Intellectual Elitism

...The only thesis that I can find in these two volumes is that what ordinary people take for thinking and willing is not the real thing...

...In any case, her major theme, that evil is banal because, given the appropriate social conditions such as those of Nazi Germany, most conventionally decent people can be expected to do as Eich-mann did, was hardly any less objectionable...

...And this ego-the I am I-experiences differences in identity precisely when it is not related to the things that appear but only related to itself...

...During the last two decades she was something of a cult figure to a sizable sector of the intelligentsia...

...and, "The faculty of the Will was unknown to Greek antiquity and was discovered as a result of experiences about which we hear next to nothing before the first century of the Christin era...

...That the leisurely contemplations of the Greek philosophers, as John Dewey pointed out in The Quest for Certainty, were made possible by slave labor, and that their contempt for technological applications of scientific knowledge led to its ossification, she blithely disregarded...

...She practiced as well as she preached the solitude of the ivory tower...

...On Revolution, 1963, had a similarly elitist theme, but so vaguely conveyed that it aroused scant indignation in liberal quarters...

...When common opinion gets hold of the 'concepts,' that is, the manifestations of thinking in everyday speech, and begins to handle them as if they were the results of cognition, the end can only be a demonstration that no man is wise...

...Yet when, near the end of Origins, I found Arendt citing with approval Martin Luther's denunciation of logical reasoning and expressing the hope that "Loneliness may be transformed into solitude and logic into thought," I was reminded of the reactionary romanticism of Ortega y Gasset's Revolt of the Masses and Heidegger's contemptuous denunciations of the "inauthenticity" of the common man...

...She had committed the Hannah Arendt, who died in 1975, was a scholar of international renown...

...Her own comments are rather vague cliches, such as "The everyday common-sense world, which neither the scientist nor the philosopher ever eludes, knows error as well as illusion," and "Could it not be that appearances are not there for the sake of the life process but, on the contrary, that the life process is there for the sake of appearances...

...I am surrounded not by sense-objects but by images that are invisible to everybody else...

...I am not familiar with the rules governing the wordgames that she plays with these abstract ghosts...

...Mary McCarthy labored long and faithfully in editing the manuscript, and wrote the Preface and Postface repeated in both volumes...

...In order for us to think about somebody, he must be removed from our presence...

...When one withdraws from reality, one must live with the ghosts of one's imagination and memory...

...Reviewed by Raziel Abelson Professor of Philosophy...

...Still, little criticism was directed toward Hannah Arendt's panegyrics to the class structure of antiquity and disdain for modern democratic society until her pieces on the Eichmann trial appeared first in the New Yorker and subsequently in the book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, 1963...

...I recall wondering then if the author was not blaming totalitarianism on democracy...

...When, in the early '60s, she was criticized for suggesting that the Jewish victims of Hitler had supinely collaborated in their own extermination, a host of influential writers, led by Mary McCarthy and Dwight Macdonald, rose to her defense, insisting that her complaint about Jewish compliance was only a minor point in her book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, whose more general and important thesis was the "banality of evil...

...Too bad...

...Arendt envisions the mind as Aristotle's unmoved mover, eternally and unchangingly thinking about itself...

...so long as we are with him we do not think either of him or about him...

...withdrawal from the world is the only essential pre-condition...

...Just what she really meant was not clear, so it seemed only fair to assume she could not really have meant that...

...always tends to assert an 'I-myself against an indefinite 'they'-all the others that I, as an individual, am not...

...The French and Russian revolutions were compared unfavorably to the American Revolution, on the grounds that the former were dominated by the hedonistic poor rather than by the cultural elite: "The trouble was that the struggle to abolish poverty...

...She informs us that she improved the English, but that "no change has been made that in any way affects the thought...

...For abundance and endless consumption are the ideals of the poor...

...It seemed to me that Arendt's remarks about the Jewish councils were silly rather than malevolent, and that the main idea of the book, that evil is commonplace rather than remarkable, was even sillier...

...She looked back with nostalgia to the city states of ancient Greece and to the contemplative life praised by Plato and Aristotle...

...These difficulties and anxieties are caused by the Will insofar as it is a mental faculty, hence reflexive, recoiling upon itself...

...Nothing we see or hear can be expressed in words that equal what is given to the senses...

...A torrent of denunciations of the book appeared in magazines, followed by an avalanche of letters and articles in its defense...

...Often a remark starts out as an innocuous platitude and soon turns into a preposterous claim, as in the following passages: "For thinking then...

...She insisted that historians who had tried to explain the phenomenon as merely a particularly violent and tyrannical form of government, continuous with more conventional forms, had failed to understand its metaphysical nature and purpose: to destroy human individuality and transform citizens into automata...

...New York University traced the origins of the "absolute, radical evil" of totalitarianism, both German and Russian, to 19th-and early 20th-century racism, colonialism and imperialism...

...And also willing itself: "The individual, fashioned by The Will and aware that it could be different from what it is...

...We might have been spared such absurdities as "The only outward manifestation of the mind is absent-mindedness...

