JUDGMENT AFTER ARENDT This page intentionally left blank Judgment After Arendt MAX DEUTSCHER Macquarie University, Australia © Max Deutscher 2007 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Max Deutscher has asserted his moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company Gower House Suite 420 Croft Road 101 Cherry Street Aldershot Burlington, VT 05401-4405 Hampshire GU11 3HR USA England Ashgate website: http://www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Deutscher, Max, 1937- Judgment after Arendt 1. Arendt, Hannah 2. Judgment (Ethics) I. Title 170 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Deutscher, Max, 1937- Judgment after Arendt / Max Deutscher. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-7546-5688-3 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Arendt, Hannah. Life of the mind. 2. Philosophy. 3. Thought and thinking. 4. Will. 5. Judgment. I. Title. B29.D428 2007 191--dc22 2006021580 ISBN 978-0-7546-5688-3 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire. Contents Acknowledgements vii Abbreviations viii Introduction ix PART I: APPEARANCES OF THOUGHT 1 Appearances 3 2 Thinking 19 3 Recall 29 PART II: THINKING WITH OTHERS 4 By Metaphor 43 5 Conversing 57 6 Absence 69 PART III: WILLING MYTHS 7 Being Willing 81 8 Resolving Will 93 9 Commandment 107 PART IV: JUDGMENT 10 Process and Judgment 125 11 Working Magic 137 12 Willing Thought 149 Bibliography 163 Index 167 This page intentionally left blank Acknowledgements I have written this book as a direct response to Arendt’s own work, referring only occasionally to other writers on Arendt, and then mostly to mark a point of difference from their approach. But what I have written has been made possible by the wealth of material on Arendt that has appeared recently – especially in the last two decades. I would like to mention in particular the work of Ronald Beiner, Richard Bernstein, Margaret Canovan, Agnes Heller, Jerome Kohn, Julia Kristeva, Andrea Nye, Jacques Taminiaux, Dana Villa and Elizabeth Young-Bruehl. I also should mention some challenging discussions with George Markus on Kant’s theory of judgment and its relation to Arendt’s ideas. Errors in interpreting Kant that have remained would be my own. I owe a great deal to the spirit of experimentation in new ideas and methods in philosophy that has marked the life of the Australian Association of Phenomenology and Social Philosophy. I made my first venture into writing about Arendt qua philosopher at the annual conference of that association in 1991, and thus met Agnes Heller and Ferenc Feher, the principal visiting speakers, who had been, of course, closely involved with Arendt and her work. They were encouraging and helpful in their advice and criticism. I was invited to speak (in 2002 and then again in 2003) at the annual conferences of the Association (then reconstituted as the Australian Association for Continental Philosophy). Those papers on philosophical themes in Arendt (‘In the Blink of an Eye’ and ‘Being Willing’) have become Chapters 3 and 7 in this work. I am grateful to the Association, and to those members of it who questioned me so thoroughly, and spoke encouragingly. Also, I developed the ideas on metaphor in describing mental activity that has become Chapter 4 while a visiting scholar in 2003 in the department of philosophy and the School of European Studies at the University of Queensland. I thank those departments for their scholarly and financial support. Phyllis Perlstone, Isabel Karpin, Zoë Karpin, David Ellison, Penelope Deutscher, Marguerite La Caze and Daniel Nicholls have given vital encouragement and critical advice about various chapters. Paul Crittenden read the penultimate draft in its entirety and I thank him for his probing questions and constructive suggestions. Macquarie University has generously supported my work, first in terms of study leave and then by expediting my early retirement, to take up writing full time. Abbreviations LM The Life of the Mind, Hannah Arendt: Book One, ‘Thinking’ LMW The Life of the Mind, Hannah Arendt: Book Two, ‘Willing’ Introduction Hannah Arendt describes thinking, willing and judging as within historical events and moral pressures. The meaning of thinking places in relief the sometimes destructive and sometimes beneficial ‘wind’ of thought (LM, 178). Arendt tells us of her ‘preoccupation with mental activities’ as arising most immediately from having attended the trial of Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961. She observed the way Eichmann spoke of what he did as an official taking a direct role in the state policy of total extermination of Jewish people in Germany and the countries under its control. He was responsible for the official murder of innumerable Jewish people – indiscriminately – and yet what Arendt was struck by was ‘a manifest shallowness in the doer that made it impossible to trace the uncontestable evil of his deeds to any deeper level of roots or motives.’ Arendt finds writing about thinking ‘awesome’ (LM, 3), and the title The Life of the Mind ‘presumptuous’ in its promise to reveal the nature of thought and the mind. She disclaims the position of ‘philosopher’ as ‘professional thinker’ but (like Simone de Beauvoir) only so as to be free to develop the kind of philosophy that she needed. Neither a ‘demonic Evil’ nor some ‘stupidity’ that might have explained his actions as due to incomprehension appeared in Eichmann when Arendt observed him at his trial. When confronted with his role in administering mass murder, Eichmann did not appear to have believed that he had committed any crime. He can ‘function under the Nazi regime’, Arendt observed, and he can even ‘function well enough within the Israeli court and prison procedures’, but ‘when confronted with situations for which such routine procedures did not exist’,1 he is ‘utterly helpless’ and his ‘cliché-ridden language’ is a ‘kind of macabre comedy’. It is the ‘absence of thinking’ – the absence of the preparedness to ‘stop and think’ which awakened Arendt’s interest in thinking. For all that, Arendt does not imagine that thinking will directly produce good deeds out of bad feelings and motives. Like Socrates in Plato’s Meno she doubts that ‘virtue can be taught’. ‘Moral habits and customs can be unlearned and forgotten … [at an] alarming speed [when] new circumstances demand a change in manners and patterns of behaviour’, as Arendt learned to her cost in her Germany of the 1930s. It was not some lack of moral education that Eichmann lacked – as if he had ‘not learned or had forgotten his lessons’ when he signed orders with the effect that the victims of Nazi prejudice be transported to be killed. She observed a negative quality that she described as ‘thought-lessness’,2 a lack that pervaded everything Eichmann 1 In particular, when he had to speak for himself – explain why he had been prepared to be involved in murder. 2 Her friend Mary McCarthy, editor of the manuscript for The Life of the Mind tried to tell her that ‘thoughtless’ was inadequate as an English idiom. I hyphenate the word, interrupting our over-familiarity with it, and to suggest something of the gravity of the superficiality that she wished to convey.