Hannah Arendt

Born: 1906

Died: 1975, at the age of 69

Country of origin: Germany

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• Areas of focus:       Political Philosophy, Totalitarianism, Anti-Semitism
  
  
• Major Books written by Hannah Arendt:
  
  
  • "The Origins of Totalitarianism" (1951)
    
  • "The Human Condition" (1958)
    
  • "Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess" (1958) (Novel)
    
  • "Reflections on Little Rock" (1959) (About the emerging Black Civil Rights movement)
    
  • "Between Past and Future" (1961)
    
  • "Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil" (1961)
    
  • "On Revolution" (1963)
    
  • "Men in Dark Times" (1968)
    
  • "Crises of the Republic" (1972)
    
  • "The Life of the Mind" (published posthumously in 1978)
  
  
• Cocktail summary of Hannah Arendt's main ideas:
  
  
  Hannah Arendt was an Existentialist Political Theorist (of which there aren't too many left these days), focusing on the root causes of Totalitarianism and passive public complicity to atrocities like the Holocaust. One of her main arguments was that collective evil could be reduced by people simply thinking more: the life of the mind has the power to overcome the passions of the mob.
  
  She is probably most famous for coining the term "The Banality of Evil", in referring to the fact that many perpetrators of unspeakable atrocities are people of very bland, boring personalities when encountered face-to-face. She originally used the term to refer to Adolf Eichmann, one of Hitler's top henchmen who had been captured in Argentina and was tried and executed in Israel in 1961. She covered the trial as a reporter, and was intrigued by how something as heinous as the Holocaust could be orchestrated by someone with about as much personal charisma and apparent ill-will as a tax-accountant.
  
  Her argument was that evil doesn't necessarily come in the form of raving lunatics, such as someone like Charles Manson, but that it often comes from ordinary people who simply allow someone else to make moral decisions for them and then simply "follow orders" passively. Eichmann orchestrated the death-camps like a corporate bureaucrat, managing Auschwitz like a Volkswagen factory. Therefore the evil of Eichmann was not unique to Nazi ideology and could easily happen elsewhere. This observation caused a lot of consternation amongst many who assumed that anyone who was responsible for the Holocaust had to appear far more visibly evil and demented. But evil is often all too ordinary-looking.
  
  Arendt spent a lot of her early adulthood studying under prominent Existentialist thinkers, such as Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Karl Jaspers. She used many of the techniques of Phenomenology, channeled through the ideals of Existentialism, to analyze the basic nature of political life - life in the Polis, the activity of community engagement. Instead of analyzing abstract political theory, she looked at the "phenomena" of political engagement as experienced on a day-to-day level by individuals. The emphasis was on description of human experience, not the explanation of that experience.
  
  She made a point of distinguishing between political life and so-called "social life", involving things like the artistic life, religious life, and moral life. She followed some of the techniques of Heidegger in clearing away the "particulars" of abstract political theory in order to reveal the underlying experience of ordinary political engagement. The result was her argument that there were issues that were inherently political and issues that were inherently social. Such as, she argued that poverty is not a political issue but a social one, but freedom of speech is a political issue. Each topic should only be discussed in their proper sphere, so politics should maintain freedom of the Press but helping the poor should be dealt with by charitable organizations.
  
  Like her special friend Heidegger, Arendt considered Plato to be the root of all modern problems in Philosophy. The obsession with abstract political theory and devaluation of ordinary experience can be traced, she argued, back to Plato's analogy of the cave and the shadows on the wall being ordinary human actions, with the seeker of truth being encouraged to focus on the eternal Forms of pure theory. Societies that have their heads in the cloud are easier to manipulate by madmen like Hitler and Stalin. The solution was for individuals to live examined lives of the mind in order to ward off evil.
  
  
• Arendt praised & criticized:
  
  
  • Hannah Arendt is often criticized for compartmentalizing political engagement from other forms of engagement, since it doesn't recognize the overlap that often occurs, such as between the life of the home and raising children and engagement in public affairs. While claiming to be unconcerned with idealistic political theory her conclusions still didn't always reflect pragmatic experience.
    
    Her analysis of Adolf Eichmann got her into a lot of trouble with her fellow Jewish intellectuals, who considered her "banality of evil" arguments to amount to cutting Eichmann some slack. She disagreed, and supported his death sentence, and her arguments that evil acts are often committed passively by ordinary people have been confirmed by the infamous Milgram Experiments in Ohio at around the same time.
    
    The other aspect of her life that has long baffled her readers is her life-long involvement with the Philosopher Martin Heidegger, as described below. The spectacle of a passionate Jewish intellectual and Holocaust-survivor defending an avowed Nazi, long after World War II, is evidence to many that she was conflicted at best, and simply irrational at worst.
    
    Her arguments that examined-thinking could prevent collective-evil often fell on deaf ears when she went to great lengths to make excuses for the public pro-Nazi support Martin Heidegger had proclaimed in Germany, and which he never publicly renounced to the end of his life in the 1970's. Her observations on the roots of despotism and the acquiescence of the masses in the face of propaganda are valued for their insight into collective reasoning and mob-psychology, but her legacy will always exist in the shadow of her romantic involvement with an avowed Nazi and her blindness in refusing to hold him publicly accountable for his actions.
    
