[lit-ideas] Hannah Arendt's critics

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Arendt via Walter F... 
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The slanders about Arendt's alleged "antisemitism" are never-ending. The acid 
bath of actually checking the citations, though, tends to eviscerate the 
charges. Nice work, but the Arendt-haters don't bother to read her work 
responsibly anyway (by the way, it's fascinating how the most unreliable and 
mendacious of Arendt's critics claim that all her defenders are part of some 
"cult," when they're the ones who can't read the evidence responsibly and can't 
get their footnotes right). 

COMMENT:

Right you are, and such slanders are puzzling.  Do these slanderers do it with 
malice aforethought?  Do they intend to lie?  Or is something else at work?

I was able to read Arendt with an open mind.  I don’t claim to read everything 
with an open mind (I can’t read Chomsky that way, for example), but I had no 
preconception about Eichmann in Jerusalem: the banality of evil.  But her 
critics had preconceptions and apparently judged Arendt as they read.  When I 
read these critics I am shocked.  Did I misread something?  Was I mixed up?  So 
I go back and check and find that the critics are at fault.  They have misread 
her.  What they say Arendt said does not jibe with what Arendt actually said 
when I go back and look at it.

I have to think they do not intend to lie, that their prejudices get in the way 
of their understanding.  Collingwood can explain why this happens.  We bring to 
a text our preconceptions.  And if someone has strong prejudices about a given 
subject then objective understanding is very difficult.  Collingwood wrote in 
The Idea of History that the responsible historian will strive to set his 
presuppositions aside.  He will strive to understand his subject from the 
subjects point of view, and not impose his presuppositions on the subject.  

None of the Arendt-critics I have read thus far could meet Collingwood’s 
requirements.  None of them have striven to write objective “history” about 
Arendt.  Their writings are polemically rather than objective, and, more 
puzzlingly, rather than being accurate.  

Lawrence Helm
www.lawrencehelm.com

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