Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt found hope in the most unlikely fact: that human beings are born. Every birth, she observed, is the arrival of someone who has never existed before, a genuine newcomer, capable of doing what no one could have predicted, of beginning something that was not already written in the chain of causes. She called this the principle of natality, and she made it, astonishingly, the foundation of a whole political philosophy. Most thinkers who confronted the horrors of her century, and Arendt confronted the worst of them, having fled the Nazis and watched a civilization collapse into the camps, came away with some version of despair, some sense that history is an iron process grinding toward its end. Arendt drew the opposite conclusion. Because new people are constantly being born, she insisted, the human world is never finished, never fully determined; at any moment, someone may step forward and begin something new, interrupt the automatic processes of nature and habit and history with a free act. This power to begin is what she meant by freedom, and it is not, for Arendt, a feeling inside us or a property of the will; it is something we do out in the world, in public, among other people, when we act. To be free, for Arendt, is to act, to start a new chain of events whose end no one can foresee, and the capacity for it is reborn with every human being who enters the world.

Labor, work, and the deed. To see what Arendt meant by action, and why she thought the modern world was losing it, you have to follow a distinction she drew at the core of The Human Condition, among three things we do. There is labor, the endless, repetitive toil that keeps us biologically alive, the cooking and cleaning and earning that is consumed as fast as it is done and leaves nothing behind. There is work, the making of durable things, the building of a lasting human world of tables and houses and books and tools that outlives its makers and gives our lives a stable home. And there is action, the highest and most fragile of the three: the things we do and say in the presence of other people, in public, that disclose who we uniquely are and that begin something new in the world. Action depends on plurality, on the basic fact, which Arendt thought politics is entirely about, that the earth is inhabited not by Man in the abstract but by men, by countless distinct, irreplaceable individuals, each seeing the world from a place no one else occupies. When such people come together as equals to speak and deliberate and act, something precious and rare happens: a public space of freedom opens up. And this, Arendt warned, is exactly what the modern age is destroying, by reducing everything to labor, to the economic, to production and consumption and the management of a "society of jobholders," until the room for genuine action, for politics in her exalted sense, shrinks toward nothing. We are in danger, she thought, of forgetting how to act at all.

The factory of the superfluous. Arendt came to all of this by way of catastrophe, by trying to understand the thing that had driven her from her home and murdered her people: totalitarianism. Her great insight was that the Nazi and Soviet regimes were not just old-fashioned tyranny grown larger; they were something new under the sun, a form of horror the world had never seen. An old tyrant wants obedience; he leaves you alone if you keep quiet. Totalitarianism wants something far deeper, total domination, the remaking of human nature itself, the elimination not just of resistance but of the very capacity for spontaneous action that makes us human. It works, Arendt saw, by first making people lonely, atomizing them, destroying the public spaces where they might come together and the private bonds that might shelter them, until each person stands isolated and afraid, with nothing to lean on but the all-explaining ideology and the ever-present terror. And its final, most chilling aim, pursued in the camps, was to render human beings superfluous, to strip away everything that made them distinct and spontaneous and to reduce them to interchangeable, expendable specimens, as if to prove that nothing about a person, not their individuality, not their dignity, not their very existence, is necessary or irreplaceable. Totalitarianism was, for Arendt, an assault on plurality and natality themselves, on the human capacity to be distinct and to begin, and understanding it became the dark ground from which her whole defense of freedom and action grew.

The evil that did not think. Then, in 1961, Arendt went to Jerusalem to watch one of the architects of that horror stand trial, and what she saw there produced the most famous and most misunderstood phrase of her career. She had expected a monster, some figure of demonic, towering wickedness equal to his crimes. Instead she found Adolf Eichmann, the bureaucrat who had organized the transport of millions to the camps, to be something far more disturbing: a shallow, mediocre, almost comic figure, a careerist who spoke in clichés and stock phrases, who seemed unable to think an original thought or to see the world from any standpoint but his own advancement, who insisted he had only been doing his job and following orders, and who appeared genuinely not to have grasped, in any deep way, the enormity of what he had done. Arendt called this "the banality of evil," and she did not mean, as furious critics charged, that the evil was small or excusable, or that Eichmann was innocent. She meant something more terrifying: that history's greatest crime had been carried out, in large part, not by sadistic demons but by thoughtless ordinary men, men who never stopped to think about what they were doing, who hid from the meaning of their own actions inside their roles and their orders and the comfortable language everyone around them used. Evil on this scale, she came to believe, can spring not from monstrous depth but from a kind of shallowness, from the simple, fatal refusal or inability to think. It was a deeply unwelcome discovery, and it cost her dearly; the controversy savaged her for years. But it pointed at something we cannot afford to forget: that the capacity to commit atrocity may lie not in a special class of monsters but in the ordinary person who has stopped thinking.

The thinking that defends us. If thoughtlessness can make evil possible, Arendt reasoned in her final years, then thinking itself must be a kind of moral defense, and she turned, at the end, to ask what thinking really is. Her answer reaches back to Socrates. To think, she said, is to carry on a silent dialogue with yourself, to become "two-in-one," a questioner and an answerer in the privacy of your own mind, holding yourself to account, refusing to let your beliefs and your actions go unexamined. The person who thinks in this way can never quite become an Eichmann, because they cannot escape the inner companion who keeps asking whether what they are doing is right; they would have to live, afterward, with a self that had witnessed the deed. This is why Socrates would rather suffer wrong than do it, Arendt notes: a wrongdoer must share his life with the worst of company, himself. And alongside thinking she set judging, the even rarer capacity to face a particular situation that no rule quite fits and to judge it well, without simply reaching for a ready-made principle to hide behind. Good judgment, she thought, drawing on Kant, requires an "enlarged mentality," the effort to consider a question from the standpoints of all the others it touches, to think not just for yourself but in the place of everyone. In an age of ideologies that hand you your conclusions and bureaucracies that ask only obedience, Arendt's late message is quietly radical: that the homeliest of activities, stopping to think for yourself, refusing the cliché, judging each case on its own terms, is not a luxury but the last and most important line of defense against the descent into horror.

In dark times. The room reads Arendt from the wider record, since her work remains under copyright, and the chat says so. She was a refugee twice over, stripped of her homeland and her language and forced to rebuild a life and a body of thought in a new world and a new tongue, and she insisted ever after that she was not really a "philosopher" at all but a political thinker, suspicious of the philosophers' ancient temptation to retreat from the messy plural world of human affairs into the lonely contemplation of eternal truths. Her teacher and onetime lover Heidegger had been such a philosopher, and had disgraced himself by embracing the Nazis; Arendt never fully forgave him and never fully let him go, and the contrast between the great solitary thinker who failed the political test and the refugee who made the public world her great theme is one of the most charged in modern intellectual life. She left us no system, and she was wrong about some things and savaged for others. But she gave the twentieth century, and ours, a handful of ideas it cannot do without: that politics, at its best, is the shared space where free and distinct people act together; that every human birth is a fresh promise that the world can be begun anew; that the gravest evil can wear the most ordinary face; and that the simple act of thinking, of refusing to stop asking whether what we do is right, may be the truest thing standing between us and the abyss. In dark times, she believed, this is not nothing. It may be everything.