Phillip Nelson
It is impossible to develop a categorical definition of responsibility as Arendt understands it. She gathers a group of concepts under this heading, which are best understood in terms of two intersecting axes, one running between past and future and the other between the public and the private realms. Arendt gives the following names to the resulting four types of responsibilities falling into four separate quadrants: collective (public/past), legal or moral (private/past), personal (private/future), and political (public/future).
Throughout these various descriptions, the reader should keep in mind that the concept of responsibility for Arendt is not to be understood as some sort of “feeling” whereby I am struck with a “sensation” of responsibility. Any kind of psychological state of responsibility would fall among other emotional attitudes such as disgrace, regret, remorse, or shame, but this is not what she has in mind for responsibility. For her, responsibility is a metaphysical status, something I possess socially, politically, and temporally, but never a sensation I possess psychologically. As we will see, Arendt makes a strong distinction between guilt and responsibility, but in neither case is it something that I “feel.”1
Collective Responsibility 2
In Arendt’s writing on responsibility, the most prominent and consistent distinction she makes is the insistence that guilt is not the same as responsibility. As she defines it, guilt is primarily individualistic. A community or large group cannot be guilty for its sins in any sense of that word because guilt must single out an action and an agent. Even in a case where a gang robs a bank, each individual, from the getaway driver to the point man, is singly accountable for his or her role in the execution. As Arendt puts this in her 1968 essay on “Collective Responsibility,” the fault for the robbery is not a matter of vicariousness but rather of “various degrees of guilt.”3
Significantly, Arendt does not draw a strong distinction between “responsibility” and “accountability” (at least not in terms of collective, moral, and legal responsibility, which are oriented toward the past; we will see that personal and political responsibility are a separate matter because of their future orientation), and she actually believes these concepts are at the very heart and origin of Western philosophy. In her Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, Arendt notes that the pre-Socratic philosophers never felt the need to explain or account for their great insights. It was not until Plato that accountability and responsibility helped to shape our philosophical practices. Arendt explains,
Logon didonai, “to give an account”—not to prove, but to be able to say how one came to an opinion and for what reasons one formed it—is actually what separates Plato from all of his predecessors. . . . And this—holding oneself and everyone else responsible and answerable for what he thought and taught—was what transformed into philosophy and that search for knowledge and for truth that had sprung up in Ionia.4
Responsibility as accountability is always oriented toward the past because we must “be able to give an account” or “hold someone to account” for deeds committed in the past.5
Keeping this definition of accountability in mind, Arendt gives two conditions for collective responsibility: “I must be held responsible for something I have not done, and the reason for my responsibility must be my membership in a group (a collective) which no voluntary act of mine can dissolve.”6 Arendt calls this kind of responsibility political since it deals with the community, either when the community takes on the responsibility for deeds done by one of its members or when the whole community is responsible for actions done in its name. In either case, the importance of distinguishing guilt from responsibility is crucial. Conflating guilt and collective responsibility has the potential to incite xenophobic sentiment as well as nonspecific acts of hate. By keeping these two phenomena separate, an individual can be held responsible for something he or she did not do without being condemned as guilty of those actions. Arendt’s example par excellence is the leadership exhibited by Napoleon Bonaparte after becoming the ruler or France. She explains this leadership in the following way:
He said: I assume responsibility for everything France has done from the time of Charlemagne to the terror of Robespierre. In other words, he said, all this was done in my name to the extent that I am a member of this nation and the representative of this body politic.7
Napoleon is held to account for the sins of his predecessors without assuming their guilt.8
Collective responsibility always orients away from the individual and toward the community or group—its concern remains with the accountability of that which is greater than the self. Insofar as the deeds of the state to which I belong are not carried out by me personally, I cannot be held guilty of these deeds. However, insofar as I am disadvantaged by (or benefit from) those actions, and insofar as I continue to belong to the state that carried them out, I am accountable for them, which implies that I have a responsibility to set the record straight, as it were, for the good of the collective to which I belong.
