Background: On November 6-9, 2003, the Weissman Center for Leadership and the Liberal Arts at Mount Holyoke College sponsored a conference called Artists, Intellectuals and World War II: The Pontigny Encounters at Mount Holyoke College, 1942-1944. The conference celebrated both a pre-war meeting that took place in Pontigny, France, and the series of wartime meetings at Mount Holyoke that brought together Americans and émigrés from Europe to talk about the future of human civilization in a precarious world. The lives and work of Hannah Arendt, Rachel Bespaloff, Marc Chagall, Jacques Hadamard, Roman Jacobson, Claude Levi-Strauss, , Marianne Moore, Robert Motherwell, Wallace Stevens, Jean Wahl, and others who had gathered at Mt. Holyoke in 1942-44 were invoked by the conference participants. This text (slightly revised) and others were published in Artists, Intellectuals, and World War II (U. of Massachusetts Press, 2006)
HANNAH ARENDT ON ACTION AND VIOLENCE
with reference to Simone Weil and Rachel Bespaloff on Homer’s Iliad
Jerome Kohn and Elisabeth Young-Bruehl
Installment I – JK
Thirty-five years ago Elisabeth and I met for the first time in Hannah Arendt’s seminar on “Political Experiences in the Twentieth Century,” and we’ve been talking ever since. We’ve often wondered why, in 1968, just as her students were protesting America’s aggression in Vietnam, which she also opposed, Arendt chose to evoke the wars, revolutions, and unprecedented terror of totalitarianism that had destroyed so many millions of lives in the first half of the twentieth century. Just five years earlier, in her book On Revolution, she had affirmed the political and legal principles of the Constitution of the Republic of the United States and inspired students from Berkeley to Columbia to rebel against what appeared to them as the betrayal of those principles. But in her seminar, which she said might just as well have been called “Exercises in Imagination,” Arendt was intent that her students experience vicariously what her own generation immediately had known: a time in the not distant past when politics had played itself out in a concatenation of actions and reactions of extreme violence. If she meant to caution us, I’m afraid that in our enthusiasm we were not much inclined toward caution of any kind. On the contrary, we were equally enthused by what we were learning and what we were doing, for what we read and talked about in the seminar determined us to resist, if necessary with force, the violence that had been devastating the world in an almost continuous process of escalation since 1914, the year in which “the real twentieth century” (as the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova called it) had begun.
Surely we were not entirely wrong, but what then was Arendt thinking? She did not believe in progress and was not an optimist, but she was not a pessimist either. She never thought that merely knowing what had happened in the past could prevent catastrophes from occurring in the future, which followed directly from her conviction that the course of human affairs, shot through with contingencies, is never entirely predictable; yet she did not counsel resignation. I believe that for Arendt the importance of elucidating the past lay in showing that the present has become what in reality it is, a world in which a new beginning is always possible but also is always conditional on taking not personal but political responsibility for the circumstances (unforeseen though they may have been) from which the present world emerged. The reality of the realm of politics, in her view, is precisely its responsible freedom, which is ignored when that realm is envisioned as a stage upon which the successive acts of a drama are played out according to a plan, regardless if its origin is conceived as divine or human, and no matter how scientifically it is thought out or calculated. For Arendt such a plan, like the notion of a fate inflicted, stands opposed to human freedom, and for that reason has never yet and probably never will be realized in historical time. On a philosophic level it is the ideal that lurks behind visions of an ultimate “end” to the so-called forces of history, whether that end is conceived as history’s conclusion or telos or both. It is likely, I believe, that the pitfalls of supplanting responsible action with an irresponsible faith in the course of history lay at the heart of the caution that was lost on us in 1968. But however that may be, Elisabeth’s and my fortuitous meeting that year developed into a deep and abiding friendship, the living roots of which are still nourished by the conversation that began in Arendt’s seminar.
A good deal more could be said about that seminar, but first it should be noted that Elisabeth and I, while discussing how we might contribute to this celebration of the Pontigny-en-AmÈrique entretiens convened at Mount Holyoke during World War II, which must have been richly talkative occasions, came up with the idea that instead of writing two conventional papers we would attempt to convey something of the spirit of our conversation. For one thing, we hoped that that might engage you more and burden you less, since the overall meaning of a conversation (insofar as it may be said to have one) is inseparable from the pleasure of participating in it. Although seeming answers are sometimes found to questions that have been raised, they amount to no more than passing moments within the conversation, and are by no means its most attractive or meaningful ones. The conversation that has engaged us for many years is, to quote Michael Oakeshott, “not an enterprise designed to yield an extrinsic profit,” nor, it may be added, is it one in which the predominance of one voice over another is either feasible or desirable. It is not, in short, a preparation for another form of activity, as if its aim were to find a location beyond its own where its lessons might be applied. In that respect conversation is analogous to Arendt’s understanding of political activity: how it will develop and where it will lead are not discernable in advance of its undertaking, and its only lasting lessons (like those of political action) arise from the experience of taking part in an unrehearsed adventure, which may and inevitably will be interrupted, but within which no conclusion is potential.
