The German text of the taped police examination . . . , each page corrected by Eichmann, constitutes a veritable gold mine for a psychologist—provided he is wise enough to understand that the horrible can be not only ludicrous but outright funny.
HANNAH ARENDT, Eichmann in Jerusalem
Eichmann really figured, you know, “The Jews—the most liberal people in the world—they’ll give me a fair shake.” Fair? Certainly. “Rabbi” means lawyer. He’ll get the best trial in the world, Eichmann. Ha! They were shaving his leg while he was giving his appeal! That’s the last bit of insanity, man.
LENNY BRUCE, “The Jews”
By the end of the 1940s, after the Nuremburg Trials and the founding of Israel, discussions of the Nazi genocide, much less its mechanics, all but disappeared from public view. In the United States, the 1955 stage version of The Diary of Anne Frank, which won both multiple Tony Awards and the Pulitzer Prize, excised references to Anne’s Jewishness to the protest of no one and converted her story into a timeless and universal example of the triumph of the human spirit under trying conditions. Ending with the line “I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are really good at heart,” the play might reasonably have left the impression that it was about a girl trapped in an attic, not one gassed in Auschwitz. In France in the late 1950s, Elie Wiesel struggled to find a publisher for his memoir, Night; in 1960 he accepted a hundred-dollar advance from an American publisher, and his book was published in a first print run of three thousand copies, which took three years to sell out. Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man sold only 1,500 copies when it was first published in Italy in 1947. It was issued in both English and German translations in 1958 and had its biggest success in 1963, when it was published along with Levi’s second novel, The Truce. Though all three of these works now have been read by many millions of readers and have become a part of a canon of Holocaust literature, neither survivors nor the public at large were, to borrow a phrase from Hannah Arendt, willing to “face the reality” of the extermination camps in the early postwar era.1
By many accounts, the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem marks a turning point in the public acknowledgment of Jewish suffering under the Nazi regime. Eichmann’s trial did not alone cause but rather coincided with and accelerated the insertion of the Holocaust into the collective memory of the twentieth century. In addition to the unprecedented testimony of Auschwitz survivors during the trial, the word “Holocaust” was then coming into popular use; its historians, most notably Raul Hilberg with his The Destruction of the European Jews (1961), were publishing in noticeably greater numbers with the benefit of broader archival and ethnographic research; personal testimony about the Holocaust was losing its stigma, significantly as an effect of the trial itself; and a new generation, particularly in Israel, was stirring up controversy by asking difficult questions of survivors, who had been reluctant to discuss in public the atrocity that had defined their lives. Because we have grown so accustomed to the Holocaust as a fixture of the public imagination and because testimony to trauma per se became so prominent a feature of late twentieth-century culture, particularly in the United States, we may need to remind ourselves of the emotional intensity and intellectual uncertainty that attended these changes in public discourse. Along with the question of whether one should talk about the Holocaust in public came the even less clearly formulated question of how one should go about it.
Into this very sensitive moment came the often ironic and, for many, scandalously insensitive Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil by Hannah Arendt. The reputation of this esteemed political philosopher, a German Jew who had herself fled the Nazis, assured readers of the book’s seriousness; serialization in the New Yorker and publication by Viking Press shortly thereafter guaranteed exposure of the story to a wide audience. It is hard to imagine conditions under which a book would receive more notice, and indeed, it enjoyed extraordinarily broad coverage and criticism: scores of reviews, radio programs, interviews, mentions in gossip columns, extended essays, private book club discussions, public symposia, and hundreds of letters to the editors of the New York Times, the New Yorker, and newspapers and magazines around the world. No one, neither contemporary reviewers nor recent critics, discusses Hannah Arendt’s report on the trial of Adolf Eichmann without first touching on the intense and protracted controversy that it generated. In fact, as Dan Diner has argued, the controversy became as much a subject for commentators as the book itself, giving to the debates around Arendt’s work an iconic status apart from the report itself.2
There have been many attempts to understand precisely why Eichmann in Jerusalem was and for many remains so disturbing, but it has yet to be fully examined how Arendt’s treatment of suffering depended upon assumptions about the display of sympathy in relation to the Holocaust. While Eichmann in Jerusalem engendered a great deal of acclaim for Arendt, its reception was more profoundly marked by the bitterness, anger, hurt, and disappointment, primarily but not only among her Jewish readers. The outrage over the book arose largely around two questions: the first was Arendt’s sensitivity; the second, her factual accuracy. Scholars have scrutinized Arendt’s presentation of the facts and have deemed it a notable but less troubling issue than the initial accusations of pervasive error and distortion predicted.3 Instead, I want to concentrate on the problem of Arendt’s tone because the debates over her book suggest that among the many controversial ideas that she expounded, Eichmann in Jerusalem violated conventions of sympathy that, although still incoherent, were deeply felt. The book continued to irritate readers, because the late twentieth century was a period when psychic pain became one of the most prominent features of political and aesthetic discourse.
Her critics were much more inclined to interrogate her rhetoric than her supporters were, though the problem was often cast as one of personality or psychology. According to this argument, Arendt was simply herself unsympathetic, cold, even brutal; she hated herself for being a Jew and therefore accused the Jews of their own murder; she identified with the German persecutors. Her supporters, however, never presented a very satisfying case for the virtues of Arendt’s writing style.4 By only sometimes acknowledging the caustic comments or seeming harshness of tone, her defenders brushed aside her style’s potential to injure; by praising her cool impartiality, wry pleasure, and wit, they failed to recognize the possible insult in the very qualities they admired. Only in recent years have critics wondered at the rhetorical strategy of Eichmann in Jerusalem.5 Arendt was certainly aware of the terrible history of those who would find her arguments most urgent and certainly knew that to be deliberately, or even carelessly, tactless would have been cruel. It is not that I want to rescue Arendt from this charge so much as I want to restate the question in order to derive a meaningful philosophical and political answer from it. I prefer, that is, to pose this question to Arendt’s ideas rather than to her personality.
To restate the question: does the rhetoric of Eichmann in Jerusalem derive from Arendt’s political philosophy? And does this political philosophy presuppose a relationship to suffering? The issues that Eichmann addresses are central to Arendt’s work as a whole, though she does not explore them systematically; she was, after all, acting as a journalist, providing a report on a trial by telling a story. Too often Eichmann is taken out of the context of Arendt’s other work, but it would be a mistake to imagine that her recourse to irony was made without calculation. Arendt had reflected on how to think about extremity for more than a decade, and her views on it were typically idiosyncratic. In fact, published only a month before Eichmann in Jerusalem was On Revolution, which contains her most sustained discussion of sympathy and the politics of misery. The writing of On Revolution was temporarily interrupted by Arendt’s attendance at the trial and the manuscript was completed just before she began to work on her report. Naturally then, her ideas about emotion—specifically compassion, love, pity, and sympathy—and, as she put it, their “disastrous” effects on politics and public discourse would have been very much present to her as she arrived at her analysis of the Eichmann trial, and the Eichmann trial very much on her mind in the revising of On Revolution. In particular, the chapter “The Social Question” in On Revolution is noteworthy because she gestures toward it in her famous post-Eichmann exchange with Gershom Scholem, the scholar of Jewish mysticism who had been her longtime friend. Equally important, the last work of her life—the posthumously published The Life of the Mind—attempted to resolve the question that she declared her consuming topic after witnessing the display of what she called Eichmann’s thoughtlessness. Once we see Eichmann as posing a problem of thinking, however, it also becomes clear that this investigation did not begin after Eichmann but considerably earlier in Rahel Varnhagen and The Origins of Totalitarianism. What remained for Arendt to develop was a conception of thinking that would avoid the traps and delusions she dissected in those two earlier works.
