política, em contraste ao parvenu, ao adventício, dominado por suas ambições sociais (Nordmann 1993:71-72; Young-Bruehl 1993:169).

A estada em Paris é abruptamente interrompida em maio de 1940. Arendt é detida pelas autoridades francesas como “estrangeira inimiga” e enviada, junto com outros refugiados procedentes da Alemanha, ao campo de internamento de Gurs, nos Pirineus, triste lembrança na memória dos refugiados da Guerra Civil espanhola. Como ela ironizaria, “[...] a história contemporânea criara um novo gênero de seres humanos: aqueles que tinham sido levados aos campos de concentração por seus inimigos e aqueles levados aos campos de internamento por seus amigos” (Arendt 1993). Por sorte, o caos provocado pela entrada do exército alemão na França permite-lhe novamente fugir e reencontrar seu marido, com quem, em maio de 1941, empreende o caminho para o exílio nos Estados Unidos.

Hannah Arendt chega aos Estados Unidos como apátrida, como pessoa despojada de sua Heimat (pátria) ¾ recebe a nacionalidade norte-americana apenas em 1951. Ali, compartilha o destino de muitos intelectuais europeus refugiados, geralmente acolhidos com pouco entusiasmo no país. Os primeiros anos de exílio são duros. Sua consciência de Aussenseiterin torna-se mais profunda. Seu extraordinário dom para congregar pessoas faz com que o casal Arendt-Blücher seja rapidamente rodeado por um grupo de intelectuais de esquerda e amigos fiéis. No entanto, suas relações com as organizações e com a comunidade judaica são ambivalentes.

O assustadoramente novo

O golpe emocional e político mais duro, no entanto, estaria ainda por vir. As primeiras notícias de Auschwitz chegam em 1943. A inconcebível brutalidade das “fábricas de extermínio”, carente de qualquer lógica ou necessidade militar, mergulha Arendt em uma profunda melancolia diante desse testemunho extremo e sem precedentes de como o ser humano pode ser reduzido a um mero feixe de reações e ter sua vontade, personalidade e liberdade completamente anuladas, em rompimento radical com a tradição moral e cultural do Ocidente. Auschwitz nunca deveria ter ocorrido! (Gaus 1964; Arendt e Blumenfeld 1995:43).

No fim da guerra, Arendt encontra-se trabalhando no seu célebre estudo sobre as origens do totalitarismo, no qual tenta compreender as raízes e circunstâncias políticas que tornaram possível a assustadora novidade do extermínio dos judeus europeus. A obra completa As Origens do Totalitarismo é publicada em 1951. O livro proporciona-lhe seu primeiro reconhecimento público enquanto intelectual pela imediata controvérsia que provoca (Arendt 1999). Arendt iniciara sua análise do totalitarismo em um clima de desespero absoluto e o tinha concluído em meio a um otimismo desmedido, suscitado pela vitória sobre o fascismo. Não obstante, ela conseguiu superar, tanto o profundo desalento da guerra, quanto as ingênuas ilusões de uma paz eterna no pós-guerra.

As Origens do Totalitarismo suscitou severas críticas, em especial pelo paralelismo que Arendt detectou entre o totalitarismo nacional-socialista e o stalinismo, bem como por algumas simplificações históricas. Os críticos de esquerda pouco compreenderam o efeito político que o pacto de não-agressão entre Hitler e Stalin tivera para os judeus alemães na desqualificação do projeto comunista (Benjamin 2000; Klemperer 1995).

Em As Origens do Totalitarismo, Arendt desafia as interpretações convencionais sobre o extermínio dos judeus europeus⁶. Para ela, a “solução final” ¾ o aniquilamento dos judeus ¾ idealizada e executada com inenarrável crueldade e eficácia pelo regime nacional-socialista alemão, ainda que sem precedentes, não foi historicamente inevitável, nem constituiu um fenômeno excepcional (Sonderfall) no mundo moderno. Enquanto protótipo da total privação de direitos a uma população, esse episódio encontrava antecedentes no “assassinato administrativo” praticado pelo imperialismo colonial europeu. O “assustadoramente novo” na eliminação física sistemática de milhões de prisioneiros ¾ homens, mulheres e crianças judias e outros grupos humanos declarados inimigos da nação alemã e internados nos campos de concentração pelo regime nazista ¾ estava na verdade na sua prolixa execução burocrática e tecnificada, desprovida de toda dimensão moral. Para esse caráter amoral do holocausto, contribuiu o avanço da técnica que permitiu matar à distância, em flagrante ruptura com a história européia (Gaus 1964; Arendt 1967 [1951]; 1999; Whitfield 1998).

Além disso, o extermínio dos judeus também não foi, para Arendt, produto de um “anti-semitismo eterno”, nem radicava em algum “fato” diferencial das vítimas. O que tornou possível o holocausto foram as novas circunstâncias sociopolíticas e ideológicas que acompanharam a formação do Estado nacional moderno no século XIX, e que deram origem a uma sociedade progressivamente atomizada e burocratizada, favorecendo o abandono das massas a estreitas satisfações pessoais e a manipulações políticas. O ódio de outrora aos judeus, de cunho religioso, tinha se transformado de modo radical ao longo do século XIX, convertendo-se, no século XX, em uma forma extrema de nacionalismo que respondia a uma necessidade interna ao regime totalitário de forjar uma imagem inimiga ameaçadora. Arendt não se serve do argumento, tão acionado na atualidade, de uma suposta propensão do ser humano à rejeição do estranho, em vez disso, desenvolve uma lúcida análise crítica da lógica exclusivista do próprio Estado nacional moderno. Os judeus, como também os ciganos, prestavam-se à encarnação dessa ficção de inimigos por jamais se terem integrado plenamente à nação. Arendt nega a existência de um conflito de interesses econômicos entre a maioria alemã e a minoria judia, como argumento de causalidade para explicar a perseguição destes últimos. Pelo contrário, os judeus assimilados, ao batizarem-se por não aceitarem sua condição judia, tinham contribuído para que seu antigo “crime” religioso de ser judeu se transformasse em um “vício” inerente, que somente poderia ser extirpado mediante seu aniquilamento. Um antecedente dos campos de morte foi a esterilização ou o assassinato de alemães “defeituosos” em câmaras de gás. Para poder levar a cabo a eliminação física dos judeus alemães e daqueles residentes nos territórios incorporados ao Reich, de acordo com sua lógica nacionalista, o regime totalitário teve, antes de tudo, de “diferenciar” a minoria perseguida, negando-lhe sua condição de sujeitos de direitos, privando-os de sua nacionalidade e convertendo-os, assim, em apátridas que, como a própria Arendt, tinham perdido seu Heimat.

Ainda que Arendt supusesse que a consolidação da sociedade de massas ocorreria acompanhada da desagregação do Estado nacional, e não levasse sua tese do caráter nacionalista do anti-semitismo moderno até as últimas conseqüências ¾ elaborando uma crítica ao Estado nacional moderno exclusivo que funda a igualdade formal de direitos na uniformidade cultural, racial e institucional de seus cidadãos ¾, é inegável a absoluta atualidade de sua obra em face do alarmante ressurgimento do nacionalismo contemporâneo e das guerras genocidas, do caráter insolúvel do conflito palestino e do colapso do império soviético. Ainda assim, a desilusão que sentiu com o fracasso da idéia de um Estado binacional palestino no Oriente Médio, quando foi criado o Estado de Israel em 1948, distanciou-a ainda mais da comunidade judaica organizada que, a partir daquele momento, concentrou seus esforços na soberania judaica sobre a Palestina.

Quando Arendt retorna à Alemanha pela primeira vez, em 1949, percorre durante seis meses um país devastado e constata, com pessimismo talvez excessivo, que os alemães tinham “perdido o sentido de realidade”, tendo em vista a profunda perturbação moral que reinava, manifestada em um silêncio quase absoluto sobre o terror nacional-socialista (Arendt 1993). Como ela assinalaria anos mais tarde, o único que lhe restara de seu país de origem era a língua, pois nada poderia substituir a língua materna (Gaus 1964). Esta dissociação entre povo, Estado e língua está, evidentemente, em choque com a concepção de Estado nacional moderno. Se Arendt tivesse percebido mais claramente a contradição entre liberdade individual e identidade nacional, constitutiva do Estado nacional liberal, talvez pudesse compreender melhor a tensão entre sua opção pessoal pela condição de pária e os compromissos e coerções políticas nacionais que a preocuparam ao longo de sua vida, e que fizeram da condição de apátrida uma anomalia inviável em um mundo de Estados nacionais (Stolcke 1995).

Liberdade e ação política

À análise histórica do totalitarismo de Arendt seguem-se, em rápida sucessão, três estudos de cunho político-teórico: A Condição Humana (1958b), Entre o Passado e o Presente (1968a [1961]) e Sobre a Revolução (1965), nos quais ela propõe uma renovação da filosofia política clássica com vistas a superar a noção genérica de natureza humana a ela subjacente, e elaborar uma forma de conciliar a liberdade e pluralidade individuais com a ação política em um mundo compartilhado.

Em 1960, no entanto, o julgamento, em Jerusalém, do tenente-coronel das SS, Adolf Eichmann, principal responsável por organizar o transporte dos judeus aos campos de extermínio, oferece a Arendt uma oportunidade inesperada para aproximar-se da realidade empírica dos campos de morte. Ela revisa sua concepção do crime que, na realidade, constituiu um “crime contra a humanidade” e propõe um Tribunal Penal Internacional para julgá-lo.

Arendt presenciou o julgamento como correspondente do The New Yorker. Em 1963, publica Eichmann em Jerusalém, com o provocador subtítulo Um Estudo da Banalidade do Mal (Arendt 1986 [1963]). Este é o livro mais controvertido de toda a sua obra, no qual explica a escalada dos crimes cometidos pelo regime nacional-socialista, com especial atenção para sua dimensão moral. Se, em As Origens do Totalitarismo, Arendt havia visto nas “fábricas de extermínio” nazistas a manifestação do mal radical, agora, ela retrata Eichmann como a encarnação da banalização do mal. Sua tese da banalidade do mal causa espanto, pois em lugar de tratar o holocausto como um episódio isolado de irracionalidade, Arendt julga a humanidade enquanto tal. A ameaça personificada em Eichmann transcendia a singularidade política do Terceiro Reich, posto que suas condições de possibilidade residiam na própria sociedade moderna burocrática de massas, pela falta de empatia com o sofrimento alheio que propiciava um tipo de personalidade submissa à ordem estabelecida que gerou.