There is nothing that prohibits a conversation from reflecting on itself, and four related benefits that Elisabeth and I have found in doing so may be briefly mentioned. First, to participate spontaneously in endlessly resumed talk unquestionably provides a sense of continuity for those who are aware of a break in traditional ways of thinking and, which is much the same, a loss of meaning in the beliefs that have been handed down to them. Second, to be willing to enter and entertain the thoughts and articulated feelings of another is one way of approaching what Immanuel Kant called an “enlarged mentality,” which for him was the condition apart from which the faculty of human judgment cannot be exercised. Third, a mentality sufficiently enlarged to treat with consideration viewpoints and interests distinct from one’s own, which may amount to fundamental differences of opinion, issues in a degree of self-knowledge, that is, in recognizing oneself as a shareholder, but no more than a shareholder, in a common world. And fourth, to be active as an equal member of a mutually responsive copartnership — even if it be only of two — is to have arrived in a situation in which one’s character submits to formation and can gradually grow firm. Since these beneficial claims of conversation are first glimpsed and then brought to clarity only in the activity of conversing, it would be premature, at this point, to elaborate or attempt to substantiate them. On the other hand, a rather serious admission is called for.
To share its spirit it seemed to us to some extent desirable to sacrifice the spontaneity of an actual conversation, for the last thing we wanted was to place you in the awkward position of eavesdroppers. I am, obviously, reading from a text, in preparing which I have, I hope, diminished the number of the not entirely random but extraneous thoughts that naturally spring up when the activity of talking is engaged in for its own sake. The expression of spontaneous thoughts, which constitutes a large part of the delight of conversing, is not constrained by the rules of argumentation, not even when the conversation contains arguments. But a conversation can and often does have a topic, and ours today is the general urgency of the widespread and principled acceptation of political violence. This presents not only a many faceted but also an ironic problem, since it is manifest in direct proportion to the increasing awareness that the contemporary world has become, as never before, one world, precipitately hailed as the emergence of a global community. We cannot solve the problem of global violence by talking about it, but we can try to understand it, and we have agreed by and large to limit what we say to that endeavor. In doing so we have not sacrificed spontaneity altogether, for we are not constructing an argument but simply responding to what the other has written, deeply concerned and wondering where, if anywhere, these conversational installments — or, if you prefer, this essay in conversability — may lead this afternoon.
Installment II – EYB
Reflecting on what you said I thought, yes, and thank heavens for this conversation of ours, which has the quality for both of us of being both a very personal help –a sounding board in good times and bad—and a political forum, our small forum of two, especially important to us when the larger political forum in which we are citizens has seemed to us so lacking in the kind of honest talk which we have been fortunate to expect from each other.
When we have a political talk, when we share an analysis of the political situation and take responsibility for understanding, we both come away from it fortified, even happy –the kind of happiness the we feel when we read something or hear something from the larger forum that seems honest and full of good judgment. I know one of the reasons that our conversations have focused so often on the nature of judgment is that we both sense that she, in her effort to explore the nature of thinking and judgment had in her mind the key problem of our national politics. As you said, we came of political age, as her students, in the middle of the Vietnam War a war that our leaders hoped would solve the perceived political problem of communist domination in Southeast Asia. And that meant that we were citizens at a time when our country, through the bad judgment of its leaders and a consequent near breakdown of our country’s democratic processes , was involved in a war that all can see now, in retrospect, was a disaster for our country, for Vietnam and Southeast Asia, and for the world.
At that time, I think we learned –from Hannah Arendt—how crucial it is in “dark times” that there be people who do not get swept up in the moment to moment, day to day, year to year,
cascade of events, or in the feelings that cascading events, out of control events, induce; feelings of helplessness and desperation; feelings that lead people to want a quick solution, a remedy and a rule to follow, an explanation and a command deduced from the explanation. We learned how hard it is to do the thing Hannah Arendt named very simply “stop and think.” When we talked politics, then, as now, we would produce for ourselves at least, the space and time to “stop and think” and it would bring us happiness—that peculiar happiness of citizens, which our Constitution invokes.
Those conversations then, like the ones now, also took place under the influence of Hannah Arendt’s example. She was our model for stopping and thinking, and our model for trying to get a view on the cascade of events, to be able to look below the chaotic and confusing surface into the deeper patterns and meanings. She taught us, in those lectures on the nature of thinking and judgment, that thinking deals with meanings and that judgment needs particular examples to focus on, that judgment is guided by individual and particular examples and not by rules, norms, theories, visions of History or Nature. Judgment focuses on examples, and judgment also needs examples of people thinking and judging
I remember how forcefully we were struck by that “Political Experiencs in the 20th Century” course Hannah Arendt gave at the New School, which you invoked in your letter. Her idea was to imagine a particular person –an exemplary person—living through the events of Europe in the early to mid 20th century, experiencing that cascade of events and trying to make sense of it. It was, in effect, a literary enterprise, an imaginative enterprise. I think it was rather like Kafka putting his K. in the Castle and showing how he tried to make sense of it, without any companion to rely on, that is, in the complete unsafety and disorientation of isolation.
She brought her reading of Kafka’s imaginative creation to the Pontigny at Mt. Holyoke in 1942, in the middle of the war, as news came crashing in from Europe of novel political events initiated by the novel form of government that was then beginning to be called “totalitariianism,” to which she would herself give the monumental analysis of her The Origins of Totalitarianism. It is very striking that the two other women whose efforts to understand totalitarianism come to mind in connection with this revisiting of Pontigny –Simone Weil and Rachel Bespaloff—also turned to a literary source, Homer’s Iliad (and, in Bespaloff’s case, also to Tolstoy’s War and Peace) to stimulate and guide their thinking. They, too, were looking for a deeper meaning in the cascade of wartime events. They both turned to great examples of stories of war to meditate on Force. Arendt turned to Kafka –and I think she did so because she felt that, although she was writing in the middle of a war, it was not the war per se, not the battles, and not even the novelties of the types of battles, the means for waging war, that needed understanding, it was the form of government in Nazi Germany that presented the greatest challenge to understanding.
