By Steve Baxi

INTRODUCTION

“It is, of course, always nice to be praised. But this is really not the point, it’s ever so much nicer to be understood.”

Hannah Arendt, Letter to Roger Errera, 1967

Following the election of US President Donald Trump in 2016, multiple retailers, including Amazon, found themselves out-of-stock of a 1951 book titled The Origins of Totalitarianism by German Jewish philosopher, Hannah Arendt. Considered to be a defining text of political philosophy in the 20th Century, Arendt chronicles the features and tendencies of Totalitarian regimes following the downfall of Nazi Germany and the rise of Stalin’s Soviet Union. Ironically, this posthumous success and relevance of her work is something Arendt herself may not have approved of. In a late interview, she says “To look to the past in order to find analogies by which to solve our present problems is, in my opinion, a mythological error” (Hill, 14). 

In July 2020, DC Comics announced a 12 issue maxi-series titled Rorschach, by Tom King, Jorge Fornés, Dave Stewart and Clayton Cowles. Set 35 years after the events of Watchmen, the series follows an unnamed detective as he attempts to solve the mystery surrounding an attempted presidential assassination. The series takes influence from the HBO Watchmen TV series, classic films Laura (1944), Gun Crazy (1950), The Parallax View (1974), the real-life accounts of various comic book writers, and most notably, the political philosophy of Hannah Arendt.

According to King, the inspiration for this series was two-fold. The first was a response to the election of Trump, a zeitgeist that was evidenced by the skyrocketing demands for Origins of Totalitarianism. The series belongs to King’s fourth era of comics work, alongside Strange Adventures and Batman/Catwoman that deal to varying degrees with experiences of anger and political paranoia. The second inspiration was the real-life connection to Steve Ditko and right-wing philosopher, Ayn Rand. Watchmen (in)famously created an iconic group of characters that were stand-ins for existing superheroes. Originally, Alan Moore planned to use these already established characters, with Rorschach being a replacement for Steve Ditko’s The Question who engaged with Rand’s philosophy of objectivism. King circled back to this influence and based the series around an inverted philosophical view of Steve Ditko where he idealized Hannah Arendt instead of Ayn Rand.

Rorschach is a divisive series, with groups denouncing it as an unauthorized, and insulting gesture against Watchmen writer, Alan Moore. Similarly, some critics reject the series as a dangerous both-side-ism that creates a problem out of fake left-wing extremism in the context of a real life right wing insurgency.

This reaction, I think, has made it difficult to see the rich work being done by King, Fornés, Stewart and Cowles on this series which examines not only the origins of fascist thought, but the ups and downs of Arendt’s own work. This is not a series that feels like a sequel to Watchmen outside the setting, and instead tells a story that is influenced deeply by the current political climate, taking in the past in a manner akin to what Arendt called Pearl Diving: “a way of approaching history that is fragmentary, so that one can bring to the surface those rich and strange gems that might offer some illumination” (Hill, 11). Indeed, I believe the response to Rorschach, and some of the criticisms lobbed against it have largely missed the point of both the work and the philosophy at play. To refuse to engage with Rorschach by calling it dangerous is a criticism Arendt herself would scoff at: “The notion that there exist dangerous thoughts is mistaken for the simple reason that thinking itself is dangerous to all creeds, convictions, and opinions” (Hill, 11).

In this article, I want to break down Rorschach from the perspective of Hannah Arendt’s philosophy. In particular, how the story is framed around her understanding of thinking and the roots of totalitarianism in relation to people’s capacity for what biographer Samantha Rose Hill refers to as critical self-reflective thinking. Rorschach not only mines Arendt’s work appropriately to study fascism, but I argue can also be seen as a critique of them in today’s context.

WHO WAS HANNAH ARENDT?

“A small, rotund, stoop shouldered woman with a crew-like haircut, masculine voice, and marvelous mind.”

FBI Memorandum on Hannah Arendt, 1956

Hannah Arendt was a German-Jewish philosopher, born on October 14, 1906 in Linden, Hannover, Germany. Her family was secular Jewish, and often faced anti-sematic language from their community during the Weimar years and subsequent rise of Nazism. Arendt studied Greek, Latin and Philosophy from a young age, saying to Günter Gaus in a 1964 interview: “I read Kant. You can ask, Why did you read Kant? For me the question was somehow: I can either study philosophy or I can drown myself, so to speak.” In her formative years, she combined phenomenology, a secular approach to Saint Augustine's concept of love, and Immanuel Kant’s concepts of reason and judgment into her own thought. She studied under Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers, having an affair with the former but ending things as he grew distant and found himself in the thralls of Nazism.

For Arendt, the foundational question of philosophy was “Is there a way of thinking that is not tyrannical?” Indeed everything from training with Heidegger and Jaspers, up to her rejection of Adorno and Critical Theory comes back to a philosophical thinking that richly interrogates our ability to understand and to imagine the world from the perspective of another. In Eichmann in Jerusalem, her famous series of reports on the trial of Nazi Adolf Eichmann, she coins the phrase “Banality of Evil.” Eichmann was an SS officer tasked with overseeing the mass transportation of Jewish people to concentration camps. In May 1960, Eichmann was captured and brought to stand trial in Israel for his crimes against humanity. Arendt flew to Israel to cover the trial and attempted to understand both his rationale, as well as the state’s responsibility in trying his case.

