The Arendt Wars Continue: Richard Wolin v. Seyla Benhabib

Richard Wolin has written a response to Seyla Benhabib’s New York Times piece on Arendt and Eichmann.

I hesitate to weigh in on this controversy for two reasons. First, I know both Richard and Seyla, and Richard is a colleague. And even though, when it comes to Arendt, I have consistently found Seyla to have the better of the argument, I have a great deal of respect for both of them and their work. Second, I may be writing about the war over Eichmann in Jerusalem in a lengthier piece in the coming months—More than a half-century after its publication, how is it that this book still manages to get under people’s skin? Is there any other book, not allied to a political or religious movement, that can do that?—so I don’t want to get too caught up in any one bit of the fracas right now.

Still, I wanted to respond to this one paragraph in Wolin’s critique:

Benhabib’s claim that Kant’s moral philosophy plays a systematic role in Eichmann in Jerusalem is similarly unsustainable. Arendt’s reliance on Kant’s theory of judgment—the idea that we broaden our mental horizons by virtue of our ability to reason from the standpoint of other persons—is limited to one meager passage (Eichmann in Jerusalem, p. 48).  Moreover, in the passage in question, Kant’s name is not even mentioned. Casual allusions along these lines hardly qualify as systematic or serious employment. As most Arendt scholars are aware, Arendt only developed these Kantian precepts in earnest circa 1970, in the course of her Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy and in the complementary essay “Thinking and Moral Considerations.”

That last claim, which I’ve bolded, is simply not true.

In a brilliant article—”Arendt, Aesthetics, and ‘The Crisis in Culture’“—that totally changed how I see some of Arendt’s work, University of Chicago political theorist Patchen Markell shows that the Kantian presence in Arendt’s thought, particularly regarding these issues of judgment and enlarged mentality, well predate her 1970 writings, extending as far back as the 1950s. And in fact, as Patchen shows, most serious Arendt scholars know that.

If memory serves (I only read this essay in draft more than a year ago), Patchen looks at Arendt’s essay on culture from the 1950s, which finally appears in Between Past and Future in 1961 (the year Eichmann went on trial). He shows, among a great many other things, that Arendt and Jaspers were corresponding about Kant’s Critique of Judgment in the late 1950s (the text was very much on her mind), and that the Critique of Judgment very much informs her essay on culture, and how to think about questions of taste and judgment and their relationship to politics. In other words, whether or not Kant is present in what Arendt wrote in Eichmann in Jerusalem (and again, I think Seyla’s got the better of that argument), he, and his writing about judgment, were clearly present in Arendt’s thinking on the eve of her travels to Jerusalem.

Inspired by Wolin’s piece (and Patchen’s corrective, avant la lettre), I read Arendt’s other essay from that period, “Culture and Politics,” which I don’t think Patchen actually discusses but which is nevertheless instructive.

In that essay, Arendt claims Kant’s Critique of Judgment as an explicit inspiration for her thinking about judgment and politics: it “contains,” she says, “what is in my opinion the greatest and most original aspect of Kant’s political philosophy.” That was in 1959, two years before Arendt would head to Jerusalem to report on the Eichmann trial.

As she goes on to develop the political implications of Kant’s theory of taste and judgment, Arendt writes:

It is as though taste decided not only what the world should look like, but also who belongs together in the world….The belonging-together-of-persons—this is what gets decided in judgments about a common world. And what the individual manifests in its judgments is a singular “being-thus-and-not-otherwise”….

As soon as I read that “who belongs together in the world,” I stopped. The passage has an eerie resonance.

In the epilogue to her report on the Eichmann trial, Arendt delivers what she thinks should have been the Israeli court’s judgment against Eichmann. Her very last two sentences read:

And just as you [Eichmann] supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations…we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang.

Though I have no idea if Arendt intended these last sentences of Eichmann in Jerusalem to be read as such, it’s hard for me not to read them as an indication of how, for her, Eichmann’s crimes are a terrible and ironic perversion of the Kantian themes she was developing in her 1959 essay.

Just as a person reveals herself in her tastes (and what she reveals in part is “who belongs together in the world”), so does Eichmann reveal himself in his taste (or lack thereof), and what he reveals is who belongs together in his mind (namely, Aryans as opposed to Jews) and who belongs together in actuality: namely, he and all the other Nazis who refused to share the earth, as opposed to the rest of the peoples of the earth.

It is because of that terrible and ironic perversion of Kant’s theory of taste, which is connected to judgment, that Arendt insists so strongly on the court restoring the proper meaning of Kant’s theory of taste/judgment in its verdict on Eichmann: through its verdict, Arendt claims, through its revealing who or what it is, the court must decide who does indeed belong together in the world—namely, the peoples of the earth, in all their plurality—and who does not: those individuals, like Eichmann, who do not wish to share the earth with others.

