Rosenbaum offers sound evidence, pulled from the books under review and several other recent commentaries on Arendt. He builds up a psycho-tableau of her self-identy, burrowing her idea(s) under a kind of unconscious adaptation to the zeit of Germany in the 30s. Or a 'parochial' Jew living in Germany high society in the 30s. Fine. But in doing so, he must accept the patency in what Arendt meant. In condemning 'banality of evil' as he does, Rossbaum risks assigning Arendt's thinking to the banality of evil represented by nascent-Hitlerian Germany. What led her to construct a meaningless and historically empty phrase is her meaningful and historically potent frame of mind. She understand the banality of evil because, well, she represented the banality of evil in other form.
Human reason is necessarily contingent of the content of the mind at any given point in life. That content is supplied by the socio-temporal moment in which we live, our 'lifeworld' of all that is known and believed in our time. Our reason is necessarily limited by the cultural community that nurtures us, the educativeness of the society in which we grow to understand the world and the openness of our thinking to a skepticism that appreciates the novel as a challenge to the normal, the assumed to be. That kind of openness is itself subject to these same limitations. The banality impressed by Arendt fronts the everyday nature of human communities. We can not always question everything and everyone. We function through a matrix of understandings presented through a consistent world; it would be ridiculously superhuman of us to wake up everyday and remap the essence of our lives.
So we live a banal life, a fluid participation of what is, stopping to question when life unspools in front of us (major calamity), when our ideas and expectations fail to produce (William James' gut-level pragmatism) and when the mystifying overwhelms the senses. Arendt may have missed some essential truth about herself when writing Eichman, as Rosenbaum details. Yet she presents us moderns with a devastatingly clear explanation for the hubris to human understanding: reason is not an objective state of perfect clarity, but a subjective experience complete in itself. We are frail, fallible and committed to error with every thought. Accepting that radical humanness does not mean we should live in fear of acting or even thinking. Rather, the banality of evil looms over us in harmony with the banality of goodness. What we do is what we do. Our moral life is measured not by the balance sheet of deeds presented after death to Osiris, or whoever awaits outside the tombs of everlasting life, but by the capacity to understand ourselves down to the most minute and fragmentary of trace implication. Time and history, space and place; we are always and already in flow with all there is.