Legal/Moral Responsibility
Legal responsibility is also a matter of what has already happened, but it concerns the private individual rather than a public collectivity. Observe how courts of law individualize or single out one person and his or her relationship to a specific crime committed. Arendt writes: “If the person happens to be involved in a common undertaking as in the case of organized crime, what is to be judged is still this very person, the degree of his participation, his specific role, and so on, and not the group.”9
In terms of morality, Arendt herself admits that such considerations are less distinct, and moral responsibility, while concerned with the past, is less firmly fixed in the private realm. For the Greeks, moral considerations had to do with the individual, but always insofar as the conduct of the individual was good for the surrounding world. She writes: “In the center of interest is the world and not the self.”10 This shift in orientation began with the rise of Christianity where moral matters come to concern the well-being of the soul and have little to do with the goodness of the world. However, Arendt does acknowledge a kind of inward concern in Greek antiquity in the Socratic proposition, “It is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong.” After all, I am forever forced to live with myself: doing wrong will always be worse than suffering wrong.11 But when coupled with the fact that I cannot live only with myself, but am forever living with others as well, it becomes my duty to prevent any and all suffering. Arendt therefore modifies the Socratic proposition into a moral-political maxim: “What is important in the world is that there be no wrong; suffering wrong and doing wrong are equally bad.”12 Moral responsibility for Arendt is a hybrid between the private and the public: in both cases it relies on togetherness—privately, I am always with myself, but publicly I must live with others.
Yet this moral responsibility does not implicate me politically in the same manner as does collective responsibility. Even though I am together in the world with others, this does not mean I am necessarily part of the same collectivity. And unlike collective responsibility, moral responsibility concerns my own specific conduct; that is, my own moral responsibility does not concern the actions of others whatsoever. This individualizing aspect of moral responsibility is what makes it similar to legal responsibility in that it concerns the conduct of a single person who can be accountable or morally praised for such conduct.13 Thus, collective responsibility can be distinguished from moral and legal responsibility in that the latter must deal solely with the behavior of an individual, whereas the former must account for deeds committed in the name of a group. Even though these two kinds of responsibility differ with respect to the public/private distinction, both are directed temporally in the direction of past conduct—collective, moral, and legal responsibility all come to be defined by what has already taken place.
Personal Responsibility
In a world where the public realm would naturally stand apart from private matters, and freedom would be possible through political action, Arendt would perhaps have little need for a responsibility that is personal in nature. In actuality, Arendt’s meaning of “personal” doesn’t exactly indicate a sole concern for matters that are private or distinctively singular in nature. The commonly employed phrase “personal responsibility” often indicates a kind of standard one strives to uphold without the assistance (financial or otherwise) of others, but Arendt’s meaning has more to do with the overall absence of a state’s public sphere. It might be more helpful to think of her usage of “personal” as indicating the bare life to which one is reduced in certain extreme situations. Even though someone is reduced to singularity in such circumstances, Arendt’s personal responsibility should not necessarily be understood as apolitical or absent of political concern. Arendt’s notion of political responsibility, which I will describe in more detail momentarily, shares with this personal responsibility two key features: (1) both types look forward toward the future, unlike collective and legal/moral responsibility, which focus primarily on accountability; and (2) both types require the use of the faculty of judgment as a tool for ethical discernment.
In certain extreme situations, it can be difficult to continuously reduce an individual’s actions to his or her moral or legal conduct, since these usual ways of characterizing behavior can themselves become utterly reversed and confused. In her essay “Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship,” Arendt explains that the inhabitants of Nazi Germany “acted under conditions in which every moral act was illegal and every legal act was a crime.”14 Yet the Arendtian point about responsibility is more aptly captured by saying that “every moral act was illegal and every legal act was immoral.” The Nazis had so perverted the environment/world during the Third Reich that legality, defined as what was sanctioned by the state, had nothing whatsoever to do with moral action. The primary question in “Personal Responsibility” is “How am I to tell right from wrong, if the majority of my whole environment has prejudged the issue? Who am I to judge?”15 The Arendtian concept of personal responsibility is key to answering this question.
