Hannah Arendt’s Ethics

243 Pages·2018·1.66 MB·English

by  Deirdre Lauren Mahony

Hannah Arendt’s Ethics
Also available from Bloomsbury
Heidegger, History and the Holocaust, Mahon O'Brien
The Aesthetico-Political, Martín Plot
Arendt: A Guide for the Perplexed, Karin A. Fry
For Jeanmarie, Shay and Shyam
Hannah Arendt’s Ethics
By Deirdre Lauren Mahony
University of Hamburg, Germany
Contents
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
Introduction: Hannah Arendt and Ethics after Auschwitz
Philosophy and politics
Ethics and politics
Arendt’s ethics
Hannah Arendt and ethics after Auschwitz
1 Arendt, Eichmann and the Banality of Evil
Arendt on Eichmann
The Eichmann controversy
Was Arendt wrong about Eichmann?
Banality: One form of evil
Intention and moral responsibility
Neiman on Arendt
Intention
Responsibility
Moral luck
Concluding remarks
2 Thinking and Evil
Arendt on thinking and morality
Thinking: A particular kind of process
Thinking as destructive
Thinking as dialogue
Conversation: A model for Arendt’s notion of thinking?
Thinking, reality and the other
The moral relevance of thought
Is thinking a moralizing activity?
Does the thinking process lead one to moral truth?
Thinking as destructive, aimless and without result
Can evil be an object of thought?
Characterizing the dialogue of thought
Ability to think and responsibility
Morality and politics; thinking and judging
Concluding remarks
3 Evil and Living with Oneself
Reflections on meta-ethical positions in Arendt’s work
Arendt on living with oneself
Problematic elements of Arendt’s notion of ‘Living with Oneself’
Can living with oneself be an ultimate moral standard?
Is living with oneself the same as thinking?
Does everyone live with him- or herself or only a select few?
Does the notion of living with oneself undermine the thinking thesis?
Character, integrity and living with oneself
4 Nonparticipation
Individual (moral) guilt and collective (political) responsibility
Moral incapacity
The morally unthinkable
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Christopher Hamilton and Robert Weninger for their
academic guidance and advice, and Sarah Schmidt for her support. My thanks
also go to Frankie Mace at Bloomsbury for her enthusiasm for this project.
To my parents and my husband, I owe a deep debt of gratitude for their
continued patience and encouragement.
List of Abbreviations
‘CR’ Hannah Arendt, ‘Collective Responsibility’, in Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment, ed. Jerome Kohn
(New York: Schocken, 2003)
EiJ Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin, 2006)
EU Hannah Arendt, Essays in Understanding, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken, 1994)
HC Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998)
LKPP Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1982)
LMT Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, Volume One: Thinking (New York: Harcourt, 1978)
OR Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin, 2006)
OT Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, 1968)
‘PR’ Hannah Arendt, ‘Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship’, in Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment, ed.
Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken, 2003)
R&J Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken, 2003)
‘SQ’ Arendt, ‘Some Questions of Moral Philosophy’, in Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment, ed. Jerome Kohn
(New York: Schocken, 2003)
‘TMC’ Hannah Arendt, ‘Thinking and Moral Considerations’, Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment, ed. Jerome
Kohn (New York: Schocken, 2003)
Introduction: Hannah Arendt and Ethics after Auschwitz
Hannah Arendt, the Jewish–German (and later American) thinker, writer and
teacher, has become a well-known figure in twentieth-century Western
intellectual life, particularly in her adopted home of the United States. Arendt
was an émigré who fled the persecution in Europe. Finding refuge in America,
she developed reflections on totalitarianism, Jewish identity, political theory and
practice, culture, education and ethics that have informed numerous discourses
in modern American and European philosophy, politics and history. Arendt has
been variously considered a philosopher, a political scientist, a historian, a
German romantic apologist for Heidegger, a disciple of Karl Jaspers, a Zionist
and an enemy of the Jewish people. Her work has been both harshly criticized
and reverently praised, her thinking considered original by some and derivative
by others. Critics have emphasized her perceived conservatism as well as some
of her more radical approaches, depending on their vantage point in the political
spectrum. Her presence ‘in the world’, that is to say, her significance as a public
thinker for public discourse and the contribution her thinking has made to the
study of some of the most fundamental concepts in Western thought
(totalitarianism, revolution, freedom and action in politics, for example) are
considerable. Whether provoking fierce (and sometimes bitter) controversy or
respectful veneration, even her detractors would admit that Hannah Arendt has
had a significant impact on modern thought.
Recent years have seen renewed interest in Hannah Arendt’s work, from both
within and outside the Academy. The year 2011 marked the fiftieth anniversary
of the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, on which Arendt had famously (and
controversially) reported. Consequently, the last few years have witnessed a
revival of discussions of the trial, its outcome – Eichmann’s execution – and the
interpretation of Eichmann and his motivations that Arendt proposed in her
reports. Significant new books have been published which once again seek to