The Rational Pessimist

We watched a PBS documentary about Hannah Arendt (1906-75), a German-Jewish-American intellectual best known for her book Eichmann in Jerusalem with its “banality of evil” trope. The program was quite timely, given Arendt’s deep concern with the phenomenon of authoritarianism (which had up-ended her own life).

I was particularly struck by her writing how, with such a regime, people and institutions can be sucked into a black hole of ideas and beliefs that defy reason and human decency. It becomes normalized. Exactly what we’re seeing in today’s America.

Then I found on my chair Arendt’s 1958 book The Human Condition. Put there by my wife; probably left behind by our daughter. A substantive intro by Margaret Canovan deems the book hard to categorize, querying what Arendt was really getting at. The book basically explores what it’s like to be a human being in society as well as in one’s own skin. I hoped to find in it some interesting and insightful points. Instead I found myself weirdly fascinated by its idiosyncrasy.

Despite her title, Arendt speaks always of “men.” Rooted as she is in ancient thinkers like Aristotle and Plato, who didn’t regard women in the same way at all. It’s strange that a woman would write obliviously of this. Her 1950s now seem scarcely less ancient than Periclean Athens.

Much of the book does reference the ancient Greeks and Romans, their thinkers, and how their lives were. Slavery a particular preoccupation (in fact, much of those populations were enslaved).

The book’s 300+ dense pages present observations and reflections trying to dissect life in society. Initially one might be in awe of Arendt’s ability to fill all those pages and blitz the reader with a ceaseless barrage of deep things no one else would have thought to say — an intellectual tour-de-force. The equally dense footnotes display great erudition, as if she’s read and absorbed everything ever written. And Canovan’s introduction does an excellent job of positioning it all into a framework that makes some sense.

And yet I found myself repeatedly reacting not with “Yes!” but with “What??” Seeing not a parade of true insights but non sequiturs. Many times I’d re-read a line to dissect just how it went awry.

What also strikes me is how loftily divorced Arendt’s writing was from true human concerns. Even while the whole thing ostensibly analyzes what life is like, I found scant insight helping us to understand and deal with the problems confronting us in today’s world. There is also zero attention to such matters as sexuality, love, parenting, etc.

Arendt repeatedly calls us homo faber — man the maker. Creating stuff. Yet that’s really means, not ends; we make things to live, not live to make things. And she finally declares “the victory of the Animal laborans” — simply expending effort, distinguished from making things. A dichotomy I find elusive. And this she somehow ties to a lamented modern loss of Christianity’s notion of individual immortality. Not that she’s a Christian. While I haven’t noticed losing a fantasy of Heaven making a whit of difference in how people live their lives.

Discussing the interplay between the private and the public realms, Arendt bizarrely states that “Christian morality . . . has always insisted that everybody should mind his own business.” Really? Then she deems it natural “that the final stage of the disappearance of the public realm should be accompanied by the threatened liquidation of the private realm as well.” On what planet is this?

A paragraph on Rousseau is alternately intriguing and baffling. I put a question mark by Arendt’s beginning statement that he’s “the only great author still frequently cited by his first name alone.” Maybe I don’t read enough. I did relish her saying, “it was as though Jean-Jacques rebelled against a man called Rousseau.” Then she references a 17-1800s “flowering of poetry and music,” and “the rise of the novel, the only entirely social art form” — is it that? — “coinciding with a no less striking decline of all the more public arts, especially architecture.” What on earth is she talking about? Maybe the ’50s seemed to her a particularly arid interval. But I reckon music to be art both “public” and “social” and, in modern times, culturally pervasive. Anyhow, whatever one can make of Arendt’s sweeping generalizations about culture, she concludes by deeming them “sufficient testimony to a close relationship between the social and the intimate.” An opaque pronouncement grounded on weird premises.

The next paragraph talks of conformism as related to “the disintegration of the family.” Such pop sociology is common today, but it’s jarring that she said this smack in the “Ozzie and Harriet” era. And families today seem more prone to helicopter parenting, the antithesis of “disintegration.” Anyhow, she says “what actually took place was the absorption of the family unit into corresponding social groups.” Whatever sense might be wrung from those words, they seem belied by the whole “bowling alone” phenomenon of social isolation.

These are just examples of why I found the book maddening. Its last part is a lengthy meditation on doing versus thinking, and the interplay among science, mathematics, philosophy and the search for knowledge, and Man’s inner being and place in the world. Which Arendt thinks is all mucked up. But don’t ask me to explain how. Here again, sentence after sentence would begin more or less intelligibly, only to veer off the deep end. I could find no overall clear line of argument. And much of what I could actually understand her to be saying seemed simply wrong.

I was reminded of the long-ago TV comic “Professor” Irwin Corey, “the world’s foremost authority,” whose shtick was bloviating deep-sounding verbiage actually devoid of meaning.