Arendt and Kant’s Moral Philosophy
Robert Burch
In a crucial endnote to volume one of The Life of the Mind, Thinking, Arendt states, “My chief reservations about Kant’s philosophy concern precisely his moral philosophy.”1 Yet Eric Weil, from whom Arendt gains her most basic insight into Kant’s philosophy in general—that “the opposition knowing . . . and thinking . . . is fundamental for understanding Kantian thought,”2 an insight that Arendt herself acknowledges is “crucial” to her own “enterprise” in The Life of the Mind 3 —correctly argues that, for Kant, “philosophy is moral in its essence, founded on morality and revealing this foundation to consciousness.”4 Thus, in Arendt’s thinking about Kant’s moral philosophy as a part of her own enterprise, there is a fundamental, perhaps unresolvable, tension.
Arendt comments on Kant’s moral philosophy in various contexts: in archived notes for courses on moral issues that she offered in the mid-1960s and the early 1970s—“Kant’s Moral Philosophy” (1964), “Some Questions of Moral Philosophy” (1965), “Basic Moral Propositions” (1966), and “Thinking and Moral Considerations” (1971); in the four essays included in the section “Responsibility” in Responsibility and Judgement (2003), of which the main essay, “Some Questions of Moral Philosophy,” is a posthumously edited version of the lecture notes from the 1965 course of that name, with any “significant variants of her thought” from “Basic Moral Propositions” being “incorporated in the endnotes”;5 in notes on the topic that Arendt kept in her Denktagebuch;6 and in taking up Eichmann’s fantastical claim to have “lived his whole life according to . . . a Kantian definition of duty,” tangentially in her report on the Eichmann trial.7
In this chapter, it is not possible to undertake a genuine Kant-Arendt “confrontation” on the essence of morality, nor is it possible to sort out fairly the agreements and differences between them on the topic. Their respective approaches to morality—their assumptions, the sense of their questioning, their basic casts of mind, and the “conclusions” they draw—are ostensibly quite different. It is clear that Arendt does not take Kant’s moral teaching seriously on its own terms, that is to say, as a systematic philosophical attempt by Kant to answer the philosophical questions about morality that Kant poses for himself in the way that he poses them. By and large, she treats Kant’s moral philosophy only in order to expose the “mistakes” she presumes to find in it as a means of clarifying her own views by way of contrast. But likewise, serious Kantians are not apt to see much, if anything, in Arendt’s reading, since both in its spirit and in its letter it reprises a stock formalist critique that no sympathetic reader of Kant takes seriously. Perhaps, then, the best way to approach this difference would be to sketch its limits, summarizing the essentials of Kant’s moral philosophy on his own terms, and then to review the essentials of Arendt’s critical response in order thereby to sort out what is at stake in the opposition, if only thereby to get clearer about the trajectory of Arendt’s thinking.
Kantian Moral Agency
For Kant, “morality is . . . the relation of action to the autonomy of the will,”8 the ultimate sense of which is the realization of our consummate human vocation. That vocation is the “endeavour to produce and to further the highest good in the world,” as a duty enjoined by the categorical imperative.9 The categorical imperative itself is the supreme principle of morality as “a law by which reason directly determines the will.”10 As such, it has a threefold character. It is the a priori principle that determines universally whatever can count as a duty so as to define in principle the possible range of worldly moral action to strictly moral ends for all finite rational beings—that is, for all imperfect rational agents who can represent the good to themselves as an imperative and whose moral necessitation is obligation. The categorical imperative is also the transcendental condition of the possibility of moral experience, and thereby the condition for any distinctively moral questions to arise for us in the first place. And it is the principle of our unconditioned self-worth as the principle in terms of which we actualize both in ourselves and in relation in principle to every other finite rational being the inherent worth of our rational nature.
