In Our Time

by Melvyn Bragg

  ALISON HILLS: We are never really sure exactly what will make us happy, so we can’t base anything as important as duties on that. But he also says that we must do our duty even if it is not going to make us happy, or even anybody else happy. We must not lie, we must not torture people, even if that would make ourselves, or other people, happy.

  Kant did think that the highest good is virtue rewarded, with the good will and happiness combined. And he asked: do good people get rewarded in this life? No, they do not. We must hope that there is another life where we will be able to perfect our virtue because, Alison Hills suggested, Kant thought it would just be too depressing if it weren’t true and it would undermine our motivation.

  Melvyn queried this, as we had heard that Kant’s idea was that we were doing something not because of some higher authority figure, but because of some inward authority figure that somehow had accreted to us.

  JOHN CALLANAN: Kant seems to have religious and anti-religious moments. The anti-religious moment seems to be the one that you just described. We look to ourselves for the source of moral authority and moral decision-making. There are other moments where thinking of ourselves as God’s creatures, thinking perhaps that there might be some reward for us in an afterlife, has to find a place in his system.

  There was a deep ambivalence frequently in Kant’s thinking, it was noted, and this was one example.

  David Oderberg introduced what has been called the humanity formulation of the categorical imperative, which is the second formulation and has perhaps been more influential in its long-term legacy than the first formulation.

  DAVID ODERBERG: The second formulation: always act on those maxims such that you treat humanity never merely as a means, but always as an end, an end in itself. The idea there is we use people as means to ends all the time; when I go to the supermarket, I am using a checkout person as a means to get my bottle of milk, that’s okay. But what Kant objects to is the idea of using other rational beings as pure means to our own ends. To put it in contemporary jargon: exploitative behaviour that treats people purely as objects for furtherance of one’s own ends.

  We can see immediately the influence of that kind of idea and the notion of dignity. We are rational beings and that makes us an end in itself, to be respected absolutely. We can say that human rights, human dignity, the dignity of the person, a lot of that can be traced back to Kant.

  Probably the most difficult question mentioned so far, Alison Hills suggested, was how free we are to act morally. It was absolutely crucial to Kant and he thought that, if we have a duty to do something, it must be possible for us to do that thing.

  ALISON HILLS: He is very concerned that we might be just a member of the causal order, like anything else, where one thing happens after another, and there aren’t actually options open to us that we can freely choose between. Another really important strand is that one of the grounds of the value of the will is our capacity to act freely, to make choices for ourselves, but, as we mentioned before, he thought we couldn’t prove that we are free.

  In the third part of The Groundwork, Kant tried to show that there is room to think of ourselves as free. He said there is a shift where you think of yourself as acting, and you see that, when you act and you are making a decision, you must think of yourself as having an option.

  There is another formulation of the categorical imperative, the autonomy formulation, which John Callanan said was very influential, and it relates to that notion of freedom. We have to presume that we are free and we have a responsibility to decide for ourselves. This is about growing up and not outsourcing moral responsibility to some parental figure, to conventional morality or religious figures, but rather deciding for yourself what you think is the morally correct thing to do. Kant described that as acting autonomously.

  JOHN CALLANAN: It can’t be that I perform moral actions because it is God’s will, Kant says, that can’t be my moral motivation. If it is, then the reason I am helping someone who is, say, drowning in front of me is because God would like it. There it seems like my motivation is just to win the approval of some divine parental figure, but that’s distorting proper moral motivation. You should help someone in need because it is the right thing to do.

  To this, David Oderberg added his thoughts about how to place Kant in the history of philosophy, and this emphasis, this almost ‘fetishisation’ of duty. Moral philosophers believe in duties but there are also other things in morality, such as what is permissible, what is admirable, what is praiseworthy and so on; there is the building of character.

  DAVID ODERBERG: For Kant, it is duty, duty, duty above all else, only holy duty, that is the holy thing. It is Prussianism, it is Prussianism. I know that I am probably going to get my colleagues trying to kill me on this one, but that is Prussianism. It is so easy to say, ‘Oh, well, of course duty, so therefore obedience to the moral law’ – that is kind of a caricature. Unreasoned obedience to the moral law is absolutely crucial for Kant.

  Alison Hills found lots to disagree with there, asserting that obedience to the moral law is something that reason gives to itself; it cannot be unreasoned. Other works that Kant wrote were all about other aspects of character, including the importance of some kinds of love and some kinds of sentiment, and respect was hugely important. Those, David Oderberg suggested, were arguably dilutions of the official theory, as found in The Groundwork. John Callanan contended that Kant, when he talked about duty, was using his name for a very ordinary kind of moral psychology that he thought everyone did – it was the notion of reasoning and doing something simply because you thought it was the right thing to do.