...It now occurs to me, in the light of her posthumous two-volume work, The Life of the Mind, that there was a consistent theme in all her writing that warrants serious inspection, a theme of intellectual elitism that understandably inspires admiration in some readers and antipathy in others...

...Origins was thoughtful, well informed, frequently perceptive (for example, in her acidulous portraits of Disraeli and T. E. Lawrence as precursors of totalitarian racism), and deserving of the acclaim it received...

...No effort is made to state clearly and to take a consistent position on the problems others have struggled with-the relation of mental to bodily states and to behavior, the possibility of mind-body interaction, the compatibility of purposive and causal explanation, the compatibility of determinism with moral responsibility, etc...

...This warning of metaphysical apocalypse seemed to many to do justice for the first time to the otherwise incomprehensible horrors of the preceding decades...

...Having withdrawn from the world in order to think, Arendt found nothing worth thinking about except her own thoughts about Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Descartes, Kant, and Nietzsche...

...Then the dam burst...

...It is hard to summon up any writer whose thinking has been more hermetically sealed off from reality than Hannah Arendt...

...Her extraordinary claim (which contrasts starkly with her contention in The Origins of Totalitarianism that no one properly appreciated the "absolute, truly radical evil" of totalitarianism) brought to its limit of absurdity the nostalgic classicism and contempt for modern culture that ran through her works...

...Arendt kind of tasteless folly that only a pedant remote from social reality can commit innocently...

...Thinking," she writes in Volume I, "withdraws radically and for its own sake from this world and its evidential nature...

...Her defenders' argument that her faux pas was only a minor point of the book merely made matters worse, for an issue of this kind can hardly be treated as unimportant...

...In this case, though, her major fault as a writer worked in her favor...

...I recall being impressed by most of the book, yet feeling some discomfort about passages that seemed to focus responsibility for the rise of totalitarianism on the wrong targets, such as Jewish separatism and its myth of chosenness, the materialism of bourgeois society and, most disturbing of all, the "breakdown of hierarchical class society...

...The theme of intellectual elitism kept reappearing in Arendt's works, however...

...If her minor point insulted the Jews, her major point insulted humanity...

...she had blamed the victims of Hitler for not having put up more of a fight, despite having had the good fortune herself to escape to America...

...after all, she was mainly denouncing totalitarianism, so she must be on the side of the angels, even if, perhaps because of her Germanic schooling, she talked rather disparagingly of the masses...

...The books consist almost entirely of quotations from and paraphrases of classical philosophers, so much so that they read like an examination paper in the history of philosophy...

...This extraordinary belief may explain why Arendt includes only a few perfunctory references to contemporary writers, despite the vast literature of the last half-century in psychology and philosophy of mind...

...How unobservant of the otherwise omniscient Greeks not to have noticed that they had wills...

...Arendt found herself at home with the philosophers and poets of antiquity, and with all sorts of "faculties," The Intellect, The Memory, The Will, The Mental Ego, The Willing Ego, the Nilling Ego, The Temporal Ego, The Sempiternal Ego and The Eternal Ego...

...While thinking I am not where I actually am...

...It is therefore not surprising that Arendt's final legacy, The Life of the Mind (Volume I: Thinking, Volume II: Willing), has as its main theme the very separation of thought from reality that characterized her entire career...

...At that time I was astonished by the amount of attention given to the book by both sides of the controversy...

...The Human Condition, 1958, a critique of Western culture's pattern of development, purported to find that modern civilization has reduced creative activity to mechanical labor...

...Hence, thinking is 'out of order' not merely because it stops all the other activities so necessary for the business of living and staying alive, but because it inverts all ordinary relationships: what is near and appears directly to our senses is now far away and what is distant is actually present...

...fell more and more under the sway of the poor themselves, and hence came under the guidance of the ideals born out of poverty, as distinguished from those principles which had inspired the foundation of freedom...

...On Violence, 1970, originally published in a supplement to the New York Review of Books and then in book form, was mainly devoted to criticism of student antiwar demonstrations and made only brief references to the violence of established governments, although it was allegedly written in commemoration of George Sorel's essay, Reflections on Violence...

...Americans, Arendt complained, have lost the spirit of their revolution and, "under the impact of a continual mass immigration from Europe," have become corrupted by the hedonism of the European masses...

...With a few exceptions, namely Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Arendt, the life of the mind presumably expired with the ancient Greeks...

...The upshot of over 500 pages of expositions de textes on thinking and willing is that real thinking thinks only about itself and that real willing wills only itself or its own extinction: "In brief [sic], the specifically human actualization of consciousness in the thinking dialogue between me and myself suggests that difference and otherness, which are such outstanding characteristics of the world of appearances as it is given to man for his habitat among a plurality of things, are the very conditions for the existence of man's mental ego as well, for this ego exists only in duality...

...The Stalinist purges, the Holocaust and the devastation wrought by World War II were fresh in people's minds...

...But then, I reasoned, these were only small slips...

...Heidegger is the only contemporary thinker who merits more than a briefly critical reference...

...Arendt's first book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951, brought her world recognition...