Arendt:

Recall…

Hannah Arendt

Born in Prussia (Germany), 1906

Middle class family: father an engineer, mother a musician

Family were Jewish, non-religous, but grandfather would take her to synagogue.

Admitted into graduate program in 1923, age 17

Earned Ph.D. in Philosophy

Dissertation on St. Augustine's concept of Love

Meanwhile, 1923 Beer Hall Putch. 2000 Nazis march in Munich, attempting to seize power.

16 Nazis killed, 4 police. Hitler imprisoned.

Because Arendt was Jewish and a woman, an academic career in Germany wasn't really possible.

Nevertheless, continues to work on Augustine, and the poet Rilke.

Hitler, in prison, writes Mein Kampf. Pardoned in 1924.

Nazi party reinstated in 1925.

Hitler granted German citizenship in 1932

With Nazi party gaining power, Arendt turns to activism around 1930.

1933, Hitler appointed Chancelor. Reichstag burned down.

“Enabling Act” gives Hitler essentially absolute power over the German state.

Arendt flees to Paris.

Befriends a circle of philosophers there, works with refugee organizations.

1940, German refugees in Paris ordered to report for internment.

Arendt walks and hitchhikes to Montauban, secures visa, flees to USA.

Living in New York, continues to work on political issues.

1945, Nazi Germany defeated.

Arendt writes The Origins of Totalitarianism, published 1951.

We're joining in after 400 pages of historical analysis of the rise to power of different totalitarian regimes, focusing on Stalinism and Nazism.

Arendt's observation

total terror is launched only after [all resistance] has been overcome and the regime no longer has anything to fear from the opposition. In this context it has been frequently remarked that in such a case the means have become the end, but this is after all only an admission, in paradoxical disguise, that the category ‘the end justifies the means’ no longer applies, that terror has lost its ‘purpose,’ that it is no longer the means to frighten people.”

Her conclusion:

The camps exist in order to prove that individual human life has no value—individuals are “superfluous”.

After draining the world of humanly recognizable meaning, the regime seeks to impose a kind of alternative value system, an “ideological supersense” to replace common sense.

It is chiefly for the sake of this supersense, for the sake of complete consistency, that it is necessary for totalitarianism to destroy every trace of what we commonly call human dignity.”

For respect for human dignity implies the recognition of my fellow-men or our fellow-nations as subjects, as builders of worlds or cobuilders of a common world. No ideology which aims at the explanation of all historical events of the past and at mapping out the course of all events of the future can bear the unpredictability which springs from the fact that men are creative”

The ideology, once imposed, is supposed to be absolutely immovable, a fixed point that all of your other thinking needs to bend itself around.

A Theory of Evil?

Arendt argues that there is a distinctive force here that totalitarianism makes possible.

… in their effort to prove that everything is possible, totalitarian regimes have discovered without knowing it that there are crimes which men can neither punish nor forgive… unforgivable absolute evil which could no longer be understood and explained by the evil motives of self-interest, greed, covetousness, resentment, lust for power, and cowardice; and which therefore anger could not revenge, love could not endure, friendship could not forgive.”

Arendt's First Theory of Evil

(Radical) evil is the result of a two-stage process:

1. The systematic denial of individual human dignity; and
2. The imposition of a totally inflexible ideology as a replacement.

Evaluation

Is this true?

Worry 1:

Seems surprising that “absolute” evil should be a 20th century innovation.

But maybe there's some mixture here of what we recognize?

Socratic elements:

Does not (precisely) involve doing what's wrong while knowing it is wrong.

Seems to require absolute evil to disguise itself as a kind of good.

Platonic elements:

Requires a kind of disruption of the normal functioning of the soul/mind/psyche.

Augustinian elements:

Cannot be understood in terms of ordinary motives

Although you're not choosing the wrong because it is wrong, it's close. You're choosing what's horrible because that is the most effective way to undermine human dignity.

Worry 2

Is this psychologically realisitic?

Digression: Arendt on the origin of Evil

Kant's question: how is what she describes possible for human beings?

Three ways of not being with others:

Solitude

Isolation (being unable to act with others)

Loneliness (separation from humanity, including oneself)

Loneliness goes along with the feeling of superfluousness.

only when the most elementary form of human creativity, which is the capacity to add something of one's own to the common world, is destroyed, isolation becomes altogether unbearable. This can happen in a world whose chief values are dictated by labor, that is where all human activities have been transformed into laboring. Under such conditions, only the sheer effort of labor which is the effort to keep alive is left and the relationship with the world as a human artifice is broken.”

the process into which totalitarianism drives and organizes the masses looks like a suicidal escape from this reality. The "ice-cold reasoning" and the "mighty tentacle" of dialectics which "seizes you as in a vise" appears like a last support in a world where nobody is reliable and nothing can be relied upon.”

And this made me think about...

The internet can be a lonely place.

2023

• Buffalo NY, man shoots 13, kills 10. Radicalized online.

2019

• El-Paso TX, Patrick Crusius shooots 46, kills 23. Radicalized online.
• Poway CA, John Earnest kills 3, injurs 1. Radicalized Online.

2018

• Robert Bowers, Cesar Soyac…

Worry 3

Does this, in a sense, minimize evil?

It makes (radical) evil very alien, very distant.

Almost comforting.

Is evil really so far away from us?