Hannah Arendt's Moral Ontology: Comments on David Luban's Arendt on the Crime of Crimes

Abstract

David Luban identifies a tension between Arendt's conception of ethnic identification in a context of persecution and her conception of humanity. That tension pertains to the reality - or realities - that Arendt addresses: the moral reality of her Bildung that appears throughout her work, and is centered on the “dignity of man,” on the one hand, and the divisive, “political” reality that she was forced to face when “attacked as a Jew,” on the other. By implicitly accepting that in a context of persecution one cannot escape the framing relevance of the “political” - an idea that is also present in her imaginary condemnation speech of Eichmann - Arendt betrays a fundamental theme of her work: “forgiveness” and the inherent possibility of a “new beginning.”