 For Arendt, the problem with Eichmann, and fascists in general, is a failure to think. In Arendt’s estimation, Eichmann was being taken too seriously, when in reality she saw him as a buffoon who simply did what he was told without actually thinking about it. The capacity for critical self-reflective thinking is shared by all, and is necessary to resist ideological thought like Nazism, and to take personal responsibility for our actions. For Eichmann, the problem was that he saw no other options for his situation, he lacked the ability to imagine the world from the perspective of another and thus carried out the bidding of a fascist regime. This capacity for thought is what Arendt’s work focused on, using concepts like storytelling to explain how our ability to think ties into our ability to have empathy, freedom, and sound political judgment.

WHY USE ARENDT?

“What I propose, therefore, is very simple: it is nothing more than to think what we are doing.”

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

Steve Ditko was an outspoken reader of Ayn Rand, a right-wing German philosopher of the 20th century. Ditko’s characters represented and engaged with her ideas of objectivism, a philosophical system centered on radical individualism and self-overcoming. Rand claimed to be in dialogue most directly with Aristotle and Friedrich Nietzsche, though the latter is based primarily on a widespread misunderstanding of his work curated by his anti-semitic, Nazi sister, Elizabeth Nietzsche. Ditko for his part took the formula of objectivism and created characters that played out the dialogues of Rand’s work, sprinkling in his own nuances and theories on liberalism, most popularly through the Question.

Tom King explains that Rorschach was a riff on the Question, and largely a joke Alan Moore was making about Steve Ditko qua Ayn Rand’s objectivism taken to its furthest possible extreme. Watchmen takes Ditko’s Question, and transforms him into the moral absolutist, Rorschach. According to King, Moore critiqued Ditko’s objectivism by demonstrating the absurd results we’d find ourselves with when this approach is taken to its furthest conclusion. Rorschach is so uncompromising in his will that he can’t live in a compromised world. Of course, the historical problem ended up being that Rorschach is largely regarded as the most popular character in the series. Regardless of the reasons why, Moore’s presentation of the objectivist, moral absolutist became less a joke and more a serious position of its readers.

In one sense, Rorschach is an ideology all its own, something evidenced in the HBO Watchmen TV series but also clearly visible in cultural conversation about the character. Indeed, there is a flattering picture here of a man who is completely sure of himself, who knows what he believes and does not compromise. Rorschach in one reading can be seen as the only moral character in Watchmen because he refuses to accept anything but an absolute good as the basis for our society. The critique of course is that such extreme devotion to an abstract good is ultimately self-contradictory and absurd, as Rorschach’s methods do not play by the same rules as his self-righteousness. While this nuance is clear in the text of the series, it’s also perfectly understandable that some might read Rorschach and find him aspirational. Correct or not, there is an ideology of Rorschach that does see him as good, as right, as the hero we might need.

For his series, Tom King muses on the possibility of Ditko not being inspired by this particular 20th century, right-wing, German, female philosopher but instead being inspired by the 20th century, left-wing, German, female philosopher, Hannah Arendt. He frames the story around Wil Myerson, a stand-in for Steve Ditko that creates the Question-esque character, the Citizen, who expresses Arendt’s views rather than Rand's.

King frames Arendt as the philosophical opposite of Ayn Rand. Indeed, there are many points of contention between the two theorists, in particular how they understand one’s responsibility to the world differently. For Rand, overcoming is merely the active asserting of one’s own will on the world. The individual in Rand’s work is a quasi-sacred thing, a universal concept and a universal good in itself. For Arendt, we must strive to build the world in common. As philosopher Nolen Gertz notes, for Arendt it is not so much that we should harden ourselves to overcome the challenges around us, as with Rand, but rather we should see the people we share this burden with, and overcome together. While a case can easily be made for the differences in Rand’s and Arendt’s views, ultimately King does not have to work very hard to make Arendt fit into this context because the real life Ditko may have been more agreeable to Arendt’s positions.

In Mysterious Travelers: Steve Ditko and the Search for a New Liberal Identity, Historian Zack Kruse chronicles Ditko’s work to parse out the distinctions between his views and Ayn Rand’s. While Ditko was influenced by Rand’s work, significant elements of hisœuvre and historical anecdotes tell a more complex story about his relationship to the philosopher. In particular, Kruse argues that Ditko’s characters like the Question and Mr. A or Hawk and Dove represent binaries of choice, where the goal is to force the reader to make a decision. In Kruse’s reading, the Question and Mr. A are projections that haunt other characters for the choices they (fail to) make.

Kruse argues that for Ditko, the answer was not simply to embrace Rand or any other ideology wholesale, but to maintain a sense of personal responsibility for making the choice at all. Kruse’s reading of Ditko has more in common with Arendt and Nietzsche than Rand. For Rand, the basic unit of thought was not experience but the priority of the individual, a universalizable subject at the root of everything. For Arendt, and for this portrait of Ditko, the subject is created as a function of their experiences and reflection on those experiences. If we take Kruse to be correct on his reading of Ditko, then Tom King’s use of Wil Myerson is not so much an inversion of Ditko, as much as it might be a more refined version of him.

Myerson’s Citizen and Ditko’s Question ultimately have the same goal for the reader, to establish personal responsibility for our choices, but the Arendtian view is more concerned with our ability to empathize with others and less on the individual’s importance in the universe.

That’s all for this section. Stay tuned for part two of Watchmen Two-in-One: Hannah Arendt and Rorschach (2020) coming next week. In the meantime, check out Steve’s other writing on philosophy in Tom King comics, focusing on Batman (2016) #23.

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.