O julgamento de Eichmann não revelou nada de concretamente novo para além de evidenciar, mais uma vez, as monstruosas condições em que se deu o extermínio dos judeus europeus. Em sua análise da personalidade de Eichmann, Arendt fornece chaves perturbadoras mas imprescindíveis à compreensão da conduta daqueles que tornaram possível a “solução final”. Nem seus executores foram monstros singulares, nem seus atos foram excepcionais na sociedade moderna. Longe de ter sido o resultado de um longo e sistemático planejamento político, a “solução final” consistiu, na verdade, em uma sucessão de acontecimentos em si triviais, singularmente difusos, automatizados e terrivelmente rotineiros que impediram qualquer reação significativa de índole moral. A desvinculação entre o executor e as vítimas do crime nada teve de anacrônico, nem de irracional. Arendt desafia a visão convencional sobre Eichmann como a quinta-essência diabólica do fanatismo ideológico anti-semita. O acusado exemplificava, pelo contrário, a terrível banalidade do mal, pois tinha cometido os crimes simplesmente por não pensar no que fazia, por “inconsciência”. Eichmann tinha sido um burocrata subalterno medíocre, um funcionário de rotina, pedante e vaidoso, para quem virtudes subsidiárias como a obediência, a hierarquia e a ordem haviam se transformado em instrumentos do crime. O angustiante na personalidade de Eichmann é, precisamente, que ele, como muitos outros, longe de ser um sádico, fora inquietantemente normal. Em nenhum momento, Arendt pretendeu escamotear a responsabilidade do regime nacional-socialista, nem da população alemã pelos crimes cometidos, mas sim, compreender os efeitos psicológicos do emprego sistemático do terror por parte do regime totalitário quando suspende qualquer inibição moral entre seus executores e propicia, para além do sigilo oficial, toda uma série de justificativas falaciosas entre a população alemã, que invalidavam o significado moral dos atos⁷. Como Zygmunt Baumann concordaria mais tarde,

“O holocausto não foi simplesmente um problema judeu e, tampouco, um fato exclusivo à história judaica. O holocausto nasceu e foi executado em nossa sociedade racional moderna, em um ponto alto de nossa civilização, na culminação das conquistas culturais humanas, sendo, por essa razão, um problema dessa sociedade, civilização e cultura.” (Baumann 1991:x)

Segundo Arendt, nem as vítimas da “solução final” podiam ser eximidas completamente da responsabilidade de sua própria destruição. Os conselhos judaicos tinham colaborado, em diferentes medidas, com nazistas como Eichmann na fatal ilusão de que lidavam com anti-semitas convencionais, influenciáveis e subornáveis, em lugar de perceber o novo dessa potente máquina da morte, um reconhecimento que teria exigido uma oposição política muito mais radical. Esta crítica de Arendt, que distingue os funcionários judeus e a população judia, tem seu contraponto na crítica à escassa e ambivalente oposição alemã contra Hitler.

Arendt concordou com a condenação de Eichmann à pena de morte. Visto que Eichmann não quisera compartilhar o mundo com os judeus, estes não tinham por que comparti-lo com ele. No entanto, ela teve sérias dúvidas em relação ao Tribunal de Jerusalém, por ser, ao mesmo tempo, juiz e parte da causa julgada, e por interpretar o holocausto como um crime contra o povo judeu. Arendt rejeitava a tese de que existia uma continuidade na história judaica que reservava aos judeus o eterno papel de vítimas, assim como um destino singular, dado que esta tese acaba justificando, de modo indireto, o anti-semitismo. Mais do que um fato inerente à relação entre judeus e não-judeus, o extermínio dos judeus europeus constituía um “crime contra a humanidade cometido contra o povo judeu”. As discriminações anti-semitas promulgadas pelas leis de Nuremberg de 1935 criaram sim uma segregação de âmbito “nacional”, mas quando o regime nazista coloca em prática sua política de expulsão e de aniquilamento dos judeus, surge um novo tipo de crime de alcance internacional. A expulsão de judeus alemães do território alemão infringia a soberania territorial dos Estados vizinhos. O extermínio constituía um crime contra a humanidade, na medida em que, pelo contrário, atentava contra a pluralidade, traço inerente à condição humana, sem o qual a espécie humana era inconcebível⁸. Como Arendt sustentaria de modo profético, se o extermínio dos judeus fosse entendido como um crime cometido contra um povo em particular, poderia converter-se em precedente de futuros genocídios (Arendt 1986:317-ss.). Mas as autoridades de Israel não concordaram com o estabelecimento de um Tribunal Penal Internacional, nem o Tribunal de Jerusalém pôde aceitar o holocausto como um “crime contra a humanidade”. E Arendt não encontrou solução para o dilema que a “inconsciência” do acusado colocou para a justiça moderna, sempre atenta a fatores subjetivos.

Eichmann em Jerusalém detonou uma avalanche de críticas. A ampla campanha de desautorização do livro significou um profundo corte na sua vida, levando-a a um profundo estado de solidão, do tipo que ela mesma já analisara, e que se instaura quando é negado a alguém o diálogo com outrem. Naquele momento, experimenta o que Jaspers denominou de “risco do público”, essa insegurança em que incorrem aqueles que defendem a liberdade de pensamento sem se apoiar em nenhum movimento político, nem confiar em nada além de seu próprio julgamento independente (Nordmann 1999:87).

A “controvérsia Eichmann” giraria, por um lado, em torno à aparente banalização da personalidade de Eichmann e, por outro, à negação, por parte de Arendt, da inocência dos próprios judeus. Os críticos não quiseram entender que, antes de tudo, Arendt queria compreender as condições extremas nas quais era possível liquidar seres humanos inocentes, sem que isto provocasse uma rebelião das consciências. Também não se interessaram pela sua reflexão acerca dos limites que a emergente sociedade burocrática de massas impunha ao julgamento individual e à ação política.

O que fazer?

Apesar de sua íntima familiaridade com os horrores totalitários, Arendt não perde a esperança no ser humano. Inspirada em A Crítica do Juízo de Kant, segundo o qual “a força exterior que arranca do ser humano a liberdade de comunicar suas idéias em público, retira-lhe também a liberdade de pensar” (Arendt 1994:216), Arendt optou pelo pensamento como dimensão da ação política (Arendt 1968a). A maior parte de seus escritos posteriores nasce do esforço para resgatar a possibilidade da liberdade de julgamento fundada na percepção de um mundo compartilhado. Suas reflexões sobre “o que é a política?” contêm outra tensão, já não mais histórica, mas de caráter teórico-político, inerente ao dilema posto pela modernidade sobre como conciliar a liberdade de pensamento do indivíduo com o fato social da condição humana e da ação política. Arendt não anula, nem se esquiva deste dilema, ainda que não consiga resolvê-lo (Birulés 1997:38).

À terrível “inconsciência” dos verdugos nazistas, a esse agnosticismo moral gerado pelo desenraizamento do ser humano e ausência de laços sociais compartilhados, à perda do compromisso com o público na sociedade moderna de massas, que tornam o indivíduo extraordinariamente vulnerável a manipulações totalitárias, Arendt contrapõe a condição de pária como requisito do julgamento individual e da recuperação de uma cultura cívica do público. A essência das ditaduras totalitárias consiste, assim, na despolitização, no sentido da supressão da liberdade de pensamento, de vontade e de criação (Arendt 1994:204). Entretanto, é unicamente o julgamento individual, livre da tradição, de raízes familiares e da obediência às normas, que assegura a liberdade de movimento exigida pela agilidade que o enfrentamento de situações imprevistas requer, agilidade esta cuja ausência conduziu ao desastre do holocausto. O indivíduo é o ponto de referência irredutível dessa liberdade de movimento que Arendt reivindica quando rejeita os determinismos essencialistas e históricos (Nordmann 1993:88; 1999). Não se trata do livre-arbítrio postulado pelo individualismo liberal, mas da liberdade que coincide com a ação: “quando se está atuando, se é livre, não antes, nem depois” (Arendt 1994:206). Conforme assinala Birulés, ao assumir a contingência, não como deficiência, mas como uma forma positiva de ser, Arendt tenta distanciar-se tanto do sujeito moderno quanto de princípios transcendentes. No entanto, essa postura inconformista não significa submeter o pensamento ao mero acidente, mas sim implica a defesa decidida da responsabilidade em relação ao mundo (Birulés 1997:31-32). Arendt resiste às correntes filosóficas anglo-saxônicas do empirismo e do liberalismo. Postular a liberdade de pensamento não quer dizer descartar qualquer critério, e tampouco o acontecimento. Neste ponto, Arendt diferencia-se do pensamento pós-moderno, que dissolve a realidade em interpretações e construções discursivas (Nordmann 1999:72). Como escreve na apresentação de Entre Passado e Presente, “estes são experimentos no pensamento político, entendido como resultado da atualidade de acontecimentos políticos, e minha suposição é a de que o pensamento nasce dos acontecimentos da experiência viva e deve estar vinculado a eles como único guia que permite orientar-nos.” (Arendt 1994:18)

Arendt apóia a experiência viva como fonte do pensamento e da ação política na antropologia. O poder de iniciativa, de começar algo novo no mundo, define a condição humana. Esta faculdade é por ela denominada de natalidade, aquilo que sempre introduz algo novo no mundo. É daí, portanto, que a condição humana, em vez de estar prefigurada por algum tipo de natureza humana genérica, caracteriza-se por uma pluralidade e liberdade originais. É a partir do fato da natalidade que o ser humano é introduzido ao mundo e pode adquirir uma multiplicidade de aparências através da palavra e da ação (Cruz 1999a:20). Desse modo, Arendt pluraliza o universal. Além disso, a ação política, diferenciada da simples ação requerida para sobreviver, define-se como tal somente se acompanhada da palavra, do discurso, que implica e gera redes de relações e inaugura uma cadeia de acontecimentos, cujo fim é, não obstante, sempre, imprevisível (Birulés 1997:18-19). É esse caráter da imprevisibilidade do devir histórico que exige a agilidade propiciada pela liberdade de movimento, condição do pensamento livre.

A Segunda Guerra Mundial não foi sucedida por uma paz segura, mas pela Guerra Fria. Até os anos 60, há em Arendt uma única referência direta ao pacifismo, no fim de As Origens do Totalitarismo, em que Arendt ironiza os pacifismos levianos e insiste que a única razão que poderia justificar uma guerra é o combate a condições ¾ como os atrozes tormentos infligidos aos presos nos campos de concentração ¾ que tornam a vida absolutamente insuportável (Arendt 1973:442). A sombra da bomba atômica e o avanço das técnicas bélicas modernas inauguraram o equilíbrio do terror entre os dois grandes blocos políticos em disputa pela partilha do planeta. Em artigos publicados no New York Review of Books, nos anos 60 e inícios dos 70, Arendt denunciou a intervenção militar dos Estados Unidos no Vietnã e os abusos imperialistas do poder presidencial. Simultaneamente, manifestou desprezo pelos miseráveis compromissos próprios à política eleitoral convencional, sendo muito crítica com a glorificação da violência nas doutrinas e projetos revolucionários. Encontrou, no entanto, inspiração política no movimento estudantil dos anos 60 e, em especial, no movimento não violento de desobediência civil, pois se aproximava mais de sua idéia de associação política voluntária e espontânea como forma de ação política para a livre expressão de reivindicações minoritárias (Arendt 1973).

