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12(2), 129158
Confronted with a vertiginous feeling of loss and futility before the facts of
totalitarianism, Arendt insists that something be learnt from the experience
as security against a repetition, that some good must be made to come of
it. An absolute evil had appeared, and on the basis of a knowledge of the
truly radical nature of evil the old safeguards of human dignity, having
been exposed as brittle abstractions, must be replaced by a new, concrete
political principle. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt expounds evil
as radical in order to argue for a fundamental review of existing
institutions, laws and bodies of thought. If she subsequently refuses to take
evil seriously, it is because the thesis of the radicality of evil is at odds with
the very political principle that she will propose as a reply to the experience
of totalitarianism.
Strictly speaking, Arendt never stops taking evil seriously. The banaliza-
tion of evil in her later works arguably even corresponds to an increasing
preoccupation with evil. Arendt refuses to take evil seriously so as to avoid
justifying it. The radical, in its insuperability and independence, calls for
accommodation. Only within a more encompassing, which is to say more
abstract, conception of the world can evil be acknowledged in any
radicality: the abstractness by means of which evil is acknowledged is at the
expense of a comprehension of humanity and its definitive concreteness.
Finitude, in terms of which both Heidegger and Arendt understand what it
is to be human, is misunderstood in order to make sense of evil. Lacking
the prefaces plea to make of the fact of the camps an occasion for a change
for the better, a passage from the body of The Origins of Totalitarianism
already defines evil as the unjustifiable:
reality and breaks down all standards we know. There is only one
thing that seems to be discernible: we may say that radical evil has
emerged in connection with a system in which all men have become
equally superfluous.2
Evil, for Arendt, can no longer be played off dialectically against the good,
since evil, as it has burst forth under totalitarianism, is the very
impossibility of human beings. Radical evil is the abolition of the fact of
existence. Murder, by contrast, is a limited evil: it wipes out an existence
but stops short of wiping out all recollection of the existence of the
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F RO M R A D I CA L TO BA NA L E V I L
The Life of the Mind will involve the attempt to provide a doctrine
insupport of the phrase the banality of evil.
In the second volume, Willing, Arendt discusses the deceptively similar
conception in medieval theology of evil as a mere privation. Expounding
the thought of Saint Thomas Aquinas, she writes:
Absolute or radical evil, for Proclus, for the author of the Corpus
Areopagiticum and the other Christian opponents of Manicheism as much
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I N T E R NAT I O NA L J O U R NA L O F P H I L O S O P H I CA L S T U D I E S
as for late Arendt, cannot exist because it cannot take root. By aligning
being with goodness, Aquinas is able to discount the possibility of radical
evil since in the absoluteness of its non-being, radical evil absolves itself
from any relation to what is: it is simply that which is not. Evil is abashed
by life, namely by that which Arendt calls the first principle of the thought
of Aquinas and which could be called, with still more right, the first
principle of her own thought. The triumph over evil is assured from the
start for Aquinas because the first principle of his thought is the life of the
God of monotheism. The banality of evil in the Christian world is its
powerlessness against the life that is the Whole. What Arendt understands
by the banality of evil is not the powerlessness of evil, since the life against
which it is drawn up in opposition is the life of finite human beings. Evil is
banal for Arendt not because it cannot destroy life; it is banal because it
can.
Late Arendt shares the Scholastic position on the non-existence, the
nothingness of radical evil for reasons that have little to do with
eschatology. Evil does not need to be radical in order to be irredeemable.
