Hannah Arendt & The Limitations of Truth
Recently, I was reading a book on Gestalt therapy wherein the author Fritz Perls refers to the philosophical concept of the banality of evil. It wasn’t the first time I had heard the expression. I knew it came from a book written about the atrocities of genocide in Nazi concentration camps, but I had always been intimidated to read it. Something about evil being common, ordinary, and ubiquitous always seemed too pessimistic of a worldview for me.
But if it was okay with Perls, it’s okay with me. So I ventured into the magnificent mind of the book’s author, Hannah Arendt.
Arendt, a political philosopher and Holocaust survivor, released her controversial book Eichman in Jerusalem — A Report on the Banality of Evil in 1963. The book covers the trial of Adolf Eichman, a Nazi official who was one of the main organizers of the Holocaust. The book caused a stir in the United States not only because Arendt brought attention to the role that some prominent Jews in Germany inadvertently played in facilitating the Nazi mission, but also because she did not portray Eichman as particularly monstrous. Arendt drew the conclusion that nothing extraordinarily maniacal or brilliant makes one evil. There was nothing extraordinarily maniacal or brilliant about Eichmann. He was boring, average, and insignificant. This banality, combined with a few other psychosocial phenomena that are disturbingly common to the human experience, led to unspeakable evil.
But this article isn’t about that book.
On Lying & Politics
Instead, I will focus on a collection of two small philosophical treatises by Arendt released in a volume called On Lying And Politics. The book includes two works by Arendt, one published in 1954 called Truth and Politics and one published in 1971, in reaction to the leak of the Pentagon papers, called Lying in Politics. Arendt’s discussion of how facts, truths, lies, and opinions play out in the political and social sphere raises the political curtain and shines a spotlight on the limitations of truth-telling.
It is my experience, about which my readers are well aware, with the use of indoctrination, religious propaganda, and control of information within the Jehovah’s Witness community that contributes to my interest in Arendt’s commentary. I’m fascinated with the eerie power over cognition that is wielded by both influential ruling bodies and social majorities. But over the last year, during which I neither wrote nor recorded, I have come to the conclusion that many of my complaints about the psychosocial atmosphere of the obscure religious group of my upbringing are not all that peculiar to it. They are well…banal. And, of course, Arendt’s philosophical approach to facts, truths, lies, and opinions is equally applicable to my old microcosm as it is to the broader socio-political sphere of the secular world of which I am a part.
By this I mean to say that, while honoring my traumatic history, I wish to expand the realm of my curiosity in this new chapter of my podcast Provisional Aspirations and in my writing.
With that, I will tease your interest in the following discussion of the relative powers of fact, truth, opinion, and lie with a quote from Arendt on page 47 of On Lying And Politics,
“It has frequently been noticed that the surest long-term result of brainwashing is a peculiar kind of cynicism — an absolute refusal to believe in the truth of anything, no matter how well this truth may be established. In other words, the result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lies will now be accepted as truth, and the truth be defamed as lies, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world — and the category of truth vs. falsehood is among the mental means to this end — is being destroyed”
Let’s start with the Facts
Arendt identifies that facts have a disrupting effect on both philosophical truth and political opinion. Factual truth often clashes with political opinion, disrupting a group’s mission or profit. As a result, Arendt says, facts can turn into secrets. This was one of the terrible realities she identifies in her book Eichman in Jerusalem wherein facts of which most Germans were very well aware regarding the genocidal efforts of the Nazi party, became secrets that could not be discussed and resulted in a social silence that worsened the situation. In On Lying and Politics, she puts it this way
“The facts that I have in minds are publicly known, and yet the same public that knows them can successfully, and often spontaneously, taboo their public discussion and treat them as though they were what they are not — namely secrets” (p.16)
So, while it would seem rational to rely on fact in open debate. The fact is politically vulnerable. She goes on:
“To the extent to which unwelcome factual truths are tolerated in free countries, they are often, consciously or unconsciously, transformed into opinions.” (p.16)
Likely you’ve heard times when well-developed arguments based on factual truths are dismissed as “just one opinion”. And they very well may be just that. When it comes to historical facts, Arendt says that “generations of historians and philosophers of history demonstrated the impossibility of ascertaining facts without interpretation, since they must first be picked out of a chaos of sheer happenings, and then be fitted into a story that can be told only in a certain perspective” (p.19).
Arendt identifies a caution here when depending on fact. Fact “seems often to suffer a similar fate when it is exposed to the marketplace — namely to be countered not by lies and deliberate falsehoods, but by opinion” (p.17). And finally, summing up the unfortunate destiny of facts says that “it is not difficult to imagine what the fate of factual truth would be if power interests, national or social had the last say in these matters” (p.21)
Truth
Truth seems like a noble-enough pursuit. But Arendt highlights its weakness in relation to opinion. She says “truthfulness has never been counted among the political virtues, because it has little indeed to contribute to that change of the world and of circumstances which are among the most legitimate political activities.” (p.38)
Philosophical truth, she states “concerns man in his singularity, it is unpolitical by nature”. That is to say that philosophical truth is fit for the individual but not for collective political or social use. She goes on to explain that truth if accepted by the many, does not owe its success to its truthfulness, but to the power of the opinion of the many. Thus opinion outweighs truth.
She goes on to use quite a jarring example of the blurred line between truth and opinion by quoting the United States Declaration of Independence. Thomas Jefferson begins with “We hold these truths to be self-evident”. Arendt italicizes “we hold” to show that it was an opinion that contributed the weight to the words and actually not that they were indeed self-evident.