Kant derives the principle “analytically” from the common rational understanding of morality implicit in moral experience as a function of our universal rational nature. That there is moral experience is not itself in question, since it is already presupposed in any and all moral questions that could be asked. Instead, the issue is how moral experience is possible, and thus how as finite rational agents our worldly participation in moral being can be actual. For there to be moral experience, finite rational agents must distinguish a moral “ought” from all pragmatic needs and wants, and thus from all calculation of means to heteronomous ends. For there to be such a distinction, there must be something that is possible to think of as an unconditioned good. Only a good will is thinkable as an unconditioned good. A good will is a will that acts autonomously (i.e., it gives itself a law from its own rational nature) in accord with duty for the sake of duty. The principle of such action is the categorical imperative. “There is only one categorical imperative and it is this: act only according to that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it be a universal law.”11
Yet, Kant’s analytic conclusion is hypothetical: if there is morality, then the categorical imperative is its principle. However, the “analysis” alone does not insure that “morality is no mere phantom of the brain.”12 To dispel that possibility, Kant has to establish the truth of the categorical imperative itself as a synthetic principle known a priori in moral experience itself. It is known, however, not first and foremost as a theoretical principle of detached moral speculation in which it would be “thought abstractly in its universal form,” but as the principle of moral action known as such by agents in medias res who, compelled to choose among competing worldly ends, determine themselves to act morally according to the representation of a law, as if that law “were to become through one’s will a universal law of nature.”13 It is as a finite rational agent compelled to act in the world that I know with certainty that I am morally obligated, without the need for “science or philosophy” to instruct me.14 This certainty is the certainty of a truth. Moreover, were I to lack this moral knowledge as an agent in the world, neither science nor philosophy nor any theoretical perspective alone could provide it. In knowing that I am obligated, I also know that I am free. Obligation is the ratio cognoscendi of freedom; freedom is the ratio essendi of obligation.15 A complete science of knowledge by which we could know the nature of freedom within the totality of being in itself is beyond finite understanding. Nevertheless, in demonstrating the possibility of a finite freedom by way of an encompassing overview of the whole structure of our finite experience, Kant is able to assert philosophically as true for finite rational beings what the common rational understanding of rational agents knows with subjective certainty to be true in moral experience itself, namely, not only the actuality of obligation but also the actuality of freedom.
Although Kant legitimates the categorical imperative itself in this way, he has also to show that the conditions exist—God and immortality—by virtue of which we can make sense of the possible fulfillment of the obligation implied in the categorical imperative to realize the highest good as our consummate human vocation. For as Kant argues, we cannot be obligated to realize the highest good unless we can make sense of how in principle we could be able to realize it. However, what as a philosopher Kant shows about God and immortality is not a matter of theoretical knowing at all, nor is it a matter of objectively verified cognitions (Erkenntnisse) nor of subjectively justified theoretical beliefs (Glauben) about God and immortality as objects of metaphysical speculation; rather, it is a matter of practical belief (Glaube) in the sheer fact of God and immortality as implicit in the structure of finite moral experience and requisite to its meaning. Thereby, “the ideas of God and immortality gain objective reality and legitimacy and indeed subjective necessity (as a need of pure reason).” But “reason in its theoretical knowledge is not thereby extended.”16 The Kantian philosopher does no more and no less than explicate and legitimate a moral reality in which he or she is in touch, not theoretically as a philosopher in the study, but practically as a moral agent in life.
