IRVING LOUIS HOROWITZ
Die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht,
leaving the ultimate judgment to
Success, or we can maintain with Kant the autonomy of the minds of
men and their possible independence of things as they are or as they
have come into being.
279
As long as thinking, willing, and judging are viewed as three basic
mental activities that "cannot be derived from each other" and that "can–
not be reduced to a common denominator," the very edifice Arendt
attempts is subject to the same criticism as any other absolutism. In
twentieth-century terms, her work consecrates the collapse of acceptable
paradigms in social science and philosophy. Hence the trinitarianism of
thinking, willing, and judging can do no more than confront itself in field
after field, disci pline after disci pline. But if Arendt did not effect the grand
synthesis, she sheds much light on what ails our social and behavioral dis–
ciplines. We at least know what the sources of division are with a precision
and a clarity that make possible new creativity. And that is ultimately what
the life of the free mind is all about.
It is ironic that the author of
Eichmann in Jerusalem
should also be a
supreme devotee of German high culture. For there can be no mistaking
that in philosophy, law, and politics, Hannah Arendt was a complete prod–
uct of the German
AuJkliirung.
The century has been rolled back with these
volumes-as if Hitler and Nazism had not happened, as if German liberal
thought were an unbroken chain of continuities. But this is not the case.
Arendt in her towering works has been a prime mover in enabling us to
understand the essence of the totalitarian persuasion. But at the end, she
remained true to the tradition of German liberalism. The French language,
which she loved, counted for little more than a Cartesian footnote, and the
English constitutional tradition, which surely nourished her faith in com–
passionate justice over and against impassioned (nonrational) vengeance,
counted more as sentiment than as structure. Russian democratic thought
from Herzen to Solzhenitsyn scarcely existed for her. And perhaps most
shattering to those who saw her primarily as a Jewish writer, the Hebrew
tradition was reduced to several hyphenated footnotes to Christian theol–
ogy. In the end, in the long pull, this remarkable woman, scholar, critic,
exile, and teacher turned out to be not an avenging angel remorselessly
pursuing her totalitarian quarry but the last loving product of German
Enlightenment: the keeper of a flame she herself had helped resurrect from
the charnelhouse of postwar Europe. The dialectical process is indeed
mysterious and insoluble, as Kant insisted. It brought forth, fifty years late
in a foreign language by an exile from Nazi repression, the last hurrah of
Weimar democracy.
