In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, Camelia Raghinaru talks with Lenka Ucnik about her article “Conscience, Morality, Judgment: The Bond between Thinking and Political Action in Hannah Arendt,” from Telos 192 (Fall 2020). An excerpt of the article appears below. If your university has an online subscription to Telos, you can read the full article at the Telos Online website. For non-subscribers, learn how your university can begin a subscription to Telos at our library recommendation page. Purchase a print copy of Telos 192 in our online store.
Conscience, Morality, Judgment: The Bond between Thinking and Political Action in Hannah Arendt
Lenka Ucnik
Introduction
As is well documented, Hannah Arendt begins exploring the meaning of thinking and contemplative withdrawal after attending the Adolf Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. After witnessing the trial, Arendt notes that Eichmann possesses an “almost total inability ever to look at anything from the other fellow’s point of view.”[1] The meaning of this accusation is fairly self-evident, and it can be taken at face value. Eichmann never once, from all accounts, displayed the ability to put himself in the place of another, imagine the situation from a different perspective, or think critically about the time and place in which he found himself. Eichmann’s abstinence from any critical reflection results in Arendt referring to his actions in terms of, in her well-known phrase, the “banality of evil” because it seemed to require neither exceptional wickedness nor depravity, but only a profound thoughtlessness.[2] Arendt concludes that Eichmann committed the crimes he did because of his profound inability to think about and judge autonomously the particular situations of his time.
Confronted with the dilemma of thinking and moral judgment, Arendt finds her work on public space and the political actor insufficient for understanding how people think and judge. In refusing to see Eichmann as inherently evil, Arendt faces a complex philosophical problem concerning the very nature of moral judgment. The role of thinking and autonomous judgment preoccupy her inquiries and are highlighted by the question “why is it that during the unprecedented situation of Nazism some people are still able to say, ‘I cannot, this is wrong!’ even when everything around them suggests otherwise?” This question—about this ability to judge independently, even while at odds with the political and social views of the time—is a question that Arendt repeatedly asks throughout her later work. As Bethania Assy argues, the “banality of evil” comes to stand for a whole slew of problems and inquiries regarding morality and the ability to tell right from wrong.[3]
In the alignment of the moral and political subject, Arendt sees a possibility for change and is critical of the tendency to reduce all social and political problems according to predetermined ends and verifiable procedures. For Arendt, it is important to develop an approach that allows for an understanding of others’ opinions, to see the world from another’s perspective, and to judge particular circumstances without appeals to universal dictates. In questioning the relationship between self and truth, and in putting opinions to the public test of others, Arendt demonstrates that the world, as a common object of human understanding, reveals itself differently to each individual. By changing one’s comportment in the world in relation to the self and others, Arendt wants to change the nature of ethical and political thought. The ethico-political attitude that Arendt demands of us all is a process of continual, critical development with no origin and no end, but which nonetheless questions consistently and purposefully.
In this article I will look at Arendt’s interest in the contemplative life presented in her later work and address the relevance that it has on her earlier interest in political action. Although I will reference all three of Arendt’s faculties of the mind, I will primarily focus my discussion on thinking and demonstrate the importance of critical self-reflection in matters of ethics and politics. To support my argument I will first present a general overview of Arendt’s account of thinking and also provide a brief critique of the importance she places on conscience as a safeguard against evildoing. I will then demonstrate the value that thinking has in a person’s ability to make independent judgments and the role that this plays in ethical and political action. Finally, I will conclude by suggesting that the ability to think critically and independently is central to ideas of political resistance and transformation.
Vita Contemplativa: The Life of the Mind
Some commentators see a tension in Arendt’s post-Eichmann work in her shift from concerns with political action to contemplative withdrawal. My claim in this section is that such criticisms ignore the coherence between Arendt’s account of politics and action, on one hand, and her interest in the life of the mind, on the other. Key concerns with plurality, judgment, and words and deeds remain constant. However, I acknowledge that superficially there appears to be a shift in Arendt’s line of inquiry from the late 1960s onward. Arendt indeed is critical of the Western philosophical tradition’s denigration of the political realm in favor of the contemplative withdrawal of the professional thinker, and in works like The Human Condition she focuses on reinstating the process of meaning to the plurality of politics, the public realm, and political action. Yet her writings in the aftermath of the Eichmann trial appear to set to one side the importance of action and the public realm, in preference for the contemplative life that she appeared to have previously criticized, culminating in her final unfinished work, The Life of the Mind.
The main issue with Arendt’s shift is the supposed revelation of a misplaced classicism in her separation of the active and contemplative life. Those wanting to link theory and practice are frustrated by Arendt’s insistence that thinking and acting occupy two entirely different existential positions.[4] Action takes place in the public realm with others, whereas a necessary condition for thinking is withdrawal. It is true that Arendt repeatedly argues against the Western philosophical tradition’s denigration of a life of action in favor of the contemplative life of the professional thinker. Yet it does not necessarily follow that her solution must be a unification of theory and practice. Arendt’s concern is not to bring action and thinking together or elevate the active life over the contemplative. Arendt remains skeptical of any ideal put forward where the goal is a unity between thought and action, or theory and practice, because she sees it as reinforcing a traditional account of thinking and acting—by framing action as the means through which thinking (as reason) is realized. Instead, Arendt moves from instrumental means-end accounts of thought and demonstrates how the Western tradition’s focus on the relationship between theory and practice, the universal and the particular, obscures the basic experience of thinking, action, and judgment.[5]
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1. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1994), pp. 47–48.
2. Ronald Beiner, “Hannah Arendt on Judging,” in Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 97. As a note, I am not interested in arguments regarding Eichmann’s actions, particularly those that have arisen following the publication of his diaries. I am only discussing Eichmann as Arendt saw him at the time.
3. For a more detailed account, see Bethania Assy, Hannah Arendt: An Ethics of Personal Responsibility (Berlin: Peter Lang, 2008), pp. 11–24.
4. Julia Urabayen, “Hannah Arendt’s ‘Thinking without Bannisters,'” in Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the Public World, ed. Melvyn A. Hill (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1977), pp. 304–5.
5. Dana R. Villa, “Thinking and Judging,” in Politics, Philosophy, Terror: Essays on the Thought of Hannah Arendt (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1999), pp. 87–106.
