Prompt/Mini-Lecture: Responsibility and Judgment Due 10/14

Use the outline/notes for Responsibility and Judgment that are posted on moodle. Pick at least one question that pertains to the chapter, “Collective Responsibility” and one that pertains to, “Thinking and Moral Considerations.” Use the questions to explore the text. It is important with this denser, more conceptual writing to use quotes for textual evidence to support your interpretation. (Don’t worry too much about section II in “Thinking and Moral Considerations.” You could skim most of it and pick it up again on pg. 177. In section III, don’t get too bogged down in all the references. Focus on what Arendt is saying about the Socratic propositions and the connection between Socratic thinking/interior dialogue and conscience.) As always, please try to draw connection to your service experience–for example, see the question in the notes under Collective Responsibility.

The following is my meditation/reflection on why I think that Arendt’s ideas here are so relevant/important. Maybe this will help you or maybe it won’t! But, as there won’t be enough time in class to discuss fully, I am posting it here–use it as you will.

I have noticed over the past 9 years that I have been using Responsibility and Judgment in my classes that it becomes more difficult every year for students to engage with. I notice the same pattern in myself as my own attention span and ability to slow down and stay with denser ideas requires more discipline.

Isn’t this symptomatic of the fact that changes are happening so quickly in the world that sometimes we aren’t cognizant of their impact? We are swept up. Isn’t this also Arendt’s point about what happened under Hitler in Germany? This is the danger of ceasing to have that internal dialogue/argument with ourselves that Lehrer will illustrated in last week’s reading.

The decline that I have witnessed in my own capacity to spend time unraveling sentences and ideas, seems to me indicative of some of the very issues that Arendt is raising. Butler will continue this by speaking to the rise of anti-intellectualism in our country.

I am the last person who would promote dense and arduous reading unless there is something there that is unique and important. I shudder to think that if I had picked up Arendt now, I might have quickly put her down. I continue to struggle with Arendt to this day. Yet, every time I read these same 40 odd pages, I find something new or have to un and re-weave* the ideas all over again to make sense of them once more (R and J, 166). * Don’t miss this beautiful metaphor from Homer’s, Odyssey that Arendt uses so powerfully: In order to stave off the suitors who wanted to marry her in the very long absence of her husband Odysseus, Penelope tells them that she will make her choice when she finishes her weaving. Each night she un-weaves what she has woven that day. Having spent many nights un-weaving my day, my thinking, my interactions, I relish this connection. It isn’t fun, but it is necessary, if we are to critically engage with our own assumptions and the many external pressures to not think in this way.

I have gained so much from my time with Arendt because what she is saying is so foundational. What I really appreciate about Arendt is that she is a phenomenologist. Phenomonology is “the study of ‘phenomena’: appearances of things, or things as they appear in our experience, or the ways we experience things, thus the meanings things have in our experience” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). I realize that I am very much more interested in this approach than one that engages in analyzing abstract ideas. I am drawn to philosophers who are grappling with “what is” more than with ideas that may never actually be manifest in our lives (or if they were the connection with the abstraction may be unidentifiable).

So, Arendt is looking at the phenomenon of the Holocaust and trying to understand the conditions that allowed the unraveling of a civil society and the larger implications thereof. She didn’t want to say — “It’s finished, we can go back to our lives now. A bad thing happened but now we move on.”

Arendt was interested in the species of phenomenology that is characterized as having to do with the public space:

“She regards philosophy as born out of the experienced discrepancy between this ‘world of appearances’ in which we live and the medium of words which support ‘thinking’ . . .understanding the world of appearances means an attempt to uncover the nature of the human living ‘in the midst of the world’ . . . Arendt was also aware of how this public space is manipulated by governments, by commercial advertising, by ‘spin doctors’, and in general ‘by speech that does not disclose what is but sweeps it under the carpet. . . . Arendt’s strong commitment to public life in the plurality, the requirement to listen attentively to the discord of many voices, meant that, for her genuine thinking required a public space, and needed to be carried out under public scrutiny and sustained by public participation, and this meant for her the practice of a kind of intellectual journalism” (Dermot Moran, Introduction to Phenomenology, 287–89).

What Arendt is saying to me in this text is that our capacity for greater humanity hinges on our capacity to think, reflect, have those Socratic dialogues (think Leher’s description and points in, “The Brain is an Argument”) with ourselves, internally, and with others in the public square. Our humanity hinges on our capacity to say, “No, this I will not do.” She says that at times saying “no” may be our only choice, but it is still a choice. Who are we, if we go against that inner voice that knows we are perpetrating what is wrong? We are the one’s that have to live “together” with ourselves.

For Arendt, thinking is not the lone realm of the elite or the academics at all but the right and responsibility of each human being and the foundation of our self-hood.

Rejecting our ability to think in order to act or to say no to external authority is, for Arendt, what gives us our human-hood. Perhaps, Eichmann was unable to imagine or feel the plight of others and thus, dehumanize them very easily. Perhaps, the sociopath who has no access to the emotions that create empathy and feed that moral imagination.* Yet, the danger is that we don’t have to have the chemical imbalance of the sociopath in order to give way to our tendency to not think. If we don’t think, then we don’t have to take responsibility for our actions? This also relates to Arendt’s point about collective guilt–she writes, “where all are guilty, nobody is” (R and J, 147). This is because guilt implies accountability for a specific act. Thus, saying we are all guilty is not linked to any form of punishment or retribution and everyone is off the hook, so to speak. Collective responsibility is ‘the vicarious responsibility for things we have not done.” a responsibility that we take and act on because we do not “live our lives by ourselves but among our fellow men [and women]” (158). For Arendt, we are all part of a community, if we leave one community, we exchange it for another (150). *(I say “perhaps” because a few years back, a student pointed out that maybe his “I was just following orders” was his rationalization for an act for which he felt extremely responsible but was still trying to deny responsibility for.)

To conclude, who else but Arendt has articulated the importance of thinking and tied it to a historical event in the way that she does? There is so much truth to her analysis because you can see that she truly grappled with the phenomenon itself. She coined the phrase the “banality of evil” in witnessing Eichmann’s testimony at his trial in Jerusalem and his defense was that “he was just following orders”. “Her characterization of these actions, so obscene in their nature and consequences, as ‘banal’ is not meant to position them as workaday. Rather it is meant to contest the prevalent depictions of the Nazi’s inexplicable atrocities as having emanated from a malevolent will to do evil, a delight in murder. As far as Arendt could discern, Eichmann came to his willing involvement with the program of genocide through a failure or absence of the faculties of sound thinking and judgement” (Arendt, Hannah, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy).

Writing this and re-engaging with Arendt myself does not come easy. It takes time of which we seem to have so little. But, if we are to be the people who say no to the men in uniforms or white coats, it is important, to cultivate our capacities in a number of ways and the struggle with complex ideas that perhaps can not be simplified without losing the process of the struggle itself. I leave you with two quotes that come from an earlier part of this text:

“The greatest evil perpetrated is the evil committed by nobodies, that is, by human beings who refuse to be persons” (Responsibility and Judgment, 111).

If he is a thinking being, rooted in his thoughts and remembrances, and hence knowing that he has to live with himself, there will be limits to what he can permit himself to do, and these limits will not be imposed on him from the outside, but will be self-set” (Responsibility and Judgment, 101)