Update (12:30 pm)

Patchen Markell has a very useful comment and corrective in the comments section, which I’m reproducing here. But first, here is the published version of that article of his that I discuss. And now here’s Patchen:

Thanks, Corey. I just sent you the the published version of the piece, which is in Nikolas Kompridis, The Aesthetic Turn in Political Thought. Although the Jaspers correspondence does contain a letter from 1957, when she was busy re-reading the Critique of Judgment, that makes it pretty clear how seriously engaged she was with that text, the place to go to really see this is her Denktagebuch or notebooks, published in 2002, which contain 15 pages (in the published version) of handwritten notes from the third Critique, including notes and comments on the idea of an “enlarged mentality,” the importance of the presence of others for the validity of judgments, etc. The editors of the Denktagebuch themselves observed how significant it was that this material came prior to, not after, the Eichmann trial. The Anglophone scholar who reconstructs this stuff best, and really focuses in a way I do not on the continuities between the Kant reading of 1957 and the lectures of 1970, is David Marshall, who published a very detailed piece on this history of Arendt’s readings of Kant in Political Theory (2010): http://ptx.sagepub.com/content/38/3/367.

Also, for the geeky record, “Culture and Politics” is the English translation of a German lecture that Arendt subsequently incorporated into “The Crisis in Culture” (in Between Past and Future).

 Update (2 pm)

I’ve been reading Bettina Stangneth’s Eichmann Before Jerusalem, which is what has kicked off this latest round of the Arendt Wars, and she tells a story there about Eichmann, which I posted about on Facebook over the weekend. It seems pertinent to this discussion re Kant and enlarged mentality. Here’s what I said:

In 1950, Adolph Eichmann, along with 15 others, managed to flee Europe and set sail for Argentina from Genoa on the Giovanna C. Years later, in a text titled “Meine Flucht,” he reminisced about the relief he felt, finally to have escaped his would-be tormentors. Drawing a parallel only he could have drawn, he marveled, “Once it was the Jews, now it was–Eichmann.” This is the sort of thing Hannah Arendt had in mind when she talked about Eichmann’s thoughtlessness.

It should be noted that Stangneth does not read the Eichmann comment in this way, but I found her reading tortured and unpersuasive, and unsupported by the text.

 

 

16 Comments

  1. patchenmarkell October 1, 2014 at 12:21 pm | #

    Thanks, Corey. I just sent you the the published version of the piece, which is in Nikolas Kompridis, The Aesthetic Turn in Political Thought. Although the Jaspers correspondence does contain a letter from 1957, when she was busy re-reading the Critique of Judgment, that makes it pretty clear how seriously engaged she was with that text, the place to go to really see this is her Denktagebuch or notebooks, published in 2002, which contain 15 pages (in the published version) of handwritten notes from the third Critique, including notes and comments on the idea of an “enlarged mentality,” the importance of the presence of others for the validity of judgments, etc. The editors of the Denktagebuch themselves observed how significant it was that this material came prior to, not after, the Eichmann trial. The Anglophone scholar who reconstructs this stuff best, and really focuses in a way I do not on the continuities between the Kant reading of 1957 and the lectures of 1970, is David Marshall, who published a very detailed piece on this history of Arendt’s readings of Kant in Political Theory (2010): http://ptx.sagepub.com/content/38/3/367.

    Also, for the geeky record, “Culture and Politics” is the English translation of a German lecture that Arendt subsequently incorporated into “The Crisis in Culture” (in Between Past and Future).

  2. Roquentin October 1, 2014 at 1:50 pm | #

    My understanding of Kant is very influenced by Adorno. I’ve only read (most of the) first Critique along with Adorno’s lectures on said Critique. It’s one of the most lucid and humorous things Adorno ever wrote. I was surprised how many times his lectures on Kant made me laugh. Anyhow, where I really want to go with this is that Eichmann’s claim that he was acting on Kant’s categorical imperative (from the second critique, which I’ve never touched) in Eichmann in Jerusalem. I can’t help but think of the Dialectic of Enlightenment where the claim is made that the Marquis De Sade is the logical conclusion of Kantian moral philosophy. I’m certain Adorno and Horkheimer had the Holocaust in mind when that was written.

    Lacan had similar sentiments and wrote an essay entitled “Kant Avec Sade” which is available in Ecrits.

  3. Mark LeVine October 1, 2014 at 1:53 pm | #

    It’s hard for me to imagine any german scholar of her era not engaging kant seriously throughout their career. that she would only engage perhaps the seminal moral philosopher of the modern era until 1970s is the argument that i find untenable.

    • Corey Robin October 1, 2014 at 2:34 pm | #

      To be fair, Wolin’s contention isn’t that she didn’t engage Kant at all until the 1970s; it’s that she didn’t engage these particular ideas of his about judgment and enlarged mentality until the 1970s.

      On Wed, Oct 1, 2014 at 1:53 PM, Corey Robin wrote:

      >

  4. s. wallerstein October 1, 2014 at 3:50 pm | #

    It’s been some time since I’ve read Arendt, but Wolin seems to misinterpret or distort what Arendt means by “thoughtlessness”.

    Thinking for Arendt is socratic, is an inner dialogue, which leads a person to question their self and according to Arendt, Eichmann did not question himself in the way that Socrates did or any “thinking” person does.