As Arendt makes clear in her correspondence with Jaspers, the terms on
which she approaches the problem of evil are not theological. After reading
the final chapter of The Origins of Totalitarianism, Jaspers questioned
Arendt: Hasnt Jahwe faded too far out of sight?9 In her reply of 4 March
1951, Arendt writes: All traditional religion as such, whether Jewish or
Christian, holds nothing whatsoever for me any more. [. . .] Evil has proved
to be more radical than expected. In objective terms, modern crimes are
not provided for in the Ten Commandments.10 Despite this unambiguous
declaration of her lack of interest in religion as a response to the radical
evil of totalitarianism, when Arendt advances a decade later the thesis of
the banality of evil, Jaspers exclaims: Now you have delivered the crucial
word against radical evil, against gnosis!11
Arendts target, however, was not gnosis but the anti-political glamour of
evil. In a posthumously published interview she outlines her ambition: To
destroy the legend of the greatness of evil, of the demonic force, to take
away from people the admiration they have for the great evildoers like
Richard III.12 For Arendt, Eichmann was the true representative of evil
because he embodied its banality. She is not open to Jaspers suggestion
that the banality characteristic of Eichmann is missing from a Goebbels or
a Hitler. Jaspers, who prior to the trial imagines an Eichmann giving vent
and publicity to a sham Shakespearian rhetoric of genocidal anti-Semitism,
meets with Arendts curt dismissal of the risks. Even if Eichmann had
possessed Goebbels oratorical gifts, any attempt to invest his appearances
in court with the satanic nimbus of the villains of tragedy would, in her
opinion, have simply been ludicrous. Arendts flippancy in the face of the
enormities of Nazism, so offensive to many of her readers, is both sincere
and strategic. She employs her considerable talents for derision to take
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apart evils mythical allure. In the 1945 text Organized Guilt and Universal
Responsibility, for example, she sardonically attributes to Hitlers sym-
pathizers in high society a romantic predilection for pirates.13 There was no
pact with the devil, only imprudence, unworldliness and conceit. In the
decades after the fall of National Socialism, evil, for Arendt, withers to a
banality, not because she finds her way to belief in an omnipotent Creator
but because evil is nothing in itself and must be seen, politically, as
nothing.
If Arendt sedulously strips evil of its radicality, which is to say its depth
and independence, it is in order to counteract a possible resurgence of the
magnetism that evil had exercised in pre-war Europe on what Arendt
sarcastically terms the elite. But where one Christian theologian after
another is able to bear witness to the nugatoriness of evil within the
spectacle of the cosmology of monotheism, Arendt does not have that
recourse. What, then, is her argument (as distinct from her political
motivation) for the claim that evil is nothing?
In order to see clearly the originality of Arendts argument, it is perhaps
best to compare it with that of Aquinas. The latter, in his Summa
Theologiae, Ia. 14, 10, writes:
That which evil possesses of its own is merely its vacuity and unreality. It
thus frustrates the understanding, as Arendt says to Scholem, because it is
not knowable through itself.
Evil is not, according to Aquinas, a principle of a nature independent of
the good (it is not radical). Evil is evil with reference to a good, and with
reference to the greatest Good it dissipates as evil and reveals, according to
Ia. 49, 3, its fitness within the Whole:
As for those who upheld there were two first principles, one good and
another evil, their mistake sprang from the same root as that of other
strange beliefs of the ancient philosophers, namely they did not
consider the universal cause of the whole of being, but only the
particular causes of particular effects. On this account when they
discovered that by the strength of its own nature one thing was
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damaging to another they reckoned that the nature of that thing was
evil; for example, that fires nature was bad for burning down some
poor mans home.
It is in its relations to particular beings that a thing can be judged evil; what
a thing is in itself, in its being and its relation to the Whole and the
goodness of the Whole, is necessarily good. The phenomenon of evil, for
Saint Thomas, is the corollary of a limited perspective.
Arendt does not venture this argument in defence of her claim of the
banality of evil. In The Life of the Mind she rejects it for the sake of
freedom:
to belong to those things about which the most learned and ingenious
men can know almost nothing.16
Arendt impugns the history of philosophy for its aversion to freedom. She
wishes to unsettle the nexus in which freedom has been shackled to evil and
then explained away through evils dissolution in the Whole. The history of
philosophy has always already turned away from evil because evil is
nothing. For Arendt too, evil is nothing, but she does not turn away from
it. Philosophy turns away from evil towards necessity. Arendt, who is more
pleased with freedom than with necessity, does not turn away from evil,
not because evil is necessary for freedom but because in its nothingness,
against which the vita contemplativa is invulnerable, evil poses a danger to
the political.