  Kant’s influence was diverse and diffuse throughout the nineteenth century and beyond, David Oderberg said, affecting the Romantic philosophers in both positive and negative ways. In a positive way, there was the idea of the human being’s own contribution to the construction of an interpretation of reality. In a negative way, some of the Romantic philosophers feuded with Kant over his destruction of any firm ground for faith. Alison Hills added that Kant is still a really dominant thinker in terms of being against that other strong tradition of utilitarianism or consequentialist thinking that says that what matters is the end result. John Callanan noted that Kant was interested in establishing a culture of reason, where we value reason as the way in which we engage in dialogue with each other; we do not think that our moral transactions are just about who has the stronger passion, who has the stronger desire. ‘And I think, to a large degree, he has been successful.’

  HANNAH ARENDT

  Hannah Arendt was born in 1906 near Hanover in Germany, where her family rarely mentioned their Jewishness. She said she first encountered the word ‘Jew’ in the anti-Semitic remarks of children as she played in the streets. She escaped to America in 1941 and spent much of her time trying to understand why totalitarianism had dominated Europe so murderously in the twentieth century. To prevent its return, she argued, everyone should engage in political life as in an idealised ancient Greek city state. She also wanted to know what motivated so many to act so atrociously in the Second World War and it was at the trial of Eichmann, one of the main organisers of the Holocaust, that she described what she called the ‘banality of evil’.

  With Melvyn to discuss Hannah Arendt were: Lyndsey Stonebridge, professor of humanities and human rights at the University of Birmingham; Frisbee Sheffield, director of studies in philosophy and bye-fellow of Girton College, Cambridge; and Robert Eaglestone, professor of contemporary literature and thought at Royal Holloway, University of London.

  Hannah Arendt excelled at school, studying ancient Greek from a young age, which, Frisbee Sheffield said, led to a lifelong interest in classics. She went on to the University of Marburg to study philosophy and theology, where she met the philosopher Martin Heidegger, before moving on to the University of Heidelberg for her doctoral dissertation on the concept of love in St Augustine, studying with another philosopher, Karl Jaspers.

  MELVYN BRAGG:
Can we spool back to Heidegger? Because she had a big affair with Heidegger that marked her for the rest of her life. His wife was anti-Semitic; he then became a Nazi and an admirer of Hitler.

  FRISBEE SHEFFIELD: I think that’s why she moved to work under the direction of Karl Jaspers rather than staying at Marburg. And, yes, there was a rupture in their relationship, of course, when he joined the Nazi party and proclaimed support for their views when he was rector at the University of Freiburg. She struggled to come to terms with that.

  Arendt moved to Berlin and came face to face with the growing Nazi movement; she gathered information about anti-Semitism, and was detained for a time by the Gestapo.

  She began with philosophy but was to work across politics as well. The events of the war were to politicise her, and she said she learned to think politically from her second husband, Henrich Blücher, who was a revolutionary socialist.

  FRISBEE SHEFFIELD: She resisted being called a ‘political philosopher’ because of what she saw as an inherent hostility towards politics in most philosophers. One might call her a political thinker, or theorist. But even there she is quite hard to pin down; she doesn’t seem to fit into established categories of political thinking. She is not a liberal in any straightforward sense.

  If Blücher taught Arendt to think politically, she said it was Heidegger who had taught her how to think and how to think about things, or how to think in order to do things, and this was what drew her to him. Heidegger taught Arendt that thinking was a way of being a person.

  LYNDSEY STONEBRIDGE: It means that how you think is how you exist. You establish yourself in the world through thinking and through language. As soon as you think about being, you are using words. Arendt will always come back to the thing she borrows from Socrates, and from Heidegger, which is the two-in-one dialogue we always have in our heads.

  The conversation to be had within ourselves was so important to Arendt. She loved the speech at the beginning of Shakespeare’s Richard III, the soliloquy where Richard is talking to himself and says, ‘I am determined to prove a villain.’ That was exactly Arendt’s model for the thinking, moral self.

  LYNDSEY STONEBRIDGE: Richard, who is, of course, evil, talks himself into doing evil. The non-thinking self won’t even have that conversation. She says that, if you are having a dialogue with yourself, your actions in the world must reckon with the fact that you are going to have to come home to that voice inside your head. Richard had that voice. It didn’t mean that he wasn’t evil, but he at least had that voice, ‘to prove myself a villain’. Someone like Eichmann didn’t have that voice, didn’t have that conversation.

  Arendt escaped from the Nazis to Czechoslovakia and, after time in detention camp, was lucky enough to get a visa for America, where she learned English, her third language. She found the people in America socially conformist, which she disliked, but she liked the political structures and political freedom there, which she felt were lacking in Europe.

  LYNDSEY STONEBRIDGE: She was very conscious of her status as a refugee. Earlier in her work, she had written about the distinction between the Jew as pariah, as ‘other’, as the troublemaker, and the Jew as parvenu, the refugee who wants to assimilate, who doesn’t want any trouble. It had become very clear to Arendt, and a lot of other people by the early twentieth century, that the assimilation option was not working, so, in her thinking and her being, she adopted the position of the pariah.

  Hannah Arendt’s book The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) brought her some fame. It had a lot of history in it, but was really about her philosophical enquiries into the core of totalitarianism. She found two essential things, one about ideology and the other about terror.

