Hannah Arendt, Life of the Mind, moral judgment, conscience, free will, intersubjectivity ...

395 Pages·2014·1.78 MB·English

by  Eric James Helleloid

HANNAH ARENDT'S PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE WILL:
CONTINGENCY, TEMPORALITY, AND THE NATURE OF MORAL JUDGMENT
by
Eric Helleloid
(Under the Direction of Elizabeth Brient)
ABSTRACT
Hannah Arendt's final work, Life of the Mind, is the crucial text for understanding her mature moral
theory. It was designed as a three-volume study—Thinking, Willing, and Judging—of the basic mental
activities and their moral limits and potentialities. Only the first two volumes were completed at her death
in 1975, and much scholarly work has since been done to understand how she would have written her
volume on judging. My account tracks the development of Arendt's moral reflections through Life of the
Mind and argues for a novel interpretation of Judging. The inadequacy of other readings lies in their
inattention to the importance of Willing, where Arendt defends her own version of free will. In Life of the
Mind, free will is recognized as a necessary condition for all moral claims about human action and the
ground of moral responsibility. Arendt's account of moral judgment is structured to accommodate the
implications of the will's freedom. The relationship between the freedom of the will and moral judgment
is the central concern of this dissertation. Human freedom and moral judgment operate only within the
context of human temporality, which is fraught with complex tensions between past, present, and future.
These tensions are essential to understanding the contingency of the will's freedom and the related
contingency of all moral judgments. Following Arendt, I will defend the intersubjectivity of moral
judgment as well as its independence from any immanent consensus of the socio-political order.
INDEX WORDS: Hannah Arendt, Life of the Mind, moral judgment, conscience, free will,
intersubjectivity, responsibility, contingency, temporality
HANNAH ARENDT'S PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE WILL:
CONTINGENCY, TEMPORALITY, AND THE NATURE OF MORAL JUDGMENT

by
Eric Helleloid
B.A., Bethel University, 2005

A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial
Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

ATHENS, GEORGIA
2014
© 2014
Eric Helleloid
All Rights Reserved
HANNAH ARENDT'S PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE WILL:
CONTINGENCY, TEMPORALITY, AND THE NATURE OF MORAL JUDGMENT

by
Eric Helleloid

Major Professor: Elizabeth Brient
Committee: Richard D. Winfield
René Jagnow

Electronic Version Approved:

Maureen Grasso
Dean of the Graduate School
The University of Georgia
May 2014
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This project would not have begun without many stimulating discussions that took place within
the University of Georgia philosophy department. My fellow graduate students and professors have been
a great influence on my thinking. In particular, I feel very lucky to have met some great philosophical
friends. Special thanks to A.J. Tiarsmith, Joey Carter, and especially Gregory Moss, whose love of
thinking and questioning continues to be a great inspiration.
I would like to thank Richard Dien Winfield and René Jagnow for their service on my dissertation
committee. I feel especially indebted to Elizabeth Brient, who first introduced me to the thought of
Hannah Arendt, for her willingness to work with me through this very long and difficult process. I thank
her for all the wonderful insights and timely corrections as this dissertation was taking shape.
I am grateful for the unwavering and bountiful support of my family, who first taught me the
value of education and commitment. Finally, and most importantly, I thank my wife Jillian for all of her
love, encouragement, patience, and for keeping me grounded in the world—I could not have done it
without her.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
Acknowledgements........................................................................................................................... iv
Introduction....................................................................................................................................... 1
Part I: Situating Life of the Mind in Arendt's Corpus......................................................................... 4
Chapter 1 Totalitarianism, Politics, and Action......................................................... 6
Chapter 2 The Eichmann Trial and Moral Issues....................................................... 63
Part II: Arendt's Moral Philosophy in Life of the Mind..................................................................... 146
Chapter 3 Thinking...................................................................................................... 147
Chapter 4 Willing........................................................................................................ 224
Chapter 5 Judging....................................................................................................... 322
Bibliography...................................................................................................................................... 385

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INTRODUCTION
Questions regarding moral judgment came to occupy Arendt as she considered the evils of
twentieth century totalitarianism and the responsibility of those who were involved in these political
movements. Despite the mass support and collaboration of so many ordinary people in the totalitarian
evils, some individuals actively resisted and others were simply unwilling to participate. Arendt was
particularly interested in this capacity for independent moral judgment in the midst of political, cultural,
and moral collapse. How can individuals maintain their capacity for moral judgment in isolation from
others who share their moral opinions? Arendt's final work Life of the Mind is, among other things, a
prolonged reflection on this capacity, and will be the focal text of my investigation.
Life of the Mind poses a number of interpretative difficulties, the most significant of which arise
from the fact that it remains an unfinished work. Upon her death in 1975, Arendt had only written the first
two of three intended volumes, each of which was dedicated to a particular mental faculty. The two
finished volumes, Thinking1 and Willing2, were meant to be followed by Judging, which has received
much scholarly attention, as commentators speculate about what Arendt would have written in the final
volume. The results of such commentaries, in my opinion, have been mixed. Some have merely isolated a
few favored ideas in Life of the Mind and used them in various tangential projects, while others have
caught the momentum and direction of her thought in illuminating ways. My goal, at least with regard to
the scholarship on Arendt, is to add another illuminating perspective to the literature on Judging by
fleshing out the ideas that have not been given sufficient attention. Specifically, in the central (fourth)
chapter of the dissertation, I will undertake a careful reading of the Willing volume, a task that I do not
think has been achieved with adequate rigor.

