.JordiGraupera remembers the philosopher Richard Bernstein and the final class he taught.
, in 1963. Arendt attended Eichmann’s trial, for war crimes, in Jerusalem, and was struck by his reliance on cliché: he was not a monster, she concluded, but a bureaucrat. She also criticized the Israeli government’s handling of the trial, and the councils of local Jewish leaders in Germany who had, in her view, coöperated with the Nazi bureaucracy. She was immediately accused of being a self-hating Jew.
One day, during a session on “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” Bernstein told the story of his first visit to a concentration camp, at Dachau, in the mid-seventies. He went to Germany to visit Habermas, whom he had met in 1972, the same year that he met Arendt. Habermas was spending some time in Middletown, Connecticut, and Bernstein had just read his book “,” which draws on the thinking of Marx, Freud, and the American pragmatist Charles S.
Still, their shared commitment to philosophical dialogue was the basis for a lifelong friendship. Habermas called Bernstein “a genius of finding a kernel of truth in the philosophy of the other.” After Habermas gave his talk at Haverford, Bernstein considered going to Munich to visit him—and to see Dachau. “I said, I can’t do this,” Bernstein recalled, “I am going to have nightmares.” But, in 1976, he decided to face his fears. He liked to recount how Habermas met him at the airport.
The department of education asked two philosophers to evaluate the New School for Social Research’s program: Alasdair MacIntyre and Richard Rorty. They saw value in the program, but, as Judith Friedlander details in her book “,” the state’s rating committees nonetheless gave it an unfavorable review. Afterward, Rorty and MacIntyre sent letters to the New School’s dean of the graduate faculty, offering advice.
The topic was “Thinking and Moral Considerations,” an essay that Arendt published in 1971. In it, she elaborates on the banality of evil. Some readers of “Eichmann in Jerusalem” were, and are, troubled by a kind of corollary to its thesis: if Eichmann’s great failing was an inability to think, does this mean that thinking is enough to keep us from moral collapse? The notion seems unlikely.
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