Hannah Arendt
MacIntyre, Alasdair
HANNAH ARENDT: FOR LOVE OF THE WORLD Elisabeth Young-Bruehl Yale, $25, 563 pp. Alasdair Maclntyre Books: HANNAH ARENDT AS THINKER THAT Hannah Arendt was a remarkable person is not in doubt. The...
...She was thus professedly the enemy of a certain kind of general scientific and philosophical theorizing...
...It is one of the weaknesses of this biography that although a variety of laudatory and hostile opinions on Hannah Arendt's books are quoted, all too little is said about the contents of the books themselves and thus the opinions quoted hang in the air, for the most part insufficiently connected with that about which they are opinions...
...The judges did not believe him," she wrote of Eichmann, "because they were top good, and perhaps also too conscious of the very foundations of their profession, to admit that an 'average,"normal,' person, neither feebleminded nor indoctrinated nor cynical, could be perfectly incapable of telling right from wrong...
...and it was and is as a theorist that she has been acclaimed...
...is nothing more than to think what we are doing") and the kind of enquiry which she took to be characteristic of science and of at least some kinds of philosophy, where there is an attempt by means of logic and evidence to arrive at truth...
...Arendt's pretentious collage simply collapses into insignificance...
...I do not doubt that Eichmann's judges took a fairly simple view of these matters...
...and this type of enforced agreement endangers freedom and those human relationships such as friendship for which freedom is essential...
...Perhaps however the chief interest of Hannah Arendt's life arises not from the successes or failures of her arguments but rather from the largely unique role that she played in American intellectual life...
...There is more than one level at which this kind of contention needs to be put to the question...
...Margaret Canovan's stance is that of a critical, but sympathetic expositor...
...But what matters most is not perhaps the particular intellectual mistakes embodied in it, but the fact that what Hannah Arendt constructed was itself an unacknowledged general theory and one which interposed Towards the end of the summer of 1940 . . . the reading of Simenon's romans policiers was not just a diversion...
...the effective functioning of any system of justice requires a certain lack of subtlety...
...These latter kind of enquiries, so Hannah Arendt asserted, enforce agreement upon those who participate in them...
...The attitude toward logic that is at the heart of it is matched in its misunderstanding only by the erroneous view taken of natural science...
...Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's is that of an enthusiastic devotee...
...But the portrait which gradually emerges and which dominates the latter part of the book does not perhaps give quite the impression that the author intended...
...It is instructive, for example, to read side by side The Origins of Totalitarianism and the writings of a modern historian of Nazi Germany such as K. D. Bracher...
...But these failures in her principles of selection are outstripped by those due to the blindness to certain phenomena which her over-simple theory of the relation of knowing to doing produced...
...But Hannah Arendt's claims in the public world were made as a theorist...
...What Elisabeth Young-Bruehl has supplied is a biography full of material for the future sociologist of culture rather than for the historian of ideas...
...Hannah Arendt's published work is at its best deeply flawed...
...It could only have been sustained, if at all, by a cogent systematic analysis of the nature of moral deception and self-deception...
...Hannah Arendt drew a fundamental contrast between the activity of thinking which puts us in touch with the reality of ourselves and others ("What I propose...
...none of the friends who heeded her warning in October 1940 against complying with the French police order requiring all Jews to register with the nearest prefet was ungrateful to Simenonfor stimulating her distrust of police...
...For those seriously interested in Hannah Arendt as a thinker Margaret Canovan's excellent The Political Thought of Hannah Arendt (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974) will provide what is missing from Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's biography...
...The devotion has some admirable resuits...
...His insight into the structures and methods of the French police proved very helpful...
...For it is clear that we can collaborate in deceiving ourselves about what we are doing and that those who do so in a very profound way may well know precisely what they are doing and why it is wrong, even although they deny it to themselves as well as to others...
...But Hannah Arendt's contrary view was far more inadequate...
...The names of her friends are enough to settle the matter...
...Anyone who could engage the affections and loyalties of Randall Jarrell, Mary McCarthy and W. H. Auden perhaps deserves a biography on that count alone...
...The writing is vivid, the attention to detail meticulous, the ability to tell a good story well outstanding...
...The thinking which she commands in its place takes diversity of opinion among free people as inelimina-ble and yet by freeing us from preconceptions it puts us in touch with the nature of our own actions...
...Elisabeth Young-Bruehl Hannah Arendt itself systematically, so that far from confronting the facts themselves what she saw was all too often what her theory prescribed that she should see...
...This is the possibility that Hannah Arendt owed it to the readers of Eichmann in Jerusalem to investigate...
...Industry and insight have combined to produce accounts of the Jewish milieu of Hannah Arendt's Koenigsberg childhood, of the university circles in which she moved in the nineteen-twenties and of her life as an exile from the time she left Germany until her arrival in New York in 1941, which are remarkable contributions to the social history of Hannah Arendt's time...
...At the very beginning of this biography Elisabeth Young-Bruehl quotes from the reviews of The Origins of Totalitarianism: "it is a masterpiece," "she is comparable to Marx...
...Hannah Arendt seemed to give what they withheld...
...These were ludicrous judgments and it is an unkindness to remember them...
...So although she emphasized the importance of truthfulness about the particular concrete fact, it is often the irrelevant or marginal fact which her own theory selects for its central focus...
...She was indeed a self-indulged victim of the very form of thought which she ostensibly disowned...
...In a period of great and appalling events there was a large and intelligent public which hungered for understanding, and understanding which the professionalized academic theorists of politics and society did all too little to supply...
Vol. 109 • September 1982 • No. 15