In The Origins of Totalitarianism Arendt does not yet speak of the
banality of evil, but she does speak of its nothingness. Evil, as it had
appeared with the concentration-camp system, threatens the unde-
termined infinity of forms of human living-together with the nothingness
of the extinction of human beings. It is this threat above all which
constitutes for Arendt the historical novelty of Auschwitz. Everyone had
become a candidate for extermination. The list of groups to be killed, or so
at least it seemed to Arendt, was open-ended. In the last months of the war,
plans were afoot for the elimination of any German citizen with a
hereditary illness. The evil of previous wars had always drawn back from
the desire to exterminate all participants and onlookers. The vita
contemplativa, mistaking its life for the life of the eternal, is no longer equal
to the task of confronting the nothingness, which is to say the dangerous
banality, of evil. For the history of philosophy, the nothingness of evil is still
meaningful as one moment of the indestructible life of the eternal. For
Arendt, on the other hand, evil is banal because setting itself against the
destructible lives of finite human beings it sets itself against that in which
the meaningful alone has its being. The fragility of human life has proven
the absurdity of dialectical manuvres against evil. Arendt takes seriously
the banality of evil in order to avoid accommodating it by endowing it with
a meaning. She does not dismiss it and lapse into silence, but nor does she
place it alongside the infinity of forms of human living-together. Evil is
banal because it is the incomprehensibility of sheer meaninglessness: the
term evil is without a referent. The meaningfulness of evil, as the
thinkability of the non-existence of human beings, is, in Kantian terms, a
transcendental illusion: it is an ineradicable concomitant of our powers of
abstraction. Every attempt to assign evil a meaning and an attempt is
always already made so long as human beings exist inevitably reaches
beyond the absolute banality of evil. In this regard Arendts treatment
recalls the remark with which Karl Kraus opens The Third Walpurgisnacht:
When it comes to Hitler, nothing occurs to me. The experience of
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Hegel dared what no one after Auschwitz would dare. To reconcile oneself
with the reality of extermination camps is not so much morally offensive as
impossible, since the reality that the concentration-camp system was wholly
intent on realizing was the non-reality of the human agent of reconciliation.
Hegels audacity, however, is directed not at evil in the first instance but at
Scholasticism. He puts himself in the place of the God of medieval
theology and thereby has done with the unsettling possibility that non-
being constitutes for finite human beings. Non-being is never even
considered as the problem of the unthinkability of unmediated non-being.
For Hegel, non-being is always already subject to the labour of the
concept. He is able to carry out philosophys perennial dream of saving
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The endsmeans category, to which all doing and all producing are
necessarily bound, always proves to be ruinous when applied to
acting. For doing, like producing, starts with the assumption that the
subject of the acts fully knows the end to be attained and the object
to be produced, so that the only problem is to find the proper means
to achieve these ends. Such an assumption in turn presupposes a
world in which there is only a single will, or which is so arranged that
all the active ego-subjects in it are sufficiently isolated from one
another so that there will be no mutual interference of their ends and
aims. With action the reverse is true: there is an infinitude of
intersecting and interfering intentions and purposes which, taken all
together in their complex immensity, represent the world into which
each man must cast his act, although in that world no end and no
intention has ever been achieved as it was originally intended.22
Kants distinction between the moral (the realm of freedom) and the
technical (the realm of means and ends) becomes for Arendt a distinction
between the political and the technical. Politics is Arendts ethics.