Therefore, though they have taken their own paths in the reception of Arendt’s work, the questions of sympathy and thinking cannot be entirely separated, as Eichmann in Jerusalem demonstrates. In this work, we see the relationship between sympathy and thinking rendered incoherent when Arendt attempts what she calls “the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality—whatever it may be” in The Origins of Totalitarianism.6 “Facing up to reality” appears countless times in slightly different phrasing throughout Arendt’s entire body of writing in terms that recognize only occasionally how painful this might be. “Unpremeditated,” however, as opposed to another crucial word in Arendt’s lexicon, “spontaneous,” implies openness and defenselessness, a refusal to assemble in advance the tools or the categories to apprehend a set of facts that may defy both. Unpremeditated attention holds still, unarmed, whereas spontaneous attention might suggest an active entering into contact. This posture resembles to a remarkable degree the form of attention Simone Weil advocates with respect to affliction or tragic reality, as discussed in the previous chapter. Where Weil’s attention derives from a relationship between individual persons, which will be the foundation of a more just political world, Arendt’s defenselessness in the face of often brutal reality is more directly political; she will insist on facing painful reality as the price not only of sharing the world with others in their plurality but of having any world at all left to share.
Thinking and suffering, the motivation for sympathy, come together in Arendt’s figure of the pariah. Not only a figure for the Jew, the pariah is the thinker who refuses the myriad safeguards against reality and dares to share reality in its painful concreteness, as well as the thinker who insists on the shallowness of the things of this world at the considerable penalty of worldlessness, a fate Arendt holds in particular horror. The foundation of individual conscience and political common ground, Arendt’s notion of thinking seems to require suffering the painfulness of reality without consolation, compensation, or communion with others. Arendt’s employment of irony in Eichmann, I want to suggest, is less a product of her character (though no doubt it was enabled by her psychological makeup) than part of an implied philosophy of suffering, one that violated the assumptions and expectations of many postwar readers, both the “professional thinkers” and the nonprofessional alike.
Sorting through the reception of Eichmann in Jerusalem is a massive undertaking. Nevertheless, two sets of reviews and responses point in the general direction of the sympathy discussion and begin to suggest its contours. The first exchange, now the most widely read of any, consisted of letters written between Arendt and Scholem, which were initially published in Mitteilungsblatt in 1963, then translated for publication in Encounter, and finally collected in Arendt’s The Jew as Pariah in 1972.7 Though she was one of the rare individuals whom he had addressed with the informal Du in his correspondence (i.e., until her writing on Eichmann),8 Scholem was deeply wounded by Eichmann in Jerusalem and his response to it was fiercely critical. The second exchange, arguably the most influential in the US popular press in the 1960s, began with Michael Musmanno, Pennsylvania Supreme Court justice, Nuremberg prosecutor, and witness for the prosecution in the Eichmann trial, whose indignant review on the front page of the New York Times Book Review was followed little more than a month later by almost three pages of letters from readers (roughly 10 percent of the issue)9 and an exchange between author and reviewer.10 William Shawn, the New Yorker editor, also weighed in, defending Arendt in his magazine after corresponding at length with Musmanno.11 Both sets of exchanges take issue primarily with Arendt’s tone and her treatment of suffering, Scholem explicitly so and Musmanno less directly by offering a counterexample.
Scholem begins by suggesting that her work is “not free of error and distortion” but turns directly to the heart of the matter—her tone—especially with regard to the role of the Jews in the catastrophe. “At each decisive juncture . . . your book speaks only of the weakness of the Jewish stance in the world. I am ready enough to admit that weakness; but you put such emphasis upon it that, in my view, your account ceases to be objective and acquires overtones of malice.”12 The depth of Scholem’s anger becomes evident in his conclusion: “Insofar as I have an answer, it is one which, precisely out of my deep respect for you, I dare not suppress; and it is an answer that goes to the root of our disagreement. It is that heartless, frequently almost sneering and malicious tone with which these matters, touching the very quick of our life, are treated in your book to which I take exception” (JP, 241). Accusing Arendt of “heartlessness,” especially given the evidence of personal friendship in the letters (they address one another by first name and exhibit a somewhat strained and formal intimacy), might appear to the reader as a severe but perhaps merely ad hominem attack. His insistence on heart, however, can be seen as a protocol-in-the-making for the treatment of the Holocaust, a “way to approach the scene of that tragedy.” Scholem has in mind two specific definitions of “heartlessness”: for one he uses the Hebrew Ahabath Israel, “the love of the Jewish people,” and for the other, the German Herzenstakt, the “tact of the heart.”13 Taken in tandem, these two definitions of heart compose a relationship to sufferers and suffering that is both general (it extends to the Jews as a people) and generalizable (it is decorum motivated by sympathy for anyone else’s pain). He concludes that to discuss “the suffering of our people and the ‘questionable figures who deserve, or have received their just punishment’” “in so wholly inappropriate a tone—to the benefit of those Germans in condemning whom your book rises to greater eloquence than in mourning the fate of your own people—this is not the way to approach the scene of that tragedy” (JP, 242). Scholem is instructing Arendt in the emotions her writing should have conveyed—her love of the Jews and her sympathy for the Jews as suffering creatures—and the place that sympathy should take in relation to other possibly competing moral priorities, like the condemnation of the German perpetrators. By this argument, Scholem would also be offended by something like dispassion or neutrality, though not perhaps as outraged as he is by what he perceives as Arendt’s malice.
Arendt responds by decisively embracing the first form of heartlessness as Scholem defines it. While she claims that she had never denied her own Jewishness, she asserts in a much-quoted passage that she does not have a “love of the Jewish people.” She answers: “You are quite right—I am not moved by any ‘love’ of this sort, and for two reasons: I have never in my life ‘loved’ any people or collective—neither the German people, nor the French, nor the American, nor the working class or anything of that sort. I indeed love ‘only’ my friends and the only kind of love I know of and believe in is the love of persons” (JP, 246).14 She concludes, “I do not ‘love’ the Jews, nor do I ‘believe’ in them; I merely belong to them as a matter of course, beyond dispute or argument” (JP, 247). She then dismisses “the tact of the heart” as politically dubious and intellectually fraudulent: “Generally speaking, the role of the ‘heart’ in politics seems to me altogether questionable. You know as well as I how often those who merely report certain unpleasant facts are accused of lack of soul, lack of heart, or lack of what you call Herzenstakt. We both know, in other words, how often these emotions are used in order to conceal factual truth” (JP, 247). At issue in heartlessness for Arendt is the devotion to the concrete, whether person or fact, which stands in for reality as such. Because it embraces a category, the love of a people can only be an idea and a willed emotional relationship to that idea, and so not an emotion at all;15 the love of a person, like all concrete matters, derives from particular qualities that are apprehended through contact. Emotional tact, she seems to suggest, submits reality to the jurisdiction of feeling because it requires one to attend first to the imagined feelings of a listener and only second to the reality at hand, forfeiting the latter in service to the former. Heartlessness would therefore be a necessary component of Arendt’s most fundamental charge to her readers: face reality.
