I woke up to discover that more or less everything I wanted to say last night about Ron Rosenbaum’s misbegotten hit job on Hannah Arendt and her conception of the banality of evil has been said this morning at length by Steven Menashi at the American Scene. (Extra fun: in touching on Carlin Romano’s recent hit job on Heidegger, Menashi makes the point which I noted had gone entirely unmade in the long, hysterical combox criticism aimed at Romano: even Strauss, Heidegger’s great foe, insisted we couldn’t wave him away. This is relevant even for those who think Strauss and Heidegger were merely the Spy vs. Spy of Nietzscheans.)
So, since Steve has done most of the talking for me, I’ll let — who else? — Rieff do the rest:
…when the human lowers itself in the vertical of authority, there is always the shock of the revelation that that lowering can scarcely be called animal. Such lowerings as went under the category of sin or transgression were beneath baseness. They were nothing. Hannah Arendt calls this nothing the ‘banality of evil.’ And she is correct, so long as one understands the nothing of banality, its meaninglessness. It is the kind of transgression which the transgressor cannot recognize as a transgression. So the human, as transgressor, once the very idea of transgression is repressed, has fallen through the bottom of sacred order (Crisis of the Officer Class, 161-62).
November 3rd, 2009 | 10:29 am
I love how Rosenbaum blasts The Origin of Totalitarianism as “a book massively bloated by irrelevant show-your-work history,” but, in the end, it is that “show-your-work” history which exonerates Arendt. Presumably, Rosenbaum would have preferred her to engage in “pithy don’t show-your-work history” as that would have made her much easier to slime.
November 3rd, 2009 | 11:47 am
[...] James Poulos at PomoCon: I woke up to discover that more or less everything I wanted to say last night about Ron Rosenbaum’s misbegotten hit job on Hannah Arendt and her conception of the banality of evil has been said this morning at length by Steven Menashi at the American Scene. (Extra fun: in touching on Carlin Romano’s recent hit job on Heidegger, Menashi makes the point which I noted had gone entirely unmade in the long, hysterical combox criticism aimed at Romano: even Strauss, Heidegger’s great foe, insisted we couldn’t wave him away. This is relevant even for those who think Strauss and Heidegger were merely the Spy vs. Spy of Nietzscheans.) [...]
November 5th, 2009 | 1:10 pm
[...] Let me add this quote from Philip Rieff that James Poulos offered in a post two days ago: …when the human lowers itself in the vertical of authority, there is always the [...]
November 7th, 2009 | 2:31 pm
I have now come to think that Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism is more relevant today than ever before, especially in regards to the dangers of letting a totalitarian movement with what political radical islam fits get control of a state. I find the new hit jobs being done on Arendt as due to the fact that she shows how Heidegger’s thought points to a possible different direction than what the standard posties spout one that points to a recovery of politics and a common ground where all parties can access and common equity is possible. I still have serious issues of her take of the political in The Human Condition, which is more Kantian than Aristotleian, and is open to more of the polis worshiping charge than Strauss could ever truely open to.
Strauss suggest the whole problem with Heidegger’s thought and how it could be open to the Nazi project is cought up in the term resoluteness.
November 10th, 2009 | 12:08 pm
[...] Like James, I find that almost everything that needs to be said about this Ron Rosenbaum hit piece has already been said by Steve Menashi. It”s a thorough and fine job by Menashi and one that I could hardly do as well as him, so you should really read it. [...]
November 13th, 2009 | 10:28 pm
[...] The Atlantic, Volokh Conspiracy, Maverick Philosopher, MacLean’s, James Poulos, Lawrence Helms, Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)Heidegger and Nazism, again.An [...]
November 14th, 2009 | 11:28 am
[...] The Atlantic, Volokh Conspiracy, Maverick Philosopher, MacLean’s, James Poulos, Lawrence Helms. [...]
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