Welcome back for part two of Steve Baxi’s exploration of Hannah Arendt’s philosophy in Rorschach by Tom King and Jorge Fornés. If you missed part one, you can find it here.

By Steve Baxi

THE ARENDT IN RORSCHACH

“What is the subject of our thought? Experience! Nothing else!”

Hannah Arendt

The philosophical backbone of Rorschach is primarily setup in issue #2 when the Detective investigates the home of Wil Myerson, which sets up the Arendtian concepts of the two-in-one, the public and private worlds, tyrannical thought and the world in common. These ideas largely run together, where you need one to explain the others. To begin then, we need to start with what might be considered the core thesis of Hannah Arendt’s work: “Is there a way of thinking that is not tyrannical?”

Thinking is distinct from understanding, but one leads to the other. To engage in the work of understanding, one has to be able to exercise critical self-reflective thinking, by which she means one needs to think what they are doing, they need to use their ability to think to interrogate their experiences. Arendt believed everyone was capable of this, and failure to do so was what led to radicalization. If one is exposed to any ideology, Nazism or others, the only way to resist it is by thinking about what we’re doing, something that Eichmann failed at. One needs to claim responsibility for their role in society by not simply going along with the dominant ideology of a state without attempting to understand it. 

In Wil Myerson, we see an attempt to do precisely this: explore a way of thinking that is not tyrannical by creating something that forces one to engage with the world. Myerson creates The Citizen and the Unthinker to play out this central conflict in Arendt’s work about the very substance of thinking. He crafts two characters who are in an eternal struggle with each other, and might be understood in Kruse’s terms of projections of our responsibility for our choices. However, what is particularly of note here is that for Arendt, the subject of our thoughts is nothing more than our experiences. Myerson bases the Unthinker on his neighbor who has tormented him through the years, going so far as to base the action of the Citizen defeating him on a specific altercation.

In Myerson’s comic we see the thinking process Arendt wanted us to engage in, what she called the two-in-one. The Unthinker and the Citizen are two parts of ourselves split off to engage in an eternal debate. Myerson took the experiences and what he presumed to be the ideology of his neighbor, and branched it off into a being that could debate this position with him. His art ultimately is an expression of his ability to engage with critical self-reflective thinking. Arendt’s two-in-one is precisely this, the process of going home and playing out the debate of our external world internally by splitting ourselves into two, and then returning to the world as a whole person again who has not simply been swept up in the ideology they were exposed to, but has thought about and understood it. 

The question from here becomes, if Myerson is so well attuned to Arendt’s notations of the two-in-one and the importance of critical self-reflective thought, why would he have been subsumed by the ideology and conspiracy of Rorschach? The answer is that while Myerson was correct in some respects, he fell prey to the larger danger Arendt warned of: the separation of the public and private world. For Arendt, in order for one to think at all, they need the freedom to travel between the public world and the private world of their thoughts. To have a spotlight on you at all times takes away your ability to have the necessary solitude to think, and in turn diminishes your ability to understand the ideology you are exposed to. Arendt specifically feared the role the public sphere was taking on, the idea that all of us were always out in the world or that every aspect of our private lives were expected to become the topic of public conversation. If the state had access to your thoughts and could punish you for them, as was becoming the case in the Soviet Union with Stalin and the United States with the red scare and communist blacklists, then you had no ability to travel into a private world. Your thoughts were not your own. The lack of private life represented the lack of ability to have a private life, or in other words a lack of freedom indicative of totalitarian society.

King proposes the opposite extreme by taking the events of Watchmen as a stepping stone to create an exaggerated private sphere. Myerson is a recluse who never travels out into the world. Laura’s hometown of Hanna, Wyoming never gets visitors from the outside, New York here has become the city that always sleeps, the detective is himself such a private person that we don’t even know his name.

None of these characters have a balance of public and private life, and in turn none of them care to imagine what Arendt called a world in common. Whether they care for other people is secondary to the maintenance of their private life. In a letter to Laura, Myerson confirms this as he recounts the story of his father not wanting to cooperate with the authorities in order to maintain his own private life.