Arendt and the “Basic Mistake” of Kant
According to Arendt, Kant’s moral philosophy involves the “basic mistake” (Grundfehler) of presuming to lay the ground of morality simply in the rational self-consistency of the individual will as pure practical reason.17 In Arendt’s view, this “mistake” sets in stark opposition Kant’s ethics as strictly an “ethics of principle” (Gesinnungsethik) with all “ethics of responsibility” (Verantwortungsethik). As Arendt interprets this opposition, the former ethics excludes a role for judgment in deciding moral action and “leaves the outcome wholly out of account, when a particular action is concerned,”18 whereas the latter takes account of “the course of the world” and, in doing so, of our being in the world as essentially a being with others.19
It is certainly Kant’s explicit thesis that the will is a matter of rational self-determination, “the capacity to act according to the representation of laws, that is, according to principles.”20 Kant further argues that an action with distinctive moral worth is possible only if there is a lawful self-determination of the will to action other than according to the representation of hypothetical imperatives as principles serving the willful satisfaction of one’s own inclinations. In other words, if there is morality, “pure reason alone must itself be practical,” and so “must be able to determine the will by the mere form of the practical rule.”21 Now, Arendt interprets this thesis to mean that according to Kant, “one can find the good only through a kind of thinking,” and yet for that very same reason, “the capacity to judge . . . plays no role.”22 Moreover, the kind of thinking involved would be a matter simply of the self-consistency of practical reason that “needs presuppose only itself” in determining categorically the practical law of its own autonomous self-determination.23 Thus, according to Arendt, “the validity of the categorical imperative is derived from ‘thinking in agreement with the self,’ and reason as the giver of laws does not presuppose other persons but only a self that is not in contradiction with itself.”24
On Arendt’s reading then, the supreme principle of morality as a practical law of the will “refers only to the will” itself as pure practical reason, “irrespective of what is attained by its causality.”25 In that case, willing the unconditioned good would be a matter of rational self-consistency separate from actually bringing about the unconditioned good in the world by means of worldly action. Likewise, in doing one’s duty for duty’s sake out of respect for the law, one has in effect no direct duty to others, but only to oneself in terms of rational, lawful self-consistency. Accordingly, the moral standard is “not a matter of concern with the other but with the self” as a matter of “self-respect.”26 Hence Kant “puts duties man [sic] has to himself ahead of duties to others,” so as to stand “in curious contradiction to what we usually understand by moral behaviour.” Thus, Arendt comments, “It is most striking that in the Critique of Practical Reason and in Kant’s other moral writings the so-called ‘fellow-man’ [Mitmenschen] is scarcely mentioned. It is really only about the self and reason functioning in isolation [in der Einsamkeit].”27
If it were simply a matter of thinking consistently with oneself in isolation, Kantian morality would be, as Arendt says, “inviolable.”28 Yet, insofar as it would leave out of account all worldly outcomes and all relation to others, and therefore all responsibility for our being in the world with others, its inviolability would be the inviolability of an empty tautology. For this reason, Arendt declares Kant’s ethics to be “the morality of impotence [Moral der Ohnmacht],” since it presumes to hold sway in principle without concern for worldly effects. She likewise regards it as “the perfect formula for the powerless individual,”29 since according to it, impotence in terms of worldly effects would need no moral excuse or exculpation, since on Arendt’s reading, no worldly responsibility or effects are entailed by the categorical imperative itself in the first place. In Arendt’s own view, however, “responsibility for the world . . . is primarily political” and “always presupposes at least a minimum of political power.”30 In that respect, “impotence or complete powerlessness” would be “a valid excuse” politically for failing in one’s “worldly” responsibility, whereas on Arendt’s reading of Kant it would be morally irrelevant, since on that reading thinking in agreement with itself is the only moral criterion and incentive.