At that Pontigny meeting, Arendt was making a case for reading Kafka as a political thinker, studying a form of government unknown to Montesquieu–the one that she herself was witnessing in its mature totalitarian form. (In 1944, she could read reports on the concentration camps, which she later viewed as the defining result of totalitarianism.) Kafka’s fictions were like experiental maps that pointed to the essence of rule by bureaucracy. No one before had seen bureaucracy as a form of government (despite the “cracy” in the word itself); on the contrary, bureaucracy was understood as a means toward the end of ruling, as a means that could be exported to colonies in order to bring order to people who were considered primitive, pre-political. Kafka, Arendt argued, could really, deeply, understand his world as one in which this means had become an end in itself. She could see bureaucracy dedicated to the vast extension of bureaucracy –bureaucratic imperialism. And the means for this extension was violence.
Arendt was arguing that Kafka not only understood his world, but understood it so well that he ended up understanding the mid-20th century world, and it can certainly be argued that he understood ours, now, as well. He was a seer as well as a sage. And this has to do with the way in which he imagined the future –and captured his vision of temporal experience in that figure that Arendt explored in Between Past and Future, the figure which gave that collection of essays its name. The future does not –so that figure shows—stretch out before us, but comes to us, comes at us, as the past comes from behind us. And Kafka understood that that future is never the one we plan; it is more likely to be, indeed, the one we do not plan, even the one that mocks the arrogance in human planning
All the journalists who have dared to be critical of our war in Iraq since it was declared ended have remarked that much more planning went into the war than into the peace. That is true enough, but not really to the point. It is certainly the case that an interim Iraqi government could have been organized before the bombs began to fall, from among the Iraqi dissidents and political exiles (not the businessmen living in safety abroad, but the political exiles). There did not have to be an American occupation government proving the well known fact that military training is not for governance and the equally well known fact that occupation governments are not popular among people who wanted liberation. It is also certainly the case that a tremendous opportunity was missed to find a model for bringing United Nations (not just American) support to the opponents of authoritarian regimes before the possibilities of “regime change” are even discussed much less planned by governments readying to declare war. But the more important point is that the American conquerors of Iraq did not seem to have any cognizance that the aftermath of the military victory, which was virtually assured, was a complete unknown; that the post-war future was not plannable as the war was.
A problem of means and ends was at play here, too. The American administration really seems to have thought that the means for dealing with Saddam Hussein –war, violence—was equivalent to “regime change.’ The assumption seems to have been that if the war were won decisively enough, that would constitute regime change; that violence is a political process. What was operating was a kind of notion that those who have overwhelming means, overwhelming force, have the end: rule.
This has never been a reasonable assumption –even when it has resulted eventually in a new regime, as it did, say, in Japan or Germany after the saturation and atomic bombings during the Second World War. Violence is not a political process. And the matter is, now, vastly complicated by the conditions of violence in the world. As you note, there a world-wide acceptance of violence now that makes for conditions quite different than those apparent in any previous historical moment –an unprecedented condition. Violence is still commanded by nation states, of course, but the novelty is that groups of all sorts can command it not just for local purposes like civil wars and national liberation movements, but for potentially limitless enterprises –for global terrorism. Any kind of group can lay hold of “weapons of mass destruction”; any kind of group can make its own members into bombs – and a continually recruiting and regenerating group composed of suicide bombers is unstoppable. Any kind of group can use modern technologies of communication and violence anywhere, anytime, to any extent.
We can see the beginnings of what this unprecedented type and level of violence stimulates in the existing nation-states, particularly our own. It stimulates the desire to make a police state, to turn bureacracies into police agencies. In our country, the erosion of our legal system and our constitutional protections that began with the Patriot Act after the 9/11 terrorist attack signals the allure of the idea of transformation of bureaucracies into police agencies. What we have to fear is the idea that the only protection possible against global terrorism is a totalitarian fortress a fortress that would have to be worldwide. A Castle beyond even Kafka’s nightmare.
Installment III – JK
As usual I want to respond to everything you said. But to begin with I’d like to try to see how the work, or at least some of it, of three writers you mentioned, Franz Kafka, Simone Weil, and Rachel Bespaloff, bears on Arendt’s political thought. In doing so my overall concern is with what you intimated: the widespread tendency to accept virtually as a given the reliance on the means and implements of violence to achieve political ends. From there it is only a short step to the belief that maintaining political power depends on the ability to command the ever more ingenious, ever more deadly, techniques of violence. Not only militarists believe this, but also liberal and conservative pundits, as well as politicians from left of center, right of center, and center. The belief in the efficacy of violent implements has, moreover, a time-honored philosophic history stretching back to antiquity’s definition of political power, or dominion, as the rule of one or few over many others. From the sixteenth century notion of the absolute and inviolable sovereignty of states, to the twentieth century’s proclamation that “power grows out of the barrel of a gun” (Mao Zedong), to the immensity of America’s current military budget, that belief has hardly been questioned. Indeed, it has received a sort of scientific justification in biological, physiological, ethological, zoological, and polemological hypotheses advanced in the study of the violent proclivities embedded, supposedly, in the very nature of human and other animals.
An acute aspect of the problem of violence today lies in the existence of individuals who are literally dying to kill. As you noted, men, women, and even children willing to destroy themselves to destroy those they perceive as persecutors and exploiters may but need not be state-sponsored terrorists. Different ideas about how to eliminate, or at any rate mitigate, this not entirely new but technologically enhanced threat of violence are also almost always, whether or not explicitly, voiced within the assumed equation of power with the means of violence. To anyone familiar with Arendt’s conceptual analyses of power and violence that equation is, to put it mildly, highly questionable. What then is the relevance of the parable by Kafka that you mentioned, Elisabeth, and of the essays written by Weil and Bespaloff on Homer’s Iliad after the outbreak of World War II, to Arendt’s distinction between power and violence?
