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Crimes of Action, Crimes of Thought A R E N D T O N R E C O N C I L I AT I O N , F O R G I V E N E S S , A N D J U D G M E N T s h a i l a v i In the winter of 1932–1933, correspondence between Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt was abruptly terminated. It requires little imagination or speculation to understand the cause of the long and lasting silence between the two. More disquieting for some, above all for Arendt herself, was the revival of this relationship, beginning in February 1950. For Arendt, Heidegger posed a problem bigger than the romantic drama depicted by some of her biographers, and a moral dilemma that went far beyond the failings of one individual. Arendt’s confrontation with Heidegger involved more weighty concerns, and it is these that led her to contemplate the phenomenon of reconciliation , forgiveness, and judgment. Three months after their unsettling reunion, in a letter dated May 16, 1950, Heidegger writes to his former student: “Oh you! Most trusted one. . . . You are right about reconciliation and revenge. I have been thinking about that a great deal. In all this thinking, you are so near.”1 Heidegger recalls “a walk in the valley ,” presumably referring to a conversation he had with Arendt during her earlier visit to Freiburg in March. Though the content of the conversation between the two remains unknown, some hints regarding Arendt’s thinking on these matters can be gathered from her recently published Denktagebuch. Reconciliation and revenge were central themes in Arendt’s writing after the war and became decisive in her relationship with Heidegger. Together with blame and guilt, wrong and evil, and forgiveness and resignation, reconciliation and revenge became word-thoughts through which Arendt contemplated two very different and novel human failings that the war had revealed. The first failing, to which Arendt responds, concerns the crimes performed under the Third Reich, crimes that led to the systematic extermination of millions of people with the active participation and tacit cooperation of entire political regimes; the second, more theoretical but no less definitive, was the failure of the vita contemplativa. Putting personal matters aside, Arendt read Heidegger’s moral failure during the Nazi regime not as the wrong of an individual human being but of philosophical thinking as such. Both these crimes, Facing: Inscribed cover of Hannah Arendt’s copy of an offprint of Martin Heidegger’s Zeit und Sein. The inscription reads: “For Hannah. Martin.” Courtesy of the Hannah Arendt Collection, Stevenson Library, Bard College. 230 Crimes of Action, Crimes of Thought of human action and of human thinking, demanded Arendt’s attention not merely because of their novelty and gravity, but also because they put into question the ability, long taken for granted, of the legal system and of philosophical thinking to correct their failings from within. One can identify three moments in the writings of Hannah Arendt where she contemplates the proper response to human failings. In each case, she strives to come to terms with both the crimes of human action and the failures of human thought. The first appears in her Denktagebuch notes from June 1950. To anyone familiar with her later discussion of forgiveness and its central role in her book on The Human Condition, this earlier discussion of similar themes may come as a surprise. In these notes, Arendt rejects not only revenge but also forgiveness as a proper response to crime. Both fail to ground a political community, which to her can be founded only on the basis of human equality. Revenge, Arendt argues in line with a long tradition of political thought, cannot be the basis of a political community because it is grounded in natural rather than political equality. When the avenger claims that his act of revenge revisits upon the wrongdoer the same (equal) act that he himself has done, the notion of equality he relies on is the natural equality of the experience of pain. Such equality is based on an experience that human beings share with the animal kingdom, and therefore cannot serve to ground a uniquely human polity. Arendt’s rejection of forgiveness is more nuanced. She objects to the prevailing notion that forgiveness is rooted in human equality, specifically in the notion that all human beings share, by virtue of their humanity, the capacity to do wrong and consequently the power...

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