“He conceded, albeit without becoming aware of it, that the statement “All men are created equal” is not self-evident but stands in need of agreement and consent — that equality, if it is to be politically relevant, is a matter of opinion and not “the truth”…That all men are created equal is not self-evident nor can it be proved. We hold this opinion because freedom is possible only among equals, and we believe that the joys and gratifications of free company are to be preferred to the doubtful pleasure of holding dominion” (p.31)
So how can one even identify truth? Arendt says that “the hallmark of factual truth is that its opposite is neither error nor illusion nor opinion…but the deliberate falsehood, or lie.” That is to say that someone cannot argue with a lie. While opinions and truths can be argued, the lie stands apart in its ability to identify a factual truth. But I’ll get to lies in a bit.
Opinion
Arrendt asserts that opinion is the opposite of truth (p.11). She states that “opinion, and not truth, belongs among the indispensable prerequisites of all power” (p.11). Since truth is, according to Arendt, for the person in solitude, one must rely on opinion for use in the political realm.
Arendt presents an insightful formula about how to create a good political opinion. Since philosophical truth involves the person in solitude, the quality of a political opinion relies on its ability to take into account other people’s opinions, what Arendt calls “representative thinking” (p.24). The political thinker does not sit and search for truth as does the philosopher but uses an enlarged mentality (drawing from Kant) to disinterestedly create an opinion that takes into account the viewpoint of others. This is not a matter of empathy or “counting noses” to find out how the majority feels, but rather a matter of imagination.
Arendt puts it this way:
“Hence, even if I shun all company or am completely isolated while forming an opinion, I am not simply together only with myself in the solitude of philosophical thought; I remain in this world of universal interdependence, where I can make myself the representative of everybody else. Of course, I can refuse to do this and form an opinion that takes only my own interests, or the interests of the group to which I belong, into account; nothing, indeed, is more common, even among highly sophisticated people, that blind obsitnancy that becomes manifest in lack of imagination and failure to judge. But the very quality of an opinion, as of a judgement, depends upon the degree of its impartiality.” (p.24)
Opinion can be disrupted by inconvenient facts or philosophical truths. But as we have learned, fact can be dismissed as opinion, and truth can be lied out of existence. Therefore, according to Arendt, opinion is by far the most useful political and social tool.
Lies
So what about lies in politics? Arendt’s perspective is fascinating. Lies are essential in politics. She put it this way:
“The liar…is an actor by nature; he says what is not so because he wants things to be different from what they are — that is, he wants to change the world.” (p.37)
Later she says: “A characteristic of human action is that it always begins something new”. We “remove ourselves from where we physically are located and imagine that things might as well be different from what they actually are. In other words, the deliberate denial of factual truth — the ability to lie — and the capacity to change facts — the ability to act — are interconnected; they owe their existence to the same source: imagination.”
So basically, while “the mere telling of facts leads to no action whatever” (p.38), a lie is politically useful because it seeks to create change by manipulating opinion, which is essentially the work of politics. As a result, the liar is always at an advantage over the truth-teller because the liar is “free to fashion his facts to fit the profit and pleasure, or even the mere expectations, of his audience”. Arendt concludes that he will be “more persuasive than the truthteller”.
One other significant observation from the second half of my volume in On Lying in Politics is the possibility of self-deception in the political liar. Arendt notes that the political and media messaging during the Vietnam war era managed only to convince the liars themselves of the official propaganda regarding the rationale for the war. In the end, only the liars believed the story.
She highlights the psychology of self-deception by saying that those who attempt to change reality “will be tempted to fit their reality — which, after all, was man-made to begin with and thus could have been otherwise — into their theory” (p.71). She says, “the self-deceived deceiver loses all contact with not only his audience, but also the real world”. In the quagmire of organized lying, the deceiver loses grasp of the contingency to reality that once differentiated their opinion from the real world. They forget that their opinion, designed to change the world, was still contingent on reality catching up. The self-deceiver then, as Arendt puts it “disappears in an entirely def actualized world” (p.95).
Arendt’s caution about self-deceit is valuable. It theorizes a process for the loss of one’s reality in political or social opinion. The contingency of opinion to deliberate philosophical contemplation of truth and the scientist’s “meticulous loyalty to factual, given reality” (p.71) can be overlooked in our eagerness to act. People who act “will hardly have the natural scientist’s patience to wait until theories and hypothetical explanations are verified or denied by facts” (Arendt, p.71).
Liberation from The Truth
If all this seems a bit hopeless, Arendt’s thoughts at least have a way of unburdening one from the responsibility to stubbornly hold to one’s truth or even from the obsessive pursuit of philosophical truth in general.
For me, truth is an emotion-laden word.
Jehovah’s Witnesses colloquially refer to their organization, doctrine, and way of life as “The Truth”. Children born to Jehovah’s Witness parents are said to be “raised in the truth”. Dinner parties start with the ice-breaker: “what brought you into the truth”. My mother shamefully tells prying community elders that her son is “no longer in the truth”.
That aside, the quest for truth seems like a noble enough path. But Arendt’s commentary certainly levies a moderating influence on the pursuit. It might be good for the life of the singular philosopher or scientist, but as Arendt puts it, it’s not fit for life “in the plural” (p.14).
(This article is a repost from wallisbooks.com. If you enjoy my work and would like to support me, buy me a cup of coffee!)
References:
Arendt, H. (2022). On Lying and Politics.