Like Scholem, for whom suffering must remain in the foreground out of an ethics of attention, Musmanno obligates Arendt to attend to suffering because its sheer enormity makes it impossible to ignore. While Musmanno never makes broad claims about Arendt’s tone with respect to the suffering of the victims, his own rhetoric is an implicit rebuke to her lack of sympathy because it supplies the emotion he evidently did not find in her account.16 For example, at one moment he speculates: “If, in recalling the period, one could shut one’s eyes to the scenes of brutal massacre and stop one’s ears to the screams of horror-stricken women and terrorized children as they saw the tornado of death sweeping toward them, one could almost assume that in some parts of the book the author is being whimsical.”17 Musmanno’s rhetoric dramatizes the engulfment in misery that Arendt finds “disastrous” in On Revolution. So overwhelming is the horror, recollection literally reproduces suffering and compels even the witness to participate in it: scenes and sounds become so real that only by becoming insensate (shutting eyes, stopping ears) can one avoid confronting them. Nevertheless, his sentimental invocation of “women and children” in his censure of Arendt’s whimsy suggests some mistrust of the fact of suffering, some fear that the “tornado of death” will be insufficiently horrifying on its own. His apparent need to amplify the suffering that, in his own terms, is beyond intensification refers us not to the victims’ distress but to his own at witnessing the scene. Moreover, it suggests that there is an inherent problem of scale in matching the witnesses’ emotional response to the sufferers’ terror or grief. Musmanno seems to think that ethically he—and Arendt—need to suffer too, but of course, his own suffering pales in comparison, and so the rhetoric of his response looks melodramatic and inauthentic. The problem with the available conventions of sympathy—the attempt to stand with and to share the feelings of the victim—is that with a disaster of such unprecedented magnitude, such conventions can only fail.
Arendt’s refusal of the obligation to attend to suffering rests precisely on its power to blind and deafen and to shift emphasis from an event to feelings about the event. The suffering of the Jews, Arendt argued in Eichmann in Jerusalem, had no place in the trial because it was not in dispute; rather, Eichmann’s responsibility for it was. But in On Revolution, Arendt banishes suffering from the public realm in more general terms, not because one can be indifferent to it, but because one cannot. Precisely for this reason, On Revolution is an extended defense of coldness and heartlessness. Drawing her metaphors almost always from bodies of water, Arendt repeatedly describes suffering and the emotion it stimulates as “boundless.” As she says of Robespierre’s sympathy for the destitute masses of Paris, “He lost the capacity to establish and hold fast to rapports with persons in their singularity; the ocean of suffering around him and the turbulent sea of emotion within him, the latter geared to receive and respond to the former, drown all specific considerations, the considerations of friendship no less than considerations of statecraft and principle.”18 In the context of this loss of boundaries, Arendt’s heartlessness refuses the generalizing tendency upon which Scholem’s definition rests and which Musmanno’s review attempts to demonstrate. Moreover, the ocean of sympathy pulls into the public realm the necessities of life, which are the most immediate and urgent concerns there are: the reproduction and maintenance of life. “Where the breakdown of traditional authority set the poor of the earth on the march, where they left the obscurity of their misfortunes and streamed upon the market-place, their furor seemed as irresistible as the motion of the stars, a torrent rushing forward with elemental force and engulfing the whole world” (OR, 113). Once having entered the public sphere, necessity and the rage that accompanies its frustration will swamp all other concerns, just as suffering in Musmanno’s description threatens to do. Because misery is as irresistible as a force of nature, because it is impossible to look beyond it once it has shown itself, it must not be revealed in public.
In the writing of her own account, Arendt sought to hold back the tide of suffering that she felt threatened to overwhelm the trial. Her most characteristic rhetorical technique, especially in her report of Eichmann’s testimony, is abrupt understatement. For instance, when Eichmann defended himself from the charge of “base motives” by arguing he “remembered perfectly well that he would have had a bad conscience only if he had not done what he had been ordered to do—to ship millions of men, women, and children to their death with great zeal and the most meticulous care,” Arendt concedes that “this, admittedly, was hard to take” and moves on with her analysis.19 By explicitly naming Eichmann’s duties, which certainly he did not, Arendt pauses to make his crime concrete and visible, but in tersely confessing the pain his defense inflicts, she hurries past the emotional reaction while also minimizing it. When she retells Eichmann’s anecdote of his “normal human encounter” in Auschwitz with a man named Storfer, one of the representatives of the Jewish community with whom he had worked for years, she concludes: “Six weeks after this normal human encounter, Storfer was dead—not gassed, apparently, but shot” (EJ, 51). It is not that Arendt denies this story its horror, but rather that she attempts to suggest its horror by not dwelling on it, instead letting the rhythm of her prose convey the weight of the evidence. This lengthy story told in complex, concatenated sentences ends here almost literally with a bang.
Arendt’s chapter “Evidence and Witnesses,” about fourteen pages (as long as most other chapters), spends only about half of those pages on survivor testimony, though such testimony, she notes, occupied twice as much court time as Eichmann’s own. And yet, she is not able to resist completely the power of the victims’ stories, and she has her own criteria for their proper appearance in public. Of the several she recounts, mostly critically (for irrelevance, propaganda, self-aggrandizement), Zindel Grynszpan’s20 testimony of his expulsion from Germany to Poland produces an uncharacteristic moment of engagement:21 “This story took no more than perhaps ten minutes to tell, and when it was over—the senseless, needless destruction of twenty-seven years in less than twenty-four hours—one thought foolishly: Everyone, everyone should have his day in court. Only to find out, in the endless sessions that followed, how difficult it was to tell that story, that—at least outside the transforming realm of poetry—it needed a purity of soul, an unmirrored, unreflected innocence of heart and mind that only the righteous possess” (EJ, 229). Everything in these two sentences, even the self-mocking “foolishly,” refuses momentum. Arendt’s awkwardly placed dashes interrupt the flow of the first sentence and return us to the story she has just recounted. Her references to time intervals between the dashes—twenty-seven years, twenty-four hours—belie the brevity of the ten minutes the witness spent on the stand. Moreover, the two repetitions—the repetition “senseless, needless” and the doubling of “everyone, everyone”—not only halt the progress of the sentence but also mark perhaps the only eruption of sympathy in the prose of Eichmann in Jerusalem. This passage is noteworthy, not only for its rarity, but for its style. If one eliminated these repetitions, the line would be voided of affect, transformed into a statement rather than an expression of anguish. (Edited, the sentence would read: The story took no more than ten minutes to tell, and when it was over one thought: everyone should have his day in court.) Sympathy is conveyed in the micropauses of the dashes and commas, which produce a hitch between the repeated words. There is a momentary refusal to move on or pass over, a dwelling on suffering and a sharing of emotion if only for the space of a breath.
Nonetheless, Arendt takes back the sympathetic identification (though not the hitching syntax) immediately in the next sentence with her depiction of the tedium (the “endless sessions”) of survivor testimony when it is neither aesthetically satisfying nor pure of heart, by which she means un-[self]-reflecting (unconscious of one’s effect on others). Indeed, what most impresses Arendt about Zindel Grynszpan’s testimony is its refusal of emotional rhetoric: “He spoke clearly and firmly, without embroidery, using a minimum of words” (EJ, 228). It is his economy, even more than his “shining honesty” (EJ, 230), that tempts Arendt to abandon her strict refusal of sympathetic witnessing, if only momentarily and “foolishly.” Combining the purity of heart with an aesthetic of the concrete, Grynszpan allows the facts to speak for themselves; it is as if he disappears behind or into them, which allows the listener to confront, not the emotion produced by suffering, but the reality of suffering itself. The boundlessness of emotion in the sufferer and the witness is contained by an implied agreement not to share it, either the pain of suffering or the sympathy of witnessing.22 Arendt clearly does have in mind an aesthetic for sharing the reality that produced the suffering (but not the suffering itself): concrete, rhetorically minimalist, matter-of-fact (neutral, not affectless), and unself-conscious. As she argues in On Revolution, the exposure of the heart carries its own dangers:
Whatever the passions and emotions may be, and whatever their true connection with thought and reason, they certainly are located in the human heart. And not only is the human heart a place of darkness which, with certainty, no human eye can penetrate; the qualities of the heart need darkness and protection against the light of the public to grow and to remain what they are meant to be, innermost motives which are not for public display. However deeply heartfelt a motive may be, once it is brought out and exposed for public inspection it becomes an object of suspicion rather than insight; when the light of the public falls upon it, it appears and even shines, but, unlike deeds and words which are meant to appear, whose very existence hinges on appearance, the motives behind such deeds and words are destroyed in their essence through appearance; when they appear they become “mere appearances” behind which again other, ulterior motives may lurk, such as hypocrisy and deceit. (OR, 96)
In this “place of darkness,” a phrase that colors emotion more ominously, Arendt tightens the clamp on emotion one more time, suggesting both the necessarily unreliable nature of testimony to emotion or motivation and the necessarily corrupting effect of its appearance in public. Zindel Grynszpan’s righteousness was preserved in public because he did not seem to be aware that he was making it appear.