Kantians would be quick to point out the apparent infelicities in this interpretation. Arendt abstracts from Kant’s philosophical grounding of morality the aspect of formal universality and self-consistency, and presents this necessary condition of determining in principle what morally one ought to do as if it were for Kant himself in its sheer formalism the sufficient condition of worldly moral action. Yet, for Kant, the categorical imperative tells us what counts universally and unconditionally as a duty for all finite rational beings; it does not provide an exact calculus that tells us in all actual circumstances what to do, morally, in the world. Thus, Arendt not only merely overlooks (as do many) but also flatly denies the role that Kant himself explicitly ascribes to “anthropology” and the “power of judgement sharpened by experience” in deciding what, under the universal purview of the categorical imperative, one ought to do in particular concrete human situations.31 Although more subtle than most, Arendt in effect repeats against Kant the superficial charge of formalism, which is an account of Kant that, ironically, Arendt herself hyperbolically praises,32 and Karl Jaspers astutely sets aside as misdirected.33 By focusing exclusively on the “form” of the categorical imperative, “which consists in universality,” Arendt omits consideration of both its “matter or end” and its “complete determination”—these latter having to do with our treatment of others and our moral responsibility for the world.34 In this way, Arendt effectively reduces the Kantian maxims leading to “practical wisdom” to their merely negative and logical form, and thereby excludes the central positive maxim: “to think oneself . . . in the place of every other person,” a maxim that can become an “unalterable command,” not through the political vicissitudes of our being with others, but only through its relation to the categorical imperative.35 In the end then, Arendt has next to nothing to say about what for Kant is our morally derived human vocation, to wit, the “duty” implied in the categorical imperative “to endeavour to produce and to further the highest good in the world.”36
In this way, Arendt tends to interpret the finite worldly reality of the good will as Kant characterizes it in terms of the pure unconditioned self-activity of practical reason in itself beyond the world of experience. In other words, she understands the good will “in the world” in terms of the idea of the holy will “beyond the world,” taking the latter as paradigmatic of the good will in general.37 But this approach is misleading. The idea of the holy will is what in Kant’s theoretical philosophy he calls an ens rationis, “a concept without an object, like noumena, which cannot be counted among possibilities.”38 For Kant then, the idea of the holy will is a thinkable but unknowable limiting concept, a practical idea as a model to which the finite will can only endlessly approximate.39 In contrast, Arendt treats the idea of the holy will as if were something like a Platonic eidos in terms of which all instances of the good will can both be and be known. But an actual good will in the world only makes sense in terms of duty, and duty is the objective necessity of an action from obligation; and “obligation cannot be attributed to a holy will.”40
Dismantling the Tradition of Moral Philosophy
In Arendt’s defense, however, she does not so much engage Kant’s moral teaching on its own terms as attempt to “dismantle” the tradition of moral philosophy to which it belongs.41 She notes passim some essential features of this tradition.42 It searches out universal and necessary moral truth that transcends all “customs or manners or habits” and all contingent political arrangements set up to serve our being with others.43 Thus, although it may grant that moral awareness and moral being come about initially only under conditions of sociability, it holds that these conditions themselves are accidental to the principle of morality itself. Only in that way does morality truly permit resistance to corrupt society, even where the corruption degrades moral conscience generally and reduces all questions of autonomy to questions of a self-serving heteronomy. In searching for moral truth, moral philosophy does not teach anything essentially new; rather it only explicates and legitimates moral truth that is always already immanent in all moral experience and all moral matters, however vaguely or confusedly these matters may happen to be understood by individuals or societies as a whole.44 In some sense, one always already knows one’s duty. The tradition of moral philosophy locates morality in the integrity of “the individual in his singularity”45 as a matter of one’s being at one with oneself in immanent participation in the unconditioned transcendent good.
In Arendt’s dismantling, the philosophical question of universal moral truth gives way to the question of the effective meaning of morality as this meaning is constituted and holds sway, experientially, in and through our ongoing being with others. This shift accords with etymology. Derived from the Greek word, ethos, ethics originally meant customs and habits,46 those that were conventionally established as the basic organization that defined a communal life and practice, and thus by extension, the appropriate conduct, manners, and behavior that such life and practice prescribed for “proper” members of the particular community. In this original sense then, “ethics and politics [were] the same.”47 In direct challenge to the tradition of moral philosophy, Arendt recalls this sameness with seeming approval. “Our own experiences,” she writes, “seem to affirm that the original names of these matters (mores and ethos), which imply that they are just manners, customs and habits, may in a sense be more adequate than philosophers have thought.”48 They would be more adequate, presumably, in the wake of the German experience wherein “morality collapsed into a mere set of mores—manners, customs, conventions to be changed at will—not with criminals, but with ordinary people.”49 In other words, “we witnessed the total collapse of a ‘moral’ order not once but twice,” not only in the collapse that marked the Third Reich itself but also in the “sudden return to ‘normality.’”
