Benhabib in the NY Times has written a critique of the book
and she states[2]:
The Emory University historian Deborah E. Lipstadt told
The Times this month that Stangneth “shatters” Arendt’s portrait of Eichmann.
In The Jewish Review of Books, the intellectual historian Richard Wolin writes:
“Arendt had her own intellectual agenda, and perhaps out of her misplaced
loyalty to her former mentor and lover, Martin Heidegger, insisted on applying
the Freiburg philosopher’s concept of ‘thoughtlessness’ (Gedankenlosigkeit) to
Eichmann. In doing so, she drastically underestimated the fanatical conviction
that infused his actions.”
The fact is that Arendt had an affair with Heidegger when she
was his student, as one gathers he had affairs with other students at the same
period, all the while he was married. Arendt continued a somewhat close
relationship with Heidegger up to her death despite the fact that Heidegger was
a member of the Nazi party and had personally expelled Jews from his Faculty. Heidegger
had a long history of extreme National Socialist tendencies and his joining the
Nazi Party was but a step in that process[3].
This was a complex relationship as exhibited by the book by
Ettinger which recounts the letters exchanged between Heidegger and Arendt.
Ettinger’s work allows insight into the complex and continuing relationship
between Arendt and Heidegger, a relationship built in many ways by the basics
of German philosophy, from Kant onwards. She remains almost devoted to him to
the end, despite the continual exposure of his actions during the War and
before. Heidegger in a manner that we see in Eichmann tries to reconstruct a
new portrayal of his actions, trying to show that he was not a real Nazi and
that his actions were just in line with what was expected of him at the time.
It is this situational ethics that somehow Arendt dismisses and she renews and
expands the friendship despite the involvement that Heidegger had.
Benhabib continues:
This sort of dismissal of Arendt’s work — essentially a
rejection of the “banality of evil” argument — is by no means new, but it does
not hold up when one truly understands the meaning of her phrase. Couldn’t
Eichmann have been a fanatical Nazi and banal? What precisely did Arendt mean
then when she wrote that Eichmann “was not stupid. It was sheer thoughtlessness
— something by no means identical with stupidity — that predisposed him to
become one of the greatest criminals of that period.”? Arendt certainly did not
think that ordinary human beings were all potential Eichmanns; nor did she
diminish the crime Eichmann committed against the Jewish people. In fact, she
accused him of “crimes against humanity,” and approved his death sentence, with
which many, including the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, disagreed.
The problem with this argument is that Arendt examined Eichmann
by what he said at Trial, and she did not examine the record of Eichmann as one
would have done either as a Historian or as the Prosecutor. Eichmann, the defendant,
had prepared himself for the very role of Defendant. His writings as presented
by Stangneth clearly demonstrate the mind of a Nazi, clever, plotting, planning
and executing with precision. His defense at Trial was a planned and rehearsed
presentation of what he wanted people to believe. Arendt it appears fell into
the trap. The four walls of her understanding of Eichmann were delimited by the
well prepared presentation he made at Trial. In contrast, in Stangneth, we see
the drafts of Eichmann’s own words and what is revealed is the truth of what
Eichmann truly was, a classic Nazi.
Thus the Benhabib defense of Arendt is somewhat weak. Arendt,
it appears, went to the Trial to absorb from the Eichmann testimony a measure
of the man. Yet as was shown in his writings and with an additional half
century of discovery the man was quite complex and had anticipated such an
event as the Trial. Thus he took it upon himself to present a stage persona at
the Trial as a means of presenting his message.
To better understand the mindset of Arendt at the time of
the Trial one need read Elizabetta Ettinger work on the correspondence between
Heidegger and Arendt[4]. Ettinger
had access to the papers, via allegedly Mary McCarthy, a close friend of Arendt,
and a fellow traveler in the circle of the then New York intellectual elite. As
Wistrich stated in Commentary on the review of Ettinger[5]:
Among the story’s more troubling aspects is the extent of
Arendt’s submissiveness to Heidegger. Both as a student and later as a friend
and equal she displayed an extraordinary readiness to put herself at his beck
and call, to place him on a pedestal, and to subject herself to his arrogance.