With Jewish suffering in the Holocaust making its appearance in public in the early 1960s, Arendt’s defense of heartlessness in On Revolution looks both defensive and prescient. I think it is worth speculating that in addition to developing her analysis of totalitarianism in On Revolution, this time with respect to the political Left, Arendt might have been moved to ponder the vicissitudes of compassion for the very reason that the extreme suffering of the camps was beginning to be explored in public, particularly in the Eichmann trial.23 Her admonition, “History tells us that it is by no means a matter of course for the spectacle of misery to move men to pity” (OR, 70), suggests also some concern that miseries are asymmetrically compelling. The American revolutionary leaders were not moved by the spectacle of black misery in the institution of slavery, seeing nothing of the possibilities of solidarity in suffering that the French revolutionaries did with the sans-culottes of Paris. So the possibility that misery does not provide a direct line to compassion, that it can indeed be overlooked no matter how visible it is, sits adjacent to its overwhelming power to sustain interest and obliterate all other considerations of justice and reality. For these combinations of reasons—the capacity to be either mesmerized by suffering or indifferent to it, the willed obscuring of facts by emotional tact, the corruption of motivation in the witness/reporter—Arendt pushes both the heart and suffering out of the light of public display. She could not have been more out of step with the times.
If Arendt’s sympathy (or lack thereof) for the Jews constituted one pole of the debate over her heartlessness, the other would be that she extended whatever sympathy she had to Eichmann himself. In her portrayal of Eichmann, Arendt’s irony came into play, and it is this feature of her work as much as any that contributed to the confusion as to where her sympathies lay. William Shawn, for instance, attributes Musmanno’s misreading of her sympathy to his misunderstanding of her irony: “He accused Miss Arendt of an excess of sympathy for Eichmann (her condemnation of the Nazi leaders was far more withering than any that had been made before) and of a lack of sympathy for the Jews (her sorrow over their suffering was far more eloquent than the Justice’s own). He ignored all Miss Arendt’s ironies (referring to her ‘Alas, nobody believed him,’ unmistakably ironic in context, as a ‘lament’ for Eichmann).”24 Shawn is clearly correct in this case: this “alas” was meant not for Eichmann but for the court—prosecutors, counsel for the defense, and the judges—who “missed the greatest moral and even legal challenge of the whole case,” which was that “an average, ‘normal’ person, neither feeble-minded nor indoctrinated nor cynical, could be perfectly incapable of telling right from wrong” (EJ, 26). Another example shows a greater degree of subtlety on Arendt’s part but will make the point more broadly and suggest the value she might have found in irony. Musmanno states: “She says that Eichmann was a Zionist and helped the Jews get to Palestine.”25 Arendt’s version is considerably less straightforward. In her account, when Eichmann began working for Himmler’s security service, he was required to read “Der Judenstaat, the famous Zionist classic, which converted Eichmann promptly and forever to Zionism. This seems to have been the first serious book he ever read and it made a lasting impression on him. From then on, as he repeated over and over, he thought of hardly anything but a ‘political solution’ (as opposed to the later ‘physical solution,’ the first meaning expulsion and the second extermination)” (EJ, 40–41). As ambivalent as Arendt’s own relationship to Zionism was, she is not equating Zionism with Eichmann’s “idealism,” nor his belief with anything a Zionist would espouse.26 Zionism was, on the one hand, simpler. Eichmann’s and the Zionists’ goals overlapped: Eichmann was ordered to rid Europe of the Jews; the Zionists wanted a homeland. On the other, it was much more complicated. Eichmann’s conversion to Zionism demonstrates the extent to which he understood himself as an “idealist”:
The reason he became so fascinated by the “Jewish question,” he explains, was his own “idealism.” . . . An “idealist,” according to Eichmann’s notions, was not merely a man who believed in an “idea” or someone who did not steal or accept bribes, though these qualifications were indispensable. An “idealist” was a man who lived for his idea—hence he could not be a businessman—and who was prepared to sacrifice for his idea everything and, especially, everybody. When he said in the police examination that he would have sent his own father to death if that had been required, he did not mean merely to stress the extent to which he was under orders, and ready to obey them; he also meant to show what an “idealist” he had always been. (EJ, 41–42, emphasis mine)
As we can see in the passage, Arendt is not, as Musmanno claims, defending Eichmann “against his own words” but conversely, maybe even perversely, attempting to take Eichmann at his word. Moreover, for many reasons, taking Eichmann at his word was an enormously difficult task: he lied, boasted outrageously, and, worst for Arendt, demonstrated a staggering incompetence in the use of language (his utter dependence on his own stock phrases and clichés, “winged words” as he called them; his “heroic fight with the German language, which invariably defeats him”; and his inability to speak anything but “officialese” [EJ, 48]). Nonetheless, her attempt to take him at his word, which produces the irony so characteristic of her depiction of him, is crucial to both her sense of his moral failing and her own attempt to do what Eichmann so conspicuously failed to do: view the world through the eyes of others.
“It was all irony,” Arendt said, and while many have commented on her choice to characterize Eichmann primarily through irony, it has remained an open question as to why she did so. One of the consistent elements of the reception of Eichmann in Jerusalem is the extent to which this irony backfired. As one commentator noted in Dissent, “If this is irony, at whom is it directed? One does not have to be a Zionist to be shocked, or to ‘misunderstand’ the author’s intent.”27 Shawn, too, argues that both the New York Times and Justice Musmanno were “insensitive” to her irony, though Shawn insists that Musmanno “chose” to misread. Whether deliberate or inadvertent, the misreading of Arendt’s irony seems to have derived from her attempt to communicate, mostly ironically, Eichmann’s view of himself, which suggests the extent to which the grammar of reported speech can itself convey sympathy. No matter how often Arendt lampooned Eichmann in the pages of her narrative, when she reported his speech she was perceived to share his perspective—that is, to empathize with him, not to ironize him. Arendt’s taking Eichmann at his word struck her readers as an act of solidarity rather than a testing of reality.
Why would Arendt take such a risk? Arendt’s commitment to her idea of “plurality,” which Seyla Benhabib called her “political principle par excellence,”28 outweighs the risk she took in using irony. Instead of evil, hatred, or sadism, Arendt identifies Eichmann’s most “decisive flaw” as the “almost total inability ever to look at anything from the other fellow’s point of view” (EJ, 47–48). This solipsism is a failure to “merely [make] present to oneself what the perspectives of others involved are or could be,” which pointedly is “not empathy . . . for it does not mean assuming, accepting the point of view of the other.”29 It is not, in Arendt’s terms, that Eichmann could not feel for others (though nothing in his testimony suggested that he could). What disabled his conscience and permitted him to transport the Jews to their death was that he could not imagine their having a perspective on this enterprise other than his own. Therefore, her irony can be viewed as an attempt at plurality, as mocking as it was. By taking him at his word, Arendt displayed his self-understanding on the assumption that its ludicrousness was always visible at the same time. That irony is an affectless rhetoric suggests the distance between plurality and empathy. It was a distance, however, that many of her detractors could not travel, not because they were poor readers necessarily but because their habits of reading and their preference for an emotional explanation for Nazi evil overrode her intervention.
