The Life of Thought

Today it is the 37th death anniversary of the political philosopher Hannah Arendt. She was born in 1906 in Königsberg, Germany, where, she liked to point out, was also the birthplace of Immanuel Kant. She was of Jewish origin, although her family was not very religious; next to some casual reading of the Torah, during her teenage years she carefully studied all the Greek and Latin classics, available at her home’s library. However, in a rising tide of anti-Semitism she sometimes suffered the mischief of her fellow classmates. Later on she studied philosophy at the University of Marburg. Two of his professors were key figures in the history of the ideas of the 20^th century: Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger. The former directed her doctoral dissertation on the concept of love in Saint Augustine, her first major scholar piece; thus began a friendship that lasted to the end of their lives. From the latter she learned the foundations of existentialism, which were being further developed in his book Being and Time.

In interviews Arendt mentioned that existentialism (the basic idea of this current of thought is that the world must be confronted as it is; thus each individual gives it meaning after his or her own experience, in contrast with theories which asserted the immanent, pre-determined or relative-to-other-events meaning of the world) was the first shock in her life, in the sense that it changed her perspective on the public realm. The second shock was the Nazi experience. When Hitler took power she tried to leave Germany; she was arrested, escaped, and finally arrived in Paris. As the Nazi invasion progressed she finally moved to the US.

These two shocks had a clear effect on the kind of work she did during the rest of her life, and can be a reason for her refusing to be called a philosopher, preferring rather to be thought of as a political thinker. With strong theoretical foundations, many times making them implicit in her arguments, Arendt discussed polemical but concrete questions of her time. During the war she actively participated in debates on building a Jewish Army to fight against the Nazis, on whether or not the State of Israel should be constituted, on the consequences of being an expatriate, and also conducted one of the first attempts to understand how regimes such as Hitler’s and Stalin’s came into existence and how they had been able to maintain itself in power. In her book The Origins of Totalitarianism (published in the mid-1950s) she mentions anti-Semitism, an imperialist logic of state bureaucracies, and violence as the columns of this kind of political systems.

In the early 1960s Arendt went to Israel as a reporter of The New Yorker to cover the trial against Adolf Eichmann, largely considered a key figure in planning the holocaust. The chronic became the book Eichmann in Jerusalem, where she makes two points. First, that Eichmann was not the mastermind of mass murders, but just another bureaucrat with the head filled of Nazi clichés. Second, that an essential feature of the Nazi regime was making evil (as understood in the Western world) banal by making it legal to kill. For this reason many Nazi officials did not feel any guilt or remorse of their actions during the war, as they were just obeying the law.

Both of those works became controversial. Regarding The Origins of Totalitarianism critics later dismissed state violence as a distinctive feature of this kind of regimes, which reflected a tendency to overstress the importance of prosecution (against Jews or other dissidents) in these systems. In relation to Eichmann in Jerusalem, it was noticed that Arendt did not attend all the hearings of the trial and that relied too much on Eichmann’s own accounts of what happened, not consistently contrasting them with testimonials in that same or previous trials (such as Nuremberg’s).

Those two books, along with others written at that time (like On Violence, where she speaks of the civil rights movement, or On Revolution, about the establishment of modern political systems), reflected efforts to try to understand central events of the political developments of the 20^th century. However, this does not mean that the conclusions or observations are valid just for those episodes. In 1958 she published The Human Condition, where she elaborates a kind of review of her thoughts on politics. Somewhat close to the Greek classical tradition, her argument there and in other pieces (The Promise of Politics, Between the Past and the Future) concentrates on the idea that it is men, in plural, not man, that inhabit the world. Therefore, homogenizing ideas defended by totalitarian regimes go against the nature of men. In addition, politics goes beyond thought; given that a plurality of men live together, thinking and perceiving the world different from one another, it is necessary to reach into action in order to do things that can benefit the community. However, the only way in which action can bring about some benefit is by previous discussion and consensus, as this is the only way in which the diversity of the members of the community can be taken into account. Violence, then, represents an essential negation of politics and of a community of men, in plural. Otherwise said, retrieving its classical foundations, she provided a philosophical understanding, even justification, of democracy in a century in which it was constantly challenged. Almost forty years after Arendt passed away democracy is still severely challenged; her ideas could help in fighting back.