Insensitive to Arendts objections to the hegemony of the endsmeans
category, Margaret Canovan writes: It is not quite so obvious as she seems
to think that it would be better to have a country run by the sort of people
who run voluntary organizations than by careerist politicians.24 What is
meant here by better? Is a country, according to Arendts conception of
politics, something to be run at all? Judged by alien categories, action is
frequently seen to fail. Failure is not in itself an argument against action.
Relying on the historical studies of Anne Querrien, Deleuze and Guattari
look past the failures of Gothic architecture (the collapse of the cathedrals
at Orleans and Beauvais at the end of the twelfth century) to the collective
experimentation the minor science of the journeymen who built
them.25 Although it proceeds outside the sway of absolute forms, action is
not indeterminate: it generates its own determinacy. Action is existence
become a power of determination. It is without a banister, without what
Deleuze and Guattari call the templates of Royal science.
Action, for Arendt, is specifically political. Arendts conception of
politics is, from one angle, startlingly narrow (she excludes the private and
the social as well as phenomena such as totalitarianism), and, from another,
unusually broad. To act, since this involves dispensing with the categories
of teleology in favour of collective experimentation, is to be political.
Arendt privileges the Greek polis in her exposition of her concept of the
political because for certain periods at least in its history the polis did not
submit itself to rule. The polis is, for Arendt, an example rather than an
object of nostalgia, and as an example of isonomy it cannot convert into a
rule for other communities and ages. Arendts archaeology of the notion of
the political does not end in a call for a return to the Greeks. What attracts
Arendt to the Greeks is their greater understanding of the continuous
dislocation of human plurality. A community can never congeal into a
homogeneity because it is always being intruded upon by the newcomers
who take the place of the dead. It is only out of neglect for the character
of human plurality that something or someone is ever raised over and
against the community to make sense of it as a unity. On Revolution
accordingly denounces the absurdity of absolute monarchy, which had
placed an absolute, the person of the prince, into the body politic, an
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absolute for which the revolutions then erroneously and vainly tried to find
a substitute.26 The inventiveness of freedom is obscured by political
absolutes, which are self-contradictory because absolutes are irreconcil-
able with human plurality. In pulling a community into line, the absolute
erases the distance of the freedom of human plurality from the phenomena
appropriated by the so-called laws of nature. The absolute puts itself
forward as the unity of plurality when it lies precisely in the nature of
human plurality to be always already united; united not in the logical sense
of a point of indifference but in the mutual interweaving and contestation
of activities and identities.
We are free inasmuch as we are many. Even the freedom of the solitary
thinker is, for Arendt, the freedom of the plurality populating his or her
solitude. Solitude, because it is populous, is distinct from loneliness and its
inactivity and invisibility. The solitary is already a polis. For all her
fascination with the classical polis, Arendt is loth to abandon late
antiquitys deepening insight into the populousness of solitude. If the
following passage from On Revolution speaks of the visibility of the public
realm, it must be borne in mind that Arendts work as a whole constitutes
a redefinition of visibility:
The Greeks held that no one can be free except among his peers, that
therefore neither the tyrant nor the despot nor the master of a
household even though he was fully liberated and was not forced by
others was free. The point of Herodotuss equation of freedom with
no-rule was that the ruler himself was not free; by assuming the rule
over others, he had deprived himself of those peers in whose
company he could have been free. In other words, he had destroyed
the political space itself, with the result that there was no freedom
extant any longer, either for himself or for those over whom he ruled.
The reason for this insistence on the interconnection of freedom and
equality in Greek political thought was that freedom was understood
as being manifest in certain, by no means all, human activities, and
that these activities could appear and be real only when others saw
them, judged them, remembered them. The life of a free man needed
the presence of others. Freedom itself needed therefore a place where
people could come together the agora, the market-place, or the
polis, the political space proper.27
Ever since, there has been a striving for truth in the sense of the
correctness of the gaze and the correctness of its direction. Ever since,
what matters in all our fundamental orientations toward beings is the
achieving of a correct view of the ideas.35
Heidegger, like Arendt, does not equate visibility as such with correctness.