Many who chose to remain in Germany during the war years, and even some who participated in the state-sanctioned activities of the Holocaust, invoked the argument that another ought not be able to judge what happened if he or she was not present during such events. Arendt recounts this argument as something she was personally told after the Eichmann trial: “Most surprisingly, since after all we dealt with a trial whose result invariably was the passing of judgment, I was told that judging itself is wrong: no one can judge who had not been there.”16 Besides the fact that criminal trials would be very difficult to maintain if judgment could only come from eyewitnesses or solely those involved in criminal acts, there is something dishonest about attempts to exclude the activity of judgment altogether. Arendt summarizes this kind of bad faith in the following way: “Behind the unwillingness to judge lurks the suspicion that no one is a free agent, and hence the doubt that anyone is responsible or could be expected to answer for what he has done.”17 In other words, through the unwillingness to judge, the attempt is made to absolve everyone of responsibility since everyone is alike. Either all are imperfect and flawed, and hence all would perform exactly as I did given similar circumstances, or, conversely, no one could ever know what it is like to be in my shoes, so my perspective is all that matters in cases of judgment. Yet there were people who refused to participate in the same way as those around them; that is to say, it was possible to break from the automatism apparently required by their environment.
This is the sort of personal responsibility Arendt wants to highlight in this essay. The environment in Nazi Germany was such that one had to judge within a context where neither moral nor legal code could help. Neither the former, understood in terms of a moral formula or outcome calculus, nor the latter, understood as appealing to established rules or laws, is helpful when one’s whole environment has been corrupted. One is on the “front lines,” so to speak—“abandoned” in the existential sense—and, thus, left to decide alone, without legal or moral guidance. What made some people capable of right action? According to Arendt they possessed an ability to think in solitude, which means that they were not completely alone.18 She writes:
Their criterion, I think, was a different one: they asked themselves to what extent they would still be able to live in peace with themselves after having committed certain deeds; and they decided that it would be better to do nothing, not because the world would then be changed for the better, but simply because only on this condition could they go on living with themselves at all.19
This, for Arendt, is the human ability to think and judge: the ability not to allow one’s conscience to be drowned out by clichéd phrases or whatever other categories, rules, standards, norms, and so on tend to take the place of thinking.
Arendt is clear that this notion of personal responsibility cannot be concerned with political affairs due to the lack of a public realm. She notes, “I think we shall have to admit that there exist extreme situations in which responsibility for the world, which is primarily political, cannot be assumed because political responsibility always presupposes at least a minimum of political power.”20 Without a public realm where citizens have the freedom to appear and act before a plurality, political power is impossible. Yet there is still a kind of political concern that comes with personal responsibility: its interest is in the revival of the public realm, which would allow individuals to once again have that freedom to speak and to act among their peers, to appear before a plurality of witness, and to assume responsibility for the world—in other words, to assume political responsibility.
Political Responsibility
Personal responsibility’s forward-looking aspect, as well as the requirement to judge, is what it shares with political responsibility, the most distinctively Arendtian of these types. Like personal responsibility, political responsibility is about being responsible rather than holding accountable or giving an account of some past conduct. Also important is the scope of this responsibility and the authority that comes with its assumption: political responsibility must assume authority for the world by making worldly concerns (the public sphere) central, over and above self-interest. If there were a hybrid between personal and collective responsibility, that hybrid would be political.
In “The Crisis in Education,” Arendt explains that it is the task of the parent and teacher to assume responsibility for the world, to be a kind of “stand-in” or mediator between the child and the world. By assuming such responsibility, the educator joins herself with something that exceeds her own unique circumstance regardless of her personal feelings or reservations about it. Arendt explains the tension here, “The educators . . . stand in relation to the young as representatives of a world for which they must assume responsibility although they themselves did not make it, and even though they may, secretly or openly, wish it were other than it is.”21 Our own thoughts and wishes about the current or future status of the world are always somewhat out of sync with the world we actually inhabit, so taking responsibility for the world is a process of accepting our existence within it—admitting that we belong to it and that we must deal with it—while at the same time putting its welfare before our own self-interests.
How do I accomplish an assumption of responsibility for a “continuously changing world” that I did not make, yet find myself within? Arendt’s answer is to employ the faculty of judgment while exercising the virtue of courage. In other words, Arendt’s sense of political responsibility is a combination of contentious thinking—that is, the ability to listen to one’s own conscience and have a dialogue with one’s self—while simultaneously turning away from private self-interested concerns for the sake of making the world a better place, which is her definition of courage.