Ettinger, whose analysis eschews crude psychological reductionism, accounts for
Arendt’s actions in broad sociological and historical terms:
[Arendt] shared the insecurity of many assimilated Jews
who were still uncertain about their place, still harboring deep doubts about
themselves. By choosing her as his beloved, Heidegger fulfilled for Hannah the
dream of generations of German Jews, going back to such pioneers of
assimilation as Rahel Varnhagen.
The irony here is that Arendt’s own book-length study of
Rahel Varnhagen, a German Jewess prominent in early-19th-century literary
circles, displays keen insight into the delusions and self-deceptions which are
entailed in the Varnhagen “model” of assimilation, but which in her
relationship with Heidegger she appeared unable to resist.
The assimilation construct was one of trying to shed the
long held anti-Semitism on the part of the non-Jewish population. Arendt it
appears tried to shed that both with her relationship with Heidegger and
possibly by her later claim of certain German Jews facilitating the work of the
Nazis, a claim rejected by many.
Benhabib further states:
It is this strange mixture of bravado and cruelty, of
patriotic idealism and the shallowness of racialist thinking that Arendt sensed
because she was so well attuned to Eichmann’s misuse of the German language and
to his idiosyncratic deployment of concepts like the Categorical Imperative. As
Stangneth puts it, “Hannah Arendt, whose linguistic and conceptual
sensibilities had been honed on classical German literature, wrote that
Eichmann’s language was a roller coaster of thoughtless horror, cynicism, whining
self-pity, unintentional comedy and incredible human wretchedness.” Eichmann’s
self-immunizing mixture of anti-Semitic clichés, his antiquated idiom of German
patriotism and the craving for the warrior’s honor and dignity, led Arendt to
conclude that Eichmann could not “think” — not because he was incapable of
rational intelligence but because he could not think for himself beyond
clichés. He was banal precisely because he was a fanatical anti-Semite, not
despite it.
Eichmann had studied Jewish culture and thought, almost as a
way to perfect his job. Thus he knew his adversary, his prey, oftentimes using
that knowledge to effect his task. Arendt in many ways was critiquing Eichmann for
his lack of acumen, lack of education, and then and again Eichmann had spent
years developing this very persona as a means to present his tale, and most
likely Arendt fell into the well laid trap. One could truly question the use of
the phrase “banal” for Eichmann, for he was a shrewd manipulator of not only
the facts but oftentimes of the audience listening to them.
In contrast in a review in the NY Times by Schuessler the
author states[6]:
Listening to Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt saw an
“inability to think.” Listening to Eichmann before Jerusalem, Ms. Stangneth
sees a master manipulator skilled at turning reason, that weapon of the enemy,
against itself.
That assessment is true but it appears to be only part of
the overall truth. On the one hand Arendt did not due her due diligence; she
did not independently investigate Eichmann. On the other had she let her
Heideggerian training overtake the cunning rationality of Eichmann, she failed
to see him as an actor in a play reading lines he had rehearsed again and
again. One could say she let her German arrogance get in the way of what was in
front of her, true evil. She was still a student of Heidegger, she was not able
to become a common Police detective and see a criminal for what he was.
As Honan stated in the NY Times in a review of Ettinger in 1995[7]:
Heidegger, then the newly appointed rector of
Albert-Ludwigs-University in Freiburg, had just joined the Nazi party and had delivered
the infamous rector's address in which he declared his allegiance to Hitler. With
heavy sarcasm, he denied Arendt's accusations. The truth is, as Professor
Ettinger points out. His anti-Semitism had been well-established four years previously
when he wrote to warn a high official in the Ministry of Education against the
"growing Judiaization" of Germany's "spiritual life." Among
his more abominable acts while rector in Freiburg, Heidegger banned from the
campus all Jewish professors including his mentor, the aging Edmund Husserl —an
act that is believed to have contributed to Husserl's death.
