Marie Luise Knott
Hannah Arendt’s Power of Judgement

How can we confront the incomprehensible? How can we arrive at a new understanding of the world and politics after the collapse of all certainties? Hannah Arendt asked these questions with an intellectual radicalism that continues to fascinate us to this day. Our leading article on a thinker who still encourages us to think for ourselves.
 

By Marie Luise Knott

Whether it’s a lecture, interview or essay, anyone who engages with Hannah Arendt’s work is immediately struck by the freedom of her thought. Equally striking is the way this thinker, who neither belonged to a theoretical school nor sought or founded one, allowed her thinking to be so profoundly shaken by reality – that is, by what she heard, read and saw. She devoted herself to her own time, always striving to understand it and, as she once put it, to “get a little closer to the truth”. Today, as then, the power of her writing lies precisely in its capacity to disrupt conventional patterns of thought, both her own and those of her contemporaries, challenging certainties and continually urging us to think for ourselves.  Kant's "Selberdenken".

Vita

Born in Linden near Hanover in 1906, Hannah Arendt grew up in Königsberg, a city still influenced by the ideals of the Enlightenment: “The moral was self-evident,” she once remarked. Early on, she was drawn to Berlin, and later experienced the intellectual awakening of modernity in Marburg and Heidelberg by studying with Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers. As late as 1927, she described herself as “hopelessly assimilated”, but the rise of the National Socialists and growing antisemitism prompted her to question her own Jewish identity and engage with Zionism. In 1933, she fled to Paris, and was imprisoned following the German invasion in 1940. Thanks to American refugee aid, she and her second husband, Heinrich Blücher, managed to escape to New York that same year. There, she lived and worked until her death in 1975, a committed and provocative political theorist in constant dialogue with Plato, Mary McCarthy, Baruch Spinoza, Immanuel Kant, Franz Kafka, Karl Jaspers, William Shakespeare and Emily Dickinson.

Her entire body of work is driven by the question: How could one come to terms with what had happened in 1933, and above all, with what had occurred in the extermination camps after 1941? Confronted with the “utter senselessness” of the “manufacture of corpses”, which exposed the “collapse of established categories of political thought and traditional standards of judgement”, she saw the world under National Socialism as an empty space, inhabited only by individuals – survivors – whose discourse, she hoped, might one day provide a foundation for the world.

Her first major work, The Origins of Totalitarianism, which began with a historical analysis of antisemitism and imperialism, concentrated in its final part on the totalitarian power of ideology and terror and the system of extermination camps. Arendt argued that while one could never fully comprehend the concept of radical evil, totalitarian regimes – “in their effort to prove that everything is possible” [mm1] [MK2] – revealed that radical evil really did exist. After all, one knew them – the increasingly radicalised fanatics and sadists who had perverted the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” into “Thou shalt kill”.

Activa

The defence of freedom became the defining focus of her work. In Vita activa, or The Human Condition , Arendt opened the way for a new understanding of the freedom of political action. She wrote that while humans work out of necessity and create lasting objects through productive labour, they are more than labouring animals or craftsmen. They are more than mere instruments of natural or historical laws, more than mere agents of progress. This “more”, which finds expression in free, collective action, had to be reclaimed – especially given the growing dominance of a pragmatic mindset. Arendt repeatedly stressed the need for passions, which since the beginning of the modern era had lived a “shadowy existence”, to again become part of public life and action. It is therefore no surprise that her work speaks not only of the “pursuit of happiness” but also of the “worldlessness” of suffering. For the individual experience of suffering and pain all too often robs us of language and therefore separates us from our fellow human beings.

In her study on revolution, in her Eichmann report and in her political essays of the 1960s – such as On Violence or Truth and Lies in Politics – Arendt’s primary concern was always the defence of freedom. The encounter with Adolf Eichmann during the Jerusalem trial had been deeply disturbing. That someone could present himself as diligent and justify his leading role in mass murder by claiming he was merely “doing his duty” shook her to the core. Was evil indeed banal because it was thoughtless or presented itself as thoughtless and based on blind obedience? What did responsibility – a fundamental condition of freedom – mean? Could it be that National Socialism was in the process of changing the very essence of humanity? Could manipulation and fake news have subjugated members of a community to the control of a clique or single dictator so completely that words and actions dissolved into dutifulness and obedience?

Those who seek freedom and wish to form their own judgement must first free themselves from fear – fear of the present and the future, and fear of social pressures from their surroundings. Yet the question that Arendt’s encounter with Eichmann raised was this: Could there be people who have never known inner conviction, honour or human dignity? And if so, what implications did that have for the political sphere?

Revocation

For Arendt, as for so many others, the very foundations of reality had collapsed into an abyss under National Socialism, leading her to return time and again to the insights and transformative power of poetry. “Freer through recantation / the capacity rejoices”, she quoted from Rilke’s The Dove That Stayed Outside. This line was programmatic for her: the ability to speak and act presupposes the possibility of “revocation". In the interplay of speech and counter-speech, mankind in all its diversity creates the public realm and together builds a shared world. Through speech, we humanise reality, expand our ideas, perhaps even change them. In this way, the disturbing or new experiences we have can be articulated through language. Language then allows us to reach judgements, although we are fully aware that every judgement is provisional, arising from specific circumstances, contexts, conversations and contemporaneities. When Hannah Arendt died in December 1975, The New Yorker wrote: “Some days ago Hannah Arendt died, at the age of 69. We felt a tremor, as if some counterweight to all the world’s unreason and corruption had been removed.” And: “She revered the poets of the world, as though she did not know – was it possible she did not know? – that cerebration itself, when it was hers, became poetry.”

Since Arendt died, her work has detached from her person and began what she once called “it’s uncertain, always adventurous journey through time”. In the late 1980s, her writings inspired civil society movements not only in Eastern Europe and in South Africa. Even today, and likely well into the future, her voice will remain present – wherever people struggle for freedom, responsibility and the “venture of the public realm”.