Spoiling One's Story

The Case of Hannah Arendt

De: Abigail L. Rosenthal

Narrado por: Matthew Cohn

Hannah Arendt’s posthumous influence continues to be enormous, even though her best-known claims have been refuted by new evidence.

Since her death, a youthful diary shows Arendt precociously aware of a choice between two possible futures. Either she would choose a natural future unfolding with harmonious openness, or else attain public influence by advancing unsupported claims. In fact, Arendt lived both futures successively. In early essays, she held ex-Nazis responsible for their war crimes, and depicted Martin Heidegger, her former teacher and lover, as a nihilist whose philosophy led directly to his Nazi commitment. Yet later, she portrayed Adolf Eichmann, the official who implemented the Holocaust, as a mindless, “banal" bureaucrat. And she later exonerated and celebrated Heidegger, even using his coinages in arguments that lifted responsibility from bad actors. Arendt left a paper trail of documents for us to decode.

The real story, of a talented woman - simultaneously sustaining a hidden love affair and maintaining the posture of a disinterested public intellectual - is also a story of moral upendings and reversals. It is the back story. It is time for thoughtful listeners to know it.

©2018 Wipf and Stock Publishers (P)2021 Wipf and Stock Publishers

Unedifying, typical of the genre

Save your time. Skip it.

Since discovering Arendt's work, I have been baffled by the rivers of ink spilled in obsession about what she said at a particular time or trial, and whether we can tease out the minutiae her personal relationship with Martin Heidegger. All this obsession seems, to me, to spring from two things. First is the basic inability to see brilliant people as also ordinary. As flawed, inconsistent, and pinned down by the same vicissitudes as everyone else. The only difference is the ability to articulate ideas. The second is that you have to read her "banality of evil" thesis in a particular way. Namely as some kind of excuse, rather than a damning and demeaning "You, man of evil, are nothing special. In fact, you're just a cog, and barely more than nothing at all". I don't know or care whether one of these readings is correct, because I don't think it's productive to spend time on ideas that haven't been clearly articulated enough to suggest a more probable reading.

As for the first, the only way to become obsessed with the missteps and flaws of the genius is to begin from a place of genius worship.

I have never worshiped or even recognized Arendt as an intellectual celebrity. I don't believe in the cult of genius. She's somebody whose books I've read. And I never saw her as superhuman, just exceptionally articulate. So I'm neither surprised nor disappointed that she had the same little vanities and deceptions as the rest of us. Having no pedestal to fall off of (or for me to push her off of after judging it righteous), she isn't that interesting to me as a topic of discussion as such.

Her ideas are.

The disappointment in Arendt, and the obsession with placing her life under a microscope come from the same kind of drive that sells tabloids. This essay is an intellectualized version of "Did Michael Jackson commit suicide?". I don't care whether Arendt's sex life can be reasonably implicated in her now famous "banality of evil" thesis. I care whether her thesis stands or falls on its merits.

I don't care whether, in regards to Heidegger, she deceived herself, was deceived, was cynical, was blinded by love, or any of the other proffered narratives.

The offense at labeling evil "banal" is certainly linked with the inability to see Hannah Arendt as, in her own many ways, also banal. And that inability leads to these wild safaris to hunt down fragments of notebooks and diaries, and treat them as sources of objective facts.