1 Arendt, Life of the Mind, ed. Mary McCarthy (New York: Harcourt, 1978), vol. 1: Thinking.
2 Arendt, Life of the Mind, vol. 2: Willing.
1
Willing's many intertwining themes and vast historical scope pose an interpretative challenge of
the highest degree. If one comes to Willing without having read Arendt's other writings, the text can be
nearly impossible to understand. Even when armed with knowledge of Arendt's corpus, the most original
parts of the text are often missed amid the various commonalities with Arendt's earlier works. I will
highlight the originality of Willing within Arendt's mature corpus. While Arendt is often critical of all
theories of free will in her early work, Willing contains a qualified defense of free will and its moral
significance. It is her revised perspective on free will that will allow us to see Arendt's intentions for
Judging with new eyes. I will track Arendt's growing appreciation for the faculty of the will and its
paradoxes in order to illuminate a parallel development in her theory of judgment, a shift toward a
conception of judging as a mental activity that is independent of, but not hostile to, the world of human
interaction.
Many readers of Arendt interpret her work exclusively or primarily in political terms, overlooking
the depth and originality of her reflections on morality. One reason for this is that Arendt's early work is
devoted mainly to political issues and is, at times, dismissive of moral considerations. Arendt mounts a
thoroughgoing defense of human plurality and political action in the face of growing anti-political
elements in the modern age, elements that became nightmarishly clear with the appearance of
totalitarianism. In her mind, traditional moral beliefs and ethical systems were inadequate, for they were
both incapable of preventing totalitarian evils in practice and unable in theory to respond to the political
realities of the contemporary world, such as the loss of traditional authority and the rise of bureaucratic
institutions. In her early work Arendt is generally critical of traditional theories of the will, due to their
anti-political, overly individualistic, and moralistic implications.
However, Arendt's attention to moral concerns begins in earnest after her experiences at the trial
of Nazi criminal Adolf Eichmann and the controversy that surrounded the publication of her well-
known—some might say notorious—Eichmann in Jerusalem. According to Arendt, the "banality of evil"
appeared in the person of Eichmann, whose deeds were monstrous but whose character was marked by a
profound "thoughtlessness" and lack of conviction. Eichmann's banality exemplified a major crisis of
2
moral responsibility and moral judgment in the contemporary world. This moral crisis motivates her
investigations into the nature of our moral faculties.
Part I of the dissertation will introduce the reader to the basic threads of Arendt's political theory
(chapter 1), and then highlight the shift toward moral issues that occurs in her post-Eichmann work
(chapter 2). Part II will investigate the three volumes of Life of the Mind, with one chapter devoted to
each volume. By tracking the development of Arendt's theory of the mental faculties, and bringing out the
unique arguments of Willing and Judging, I will motivate an interpretation of Life of the Mind that
illuminates the complex relationship between moral judgment and the freedom of the will. The defining
characteristics of this relationship concern the temporality and contingency of human experience.

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PART I: SITUATING LIFE OF THE MIND IN ARENDT'S CORPUS
The opening part of the dissertation will introduce readers to Arendt's work prior to Life of the
Mind. Arendt professed to begin her thinking from concrete experiences and events, and I will follow the
development of her work in a generally (but not strictly) chronological fashion, emphasizing the key
historical events that inspired her thinking. The two key events are the outbreak of totalitarianism in
Europe and the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961. The first sets the stage for all of Arendt’s major works,
and the latter highlights a shift in the last stage of her career, a shift toward explicitly moral issues and
human moral capacities. There are many common threads through the periods of Arendt’s work, and
commentators have been quick to notice and draw out these connections.1 By contrast, my interpretation
of Arendt's work points to the influence the Eichmann trial exerted on Arendt’s work, an influence strong
enough to motivate her reformulations of key human capacities in Life of the Mind and elsewhere. Since
Arendt was a thinker who wished to stay attuned to the worldly events and political realities, I think it
only charitable to follow her reflections with an eye to the way she is responding to events and novel
experiences.
The first part of the dissertation will be separated into two chapters, each of which deals with a
different period of Arendt’s work prior to Life of the Mind. Arendt's experience with Eichmann initiated a
shift in her thinking that I wish to capture with a division of her work into two periods. I will argue that,
prior to the Eichmann trial, Arendt is primarily concerned with modern threats to human political life. The

1 Kampowski is a good example of an interpreter who focuses on continuity, as his project is aimed at
drawing out similarities throughout Arendt's corpus as a whole, and especially from her dissertation in 1929 to her
final works. Kampowski's treatment is illuminating but it certainly ignores the influence of totalitarianism on her
thought: that event undermines her earlier reflections about the nature of human community. See Stephan
Kampowski, Arendt, Augustine, and the New Beginning: The Action Theory and Moral Thought of Hannah Arendt
in the Light of Her Dissertation on St. Augustine (Cambridge, U.K.: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2008).
I have not concerned myself with Arendt’s dissertation in this project—mainly for the reason that I think
she leaves many of her dissertation ideas behind her once she confronted totalitarianism. Kampowski has brought
out some of the thematic continuity from Arendt’s dissertation through Life of the Mind, but I think the differences
are too great to warrant much treatment of her dissertation.
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