This equation has its historical starting point with Plato. But Heideggers
response to Platos preparation for the forgetting of the essence of truth is
to seek to approach the concealed. He is insusceptible to the humour of
icons. Even though he is convinced of the distorting effect of the light of
publicity (this is clearly enunciated in the analysis of the they in 27 of
Being and Time), Heidegger does not deploy it against Platonism. In
Heideggers Auseinandersetzung with metaphysics, in comparison with
Arendts, there is much more of the darkness of the Christian soul than the
mendacious light of the classical polis.
Platonism, in Arendts account, is the abolition of the openness of the
agora rather than the oblivion of the originary concealment of Being.
Platonism is hence anti-political because it endeavours to resolve the
undecidability of opinion and establish the rule of the true. Isonomy, as
the defining experiment of the Greeks, is to come to an abrupt end with
the inauguration of Platos philosopher-king. Plato is the enemy of
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The multitude, who had killed Socrates (but whose judgement Socrates had
nonetheless acknowledged), are to be relieved of the power to pass
judgement. That which Heidegger laments in Platos doctrine of Ideas
Arendt ascribes to Platos anger over the death of Socrates. Plato betrays
his own understanding of truth in order to achieve his anti-political end:
The ideas become measures only after the philosopher has left the bright
sky of ideas and returned to the dark cave of human existence.38 A little
later in What is Authority? Arendt expands:
For the original function of the ideas was not to rule or otherwise
determine the chaos of human affairs, but, in shining brightness, to
illuminate their darkness. As such, the ideas have nothing whatsoever
to do with politics, political experience, and the problem of action, but
pertain exclusively to philosophy, the experience of contemplation,
and the quest for the true being of things. It is precisely ruling,
measuring, subsuming, and regulating that are entirely alien to the
experiences underlying the doctrine of ideas in its original
conception.39
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The realm of human affairs does not submit to standards since its
difference from the realm of the laws of nature lies in its very resistance to
standards and yardsticks. Its freedom is the free play of opinion. Truth, as
Arendt continues, can merely embarrass itself by forcing its way into the
public realm:
Deception is not evil in Arendts sense. Evil is the closure of the space of
the decision between falsehood and truth. Evil does not deceive; it destroys
both the true and the false. Consummate evil, as projected by the Nazi
genocide, leaves no traces. Deception, on the other hand, as it presupposes
the ability to concede that things could be otherwise, stands in need of
existence and its freedom. Consummate evil has little in common with the
evil of Pericles Athenians, with which, by contrast, Arendt almost seems to
feel a certain sympathy. According to the funeral oration recounted by
Thucydides, the Athenians had left behind among their neighbours
monuments to their good as well as evil. This evil which is to be
remembered is not the evil of the oblivion into which Nazism sought to
disappear with its crimes. The Athenians left behind monuments to their
good and evil because what the classical polis desired above all was to
scintillate in the variety and complexity, in short, the isonomy, of its
appearances.
Arendt sides with the classical polis. She sides with opinion against truth,
but she does not base her decision on a mere opinion about truth. Truth, for
Arendt, at once presupposes the freedom of human plurality and conceals
it. In this respect, Arendts account resembles Heideggers archaeology of
the traditional understanding of truth in On the Essence of Truth.
