Roger Berkowitz
Reconciliation is seemingly a minor theme in Arendt’s published writing. But the prominence of reconciliation as a major theme within Arendt’s Denktagebuch suggests that reconciliation plays a flexible and important role underlying much of Arendt’s political thinking. The Denktagebuch begins with a polished opening reflection arguing that reconciliation is the only truly political way to respond to evil. And the discussion of reconciliation continues. Over dozens of further entries, Arendt develops the idea of reconciliation in connection with her ideas of action, thinking, understanding, comprehension, forgiveness, politics, and the love of the world. And in conversation with her readings of Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, Arendt reworks the question of reconciliation into one of the fundamental, if at-times hidden, questions of her work. For Arendt, reconciliation is the political question of our time: Can we commit ourselves to love and engage in a public world that, after the break of tradition, cannot be cleansed of evil?
Arendt first develops her understanding of reconciliation in the opening entry of the Denktagebuch by setting reconciliation against forgiveness and revenge as one of the three possible responses to wrongdoing. When confronted with a wrongdoer who has done evil, forgiveness and revenge both are incapable of political judgment. Forgiveness proceeds on the Christian assumption that what the wrongdoer has done is something that anyone could have done. “Forgiveness is perhaps possible insofar as it is only the express recognition that we are all sinners, thus it claims that everyone could have done anything, and in this way it produces an equality—not of rights, but of nature.”1 In order to forgive, we assume that “but for the grace of God” we could have committed similar wrongs. Forgiveness erases the difference between the one who forgives and the wrongdoer; thus, forgiveness erases the distance necessary to judge and makes judgment impossible.
Revenge similarly follows the Christian precept of a natural equality, but in the reverse direction. If forgiveness assumes we are all equally sinful and fallen and thus might have committed a wrong, revenge presumes we all have the right to do wrong. Revenge proceeds from out of a concept that “we are all born poisoned” by our vengeful lusts.2 The avenger asserts his equal right as a human animal to take the law into his hands instinctively and without reflection, just as the wrongdoer has done. To avenge a wrong is to claim the same passionate right as the wrongdoer. Acting on unthinking passions, revenge also negates judgment.
Both revenge and forgiveness, Arendt writes, “spring from the Christian solidarity between mankind, that all are equally sinners and all are capable of everything just as their fellow man, even the greatest evil.”3 For Arendt, this Christian solidarity with all men is “grounded on the fundamental mistrust in the human substance.”4 Since revenge and forgiveness imagine all people to be equally sinful, both erase human plurality and difference. Christian solidarity is a “negative solidarity, which springs out of the idea of original sin.”5 If everyone is the same, no one can judge another. Neither forgiveness nor revenge allow for political judgment that could articulate a positive ideal of a common world that might gather a plurality of persons into a political world.
Reconciliation is different from forgiveness and revenge in two ways that are crucial for politics. First, the political power of reconciliation proceeds from its ability to create and affirm solidarity in the face of a wrong that threatens to dissolve that common sense of belonging to a single world. By affirming one’s acceptance of the world with the wrong in it, reconciliation accepts the wrong in its difference. It is not an accident that Arendt develops her idea of reconciliation in 1950, just weeks after returning from her meeting with Martin Heidegger. And we know from their letters that Arendt and Heidegger discussed reconciliation during their walks in the Black Forest. For Arendt to reconcile with Martin Heidegger meant to accept that what he did was wrong and yet still affirm that the world is better with him and his wrongdoing in it than without them. Reconciliation is politically radical because it affirms the reality of and the love for people whose acts we consider to be fundamentally wrong. Arendt can disagree with anti-Semites and racists as well as communists and laissez-faire capitalists, and yet affirm that they and their opinions are part of the common world. Reconciliation is thus open to radical plurality in a way that forgiveness and revenge are not.