In a sense, as Arendt accused many German Jews of complicity
with the Nazis out of some form of self-deception, perhaps she also could be
criticized for missing the point of Eichmann by a form of self-interpretation.
Eichmann may very well have used his well-planned defense as a means of leaving
a trail of confusion to all but those who would eventually become privy to his
writings.
To understand the conflicts of Arendt one may look for the
inherent conflicts in Heidegger; his philosophy and his life. To do so it is
worth examining the book by Winograd and Flores written in the 1980s[8]. Winograd
was well known and highly respected at MIT at the time as a brilliant engineer
in the Artificial Intelligence community. His career has subsequently secured
that reputation. Flores was a politician in exile from Chile, a former member
of the prior Communist Government overthrown by Pinochet, studying Philosophy
at Berkeley. The combination of these two individuals had created a book, which
now some 26 years later, is truly timeless.
The book fundamentally is a fusion of philosophy with
technology and it does so through the eyes and minds of philosophers, especially
Heidegger. By doing so, the authors demonstrate what technology, media, can do
to not only elucidate knowledge but to frame and reposition what we seem to
feel is “immutable truth”. Truth then becomes what we may perceive through the
eyes of the medium, the signs placed before us so to speak. Thus, as we see so
many “Apps” being developed on so many platforms in today’s world we seem not
to stop and ask the question of how these Apps may be changing what we hold as
knowledge, as truth, and how they reflect on the meaning of our existence. The
authors have used this work to address these issues in the context of Heidegger
and his view of being. Thus one can use this interpretation of Heidegger as a
lens to focus on the relationship between the view of Arendt of Eichmann’s
world. In a sense, Eichmann used the medium of the Trial as a way to recast
Truth, and it was incumbent upon Arendt, having been trained by Heidegger, to recognize
this. She did not.
The authors use the ideas of such opaque philosophers as
Heidegger to establish a basis for their exposition. As Scrunton
has noted Heidegger is obtuse, he is a quintessential German, creating a
plethora of neologisms in German, which get half translated to English[9].
Heidegger deals with existence, ontology, and how we as humans are created as
individuals by our interactions. The example of a man using a hammer to insert
a nail becomes the amalgam of the hammer, human and nails as a process, and it
is that at hand process that the human understands and becomes one with
hammering. In a sense that is what we do when we create programs; we try to
engage the human user with the process and its externalities to become one
concerted effort.
Chapter 3 is seminal, for it is a wonderful summation of
Heidegger and Gadamer, or what they would have said had they tried to do it in
a few pages. The rationalist versus the idealist, the subject and object, the
observed and the observer are all explored, The introduction of Heidegger’s Dasein
is made in such a manner that the reader just flows with its insertion as
being-in-the-world, and that one comes away with a highly readable and
understandable grasp of what Heidegger meant to say[10].
They end with, “Heidegger insists that it is meaningless
to talk about the existence of objects and their properties in the absence of
concernful activity, with its potential for breaking down”. The interaction
between the individual and the medium presenting facts then is essential to
understanding. It is akin to the McLuhan statement regarding any medium used
for transmitting knowledge, that is the medium will define what is truth or
knowledge, not the “facts” or objects which the one conveying them wishes to
transfer. This understanding or interaction of message and messenger, the
hermeneutic view, and object and understanding, were what the authors saw as
critical in developing “software”.
Now here we again come to Eichmann. Eichmann was in a sense
both the messenger and the message. He viscerally understood that and had
prepared for the confrontation that was his Trial. Heidegger understood that,
it was Dasein confronting the world. The one wonders why Arendt of all people
would not have had the openness to both understand that as well as the ability
to translate it properly.