Just as the concept of “the banality of evil” offended many of her readers, shifting the Nazi moral breakdown into the register of cognition rather than emotion was perceived as a banalization of their crimes and an exoneration of Eichmann. Arendt’s term seemed to reduce the gravity of the crimes by changing their motivation: by assuming a motivation, no matter how odious, radical evil had the effect of sustaining the enormity of the crimes; in contrast, by assuming motivelessness (or incommensurate motivation, like Eichmann’s desire for a promotion), the crimes, not the criminal, seemed banalized, as if mass murder would be more tolerable, not less, when done for no reason rather than for a repellent one.30 As Ernest Pisko was to claim in a Christian Science Monitor article on May 23, 1963: “Using rationality where only experience and compassionate imagination could have been proper guides she has pushed herself into a position where she appears to adopt a thesis proclaimed by Franz Werfel that not the murderers but the murdered are guilty.”31 Newsweek’s reviewer, while calling her a “profound and brilliant political philosopher,” nonetheless wonders whether thinking itself had gone too far in her attempt to understand the trial:
Miss Arendt has the kind of courage which only first-rate intelligences have—the courage not only of her convictions, but also of the power of her thinking processes. It is here that she runs tragically afoul of her fellow Jews, who like most of mankind, have merely the courage of their convictions. They know what has happened to the Jews in recent history; Miss Arendt is constantly struggling to find out, to break through what appears to be the congealed surface of events to the life below. On her side, the difficulty is that she sometimes dives too deep and not only loses contact with the surface, but also with the human oxygen that makes common-sense breathing and thinking possible.32
And yet, it is precisely losing “common-sense” and “contact with the surface” that Arendt finds so morally suspect in Eichmann. Eichmann’s thoughtlessness ensures his failure to remain in contact with reality and to share and dispute it with others, which is her definition of common sense: “The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else. No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against the words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such” (EJ, 49). Eichmann demonstrates the moral collapse of Germany because he resists the kind of thought that would force him to face reality, which is the criminality of the regime on whose behalf he acts. Arendt’s efforts to distinguish between Eichmann’s thoughtlessness and his lack of intelligence or education make thoughtlessness a product of will rather than of nature or socialization. (This distinction will become crucial to Arendt in The Life of the Mind because thinking becomes the bulwark of morality and so necessarily a property of all men rather than just the trained or the talented.) Plurality and concreteness in language work together as the safeguards of rather than against reality—plurality because it will not mirror a person back to himself; concreteness because it, as she sees in Zindel Grynszpan’s testimony, brings one face-to-face with reality without distortion or evasion.
Arendt sees plurality at risk in two opposing but equally devastating ways in Eichmann in Jerusalem and On Revolution. Eichmann’s radical remoteness from the reality of anyone else’s perspective on the world destroys plurality as surely as does the overwhelming sympathy of the revolutionary temperament as described in On Revolution. Instead of too much distance, the boundlessness of emotion and sympathy dissolves otherness by collapsing distance, the distance that maintains the distinction between self and the other and that sustains plurality. Between these two poles of “idealism,” the right and left incarnations of totalitarianism, stands the realist whose foremost obligation is to reality as such, which must always be guaranteed with plurality and common sense—that is, that we share the world with others. Since Arendt believes that the most important political question of the late twentieth century is whether or not something leads to totalitarianism, her prescription for political action and political deliberation could not be clearer: face reality together, not the emotions that reality inspires. The reality that she insists on sharing is itself painful, but perhaps more importantly, facing reality with “unpremeditated attention” requires suffering forms of discomfort that can bring that engagement to a halt. Testing reality against the views of others, while it may corroborate and enlarge our own, also may not, which is both its value and its risk. The thinker who would value plurality must also embrace its unpredictability and uncertainty. And concreteness may make reality perceptible and shareable, but the very facts of reality may be extremely painful to bear. The safeguards of reality (plurality and concreteness), then, deserve more scrutiny because they are the pressure points in Arendt’s philosophy of thinking and emotion. What allows one to confront reality without safeguards, to take the essential moral, political, and psychological risks that this entails, and what are the risks of failing to do so? Arendt is far more explicit about the risks of failing to confront reality than she is about the capacities that must be nurtured in order to do so.
Her decision to banish painful feelings from public life, theorized in On Revolution and put into practice in Eichmann in Jerusalem, needs to be understood in relation to her conclusions about suffering and thinking in the work that preceded these. Coming to terms with Eichmann crystallized something in her own thought that had been latent or undertheorized, and this led her to questions about thinking and thoughtlessness that preoccupied her for the rest of her life.
Her biographer Elizabeth Young-Bruehl argues that Arendt felt herself to be “cured” of an intense emotional relationship to painful reality in the writing of Eichmann in Jerusalem.33 While Arendt survived the malaise brought on by the rise of totalitarianism and of the reports of the Holocaust, her work preceding Eichmann wrestled continually with the painfulness of reality and with forms of thinking. In particular, Rahel Varnhagen and The Origins of Totalitarianism revolve around the terrible costs of failing to face reality and the forms of thinking that permit its evasion. In distilling the compensations provided by these forms of thinking, which shelter individuals and even whole societies from reality, we can approach her philosophy of political heartlessness.
Arendt’s thinking about the relationship between painful reality and forms of thinking begins in her biography of the early nineteenth-century Jewish socialite Rahel Varnhagen, which like Eichmann in Jerusalem, is frequently characterized as unsympathetic, harsh, or pitiless.34 In this biography, Arendt places a very different value on Lessing’s “self-thinking” that she referred to in her letter to Gershom Scholem. There she defined self-thinking as characteristic of the “conscious pariah”:35
What confuses you is that my arguments and my approach are different from what you are used to; in other words, the trouble is that I am independent. By this I mean, on the one hand, that I do not belong to any organization and always speak only for myself, and on the other hand, that I have great confidence in Lessing’s selbstdenken, for which, I think, no ideology, no public opinion, and no “convictions” can ever be a substitute. Whatever objections you may have to the results, you won’t understand them unless you realize that they are really my own and nobody else’s. (JP, 250)
In her post-Eichmann reconciliation with reality,36 Arendt viewed self-thinking as a part of the public exchange of ideas, one that guaranteed a plurality of thought by ensuring the independence of individuals from what was often called “group-think” in the sixties. In contrast, in Rahel Varnhagen, “self-thinking” is a form of Enlightenment reason peculiarly susceptible to the distortions of introspection and, therefore, particularly appealing to Rahel, who wished to avoid acknowledging to herself her status as a pariah. Cut off from the world, “‘self-thinking,’ which anyone can engage in alone and of his own accord,” was not a way of entering into public debate, secure enough in one’s perceptions to share and thereby amend them, but a way of closing oneself off from plurality and the facts of experience.37 “Self-thinking” for Rahel, as Arendt gleans from her letters, “brings liberation from objects and their reality, creates a sphere of pure ideas and a world which is accessible to any rational being without benefit of knowledge or experience” (PHA, 54). This abandonment of the world in Arendt’s account of Rahel’s self-thinking, a “foundation for cultivated ignoramuses” (PHA, 54) as Arendt bluntly puts it, liberates but only for “isolated individuals.” Preferring to imagine past prejudices as mere relics, the isolated individual is not required to acknowledge “a nasty present reality,” which is the lingering of prejudice in the minds of others.
The trajectory of Rahel Varnhagen’s life arcs toward her acceptance of her pariah status, as the words she spoke on her deathbed attest: “The thing which all my life seemed to me the greatest shame, which was the misery and misfortune of my life—having been born a Jewess—this I should on no account now wish to have missed” (PHA, 49). This shift entailed learning to think with reality rather than using her mind to distract, obscure, and cushion the reality that was too painful for her to bear: her status as a Jew. Arendt does not underestimate the agony of Rahel’s dilemma; if anything there is an astonishingly visceral pain in Arendt’s description of Rahel’s exclusion. Arendt asks how introspection can “be so isolated that the thinking individual no longer need smash his head against the wall of ‘irrational’ reality?” (PHA, 55, emphasis mine), and “how can you . . . transform reality back into its potentialities and so escape the ‘murderous axe’?” (PHA, 55, emphasis mine), a metaphor Rahel used for acknowledging herself a “Schlemihl and Jewess” (PHA, 54). Arendt argues that “bound by this inferiority,” Rahel “must avoid everything that might give rise to further confirmation, must not act, not love, not become involved in the world. Given such absolute renunciation, all that seemed left was thought” (PHA, 53). Introspection in Rahel Varnhagen is principally a form of compensation for this worldlessness and a consoling method of consolidating self-image by refusing to subject it to contradiction.
