Robert Tulip wrote:The first thing I really like in the essay is her comment about judgment which I interpret as a critique of the insidious function of cultural and moral relativism in stripping us of our right and ability to judge in matters of truth and ethics.
Certainly a lot of her comments can be read in that light, but I don't think she herself has done much to bring relativism into the topic. I could be wrong on that, of course, but to say that she's offering a critique of moral relativism would seem to imply that she's dealing with the results of a largely philosophical shift. As Richard Rorty has noted, moral relativism has mostly entered public thought
as critique -- the philosophers who have offered the observation that moral schemes are relative to context never seem to get noticed by layperson's until someone has something to say against moral relativism. So far as I can tell, the closest Arendt comes to broaching the issue is in her references to Nietzsche, who is often interpreted as a moral relativist, when a closer reading would, I think, entail the recognition that he neither described moral relativism as a fact of modern culture (rather, he diagnosed modern Europe as having contracted a gradually spreading case of nihilism) nor prescribed it as a remedy.
Rather, it seems to me that Arendt sees in the events of the 20th century a kind of bewildering effect. We are incapable of judging them not because we've bought into any notion of moral relativism, but simply because they're so astonishing, so unprecedented, so big. For a time, people tried to judge them according to the standards they had judged other events, and only through the attempt to do so did they recognize that the old standards were only incompletely applicable.
Arendt implies that the postmodern worship of secular pluralism is more a problem of cultural elites than the mass of the population, but as she says of elites in the prologue "that they were small in number does not make them any less characteristic of the climate of the times".
Ah, I think you see what you're getting at. Throughout the book, Arendt does continually repeat that the German collaborators had abandoned their old moral norms as though morality were, as its etymology would imply, merely a set of customs that could be abandoned at will. But I don't think she intends that to be taken as evidence of motive. Rather than the thought of this relativity preceding the act, I think she takes it as a conclusion that people have been inclined to draw from the ease with which entire populations during the 20th century traded in their previously firm moral convictions.
Rose wrote:Can the right premise, and the progression of logical thought, lead to horrific conclusions? I think the answer is clearly, yes.
The generally held conviction is that, if you've chosen your premises well, and if you're scrupulous in your logic, your conclusion will be, at the very least, true. It might still be horrific, but to get a conclusion that his horrific
because false -- ie. to have arrived through logical consideration at the conclusion that it is morally justified to support the Nazi regime -- would require that your reasoning is in error at some point in the process -- either in its premises, or because of some logical fallacy.
She references the argument heard at the Nuremberg and Eichmann trials: "every organization demands obedience to superiors as well as obedience to the laws of the land. Obedience is a political virtue of the first order, and without it no body politic could survive." A premise, which as we saw, did follow to its horrific conclusion.
From the point of view I offered above, a critical approach would begin with the question of whether or not the premise of that argument -- that obedience is a political virtue -- is true, or even plausible. Arendt seems to argue that obedience is not, in fact, a political virtue. On analogy with Mary McCarthy's example of the person with the gun held to their head, obedience is never fully the motivation of the citizen who acts in accord with the dictates of state. State orders are merely the temptation to act as the citizen would.
Another argument could be raised against that offered by the Nazi sympathizers. Rousseau argued in "The Social Contract" that obedience is due only to legitimate powers, and his argument has been broadly influential in the political philosophy of the last several hundred years. If that principle is granted, then an objection could be raised on the grounds that the Nazi government was not a legitimate authority, and that obedience was therefor not due it. That's not a line of inquiry that Arendt takes up, but it's there for consideration.
But I think the use of such intuition, within both those judging acts, resides in the realm of judging with regard to personal responsibility.
I think that's a substantially correct interpretation of what Arendt meant. Ultimately, she's only talking about what a person decides to do of their own power, not how they judge the actions of others.
So does Arendt mean to offer that subscription to a set of premises , to "standards and rules," inhibits that human capacity to judge intuitively to the point that it leads to conclusions like the Nazi Final Solution? It seems that Arendt gives a nod to reason, but it also seems that reason is maligned as that which leads to such horrific conclusions.
Well, this isn't going to be a popular suggestion around these parts, but I would say that Arendt is party to that suspicion of reason which developed in the 20th century mostly as a reaction to just the sort of event she's examining here. She certainly doesn't develop the theme of the dangers of total reason to the same extent as, say, Max Horkheimer or George Steiner, but it does seem to me that she wants to forward this intuitive form of judgment as a preserve, a kind of fall back position, against the sometimes menacing development of rational systems that can result in a horrific situation like the Holocaust. I wouldn't say that she rejects logical systemization altogether, but she is critical of any temptation to rely so heavily on such systems that we fail to employ our faculty for judgment.
As I've pointed out to Garicker in another context, there is actually a fairly long tradition of finding in systematic reason the means and methods to arriving at some of the worst atrocities in human history -- a tradition that winds its way through Neitzsche, Dadaism, surrealism, Camus, Satre, free jazz, and so on.
Thus the government derived its just power from the consent of the governed. Now the structure of Arendt's following sentence leads to a bit of confusion:
"Its plausibility rests on the truth that 'all governments,' in the words of Madison, even the most autocratic ones, even tyrannies, 'rest on consent'..."
Here, too, I would say, is the influence of Rousseau. Rousseau argued that the basis for all political authority rested with covenants. (Incidentally, if anyone is interested, a more modern author, Guglielmo Ferrar, developed that notion in very interesting ways.) The specific term "consent" probably entered the general premise because it is more nebulous and thus more difficult to critique. Arendt is probably deriving her inclusion of autocratic, tyrannical governments in part from Rousseau and in part on analogy to her reference to Mary McCarthy.
But I think any discussion with regard to consent of the governed as applied to dictatorships, as applied specifically to the discussion of German involvement with the Nazi machine, is inherently different than a discussion of the consent of the governed with regard to republics.
Can you be more specific as to how? I think it's an interesting assertion, but I'm not sure straight off how the distinction would apply.