Em contraste, no âmbito internacional, Arendt antecipou com perspicácia as conseqüências destrutivas da ausência de um árbitro supranacional eficaz nos conflitos armados que fosse verdadeiramente independente. Como assinala, com a lucidez advinda de sua própria experiência, um árbitro e uma justiça universais são inviáveis enquanto os Estados exercerem poder em assuntos externos legitimados pelo manto da sua sacrossanta soberania nacional. Com certeza, pequenos avanços ocorreram com o princípio da extraterritorialidade de crimes cometidos contra a humanidade. Mas, enquanto o Estado nacional moderno não seja colocado em questão de forma radical, a situação será sempre essa, conquistas isoladas. Portanto, o pensamento inconformista de Arendt apresenta-se como uma fonte de inspiração excepcional para uma crítica humanista radical do mortífero mundo atual.

Tradução: Maria José Alfaro Freire

Verena Stolcke, formada pela Oxford University, é professora do Departamento de Historia de Sociedades Precapitalistas y Antropología Social da Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona.

Dignidade da política: por amor ao mundo

Discutir política a partir do legado arendtiano é falar sobre a dignidade e o papel da verdade nas instituiçoes contemporaneas ante ao vazio generalista que a humanidade se encontra, na brecha deixada pela ruptura entre o passado e o futuro, para usar a expressão tão cara a Hannah Arendt.

Alguns, por se pautarem em premissas distintas, podem ver nesse diálogo uma utopia, um idealismo. Mas é no espaço entre o niilismo e a utopia que pretendemos alcançar uma dimensão de existência para o homem do século XXI.

Milan Kundera, em “A insustentável leveza do ser” nos traz a reflexão sobre a dualidade, sobre os extremos, colocando a pergunta sobre a possibilidade de conciliar peso e leveza em face do absurdo da existência humana. O peso é o apego à Terra, que nos permite a realização vital, a vida real, sensível, humana. A leveza faz com que o ser humano se livre do fardo de sua existência mundana e voe, tornando-o semi-real, permitindo que ele realize movimentos tão livres quanto insignificantes. Pautados em outra contradição, niilismo-utopia, pretendemos entender aqui o significado da existência política do homem dentro dos limites e das contingências da sua situação no mundo. O niilismo nos aproxima da realidade, nos faz dobrar diante dos fatos e da situação a que chegamos no nosso caminhar histórico. A utopia se coloca diante dos olhos humanos, quando esses deixam de olhar para trás ou para baixo; ela planta a vontade, que vence o medo, a desesperança e a angústia e faz a Terra continuar girando dentro do coração dos homens. Talvez ambas, longe de se separarem e de se antagonizarem, se complementem. Talvez nem peso nem leveza, nem niilismo nem utopia; talvez o equilíbrio, o ponto eqüidistante, para sermos fiéis a Aristóteles. A dualidade pensada por Parmênides, antes de nos dar uma resposta, coloca para nós o desafio de superá-la.

Podemos abraçar a descrença ao pensar que tudo vai se repetir na dialética da história: a idéia do eterno retorno, que nos prende na eternidade. Contudo,  entendemos que a consciência de que tudo vai recomeçar, antes de nos destruir, deve conferir ao homem uma esplêndida leveza. Já que existe um retorno, ao inverter a consideração do mundo da mortalidade para a natalidade, Arendt nos permite entender esse eterno retorno não como um fardo, mas como uma bênção: a possibilidade de recomeçar e de inovar, inerente a cada nascimento, cria a medida de horizonte necessária que nos faz seguir em frente, nesse tempo de estrutura circular e dialética.

Se é certo que nossa realidade nos defronta com a indiferença aos assuntos do mundo e com a demissão do homem da sua função maior, que é a de pensar, nessa estrutura alienante que destrói o nosso sistema educacional, interrompendo a formação do indivíduo cidadão, condenando a natalidade ao árido terreno da falta de escolhas e com isso boicotando o futuro, também é certo que a consciência dessa questão, se seriamente considerada, pode gerar a transformação. A proposta de mudança, ao negligente e indiferente homem-de-massa do século XX, pode ser abraçada pelo homem do século XXI, quando este buscar olhar o horizonte diante de si, acima dos muros da necessidade e da fatalidade. Pensar, querer e julgar, as três atividades da vita contemplativa que, aliadas à ação, permitem ao homem, enquanto ser hiperbóreo, olhar adiante e ver um norte, rumo à transformação dessa situação desoladora.

Uma democracia construída sobre um sistema representativo cheio de vícios, corruptível, demagogo e burocrata. Um direito que é objeto de consumo e instrumento de uma estrutura de poder erigida no descaso do homem, que rejeita sua condição de pluralidade, perdendo seu amor pelo mundo, abdicando de sua faculdade de julgar, para vivenciar o cotidiano da luta pela sobrevivência e da satisfação dos desejos sempre renováveis plantados em seu coração por uma perspectiva antropológica irracional e mesquinha. A contingência amargurante, que permite a burocracia tomar o lugar da (cri)ação e viabiliza a tirania, o totalitarismo, a alienação globalizante de um mundo cujo fator de integração são os mercados e as exigências da economia global, onde público e privado se confundem e se perdem, gerando a estagnação e a conformação do indivíduo, que não reconhece mais o mundo como seu lar. Essa é a nossa realidade e em nenhum momento podemos perder esse chão para construir qualquer reflexão sobre a dignidade da política tal qual a proposta de Hannah Arendt.

Importa ver, nas palavras da pensadora que recusou os rótulos e se afirmou como cidadã do mundo, o horizonte que se pensa perdido, colocando novamente o céu acima de nós, resgatando nosso horizonte. No mundo do eterno retorno, em que cada gesto contém em si a possibilidade de um novo começo, perder o horizonte é perder o mundo. E é justo no resgate do amor e da responsabilidade pelo mundo que se insere o legado intelectual arendtiano. Pugnar pela reconstrução da esfera pública, nutrir a esperança na referência à natalidade, afirmar o homem como ser pensante e capaz de julgar e colocar nas suas mãos a responsabilidade por esse mundo, que é a sua casa: antes de isso significar um idealismo vazio (do qual Arendt foi feroz combatente), esse múltiplos resgates significam um fardo para a humanidade, o fardo que a aproxima da realidade, colocando diante de si a possibilidade de realização vital sob o céu da esperança de cada nascer, que é o acontecer do novo, de novo.

Todos os homens são mortais: essa é a condição indelével da vida humana. Porém, o homem vive entre o que ele pensa e o que ele é, entre seu querer e seu fazer. Na mortalidade vemos o fim. Na natalidade, o começo. Nossa mortalidade é o limite do corpo. Quando nascemos, o fazemos para vencer os limites da vida, afirmando sua continuidade. No nascer de cada indivíduo reside a genialidade e a força que devolve a magia e a esperança ao mundo, esse mundo que é a nossa morada, a nossa casa, sobre a qual temos toda a responsabilidade e de cuja estrutura e formas somos os arquitetos.

É na afirmação do amor pelo mundo e da responsabilidade sobre ele que se inscreve a contribuição de Hannah Arendt no pensamento político contemporâneo. Resgatando a dignidade da vita activa, Arendt resgata também o valor da vida enquanto presença na Terra. Imputando ao homem a responsabilidade pelo mundo, ela convida a humanidade a voltar os olhos para as coisas, as pequenas coisas. De posse das pequenas coisas e tendo em vista o horizonte de possibilidades que o céu da esperança coloca diante dos homens, devemos construir um mundo melhor. Por amor ao mundo, eis o nosso dever em relação a ele.

“There is a strange interdependence between thoughtlessness and evil”

Hannah Arendt

Ludmyla Franca, mestra em Direito pela Universidade Ferderal da Bahia, pesquisadora do Grupo de Estudos e Arquivo Hannah Arendt – Brasil, é editora deste blog e redigiu este ensaio.

Arendt: a challenging figure

Hannah Arendt is a most challenging figure for anyone wishing to understand the body of her work in political philosophy. She never wrote anything that would represent a systematic political philosophy, a philosophy in which a single central argument is expounded and expanded upon in a sequence of works. Rather, her writings cover many and diverse topics, spanning issues such as totalitarianism, revolution, the nature of freedom, the faculties of “thinking” and “judging,” the history of political thought, and so on. A thinker of heterodox and complicated argumentation, Arendt’s writings draw inspiration from Heidegger, Aristotle, Augustine, Kant, Nietzsche, Jaspers, and others. This complicated synthesis of theoretical elements is evinced in the apparent availability of her thought to a wide and divergent array of positions in political theory: for example, participatory democrats such as Benjamin Barber and Sheldon Wolin, communitarians such as Sandel and MacIntyre, intersubjectivist neo-Kantians such as Habermas, Albrecht Wellmer, Richard Bernstein and Seyla Benhabib, etc. However, it may still be possible to present her thought not as a collection of discrete interventions, but as a coherent body of work that takes a single question and a single methodological approach, which then informs a wide array of inquiries. The question, with which Arendt’s thought engages, perhaps above all others, is that of the nature of politics and political life, as distinct from other domains of human activity. Her attempts to explicate an answer to this question and, inter alia, to examine the historical and social forces that have come to threaten the existence of an autonomous political realm, have a distinctly phenomenological character. Arendt’s work, if it can be said to do anything, can be said to undertake a phenomenological reconstruction of the nature of political existence, with all that this entails in way of thinking and acting.

Fonte: http://www.iep.utm.edu/arendt/

Eichmann, the Banality of Evil, and Thinking in Arendt’s Thought*

Bethania Assy

ABSTRACT: I analyze the ways in which the faculty of thinking can avoid evil action, taking into account Hannah Arendt’s discussion regarding the banality of evil and thoughtlessness in connection with the Eichmann trial. I focus on the following question posed by Arendt: “Could the activity of thinking as such, the habit of examining and reflecting upon whatever happens to come to pass, regardless of specific content and quite independent of results, could this activity be of such a nature that it ‘conditions’ men against evildoing?” Examples of the connection between evildoing and thinking include the distinction between the commonplace and the banal, and the absence of the depth characteristic of banality and the necessity of thinking as the means for depth. I then focus upon Arendt’s model thinker (Socrates) and argue that the faculty of thinking works to avoid evildoing by utilizing the Socratic principle of noncontradiction.

“What is the subject of our thought? Experience! Nothing else!” (1) (Hannah Arendt)

Eichmann in Jerusalem (2) was originated when Hannah Arendt went to Jerusalem in order to report, for The New Yorker, on the trial of Otto Adolf Eichmann, (3) who was acused of crimes against the Jewish people, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. The trial began in April 15, 1961. The New York Times had announced Eichmann’s capture by Israeli agents in Argentina, in May 24, 1960. Israel and Argentina had discussed Eichmann’s extradition to Israel, and the United Nations finally decided the legality of Jerusalem Trial. After the confirmation that Eichamnn was to be judged in Israel, Arendt asked The New Yorker’s director, William Shamn, to do a complete report of the Eichmann case in Israel.