I cannot imagine any more concrete illustrations of that part of Kafka’s elusive time parable in which the subject, who is called simply “he,” experiences the future as a force driving “him” backward into the past than Weil’s “The Iliad or the Poem of Force” and Bespaloff’s “On the Iliad.” Neither Weil nor Bespaloff, I think, read the Iliad as an allegory of their times, or not only or chiefly that. It seems to me more likely that these two extraordinarily impressible women of Jewish heritage found what might have been their way into the future impassable, blocked by the intolerable pressure of the circumstances — la force des choses – that, unbidden and unanticipated, plummeted about them. If so then it is no mere coincidence that both were driven as far back as possible, to the epic each regarded as the fount of western civilization. In very different ways Weil and Bespaloff sought in the origin, the self-contained perfection of the Iliad, about which they wrote brilliantly, to understand and by understanding to escape from “the mangled, slashed ground of history” and “the rage, violence, and fury” of the “catastrophe” that engulfed them, as Bespaloff put it.
But this differs altogether from what Kafka’s parable meant to Arendt, which she likened to a “parabola,” surrounding and casting intense light directly on “him” who, inserted by “his” birth into the continuum of time, is seen as the beginning of a now, the beginning of a beginning, the actualization of a potentiality concealed in the mundus or human world. This now, utterly unlike the immovable or eternal present, the nunc stans or nunc aeternitatis of medieval meditative and other philosophies, is, on the contrary, the mentally experienced battleground on which two ever-accumulating and equally annihilating temporal forces, the forward pushing force of the “no longer” and the backward driving force of the “not yet,” clash against each other. Here it is decisive to note both that Kafka’s “he” is not a determinate “somebody” with either gender or age but an “X ray” of the “inner structure” of the processes of “his” mind, and that the parabolic light illuminates how “he” thinks of temporality while fighting for “his” existence on its two fronts, against its two forces, at once. In Arendt’s interpretation “he” opens a gap that determines a new track in “space-time” in which “he” defends himself and also, by moving deliberately between them, is able to judge both forces, the past and the future.
This difficult meaning of the parable provides the key that unlocked Kafka’s novels, The Trial and The Castle, in Arendt’s singular reading of them, which she first presented here at Mount Holyoke in 1944, shortly after arriving in America as an uprooted and stateless refugee. It seems appropriate to add that Kafka’s great loneliness partly haunted and partly was shared by Arendt, in the sense that he not only abstracted terrifying images from his own declining world which, in their actualization in the world that emerged from his, “surpassed even the atrocities he describes,” but also that Kafka imagined and drew a “blueprint” of a future world where he ìcould have been at home.î While the unreality of that “not yet” world placed Arendt, as she said, “at a certain distance” from it, from that distance she was able to judge it as “our future, too — if we are to have any future at all.”
Although Weil and Bespaloff found no refuge from their world in returning to its origin, their essays on the Iliad were immensely significant to Arendt. To give an example, Weil’s essay begins with the startling statement that the “hero,” the “subject,” the “center” of the Iliad is “force,” which she defines as “that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing.” Force or violence is not only a question of killing, of extinguishing life, but also of transforming “a human being into a thing while he is still alive,” “a thing that has a soul,” as Weil put it. And these living corpses, these animate things, are not limited to those who suffer violence but include those who inflict it, for the merciless conquerors, benighted by what they mistake for omnipotence, are as insensate as stones. Anyone who has read Arendt’s account of Nazi death camps cannot but be struck by its uncanny similarity to what Weil wrote before the camps existed. In other words, Arendt recognized in Weil’s depiction of violence, and at times expressed in almost the same words, the systematic dehumanization of both the persecuted and their persecutors that occurred, not in the Iliad, but in the “laboratories” of totalitarian terror. Needless to say, Weil’s emphasis on the necessity of retribution or Nemesis, and her conclusion that the essence of epic genius is “that there is no refuge from fate,” are just about the opposite of the freedom of human action that Arendt first saw instantiated in the Iliad.
Bespaloff’s essay differs from Weil’s not only in length and complexity, but also in presenting a more judicious reading of the Iliad in which the epic’s principal characters, including three women, Andromache, Thetis, and Helen, are psychologically differentiated. For Arendt Bespaloff’s distinction between power and violence must have been eye-opening. Speaking of Achilles, Bespaloff wrote that loss of power appears “at the very height of force.” What Bespaloff meant was that, for example, when Achilles encounters an unarmed boy “in the way” of his will to omnipotence, he “can only reply to the mute defiance of his defenseless adversary with an ever-growing violence,” which, in its “cruelty,” is incapable of “total destruction.” The boy is savagely killed but lives on forever in Homer’s song of Achilles’ wrath. Although one can almost see Arendt’s wry smile at the notion of an aesthetic immortality “outside and beyond history,” for her — as for Pericles and those few who through the ages have merited the name “statesman” or understood its meaning — there is indeed an immortality, an earthly immortality. For these the quest for earthly immortality gives rise to a politics that depends on the generation of power, the source of which is the appearance of action as words and deeds “paying back” violence, which again Arendt saw instantiated in the Iliad. She certainly did not believe in human omnipotence or even in political self-sufficiency, any more than she believed in the sovereignty of either individuals or states. What Arendt knew all to well, from her own experience, is that violence can destroy power, without ever being able to reproduce it.
