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Ethical Vision and Bifocal Writing in the Twentieth Century: Primo Levi, Hannah Arendt, James Baldwin https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.121402 Murphy, Ruth 0009000180516642 Gordon, Robert SC This thesis interprets and connects a group of non-fiction works by Primo Levi (1919-1987), Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), and James Baldwin (1924-1987). It hinges on three key texts: Levi’s I sommersi i salvati, his 1986 work on the significance of the Holocaust in which he theorised the ‘grey zone’; Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, her 1963 study of Adolf Eichmann which led her to ‘the banality of evil’; and Baldwin’s ‘Letter from a Region in My Mind’, his canonical 1962 essay on anti-Black racism in the United States. Levi, Arendt and Baldwin come into dialogue not only with each other, but also with a number of philosophers, such as Iris Murdoch, Martha Nussbaum, María Lugones, Susan Neiman, and Miranda Fricker. What unites this diverse group of thinkers is their desire for lived experience to inform ethics—as, I argue, it does in the work of Levi, Arendt, and Baldwin. The thesis engages with debates on the relationship between philosophy and literature; conceptions of evil in the twentieth century; the role of colour and vision in writing on ethics; the ethical value of impurity and the ‘grey’; ‘prophetic’ writing styles that draw on biblical imagery and grant it new significance, and how existing moral concepts may, or may not, do justice to our experience. What emerges is a vision of ethics that is tied to the history of the twentieth century, and has become both contested and consecrated in the twenty-first. My central claim is that the works I interpret represent a form of writing we can fruitfully name bifocal: writing that sees both near (the personal, the historical event, the lived reality) and far (the implications of these experiences for humanity—which often leads the writer to make philosophical claims). Such writing blends elements of the philosophical, literary, journalistic, historical, and, crucially, testimonial. Bifocality, I argue, encapsulates much of what Murdoch and Nussbaum thought ethical writing should be; their hopes for a more literary philosophy are therefore put into practice in my approach to the central texts. The first chapter of the thesis gives bifocality’s theoretical foundations, and these are later evidenced through moments in Levi, Arendt and Baldwin. The term ‘vision’ in my title is both theoretical (through the concept of bifocality), metaphorical (for example, in how the Holocaust changed how these writers ‘saw’ evil), and quite literal. My interpretation of the grey zone examines how Levi uses a language of colour to depict a moral phenomenon. Then, the moral connotations of terms such as ‘blackness’ and ‘darkness’ shape my dialogue between Levi and Baldwin. In the second part of the thesis, I revisit the original publication of ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem’ and ‘Letter from a Region in My Mind’ in The New Yorker, showing how their visual presentation affected how these texts were received, and its consequences for how we understand them today. The thesis concludes by drawing on Miranda Fricker’s Epistemic Injustice (2007) to explain how Arendt’s ‘banality of evil’ filled an epistemic gap in collective ideas about evil. It is thanks to the bifocal writing of Arendt, Levi and Baldwin, I argue, that different shades of 20th century evil have been brought to light. University of Cambridge 2024-10-30 Thesis Doctoral Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) eng Cambridge Trust PhD Scholarship (Robert Gardiner) St John's College PhD Scholarship https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/389563 https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/2f22ef73-1e96-47ee-8d58-db977ecadc4f/download 99d4c90fa4ac30ca0811b15b5491882d https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/22424bf2-f8d4-4334-8ef6-1c79b6a9488a/download 87eda9de84448d1f82354d60eee3eb5f http://purl.org/NET/rdflicense/allrightsreserved banality of evil bifocality ethics grey zone Hannah Arendt James Baldwin María Lugones moral philosophy philosophy and literature Primo Levi