Arendt’s first reaction to Eichmann, “the man in the glass booth,” was — nicht einmal unheimlich — not even sinister.” (4) She argues that “The deeds were monstrous, but the doer … was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous.” (5) Arendt’s perception that Eichmann seemed to be a common man, evidenced in his transparent superficiality and mediocrity left her astonished in measuring the unaccounted evil committed by him, that is, organizing the deportation of millions of Jews to the concentration camps. Actually, what Arendt had detected in Eichmann was not even stupidity, in her words, he portrayed something entirely negative, it was thoughtlessness. Eichmann’s ordinariness implied in an incapacity for independent critical thought: “… the only specific characteristic one could detect in his past as well as in his behavior during the trial and the preceding police examination was something entirely negative: it was not stupidity but a curious, quite authentic inability to think.” (6) (emphasis added) Eichmann became the protagonist of a kind of experience apparently so quotidian, the absence of the critical thought. Arendt says: “When confronted with situations for which such routine procedures did not exist, he [Eichmann] was helpless, and his cliché-ridden language produced on the stand, as it had evidently done in his official life, a kind of macabre comedy. Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality, that is, against the claim on our thinking attention that all events and facts make by virtue of their existence.” (7)

Eichmann had always acted according to the restrict limits allowed by the laws and ordinances. Those attitudes resulted in the clouding between virtues and vices of a blind obedience. In fact, it was not only Eichmann, as an isolated person, who was normal, whereas all other bureaucrats were sadist monsters. One was before a bureaucratic compact mass of men who were perfectly normal, but whose acts were monstrous. Behind such terrible normality of the bureaucratic mass, who was able to commit the greatest atrocities that the world has even seen, Arendt addressed the question of the banality of evil. This normality opened up the precedent regarding the possibility that some attitudes commonly repudiated by a society — in this case the Nazi German attitudes — find as a locus of manifestation the common citizen, who has not reflected on the content of the rules.Richard Bernstein highlights this “normal and ordinary behavior” of the bureaucratic mass in not thinking about the real meaning of the rules themselves, in the sense that they would behave in the same manner in the manufacturing of either food or corpses. “We may find it almost impossible to image how someone could ‘think’(or rather, not think) in this manner, whereby manufacturing food, bombs, or corpses are ‘in essence the same’ and where this can become ‘normal’, ‘ordinary’ behavior. This is the mentality that Arendt believed she was facing in Eichmann… .” (8) Eichmann has brought up the radical danger of “such remoteness from reality and such thoughtlessness.” (9)

II

Subsequently, it seems that the Arendtian portrait of a banal Eichmann has become more than a lesson, as Arendt maintained against those who had affirmed that the banality of evil implied a theorization about the phenomenon of evil. (10) The banality of evil has accentuated the whole relationship among the faculty of thinking, the capacity to distinguish between right and wrong, the faculty of judgment, and their moral implications, tasks that have been extremely significant in Arendt’s work since her first writtings in the late 1940s about the phenomenon of the Totalitarianism.

The apex of detachment of Eichmann’s mind between the reality of such events, and a logical process able (11) “to wrest” his speech and thought was described then by Arendt in the final moment of Eichmann’s death. Eichmann was incapable of articulating anything other than what he had heard all his life, in such a way that “…these ‘lofty words’ should completely becloud the reality of his own death.” (12) With such description, Arendt for the first time utilizes the term banality of evil : “It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lesson that this long course in human wickedness had taught us — the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-denying banality of evil.” (13) (emphasis added) Such a “lesson,” whose potentiality denys word and thought, did not seem to frame the usual standards of evil, such as pathology, self-interest, and ideological conviction of the doer, and so one. Almost 10 years after Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt reaffirms in Thinking and Moral Considerations this same dimension of evil: “… the phenomenon of evil deeds, committed on a gigantic scale, which could not be traced to any particularity of wickedness, pathology, or ideological conviction in the doer, whose only personal distinction was a perhaps extraordinary shallowness.” (14) Arendt stressed a kind of phenomenon in which the doer exposes an impressive superficiality, in which Eichmann became the factual example. With the following question Arendt substantially circumscribes the main delineation in which the banality of evil will be the result: “Could the activity of thinking as such, the habit of examining and reflecting upon whatever happens to come to pass, regardless of specific content and quite independent of results, could this activity be of such a nature that it ‘conditions’ men against evil-doing?” (15) (emphasis added)

In other words, does the faculty of thinking, in its intrinsic nature and attributes, involve the possibility of avoiding evil-doing? At least in “border situations”? In 1946, Arendt had already mentioned the deep meaning of experiences through which the reality became an urgent element for the philosophical task in modernity. Arendt takes Jasper’s expression “border situations” to describe such incalculable and unforeseable situations in which the man is forced to think.

The banality of evil, whose potentiality denys word and thought, did not seem to frame the usual standards of evil, such as pathology of evil, self-interest, ideological conviction of the doer, intentional evil, or even an obstinate set of ideas that had impelled him to evil and so one. Eichmann portrayed the factual example of a kind of evil manifestation that was not found in the traditional dimensions. In this sense, Arendt raises the question about whether such traditional dimentions of evil are a necessary condition of evil-doing. Has the phenomenon of evil necessarily a volitive root? Or, in other words, has the imperative condition to the evil-doing been the evil based on traditional foundations? It was undeniable that this new whole of questions about the phenomenon of evil, whose roots were not anchored in the philosophical, moral, religious traditional standards, at least will open a new perspective on the understanding of evil. Such notion was mentioned by Arendt in the first pages of The Life of the Mind’s introduction: “Behind that phrase [banality of evil], I held no thesis or doctrine, although I was dimly aware of the fact that it went counter to our tradition of thought — literary, theological, or philosophic — about the phenomenon of Evil.” (16) Evil as a demoniac portion like Lucifer, the falling angel, mentioned by the religious tradition; the evil mobilized by weakness, envy, or even the hate that evil feels by Good, exemplifyed in the literary tradition in Shakespeare; for Arendt all of them cannot explain what had happened in Nazi Germany, brought into light by Eichmann. Arendt says: “… I felt was shocking because it contradicts our theories about evil,…” (17) The perplexity before a phenomenon that contradicted the known theories about evil, and the clear relationship between the problem of evil and the faculty of thinking, were what Arendt have pointed out by the expression the banality of evil.

In a correspondence with Grafton, in 1963, Arendt distinguishes between banal and commonplace with regard to the banality of evil. Arendt says: “For me, there is a very important difference: ‘commonplace’ is what frequently, commonly happens, but something can be banal even if it is not common.” (18) Banal does not presuppose that the evil has a commonplace in everyone. Evil can become banal even if evil itself is not trivial to anyone. Thus, banality of evil does not mean that the evil itself is trivial and common to everybody. This distinction between commonplace and banal is clear in a conference organized on her work in Toronto, in 1972, in which Arendt affirms that the notion that “there is an Eichmann in each one of us” is a complete misunderstanding. Arendt says: “…you say that I said there is an Eichmann in each one of us. Oh no! There is none in you and none in me! This doesn’t mean that there are not quite a number of Eichmanns. But they look really quite different. I always hated this notion of ‘Eichmann in each one of us’. This is simply not true. This would be as untrue as the opposite, that Eichmann is in nobody.” (19)

Arendt emphasizes that the absence of critical thinking was common among “Eichmanns.” Such absence could directly affect the evil-doing that became banal by the fact that this block of Eichmanns did not exercise their capacity of thinking.Thus, for Arendt, it is not true that “there is an Eichmann in each one of us,” and that the banality of evil has a commonplace in each of us. In fact, there was a deep inclination of a whole society to not exercise the faculty of thinking. Even in Eichmann in Jerusalem Arendt says: “… if this is ‘banal’ and even funny, if with the best will in the world one cannot extract any diabolical or demonic profundity from Eichmann, that is still far from calling it commonplace” (20) (emphasis added)

Let us take another penetrating aspect related to the banality of evil: the absence of roots. I would like to discuss two implications concerning the meaning of “no-roots” in the banality of evil. Firstly, for Arendt, such evil has no-roots in the sense that it has not-roots in any kind of manifestation of evil presented by our tradition as a whole. In a draft written for a debate about Eichmann in Jerusalem in Hofstra College in 1964, Arendt accentuated that banality means: ” ‘No roots’, not rooted in ‘evil motives’ or ‘urges’ or strength of ‘temptation’ (human nature) or ‘Evil be thou my good: Richard III’ etc.” (21) In another undated draft she says: “Banality of Evil — … Root-less, no demonic forces. Evil be thou my good! No Radical Evil.” (22) In The Life of the Mind Arendt writes: “However, what I was confronted with was utterly different and still undeniably factual. I was struck by a manifest shallowness in the doer that made it impossible to trace the incontestable evil of his deeds to any deeper level of roots or motives.” (23) That means, the banality of evil has, as a deep understanding, a notion of evil that has no roots in “evil motives.” (24)

Secondly, The notion that the banality of evil has “no-roots” is inherently connected with Arendt’s understanding that only the faculty of thinking can reach the profundity, and consequently reach the roots. In one of the clearest moments about this Arendt says: “I mean that evil is not radical, going to the roots (radix), that is has no depth, and that for this very reason it is so terribly difficult to think about it, since thinking, by definition, wants to reach the roots. Evil is a surface phenomenon, and instead of being radical, it is merely extreme. We resist evil by not being swept away by the surface of things, by stopping ourselves and beginning to think, that is, by reaching another dimension than the horizon of everyday life. In other words, the more superficial someone is, the more likely will he be to yield to evil. An indication of such superficiality is the use of clichés, and Eichmann, …was a perfect example.” (25) (emphasis added)

Looking for some profundity in Eichmann that could explain the roots of evil, Arendt found an absence of evil motives, as if the evil was a superficial phenomenon in opposition to the faculty of thinking, in which we necessarily reach profundity. Since “… thinking, by definition, wants to reach the roots,” the banality of evil, such evil without roots, can be understood essentially by the resulting movement from thoughtlessness. Eichmann, by the fact that he was not able to exercise the faculty of thinking, could not find any profundity with regard to his deeds. Such aspects are mentioned by Arendt in one of the most controversial statements in her correspondence with Gershom Scholem. Arendt emphasizes that evil could spread “like a fungus on the surface” mainly because there is no depth, and that solely stopping ,and starting to think, can reach the depth. Arendt emphasizes: “It is indeed my opinion now that evil is never ‘radical’, that it is only extreme, and that it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension. It can overgrow and lay waste the whole world precisely because it spreads like a fungus on the surface. It is ‘thought-defying’, as I said, because thought tries to reach some depth, to go to roots, and the moment it concerns itself with evil, it is frustrated because there is nothing. That is its ‘banality’. Only the good has depth and can be radical.” (26) (emphasis added)