The first word of Bespaloff’s essay is “Suffering” and her entire essay is based on “suffering and loss.” If suffering becomes articulate in poetry, it is despair that issues in the choice and responsibility of individual mortals. Hector, “guardian of the perishable joys,” suffers complete loss — his wife, his child, his home, his city, his life — but he transforms despair into “courage” in his final “act of self-mastery,” the act that makes him “worthy” and the equal of Achilles who kills him. Achilles is mortal and immortal and causes more suffering and at once suffers more misery than any other hero, which are the two inseparable sides of his mixed nature. The freedom of his self-assertion against destiny is his choice, for which he alone is responsible, not to live out the course of his mortal life but to die as a young and glorious immortal. Hector and Achilles encapsulate (in a nutshell, Arendt would say), the “equity” or “equality” that Bespaloff and, to a lesser extent, Weil perceived as Homer’s astonishing ability to look with impartiality on Trojans and Achaeans, both of whom were what we today would call Greeks, a concept unknown to Homer.
This impartiality, the hallmark of Kant’s “enlarged mentality,” has crucial repercussions in Arendt’s thought. Recognizing the “equity” of the other is, for Bespaloff, the ground of justice, and for Arendt justice, first and foremost, is a matter of judging right from wrong and good from evil in particular cases as they arise. Bespaloff comes close to this when she says that “ethical experience lives only in the acts that embody it,” thereby distinguishing ethics from divisive moral and religious beliefs that subsume particular cases under doctrinal rules and standards. If Homer’s blindness is the emblem of his impartiality toward the prejudices or pre-judgments of Trojans and Achaeans, today, provided the idea of humanity is realized as it was by Arendt in her fundamental conception of human plurality, its consequences are grave — no longer for different Greeks, but for different everyones who willy-nilly share the earth while they live. The problem confronting all of us is twofold: on the one hand, violence against human plurality is ongoing if not increasing, and on the other, human plurality is, as Arendt says, “the condition… sine qua non“ and “per quam,” that is, the necessary and sufficient condition “of all political life.” The epitome of political life is not violence but action, acting in concert with one’s peers, which at one and the same time establishes the equality of distinct, even unique, beings, and releases power, revolutionary or otherwise, to move the human world.
Installment IV – EYB
I am prompted to continue our discussion in the direction pointed by your clear distinctions among the ways in which Weil, Bespaloff and Arendt faced the dehumanization wrought by the war: with Weil resigning herself to suffering and awaiting Nemesis, Bespaloff emphaszing how poetry can redeem suffering, and Arendt pushing herself to understand how violence dehumanizes and how violence destroys power. The religious thinker, the artist, and the political theorist, seeing the same reality, responded in their characteristic (and I would say, characterologically) distinct ways.
Power, Arendt argued, comes from people acting in concert. It cannot come from using violence, although violence can –to a point—serve it. Always, though, there comes that point, the point at which violence destroys power. This is why Kant counseled so wisely “Conduct the war so as not to make the peace impossible.” One of the essential political abilities –political judgment abilities—is to know how to use violence only to achieve a limited end and only in such a way as to preserve to the maximal extent, the humanity of those who wield it and those who are declared the enemies. Gradually, over the course of the 20th century, and then very dramatically in the Second World War, this ability became rarer and rarer. The totalitarian concentration camps are the exemplum of violent dehumanization in an institution; the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are the exemplum of violent dehumanization in an episode. Both involved turning civil spaces into war zones and non-combatants into war victims in unprecedented ways. Since those novelties, despite valiant efforts in the forms of international laws and conventions, destruction of spaces where violence should not occur has only continued. We live in an era of genocides, we witness the violentization of the world –and see its corollaries in the domestic violence wrought by people who live in violentized societies.
This violentization phenomenon, which is so fundamentally determinative of the world as we know it now, is not something that can be measured in the social scientific manner –with incidence studies, tabulations of lives lost, or of weapons manufactured. It is, as you imply, most clearly manifest in the acceptance of violence as a solution for political problems (and by some, for all problems) and, more fundamentally, in the mistaken concept that violence that is not strictly limited and used only to restore non-violence, can produce anything other than more violence. I noted before that the kind of terror existing now, which governments hope a “war on terror” will defeat, is a novelty, and you suggest that acceptance of violence as a solution is the crucial feature of both the terror and the “war on terror.” This is the dehumanization we face: terrorized, people accept that only violence can protect them from terror; and even the terrorists accept this, viewing themselves as the victims of the terror wrought by those they attack.
I was thinking about how Weil, Bespaloff and Arendt, all three, recognized that in the Trojan War, as in the war they were facing, dehumanization was the fate of everyone Force touched, Achaians and Trojans alike. Their responses –each in its own way—arose from their impartiality. And I want to reflect on this impartiality –but beginning from the fact that of the three only Arendt focused her attention on how the dehumanization they all described was novel in the history of the world.
One of the hardest things to grasp, I think, about Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, which she was beginning to write in 1944, when she spoke at the Mt. Holyoke is that she wrote as a historian but not as a historian looking for the cause of totalitarianism or of the Second World War. She wrote about multiple “elements” crystalizing into totalitarianism, and her goal was to delineate how in the future elements, the ones she had described or variants on them, might crystalize again in a world in which totalitarianism itself, this novel form of government, had itself become an element Her deepest concern was with the future. Her goal was not to lay blame, but to ask how people who had survived totalitarianism’s crystalization, could see the future coming at them.
Key to this seeing, this judging, was a capacity, in an unprecedented world situation, to expect the unexpected, the unprecedented. And I think that she was saying that those who are obsessed with causes do not have this freedom of mind. That is, impartiality of political judgment requires both a deep inquiry into the past as it presses upon us all –an inquiry into its elements, not the causes of events—and a sense for how the future may do the same, that is, press upon us all.