Second, reconciliation has a specifically political judgment at its core. Reconciliation is an act of solidarity; unlike the presumptive solidarity of Christian forgiveness and vengeance, however, reconciliation is a political judgment that first brings solidarity to be. The “solidarity of reconciliation is firstly not the foundation of reconciliation (as the solidarity of being sinful is the foundation of forgiveness), but rather the product [of reconciliation].”6 When I decide to reconcile with the world as it is, I affirm my love for the world, and thus my solidarity with the world and those who live in it. In this sense, reconciliation is the precondition for the being of a polis: it is the judgment that in spite of our plurality and differences, we share a common world. To reconcile with a wrong is to affirm one’s solidarity with the world as it is and is, therefore, to help bring into being a common world. Arendt thus turns to reconciliation as “a new concept of solidarity.”7
The fact that solidarity is connected to political judgment means that it includes a judgment about the constitution of a people, a “we.” The “we” appealed to in solidarity is not a pre-given essence but is the result of a judgment that finds something common among a plurality. Solidarity, for Arendt, offers a unity that emerges not out of sympathy or pity, both of which develop togetherness based upon a feeling for depersonalized others, the poor. In t he judgment to reconcile with others out of solidarity, people “establish deliberately, and, as it were, dispassionately a community of interest with the oppressed and exploited.”8 Solidarity, therefore, is a conceptual judgment of reconciliation that is open to uniqueness and meaningful differences (of opinion, status, religion, and race)—a judgment that as Arendt writes in On Revolution appeals to a “common interest” not in majority opinion, but in “the grandeur of man,” or “the honor of the human race,” or the dignity of man. Political solidarity is the outcome of reconciliation insofar as we reconcile ourselves to faction, disagreement, and plurality.
Arendt’s most famous example of a judgment of reconciliation is her judgment not to reconcile with Adolf Eichmann. Faced with an epic wrong and a wrongdoer who refuses to repent, reconciliation would affirm a world in which something like the Holocaust could happen. Reconciliation, therefore, would be powerless to remake the human community shattered by the Holocaust. For Arendt, reconciliation with Eichmann is impossible.
In cases such as Eichmann’s, there is another choice beyond reconciliation—one can choose to deny reconciliation. This is the choice that Arendt makes in her own judgment of Eichmann: to act beyond the boundary of reconciliation’s power to inaugurate a common world. “Reconciliation has a merciless boundary,” Arendt writes, a boundary that “forgiveness and revenge don’t recognize—namely, at that about which one must say: This ought not to have happened.”9 Arendt explains what she means by reference to Kant’s discussion of the rules of war, where Kant says that actions in war that might make a subsequent peace impossible are not permitted. Such acts, like pogroms and genocides, whether in war or peace, are examples of “radical evil”; they are “what ought not to have come to pass.” Such acts are also those that cannot be reconciled, “what cannot be accepted under any circumstances as our fate.”10 Nor can one simply silently pass by in the face of radical evil. That is the meaning of her final judgment offered in the epilogue, the one she says the judges in Jerusalem should have “dared” to offer: “We find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang.”11 Eichmann must hang because his crimes are irreconcilable with a pluralist world.
When Arendt turns to reconciliation in her published work beginning in the 1950s, her touchstone is Hegel. In the “Preface” to Between Past and Future, Arendt writes: “The task of the mind is to understand what happened, and this understanding, according to Hegel, is man’s way of reconciling himself with reality; its actual end is to be at peace with the world.”12 In “Truth and Politics,” Arendt again raises the problem of a thoughtful reconciliation to reality alongside a reference to Hegel: “Who says what is always tells a story. To the extent that the teller of factual truth is also a storyteller, he brings about that ‘reconciliation with reality’ which Hegel, the philosopher of history par excellence, understood as the ultimate goal of all philosophical thought.”13 Reconciliation, for Hegel—she writes in The Life of the Mind—affirms that “the course of history would no longer be haphazard and the realm of human affairs no longer devoid of meaning.”14 There is a basic truth to Hegel’s idealism: that the real world only is for humans insofar as we humans understand that world and reconcile ourselves to it.
Even as she founds her approach to reconciliation on Hegel’s thinking, Arendt finds Hegel’s view of reconciliation in need of revision. After citing Hegel to argue that reconciliation allows us to make peace with the world as it is, Arendt adds: “The trouble is that if the mind is unable to bring peace and to induce reconciliation, it finds itself immediately engaged in its own kind of warfare.”15 While reconciliation is necessary to be at peace with the world, we today may no longer be in position to seek peace in the world. Arendt questions whether reconciliation and the peace it would bring are possible. Against Hegel, Arendt asks: What happens when reconciliation fails?
The problem Arendt grasps hold of under the title of reconciliation is that the “break in tradition” and the “death of God” disrupt the traditional philosophical effort to rationalize politics. The Marxian response—to force reality into a new progressive reason guided by science—goes down the path of totalitarianism. Instead, Arendt councils a new idea of reconciliation: reconciliation to a world without political truths, one in which politics is closer to a kind of unwinnable warfare—one specifically suited to the human mind.