Rousseau is here (and elsewhere in On Revolution) Arendt’s prime target for the “mania for introspection” as a form of self-delusion (PHA, 55). Freed from the conflict and contradiction of plurality, the individual is more guarded against reality than ever before. For Arendt, these various forms of avoiding reality in introspection have their temptations, which she names as the power and the autonomy of the soul. However, she argues that these are “secured at the price of truth, it must be recognized, for without reality shared with other human beings, truth loses all meaning. Introspection and its hybrids engender mendacity” (PHA, 55). This avoidance of the facts leads inevitably to disaster for the world’s pariahs. Not only is the painful condition left unchanged by the retreat from reality, but also the self is obliterated in the process. Rahel’s choice to avoid her reality “requires an inhuman alertness not to betray oneself, to conceal everything and yet have no definitive secret to cling to” (PHA, 57). Finally, her own refusal to confront reality created a vagueness that confused the object of her oppression. Not “blocked by individual and therefore removable obstacles, but by everything, by the world” (PHA, 59), no sort of action seemed either useful or possible.
The political worldlessness of Rahel and her generation is given much greater amplification in The Origins of Totalitarianism, which is itself about the distortions of thinking that permitted the rise of National Socialism. Moreover, Arendt defines totalitarianism as an attempt to obliterate the capacity to think, which had become increasingly difficult under the conditions of modern alienation and loneliness: “As terror is needed lest with the birth of each new human being a new beginning arise and raise its voice in the world, so the self-coercive force of logicality is mobilized lest anybody ever start thinking—which as the freest and purest of all human activities is the very opposite of the compulsory process of deduction” (OT, 171). The two distinctive features of totalitarianism—terror and the “self-coercive force of logicality,” which she calls “supersense”38—are thus brought together as problems of thinking. Everyone in the totalitarian system is implicated in the problem of thinking and facing of reality: the perpetrators, both the masses and the elites in different ways; the outside observers in the international community; and the victims of domination. The strategies of the perpetrators and outside observers represent solutions to the anxieties of thought (unpredictability, uncertainty, and doubt) that make totalitarianism attractive and plausible. The last category, the camp victims, represents the abyss of thought that makes thinking during one’s incarceration or about it after the fact nearly impossible.
In Arendt’s terms, the masses’ submission to logical supersense, the nonthinking that looks like thought, is a consolation and one for which she exhibits a certain sympathy: “Before the alternative of facing the anarchic growth and total arbitrariness of decay or bowing down before the most rigid, fantastically fictitious consistency of an ideology, the masses will probably always choose the latter and be ready to pay for it with individual sacrifices—and this not because they are stupid or wicked, but because in the general disaster this escape grants them a minimum of self-respect” (OT, 50). In Arendt’s calculation, the ultimately murderous self-sacrifice of the Nazis wins adherents because it provides something of value, not only meaning and a place in history, which creates self-respect, but also predictability in a time of helplessness and chaos. In adopting this logicality, however, the masses will inevitably develop contempt for their own individual realities. For supersense and logicality to proceed, any reality that contradicts them must be wished away, ignored, or destroyed, even when that process works to the detriment of the individual’s self-interest or even survival. The promise of meaningfulness and predictability is therefore a compensation and consolation for a reality that is unbearable. We can conclude, then, that logic is itself a consoling form of thought when divorced from experience and that consolation as much as logic is to be regarded with suspicion, for the cost of predictability in this case is one’s own superfluity—that is, one’s own expendability.
Like the masses, the Nazi elite also banished reality, but in this case by regarding it as mere inconvenience, something utterly plastic and subject to the will. Given enough power and the time to use it, these men would remake reality into the fantasy of the leader. In this sense, thinking has stopped altogether. There is a thought married to power, and reality is transformed in order to conform to the idea. As Arendt explains, description becomes prediction: the “Jews are a dying race” means “kill the Jews.” The elites, she says, “instinctively” understand this. Thought married to power means the destruction of plurality, something that the masses have already lost in their isolated loneliness. “It is chiefly for the sake of this supersense, for the sake of complete consistency, that it is necessary for totalitarianism to destroy every trace of what we commonly call human dignity. For respect for human dignity implies recognition of my fellow-men or our fellow-nations as subjects, as builders of worlds or co-builders of a common world” (OT, 139). Other human beings’ perspectives on the world become not only a matter of inconvenience to the elite but an obstacle to remaking reality. To the extent that the inconsistency, disruption, and the discomfort of opposition inherent in plurality seem to endanger the grand thought, plurality will be compromised, if not destroyed.
The international community was unable to grasp the reality of totalitarianism because assumptions about human nature remained unexamined in light of new evidence about it issuing from Germany. The unexamined “common sense” (in the ordinary, not Arendtian, sense of the words) that self-interest governs human motivation undermined the apprehension of the danger of totalitarianism, which is always potentially self-destructive (in Arendt’s argument, all men, not just the victims of the camps, were equally superfluous):
There is a great temptation to explain away the intrinsically incredible by means of liberal rationalization. In each one of us, there lurks such a liberal, wheedling us with the voice of common sense. . . . But wherever these new forms of domination assume their authentically totalitarian structure they transcend this principle, which is still tied to the utilitarian motives and self-interest of the rulers, and try their hand in a realm that up to now has been completely unknown to us: the realm where “everything is possible. . . .” What runs counter to common sense is not the nihilistic principle that “everything is permitted,” which was already contained in the 19th-century utilitarian conception of common sense. What common sense and “normal people” refuse to believe is that everything is possible. (OT, 137–38)
Thinking has forgotten its obligation to the world and the necessity of self-doubt and questioning. This is not a failure of feeling or empathy but a failure of nerve, a preference for the comfort of certainty to the anxiety of self-doubt. The harshness of her characterization of the “wheedling” of the “liberal” that “lurks” in us all suggests the contempt Arendt had for this avoidance of self-interrogation, because she believed that such a way of thinking had indeed occurred in the comparative safety of the rest of Europe.