This shift in meaning has three related implications. Although politics and ethics are essential human matters, it is “not Man [sic], but men [sic] [who] inhabit this planet.”50 Thus, insofar as “plurality is one of the basic existential conditions of human life on earth,”51 human being is essentially a being with others. In that measure, the ethical is derivative of the political, and not vice versa. Yet, this shift in meaning also implies that the philosophical search for universal and necessary truth is not itself an essential possibility of our human nature that, once actualized under contingent conditions, can never simply be given up.52 Rather, it implies that philosophy, stricto sensu, is just one contingent way of ordering reality in thought to make comprehensive sense of our being in the world. It is a way of thinking then to which Arendt herself can claim, tout bonnement, to “have said final farewell.”53
Nevertheless, Arendt’s dismantling cannot without formal dialectical self-contradiction simply reverse the tradition of moral philosophy so as to reduce knowledge (epistēmē) of universal moral truth to the contingent play of particular customs, habits, and conventions (doxai). Rather, her thinking must move on a different level. The task is no longer, as it was for Kant, “to search out and establish the supreme principle of morality” so as to explicate and legitimate our knowledge of universal moral truth that grounds in principle all duty and our human worldly vocation.54 Instead, on the basis of our changing collective experience as the subject-matter proper of thought,55 Arendt’s task is to think through the most “expansive” (erweiterten) horizon of meaning as the proper context for our current willing and judging through which then our human dignity and our being with others can be responsibly realized and carried forward.
As it concerns the tradition of moral philosophy, Arendt’s “dismantling process” has both a positive and a negative aspect.56 The negative aspect is a matter of pointing out what, since at least the middle of the last century, our collective experience seems to have confirmed, to wit, that the distinction between epistēmē and doxa that traditionally served as the unshakable cornerstone of the concept of moral truth in contrast to the vagaries of changing parochial positions and opinions, and along with it the distinction of autonomy and heteronomy upon which Kant so unwaveringly insists, no longer serve as the effective ruling moral principle of what is going on in the world (even though, here and there, stalwart individual exceptions do exist57 ). This experience seems also to confirm for Arendt that these crucial distinctions cannot be effectively renewed as the basis of moral thinking and acting inter homines. And yet, in the event, what has hitherto been identified as unshakable moral truth in its threefold sense (i.e., of that which makes moral experience universally possible, what determines the unconditioned good as such, and what defines our human vocation) is now open to egregious misrepresentation. Eichmann’s appeal to the categorical imperative is a flagrant case in point.
On Eichmann’s interpretation, the categorical imperative becomes explicitly a principle “for the household use of the little man,” but then just as the “little man” understands it, and so therefore it is subject to all the resentments, animosities and bigotries that can afflict a parochial, narrow-minded mentality.58 Subject to that sort of mentality, what Kant presents as the supreme principle of morality devolves in the Third Reich into the Führerprinzip of the little man. Hitler’s personal lawyer, Hans Frank, reformulated the categorical imperative for the Third Reich in just this way, a way that “Eichmann might have known,” and that seems to capture Eichmann’s sense of it: “Act in such a way that the Führer, if he knew your action, would approve it.” Yet, the Führer’s approval is not itself a matter of an unchanging moral principle based on universal reason, but of the unprincipled vagaries of the will of the Führer himself to suit his own arbitrary ends. Yet, as Arendt notes, this interpretation of the categorical imperative is subject to a peculiar Germanic twist, one that reduces autonomy to one’s heteronomous adherence to the will of another in such a way that “law-abiding means not merely to obey the law but to act as though one were the legislator of the laws one obeys.”59 That twist serves to transform one’s obedience into a self-deceptive illusion of autonomy, in which case, “freedom is slavery” after all.