Heidegger asserts:
Human Dasein in-sists, i.e. holds fast to what is offered by beings,43 and
ek-sists, i.e. is exposure to the disclosedness of beings as such.44 By always
already stepping beyond itself, beyond its unity and possible subsumption
under a concept, Dasein, which is essentially Being-with-one-another, loses
all measure and errs. Dasein has no telos by which it or its actions could be
properly judged. It is essentially errant, and it is only as such that it can
traverse the distance between a statement and its referent and thereby
constitute the condition for the understanding of truth as adaequatio rei et
intellectus. It is to Daseins errancy that Heidegger gives the name of
freedom. This errancy is prior to any failure to meet a given standard:
Humans err. Human beings do not merely stray into errancy. They
are always astray in errancy, because as ek-sistent they in-sist and so
already stand within errancy. The errancy through which human
beings stray is not something that, as it were, extends alongside them
like a ditch into which they occasionally stumble; rather, errancy
belongs to the inner constitution of the Da-sein into which historical
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human beings are admitted. Errancy is the free space for that turning
in which in-sistent ek-sistence adroitly forgets and mistakes itself
constantly anew.45
Human beings err inasmuch as they are free. Error rises up, for Heidegger,
against the derivative authority of truth as correctness, of templates and
banisters. Truth itself, because it involves a falling away from the
originarity of error, remains in error. Freedom is thus able to reclaim the
sphere of truth and the necessity of the laws of nature.
By contesting the hegemony of the endsmeans category on the basis of
the primacy of freedom, Arendt can look upon error far more dispassion-
ately than any teleologist, and even accommodate it. But her rupture with
teleology does not mean that she accommodates evil. Instead, she redefines
it: evil is that which cannot be accommodated because it is the destruction
of the fact of existence. Death destroys existence, but evil, which is the
aggravation of death, destroys the very fact of existence because it
extirpates all trace of the deceased and strips the survivors of the freedom,
in other circumstances identical with existence, to remember and recog-
nize. Evil is thus the consummation of the decline of the classical polis as
the historical site of freedom.
The end of the Greek polis, its retreat rather than its extinction, is the
triumph of the vita contemplativa in the birth of metaphysics and
Christianity. At first sight, Arendts interpretation of Heidegger as an
exponent of the vita contemplativa is puzzling, but it can be argued that
Arendt only seemingly misreads Heidegger. She understands his thought
so intimately that she can allow herself, on occasion, not to be taken in by
the letter of what he says. Such a hermeneutic practice would be
inadmissible if Arendt, on the basis of reflections on the problem of evil,
were not able to offer an assessment and critique of Heideggers central
question concerning Being.
In The Life of the Mind, remarking on Heideggers notion of errancy in
On the Essence of Truth, Arendt advances the following inaccurate
paraphrase:
But, just as, in Being and Time, this guilty self could salvage itself by
anticipating its death, so here the erring Dasein, while lingering a
while in the present realm of errancy, can, through the thinking
activity, join itself to what is absent. There is the difference, though,
that here the absent (Being in its enduring withdrawal) has no history
in the realm of errancy, and thinking and acting do not coincide. To
act is to err, to go astray.46
Heidegger, however, does not exclude thought from the errancy of human
beings. Indeed, for Heidegger we are not yet truly thinking precisely
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because philosophy has always shrunk back from error. Heidegger is not a
Platonist, and he is so emphatic on this point that Arendts interpretation
cannot help appearing wilfully obtuse. The expositions of Being-in-the-
world and the criticisms of the abstractness of the subject could not be any
less ambiguous in declaring Heideggers opposition to the theoretical
standpoint of the vita contemplativa.
For a moment, in The Human Condition, hence in a work that never
mentions his name, Arendt skirts the region in which Heidegger is
ostensibly at home:
Heidegger too thinks that praxis is the appearing of each one in his
ownmost individuality, his own way of excelling. Yet, because
excellence in his eyes resides in bios theoretikos given over to the
solitary contemplation of Being, he merely retains from the Aristote-
lian praxis what puts him on the way to speculative excellence.48
Very quickly and succinctly Heidegger throws the language of theory and
praxis out on its ear. Like Arendt, he denounces the situating of the truth
of action in the causing of an effect. This, as the But in his next sentence
indicates, is not what Heidegger means by the accomplishment of action.
What praxis accomplishes, when it is properly praxis, is not the abstraction
from itself that is its effect but rather Being. Thinking, when it is properly
thinking, is the act that produces Being. Neither theory nor praxis, as they
have been traditionally conceived, is what Heidegger understands by the
action of thought, because they are both too contemplative, too abstract
from the concreteness of Being itself. They are not productive in
Heideggers sense.
