Gabriela Mistral (1889-1957): 75 years after receiving the Nobel PrizeFyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881): In Search of God and BeautyHannah Arendt is a difficult woman to pigeonhole. Although of Jewish origin, she was not religious nor did she believe in God in the traditional way. She called herself an agnostic on several occasions, yet Hannah Arendt was a woman of faith. She spent most of her life trying to get her contemporaries to recover it: faith in reason, faith in humanity, faith in the world. There are two persistent elements throughout her life and work: trust and thought. They feed each other: Arendt trusted in thought, and the more she thought, the more her trust in it increased.
The person
Hannah Arendt was born in October 1906 in a village near Hannover. She studied in Marburg, where she met Martin Heidegger, moved to Freiburg to study with Husserl, and finally received her doctorate in Heidelberg in 1929 with a thesis on The concept of love in St. Augustine, directed by Karl Jaspers. She developed an extensive political activity in these years and, in view of the persecution of the Jews, she decided to emigrate to the United States, where she settled in 1941 with her second husband Heinrich Blücher. In the United States she worked as a journalist and as a professor of political science in several universities. She reflected a lot on her life experience in Germany and the United States. In 1951 she became a U.S. citizen after years of statelessness due to the withdrawal of her citizenship in Germany.
In 1961, she was sent as a reporter by The New Yorker to Jerusalem to give an account of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi high commander arrested in Argentina and taken to Israel. The result of that experience was his book Eichmann in Jerusalem that was and still is so controversial. Arendt proposes a thesis to try to understand how apparently normal men and women could lend themselves to the atrocities committed during Nazi Germany. She argued that the evil of a man like Adolf Eichmann, an example of any man, was not a calculated, sadistic or ideological evil, but, on the contrary, it was a banal, superficial evil, the result not of an excess of thought, but precisely of its absence.
In Arendt's view, it was the personal inability to give a thoughtful response to a conflicting moral situation that led these people to become murderers and collaborators with evil. This attempt to shed light on what happened between 1940-1945 earned her harsh criticism for "defending a Nazi and betraying her own people." What many did not understand was that, during Eichmann's trial, the German philosopher did not attempt to defend a demon, but to defend humanity.
The reasons for the evil
The intellectual and general situation in which Hannah Arendt develops her thesis of the banality of evil was one of distrust of the world and of man himself. Men distrusted reason because they believed that it had led to such immense disasters: it was reason that had built the gas chambers and nuclear weapons. What Arendt achieves is precisely to refute this idea by affirming that evil has no depth, that evil - as a rule - does not come from calculation, but precisely from a lack of reflection, from superficiality.
Arendt recovers confidence in man as a being who can do evil without being pure evil; in her understanding of man there is room for redemption, for the hope that when man behaves as such, he does not become a demon. We are capable of evil, but it is not the thought that leads us to evil, it is not our most human qualities, but rather the failure to use them fully, that can lead us to commit horrible crimes.
Thinking leads us to ask ourselves the ultimate questions. These same principles are the ones we invoke when we have doubts in our actions, when we are at a moral crossroads and need guidance. The problem arises when these principles do not exist, when the renunciation to think has turned them into empty clichés that fall down at the slightest hint of pressure and do not allow us to be able to give a reasoned and personal response to problems.
Faith in man, faith in God
This desire for sacredness, for a greater faith in man and his capacities, is transparent in all of Hannah Arendt's works, in which all great human ideals are revered. Alfred Kazin explains that reading Arendt evokes for him a world to which we owe all our concepts of human greatness. Without God we do not know who we are, we do not know who man is. This is what Arendt's philosophy seems to hint at: her trust and gratitude for the gift of being. Her faith in justice, in truth, in all that makes man great and good made her a misunderstood person who turned away from the conventions of a world that reduced the greatness and mystery of man. Arendt is far from the nihilism and frustration to which many came after witnessing the events of the last century, because she does not lose hope and her search for truth evokes some cracks through which she opens herself to a transcendent reality, to an unfathomable mystery, to God.
Arendt shows a vision open to a transcendent reality because she does not have a blind faith in the human being; she is perfectly aware of what man is capable of doing, she does not close her eyes to human evil. However, this is not a reason for despair because his faith is not only in man himself, but in what makes man great. He is aware that when man believes only in himself he is frustrated, he is not capable of being man in fullness. This is embodied, for example, in the conversation Hannah Arendt had one evening with Golda Meir. She said to her: "Me being a socialist, naturally I don't believe in God. I believe in the Jewish people.". And Arendt will explain: "I was left without an answer... But I could have told him: the greatness of this people shone at a time when they believed in God and believed in Him in such a way that their love and trust towards Him were greater than their fear. And now this people only believe in themselves? What good can be derived from that?". Precisely, Arendt's vision is hopeful because she does not trust only in her own abilities, but in something that is beyond the human being, she leaves room for mystery, for unpredictability, for the unpredictability of the human being. (unpredictability) of which he is so fond of speaking. The real evil, for man, is to renounce being a man, is to become superfluous. as a human being and this happens when man trusts only in himself.
What Arendt does in her writings is to prepare the ground for God to fit in. In a world where man is evil and his reason is also evil, God cannot exist. God exists when the human being understands himself for what he is, when he knows himself to be the possessor of great capacities and at the same time capable of the greatest horrors, when he places confidence in himself and at the same time leaves room for the mystery that surpasses him. Thus, in Arendt's philosophy we can perceive that openness and that trust that are far from nothingness and very close to God.
