Hannah Arendt on Film

Singapore, 8 January 2013 -- It's never too late in the day to pick up the daily newspaper. There are gems of articles that just pop up by surprise. Today's, the Singapore daily tabloid, article on a film is just an example.

The tabloid syndicated an article from the The New York Times International that featured a film about one of my favourite philosopher, Hannah Arendt. I would not have known that a film was made about her which just got released in January of 2013 had I not read this article.

In particular, this film focused on the controversy that precipitated from her coverage and analysis of the famous Eichmann trial. I would like to catch the film someday and see how they treated “the controversy.”

The issue may not be common knowledge among today's generation. But it was BIG at that time. It all started with this man called Adolf Eichmann.

Adolf Eichmann is a German Nazi official who escaped to Argentina after the fall of Nazi Germany. He was responsible with many of the horrors of the Holocaust committed against the Jewish people. Eventually, he was “extracted” to Jerusalem to face trial.

Arendt pressed hard to be sent by her newspaper to cover the trial. It is no surprise. As a Jewish immigrant, she has a personal stake on the trial. She herself was a victim of Nazi atrocities. A promising intellectual at the the German academe, she experienced discrimination among her peers for being a Jew. Had she not escaped to America, she would have been one of the millions of Jews who suffered and probably died in the concentration camps put up by Eichmann.

But the ideas she'll proffer on her articles on the trial would be anchored in earlier episodes in her intellectual life. In particular to a very ironic intellectual and romantic relationship with a mentor-philosopher-turned-Nazi, Martin Heidegger.

No biography of Arendt would be complete without the more than anecdotal mention of Martin Heidegger. Their relationship would be the quintessential exemplar of love-hate-love relationships happening on both the romantic and intellectual levels. And Hannah Arendt would be criticised for re-establishing this relationships through letters after the war.

This is no surprise as besides one of the monoliths of contemporary philosophy, Martin Heidegger was also known for one treacherous act: the firing of his Jewish mentor and father of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl, from the University for Freiburg. The act was perceived to be so evil that Arendt would opine that it hastened Husserl's death. To further complicate things, Heidegger would remove the dedication to Husserl in his book, Being and Time. He would also be absent at Husserl's cremation and only through a letter explain to the later's wife about a “human failure” for his absence.

Although some historians would argue that Heidegger, as Rector of the University, has no choice but to comply with laws promulgated by the Nazi party, it is not doubted that this episode in history provided the backdrop to many of the analysis that came about in Arendt's reports during the Eichmann trial. In particular, this episode in history resonates when Arendt asserts that the failure of the brightest minds to think-judge (vis-a-vis, to reason) as the cause of the evils of World War II. She would more often refer to this as the “banality of Evil” emphasising the juxtaposition of the seemingly inconsistent images of the obscene and the daily life.

In her book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt asserts that Eichmann acted not out of hate for the Jewish people but acted merely on orders with mechanical precision and efficiency… and in so doing failed to think and to judge his actions and their consequences. In the same respect, this argument can be analogously applied to Heidegger's failure to think and to judge when he acted on orders to fire his mentor Husserl. Heidegger seemed merely “reasoning” on how to go about the act in the most efficient and expeditious way. In so doing, both instances become exemplars of how failure to think makes the obscene banal. Such unthinking is infectious that it permeated all levels of German society during the Nazi regime.

To digress a bit, it would be worthwhile to mention that Arendt is known for her rigorous analysis of dichotomies. Thus, her analysis of reasoning vs. thinking vs. judging is very informative. Arendt has a special meaning attached to these terms. But in particular, reasoning for her is more akin to logical/calculating/syllogistic inference. Thinking is more akin to the activity of philosophising–the act of posing questions that cannot be answered by mere reasoning. And in this regard, Heidegger is again summoned back in Arendt's thinking. In “Was Ist Das–die Philosophie?,” Heidegger explains that the question “What is philosophy?” already presupposes a foreknowledge of there term “philosophy.” Thus, the act of posing the question is DOING philosophy itself. And the challenge for philosophers is to making explicit this pre-theoretical knowledge. (Ironically, this idea stems from phenomenology to which Heidegger is greatly indebted to Husserl.)

It is sometimes useful to associate images in distinguishing reasoning and thinking in Arendt's thoughts. Reasoning is concerned with a progression of knowledge in a linear fashion. One arrives at a clean inference from previous established knowledge; thus creating a progression of virtually unconditioned statements. Reasoning = creating a line and progressing beyond.

On the other hand, thinking is caught up with this circle of known and unknown-knowns (to use Donald Ramsfeld's terms). It is clear that this evokes Heidegger's similar notion of the hermeneutic circle. Thinking = travelling in a circle and going within.

It thus becomes clear that Arendt's characterisation of Eichmann (and probably of Heidegger) as people who failed to think is not very endearing. For as intellectuals, they had the capacity to explore the complex act of thinking. They were good at reasoning but they failed miserably in the faculty of thinking–and eventually of the act of judging.

Of course, detractors of Eichmann would not be comfortable with this idea. In particular, they were not comfortable of removing the motivation of intent to kill millions of Jews from Eichmann. And for this she was heavily criticised. As an Arendt reader, I would say she never meant to remove the motivation of murder in Eichmann's acts. What she meant was that at the most fundamental level, these people failed to think for themselves and readily relied on “orders” emanating from the to top to guide their moral framework and actions. In effect, not only had they carried out the evils with such efficiency but more importantly their inability to think was passed on down to the lower levels of German society. Arendt is saying that thinking is a responsibility because the inability to think is infectious. Non-thinking is equally evil as the act itself.