III

“Thinking is the only activity that needs nothing but itself for its exercise.” (27) (emphasis added) (Hannah Arendt)

Let us raise the question that comes naturally from sthe two former topic: How, then, does the faculty of thinking work in order to avoid evil? First of all, according to Arendt, the moral and ethic standards based on habits and customs have shown that they can just be changed by a new set of rules of behavior dictated by the current society.In Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship, Arendt emphasizes: “It was as though morality, at the very moment of its collapse within an old, highly civilized nation, stood revealed in its original meaning, as a set of mores, of customs and manners, which could be exchanged for another set with no more trouble than it would take to change the table manners of a whole people.” (28) Thenceforth, Arendt claims the bridge between morality and the faculty of thinking. In this same article quoted above she asks how is was possible that few persons resisted the moral collapse and had not adhered to the regime, despite any coercion. Arendt herself answers: “The answer to the …question is relatively simple. The nonparticipants, called irresponsible by the majority, were the only ones who dared judge by themselves, and they were capable of doing so not because they disposed of a better system of values or because the old standards of right and wrong were still firmly planted in their mind and conscience but, … because their conscience did not function in this, as were, automatic way, … they asked themselves to what an extent they would still be able to live in peace with themselves after having committed certain deeds; and they decided that it would be better to do nothing, not because the world would then be charged for the better, but because only on this condition could they go on living with themselves.” (29) (emphasis added)

Arendt clearly attributes to the faculty of thinking the presupposition for this kind of judging extremely necessary in times of moral collapse, that is to say, “when the chips are down.” Arendt argues: “The presupposition for this kind of judging is not a highly developed intelligence or sophistication in moral matters, but merely the habit of living together explicitly with oneself, that is, of being engaged in that silent dialogue between me and myself which since Socrates and Plato we usually call thinking.” (30) (emphasis added)

Arendt enumerates three basic propositions that involve the faculty of thinking and the problem of evil. First, one must presuppose that the faculty of thinking is accessible to everyone, rather than the privilege of “professional thinkers.” Second, if the faculty of thinking, as we will see, has an antagonistic result regarding solid axioms, then, one cannot expect that such faculty builds any kind of moral foundation, or even, any moral commandment. And finally, if the faculty of thinking concerns the invisible, it consequently takes no place directly in the world of appearances. (31) Taking into account these three presuppositions, Arendt asks how the faculty of thinking can be relevant not only to the problem of evil, but also, to the avoidance of evil-doing. Her answer would be indicative of the trajectory of such a faculty, that is, only through the functioning of the faculty of thinking, what for Arendt means: looking for the experiences of thought. She says: “Inability to think is not stupidity; it can be found in highly intelligent people, and wickedness is hardly its cause, if only because thoughtlessness as well as stupidity are much more frequent phenomena, is necessary to cause great evil… Hence, in Kantian terms, one would need philosophy, the exercise of reason as the faculty of thought, to prevent evil.” (32) (emphasis added) In fact, Arendt has made clear that after the experience of totalitarianism, we cannot walk upon the firm soil of established moral standards. Rather, since this experience, we have been confined to live in the company of ourselves, meaning by that that we are condemned to the continuos examination of the events through our activity of thinking.

Describing the faculty of thinking, Arendt takes the Kantian distinction between reason, Vernunft, and intellect, Verstand. In a broad sense, the former, as a faculty of thinking, aims at the conception of meaning, and understanding; whereas, the latter, as a faculty of cognition, aims at the apprehension through perceptions that are given by senses, objectifying a verifiable knowledge. Thus, Arendt argues that the faculty of thinking is related to the search for meaning pertaining to reason. The faculty of thinking concerns meaning, and the necessity of understanding, rather than, the search for truth, whose evidence is given by the senses, and thereby pertains to the intellect.

One of Arendt’s main concerns about the faculty of thinking was the fact that a whole society can succumb to a total changing of its moral standards without its citizens emitting any judgment about what has happened.

Arendt chooses Socrates as her model of thinker, “a citizen among citizens,” insofar Socrates thought “…simply for the right to go about examining the opinions of other people, thinking about them and asking his interlocutors to do the same.” (33) Socratic thought follows an aporetic movement, whose argumentation does not intend to achieve any concept or definition about the inquired subject. Arendt had claimed that “If there is anything in thinking that can prevent men from doing evil, it must be some property inherent in the activity itself, regardless of its objects.” (34) Such a form of preventing evil is located in the process of thinking itself. This Socratic movement of thinking provokes essentially the perplexity, putting the established standards in movement, as if the perplexity has the power to dislodge the individuals from their own dogmas and rules of behavior. As if the faculty of thinking had the potentiality of putting man in front of a blank painting, without good or evil, without right or wrong, but simply activating in him the condition to establish dialogue with himself, reflecting by himself, and deliberating by the faculty of judging his own judgment about such events.

Taking the Socratic propositions, Arendt points out the only criterion that Socrates attributes to the faculty of thinking: “agreement, to be consistent with oneself, its opposite, to be in contradiction with oneself, actually means becoming one’s own adversary.” (35) Even though the condition to the thinking process is the two-in-one dialogue, the harmony of such dialogue is essential to make one’s own dialogue possible, that means, these two must be friends. Because if the modus operandi of the thinking process takes place in the form of a dialogue, to be in contradiction with yourselves, in disagreement with yourselves, implies the acquisition of an adversary, taking account that the self is also a kind of friend. The criterion of dialogue, by its own nature, is the harmony that makes possible the dialectical process throughout, so that, when one has disagreement with any partner, the dialogue naturally interrupts. In regarding the faculty of thinking, in which we are our own partner, the adversary becomes ourselves, in which the only form of interruption is, consequently, to stop thinking, to stop provoking the two-in-one dialogue.

What Arendt has pointed out in claiming such criterion of noncontradiction, as a sine qua non condition for the thinking process, is to stress how dangerous the deeds can be when the actor does not exercise the inner dialogue with himself in order to examine the events in front of his eyes. Arendt is trying to avoid adherence by men to any moral, social, or legal established standards without exciting their capacity of reflect, of thinking, based on an internal dialogue with themselves about the meaning of such happenings. The thinking process, by its inner form of working, wants to reach the roots, which compels meaning through remembrance. The banality of evil which appeared through Eichmann made evident how superficial the phenomenon of evil could show its face. The evil could spread out as fungus under the surface, by a mass of citizens that did not reflect on events, did not ask for significance, nor made a dialogue with themselves about their own deeds. Arendt says: The greatest evildoers are those who don’t remember because they never given the matter a thought; nothing can keep them back because without remembrance they are without roots. (36)

In other words, the manifestation of the winds of thought able to provoke perplexity, dislodging the prejudices, at least in border situations, impels men to exercise the faculty of thinking, of reflection, making them emit their own judgment. Arendt argues that the man that exercises his faculty of thinking is always his own witness of his deed: “I am may own witness when I am acting. I know the agent and am condemned to live together with him.” (37)

At first glance, in taking Socrates as her model of thinker, it can be infered that such a model will be even helpful in destroying all rules of social behavior. Nevertheless, in Arendt’s view the result of the process of thinking is not nihilism, on the contrary, nihilism springs by the wish to find results independently from the necessity of the activity of thinking. Although, Arendt has adverted that as the Socratic model of thinking does not originate any standard, in the same sense, it represents a kind of danger. However, at least in times when the chips are down, the absence of the faculty of thinking can be far more dangerous. If the absence of thinking protects individuals against the “danger” of the winds of thought, the non-exercise of such a faculty can bring the “banality of evil.” The lesson was how easily individuals can adhere to new standards, no matter whether such set of rules comports “thou shalt kill,” instead of “thou shalt not kill,” insofar as such a new set of code has its proper working logic. In Arendt’s proposition, such a lesson was the perplexity of how little the habit of reflecting with oneself, thinking and judging, modern society had shown us. This lesson was the banality of evil, making possible The Concentration Camps, a devastating article wrote by Arendt in 1948.

I conclude this paper pointed out two fundamental implications of the faculty of thinking. Firstly, the faculty of thinking in such emergent times “is political by implication.” Secondly, the faculty of thinking has a deliberating effect upon the faculty of judging.This later proposition works as an intentional open door, keeping in mind that the faculty of thinking and the faculty judging are intrinsically connected, even though Arendt has left our world without showing exactly how. Arendt writes: “If thinking — the two-in-one of the soundless dialogue — actualizes the difference within our identity as given in consciousness and thereby results in conscience as its by-product, then judging, the by-product of the liberating effect of thinking, realizes thinking, makes it manifest in the world of appearances, where I am never alone and always too busy to be able to think. The manifestation of the wind of thought is not knowledge; it is the ability to tell right from wrong, beautiful form ugly. And this, at the rare moments when the stakes are on the table, may indeed prevent catastrophes, at least for the self. (38)

Notes

* This paper was presented at the Seminar “Hannah Arendt’s The Life of the Mind,” taught by Prof. Richard Bernstein in the Department of Philosophy at New School For Social Research in the spring/97. This paper was also a part of my Master Thesis entitled “MIGHT THE PROBLEM OF EVIL BE CONNECTED WITH THE ABSENCE OF THE FACULTY OF THINKING? The relationship between the Banality of Evil and the Faculty of Thinking in Hannah Arendt,” defended in the summer of 1996 in Brazil.

(1) (emphasis added) Hannah Arendt, “On Hannah Arendt.” In Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the Public World, edited by Melvy A. Hill (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979), p. 308, (hereafter cited as On Hannah Arendt).

(2) Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report of the Banality of evil, revised and enlarged edition (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), (hereafter cited as EJ).

(3) Eichmann was a Gestapo’s officer under the Himmler’s command. He was not an high rank officer, even though he was responsible by “the Jewish question,” including “the Final Solution.” This means that he had the responsibility in organizing the deportations and evacuations of Jews, including to bring them directly to the camps of extermination.

(4) Correspondence between Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Blücher, April 15, 1961, (Hannah Arendt’s Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, unpublished). Quoted from Elizabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt – For Love of the World (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1982), p. 329. (hereafter cited as LW).

(5) Hannah Arendt, The Life of Mind – Thinking – Willing (New York-London: Ed. Harvest/HJB Book, 1978), p. 04 (hereafter cited as LM).

(6) Hannah Arendt, “Thinking and Moral Considerations: A Lecture,” Social Research, no. 38/3 (Fall 1970), p. 417, (hereafter cited as TMC).

(7) LM., p. 04.

(8) Richard Bernstein, “Evil, Thinking, and Judging,” in Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1996), p. 170.

(9) EJ., p. 288.

(10) In the postscript Arendt clarifies that the banality of evil does not concern the theorization about the ontological nature of the evil. She says: “… it was a lesson, neither an explanation of the phenomenon nor a theory about it [banal].” Arendt, Ibib., p. 288.