The positive moment of Arendt’s dismantling of the tradition of moral philosophy is more tentative. She does not seek, theoretically, to reconnect the broken thread of that tradition by taking up again its now abandoned archē, namely, the epistēmē and doxa distinction as the cornerstone of the very concept of moral truth. Instead, she seeks, as it were, to “pave anew the path of [moral] thought,”60 by prizing loose from the past “thought fragments” that can now take on a representative significance before and beyond the entrenched distinctions—epistēmē and doxa, meaning and truth, the moral and the political—that have, traditionally, informed all metaphysics of morals. The appropriation of these thought fragments opens the way to rethinking of the whole moral problématique as preeminently a political matter.
Yet, in relation specifically to Kant’s moral philosophy, this new path of thinking is an ambiguous achievement. On the one hand, it can be argued that it does make more perspicuous the connection specifically between thoughtlessness and evil than does Kant’s moral philosophy, and that in terms of an account of the two-in-one as a matter of thoughtfulness and accountability, it shows better than does Kant the structure of a responsible conscience in the individual “coming home” from the public world. Yet, on the other hand, having abandoned the “causal” categories of philosophy altogether, Arendt’s new path reveals somewhat less about “why” in principle each individual thoughtless person might be thoughtless as a matter of a human, all-too-human disposition than does Kant about why we might abandon autonomy for heteronomy and even make the occasional deviation from the moral law into a maxim of the will. Moreover, in the context of our present “fragmented” experience, which seems to show no promise of anything like a more “expansive” understanding, but only the threat of a further entrenchment and fragmentation of antagonistic partisan extremes, Arendt’s new path rules out any Kantian appeal to a principled development of personal character as a thoughtful individual stand one might take in response to the sort of resolute narrow-mindedness that constitutes generally our current reality. Moreover, in her quest for meaning over knowledge of truth, she also does not offer anything like a “strategy” for cultivating and carrying forward the goal of an enlarged mentality in the public political world of our being with others. In this, as in all such fundamental matters, we need to work things out for ourselves, but now in the face of a basic paradox: the fundamental condition of the realization of an enlarged mentality in the face of current fragmentation and antagonism is itself a disposition to an enlarged mentality, which everything in our worldly experience seems now to work against.
Notes
1 Hannah Arendt, Life of the Mind, Thinking Vol.1 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 236–37, n. 83.
2 Eric Weil, Problèmes Kantiens, 2nd ed. (Paris. Libraire Philosophique, J. Vrin. 1970), 112, n. 2; cf. Arendt, Thinking.
3 Arendt, Thinking, 13.
4 Eric Weil, Préface à Gerhard Krüger, Critique et morale chez Kant, trans. M. Regneir (Paris: Beauchesne et Ses Fils, 1961), 8.
5 Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2003), xxxiii.
6 Hannah Arendt, Denktagebuch 1950–1973 (Munich: Piper, 2003), passim.
7 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (New York: Viking Press, 1963), 135–37.
8 Immanuel Kant, Kants Gesammelte Schriften (Berlin: Prussian Academy, 1902–55), IV:439.
9 Ibid., V:126.
10 Ibid., 132.
11 Ibid., IV:421.
12 Ibid., IV:445; cf. Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment, 277, n. 9.
13 Ibid., 421; cf. 403–4, 412. Cf. Weil, Préface à Gerhard Krüger, 8. “Philosophy in Kant’s eyes is the affair of human beings in life, not that of intellectuals [savants] and specialists . . . the affair of the world of the living, not of the study [cabinet].”
14 Ibid., 404.
15 Kant, Kants Gesammelte Schriften, V:5n.
16 Ibid., 4–5.
17 Arendt, Denktagebuch 1950–1973, II:794, 820.
18 Ibid., 820; cf. Kant, Kants Gesammelte Schriften, VI:7n.
19 Arendt, Denktagebuch 1950–1973, II:822.
20 Kant, Kants Gesammelte Schriften, IV:412.
21 Ibid., V:24.
22 Arendt, Denktagebuch 1950–1973, II:794.
23 Ibid., 820; cf. Kant, Kants Gesammelte Schriften, V:21.
24 Hannah Arendt, The Promise of Politics, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2005), 169.
25 Arendt, Denktagebuch 1950–1973, II:820.
26 Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment, 67.