Production, for Heidegger, has clearly nothing to do with what Arendt
analyses as fabrication in The Human Condition (or with that which
Heidegger himself expounds later in the Letter on Humanism in a
discussion of Hegel and Marx). Dana Villa, in Arendt and Heidegger: The
Fate of the Political, grasps too soon at a difference between his two
subjects:
of human finitude, and yet he himself retains the dispassionate view of evil
proper only to the indestructible. Having pursued a critique of the
ontological tradition on the basis of a more originary understanding of
temporality obtained through his analysis of human finitude, Heidegger
endangers his own project through his equanimity regarding evil. On her
guard against the eternalist prejudices of the vita contemplativa, Arendt
experiences the utter and hence banal irreconcilability between the
existence of finite human beings and evil.
Even as he defends Schelling against Heideggers reading, Nancy
suggests that Schelling, and Heidegger similarly and with a far more
sinister historical corollary, has no genuine understanding of freedom.
Nancy asks:
against the extermination of his fellow human beings. What Arendt takes to
be the anti-metaphysical lesson of Auschwitz is lost on him. Non-being, as
it threatened to assert its hegemony in the extermination, is not simply one
of the many ways of Being. Non-being is unthinkable. For all the
vociferousness of his confrontation with Plato, Heidegger implicitly
subscribes to the founding thesis of metaphysics in Platos Parmenides:
non-being is. Arendts meditations on the pre-Socratic polis are properly
understood only if they are seen as a response to Auschwitz and not as a
flight into nostalgia and the Graecomania once endemic to German-
speaking intellectuals.
It is not an issue of a choice between fundamental ontology and ethics,
between Heideggers question of the categorial interconnections of the
ways of Being and Arendts political opposition to totalitarianism.
Unjustifiability threatens rather than extinguishes ontology. The question
of the categorial interconnections of the ways of Being is ill served by any
restoration or reinvention of theodicy. Through justification the unjustifi-
able is presumed to be understood when it can only ever be misunderstood.
The unintelligibility with which non-being withholds itself from the sway of
the proposed categorial interconnections is to be rendered intelligible as
unintelligible. This means that it is to be considered a block to any answer
to the question of the categorial interconnections, but not to the question
itself. The question of the categorial interconnections asks after unity and
in the name of the unjustifiable must work, perhaps even more vehemently,
against it. Dasein, as the meaning of the originary finitude of Being, as the
being-outside-of-itself of ecstatic temporality, must be grasped in the
impossibility of its unity. Ontology, if it is to be itself, must come asunder
and must never cease coming asunder against the unjustifiable.
Notes
1 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1967),
pp. xxxxxxi.
2 Ibid., p. 459.
3 Arendt, Letter of 24 July 1963 to Gershom Scholem, in The Jew as Pariah, ed.
Ron H. Feldman (New York: Grove Press, 1978), pp. 2501.
4 Richard J. Bernstein, Did Hannah Arendt Change her Mind? From Radical
Evil to the Banality of Evil, in Larry May and Jerome Kohn (eds) Hannah
Arendt: Twenty Years Later (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997), p. 142.
5 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, pp. 4423.
6 Arendt, On Violence (London: Penguin, 1970), p. 56.
7 Arendt, The Life of the Mind: Thinking (London: Secker & Warburg, 1978), p.
3.
8 Arendt, The Life of the Mind: Willing (London: Secker & Warburg, 1978), p.
118.
156
F RO M R A D I CA L TO BA NA L E V I L
9 Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers, Correspondence, ed. Lotte Kohler and Hans
Saner, trans. Robert and Rita Kimber (New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
1992), p. 165.
10 Ibid., p. 166.
11 Ibid., p. 525.
12 Roger Errera, Hannah Arendt: From an Interview, New York Review of Books,
26 October 1978, p. 18.
13 Arendt, Organized Guilt and Universal Responsibility, in Essays in Under-
standing: 193054, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company,
1994), p. 126.
