Rosenbaum on Arendt/Heidegger

[Caveat lecteur: this got kind of long and boring]

For whatever reason, the Heidegger controversy is happening again. There was that article in the Chronicle for Higher Education by Carlin Romano. That wasn't and shouldn't be taken seriously, as Romano is a known hack. The response in the New Republic was pretty weak, I thought. Linker accepts the basic principle of Romano's essay ("Heidegger was fundamentally a political thinker, and an evil one at that") and Romano's basic stance ("I am not a Nazi, but rather a liberal democrat"). He just changes it a little bit, by saying that we should read Heidegger because it is an intellectually exhilarating challenge to our liberal democratic principles, but of course we will not change anything because Linker is "not inclined to follow Heidegger in its efforts to prepare the way for a more 'primordial' encounter with Being." Not inclined! This from the guy who's supposed to be defending philosophy!

This article is the most infuriating of the bunch, I think. Sloppy thinking is not in itself infuriating. We're all guilty of it. But this is published in a pretty high-profile online journal, and will be read by lots of people who don't know any better. That's what's so maddening about it. It's also evidence of a horrible but very common way of reading philosophical texts. According to this strategy, there is one obviously correct way to think. This correct way can be found by observing my gut instincts. Philosophers are to be judged to the extent that they meet this criteria or not. This hermeneutic is not even just a denial, it's a negation of the whole principle of philosophy. ALSO it goes beyond the standard Heidegger polemic by trying to drag in Hannah Arendt.

Here is Rosenbaum's argument: there have been lots of recent revelations about Arendt and Heidegger, which demonstrate that the latter was a horrible Nazi and the former was deeply influenced by anti-Semitic sources, including Heidegger. This should lead us to question the phrase, "the banality of evil," and see what hokum it is.

The non sequitur is tremendous, no? It's not any more sensible in the actual article. There are two unrelated claims: (1) Hannah Arendt was a bad person. (2) "The banality of evil" is a bad idea. There is no connection between these things. The attempt to connect them in the second to last paragraph makes no sense, either logically or historically. Both points are overstated. The part about Heidegger bears no relation to either of these points, although I guess it helps his ad hominem case against Arendt. It does give him a chance to demonstrate that he is deeply philosophically illiterate (again, there's nothing wrong with that. I know nothing about botany. But I don't publish muckraking articles in botanical journals).

Point (1) There are no new revelations about Heidegger or Arendt. That's his hook for the whole article, but I don't see anything that isn't blindly obvious, or known for 20 years already. I like Wasserstein, and haven't read his article, but I certainly hope it's more nuanced than RR says. Arendt used anti-Semitic sources, RR reports, when writing "Origins". He focuses primarily on J.A. Hobson, which is ridiculous: Hobson said a few nasty things about Jews (this was c. 1900 after all), but he was in no way a proto-Nazi. He had far worse things to say about Englishmen. The greatest inheritor of Hobson's ideas was Lenin, not Hitler. He's still taken seriously by prominent and probably non-Nazi scholars of imperialism (Cain/Hopkins). RR lists a few genuine Nazi or anti-Semitic sources that Arendt used, but his arguments are purely ad hominem. He quotes Arendt saying that these sources are useful, and then we're supposed to assume that they are not because these people were Nazis. This is not an argument. This is the same as those fliers you get in the mail saying, "Adolf Hitler supported gun control," and you're supposed to conclude, "Therefore gun control is bad."

Point (2) The critique of "banality of evil." Sure, this idea can be criticized, but not by saying, "Hannah Arendt is bad." RR's argument seems to rely on a gut emotional instinct but he gives it a facade of logic:

"To my mind, the use of the phrase banality of evil is an almost infallible sign of shallow thinkers attempting to seem intellectually sophisticated. Come on, people: It's a bankrupt phrase [...] Adolf Eichmann was, of course, in no way a banal bureaucrat: He just portrayed himself as one while on trial for his life. Eichmann was a vicious and loathsome Jew-hater and -hunter who, among other things, personally intervened after the war was effectively lost, to insist on and ensure the mass murder of the last intact Jewish group in Europe, those of Hungary. So the phrase was wrong in its origin, as applied to Eichmann, and wrong in almost all subsequent cases when applied generally. Wrong and self-contradictory, linguistically, philosophically, and metaphorically. Either one knows what one is doing is evil or one does not. If one knows and does it anyway, one is evil, not some special subcategory of evil. If one doesn't know, one is ignorant, and not evil. But genuine ignorance is rare when evil is going on."

Only the best of arguments requires the phrase, "Come on, people." Also that "of course" is a red flag for a missing logical step. His whole argument is: "Evil is not banal." That's not an argument, it's just a counter-assertion. How is "banality of evil" linguistically or metaphorically "wrong"? That doesn't even make sense. RR's argument at the end rests on the belief that Eichmann knew that what he was doing was evil. First off, this commits him to a Kantian ethics that is not shared by Arendt, but RR is not interested in philosophical niceties. Second, he has no evidence for this, and I don't see what kind of evidence is possible. All evidence points to the contrary, it seems to me. The final sentence is a blanket assertion, based on nothing and so meaningless that it is neither true nor false.

But he's not through yet. He has an alternative: "Arendt should have stuck with her original formulation for the Nazi crimes, 'radical evil.'" Not an easy concept to define, but, you might say, you know it when you see it." You know it when you see it! Now that's what I call slam-dunk argumentation. I actually don't know it when I see it. RR should give everyone updates on this. Maybe RR should be kept in a secret lair, like the diviners in "Minority Report," and he can watch things and tell us whether they are evil or not, using his special spider-sense to detect radical evil.

He has some praise, though, for "The Origins of Totalitarianism" because it allows him to call states fascist, which is a very productive thing to do. Here's RR: Totalitarianism is "a concept that has great relevance right now because there are still those who don't understand how theocratic police states can be called 'fascist.' Duh! It's because they're totalitarian." Duh! The whole point of Arendt's book is that fascism and totalitarianism are not the same thing. Duh! She actually thought that Fascism proper (i.e. in Italy) was not totalitarian.

Man, that was cathartic.