Tag Archives: Nazis

Happy Birthday, Hannah Arendt!

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Hannah Arendt, born on October 14, 1906 in Hanover, Germany, was one of the twentieth century’s leading thinkers about political philosophy and the nature of evil. In the one and only filmed interview with her that survives, Arendt objected to being called a philosopher; she said she doesn’t feel like a philosopher, and that she thinks she has not been accepted in the philosophical community. We’re still hashing out what she meant by these statements to this day: some believe that she didn’t feel, as a woman, that the traditionally male-centric philosophical circle had room for her, so she did her work in another arena of thought; some believe since she emphasizes action and responsibility in her ethics and political thought, she felt this did not fit into the abstract nature of the accepted philosophical canon. However, her latter remark has proved no longer true, if it ever was: she is not only accepted into the philosophical circle, she has earned a prominent place in it.

Arendt completed her doctoral degree in philosophy in 1928. By 1940, she was forced to flee the Nazi’s persecution of intellectuals, first as a refugee to Paris, then to the United States, where she arrived in 1941. She settled in the U.S. for good, became a naturalized citizen, and taught at the University of Chicago and then at New York City’s New School for Social Research. Arendt established herself as a major political thinker with her 1951 book Origins of Totalitarianism, and a controversial one with her series of articles for The New Yorker about the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann’s 1961 trial. She used this series as the basis for her 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem.

Among Arendt’s major themes is the idea that evil is not so much the result of an active malevolence but of thoughtless complacency. She distills this idea in her concept the banality of evil, which made people very uncomfortable at that time and ever since. Many hate this idea in part because they detect in it an element of victim-blaming, such as in Arendt’s including in her discussion the supposed cooperation of many Jewish community leaders in the massive and efficient deportation of the Jews to Nazi concentration camps and gas chambers. But I believe people hate Arendt’s concept more because of its implication that it’s so very easy for every single one of us to participate in great evil through our own carelessness and laziness.

Arendt’s philosophy of action and personal responsibility, problematic as it might be in some particulars, presents an important challenge even as it lays on all of us what might feel like an intolerable burden. She demands that we shake off complacency every moment of our lives, that we resist the temptation to thoughtlessly participate in harmful practices and ways of thinking. In an age where mass consumption has become the norm, even the source of meaning and impetus for most of our actions, regardless of its ravages on the beautiful world that gives us life, there are few ideas that are more timely or more important.

Learn about the life and thought of the courageous and brilliant Hannah Arendt:

Hannah Arendt ~ Interview with Gunter Gaus for Zur Person

Hannah Arendt ~ by Maurizio Passerin d’Entreves for The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Hannah Arendt ~ Melvyn Bragg talks to Lyndsey Stonebridge, Frisbee Sheffield, and Robert Eaglestone for In Our Time

Hannah Arendt: American Political Scientist ~ by the editors for Encyclopædia Britannica

Hannah Arendt and the Hierarchy of Human Activity ~ by Finn Bowring for The Times Literary Supplement

Film Review: Hannah Arendt ~ Yasemin Sari for Philosophy Now

The Trials of Hannah Arendt ~ Corey Robin for The Nation, May 12, 2015

Why Do Hannah Arendt’s Ideas about Evil and the Holocaust Still Matter? ~ An interview with Michael Rosenthal for the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Washington

Various articles ~ by Hannah Arendt for The New Yorker magazine

Various articles featuring Hannah Arendt ~ Maria Popova for Brain Pickings

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Is There Such a Thing as a Good Lie, and is Truth Merely a Tactic Anyway?

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Mouth of Truth, Rome, Italy, by Serghei Topor, CC0 Public Domain

The Mouth of Truth, Rome, Italy, by Serghei Topor

‘A lie that serves a vital purpose, after all, is a lie that should be told. Whether we tell falsehoods or nothing but the truth, we all of us have the same objective: liars are always on the alert for the chance to profit by convincing others of their lies, just as those who tell the truth do so with the aim of ending up more trusted by everyone else, and thereby acquiring profit in their own manner. Different though our means may be, yet we have identical ends.’ (Histories, p 224)

In this passage from Herodotus’ Histories, Darius, a member of the royal guard and son of a Persian governor in Egypt, is justifying his plan to use trickery to enter the royal palace. He and six other Persians are planning the overthrow of Smerdis, a Magian who had taken the throne by deception after the death of Cambyses, son of Cyrus, king of Persia. Evidently, Darius takes the trouble to justify his plan of lying to the guards to gain entry because he knows his compatriots believe lying is wrong.

Darius is saying two very different things here. First, he suggests that there are some lies that are not only morally justified, but morally imperative. We’ve all heard the famous test case for when lying might be the right thing to do. Say you’re hiding a Jewish family from the Nazis under your floorboards, and they come up to your door and ask point blank if there are any Jews in your home. Other than remaining silent, which will likely be taken as a ‘yes’ and result in the Nazis storming the house and capturing the family, the only other options are to say ‘no’ and even to tell more elaborate lies which will convince the Nazis to move on. So even those who are generally committed to truth might allow that there are circumstances in which lying might not only be not wrong, but right, and furthermore, the only right thing to do, so long as it’s the only way to save the Jewish family from suffering and death. Darius is claiming that sort of thing here, but in his case, the vital purpose is to restore the Persian throne to its people, which had been stolen through deception in the first place and to whom it justly belongs. If he stopped here, I think many of us might agree he makes a fair point, even if we disagree with his assessment that there’s such a thing as a noble lie.

But he seems to doubt that his audience will accept will accept that this occasion justifies lying, so he goes on to say something far more radical. Darius claims that in fact, truth and lies are just two different ways of getting what you want anyway, and if that’s the case, the only reason you should choose truth over lies, or vice versa, is that it’s more effective. In this view, truth and lies are simply two means to an end, so the justification for their use is purely a matter of tactics. All we need to do, then, is figure out whether the end, the goal, is a worthy one, and what we say and in order to accomplish that end should be judged accordingly. Truth and lies are just as good, or just as bad, depending on the circumstances.

So what do you think? What do you think Darius gets right, if anything, and where do you think he goes wrong, if he does at all? Are truth and lies simply judged according to the intention of the speaker? According to how well they track available evidence? Are there different kinds of truth and lies, for example, ‘contingent’ versus ‘ultimate’ truth, and does that make a difference in Darius’ case, the case of saving the Jewish family, and other cases?

By the way, as Herodotus’ translator Tom Holland points out in his note to this passage, ‘Here Darius is made to speak like  a Greek rhetorician rather than a future Persian Great King, for whom any form of lying was officially anathema’.

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Sources and inspiration:

Herodotus. Histories. Translated by Tom Holland, New York: Viking, 2013

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