We come finally to those terrorized into abandoning thought: the inmates of the concentration camp. Once again, Arendt poses for her reader a question about the relationship between thinking and reality, though in this case she argues that the individual must flee reality because it is unbearable. Reducing a human being to a set of physiological reactions makes thought impossible, as we have seen in Weil’s “Factory Work.”39 More interesting in terms of Arendt’s own insistence on facing reality is the problem of thinking about total domination in light of the suffering of the Jews. Richard Bernstein suggests “it is by ‘dwelling on horrors’ of the concentration camps . . . that Arendt can provide a brilliant analysis of these institutions.”40 A closer examination of her analysis in The Origins of Totalitarianism reveals that the camps were the only reality that could not properly be faced in the sense that she had elaborated elsewhere. The death camps, which are in her terms the most significant feature of totalitarianism, its laboratory for “everything is possible,” produce something like an abyss in thought. It is essential to think of them—that is, of the fact of their existence—because totalitarianism presents the single greatest threat to the future of human beings, but it is literally impossible to think about them:
If it is true that the concentration camps are the most consequential institution of totalitarian rule, “dwelling on horrors” would seem to be indispensable for the understanding of totalitarianism. But recollection can no more do this than can the uncommunicative eyewitness report. In both these genres, there is an inherent tendency to run away from the experience; instinctively or rationally, both types of writer are so much aware of the terrible abyss that separates the world of the living from that of the living dead, that they cannot supply anything more than a series of remembered occurrences that must seem just as incredible to those who relate them as to their audience. (OT, 139)
The experience, not the fact, of the concentration camps violates the prerequisites of common sense. Testimony to the experience of the camps cannot be shared, because it is unbelievable both to the one experiencing it and to the one listening. Because it is “as though he had a story to tell of another planet” (OT, 139), the horror also attains the status of the surreal, if not the unreal. Unthinkable, unshareable, and unreal, the memory of the camps is transformed into physical pain: the memory is “smitten in the flesh,” a wound that the sufferer cannot dwell on. Arendt also bars the contemplation of this suffering by others, much as she does in Eichmann in Jerusalem: “Suffering, of which there has been always too much on earth, is not the issue, nor is the number of victims. Human nature as such is at stake” (OT, 139). Using the problem of boundary violation that she uses in On Revolution, Arendt argues that pity only augments suffering: “In times of growing misery and individual helplessness, it seems as difficult to resist pity when it grows into an all-devouring passion as it is not to resent its very boundlessness, which seems to kill human dignity with a more deadly certainty than misery itself” (OT, 27). It is left to the “fearful imagination” of those “aroused by such reports” to speculate on the future reappearance of totalitarianism. In this sense, pain, suffering, and the wound of history are relegated to the private realm. They are neither the grounds of politics nor a subject of knowledge.
Arendt even denies that facing this reality has any value by suggesting, incredibly, that the experience of the camps has no future consequences for survivors. She makes the startling claim that horror changes no one and nothing: “A change of personality of any sort whatever can no more be induced by thinking about horror than by the real experience of horror. The reduction of a man to a bundle of reactions separates him as radically as mental disease from everything within him that is personality or character. When, like Lazarus, he rises from the dead, he finds his personality or character unchanged, just as he had left it” (OT, 139). By limiting the power of terror to the moment of its infliction, Arendt eliminates the need to revisit it after the fact. Because it changes nothing and no one, because it cannot be thought or shared, it exists simply as a motivation, as a question, the question, that unites all political thinking. Erasing horror from the domain of thought leads us back to Eichmann in Jerusalem. Declaring the suffering of the Jews in the camps beyond thought in The Origins of Totalitarianism and the heart’s motivations beyond scrutiny in On Revolution, what could she have examined but Eichmann’s thoughtlessness when she arrived in Jerusalem for the trial?
Arendt made no secret of the effect of Eichmann’s trial on her life’s work, dedicating herself to an inquiry into thoughtlessness and ultimately the philosophical history (or lack thereof) of the activities of thinking, willing, and judging, the three sections of The Life of the Mind. She repeatedly announced that it was the “fact” of Eichmann’s thoughtlessness and what she came to understand as its role in the moral collapse of Germany that fueled the urgency behind this inquiry. Throughout all her essays, lectures, and books in the 1960s and early 1970s, Arendt’s thinking about thinking colored her inquiries into contemporary political and moral dilemmas like the atom bomb, the Vietnam War, and the global student movements. As in her, albeit less systematic, attention to thinking that marked Rahel Varnhagen and The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt continued to point out the aversion to thinking and the situations, events, or conditions under which people became thoughtless. While she always uses the term “emotion” as she slows down to isolate that moment when a person abdicates his responsibility to think, it would be more accurate in our own terms to call thoughtlessness a response to affective distress, those moods or states that combine somatic, emotional, cognitive, and behavioral elements that do not yet rise to a nameable emotion. Thoughtlessness, or the forms of thinking that take the place of thought (logical supersense, for instance), ease the affective turmoil brought on by the unpredictability, uncertainty, doubt, and sheer painfulness of contemporary life and, in the end, by thinking itself.
In one of her first efforts to explore thinking after Eichmann in Jerusalem, a series of lectures given at the New School and the University of Chicago in 1965 and 1966 and published as “Some Questions of Moral Philosophy,” Arendt argued that emotions were impeding the ability to think about the moral questions raised by the genocide of the Jews.41 In these lectures, Arendt reacts to the dramatic reversal in the public discussion of the Holocaust, which had moved from one that could not admit the horrors into visibility to one that could not stop looking at them in the two to three years since she published her report. Arendt believed that the question she wished to investigate—how ordinary people could completely lose their moral compasses—“was concealed by something about which it is indeed much more difficult to speak . . .—the horror in its naked monstrosity” (RJ, 55). Arendt is adamant that it is the “speechless horror” and the speechlessness produced by horror that make thinking impossible and trivialize other considerations of judgment and analysis:
Since people find it difficult, and rightly so, to live with something that takes their breath away and renders them speechless, they have all too frequently yielded to the obvious temptation to translate their speechlessness into whatever expressions for emotions were close at hand, all of them inadequate. As a result, today the whole story is usually told in terms of sentiments which need not even be cheap in themselves to cheapen and sentimentalize the story. The whole atmosphere in which things are discussed today is overcharged with emotions, often of a not very high caliber, and whoever raises these questions must expect to be dragged down, if at all possible, to a level on which nothing serious can be discussed at all. (RJ, 56, emphasis mine)
One cannot help but hear Arendt responding to the reproaches of heartlessness in this complaint. Emotions, and not just sentimentality, in this passage are always dangerous to public debate; emotions “need not even be cheap in themselves to cheapen”; therefore, any emotions whatever will spoil the public sphere. The answer for her is to refuse to “translate” the horrors into emotion rather than into language. As in On Revolution, the appearance of misery elicits a collective emotional outpouring that swamps the public sphere and blocks thinking.
Arendt’s collapse of legitimate emotions, which nonetheless “sentimentalize,” with those of “a not very high caliber” places her squarely in the modernist tradition and in the company of the Frankfurt school refugees/émigrés, like Theodor Adorno, who had such influence on American intellectuals in the postwar era. Certainly she shares with them a distrust of emotions in public life and a deep distaste for sentimentality; her treatment of the testimony of Zindel Grynszpan demonstrates her own modernist preferences for concreteness and lack of emotional expressivity. However, Arendt goes a step further. Misery and horror do not provoke an insipid response from either French revolutionary leaders or contemporary witnesses to atrocity; but although they elicit a powerful and genuine one, that response nevertheless ends in disaster. Given the familiarity with the antisentimentalism of her contemporaries and the long-standing aversion to sentiment among modernist writers and thinkers, the outcry elicited by her irony and her refusal to treat Jewish suffering directly should be far more surprising than it has been, especially from within the circle of intellectuals who championed modernist aesthetics at the Partisan Review and elsewhere.42 In thinking about the Holocaust, modernist antisentimentalism seemed to be just as spectacular a failure for many readers as the more easily disparaged sentimentalism of The Diary of Anne Frank a decade before. No representational solution seemed adequate. The almost-universal chorus among writers and intellectuals after the war lamented the unbridgeable gap between language and modern life, the inability to express either the gravity or the enormity of the midcentury atrocities, the unprecedented and therefore unmanageable crisis of the atom bomb’s capacity to wipe out human life, and the inadequacy of traditional literary forms and practices to cope with these new crises of representation. Nevertheless, some responses seemed more ethically repellent than others. Arendt’s heartlessness, as she defined it, rather than the more broadly shared antisentimentalism of her peers, carved out areas of reflection and practices of representation that she assumed would be painful—not merely clarifying or invigorating—but not so emotionally wrenching as to render the translation of experience into language pointless.