Every character in Rorschach can be seen as manifesting a level of the two-in-one conversation, whether that be the Detective to Laura and Wil, Wil and Laura to each other, The Detective and Alan, even the opposing presidential candidates. The series is largely set in a world eternally in the split created by having the two-in-one conversation. However, the next step of unifying the two selves into one by returning to the public world never actually happens, everyone is perpetually split in two because they exist in a world that no one can think of in common, a world no one seemingly wants to share. They lack connection to others, they lack empathy.

In Between Past and Future, a collection of essays by Hannah Arendt, she argues that political judgment is something we learn and refine through aesthetic judgment. She writes:

“In aesthetic no less than in political judgments, a decision is made, and although this decision is always determined by a certain subjectivity, by simple fact that each person occupies a place of his own from which he looks upon and judges the world, it also derives from the fact that the world itself is an objective datum, something common to all its inhabitants” (Arendt, 219) 

Artistic judgments are an issue of taste. However, as she borrows from previous writings by David Hume and Immanuel Kant, issues of taste are not interesting to us because they are purely subjective, they are interesting to us because we behave as if they were objective. For example, the objective sentence “the door is 5ft tall” and the subjective sentence “the painting is beautiful” are no different in their language. We do not discuss art from the point of view that no one will understand our subjective relationship to it. Rather, we discuss it as if others are capable of agreeing with and being convinced by us. Aesthetic judgments “share with political opinions that they are persuasive; the judging person - as Kant says quite beautifully - can only ‘woo the consent of everyone else’ in the hopes of coming to an agreement.” This process is what allows us to see the world from the perspective of another. Through art and aesthetic judgment, we do not rely solely on our own subjectivity but imply that others understand us, that we share the world in common and we care enough to persuade them to our side.

Rorschach thus builds a world that seems largely devoid of empathy. From the first page, our introduction to this series is an image of a man in a costume being gunned down gruesomely, dare I say almost pathetically.

The story of Rorschach as established here is not one about the evils of two political extremists, per se. But rather, the tragic story of two lonely people swept up in a conspiracy that took advantage of their isolation and hope for a better world. For Wil Myerson, the torments of his neighbor found their way into a story about the failure to think about our actions, but no attachment to the world ever came from these drawings. No one read his comics, and he in turn never seemed to connect with others. For Laura, there was no purpose in her life outside of the mission given to her by her father, himself a radicalized individual that failed to think what he was doing.

As the story concludes, Wil and Laura were nothing but pawns their entire lives: for their parents, for Alan’s political ambitions, for the ideology of Rorschach they were consumed by, they were never understood in their own terms and ended up dead. They of course are not the only ones, as Issue #8 demonstrates the various people who helped them in this political plot, and the crime each of them committed simply because they never thought about what they were doing until they were so enmeshed in it that their identities homogenized with the ideology they were complicit in.

In a more controversial choice, King uses the real-life story of Otto Binder and a group of comic book creators that would meet at his home in an attempt to contact the spirits of their loved ones. Myerson attends these meetings and overtime comes to feel the same isolation and grief that Binder did allowing the conspiracy behind Rorschach told to him by Laura to take hold. At the same time, this real life tragedy channels the core mission of this series and Arendt’s work of trying to imagine the world through the perspective of another. In attempting to bridge the gap between reality and fiction in the series, there is an attempt to bridge the aesthetic and political judgments Arendt was arguing for. That by feeling for these characters, themselves plays on real people, we can perhaps start to feel for the people and reality around us. And perhaps also implying that the real grief we feel can sometimes be eased by telling ourselves a story, a conspiracy, that we want to hear rather than facing the world with others.

Ultimately through all these Arendtian concepts, Rorschach asks what is our responsibility as thinking individuals with respect to the world around us? Are we complicit by neglecting our duty to think about what we are doing? Are we in a state of an exaggerated private world without ever attempting to build a world in common? I think Rorschach argues yes, to all of the above. The idea that our Detective could investigate these events and not himself become complicit in some way is itself the tragedy. However, is this an appropriate examination of totalitarianism today or is it a conflation of the past with the present that Arendt was against when she warned of our “mythological error?”

THE ARENDT IN TOM KING

“Every thinker, if he lives long enough, must strive to unravel what appear as the results of his thoughts, and he does this by rethinking them.”