(11) With regard to this logical process see: Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism-Anti-semitism, Imperialism, Totalitarianism. (New York/London: Ed.Harvest-HJB Book, 1979.) p. 473; Hannah Arendt, “On the Nature of Totalitarianism.” In Essays in Understanding 1930-1954. (New York, San Diego and London: Harcourt Brace & Company, edited by Jerome Kohn, 1994.) p. 356; Hannah Arendt, “Understanding and Politics” In Essays in Understanding 1930-1954. (New York, San Diego and London: Harcourt Brace & Company, edited by Jerome Kohn, 1994.) p. 318; Margareth Canovan, Hannah Arendt – A Reinterpretation of Her Political Thought. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) p. 26.

(12) EJ., p. 288.

(13) Ibid., p. 252.

(14) TMC, p. 417.

(15) TMC, p. 418.

(16) LM., p. 03.

(17) The article called Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship was published in The Listener, London, BBC (August 6 1964). By the reason that the published material has omitted the fifteenth first pages of the original manuscript, we will adopt the following systematic: the published paper will be quoted as Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship II; whereas the unpublished material will be cited as Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship I ( Hannah Arendt’s Papers, The Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, 023315, container 76). This quotation is in ‘Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship I’ 023317.

(18) Hannah Arendt, Correspondence between Grafton and Arendt, (September 19, 1963) draft, Hannah Arendt’s Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, p. 06. (hereafter cited as ‘Arendt to Grafton’).

(19) “On Hannah Arendt,” p. 308.

(20) EJ, p. 288.

(21) Hannah Arendt, “Eichmann – Discussion with Enumeration of Topics” Hofstra College, 1964, Hannah Arendt’s Papers, The Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, 24842, container 60.

(22) Hannah , “Reflections after Eichmann Trial”, undated, Hannah Arendt’s Papers, The Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, 24820, container 60.

(23) LM., 04.

(24) For the relationship between radical evil and the banality of evil concerning the meaning of “evil motives” see Richard Bernstein, “From Radical Evil to the Banality of Evil:From Superflousness toThoughtlessness,” in Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1996) pp. 137-53.

(25) ‘Arendt to Grafton’ 07.

(26) Hannah, Arendt, The Jew as Pariah – Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age. (New York: Grove Press, 1978), p. 251.

(27) LM, p. 162.

(28) ‘Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship II,’ p. 205.

(29) Ibid.

(30) ‘Ibid.

(31) See, in this regard, TMC, p. 425.

(32) TMC, p. 423.

(33) LM p. 168.

(34) LM., p. 180.

(35) (Protagoras, 339c.) LM p.186.

(36) The first part of the Morality Lectures 1995, given by Arendt at New School, was published as “Some Questions of Moral Philosophy.” In Social Research, Vol. 61, No. 4 (Winter 1994), pp. 739-64. The other three parts remain unpublished as “Some Questions of Moral Philosophy”. Morality Lectures 1965, New School for Social Research, Hannah Arendt’s Papers, The Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, container 45. We will take the following systematic: ‘Some Questions of Moral Philosophy I’ for the part published and ‘Some Questions of Moral Philosophy II’ for the unpublished one. This quotation is in ‘Some Questions of Moral Philosophy II’ 024633.

(37) Ibid., 024636.

(38) LM., p. 193.

FONTE: http://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Cont/ContAssy.htm

Jane Mayer: Calling Hannah Arendt (The New Yorker)

The mind-numbing bureaucratic details displayed in the documents released last week on the Bush Administration’s abusive detention program sent wise commentators, such as The Atlantic’s Hanna Rosin, to Hannah Arendt, the mother of all war-crime writers. Her observations, first published in this magazine, on what she eventually dubbed the “banality of evil,” exhibited by the Nazis’ tidy, carefully monitored control of the Final Solution, are, sadly, timeless.

This is not to suggest that there is any moral equivalence between the Nazis and the Bush Administration. That would be absurd. Nevertheless, as C.I.A. bureaucrats debated the appropriate temperature of the water with which they planned to fill the lungs of captives or the number of times prisoners could be propelled head-first into a plywood wall (“twenty to thirty times consecutively”), it’s hard not to have renewed appreciation for Arendt.

There is also a less famous observation by Arendt, made in The New York Review of Books in the wake of the protests of 1968 and shared with me by Georgetown Law professor David Luban, that captures the problem faced by the Obama Administration in its attempt to hold the right officials accountable. She calls it the “rule by Nobody.” Attorney General Eric Holder is stuck trying to investigate an entire bureaucracy. Those on the top can claim to have clean hands, while those on the bottom can claim they were following ostensibly legal orders. What’s left, Arendt suggests, is an all-powerful government that is beyond accountability.

Here’s what she wrote:

These definitions coincide with the terms which, since Greek antiquity, have been used to define the forms of government as the rule of man over man—of one or the few in monarchy and oligarchy, of the best or the many in aristocracy and democracy, to which today we ought to add the latest and perhaps most formidable form of such dominion, bureaucracy, or the rule by an intricate system of bureaux in which no men, neither one nor the best, neither the few nor the many, can be held responsible, and which could be properly called the rule by Nobody. Indeed, if we identify tyranny as the government that is not held to give account of itself, rule by Nobody is clearly the most tyrannical of all, since there is no one left who could even be asked to answer for what is being done. It is this state of affairs which is among the most potent causes for the current world-wide rebellious unrest.

Fonte: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2009/09/jane-mayer-calling-hannah-arendt.html

Hannah Arendt: a short bio

Political philosopher, an authority on anti-Semitism, and writer of The Human Condition (1958) and Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963). When Arendt’s brief love affair with the famous philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) in the 1920s was revealed, it caused much debate. Heidegger had joined in the 1930s the Nazi party. Arendt, a Jew, gained fame as a German-Jewish refugee scholar. She did not cut his friendship with Heidegger after World War II, although a number of Heidegger’s colleagues were disappointed in his reluctance to apologize for his Nazi past.

“Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason that it is not only apolitical but anti-political, perhaps the most powerful of all anti-political human forces.” (from The Human Condition)

Johanna (Hannah) Arendt was born in Hannover, East Prussia, into an old Jewish family from Köningsberg. She was the only child of Paul Arendt, an engineer, and Martha (Cohn) Arendt. Both her father and grandfather had died when she was young – Paul Arendt died from syphilis in 1913. A few years later her mother remarried. Arendt had troubles in adjusting herself to her stepfather and two stepsisters; at sixteen she was already intellectually far ahead of her friends of the same age. She had read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and founded a circle for reading of ancient literature. After receiving her B.A. from Königsberg University (now Kaliningrad), Arendt went to Marburg, a small university town. There she met Martin Heidegger, whose lectures attracted students from all over Europe. “There is a teacher; perhaps thinking can be learned… ” she later wrote in her commemorative essay ‘Martin Heidegger at Eighty’ (1969).

Heidegger was writing at that time his most important work, Being and Time, which was published in 1927. Arendt, called “the green one” because of her elegant green dress, moved to an attic near the university. As a young student of philosophy, Arendt was not an interlocutor who was Heidegger’s intellectual match. Their age difference – seventeen years – was perhaps a greater problem socially and psychologically than sexually. “The demonic has seized me,” Heidegger wrote to Arendt in a passionate letter. Her attic apartment was their secret meeting place. “Why do you give me your hand / shyly, as if it were a secret?” Arendt asked in a poem. “Are you from such a distant land / that you do not know our wine?”

The young, insecure Arendt has been characterized one-track-mindedly as a “victim” of Heidegger’s seduction. Without doubt Arendt must have realized early that she cannot build her life of their affair. Heidegger was married and had two young children. Thea Elfride Petri, his wife, came from a Protestant family; Heidegger was a Catholic. She had attended Heidegger’s classes in 1915 and two years later they married. She become a faithful companion to Heidegger. Elfride was a Nazi before he joined the party, and her anti-Semitism was notorious even in the 1920s.

In some sources it has been speculated that Arendt was looking for a father figure, or she tried to find acceptance as a Jewish woman in the hostile German society. Heidegger definitely was an authority figure, devoted to philosophy, and the most inspiring person in Arendt’s life. She become the passion his life. Their secret meetings and correspondence continued also after Arendt left Marburg for Heidelberg, where she finished her studies with Karl Jaspers, a friend of Heidegger.

In 1926, when Arendt informed Heidegger of her other affairs, he congratulated her. “I love you as on the first day – that you know,” Arendt wrote to him, but in 1929 she married Günther Stern, and moved with him to Frankfurt. Stern was a journalist and former philosophy student. Arendt did not love him and they divorced in 1937. Arendt’s doctoral thesis, Der Liebesgriff bei Augustin: Versuch einer philosophischen Interpretation, appeared in 1929. In a note, referring to Heidegger, she criticized his concept of “world” as impersonal and loveless. In Arendt’s subsequent study of Rahel Varnhagen, a Berlin Jew, her description of Rahel’s broken love affair with Count Finckenstein has been read as an examination of Arendt’s own experiences.

Heidegger joined the Nazi Party in 1933, when Hitler became the leader of new Third Reich. Arendt was arrested, interrogated, and as soon as she was released from jail, she fled to Paris with her husband. In exile Arendt joined Youth Aliyah, an organization which trained students who wanted to move to the Holy Land. In 1940 she married Heinrich Blücher, an art historian and fellow exile. Following the fall of France to the German army, Arendt and Blücher escaped to the United States, where they started a new life. Arendt learned English, began to write, and moved among the intellectuals of the Partisan Review milieu. Alfred Kazin wrote in his diary after meeting her: “What luck. Hannah Arendt placed next to me at the dinner for Rabbi Leo Baeck…. Darkly handsome, bountifully interested in everything, this forty-year-old German refugee with a strong accent and such intelligence – thinking positively cascades out of her in waves – but I was enthralled, by no means unerotically…. I love this woman intensely – she is such a surprise, such a gift.” However, during the 1940s, the living situation of Arendt and Blücher was grim. They cooked their meals in a communal kitchen, and Blücher shoveled chemicals in a factory before he found more agreeble work.

At the beginning of 1946 Arendt published an essay entitled ‘What Is Existential Philosophy?’ She also met Jean-Paul Sartre who was lecturing in the United States. In New York City Arendt worked from 1944 to 1946 as a research director of the Conference on Jewish Relations, then as chief editor of Schocken books (1946-48), and executive director of Jewish Cultural Reconstruction (1949-52). In 1950 Arendt became a U.S. citizen.

After the war Arendt contacted Jaspers and took him into her confidence. She was still living in modest circumstances but it did not prevent her from sending her former teacher and his wife three parcels of provisions each month. In November 1949 Arendt went to Europe as a member of Commission for Jewish Cultural Reconstruction in Europe, inspecting and recording what remained of Jewish cultural treasures. During this journey she revealed her love affair with Heidegger to Jaspers, who answered, “Ach, but this is very exciting”. At that time several of Heidegger’s students had gained fame as thinkers of their own right, and they had to deal with their mentor’s Nazi allegiance. Arendt remained dutifully his defender, but there was other problems. “I know that he can’t bear to see my name appear in the public, that I write books, etc,” Arendt complained to Jaspers.