  ROBERT EAGLESTONE: She says that totalitarianism arises when people are disconnected from each other, when they are atomised, when social bonds aren’t as strong as they had been. A movement, or a strong man, arises and offers a story, an ideology, which claims to explain everything, why people are unhappy, to its adherents. This story becomes more and more powerful; it means that you can’t argue with people who have become Nazis or Stalinists.

  With that power, there becomes only one way to think and, bizarrely, the adherents cannot even experience their own experiences. Arendt had an example from the Stalinist trials of the 1930s, where a man was arrested and accused of being a factory saboteur.

  ROBERT EAGLESTONE: He says: ‘Well, the party is always right. I don’t think I was a saboteur, but the party is always right. And, if the party says I was a saboteur, I must be a saboteur.’ It even takes other people’s experience of their own lives. And she calls this the ‘rule from within’.

  The terror aspect related to some thoughts that emerged out of Aristotle and Heidegger, the idea that there are two parts to what it is to be a human being. Part of that is the animal, and part is your social, political and legal life.

  ROBERT EAGLESTONE: What totalitarian terror does is split those two bits. Totalitarian regimes take away your name, your identity, your rights, your ‘bios’, Aristotle calls it, your socio-political world, and reduces you just to your body. Once you are made just to be a body, Arendt says, you are superfluous and, once human beings are made superfluous, you can kill them the way you might kill a flea.

  There are several factors that will allow totalitarianism to happen, Lyndsey Stonebridge added, namely ideology, anti-Semitism, racism, uncontrolled imperial expansion and the elites getting together with the mob. Any one of those things alone cannot cause totalitarianism, there has to be a perfect storm of the different elements working at the same time.

  In Arendt’s view, there had been a rupture in political thought after the Second World War and the established categories of political thinking needed to be fundamentally rethought. For her, the ancient Greek philosophers were part of that rethinking project.

  FRISBEE SHEFFIELD: Central to her reading of the Greek philosophers is a contrast between the active and the contemplative life. Aristotle and Socrates had a very positive conception, she thought, of the active life, that came to be degraded by Plato.

  Socrates, to Arendt, was the last great philosopher citizen. She thought Socratic conversation was about adjusting to the plural perspectives of other people in a communal space like the Agora, the marketplace where Socrates taught. She was interested, too, in some of Aristotle’s thoughts – for instance, that man is, by nature, a political animal.

  FRISBEE SHEFFIELD: She held that what was important for Aristotle was that he thought we realise a distinct human freedom by acting together, talking together with others in a communal space. There was a particular historical moment, which was the trial and death of Socrates in 399 BC. She says that Plato’s despair at the death of Socrates motivated an inward turn and a flight from the political realm.

  Arendt was also concerned by the growth of the social or, as she called it, the blob, in place of a political space where ideas were discussed. People became jobholders or functionaries, whereas what she wanted at the heart of any vibrant political community was the notion of consent and dissent.

  LYNDSEY STONEBRIDGE: There had to be a conversation, there has to be something new. When she is looking back to the Greeks, as Frisbee was saying, a lot of people say she was nostalgic for the Greek polis. I don’t think that’s quite right. What she was nostalgic for was the marketplace of ideas, the idea that something else might happen, that something might change.

  She borrowed the concept from Herodotus of ‘isonomia’, the principle of equal liberty that any vibrant community needs. There are moments of ‘that’s not fair’ in life that provoke discussion and you need a vibrant political community that can produce change, without risk.

  LYNDSEY STONEBRIDGE: The other two things you need to keep that political community in place are a community that is okay with promising – because if you promise to do things, you make things less dangerous, you stabilise things; sometimes you have to break promises, but you have to have a good trust/promise community – and you n
eed a culture of forgiveness, because things go wrong.

  Since 1945, Hannah Arendt had been thinking a lot about the question of evil. She was present at the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, in 1961. He was a high-level desk-killer in the Holocaust who had been seized by the Israeli secret service in 1960.

  ROBERT EAGLESTONE: He spoke in clichés, he couldn’t follow a train of thought, he couldn’t understand other people’s point of view, he was vulgar. And, she used to think, this man is the evil mass killer? How can this be? She was always opposed to giving the Nazis satanic greatness; the Nazis loved that with their SS uniforms and death-head scarves. These are just people, men, how can they be evil? And she thinks about this phrase, the ‘banality of evil’.

  We might think of that phrase as describing the normalisation of evil, the means by which something as evil as mass murder could be turned into something that happens every day.

  ROBERT EAGLESTONE: She talks about (this is the crucial thing) Eichmann’s thoughtlessness. It is not carelessness, it’s his inability to think, and she says he is hedged around by these linguistic clichés, by his refusal to question, by his lack of sense of the past. And that makes him thoughtless.

  MELVYN BRAGG: Is that back to what Lyndsey was saying, about him not being Richard III?

  ROBERT EAGLESTONE: That’s right, it is like a living example of exactly that, Eichmann is unable to talk to himself about what he is doing.

  One of the things to be clear about, Frisbee Sheffield continued, especially in light of the vitriolic criticism Arendt received from her use of that phrase, is that she made a very sharp and robust distinction between the doer and the deed. There was nothing banal about the deeds; they were monstrous and wicked.