Hannah Arendt, Heidegger at 80

Following the publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem, a group of Jewish intellectuals called a meeting to in effect try Hannah Arendt in absentia for her work. The response to Eichmann was and remains controversial for two major reasons. The first is an objection to Arendt’s tone. Eichmann is written with biting irony; because she saw Eichmann as a buffoon, she refused to take him seriously in her writing. Some thought that her lack of seriousness was dismissive to the issues in question, that rather than seriously condemn Eichmann, she was writing off his personal responsibility by calling him “banal.” The second critique was in regards to Arendt’s loyalties. In Eichmann, Arendt highlights the various accounts of Jewish people being complicit in the holocaust, essentially following orders to sell out their own people or taking positions as guards to avoid death. On similar grounds, Arendt objected to the trial itself because it seemed like a public hanging, a pageant to the pre-determined guilt of Eichmann as a symbol of the Nazi’s evil nature rather than a serious curating and argument of the facts in question. That Eichmann was guilty was not in debate, but the legal obligation to prove this was never even attempted.

Arendt was no stranger to controversy, as she similarly faced backlash for her views on school desegregation in the United States. With this particular issue, Arendt shares a great deal in common with Existentialism. For Arendt, issues of identity are too individualizing to help grapple with our political reality. She did not see herself necessarily as a Jewish woman as much as she saw herself positioned that way politically by others. Her critiques of the women’s movement and the growing racial issues of the United States largely rested on this idea that one chooses their identity, and while fascism attacks us for these traits, our response to it need not prioritize it either. That said, as her mother taught her, she still believed if “one is attacked as a Jew, one must defend herself as a Jew.”

While the criticisms of Arendt have not always been accurate, for example her concept of banality was largely misunderstood by her detractors in the days following the release of Eichmann, they do raise a serious question about whether the human condition that Arendt believed in was accurate. Perhaps one is politically positioned into racial and sexual categories by others, but for those people the idea they could choose anything else is impossible. As Charles Mills argues, it would be a luxury to engage in the work of thinking the way Arendt proposes, because the world around him is designed to constantly remind him of his body, of who he is regardless of what he chooses to be. While Hannah Arendt is a deeply important thinker, my point here is simply that even in her own time her diagnosis of the issues in question was not without its problems. While her report on Eichmann and her account of Totalitarianism is largely proven to be correct and deeply influential, there are elements of her argument that are idealistic even for their time and the application of it today is not necessarily appropriate.

In Tom King’s own work, there is something of an Arendtian quality to issues of sexuality, race and personal identity. When looking at the exploration of Scott Free and Barda’s trauma in Mister Miracle or the relationship to the state Sofia has in Sheriff of Babylon, there’s little if any focus on the racial and sexual nature of said trauma. Barda being a woman doesn’t play into any specific trauma suffered on Apokolips. Similarly, while the plot of The Omega Men is deeply about where these characters were born, and what creeds they belong to, how that shapes them is less specific to those circumstances, and more importantly associated with a freedom to choose their identity at every stage. In the end, everyone is always responsible for who they are, even in the face of systemic machinery no one can escape.

If there is a central flaw to Rorschach as a series, it is that it’s almost too indebted to Arendt’s work, diagnosing issues today with Arendt’s tools without factoring in the new elements that she could never have known. In particular, the distinction between the private and public world is foundational to Arendt’s claims about totalitarian states, that the loss of mobility between the two realms is the key to our loss in freedom. However, it's never particularly clear or demonstrated that we ever had a true divide between these worlds. Even in her own lifetime, theorists like Michel Foucault were demonstrating historically that our public and private lives are not so neatly divided. And if the core idea of Rorschach is the loss of empathy driven by a largely isolated existence, it’s certainly not the case that today’s social isolation is the kind Arendt spoke of.