Hannah Arendt came to realize –to make the political judgment—that one of the consequences of the crimes peculiar to totalitarianism was that they presented all who survived the emergence of totalitarianism with a novel situation for legal judgment. As she concluded in her Eichmann in Jerusalem: “… the court here was confronted with a crime it could not find in the lawbooks and with a criminal whose like was unknown in any court, a least prior to the Nuremberg Trials.” This was the political judgment that should, she felt, have preceded any legal judgment, for it would have informed the judges that they could not just apply the law.
Impartiality, seeing things from many angles, all sides, which, I was saying, depends upon a capacity to be free from merely searching for causes –and trying to assign blame—is almost impossible to attain under threat of violence, or in conditions of terror. Or, to put the matter the other way around, if you want to destroy people’s capacity for impartiality, and for not being obsessed with blaming, the surest means is to create an atmosphere of acceptance of violence. .
Installment V – JK
I want to pick up on what you have now said about the generally accepted use of violent means to achieve political ends. What is inherently wrong with that acceptance is not that violence lacks justification — in the short run it may be justified, as in the self-defense of an individual or a nation — but that in the long run it is never legitimate. This entails a further distinction between violence and the power that “springs up” when people “act in concert,” whose legitimacy is “the initial getting together” of those willing to put aside and transcend their private interests to care for what concerns all of them in common. This way of distinguishing between private and public realms of activity brings to the fore the issue of sovereignty, a term bandied about by virtually everyone, in and outside the United Nations and the European Union, with a remarkable absence of thought as to what it implies. Hannah Arendt thought a lot about the concept of sovereignty, and her great, and greatly respected, adversary in this matter is Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes was the first modern political philosopher, and perhaps (I hope not) the most farsighted.
The measure of how much the Republic of the United Stares has changed in recent years can be taken by reconsidering Hobbes, who had little if any influence on our very well-read Founding Fathers. Those revolutionaries knew that political power is generated through the public expression of diverse opinions, which more than any other factor united the colonists by forging their will to be free and independent from Great Britain. The expression of opinions was integral to what they called “public happiness,” and their diversity was incorporated in the Constitution by its framers’ insistence on a multiplicity of powers both in the federal government and the constituent states, as well as in the addition of a Bill of Rights that in principle is never to be contravened by a higher authority than the Constitution, of which there is none. Thus Madison saw clearly that citizens’ “private rights and public happiness” are inseparably linked together (Federalist 14), and that these powers and rights, checking and balancing each other, would provide the dynamic architectonic within which the power of the people of the United States could and did expand as they acted together into an open and unknown future. With none of this had Hobbes anything to do. But what he wrote three hundred and fifty years ago has become all too relevant to the situation of Americans today.
First, Hobbes saw that in terms of violence all men are equal, for “the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest, either by secret machination, or by confederacy with others, that are in the same danger with himself” (Leviathan, XIII). Since they live in “continual fear, and danger of violent death,” men in their natural state “have no pleasure, but on the contrary a great deal of grief, in keeping company.” The fear of violent death flows seamlessly into the need for the commonwealth Hobbes proceeds to describe. Second, Hobbes’ commonwealth or Leviathan is an “artificial man,” a “mortal God,” that “overawes” its subjects, who forfeit to it all rights except the “natural” right to preserve their individual lives by any means in the case of prosecution or war. What Hobbes called “mixed government” or “diversity of opinions” can only weaken the “absolute power” of Leviathan (ibid., XXIX), an artifact made out of men in their plurality who desire its protection to pursue their private, mainly economic, interests. It is in exchange for that protection that they relinquish the concept of citizenship and their ability to express opinions and to act in public. Third, the “absolute” or “sovereign” power of Hobbes’ commonwealth means that justice and law are what it decrees them to be. With his relentless logic Hobbes does not shy away from the fact that Leviathan is a tyranny, for “tyranny, signifieth nothing more, nor less, than the name of sovereignty.” It follows that “the toleration of a professed hatred of tyranny” is identical to “a toleration of hatred to commonwealth in general” (ibid., “A Review and Conclusion”). Finally, Leviathan makes no pretense of permanence, which is not identical but akin to what Arendt means by earthly immortality. For though its subjects have no political freedom other sovereign powers do, and all such powers “live in the condition of perpetual war, and upon the confines of battle, with their frontiers armed, and cannons planted against their neighbors round about” (ibid., XXI). If in war “the enemies get a final victory” then “there is no further protection of subjects in their loyalty” to Leviathan; “then is the commonwealth dissolved” (ibid., XXIX, Hobbes’ emphasis).
In its Constitution the American Republic stands in the sharpest contrast to Hobbes’ Leviathan, but today we have so far diverged from our foundation that our Republic has come to resemble it. Indeed, the United States has gone beyond Hobbes insofar as it is considered and considers itself as the world’s sole “superpower.” In the idea of a single superpower, one super-Leviathan, power is recognized as Hobbes understood it, that is, as overwhelming force through the possession and control of the ultimate means of violence, only now on a worldwide scale. This is well illustrated in the recent statement of a liberal pundit regarding America’s presence in Iraq, namely, that our “political authority is rooted in the monopoly of legitimate violence” — words Arendt would have heard as doubly contradictory. On the other hand Madison, when he spoke of the people as the “fountain of power” (Federalist, 49), understood power in its literal sense, that is, as potentiality, the unquantifiable potential of a people acting together in accord with the principles of their duly constituted freedom. Hobbes knew the stability of Leviathan was provisional, and today, in the deafening light of the events of September 11, 2001, and the ongoing debacle in Iraq, his notion of the weak being equal to the strong in their ability to inflict violent death has taken on a whole new meaning. It is not the superior force of the United States, but its power to secure and foster freedom, ours let alone that of others, that has been thrown into question.