To understand courage in its Arendtian sense, it would be helpful to understand what is so fantastically wrong with the character that comes to be known as the “family man” in Arendt’s early 1945 essay, “Organized Guilt and Universal Responsibility.” She uses this figure to make the distinction between, on the one hand, a self-involved responsibility that orients inward (though this is not to be confused with the personal responsibility described earlier), and on the other hand, a politically involved responsibility that orients outward, toward the other. The “family man” is the caricature Eichmann comes to embody during Arendt’s time writing about his trial. Arendt argues that Heinrich Himmler was the mastermind behind Nazi Germany’s manipulation of the “family man,” the man concerned mostly with his own outward reputation, which could be maintained by keeping a good home life. Arendt calls Himmler a “bourgeois” who has “all the habits of a good paterfamilias who does not betray his wife and anxiously seeks to secure a decent future for his children.”22 As she sees it, Himmler was able to recognize that a population of ordinary citizens, just like himself, would be much too concerned with their own reputations and families (and the reproduction of themselves through those families) to notice or care that they were being turned into very efficient and effective mass murderers. Their concern was directed toward the private realm; they had absolutely no need to look beyond themselves, or to attempt the prevention of suffering beyond their immediate families. It was not that these ordinary German citizens were bloodthirsty or adventurous; on the contrary, they were as mundane and regular as the rest of us. For Arendt, what they lacked was an ability to reorient their concern away from the protection and maintenance of the life process. This shift in perspective might seem unimportant on the surface, yet it is absolutely crucial: “For this world of ours,” Arendt explains, “because it existed before us and is meant to outlast our lives in it, simply cannot afford to give primary concern to individual lives and the interests connected with them.”23 Political courage, which is lacking in the “family man,” is the virtue by which one is able to reorient one’s perspective from a concern for individual life and self-involved responsibilities toward a concern for the world.24
Taking into consideration the “minimum of political power” that Arendt mentions in her 1964 essay, one could certainly imagine a combination where the citizen becomes both part of a collective, that is, by taking responsibility for the world, while at the same time attending to the voice of conscience that allows an individual to have a dialogue with herself, that is, by exercising judgment. In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt provides examples of precisely those who do possess this kind of conscience and those who took personal responsibility. She remarks, “No one knows how many there were of them—perhaps a hundred thousand, perhaps many more, perhaps many fewer—for their voices were never heard.”25 But she also gives the example of the Scholls, “two students at Munich University, brother and sister, under the influence of their teacher Kurt Huber distributed the famous leaflets in which Hitler was finally called what he was—a ‘mass murderer.’”26 I agree with Iris Marion Young that this example is key to understanding Arendt’s thought of political responsibility: through the exercise of judgment, these students took responsibility for the world by appealing to, and appearing before, what was left of the public realm. And perhaps in least dispute is the courage they exhibited in their act of public defiance in the face of totalitarian circumstances.
As Young would say, the example of the Scholls is representative of political responsibility because “it is public, and it is aimed at inciting others to join the actors in public opposition to Hitler.”27 Or, we might say, its aim was to recover and ameliorate the public realm. In a desperate situation where there was little in the way of moral guidance and where the legal code had been thoroughly corrupted, they proved capable of exercising judgment. But perhaps even in less desperate times, the comfort provided by ready-made categories or prescribed rules—what Arendt would call “automatic processes”—also require constant criticism and challenge. The public realm requires constant maintenance. Taking political responsibility requires not only that we have courage to interrupt automatisms28 and exercise judgment but also that we orient our concern—at least from time to time—away from our own personal matters and toward the world. Arendt says, “Courage liberates men from their worry about life for the freedom of the world. Courage is indispensable because in politics not life but the world is at stake.”29 In this respect, courage, as a publicly oriented concern, along with judgment, as a forward-looking ability to think and criticize, comes to define the most Arendtian responsibility: political responsibility.
