Hannah Arendt

 I watched a movie titled, Hannah Arendt (made in 2012), which was a joint European, Israel production, and is classified as ‘biography’ on SBS (where I saw it). It’s a dramatised biography, though it contains archival footage of Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Israel. The story centres on her coverage of the trial for The New Yorker and the controversy that followed. But there are also flashbacks to a younger Hannah, when she was Martin Heidegger’s favourite student and subsequent lover.

It so happens, Philosophy Now (Issue 143, April/May 2021) also had a reasonably in-depth article on her (pp. 50-3) by Hilarius Bogbinder, a Danish born writer and translator, who studied politics and theology at Oxford and now lives in London (according to a footnote).  I re-read the article after seeing the film, and they cover much the same territory.

 

In the movie, she’s portrayed by Barbara Sukowa (who appears equally fluent in German and English) as a feisty woman, capable of holding her own with any intellectual or authority figure. Given she spent time in German occupied France helping Jews escape, before escaping to America herself, one could imagine that she would not be easily intimidated or bullied. Bogbinder describes the young Hannah:

 

Bright and precocious, Hannah [originally Johanna, but always called Hanna] was a bit of a handful. A chain-smoking, self-confident young woman, in the 1920s, she stood out from the mostly male crowd at the University of Marburg.

 

In the movie, she has a sharp mind and a sharper tongue if pushed into a corner, which happened more than once, by various forces, following her coverage of Eichmann’s trial: including Mossad, Princeton University department heads, a particularly vicious journalist from The New York Times, American Rabbis and a large proportion of the New York Jewish community. However, her students loved her.

 

According to Bogbinder, she said in a TV interview in 1964, “I am sorry, but I have to object. I don’t belong to the circle of philosophers. My profession, if you can call it that, is that of political theory.” Yet she was the first woman to teach philosophy at Princeton University. The impression one gets in the movie is that she cared very much about thinking and what I’d call ‘authentic thinking’. To me, philosophy is about argument going back to Socrates and Plato (she references that lineage at one critical point in the movie) as a bulwark against dogma and political ideology. I’ve never read any of her works, but apparently one of her most influential works was The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) where she wrote:

 

While people in all great revolutions fight for true representation, the mob will always shout for the ‘strong man’, the ‘great leader’. For the mob hates society from which it is excluded... Plebiscites, therefore, with which modern mob leaders have obtained such excellent results, are an old concept of politicians who rely upon the mob.

 

Amazingly prescient, if one looks at recent American politics. Bogbinder makes the following observation: “Yet it is not difficult to see how many of her acute observations transcend her times, and apply to the 2020s, when demagogues denounce ‘experts’ and the ‘elites’.” This is also particularly relevant to modern-day Australian politics (for the past decade at least).

 

In this context, one can see why she might have seen herself as a ‘political theorist’, as opposed to ‘belonging to a circle of philosophers’. In one dramatic scene (in the movie), in response to a jibe from a fellow professor in a classroom full of students, she says, ‘That’s not an argument; that’s character assassination’. Maybe the experience at Princeton, following her treatment by her colleagues, made her denounce philosophy as a discipline. She also severed intellectual links with Heidegger after he became a Nazi, which would have disillusioned her.

 

A.C. Grayling, in his ambitiously titled tome, The History of Philosophy, gives her one paragraph, where he says:

 

She is an exemplar of intellect that is both penetrating and courageous. Her chief concern was to argue for the importance of political engagement as a civic responsibility, in order to defeat totalitarianism.

 

According to Grayling, she forgave Heidegger after the war. I won’t try to get into her head on that issue, after all they were once intimate.

 

Even people who have never studied philosophy or who are only vaguely aware of the horrors of the holocaust, know the name of Hannah Arendt because of the term, ‘The Banality of Evil’, which was the subtitle of her book on Eichmann, a publication of the reportage she had submitted to The New Yorker in serial form. The movie provides context for this famous utterance, especially when archival footage shows us firsthand what Eichmann said in his defence. In effect, he was a bureaucrat who was following orders, and ‘obeying the law’ of his government. Hannah Arendt’s most damning indictment against Eichmann was that he didn’t think, in fact, refused to think. The point is that she refused to paint him as a demonic monster because he wasn’t: he was an ordinary person; in effect, a ‘non-person’.

 

But, not only was she accused of ‘defending Eichmann’, which is ridiculous, but of being a ‘self-hating Jewess’, because she reported that some Jewish leaders had been complicit in the transport of Jews. When questioned on this, she simply said that it came out in the trial, so she was obliged to report it. Many in the Jewish community never forgave her for this, and her works didn’t appear in Israel until 1999, when her report, Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), was finally published in that language.

 

Very early in the history of this blog, I wrote a post titled Evil, in response to a book written by TIME Magazine essayist, Lance Morrow. What struck me was that Morrow seemed to believe that evil required a specific personality type. I’ve never believed this. History, including recent history, is full of stories of ordinary people turning against their ‘neighbours’ based on an ingroup-outgroup dynamic. We think that people who commit atrocities in these circumstances are the exception, but the exception is the person who refuses, and in fact, saves people who have been demonised.

I think the one thing we can take from Hannah Arendt’s insight - remember she witnessed this firsthand, and was one of the ones who helped – is that evil happens when people do nothing.

 

There is relevance here to the current situation in Australia where we’ve had people in offshore detention for up to 8 years. This is inhumane, to say the least, and most of us do absolutely nothing.