Arendt on Thinking and Evil

Thinking, Conscience and Acting in Times of Crises Paul Formosa Thinking, Conscience and Acting in Times of Crises Introduction If there is one lesson that Hannah Arendt drew from her encounter with Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem it was that the moral and political dangers of thoughtlessness had been grossly underestimated (Formosa, 2007a). However, the claim that thoughtlessness is a mass phenomenon is one that Arendt had already defended in The Human Condition. Indeed, the reason why Eichmann is, according to Arendt, so “terrifyingly normal” (EJ: 206), is precisely because he is primarily characterised by thoughtlessness, a trait he shares with his fellow “Animal Laborans”, the victorious “jobholders” of modern mass society (HC: 320-25; see also BPF: 4-13). Of course, the labelling of the ‘masses’ as thoughtless and inauthentic has been a persistent philosophical theme from Plato, through to Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger and beyond. What is novel about Arendt’s claim is her argument that there is a link between mass thoughtlessness and mass evil, the type of large-scale evil that can only be perpetrated with the support of the masses. Arendt, however, remains cautious about recommending thoughtfulness per se as a panacea to modern mass thoughtlessness. While she closes The Human Condition, a book about action, with a few hopeful words beckoning towards the promise of thoughtfulness, her advocacy of the importance of action also leads her to claim that “non-thinking … seems so recommendable a state for political and moral affairs”. While thoughtlessness clearly “has its perils”, (LMT 177) as the example of Eichmann illustrates, thoughtfulness has its own problems, as the example of Heidegger illustrates. In the course of her 1964 interview with Günter Gaus, Arendt recalls her distaste for “intellectual business” that arose from witnessing the widespread and “relatively voluntary” Gleichshaltung (co-ordination) of German “intellectuals” with the Nazis in 1933 (EU: 10). This was the year that Heidegger, Arendt’s former teacher and friend, “entered the Nazi Party in a very sensational way” (EU: 187). Arendt, in a 1946 review, even lists Heidegger as one of “those outstanding scholars [who] did their utmost to supply the Nazis with ideas and techniques” (EU: 201). But Heidegger is for Arendt also a paragon of thoughtfulness who exposes the “incomprehensible triviality” (or banality) of “the they” and their “mere talk” (MDT: ix; see also Pitkin, 1998: 49-60). This raises the following question: how can thoughtfulness, in the guise of Heidegger, and thoughtlessness, in the guise of Eichmann, both (though to a very different extent) lead to ‘co-ordination’ with the Nazis? What does this tell us about the relation between thinking and evil? Arendt begins her account of thinking in The Life of the Mind with an attempt to answer this question. She asks there (LMT: 5) whether the mere activity of - 1 - Thinking, Conscience and Acting in Times of Crises Paul Formosa thinking is “among the conditions that make men abstain from evil-doing or even actually ‘condition’ them against it?” For Arendt, there are moral benefits to be gained from simply learning how to think, above and beyond those gained from learning what to think (RJ: 101). However, conditioning implies only that, as a result of thinking, a person will be less likely, inclined or disposed to perpetrate or support evil. But how might the sheer activity of thinking do this and do all types of thinking have this same effect? In order to answer this question I shall examine Arendt’s distinction between critical and professional thinking, and her account of conscience, in order to argue how and why critical (but not professional) thinking can condition against evil. Drawing on this argument, I then proceed to critically investigate Arendt’s account of the masses, conscience, and action in times of crises. Critical Thinking For Arendt, thinking along with willing and judging are the three autonomous, spontaneous and independent faculties that comprise the life of the mind. The activity of thinking, as with all the activities of the mind, is hidden from the world and thereby involves a “deliberate withdrawal from appearances” (LMT: 75). The hidden and withdrawn nature of the mind inevitably puts it in constant “tension” with action, which can only occur in the world of appearances (RJ: 105). Arendt bases her account of thinking on Kant’s distinction between reason (Vernunft), “the urge to think and to understand”, and intellect (Verstand), “which desires and is capable of certain, verifiable knowledge” (RJ: 163). This distinction, according to Arendt, “coincides with two altogether different mental activities, thinking and knowing, and two altogether different concerns, meaning … and cognition [respectively]” (LMT: 14). This is not to say that there is no thinking involved in knowing, but only that in such cases thinking remains a mere reasoning tool or “handmaiden” for the intellect’s quest for knowledge (LMT: 61; see also Deutscher, 2007: 16). With this distinction Arendt sees Kant as liberating thinking by differentiating it from knowledge, and thereby opening up room for reason to think about issues that lay beyond what can be known, but which remain of “the greatest existential interest to man” (LMT: 15). However, when thinking goes beyond the limits of what can be known, by asking questions about the meaning of facts or stories, or by addressing ethical or political issues, it remains a never-ending or open-ended activity. Arendt accentuates this non-finality, this going around in circles (LMT: 124), by likening thinking to “Penelope’s web,” in that it “undoes every morning what it has finished the night before” (LMT: 88). It is here that Arendt, despite her close affinities with Kant, makes her decisive break with Kantian moral theory. The critique of pure reason by reason, for Arendt, goes around forever in circles, whereas for Kant, it shows us (among other things) - 2 - Thinking, Conscience and Acting in Times of Crises Paul Formosa that a rational belief in freedom and the accompanying moral law can withstand the destructive power of such a critique. Arendt thus uses a Kantian distinction from the First Critique, between thinking and knowing, to deny a Kantian position from the Second Critique, namely that thinking can practically ground universally valid moral and political norms, rather than only destructively undermine them (RJ: 159-189). Arendt claims that thinking and meaning remain forever unstable and non-definitive, whereas Kant claims that we can strike solid ground in practical matters through critical reflection and the recognition of the absolute value of humanity. In any case, how might stopping and thinking, in order to re-present thought- objects in the pursuit of meaning, condition against evil? Indeed, this thesis might seem to be a non-starter for the following reasons. If the thesis is correct, then we would expect that the more frequent and the deeper a person thinks, the greater the conditioning effect. But there does not seem to be any such effect. As we have seen, Heidegger’s deep and frequent thoughtfulness did not prevent his “error” or “lack of judgment” (as Bernstein (1996: 174) puts it) in regard to his support of the Nazis in 1933. If we find a wide spread willingness to support the racist agenda of the Nazi party among both the thoughtful intellectual elites, such as Heidegger, and the thoughtless many, such as Eichmann (Villa, 1999: 86), then this would seem to refute Arendt’s claims about the conditioning effects of thinking. However, Arendt’s position is more complex, as she makes an important distinction between ‘critical thinkers’, of whom Socrates and Kant in particular, but also the likes of Lessing and Jaspers, are Arendt’s exemplars, and ‘professional thinkers’ (Denker von Gewerbe) (LMT: 3), of whom Heidegger is an important exemplar. The professional thinker is not simply someone whose job it is to think, for both Heidegger and Jaspers earned a living from thinking. Rather the difference lies in the way or mode of thinking, as I shall make clear below. This distinction is important for Arendt because not all thinking, but only critical thinking, has a conditioning effect against evil, or so I shall argue. All thinking for Arendt is withdrawn and isolated, or similarly private and monological. But only “critical thinking, according to Kant and according to Socrates, exposes itself to ‘the test of free and open examination,’ and this means that the more people participate in it, the better” (KPP: 39). Critical thinking is ‘representative’ or ‘enlarged’ thinking, and this involves thinking through an issue from as many different standpoints as possible (BPF: 241). For Kant this leads to “pluralism” as a “way of thinking”, whereby other citizens are needed as a necessary “touchstone”, though not a replacement, for one’s own thinking (2006: 7:128-30). It is this need for a touchstone that leads Kant to claim that the “freedom to speak and to publish” and to make “public use of one’s reason” is the most important political freedom (KPP: 39). This is because without a space for the public use of reason, without “the - 3 - Thinking, Conscience and Acting in Times of Crises Paul Formosa test of free and open examination,” Arendt argues that “no thinking and no opinion- formation are possible” (KPP: 40). While Arendt somewhat overstates the case to say that no thinking and no opinion forming are possible for the thinker without a public space for the testing of their ideas, she is right to point out that critical thinking does require such a space or, more accurately, can’t survive too long (or at least flourish) without it. Kant makes a similar point: “Thus one can very well say that this external power which wrenches away people’s freedom publicly to communicate their thoughts also takes from them the freedom to think” (1996a: 8:144).

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