    Some argue that the ideas and creations of thinkers and artists need to be treated as distinct from the individuals, such as pointing out that artists like Van Gogh lived personally destructive lives, but which don't detract from the genius of what they created. Others argue that what's relevant is practicing what you preach. Take your pick...
    
    
  
  
• Notable Facts about Hannah Arendt:
  
  
  • Religious affiliation:
    Hannah Arendt was Jewish but thoroughly secular. She was inspired by the theological writings of Kierkegaard, and considered studying Theology at one point, attending lectures by Rudolf Bultmann in 1924. Even her doctoral dissertation was on a Christian saint, Augustine. However, her spiritual discipline was the secular ideal of Existentialism, which claims to look above and beyond the supposedly narrow gaze of religion. When she died her funeral was not presided over by any religious ceremony.
    
    
  • She was born in the German town of Königsberg (modern-day Kaliningrad in Russia), the hometown of Immanuel Kant.
    
    
  • Hannah got around a lot in Existentialist circles. In 1925 she studied under Edmund Husserl, then had an affair with Martin Heidegger and then, in 1927, she studied under Karl Jaspers, under who's tutelage she wrote her dissertation on St. Augustine's concept of Love. She spent a lot of time under Existentialists...
    
    
  • She was married in 1929 in Berlin, to Gunther Stern. That marriage ended in 1941, when she was divorced and married Heinrich Blucher, a Marxist activist.
    
    
  • In the early 1930's she wrote a novel, "Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess" (which wasn't published until 1958), about a Jewish woman in Germany in the early 1800's who converted to Christianity, disavowing her Jewish heritage, in order to be allowed entry into the social circles of her time, which involved access to salons. Arendt saw this as a mirror of the growing German nationalism of her own time and the increasing marginalization of Jews in public life.
    
    
  • She was arrested by the Gestapo in 1933 for stealing anti-Semitic propaganda in Germany and sent to an internment camp. But she escaped, and fled to France. While living there was she was arrested again, and was to have been sent to another internment camp but escaped again. She continued moving, one step ahead of the War, until she eventually reached America in 1941, becoming a US citizen in 1951.
    
    
  • During the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Israel in 1960 she served as a reporter for the New Yorker, covering the proceedings. Her observations of Eichmann, whom she considered to be totally bland, uncharismatic, and banal, resulted in her book "Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil". The phrase "Banality of Evil" has lived on as a euphemism ever since.
    
    
  • In 19## Hannah Arendt met with Simone de Beauvoir, which should have been the Feminist meeting-of-the-century. However, Arendt had little interest in Feminism as a movement and the meeting of these 2 great women resulted in little more than a polite chat.
    
    
  • Hannah Arendt was the first woman to become professor at Princeton University.
    
    
  • Hannah Arendt even has a street named after her, in downtown Berlin, Germany, the ultimate honor for a philosopher.
    
    
  • Despite all of her ideas and writings and activism, Hannah Arendt will long be famous for her tabloidesque, life-long involvement with Martin Heidegger. Theirs was one of the stranger affairs in modern history, with her being deeply committed to her Jewish heritage in the aftermath of the Holocaust, and with Heidegger being a Nazi. The irony of their relationship extends to her continued support for him even after World War II and the resumption of their friendship to the end of their lives in the 1970's.
    
    After the war she was actively involved in the new state of Israel, present at the trial of Adolf Eichmann, and was very critical of European Jews whom she accused of selling out to the Nazis prior to and during the war, therefore being complicit in the Holocaust. But she was never able to bring herself to remain consistent in applying these standards of morality to her former lover, Heidegger.
    
    As a student in the late 1920's Heidegger, who was married with two children, had maintained an intense affair with Arendt, who was 19 years his junior. It was probably as intense of a relationship intellectually as it was physically, and the flames of the mind apparently never died out in Arendt during her entire life. She later married, twice, and Heidegger remained with his wife for the rest of his life, who eventually found about the affair but tolerated her re-emergence in their life in later years.
    
    To the amazement of Jewish intellectuals, Arendt persisted in defending Heidegger long after World War II against his own public support for the Nazi party in the 1930's. She argued that he had been simply naive and was misled, even comparing him to the ancient Greek Philosopher Thales, who was said to have fallen into a well while walking and staring at the sun!
    
    Long after her death, this aspect of her life is still hotly debated, with many books published containing her private letters on the issue, and even a theatrical Play being staged, "Hannah and Martin", that portrays the conflicted love affair. No matter how sharp one's mind is, Love truly is irrational.
    
    
  • Many of Hannah Arendt's papers are available online at the Library of Congress at this link.
    
    
  • Arendt died of of a heart attack in her New York City apartment while hosting a party. Her ashes are buried in Bard College in New York.
    
    
• Quotes:
  
  
  • "The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be either good or evil."
    
    
  • "Our personal problem was not, in fact, what our enemies were doing, but rather what our friends did".
    
    
  • "The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution."
    
    
  • "Under conditions of tyranny it is far easer to act than to think."
    
    
  • Some of Arendt's comments on Adolf Eichmann:
    
    
    • "The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together."