14 Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, ed. and trans. Thomas Gilby and
others (Oxford: Blackfriars, 1964), Vol. 4, pp. 357.
15 Ibid., Vol. 8, pp. 1435.
16 Arendt, The Life of the Mind: Willing, pp. 334.
17 Arendt, Concern with Politics in Recent European Philosophical Thought, in
Essays in Understanding: 193054, p. 444.
18 Arendt, A Reply to Eric Voegelin, in Essays in Understanding: 193054, pp.
4018.
19 Cf. Kant, Lectures on the Philosophical Doctrine of Religion, trans. Allen W.
Wood in Allen W. Wood and George di Giovanni (eds) Religion and
Rational Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 411: In
paradise the human being here appears as a darling of nature, great in his
predispositions but crude in his cultivation. Thus he lives undisturbed, led by
his instincts, until finally he feels his humanity, and in order to prove his
freedom, he falls. Now he no longer is an animal, but he has become an
animal.
20 Arendt, The Life of the Mind: Willing, p. 217.
21 Arendt, Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1969), p.
179.
22 Arendt, Hermann Broch, in Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt, Brace
& World, 1968), pp. 1478.
23 Arendt, On Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), p. 274.
24 Margaret Canovan, The Political Thought of Hannah Arendt (London: J. M.
Dent, 1974), p. 124.
25 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Athlone, 1988), pp. 3645.
26 Arendt, On Revolution, p. 158.
27 Ibid., p. 31.
28 Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess (London: East & West Library,
1957), p. 177.
29 Arendt, The Life of the Mind: Thinking, p. 27.
30 Adolf Portmann, New Paths in Biology, trans. Arnold J. Pomerans (New York:
Harper & Row, 1964), p. 154.
31 Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson
(London: SCM Press, 1962), p. 447.
32 Arendt, What is Existential Philosophy?, trans. Robert and Rita Kimber in
Essays in Understanding: 193054, p. 180.
33 Arendt, The Life of the Mind: Willing, p. 187.
34 Heidegger, Platos Doctrine of Truth, trans. Thomas Sheehan in Pathmarks,
ed. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p.
171.
35 Ibid., p. 179.
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I N T E R NAT I O NA L J O U R NA L O F P H I L O S O P H I CA L S T U D I E S
36 See the political and historical exposition of Anaximanders cosmology in Jean-
Pierre Vernant, The New Image of the World, in The Origins of Greek Thought
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), pp. 11929.
37 Arendt, What is Authority?, in Between Past and Future (New York: Viking,
1968), pp. 1078.
38 Ibid., p. 109.
39 Ibid., pp. 11213.
40 Arendt, Truth and Politics, in Between Past and Future, pp. 2378.
41 Ibid., p. 246.
42 Heidegger, On the Essence of Truth, trans. John Sallis in Pathmarks, p. 151.
43 Ibid., p. 150.
44 Ibid., p. 145.
45 Ibid., p. 150.
46 Arendt, The Life of the Mind: Willing, pp. 1934.
47 Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1958), p.
55.
48 Jacques Taminiaux, The Thracian Maid and the Professional Thinker: Arendt and
Heidegger, ed. and trans. Michael Gendre (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997), p. 94.
49 Heidegger, Letter on Humanism , trans. Frank A. Capuzzi in Pathmarks, p.
239.
50 Dana Villa, Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of the Political (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1996), p. 170.
51 Heidegger, Metaphysik und Nihilismus, ed. Hans-Joachim Friedrich in the
Gesamtausgabe, Vol. 67 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1999), p. 108.
52 Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 22.
53 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Experience of Freedom, trans. Bridget McDonald
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 132.
54 Arendt, What is Existential Philosophy?, in Essays in Understanding: 193054,
p. 180.
55 Nancy, op. cit., pp. 1312.
158