Some Questions
of Moral
Philosophy
BY HANNAH ARENDT
After
the
publication,
in
1963,
oi
Eichmann
in
Jerusalem:
A
Report
on
the
Banality
of
Evil, Hannah Arendt's attention became
focused
on
moral
and
ethical questions.
On
February
10, 1965,
at
the New
School
for
Social Research,
she
initiated
a
series
of
lectures entitled "Some Questions
of
Moral Philosophy." What
follows is
the
introductory lecture, which,
in an
edited version,
is
published here
for the
first time.
The
subsequent lectures deal
with issues
in
ethics
and
politics, ethics
and
philosophy, ethics
and religion,
and
conclude with
a
consideration
of
judging
as
the connection between political
and
moral activity.
The
entire
lecture series will
be
published
in
Hannah
Arendt:
Essays
in
Understanding
1953-1975,
forthcoming from Harcourt Brace &
Company.
Jerome Kohn
JLJADIES AND GENTLEMEN. The
thoughts
of
many
of us, I
suppose, have wandered back during
the
last weeks
to
Winston
Spencer Churchill,
the
greatest statesman thus
far of our
century, who just died after
an
incredibly long life,
the
summit
of which
was
reached
at the
threshold
of old age.
This
happenstance,
if
such
it was,
like almost everything
he
stood
for
in his
convictions,
in his
writings,
in the
grand
but not
grandiose manner
of his
speeches, stood
in
conspicuous
contrast
to
whatever we
may
think
the
Zeitgeist
of
this
age to be.
It
is
perhaps this contrast that touches
us
most when
we
consider
his
greatness.
He has
been called
a
figure
of the
eighteenth century driven into
the
twentieth
as
though
the
Copyright
©
1994.
The
Hannah Arendt Literary Trust.
SOCIAL RESEARCH,
Vol. 61, No. 4
(Winter
1994)
740 SOCIAL RESEARCH
virtues of the past had taken over our destinies in their most
desperate crisis, and this, I think, is true as far as it goes. But
perhaps there is more to it. It is as though, in this shifting of
centuries, some permanent eminence of the human spirit
flashed up for an historically brief moment to show that
whatever makes for greatness—nobility, dignity, steadfastness,
and a kind of laughing courage—remains essentially the same
throughout the centuries.
Still, Churchill, so old-fashioned or, as I have suggested,
beyond the fashions of the times, was by no means unaware of
the decisive currents or undercurrents of the age in which he
lived. He wrote the following words about thirty years ago
when the true monstrosities of the century were yet unknown:
"Scarcely anything, material or established, which I was
brought up to believe was permanent and vital, has lasted.
Everything I was sure, or was taught to be sure, was impossible,
has happened." I wanted to mention these succinct words
which, alas, became fully true only some years after they were
uttered, in order to introduce, right at the beginning of these
lectures, the basic experiences which invariably lie behind or
beneath them. Among the many things which were still
thought to be "permanent and vital" at the beginning of the
century and yet have not lasted, I chose to turn our attention
to the moral issues, those which concern individual conduct
and behavior, the few rules and standards according to which
men used to tell right from wrong, and which were invoked to
judge or justify others and themselves, and whose validity were
supposed to be self-evident to every sane person either as a
part of divine or of natural law. Until, that is, without much
notice, all this collapsed almost overnight, and then it was as
though morality suddenly stood revealed in the original
meaning of the word, as a set of
mores,
customs and manners,
which could be exchanged for another set with hardly more
trouble than it would take to change the table manners of an
individual or a people. How strange and how frightening it
suddenly appeared that the very terms we use to designate
HANNAH ARENDT 741
these things—morality, with its Latin origin, and ethics, with its
Greek origin—should never have meant more than usages and
habits. And also that two thousand five hundred years of
thought, in literature, philosophy and religion, should not
have brought forth another word, notwithstanding all the
highfiown phrases, all assertions and preachings about the
existence of a conscience which speaks with an identical voice
to all men. What had happened? Did we finally awake from a
dream?