But the rougher criticism came not from her analysis of the banality of Evil in Nazi Germany but from the assertion that this banality extended to the Jewish councils established by the Nazis. The Jewish Councils were administrative bodies composed of Jewish leaders. It is through them that the Nazis exercised another level of control over the Jews in Germany (and other occupied territories). The Jewish Councils were the instrumentalities the Nazis used to organise the mobilisation of the Jews to death camps.

It's no leap of logic in the way Arendt think how the Jewish Council would equally be faulted for failure to think for themselves. Of course, at some point one can feel that the Jewish Councils were bound. Disobedience to Nazi directives would mean certain death for the leaders and probably immediate death to those under their care. Thus, others even argued that the Jewish Councils were able to “delay” what seemed the inevitable for many since the Nazis would have to deal through them… adding a layer of bureaucracy.

Whatever is the truth to this episode in history, it is well known that the Jewish communities disowned Hannah Arendt for these few lines of commentaries in her reporting. And thus, this whole episode is known as “The Controversy” by many Arendt biographers.

Thus, to go back to the film featured in the article, I'm quite keen to see it. It would interesting to see how they deal with “the Controversy.”

I'm sure the film would somehow touch on the love-hate-love relationship between Arendt and Heidegger. I personally think that it is one of the greatest love stories of all time (although Arendt would eventually marry several other men). How she was able to re-establish relationships with him after his support for the Nazis… only Arendt could explain:

“The possible redemption from the predicament of irreversibility–of being unable to undo what one has done–is the faculty of forgiving. The remedy for unpredictability, for the chaotic uncertainty of the future, is contained in the faculty to make and keep promises. Both faculties depend upon plurality, on the presence and acting of others, for no man can forgive himself and no one can be bound by a promise made only to himself.”

Inferno, Malthus, and the Population

I just finished reading Dan Brown's newest novel, Inferno. It's another historical-conspiracy thriller which now tackles the issue of overpopulation. The story again conscripts Robert Langdon, the Harvard professor with his eidetic memory and vast knowledge of history and symbology and iconology (whatever that means).

Instead of running through the underground halls of the Vatican hunting for symbols left by secret societies like the Templars and the Illuminati (from Brown's previous books, The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons), Langdon now interprets symbols which were derived from Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy (but mostly from the first of the trilogy, Inferno).

At the most part, the book was a page turner. Like his previous books, Brown masterfully ends each chapter on an anticipatory mode that keeps readers wanting to go through the next chapter. Furthermore, the chapters were really not that long, so moving from chapter to chapter is a breeze.

It is no doubt another book made for the cinema. The book jumps from one scene to another similar to how movies jump from one scene to another. At times, the scenes were juxtaposed in such a visual manner that Brown need only describe the next scene to make an impression upon the readers on what really is happening.

At times though, the book overwhelms the readers with too much history and explanations. Several times, the readers were presented graphs that illustrate the growth of the human population through time that one is jolted out of the realism that the novel was trying to create. Thus, instead of focusing on the fictional flow of events, I personally became more doubtful of the hidden thesis of the book.

While author took pains in arguing for the urgency of the population issue, it rhetorically fails in this regard by losing the readers' attention from the flow of the story. Many times, while bombarded with factual assertions in the book, I find myself stopping and looking it up in Google. This is easily done since I was reading the book through my iPad which makes shifting from book to Google as easily as swiping my finger.

And many times that I did google for the assertions made in the book, I did find inaccuracies (not blatant, but understandably done to fit it squarely in the plot). That's where the believability of the novel suffers. The novel is a fictional instrument and much of it's charm comes from illusion of creating its reality. Its rhetorical import is conveying its Truth through creating its own reality. Once this veil of illusion is pierced, it loses its charm and is now read as if it were a dissertation.

This was the same problem with The Da Vinci Code. Brown's claims on the introduction that certain parts were accurate did not bode well to readers who anticipated its historical accuracy. His interviews after the show did little to assuage the public.

But then again, I think that's more of Brown's: create much talk around it. And he's probably doing it again with Inferno. He might have learned much contrasting to the reception to his other book, Angels and Demons, which although written earlier, was less controversial and seemed meek to these two other books.

Still, I would have preferred the author to have stuck within the reality of the novel rather than assert the superiority of some mathematical assertion derived from Thomas Malthus' assertion in a work of fiction. It only exposes the novel to some uneasy questions.

For instance, Malthus claimed in 1798 that population growth will outgrow the resources needed to sustain itself (Malthus made the assertion is 1798, a time when he already though his world was overpopulated), and yet, 200 years later, our population keeps growing.

Of course, there are many other factors to consider… so it's academically irresponsible to dismiss Malthus and his theory (and his mathematics… to use Brown's term in Inferno) altogether. For one, Malthus wrote prior to the Industrial Revolution… a time when a new form of technology that increased food production. Thus, arguably, the natural limit to sustain population increased. But are we hitting this new natural limit? Are we able to find a new form of technology to allow us to breach this natural limit? Or is our population now self limiting (i.e., is human population slowly self limiting through the forces that Malthus describes)?

The arguments for or against it will continue… but this just serves to illustrate how the novel distracted the readers out of this fictional world and eventually lost the rhetorical argument.

You would not see C. S. Lewis' Screwtape Letters befall that same tragedy. C. S. Lewis being the great story teller (at the same time, Christian apologist) knew the strength of the novel lies in the reality it creates… thus, there was never an attempt in that book to take the reader out of that reality and argue ex libris (out of the book, if my Latin is erroneous).

The same way can be said with Carl Sagan's Contact. The novel's argument was so discreetly veiled in the reality of the story that readers would never suspect the motivation of the author. When I read Sagan's book, I didn't know the author and didn't know he's a proponent of “free-thinking” and against “religion and superstition.”

Having said that, I hope that the movie version would not befall the same problems. The book has a good story to tell. Let it drive the argument.