To Arendt “perhaps the greatest American innovation in politics…was the consistent abolition of sovereignty within the body politic of the Republic, the insight [shared with Hobbes] that in the realm of human affairs sovereignty and tyranny are the same.” The non-sovereignty of the Republic meant that it was not a national state in the European sense, but that its power really did arise from the people, the increasing diversity of the people and their opinions which it incorporated. The Republic was not only a federation of states, but also a confederation — an agreement, foedus, and trust, fides – among those people in their political equality as citizens. The weakness of individuals that Hobbes saw overcome by Leviathan’s sovereignty, Arendt saw overcome by their plurality, a plurality “bound by promises,” which enormously enhances their power potential. The word sovereignty nowhere appears in our Constitution, which moreover contradicts the concept of sovereignty in its Sixth Article, an article that appears in no document comparable to the one that constitutes the people of the United States. As far as the stability of the world is concerned, the Sixth Article states explicitly that “all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land.” And if treaties are not “but words” enforced by the means of violence, as Hobbes thought, what else can they be but promises stamped with golden seals?
Political freedom is not only freedom from tyranny, but also from violence insofar as
the potential to make and keep promises is realized as action creating “islands of predictability” within a future that is never wholly calculable. Arendt knew that the substitution of “violence for power can bring victory, but the price is very high,” paid not only “by the vanquished,” but also by “the victor in terms of his own power.” How tragically ironic it is that this Republic’s potential to inspire freedom by its example has turned into a breeding ground of violence, almost as if what Hobbes most feared, a “war of all against all,” were finally realized, not as a pre-political “state of nature,” but as post-political apathy, a sort of thoughtless Stoicism. Is it possible that thinking what we ourselves are doing and allowing to be done in our name, the precondition of judgment, is the last resource we have? In reflection we may realize that, apart from our Constitution, we are not a people, not a political entity at all. And in stopping to think, withdrawing even momentarily from the pushing and driving forces of time, we may begin to imagine, as Arendt did, how a public realm encompassing the humanity of all peoples might be newly founded. Our technologically shrunken world is not yet a global community, but it could become one if human plurality were recognized as power’s end-in-itself, its condition and result. It may then occur to us that violence can never be a means to that end, for the doctrine of sovereignty — which is nothing but Hobbes’ updated version of the divine right of kings — coupled with the notion of a single superpower, reveals violence in its “extreme form” of “one against all” and gives the lie to its relation to power’s political esssence. Perhaps we will agree with Arendt that the nobility of combat died long ago, and that the deployment of instruments of violence, even when unavoidable and justified, signals nothing less than the waning of political power. As she puts it, “Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power’s disappearance.” If we agree with her we will have cause to think not once but twice about the meaning of our president’s words when he said, “We will export death and violence to the four corners of the earth in defense of our great nation.”
Installment VI –EYB
Your reflection on sovereignty has set me thinking down a path that goes, perhaps, further than you meant to go. I want to draw out explicitly the conclusion for our present situation that, in my mind, followed from your reflections. Let me try it out with you, and then we can talk about it.
To put it briefly: I think that assertion of American sovereignty is the key ingredient –in practice and in ideology–of what our government is contributing to the deteriorating international situation. During the months before the American invasion of Iraq and in the months since, there has been a great deal of discussion in the newspapers and on television talk shows about whether this war marks the dawning of an era of American empire. Our political discourse has, in the whole post-Vietnam period, been predictably imprecise, but this discussion of empire has raised imprecision to a new level. And I think you are implying that it would be much clearer what the new “imperialists” are really doing and thinking if we called this not imperialism but assertion of American sovereignty and saw it as crucially aimed at justifying use of violence not for specific limited ends but for the open-ended assertion of sovereignty.
Long before the current Administration was elected (in an election that deeply threatened the independence of our judiciary, and thus the national principle of governmental checks and balances), American governments had made it very clear that our participation in international treaties and United Nations conventions was tied to assertions of American sovereignty. Provisions in United Nations conventions that required just what, as you so importantly noted, Article Six of our Constitution states explicitly, namely that “all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land,” have been consistently rejected. Our governments have refused to ratify UN Conventions because they have been said to compromise our sovereignty. In the years of this Administration, there has been a remarkable pattern of withdrawal from international treaties –the Kyoto accords, for example—and violation of them –in the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, for example. And, generally, as everyone is aware, there is a preference for unilateral rather than multilateral action and a repudiation of the United Nations as source of resolutions and of international inspectors and peace-keepers. But it was with the doctrine of “pre-emptive strike” that this Administration took the step that crucially links this growing assertion of sovereignty, this super-Leviathan ideology, to justification of violence.
I want to step back from this description for a moment and consider historically why this assertion of sovereignty seems to me to be not a mode of imperialism, but something else. Hannah Arendt drew very important distinctions in The Origins of Totalitarianism between European empires prior to the second half of the 19th century –or prior to the discovery of diamonds in South Africa in the 1870’s–and the ones typical of that period of imperialism. The European empire builders from the Caesars to the Hapsburgs had aimed to bring territories under their political control, to make them part of an enlarging body politic –the Romans, of course, dong that with much more inclination to let the peoples they assimilated to their empire govern themselves than the 19th century Europeans. The political aim of the late 19th century European imperialists was to establish monopoly control over natural resources and to keep on in pursuit of those natural resources wherever they were known to be or were discovered. The imperialists were the bourgeoisie, who backed the installation of colonial regimes that could be used to promote economic control; their aim was power for power’s sake, not for the sake of expanded political institutions. Thus a tremendous competition among imperialist states was set off –and the First World War followed.
