Hannah Arendt's Tactlessness: Reading Eichmann in Jerusalem

Abstract

Thus you will avoid hatred from the offence by harming nobody gratuitously: from which sensus communis will protect you. Seneca There is a great temptation to explain away the intrinsically incredible by means of liberal rationalization. In each one of us, there lurks such a liberal, wheedling us with the voice of common sense. Hannah Arendt I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb. Herman Melville Is it possible to envisage a viable theory of tact in the humanities? Tact has a long history, and for writers like Hans-Georg Gadamer it is bound up with the recovery of the Roman idea of the sensus communis over the course of the eighteenth century, from Shaftesbury through to Kant, and the impact of that recovery on the birth of the human sciences. For the Roman Stoics, the sensus communis implied an idea of social conduct. In the Stoic theory of judgement, according to Gadamer, '[t]he grasp and moral control of the concrete situation require subsuming what is given under the universal--that is, the goal that one is pursuing so that the right thing may result'. (1) Such practical wisdom included an awareness of how to avoid giving offence, and more expansively an ability to make judgments of what is right and proper in social situations such as the giving of gifts. (2) As Gadamer argues in the first chapter of Truth and Method, during the nineteenth century the different meanings that had come to be attached to the ancient idea of the sensus communis (from a feeling for the common interest of mankind in Shaftesbury to a model for the subjective universality of aesthetic judgement in Kant) provided justification for the emerging human sciences. A kind of 'tact,' in Gadamer's account, came to distinguish the kinds of judgement involved in the writing of, say, history, from the inductive reasoning of the natural sciences, as I will show in what follows. The writing of history, and the kind of judgements that the historian might be expected to make require tact, in order to match thinking and writing to the often traumatic objects that they describe. Writing in a 1953 response to Eric Voegelin's review of The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt wrote that '[t]he problem of style is a problem of adequacy and of response'. (3) Style, and in particular the style of writing required by an account of the pre-history and history of totalitarianism such as Arendt had written in The Origins of Totalitarianism, embodies the relation of thinking and writing to the realities of history, and notices that relation as a problem. For Hannah Arendt, doing justice to those realities means avoiding the wheedling voice of liberal 'common sense' that lurks within, and that would try to rationalise them away. Implicit in its attempt to rationalise events, such a liberal voice would seek to maintain the classical standard of a dispassionate style of historical writing sine ira et studio, a style that Arendt claimed to have abandoned, in her reply to Voegelin, 'as a methodological necessity' in The Origins of Totalitarianism (p403). To write about the concentration camps without anger, sine ira, she writes, 'is not to be 'objective,' but to condone them' (p404). The angry style of Origins thereby signals Arendt's abandonment of liberal forms of rationalisation, objectivity and dispassion that unwittingly condone the totalitarian reality that they fail to understand; and in the process it challenges an ancient opposition between reason and the passions, particularly anger. (4) To rationalise, in the light of recent events, would no longer mean primarily to avoid allowing the emotions to cloud one's judgement; to rationalise would mean now to condone what should never have happened. The angry style of The Origins of Totalitarianism resists such a move by insisting on the particularity of totalitarianism. The book's insistence and anger account for the peculiarly divergent types of emotional tone that its earliest readers found in it; the book's style tends, Arendt wrote to Voegelin, towards being 'praised as passionate and criticized as sentimental' (p403). …