Richard Wolin has written a response to Seyla Benhabib’s New York Times piece on Arendt and Eichmann.

I hesitate to weigh in on this controversy for two reasons. First, I know both Richard and Seyla, and Richard is a colleague. And even though, when it comes to Arendt, I have consistently found Seyla to have the better of the argument, I have a great deal of respect for both of them and their work. Second, I may be writing about the war over Eichmann in Jerusalem in a lengthier piece in the coming months—More than a half-century after its publication, how is it that this book still manages to get under people’s skin? Is there any other book, not allied to a political or religious movement, that can do that?—so I don’t want to get too caught up in any one bit of the fracas right now.

Still, I wanted to respond to this one paragraph in Wolin’s critique:

Benhabib’s claim that Kant’s moral philosophy plays a systematic role in Eichmann in Jerusalem is similarly unsustainable. Arendt’s reliance on Kant’s theory of judgment—the idea that we broaden our mental horizons by virtue of our ability to reason from the standpoint of other persons—is limited to one meager passage (Eichmann in Jerusalem, p. 48). Moreover, in the passage in question, Kant’s name is not even mentioned. Casual allusions along these lines hardly qualify as systematic or serious employment. As most Arendt scholars are aware, Arendt only developed these Kantian precepts in earnest circa 1970, in the course of her Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy and in the complementary essay “Thinking and Moral Considerations.”

That last claim, which I’ve bolded, is simply not true.

In a brilliant article—”Arendt, Aesthetics, and ‘The Crisis in Culture’“—that totally changed how I see some of Arendt’s work, University of Chicago political theorist Patchen Markell shows that the Kantian presence in Arendt’s thought, particularly regarding these issues of judgment and enlarged mentality, well predate her 1970 writings, extending as far back as the 1950s. And in fact, as Patchen shows, most serious Arendt scholars know that.

If memory serves (I only read this essay in draft more than a year ago), Patchen looks at Arendt’s essay on culture from the 1950s, which finally appears in Between Past and Future in 1961 (the year Eichmann went on trial). He shows, among a great many other things, that Arendt and Jaspers were corresponding about Kant’s Critique of Judgment in the late 1950s (the text was very much on her mind), and that the Critique of Judgment very much informs her essay on culture, and how to think about questions of taste and judgment and their relationship to politics. In other words, whether or not Kant is present in what Arendt wrote in Eichmann in Jerusalem (and again, I think Seyla’s got the better of that argument), he, and his writing about judgment, were clearly present in Arendt’s thinking on the eve of her travels to Jerusalem.

Inspired by Wolin’s piece (and Patchen’s corrective, avant la lettre), I read Arendt’s other essay from that period, “Culture and Politics,” which I don’t think Patchen actually discusses but which is nevertheless instructive.

In that essay, Arendt claims Kant’s Critique of Judgment as an explicit inspiration for her thinking about judgment and politics: it “contains,” she says, “what is in my opinion the greatest and most original aspect of Kant’s political philosophy.” That was in 1959, two years before Arendt would head to Jerusalem to report on the Eichmann trial.

As she goes on to develop the political implications of Kant’s theory of taste and judgment, Arendt writes:

It is as though taste decided not only what the world should look like, but also who belongs together in the world….The belonging-together-of-persons—this is what gets decided in judgments about a common world. And what the individual manifests in its judgments is a singular “being-thus-and-not-otherwise”….

As soon as I read that “who belongs together in the world,” I stopped. The passage has an eerie resonance.

In the epilogue to her report on the Eichmann trial, Arendt delivers what she thinks should have been the Israeli court’s judgment against Eichmann. Her very last two sentences read:

And just as you [Eichmann] supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations…we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang.

Though I have no idea if Arendt intended these last sentences of Eichmann in Jerusalem to be read as such, it’s hard for me not to read them as an indication of how, for her, Eichmann’s crimes are a terrible and ironic perversion of the Kantian themes she was developing in her 1959 essay.

Just as a person reveals herself in her tastes (and what she reveals in part is “who belongs together in the world”), so does Eichmann reveal himself in his taste (or lack thereof), and what he reveals is who belongs together in his mind (namely, Aryans as opposed to Jews) and who belongs together in actuality: namely, he and all the other Nazis who refused to share the earth, as opposed to the rest of the peoples of the earth.

It is because of that terrible and ironic perversion of Kant’s theory of taste, which is connected to judgment, that Arendt insists so strongly on the court restoring the proper meaning of Kant’s theory of taste/judgment in its verdict on Eichmann: through its verdict, Arendt claims, through its revealing who or what it is, the court must decide who does indeed belong together in the world—namely, the peoples of the earth, in all their plurality—and who does not: those individuals, like Eichmann, who do not wish to share the earth with others.

Update (12:30 pm)

Patchen Markell has a very useful comment and corrective in the comments section, which I’m reproducing here. But first, here is the published version of that article of his that I discuss. And now here’s Patchen:

Thanks, Corey. I just sent you the the published version of the piece, which is in Nikolas Kompridis, The Aesthetic Turn in Political Thought. Although the Jaspers correspondence does contain a letter from 1957, when she was busy re-reading the Critique of Judgment, that makes it pretty clear how seriously engaged she was with that text, the place to go to really see this is her Denktagebuch or notebooks, published in 2002, which contain 15 pages (in the published version) of handwritten notes from the third Critique, including notes and comments on the idea of an “enlarged mentality,” the importance of the presence of others for the validity of judgments, etc. The editors of the Denktagebuch themselves observed how significant it was that this material came prior to, not after, the Eichmann trial. The Anglophone scholar who reconstructs this stuff best, and really focuses in a way I do not on the continuities between the Kant reading of 1957 and the lectures of 1970, is David Marshall, who published a very detailed piece on this history of Arendt’s readings of Kant in Political Theory (2010): http://ptx.sagepub.com/content/38/3/367.

Also, for the geeky record, “Culture and Politics” is the English translation of a German lecture that Arendt subsequently incorporated into “The Crisis in Culture” (in Between Past and Future).

Update (2 pm)

I’ve been reading Bettina Stangneth’s Eichmann Before Jerusalem, which is what has kicked off this latest round of the Arendt Wars, and she tells a story there about Eichmann, which I posted about on Facebook over the weekend. It seems pertinent to this discussion re Kant and enlarged mentality. Here’s what I said:

In 1950, Adolph Eichmann, along with 15 others, managed to flee Europe and set sail for Argentina from Genoa on the Giovanna C. Years later, in a text titled “Meine Flucht,” he reminisced about the relief he felt, finally to have escaped his would-be tormentors. Drawing a parallel only he could have drawn, he marveled, “Once it was the Jews, now it was–Eichmann.” This is the sort of thing Hannah Arendt had in mind when she talked about Eichmann’s thoughtlessness.

It should be noted that Stangneth does not read the Eichmann comment in this way, but I found her reading tortured and unpersuasive, and unsupported by the text.