Arendt reiterates her rejection of the Hegelian understanding reconciliation in a passage from The Human Condition: “Hegel’s gigantic enterprise to reconcile spirit with reality (den Geist mit der Wirklichkeit zu versöhnen), a reconciliation that is the deepest concern of all modern theories of history, rested on the insight that modern reason foundered on the rock of reality.”16 The political philosophy of the modern age “founders on the perplexity” that reconciliation—the effort to prove and sustain the rationality of the world—has finally been shown to be impossible. Hegel’s “gigantic enterprise,” Hobbes’s scientific reconceptualization of reason as interest, and Marx’s scientific materialism are all heroic yet futile efforts to submit reality to rationality and thought. They represent a striving to have the po litical world make sense—to institute peace.
In rejecting Hegel’s project of reconciliation, however, Arendt does not abandon reconciliation. Rather, she reimagines reconciliation as a facing up to the basic fact of the modern world: that Hegelian reconciliation fails to institute peace and that politics in the age of the death of God is necessarily a battle. Arendt insists we reconcile ourselves to the fact that there is no truth in politics, and that all politics is a struggle among opposing opinions, or doxai. This does not mean there are no political facts or that truth is politically irrelevant, but there are fewer political facts than most people think. Further, such facts as there may be are themselves cemented only by persuasion and opinion. They are settled political facts that come, by weight of overwhelming persuasiveness, to be part of the shared common world. Political truth, in Arendt’s poetic formulation, is “the ground on which we stand and the sky that stretches above us.”17 We must reconcile ourselves, she argues, to a world of plurality absent authority and absent all but the most foundational truths.
Arendt’s rethinking of reconciliation follows her conviction that sometime in the early part of the twentieth century, philosophy and thinking ceased to be able “to perform the task assigned to it by Hegel and the philosophy of history, that is, to understand and grasp conceptually historical reality and the events that made the modern world what it is.”18 For Arendt, somehow, the “human mind had ceased, for some mysterious reasons, to function properly.”19 In other words, what happens in the twentieth century is that a gap emerges between reality and thinking. This gap between thinking and reality itself, Arendt writes, is not new. It may be, she supposes, “coeval with the existence of man on earth.” But for centuries and millennia, the gap was “bridged over by tradition.” At a time when our efforts to understand the real world forever fall short, reconciliation assumes a different and distinctly non-Hegelian sense. Reconciliation demands that we forgo the will to absolute knowledge or scientific mastery of the world. We must instead reconcile ourselves to the reality of the gap between thinking and acting. We must, in other words, reconcile ourselves to our irreconcilability to the world.
Thinking today requires accepting the irreconcilability of the world that Arendt names “settling down in the gap between past and future.” It demands that we continually recommit ourselves to the loss of a knowable and hospitable world and instead commit ourselves to the struggle of thinking and acting in a world without banisters. Only if we think and reconcile ourselves to the reality of our irreconcilable world can we hope to resist the ever-present possibility of totalitarianism.
In the end, reconciliation for Arendt is a political judgment to love the world in spite of its evil and inclusive of its irreconcilability. Reconciliation is Arendt’s necessary political response to the alienation and resentment that mark our times. The grave danger of the modern world is that we humans will resent our finitude—our moral, political, and personal limitations and weaknesses—and will strive to cure ourselves of human weakness with the aid of science and technology. The dream to perfect the earth and ourselves is, as Arendt writes in The Human Condition, “the wish to escape the human condition.”
Notes
1 Hannah Arendt, Denktagebuch (Munich: Piper Taschenbuch, 2016), I.1.4.
2 Ibid., I.1.5.
3 Ibid., I.1.6.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid.
8 Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin, 1965), 89.
9 Arendt, Denktagebuch, I.1.7.
10 Ibid.
11 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (Penguin, 2006), 279.
12 Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin, 1968), 7.
13 Ibid.
14 Hannah Arendt, Life of the Mind (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 2, 46.
15 Arendt, Between Past and Future, 7, italics added.
16 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 300–1.
17 Arendt, “Truth and Politics,” in Between Past and Future, 223–59; 259.
18 Arendt, Between Past and Future, 8.
19 Ibid.