Breakdown can be a noun or a verb. As a noun it is failure,
as a verb it is “taking apart”. [11]
For Heidegger it was the noun that was operative. It was a failure of
something. In essence we “learn by our mistakes”. Ironically Heidegger did not
achieve this and Arendt was a front row observer of that process. As Koschmann
et al state:
Heidegger, Leont'ev, and Dewey held surprisingly similar
views on the role of breakdown or failure as a means of revealing the
nature of the world around us. For Heidegger, the resources by which we
conduct our day-to-day activities do not usually require our conscious
awareness. If our ongoing activity is blocked, however, this "transparency
of equipment" is dispelled, forcing a more deliberate mode of action.
Leont'ev's development of breakdown hinges on the analytic distinction he made
among Activities, Actions, and Operations. When the necessary conditions for an
Operation are absent, the chain of Operations becomes transformed
("unfolded") back into a sequence of independent Actions. Dewey's
notion of breakdown is related to his views on sensory excitation, stimulus and
response, and the habit-formation function in the lives of complex organisms.
Implications of these three models for learning and instruction are developed.
Thus we often learn more by our mistakes rather than by
rote. We learn by reassembling that which we erred in. In a similar vein
being-in-the world is also a noun a verb. On the one hand it may mean an
individual, or being, modified by “in-the-world” or it may be the action of
being, the gerund of to be, “in-the-world”. Ironically reading and interpreting
Heidegger is itself filed with such noun type breakdowns and needs to
reassemble them. Perhaps it is the German mannerism. Heidegger, even in his
later years, after having been exposed to the evils of the Nazis, did not learn
by breakdown, in fact he continued to try to justify his actions. In a similar
manner Eichmann tried not to correct the past evils but to reconstruct them to
his own ends. Arendt, thus trained by Heidegger in the world of Dasein,
breakdown, semiotics, seems to have missed the very drama before her in
Jerusalem. Thus the value of Stangneth’s work is the opening up of the process,
deconstructing the text, and laying bare the players.
[1] Stangneth,
B., Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer, Knopf
(New York) 2014.
[2] http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/09/21/whos-on-trial-eichmann-or-anrendt/?module=Search&mabReward=relbias%3Ar
[3]
One could examine the Farias book, Heidegger and Nazism, Temple Univ Press,
1989, to get what may be a critical but detailed overview, limited somewhat by
the time of its writing because of the still closed access to closed East
German archives. A subsequent book by Ott, Martin Heidegger, A political Life,
Basic (New York) 1993, which provides a similar but less polemic a presentation
of Heidegger and the Nazis.
[4] Ettinger,
E., Hannah Arendt Martin Heidegger, Yale Press (New Haven) 1995.
[6] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/03/books/book-portrays-eichmann-as-evil-but-not-banal.html?module=Search&mabReward=relbias%3Ar
[7]
Honan, NY Times, Nov 5, 1996, p 25.
[8]
Winograd, T., F. Flores, Understanding Computers and Cognition, Addison Wesley
(Reading MA), 1987. My old copy, I have a second, is marked page by page
recording each time I went through it. As a result I went and taught the first
course at MIT on Multimedia Communications (Fall 1989), influenced by this
short treatise. The question I was trying to address at the time was: how would
people communicate as we moved into a distributed multimedia environment? The
semiotics of communicating was at that time becoming the challenge. In a sense
Winograd and Flores saw that through the lens of Heidegger.
[9]
Scrunton, R., A Short History of Modern Philosophy, Routledge (New York) 2002.
pp 270-280. In fact Scrunton states: “It is impossible to summarize
Heidegger’s work, which no one has claimed to understand completely.”
[10] See
on p 31
[11] Timothy
Koschmann, Kari Kuutti & Larry Hickman, The Concept of Breakdown in
Heidegger, Leont'ev, and Dewey and Its Implications for Education, Mind,
Culture, and Activity, Volume 5, Issue 1, 1998 pages 25-41
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