In a choice that is perhaps tonally appropriate but politically questionable, there is no social media in Rorschach. The series lacks the delivery mechanisms of the very conspiracy theories it is criticizing. The spread of ideas in this world is largely disconnected from the spread of ideas in today’s world. What seems bizarre to me, then, is that Arendt’s own critique that the private world was being erased could naturally fit into the hyper social nature of today’s media landscape, and yet instead that avenue is left completely out of the series, in favor of a more traditional murder mystery where such devices almost make things too easy. The series has a love affair with old technology like pagers and tape recorders, yet the book is grounded thematically in today’s political climate in a world that doesn’t as naturally superimpose itself on our reality as it might hope. 

However, this all said, the key to Arendt’s thought is that it is always changing, always evolving with the world of her experiences. As long as the goal is to create a world together, this constant process of change must always be allowed to happen so that our understanding can change with it. While Rorschach might be broken down in a number of ways for its philosophical concepts, I think the enduring message of Arendt is empathy, and the need to think about what we are doing is the spirit with each we need to engage all our problems, and simply allow the circumstances to dictate the best ways to engage with that thinking. Perhaps Myerson’s real flaw was that he preached Arendt’s concepts in a story that did not resonate with his world, that he chose a medium and a genre that few people engaged with and therefore only furthered his isolation. Perhaps the same could be said of Tom King.

CONCLUSION

“I call it thinking without a banister… that is, as you go up and down the stairs you can always hold on to the banister so that you don’t fall down, but we have lost this banister.”

Hannah Arendt, The Work of Hannah Arendt, 1972

Tom King’s work has always explicitly engaged with philosophy, but using Hannah Arendt produces a new challenge for him because her thought is not systemic, nor is it something that can be distilled down to a singular position. When thinking in purely ideological terms, philosophers are often seen as equations where if we plug in for x in any given formula, we can yield an appropriate result. And while certain thinkers like Kant and Hegel would pride themselves on systems that consist, Arendt did not and rather fostered responses that were appropriate for her time and her experience. So in short, King is not able to simply say “this is Arendt’s answer to totalitarianism in the age of trump.”

Thus Rorschach, a series assembled with Arendtian concepts, wants to ultimately assert that it means whatever you want it to mean.

It is in many respects a Rorschach test all its own where the various dialogues these characters have never come together into a whole person and depend entirely on our ability to do that work. What the book delivers on is Arendt’s desire for people to take responsibility for their thoughts and actions, to not be complicit in the world by merely letting it wash over us passively. Rorschach is not a book one can simply take as a literal series of events, because so much of what is actually shown is purely hypothetical or from the perspective of a character who can’t be trusted. However, what conversations and arguments we choose to fixate on tells us more about ourselves than it does the book itself. For example, my desire to paint this entire series with an Arendt-colored brush.

I think for this reason above all else, Hannah Arendt was an excellent choice as the philosophical basis for this series. Unlike King’s previous work that seems to take a philosophical conclusion as the maxim the story is trying to prove, there’s nothing in Arendt’s work that can be taken on such literal terms. In a book about the dangers of ideology, in a time when ideological divide is more clear than it’s ever been, it makes sense to work off a philosopher who resisted being part of any ideological system, one that contradicted herself, evolved with the times, and did not think we needed her to address today’s problems because her work is entirely of its own time.

Rorschach is a story about two radicalized individuals attempting to kill a politician on the grounds of a ludicrous conspiracy they take as the only truth that makes sense. The truth of this concept as it relates to our present moment is undeniable as we are inundated with conspiracy theories online, are constantly fighting wars of misinformation, and have in the past year witnessed an insurgency that attempted to overthrow an election and kill politicians. Additionally, much like Rorschach exaggerates the private world into the only one its characters can live in, we too are living through two years of quarantine, spending more and more time at home consuming conspiracies online with a shrinking public world. America is more politically divided than ever as we are individually divided via Arendt’s two-in-one with no way to unite again. While all of these elements are true in the world right now, and could be the basis for an interpretation of Rorschach, I think the more interesting idea is how the series reads to all of us individually, what ideas does it speak to right now, and what will its legacy be from here? I think Rorschach honors the spirit of its philosophical basis by trying to be about today, and only today.

Steve Baxi has a Masters in Ethics and Applied Philosophy, with focuses in 20th Century Aesthetics and Politics. Steve creates video essays and operates a subscription based blog where he writes on pop culture through a philosophy lens. He tweets through @SteveSBaxi.