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KRITIKE VOLUME TWO NUMBER TWO (DECEMBER 2008) 95-111
Article
I. Introduction
Political Philosophy, ed. by Ronald Beiner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 140.
3 Hannah Arendt, “Thinking and Moral Considerations,” in Responsibility and Judgment,
ed. by Jerome Kohn (New York: Shocken, 2003), 159-189. [hereafter TM]
II. “Ambiguities”
4 Hannah Arendt, “The Crisis in Culture,” in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in
[hereafter HC]
8 Beiner, op cit., 93.
9 Christopher Lasch, “Introduction,” in Salmagundi, 60 (1983), xi. Quoted in
Benhabib, op cit., 31.
J. MARSH 97
Arendt’s motivation for thinking the relation between thinking and the
problem of evil is twofold: 1) from her experience in and reporting of the
Eichmann trial, and 2) the collapse of religious and metaphysical
Weltanschauungen constitutive of modernity. With Eichmann, the commission
of evil deeds on a grand scale “could not be traced to any particular
wickedness, pathology, or ideological conviction in the doer, whose only
personal distinction was a perhaps extraordinary shallowness.”11 What is
remarkable in Eichmann is his apparent lack of any intense, personal hatred of
Jews, and that he executed the genocidal orders of his superiors without
thinking. This event raises Arendt’s question:
11 TM, 159.
12 Ibid., 160.
J. MARSH 99
13 The rise and crisis of modernity is beyond the scope of this paper. See HC, 248-
320.
14 It is interesting to note the significance Arendt ascribes to these deaths: “I trust it
will [have its advantages] once it has been understood what these “ends” actually mean, not that
God has “died”—and obvious absurdity in every respect—but the way God has been thought of
for thousands of years is no longer convincing; and not that the old questions which are coeval
with the appearance of men on earth have become “meaningless,” but that the way they were
framed and answered has lost plausibility.” Ibid., 161-2. On Arendtian terms, the death of (the)
god (of onto-theology) opens the possibility of a new – and perhaps also very old – thinking of
the holy.
15 Ibid., 163.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid., 164.
18 Ibid.
100 RETURN TO PLURALITY
2. Thinking “always deals with objects that are absent, removed from direct sense
perception.”19 Thought is re-presentational and re-memorial. Imagination and
memory allow thought to make present objects or persons that are actually
absent in the form of an image. As Arendt says, “when I am thinking, I move
outside of the world of appearances . . . ”20
3. Thinking is anomic or “out of order.”21 The quest for meaning takes on
an “unnatural” character, as though the activity of thinking where somehow
contrary to the “human condition.” Thinking that refuses to obey practical
imperatives, to become instrumental to ulterior purposes, exhibits, as Kant
says, a “natural aversion” to letting things lie (as they are).
For Arendt the ‘world of appearances’ is the only world, and so the
‘no-place’ of thinking is not another ‘true’ world before or behind the world of
appearances. Genuine thinking involves a passage to the limit. Thinking
stations itself at the limits of the ordinary, mundane world of work and labor
and the “frozen” significances that support it. Thinking, in its ‘no-place,’ flirts
with the (seemingly) impossible.
Arendt elaborates the consequences of her sketch of thinking to her
overall thesis on the connection between the ability and inability to think and
the problem of evil:
19 Ibid., 165.
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid., 166.
22 Ibid., 166-7.
J. MARSH 101
Thus, the paralysis of thought not only includes the ‘stop and think,’
the interruption of all other activities, but also introduces uncertainty into the
ordinary in breaking open its sedimented implications and tacit assumption.
Thinking unsettles rule and custom. This performance of thinking at the limit
always entails the danger of nihilism. But as Arendt points out, nihilism is
simply the negative image of convention, two sides of a problematic coin.
Nihilism results from the desire to “find results which would make further
thinking unnecessary.”25 Unthinking negation is still unthinking. Unthinking
affirmation of general rules encourages people not to think, but to ‘sleep’ in
conventionalism; here, people never get used to “making up their own
minds.”26 Thus, as we hinted above, one can simply substitute new values for
old ones, if only it is expressed in a new code of laws. The faster men hold to
the old code, the more eager they’ll be to assimilate to the new one.