Arendt’s first major book in the United States was The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), a study of Nazism and Stalinism, which sought to locate their roots in nineteenth century expansionist and anti-Semitic tendencies. Arendt dedicated to work to Blücher, acknowledging the role he had played in the shaping of its ideas. In spite of her husband’s many affairs with other women, Arendt remained devoted to him until the 1950s, when they both began to live increasingly independent lives.

On her tour in Europe Arendt met Heidegger in January 1950, at a hotel in Freiburg. “When the waiter announced your name… it was as though suddenly time had stopped,” she noted a few days later. Their friendship and correspondence started again. She sent him food parcels, books, phonograph record and during the following years she visited him several times. Elfride was not enthusiastic about her husband’s interest in Arendt, who wrote to Jaspers: “The woman is jealous almost to the point of madness. After the years of apparently nursing the hope that he would forget me, her jealousy only intensified.” The Human Condition, which Arendt sent to Heidegger, was received with years of silence. In the late 1960s the silence was broken and she worked on the English translation of Heidegger’s writings. On her sixtieth birthday he wished her all the best and send a poem entitled ‘Herbst’.

On the grounds of her belief, that the ideal political entity was a federal republic and but “neither the federal nor state government should interfere with an individual’s right to free association in the social realm,” Arendt criticized in 1957 President Eisenhower’s use of federal troops to integrate the schools of Little Rock, Arkansas. Originally ‘Reflections on Little Rock’ was written for Commentary magazine but it was published in 1959 in Dissent, with the note “We publish it not because we agree with it – quite the contrary” and with two articles attacking Arendt’s arguments. This controversial essay, in which Arendt defended the right of discrimination, was not collected in Crises of the Republic (1972), which dealt with the events of the 1960s and early 1970s. Men in Dark Times (1968), referring in its title to the first line of Bertold Brecht’s famous poem ‘To Posterity’ (“Indeed I live in the dark ages!”), contained essays on Rosa Luxenburg, Karl Jaspers, Isak Dinesen, Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, Pope John XXIII, and other figures. In 1963 Arendt became a professor at the University of Chicago. She finally settled at the New School for Social Research in New York, where she taught from 1967 until her death. Arendt also lectured as a professor at various American universities and colleges. In 1959 she became the first woman professor at Princeton University. Arendt died in New York on December 4, 1975. Heidegger died next year. Her final work was The Life of the Mind (1978), which was published posthumously. Arendt’s several awards included the National Institute of Arts and Letters Award (1954); Lessing Prize (1959), Freud Prize (1967), Sonning Prize (1975). She was a member of the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

In her article series written for the New Yorker and later published in a book form, Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt argued that Adolf Eichmann was but one cog in the Nazi bureaucracy, but partly the collaboration of the councils (Judenräte) contributed to the catastrophe. The subtitle of her account, “A Report on the Banality of Evil” became a famous phrase. Arendt saw that Eichmann himself was not an evil but responsible monster. Throughout the trial he admitted what he had done, he had obeyed orders, but did not feel guilty. Arendt also offended her readers by reporting that Eichmann went to the gallows with great dignity. “It was as though in those last minutes he [Eichmann] was summing up the lessons that this long course in human wickedness had taught us – the lesson on the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.” The controversial book was much criticized, and prompted Saul Bellow to comment sourly on intellectuals in Mr Sammler’s Planet (1969). Arendt lost many of her friends, although Mary McCarthy loyally defended her in the Partisan Review. In her own defense Arendt pointed out that many of the critical statements attributed to her were in fact made by the Israeli prosecution. The uproar over her book continued in the press until the November 1963.

The Human Condition was Arendt’s major work and summarized her thoughts. When Heidegger analyzed being, Arendt focused on “doing,” exploring the related ideas of labour, work, and action from etymological, philosophical, and social point of view. Arendt drew the distinction between labor and work from Locke, who spoke of “the labor of our body and the work of our hands.” This distinction is common in European languages – the Greek distinguished between ponein and ergazesthai, the French between travailler and ouvrer, the German between arbeiten and verken, and so forth.

Arendt connected the concept of labor to biological processes, life and death, to living organisms following the cycle of life, in which animal laborans produces consumer goods, non-durables necessary to keep the human organism alive. The meaning of Heigegger’s Dasein was temporality; death and mortality were central issues in Heidegger’s Being and Time, but Arendt underlined life: “The miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal, ‘natural’ ruin is ultimately the fact of natality, in which the action is ontologically rooted.” Laboring activity never comes to an end as long as life lasts. Work is what a homo faber does – human hands produce the artificial environment as home for the mortal human beings, its use-objects, durables mostly.

Together labor, work, and action are the fundamental activities of human life and form the vita activa. Arendt referred often to Plato and Marx, whom she highly appreciated but did not believe in Marx’s vision of the the emancipation of man from labor. The utopic society in which animal laborans has gained freedom from necessities, is actually a dystopia. It is a consumer society, a waste economy, where the constant striving for happiness creates only destruction.

On Revolution (1963) compared the French and American revolutions. Arendt claimed that the French Revolution was a limited struggle over scarcity and inequality, and the American an unlimited search for political freedom. One of Arendt’s central themes throughout her studies on political theory was the separation of political life (the public realm) from social and economical life (the private realm). Looking back to the pre-Socratic Greek polis (city-state) and the early United States of America, she found models for what public life should be. In these societies individual citizens sought to devote their time the community, and were even ready to die for it. When the public and private spheres were absorbed into the social / economic sphere, it disturbs the peace of the contemplation, the vita contemplativa. In the modern age, labor is glorified, and contemplation itself has become meaningless. Arendt’s unfinished trilogy, The Life of the Mind, was based on the Kantian three-layered hierarchy of pure reason (thinking), practical reason (willing), and judgment. Arendt managed to complete only the first two parts, Thinking and Willing.

Fonte: http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/arendt.htm

Hannah Arendt: German-American Philosopher and Political Theorist

Descended from wealthy German Jews from Koenigsberg, she was raised by her mother after her father’s death from syphilis when Hannah was only 7. Hannah recalled her life as untouched by the strife of world war one, and similarly she remembered no anti-semitism in her early life. By the time she was sixteen she had read “nearly everything.” Her main literary interests included Kant, Goethe and Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard’s poetry and writings showed her the realms of theology and romantic thought. She matriculated at the univeristy of Marburg in 1924 with thoughts of studying theology, though once there she met Martin Heidegger. She was involved in a turgid affair with the married Heidegger, 17 years her senior, until she learned of his involvement in the National Socialist party. They resumed their relationship after the war in the 1950s, when she returned to europe on frequent visits.

Passing up the name philosopher until later in life, Arendt went by the title of political theorist until late in life. She spent much of her life attempting to understand the political and moral causes of the Nazi rise in Germany, and other totalitarian regimes of the 20th century.

Her major ideas included the thought that only through “the activity of thinking” could humanity abstain from evil; that thought could condition us from evil deeds like those of the holocaust.

Her next great teacher was Husserl, who introduced her to his phenomenological method. Soon after, she went on to be a student of Karl Jaspers, under whom she wrote her dissertation on St. Augustine’s concept of love.

In 1929 she married and took up residence in Berlin. During this time she worked on a novel about an eighteenth century salon hostess, though she was arrested in 1933 when she was found gathering ant-semitic materials at the Prussian State Library, by the Gestapo. She immediately fled to Paris and remained stateless until 1951 when she became a US citizen.

By 1941 her mother had escaped from Germany and Hanah had divorced her husband to remarry– they ended up in New York. During the war Hanah wrote about a Jewish state and army, though her words fell to deaf ears.

In 1951 she published The Origins of Totalitarianism. In 1958 she released a second version with 2 new chapters. Critics thought she overgeneralized, though her work was very influential.

Hanah received a Guggenheim Foundation Grant to study Marxism and totalitarianism in 1952. From this study she published: The Human Condition, On Revolution, and Between Past and Future.

She reported on the Eichmann war crimes trial, eventually publishing a book about the topic. The book, entitled Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality and Evil(1964) addressed the idea of trying an individual whose crime was so vast and incomprehensible.

In 1972 she published Crises of the Republic, a collection of political essays from the 1960s. In 1967 she accepted a professorship at the New School for Social Research. Soon after, her husband and later her mentor Jaspers died, causing her to return to her first love, philosophy, with a book entitled The Life of the Mind(1978).

Unfortunately she died before concluding the last third of her tripartite, Justice. The publication of The Life of the Mind only included two parts: “Thinking” and “Willing.” She was investigating the preconditions for these activities in the contemplative life, also discussing the nature of evil. She stuck to her conceptio of evil as banality.

Fonte: http://www.trincoll.edu/depts/phil/philo/phils/arendt.html

Hannah Arendt, by Stephen J. Whitfield

A political theorist with a flair for grand historical generalization, Hannah Arendt exhibited the conceptual brio of a cultivated intellectual, the conscientious learning of a German-trained scholar, and the undaunted spirit of an exile who had confronted some of the worst horrors of European tyranny. Her life was enriched by innovative thought and ennobled by friendship and love. Although her books addressed a general audience from the standpoint of disinterested universalism, Jewishness was an irrepressible feature of her experience as well as a condition that she never sought to repudiate.

Hannah Arendt was born on October 14, 1906, in Hanover, in Wilhelmine Germany. Raised in Konigsberg, she was the only child of Paul and Martha (Cohn) Arendt, both of whom had grown up in Russian-Jewish homes headed by entrepreneurs. Arendt’s childhood was punctuated with grief and terror. Her father, an engineer, died of paresis (syphilitic insanity) when Hannah was seven, and episodic battles between Russian and German armies were fought near their home soon thereafter. Her mother married Martin Beerwald in 1920, providing Hannah with two older stepsisters, Eva and Clara Beerwald.

After graduating from high school in Koenigsberg in 1924, Arendt began to study theology that fall with Rudolf Bultmann at the University of Marburg. Also on the faculty was the young philosopher Martin Heidegger, whose lectures, which would form the basis of Sein und Zeit [Being and time] (1927), were already inspiring allegiance to and interest in the emerging Existenzphilosophie. Her brief but passionate affair with Heidegger, a married man and a father, began in 1925 but ended when she went on to study at the University of Heidelberg with Karl Jaspers. A psychiatrist who had converted to philosophy, he became her mentor.

In September 1929, Arendt married Günther Stern, who wrote under the name of Günther Anders. That year, she also completed her dissertation on the idea of love in the thought of St. Augustine and earned her doctorate. However, the rising anti-Semitism afflicting the German polity distracted her from metaphysics and compelled her to face the historical dilemma of German Jews. By writing a biography of Rahel Varnhagen, a Jewish salon hostess in Berlin in the early 1800s, Arendt sought to understand how her subject’s conversion to Christianity and repudiation of Jewishness illuminated the conflict between minority status and German nationalism. Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewish Woman was not published until 1958. By then, Arendt’s great historical subject was no longer the question of whether Jews were fit to enter the salons, but the question of whether Jews were fit to inhabit the earth.