The situation now is entirely different. Since the end of the Second World War, there has been an American bourgeoisie that has wanted to expand American corporations across the globe –to globalize. But there has been no aspiration to rule directly in the developing world, to expand the reach of our political institutions –to make more states, for example, on the pre-19th century model; and there has been no aspiration on the 19th century model to install colonial administrators and train colonial troops. Rather, the aim of making the entire world as favorable to American economic enterprise as possible has been served by trade agreements and by promoting, aiding, and arming those existing regimes that supported American enterprise –and undermining, more or less actively, more or less overtly, those that did not. Rhetoric about democracy to the contrary not withstanding, it has not been their political forms that have recommended the regimes American has supported –they have been sometimes autocratic, sometimes somewhat democratic –but their cooperativeness and their allegiance to American enterprise, which, until 1989, meant as well their hostility to Soviet or Chinese enterprise. This has been imperialism without direct political involvement either by absorption of a territory or installation of a colonial regime.
The novelty of what has happened in Iraq is that the American purpose of political influence in the Middle East and the economic purpose of getting a regime in place that supports American enterprise –which in this case, means primarily acquisition of cheap oil– has involved a massive “preemptive strike,” not n operation on the scale of Grenada or Panama. The preemptive strike was preceded by an argument that if America did not strike preemptively it would be struck and a second argument that Iraq was linked to the terrorists of the al-Qaeda network so that this preemptive strike was part of the “war on terrorism.” There was, before the first argument was made, no indication whatsoever that Saddam Hussein was poised to strike America. That regime had struck Kuwait, precipitating the Gulf War, and it had struck, during that war, America’s ally Israel, but since the Gulf War it had been turned inward, controlling in a hideously authoritarian manner, its own ethic and religious groups. The second argument seems now to have been based on a series of fabrications and supports a “war on terrorism” that has no definable limits to it.
When Hannah Arendt wrote “Lying in Politics,” her reflection on The Pentagon Papers, in 1971, she was returning to the theme of bureaucracy that she had focused upon in 1942 with Kafka’s guidance and then written about extensively in The Origins of Totalitarianism. Her reflection, as was her standard procedure, was designed to pull out of a familiar theme its novel aspect, and, in this case, the novel aspect was that the American government bureaucracies conducting the war in Vietnam were receiving from their own intelligence services all the information they needed to make an accurate assessment of the situation in Vietnam before the war and during the steady escalation of the war, and they were ignoring it. As Arendt noted, the remoteness from reality of the bureaucrats, the “non-relation between facts and decision, between the intelligence community and the civilian and military services, is perhaps the most momentous, and certainly the best guarded, secret that The Pentagon Papers revealed.” Summarily, Arendt concluded: “…one sometimes has the impression that a computer rather than ‘decision makers’ had been let loose in southeast Asia. The problem solvers did not judge; they calculated.”
In the historical background of the tendency of the Vietnam War era bureaucrats to think in theories and to calculate rather than judge was the influence upon American administrations during the Cold War of an anticommunist ideology. Arendt distinguished clearly between the traditional American prejudice against and hostility to socialism and communism of the 1920’s and 1930’s and the ideology of anticommunism that grew up after the Second World War and was the work of former communists –or former Stalinists—who needed a new object of belief after their god, communism, had failed. An ideology, by definition, is a total explanation for the course of history, for how the world has come to be as it is and where it is inevitably going. It relieves the mind of any need to judge, and eventually, if believed in long and deeply enough, of any capacity to judge.
Hannah Arendt noted that it is people who have suffered a great trauma of disillusionment who reach for an ideology, an explanation that assures them of their eventual triumph. . She also noted that the ideologist’s key mental move is to find an analogy in the past for each and every event, which means that the trauma once suffered can be seen if it threatens again and be, second time around, avoided or mastered. I think that the ideology that is being reached for now is assertion of sovereignty, and not just on the long familiar “my country right or wrong” patriotic model.
This is, rather, worship of the European style nation-state and a kind of “mystical nationhood” (to use the phrase Gustave Cohen used at Pontigny, as an exponent of French sovereignty); just the nation-state the American republic, with its critique of sovereignty, was meant to repudiate, Assertion of sovereignty –we might call it the sole superpower doctrine–has been building as an ideology for some time, but certainly the attack of September 11 –so frequently analogized to the attack upon Pearl Harbor—galvanized it, unleashing a huge surge of traumatized patriotic rhetoric and the “Patriot Act” with its unconstitutional provisions.
As far as capacity to judge is concerned, he manifestation of this ideology at work is different than the “lying in politics” Arendt studied in The Pentagon Papers. It is becoming clear that over the last several years the intelligence supplied by the intelligence community in this country, and, it seems, amongst our allies, became less and less pure. Intelligence was put in the service of the bureaucrats who wanted to invade Iraq. There was no simple remoteness from the facts involved here, but a manipulation of the facts. There was no split between the intelligence communities operating in relative isolation from executive order and an executive ignoring intelligence in its pursuit of its goals. This was not a case of an administration wanting to deceive its citizens and then eventually becoming caught up in its own deception, becoming self-deceived and unable to see the reality it had once simply ignored. This was an administration manipulating intelligence, intending to prevent any intelligence form becoming public that might refute its claims or disrupt its plans. The very foundation for good judgment –connection and closeness to reality—was undermined. This is a kind of assertion of the sovereignty of a view of the world, an ideology, that accompanies assertion of political sovereignty, and it actively precludes political judgment. This is really violence against the conditions of political judgment itself.