Arendt would continue to defend and to elaborate heartlessness in On Violence and then The Life of the Mind. First, she wants to distinguish heartlessness from sociopathy, which is the inability to feel. She says, relying on Noam Chomsky, whom she quotes approvingly throughout On Violence: “Absence of emotions neither causes nor promotes rationality. ‘Detachment and equanimity’ in view of ‘unbearable tragedy’ can indeed be ‘terrifying,’ namely, when they are not the result of control but an evident manifestation of incomprehension. In order to respond reasonably one must first of all be ‘moved,’ and the opposite of emotional is not ‘rational,’ whatever that may mean, but either the inability to be moved, usually a pathological phenomenon, or sentimentality, which is a perversion of feeling.”43 More concerned with emotions in general than with sentimentality in particular and with control rather than neutrality, Arendt creates a division that she will spell out clearly in The Life of the Mind, where she goes to some lengths to inoculate thinking from the contamination of feeling. The mental activities of thinking, willing, and judging, defined by their autonomy from one another, all depend on the quieting of the “soul’s passions.”44 She creates a firm distinction, even partition, between mind, which is defined by its self-chosen activity, and the soul, which is “where our passions, our feelings and emotions arise, . . . a more or less chaotic welter of happenings which we do not enact but suffer and which in cases of great intensity may overwhelm us as pain or pleasure does” (LOTM, 72). A principal difference is that emotions and feelings are “suffered,” that is, endured passively, whereas the mind is “sheer activity.” However, Arendt has no answer to the problem of being “overwhelmed” by emotion and the degree to which one is passive in the face of it; she argues that emotions “are not liable to be changed by deliberate intervention” (LOTM, 73), and she scoffs at the Stoics, who succumbed to the philosophical “fallacy” of equating soul and mind (because they are both internal and therefore invisible) rather than understanding them to be distinct. “That you can feel happy when roasted in the Phalarian Bull” seems to her obviously ridiculous. The point is not that the mind can control feeling—it cannot—but it can control the display of those feelings. And “we need a considerable training in self-control in order to prevent the passions from showing” (LOTM, 72). The alternative to infecting public life with emotion or resorting to the morally perilous thoughtlessness seems to be the sheer endurance of pain, even overwhelming pain. Implicitly, only time will quiet the passions and allow the feelings of being overwhelmed to subside. This wait for quiet, however, must not be understood as thoughtlessness, which is for her willed nonthinking; it is, rather, not thinking just yet. Thoughtlessness constitutes the active avoidance of painful feeling and offers a substitute form of thinking that consoles and soothes.
Arendt is perhaps clearest on how thoughtlessness acts as a mechanism to avoid pain in her lectures, both “Some Questions of Moral Philosophy” and its later iteration as “Thinking and Moral Considerations.” Both of these lectures, more political and more polemical than the magisterial The Life of the Mind, begin with Eichmann to address the quandary he posed and conclude by linking the issues brought forward in the trial with her theory of thinking as a moral preservative. Her first move is to democratize thinking as an activity of all human beings and to assert that thinking can arise out of any occurrence and among all walks of life. Something happens and we retell it as a story, preparing it for communication or for reviewing it later with oneself. She then claims the best way for a criminal to escape detection and punishment is to “forget what he did” (RJ, 94) by not preparing the event for retelling: “No one can remember what he has not thought through in talking about it with himself” (RJ, 94). Thoughtlessness begins with a deliberate choice not to represent actions in language, not to create memory: “If I refuse to remember, I am actually ready to do anything—just as my courage would be reckless if pain, for instance, were immediately forgotten” (RJ, 94, emphasis mine). Thus, the motivation to thoughtlessness is not generated by feeling, much less by overwhelming feeling, but by the avoidance of painful feeling (guilt, remorse, discomfort, confusion). Having done wrong—and thus knowing it or perhaps sensing it, though she doesn’t say so—we choose thoughtlessness. She goes on to assert that evildoers may very well exist, but the real danger is “those who don’t remember because they have never given thought to the matter, and without remembrance, nothing can hold them back” (RJ, 95). In refusing to remember, evil is not radical—it has no roots to stabilize itself—but rootless and therefore limitless (the “everything is possible” innovation of National Socialism). We cannot forgive such a person because, in Arendt’s terms, there is no person there to forgive, having willingly abandoned the human capacity for thinking, using language, and remembering.
To sustain this avoidance of pain over time rather than in the moment, we turn to forms of consolatory thinking. In On Violence, the potential for painful feeling generates a form of thoughtlessness that looks very much like logical supersense. She draws her example from the US government and its efforts to strategize nuclear conflict. Contemporary warfare, utterly transformed by the destructive capacity of atomic weaponry, was the epitome of unpredictability, which is a characteristic of all violence and warfare intrinsically. She argues: “Under these circumstances, there are, indeed, few things that are more frightening than the steadily increasing prestige of scientifically minded brain trusters in the councils of government during the last decades. The trouble is not that they are cold-blooded enough to ‘think the unthinkable,’ but that they do not think” (OV, 6). What leads to disaster is not emotion or its lack but consolatory thinking that preempts the emotional volatility of unpredictability. Creating “facts” by forgetting the assumptive nature of their hypotheses, the “brain trusters” or war-gamers enjoy their fantasy of predicting the future, “hypnotized” into losing touch with “reality and factuality” because they are so mesmerized by the “inner consistency” of their games (OV, 7–8). The games provide the illusion of predictability because “random events” are excluded by the rules of the game. Arendt reminds her readers that events are called such only because they arise without warning, because they are by definition unexpected. Thus, the brilliant strategists do not think because they do not want to feel their own distress. Arendt’s respect for the worldwide student movements derived from her perception of their greater tolerance for painful feeling: young people alone had “greater awareness of the possibility of doomsday than those ‘over thirty’” (OV, 17). She says: “To the oft-heard question: Who are they, this new generation? one is tempted to answer, Those who hear the ticking. And to the other question, Who are they who utterly deny them? the answer may well be, Those who do not know, or refuse to face, things as they really are” (OV, 18). In one of the last lectures she gave, “Home to Roost,” on mendacity in the conduct of the Vietnam War, she ended her scathing remarks, delivered at a bicentennial celebration, with a call for facing reality and enduring the painful feelings that arrive in that act. “When the facts come home to roost, let us try to make them welcome. Let us try not to escape into some utopias—images, theories, or sheer follies. It was the greatness of this Republic to give due account for the sake of freedom to the best in men and to the worst” (RJ, 275).
If writing Eichmann in Jerusalem allowed Arendt to recover the amor mundi that grounded her political philosophy, it has been less obvious the extent to which this recovery depended on developing a relationship to suffering that was distinctly unconsoling and austere. Two intellectual biographies, Julia Kristeva’s Hannah Arendt and Sylvie Courtine-Denamy’s Three Women in Dark Times: Edith Stein, Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil, celebrate Arendt’s love of the world, much as did Young-Bruehl. Kristeva focuses on the importance of love in Arendt’s thinking, and Courtine-Denamy, on Arendt’s efforts to reconcile herself with reality. Both see her thought as motivated by what we might call a will to joy, and both find Arendt’s tough-mindedness with regard to painful feeling and public life scintillating. Nevertheless, in their optimistic appraisal of Arendt’s love of the world, they have not calculated the tolerance of suffering that was a part of her newfound equilibrium. The realist who stands between the twin poles of totalitarian idealism—the solipsism of thoughtlessness and the boundarylessness of revolutionary sympathy—must tolerate, even embrace, what might be considered forms of psychological distress. The realist accepts the pain of reality, no matter how extreme; endures doubt; welcomes conflict; consents to unpredictability; takes up the isolation of the conscious pariah; and concedes control over the future. The only way to become a realist, and for Arendt we all must do so for our mutual survival, is to cultivate a suspicion of intellectual and psychological comfort in whatever forms we find them. Arendt hated illusions about the terrible facets of human existence and wished for herself and her “co-builders” of the world to accept willingly a wounding by them. Suffering is so much a part of her notion of thinking that only by feeling pain can one know that one loves the world properly.