As the National Socialists grasped power, Arendt became a political activist and, beginning in 1933, helped the German Zionist Organization and its leader, Kurt Blumenfeld, to publicize the plight of the victims of Nazism. She also did research on anti-Semitic propaganda, for which she was arrested by the Gestapo. But when she won the sympathy of a Berlin jailer, she was released and escaped to Paris, where she remained for the rest of the decade. Working especially with Youth Aliyah, Arendt helped rescue Jewish children from the Third Reich and bring them to Palestine.

In Paris, she met Heinrich Blücher, a formally uneducated Berlin proletarian, a communist who had been a member of Rosa Luxemburg’s defeated Spartacus League, and a gentile. After both had divorced, Arendt married Blücher on January 16, 1940. When the Wehrmacht invaded France less than half a year later, the couple was separated and interned in southern France along with other stateless Germans. Arendt was sent to Gurs, from which she escaped. She soon joined her husband, and in May 1941, both managed to reach neutral America, where her mother was able to reunite with them. While living in New York during the rest of World War II, Arendt envisioned the book that became The Origins of Totalitarianism. It was published in 1951, exactly a decade after she arrived in the United States and the same year she secured United States citizenship.

From two separate launching pads, Arendt’s career as an American intellectual took off. Her writing appeared early in Jewish journals such as Jewish Social Studies, and she was befriended by the editor and historian Salo W. Baron and his wife, Jeanette M. Baron. In magazines such as Jewish Frontier and Aufbau [Reconstruction], Arendt argued on behalf of a Jewish army and expressed the hope that Arabs and Jews might live together in a postwar Palestinian state. She also served as an editor at Schocken Books, a German Jewish publishing firm that reestablished itself in New York and in Palestine, and brought to the attention of English readers the diaries of Franz Kafka and the fin de sìecle Jewish polemics of Bernard Lazare. After the Holocaust, Baron put Arendt in charge of Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, the effort to locate and redistribute the shards of Judaic artifacts and other treasures that had been salvaged from a doomed civilization. Her second launching pad was a circle of mostly leftist intellectuals associated with Partisan Review, especially non-Jews such as Dwight Macdonald and Mary McCarthy. The critic Alfred Kazin, however, was also invaluable in enhancing the prose of The Origins of Totalitarianism, the work that made Arendt an intellectual celebrity in the early years of the Cold War.

No book was more resonant or impressive in tracing the steps toward the distinctive twentieth-century tyrannies of Hitler and Stalin, or in measuring how grievously wounded Western civilization and the human status itself had become. She demonstrated how embedded racism was in Central and Western European societies by the end of the nineteenth century, and how imperialism experimented with the possibilities of unspeakable cruelty and mass murder. The third section of her book exposed the operations of “radical evil,” arguing that the huge number of prisoners in the death camps marked a horrifying discontinuity in European history itself. Totalitarianism put into practice what had been imagined only in the medieval depictions of hell. In the 1950s, The Origins of Totalitarianism engendered much doubt, especially by drawing parallels between Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia (despite their obvious ideological conflicts and their savage warfare from 1941 to 1945). The parallelism continues to stir skepticism in some readers, especially because of the unavailability and unfamiliarity of Russian sources when the book was researched and written. But Arendt’s emphasis on the plight of the Jews amid the decline of Enlightenment ideals of human rights, and her insistence that the Third Reich was conducting two wars—one against the Allies, the other against the Jewish people—have become commonplaces of Jewish historiography. Much of her book is stunningly original, and virtually every paragraph is ablaze with insight. More than any other scholar, Arendt made meaningful and provocative die idea of “totalitarianism” as a novel form of autocracy, as springing from subterranean sources within Western society, but pushing to unprecedented extremes murderous fantasies of domination and revenge. An expanded edition of The Origins of Totalitarianism was published in 1958, taking into account the Hungarian Revolution of two years earlier.

Arendt’s next three books–The Human Condition (1958), Between Past and Future (1961), and On Revolution (1968)–could be characterized by a yearning to reconstruct political philosophy rather than to explore the devolution of political history. Remarkably enough, in 1963 she also published what proved to be the most controversial work of her career: Eichmann in Jerusalem. In 1960, Israeli security forces had captured the S.S. lieutenant colonel who had been responsible for transporting Jews to the death camps. The following year, he was tried in Israel, where Arendt covered the trial as a correspondent for The New Yorker. Her articles were then revised and expanded for Eichmann in Jerusalem.

Her portrayal of a bureaucrat who did his duty and followed orders, rather than a raving ideologue animated by demonic anti-Semitism, was strikingly original. Far from embodying “radical evil,” Eichmann exemplified “the banality of evil,” Arendt argued-and thus the danger could not be confined to the political peculiarities of the Third Reich. While accepting the validity of Israeli jurisdiction and considering the Israeli court’s verdict imposing the death sentence on Eichmann just, Arendt also offered her own justifications for capital punishment. Eichmann had not wanted to share the earth with the Jews; therefore, the Jewish state had no reason to share the earth with him. Almost in passing, she also claimed that fewer than six million Jews would have died if the Jewish councils had not collaborated to various degrees with Nazis like Eichmann. Even anarchy and noncooperation would have been better, she stated, than the effort to act as though the occupiers were traditional anti-Semites who might somehow be bribed or appeased. Her attribution of some responsibility for the catastrophe to the councils (Judenräte) not only met sharp criticism, but also provoked a considerable historical literature that investigated the behavior of Jewish communities under Nazi occupation. The subsequent debate has often reinforced the picture of venality, delusion, fear, and selfishness that Arendt briefly presented.

The storm over the book’s apparent elevation of Eichmann’s character and denial of Jewish innocence frayed whatever bonds still tied Arendt to the organized Jewish community. Some segments mounted a propaganda campaign against the arguments that she advanced. Although Eichmann in Jerusalem is hardly free of factual error or bias, Arendt’s critics tended to miss her subtlety and to ignore the relation between her book and the grandeur of her philosophy. She held the victims of the Final Solution accountable for inadequate and ill-conceived political action, and offered the perpetrators a measure of empathy and an effort to understand-lest the horrors be repeated under different historical conditions. But Arendt also wrote as though the modernization associated with the rise of mass society made problematic the classical injunction to think clearly and to act according to conscience. Partisanship and nationalism (even sometimes on behalf of Jews) had obscured the ideals of rational speech and meaningful deeds that she especially celebrated in The Human Condition. But nearly all of her books suggest a struggle to reclaim the possibilities of freedom grounded in the sense of a shared world.

According to Arendt, then, Eichmann had done evil not because he had a sadistic will to do so, nor because he had been deeply infected by the bacillus of anti-Semitism, but because he failed to think through what he was doing (his thoughtlessness). This theory led Arendt to conceptualize the neo-Kantian meditations on judgment in her posthumously published lecture collection The Life of the Mind (1978). While in Aberdeen, Scotland, to deliver these Gifford Lectures, she suffered a heart attack. A second coronary failure on December 4, 1975, while entertaining Salo and Jeanette Baron in her New York City apartment, proved fatal. (Blucher, to whom The Origins of Totalitarianism had been dedicated, had died in 1970.)

For well over two decades, Hannah Arendt was one of the nation’s most prominent intellectuals. However, she was also a notoriously private person who shielded herself as ferociously from interviewers and television cameras as she resisted Anglo-American philosophical tendencies such as pragmatism, empiricism, and liberalism. The first woman to become a full professor (of politics) at Princeton University, she subsequently taught at the University of Chicago, Wesleyan University, and finally the New School for Social Research. Her articles in the New York Review of Books in the 1960s and early 1970s criticized military intervention in Vietnam and the abuses of executive power associated, for example, with the “imperial presidency.” Her books exerted a major impact on political theory, particularly in North America, Europe, and Australia, where scholarly conferences and subsequent anthologies have been devoted to her work (as have over a dozen other books and numerous dissertations). In 1975, the Danish government awarded Arendt its Sonning Prize for Contributions to European Civilization, which no American and no woman before her had received. Her life even inspired a roman à clef, Arthur A. Cohen’s An Admirable Woman (1983), possibly because her allure was more than austerely intellectual-her suitors included Hans J. Morgenthau, Leo Strauss, and W.H. Auden, who was homosexual.

While her work has not yet been given any major feminist readings, Arendt’s critical intelligence has enriched Jewish studies. Jewish identity was so inescapable an aspect of her sensibility that, when beginning a lecture in Cologne less than a decade after World War II, she announced: “I am a German Jew driven from my homeland by the Nazis.” Her thought also registered the impact of Bernard Lazare, whose polemics combined hostility to anti-Semitism with opposition to the timorous parvenus who often fancied themselves the representatives of the Jewish masses. As her friend Mary McCarthy once recalled, Israel was “the prime source of her political concern,” and Arendt remarked that “any real catastrophe in Israel would affect me more deeply than anything else.” When such a disaster was avoided in 1967, the victory of the Israel Defense Forces in the Six-Day War thrilled her.

Yet her own knowledge of Judaism was apparently slight, and not always accurate. Arendt died unconsecrated by a religious ceremony (her ashes are buried at Bard College, where Blucher taught), and the obituary in the New York Times tersely noted that she had “no religious affiliation.” Her dissertation topic had been a Christian saint, and she later wrote dazzlingly on the goodness of Jesus. Yet it could be argued that the primary influences upon her thought were Hellenic philosophy-and German philosophy itself. Arendt denied harboring any special love for the Jewish people (ahavat Yisrael). Since Diaspora Jewry had been denied the public space in which she believed human excellence should be cultivated, Arendt admitted that she could neither admire nor “love” a collective so deprived of political possibilities. By 1950 or so, her disappointment with the dead-on-arrival idea of a binational state in the Near East quietly distanced her from the organized Jewish community, whose resources would henceforth be mounted on behalf of Jewish sovereignty in Palestine.

Although Arendt deeply appreciated the refuge that the United States provided (an appreciation that its academic institutions and audiences reciprocated by recognizing her gifts), it is difficult to detect any significant American influences upon her work. Arendt was supremely a product of Weimar culture. She had its awareness of both the brilliance of Jewish achievement and the fragility of the Jewish status. She shared its modernist sense of the disrupted ties to the classical heritage that her own political philosophy helped to elucidate, and its apocalyptic pessimism. Finally, she reflected its disdain for the petty compromises of electoral politics, and its valorization of creative thought and cosmopolitanism that transcend the tastes of the masses. Like Heidegger, she was entranced by the poetic and philosophical resources of the German language, and in 1967, the Deutsche Akademie fur Sprache und Dichtung honored the excellence of her German prose. Like many other Jewish intellectuals, Arendt noticed the strangeness of the familiar and sought to clarify the senselessness of modern history. But like very few others, Arendt managed to stamp with individual authority a body of work that is saturated with speculative daring.

Fonte: http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/arendt.html