Notes
1 Arendt mainly deals with the concept of responsibility in three essays from 1945, 1964, and 1968, listed respectively: “Organized Guilt and Universal Responsibility,” in Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism (New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2011), 121–32; “Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship,” in Responsibility and Judgment (New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2009), 17–48; “Collective Responsibility,” in Responsibility and Judgment (New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2009), 147–58. She also explores the concept throughout her writings from the Eichmann trial, see Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (Penguin, 2006). Arendt deals with the notion of “responsibility for the world” in “The Crisis in Education,” in Between Past and Future; Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Viking Press, 1968), 170–93. Iris Marion Young has also explored Arendt’s concept of responsibility in her chapter “Guilt Versus Responsibility: A Reading and Partial Critique of Hannah Arendt,” in Responsibility for Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 75–94. However, Young does not engage with the 1964 “Personal Responsibility” essay, which is certainly key to understanding both Arendt’s notion of personal responsibility and her notion of political responsibility.
2 A word of caution: Arendt, despite numerous seemingly clear distinctions, is sometimes frustratingly inconsistent in her association of various terms. The problem is that sometimes Arendt will use the phrase “collective responsibility” interchangeably with “political responsibility.” But as I will argue in this essay, these concepts are very different.
3 Arendt, “Collective Responsibility,” 149.
4 Hannah Arendt and Ronald Beiner, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1989), 41.
5 Arendt never draws a sharp distinction between accountability and responsibility, yet there is a distinction to be made. Arendt usually speaks in terms of accountability when she is referring to a temporally past-oriented metaphysical status. We can still think of responsibility in terms of accountability, but then it is always the kind of responsibility that looks backward, toward what has already taken place. Therefore, the term accountability is helpful when considering definitions of collective, legal, and moral responsibility, but not so helpful when describing more future-oriented kinds such as personal and political responsibility.
6 Arendt, “Collective Responsibility,” 149.
7 Ibid., 150.
8 Also see The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1973), 235–36, where Arendt makes an observation, then a claim: “The appeal of tribal isolation and master race ambitions was partly due to an instinctive feeling that mankind, whether a religious or humanistic ideal, implies a common sharing of responsibility . . . men must assume responsibility for all crimes committed by men, and . . . eventually all nations will be forced to answer for the evil committed by all others. Tribalism and racism are the very realistic, if very destructive, ways of escaping this predicament of common responsibility.” In other words, Arendt is claiming that if mankind cannot acknowledge any distinction between guilt and responsibility—and refuses to recognize the collective to which it belongs—tribalism and racism become natural and logical havens where xenophobic sentiments become customary and destructive.
9 Arendt, “Collective Responsibility,” 148.
10 Ibid., 151.
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid., 153.
13 Arendt explicitly draws the comparison when she says, “Legal and moral standards have one very important thing in common—they always relate to the person and what the person has done.” Ibid., 148.
14 Arendt, “Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship,” 41.
15 Ibid., 18.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid., 19.
18 See, for example, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 476. Where Arendt makes the distinction between solitude and loneliness. The ability to “keep myself company” happens when I am in solitude, whereas loneliness describes a situation of utter singularity, when I am completely alone. Also see The Life of the Mind (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 185.
19 Arendt, “Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship,” 44.
20 Ibid., 45. Arendt is no doubt also thinking about stateless persons in this passage. She also remarks in Origins, “They were and appeared to be nothing but human beings whose ve ry innocence—from every point of view, and especially that of the persecuting governments—was their greatest misfortune. Innocence, in the sense of complete lack of responsibility, was the mark of their rightlessness as it was the seal of their loss of political status” Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 295.
21 Arendt, “The Crisis in Education,” 186.
22 Arendt, “Organized Guilt and Universal Responsibility,” 128.
23 Arendt, “What Is Freedom?,” in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought, 155.
24 In The Human Condition, while speaking of the ancient Greek notion of this virtue, Arendt notes, “To leave the household, originally in order to embark upon some adventure and glorious enterprise and later simply to devote one’s life to the affairs of the city, demanded courage because only in the household was one primarily concerned with one’s own life and survival. Whoever entered the political realm had first to be ready to risk his life, and too great a love for life obstructed freedom, was a sure sign of slavishness. Courage therefore became the political virtue par excellence, and only those men who possessed it could be admitted to a fellowship that was political in content and purpose and thereby transcended the mere togetherness imposed on all—slaves, barbarians, and Greeks alike—through the urgencies of life.” Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd ed. (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2013), 36.
25 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 103.
26 Ibid., 104.
27 Young, “Guilt versus Responsibility,” 90.
28 See Arendt, “What Is Freedom?,” 166–69.
29 Ibid., 155.