    Arendt points out in various places, as I recall, that those who were guided by conventional rules often did not resist Nazism or help its victims, while those who were less conventional and “thought for themselves” were able to react to a new ethical challenge. Thus, the two poles would be Eichmann (he did not think, he obeyed the rules) and Schlinder (a less conventional person who saved lives).

  5. voltayre October 1, 2014 at 5:29 pm | #

    @Corey. At no point did you present Seyla Benhabib’s arguments on the issue.

  6. A.D. October 2, 2014 at 1:11 am | #

    Wolin writes:

    First, in a letter written to Karl Jaspers on December 2, 1960, four months before the trial, Arendt mentions that she is looking forward to the proceedings insofar as they will allow her “to go and look at this walking disaster [i.e., Eichmann] face to face in all his bizarre vacuousness.” This frank avowal demonstrates that Arendt’s estimation of Eichmann’s fundamental “banality” was a preconception that she had already developed well in advance of the trial. Second, a perusal of Arendt’s correspondence indicates that so great was her impatience with the proceedings that she never saw Eichmann testify. Arendt endured chief prosecutor Gideon Hausner’s lengthy opening statement and, following an absence of several weeks, returned to Jerusalem to witness the final verdict. But, remarkably, she never saw Eichmann himself take the stand. (Here, one suspects that Arendt’s rather brazen disregard for the value of testimony, not to speak of the norms of journalism, is an instance of Germanic philosophical arrogance. As J. G. Fichte said, if the facts fail to accord with the sublimity of the idea, so much the worse for the facts!) With these points in mind let us turn to Benhabib’s vindication of Arendt’s “banality of evil” thesis.

    If Wolin is right, that is damning–and the questions about Heidegger and Kant are of minimal interest.

  7. James Osborn October 2, 2014 at 12:03 pm | #

    Hi Corey,

    Great piece. One thing that bothers me about the attempts to discredit Arendt’s account of Eichmann is the complete absence of any attempt to give a charitable philosophical reading of Arendt, though I understand that charitable readings are generally a thing of the past in philosophy now. And as for the historians, cultural critics, and journalists trying to find this or that fact that will put a stop to more careful, philosophical readings of Arendt, well, it’s just not working.

    Here’s why: this new obsession with Kant is not even necessary to show up the intellectual orientation and philosophical reasoning at work at the time she wrote about Eichmann. Of course her thought was influenced by Kant from early on, though this influence became more explicit later. But even Kant aside, we only need to look at her The Origins of Totalitarianism (1958 at the latest) to see the type of philosophical critique that was working in the background of Eichmann in Jerusalem–and to see the plausibility of that critique as applied to Eichmann. If you have a copy of Origins, start from page 468 and read her analysis of ideology. Already in this book (written before Eichmann), her idea that there are different types of thinking, and that a person could be proficient in one (say, a logically thinking) while lacking in another (say, a moral-political thinking), is evident. This passage, in which the cold logic of totalitarian ideology is related to the loss of contact with others and with the type of thinking that touches real existence, should suffice (p. 473):

    “The compulsion of total terror on one side, which, with its iron band,
    presses masses of isolated men together and supports them in a world which
    has become a wilderness for them, and the self-coercive force of logical
    deduction on the other, which prepares each individual in his lonely isolation against all others, correspond to each other and need each other in
    order to set the terror-ruled movement into motion and keep it moving. Just
    as terror, even in its pre-total, merely tyrannical form ruins all relationships
    between men, so the self-compulsion of ideological thinking ruins all relationships with reality. The preparation has succeeded when people have lost
    contact with their fellow men as well as the reality around them; for together with these contacts, men lose the capacity of both experience and
    thought. The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or
    the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact
    and fiction {i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true
    and false {i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist. ”

    This totalitarian-style thinking is exactly what she saw in Eichmann. By calling it “banal”, Arendt isn’t passing off blame for Eichmann’s action, and she is much less denying intentionality and self-awareness to Eichmann. She is pointing to this distinction between the type of thinking that closes itself off to the others around it, locking itself inside of the logic of an ideology. But by misunderstanding–or in some cases, refusing to understand–this distinction that Arendt makes throughout her work, and that can be seen as early as Origins, people mis-interpret the “banality” as a lack of appreciation for the scale of evil at work in Eichmann. On the contrary, we haven’t fully understood the depths and dangers of the type of thinking that lead Eichmann to act until we can make the types of distinctions that Arendt was pointing to.

    Hope this helps.

    Best,

    James Osborn

  8. LFC October 2, 2014 at 12:22 pm | #

    I was interested to discover, from the table of contents of ‘Reflections on Literature and Culture,’ that Arendt wrote something about Friedrich v. Gentz. Have made a note to read it.

  9. jonnybutter October 3, 2014 at 8:28 pm | #

    I understand that charitable readings are generally a thing of the past in philosophy now.

    I hope this isn’t true. If it is, philosophy has become very stupid indeed.

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