To be sure, a few had known before that there was
something wrong with this assumption of self-evidence for
moral commandments as though the "Thou shalt not bear
false testimony" could ever have the same validity as the
statement: two and two equal four. Nietzsche's quest for "new
values" certainly was a clear indication of the devaluation of
what his time called "values" and what former times more
correctly had called virtues. You remember that the only
standard he came up with was Life
itself,
and his criticism of
the traditional and essentially Christian virtues was guided by
the much more general insight that not only all Christian but
also all Platonic ethics use yardsticks and measurements which
are not derived from this world but from something beyond
it—be it the sky of ideas stretching over the dark cave of strictly
human affairs or the truly transcendent beyond of a divinely
ordained afterlife. Neitzsche called himself a moralist, and no
doubt he was; but to establish life as the highest good is
actually, so far as ethics are concerned, question-begging, since
all ethics, Christian or non-Christian, presuppose that life is not
the highest good for mortal men and that there is always more
at stake in life than the sustenance and procreation of
individual living organisms. That which is at stake may vary
greatly: it may be greatness and fame as in Pre-Socratic
Greece; it may be the permanence of the city as in Roman
virtue; it may be the health of the soul in this life, or the
salvation of the soul in the hereafter; and it may be freedom or
justice, or many more such things.
742 SOCIAL RESEARCH
Were these things or principles, from which all virtues are
ultimately derived, mere values which could be exchanged
against other values whenever people changed their minds
about them? And would they, as Nietzsche seems to indicate,
all go overboard before the overriding claim of Life itself? To
be sure, he could not have known that the existence of
mankind as a whole could ever be put into jeopardy by human
conduct, and in this marginal event one could indeed argue
that Life, the survival of the world and the human species, is
the highest good. But this would mean no more than that any
ethics or morality would simply cease to exist. And in principle
this thought was anticipated by the question implicit in the old
Latin saying. Fiat jvstitia, pereat mundus: Should the world
perish that justice be done? This question was answered by
Kant: "If justice perishes, human hfe on earth has lost its
meaning"
{"Wenn
die
Gerechtigkeit untergeht,
hat es
keinen Wert
mehr, dass Menschen
auf
Erden leben"). Hence,
the
only
new
moral principle, proclaimed in modern times, turns out to be
not the assertion of "new values" but the negation of morality
as such, although Nietzsche, of course, did not know this. And
it is his abiding greatness that he dared to demonstrate how
shabby and meaningless morality had become.
Churchill's words were uttered in the form of a statement,
but we, too full of the wisdom of hindsight, shall be tempted to
read them also as a premonition. And if it were just a question
of premonitions, I could indeed add an astounding number of
quotations which would go back at least to the first third of the
eighteenth century. The point of the matter for us, however, is
that we deal no longer with premonitions but with facts.
We—at least the older ones among us—have witnessed the
total collapse of all established moral standards in public and
private life during the 1930s and 40s, not only (as is now
usually assumed) in Hitler's Germany but also in Stalin's
Russia, where at this moment questions are being asked by the
younger generation that have a great resemblance to those
currently debated in Germany. Still, the differences between
HANNAH ARENDT 743
the two are significant enough to be mentioned. It has often
been noted that the Russian Revolution caused social upheaval
and social remolding of the entire nation unparalleled even in
the wake of Nazi Germany's radical fascist dictatorship, which,
it is true, left the property relation almost intact and did not
eliminate the dominant groups in society. From this, it usually
is concluded that what happened in the Third Reich was by
nature and not only by historical accident less permanent and
less extreme. This may or may not be true with respect to
strictly political developments, but it certainly is a fallacy if we
regard the issue of morality. Seen from a strictly moral
viewpoint, Stalin's crimes were, so to speak, old fashioned; like
an ordinary criminal, he never admitted them but kept them
surrounded in a cloud of hypocrisy and doubletalk while his
followers justified them as temporary means in the pursuit of
the "good" cause, or, if they happened to be a bit more
sophisticated, by the laws of history to which the revolutionary
has to submit and sacrifice himself if need be. Nothing in
Marxism, moreover, despite all the talk about "bourgeois
morality," announces a new set of moral values. If anything is
characteristic of Lenin or Trotsky as the representatives of the
professional revolutionary, it is the naive belief that once the
social circumstances are changed through revolution, mankind
will follow automatically the few moral precepts that have been
known and repeated since the dawn of history.
In this respect, the German developments are much more
extreme and perhaps also more revealing. There is not only
the gruesome fact of elaborately established death factories
and the utter absence of hypocrisy in those very substantial
numbers who were involved in the extermination program.
Equally important, but perhaps more frightening, was the
matter-of-course collaboration from all strata of German
society, including the older elites which the Nazis left
untouched, and who never identified themselves with the
party in power. I think it is justifiable on factual grounds to
maintain that morally, though not socially, the Nazi regime was