Arendt finally turns to elaborating the explicit tie of thinking to
judgment: this quest for meaning in thought as a kind of eros. “Love, by
23 Ibid., 174-5.
24 Ibid., 175-6.
25 Ibid., 177-8.
26 Ibid.
102 RETURN TO PLURALITY
desiring what is not there, establishes a relationship with it.”27 Arendt, here,
summons the old Augustinian ‘privation theory of evil’:
We are left with the conclusion that only the people filled
with this eros, this desiring love of wisdom, beauty, and
justice, are capable of thought—that is, we are left with
Plato’s “noble nature” as a pre-requisite for thinking.29
27 Ibid., 179.
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid., 180.
J. MARSH 103
c. The Two-In-One
And
30 Ibid., 181.
31 Ibid.
32 Ibid., 182.
33 Ibid., 184.
104 RETURN TO PLURALITY
d. Her Conclusion
34 Ibid., 185.
35 Ibid.
36 Ibid., 187-8.
37 Ibid., 188.
38 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York:
a. The Motive
We see now the motive for her late shift to thinking in developing her
theory of judgment. In her experience with Eichmann, and probably the
general trauma of the Shoah (not to mention Stalin’s purges, Hiroshima, etc.),
Arendt saw the need for a radically separate space from which to derive
judgment. Her own phenomenology of the vita activa locates in human labor
and work a world-sustaining and world-constituting function, they create the
conditions necessary for action proper. Social habits and rule-governed work
practices produce a relatively durable and stable world on which the free action
of politics depends. Her account of world-alienation involves the colonization
of public space by the rule-governed work paradigm (the actional equivalent of
philosophy in the vita contemplativa) and by the process-character of the labor
paradigm (expressed in orthodox Marxism, utilitarian liberalism, and even
Nietzsche’s will-to-power). Where do we turn when the world ‘goes bad’?
Whence judgment in extreme cases when there is no longer any public, no free
space of appearances in which re-presentative judgments can occur? Arendt
finds it in the “winds of thought,” in negative Socratic desire and critical
interrogation. This wind is a kind of felt resistance, a negative freedom to
refuse participation in a corrupt world. If her account of judgment as it relates
to plurality involves sensibility and the imagination, that sensibility and
imagination remain in this negative account. When plurality and publicity is
closed, when the world ‘goes bad,’ judgment remains and thinking becomes
politicized in the negative desire irrupting in the obdurate spontaneity of
thinking. It is the separateness and negative quality of this thinking that allows
it to remain critical and uncorrupt in a situation of total collapse.
39 TM, 188.
40 Ibid., 189.
106 RETURN TO PLURALITY
And
b. The Problem
It would seem that her own designations of plurality and natality entail
certain political and perhaps even ethical responsibilities. There are specific
constraints inherent to the structure of plurality ‘itself,’ or that sensibly irrupt in
its very event. Given the world sustaining and constituting function she
confers upon labor and work, clarifying the relationship between them and
public space would precisely involve positively articulating the function of
habit and law in relation to natality and plurality. Though Beiner and Benhabib
42 Ibid., 127.
43 HC, 9.
108 RETURN TO PLURALITY
are right in this respect, any rigorous Arendtian position must insist on the
secondary and constructed or variable character of this relation. Habit and law
are not basic; they are subtended and exceeded by a sensibility informing
concrete judgment and an activity capable of real change and novelty.
Aside from external imperatives, Arendt’s derivation of judgment from
thinking activity introduces a dissonance within her own theoretical fabric.
The manifest need for a space of judgment separate from social convention
and formal law led her close to the intellectualism she elsewhere criticizes, and
criticizes trenchantly. In “resolving” the tension in her account of judgment by
way of the vita contemplativa, we are left wondering about the status of plurality.
Beiner is surely right in contending:
IV. Conclusion
Writings, ed. by A. T. Peperzak, et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 168.
46 HC, 8.
J. MARSH 111
References