27 Arendt, Denktagebuch 1950–1973, II:818.
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid., II:820.
30 Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment, 45.
31 Ibid., 70, Arendt, Denktagebuch 1950–1973, II:794; cf. Kant, Kants Gesammelte Schriften, IV:411, 389.
32 Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers, Correspondence: 1926–1969, ed. Lotte Kohler and Hans Saner, trans. Ro bert and Rita Kimber (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992), 317.
33 Karl Jaspers, Die Grossen Philosophen (Munich: Piper, 1957), 481–501, esp. 488–89.
34 Kant, Kants Gesammelte Schriften, IV:436.
35 Ibid., VII:200, 228–29.
36 Ibid., V:126.
37 Ibid., IV:393.
38 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 382 (B347).
39 Kant, Kants Gesammelte Schriften, V:32.
40 Ibid., IV:439.
41 Arendt, Thinking, 212; cf. Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment, 161ff.
42 Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment, passim.
43 Ibid., 75, 101ff.
44 Ibid., 75; cf. Kant, Kants Gesammelte Schriften, IV:404.
45 Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment, 97.
46 Hannah Arendt, The Hannah Arendt Papers at the Library of Congress. Courses, The University of Chicago: “Some Questions of Moral Philosophy,” lectures, 1965 (1 of 2 folders) (Series: Subject File, 1949–1975, n.d.), 024586; Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment, 50, 75.
47 Hannah Arendt, The Hannah Arendt Papers at the Library of Congress. Courses—The University of Chicago, Chicago, IL—“Kant’s Moral Philosophy,” seminar, 1964 (Series: Subject File, 1949–1975, n.d.), 032346; Hannah A rendt, The Hannah Arendt Papers at the Library of Congress. Courses—The University of Chicago, Chicago, IL—“Basic Moral Propositions,” lectures, 1966 (Series: Subject File, 1949–1975, n.d.), 024534.
48 Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment, 75.
49 Ibid., 54.
50 Arendt, Thinking, 19.
51 Ibid., 74.
52 Cf. Kant, Kants Gesammelte Schriften, IV:367.
53 Hannah Arendt, Ich will verstehen: Selbstauskünfte zu Leben und Werk, hrsg., Ursula Ludz (Munich: Piper, 1996), 46.
54 Kant, Kants Gesammelte Schriften, IV:392.
55 Hannah Arendt, “On Hannah Arendt,” in Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the Public World, ed. Melvyn A. Hill (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979), 308.
56 Cf. Arendt, Thinking, 212.
57 Cf. e.g., Hans Jonas. “When in 1945 I reentered vanquished Germany as a member of the Jewish Brigade in the British Army, I had to decide whom of my former philosophy teachers I could in good conscience visit, and whom not . . . . The ‘yes’ included . . . a rather narrow traditionalist of a Kantian persuasion, who meant little to me philosophically but of whose record in those dark years I heard admirable things. When I did visit him and congratulated him on the courage of his principled stand, he said a memorable thing: ‘Jonas,’ he said, ‘I tell you this: Without Kant’s teaching I could not have done it.’ Here was a limited man, but sustained in an honorable course of action by the moral force of an outmoded philosophy.” (“Contemporary Problems in Ethics from a Jewish Perspective,” in Judaism and Ethics, ed. Daniel J. Silver [New York: KTAV Publishing House, 1970], 31.) It is significant that as a matter of “good conscience,” Jonas decided not to visit his “main teacher,” Martin Heidegger.
58 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 136–37.
59 Ibid., 137.
60 Arendt, Thinking, 210.