Before moving on to the books, I must first ask: who was Hannah Arendt?
Hannah Arendt was a 20th-century German Jewish philosopher and political thinker. She was born in Linden, Hannover, Germany in 1906. When she was three years old, her family moved to Königsberg so that her father could treat her for syphilis. he died when she was seven.
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Königsberg was where Immanuel Kant was born, right?
yes. It is where she took her daily constitutionals that the housewives of Königsberg put their watches to. Arendt actually started reading Kant in her father’s library after her death and she was quite well versed in her work by the time she was 14 years old. she also studied Greek and Latin.
from an early age, one of the things hannah arendt is clear is that she was always an outsider. she refused to conform to social expectations and liked to do things on her own. her mother was worried about her emotional development because she would seem cold, but she was incredibly passionate and curious. she had all kinds of ‘illnesses’ growing up, only to stop going to school so she could stay home, study alone and be with her mother. and then, finally, she was kicked out of school for leading a protest against one of her teachers who had offended her. that, combined with all her absences, meant that she couldn’t continue. so her mother sent her to berlin to finish her studies and prepare for her abitur exam. (students must pass her abitur to graduate from high school and attend college). she in berlin she studied philosophy and theology with romano guardini.
So, where did you go to study after that?
he had heard of martin heidegger through his childhood friend, ernst grumach, who had already attended the first seminars heidegger taught at the university of marburg. he had told her that the thought had come alive in the classroom when heidegger talked about plato and aristotle. And so he went to study with Heidegger. he attended her classes on plato and aristotle and their lectures on thought and of course they had what is now an infamous romantic relationship.
after a couple of years, she ended it, acknowledging what she called “the gap” between them; basically, her job and his wife would always come first, which would prevent the kind of closeness she wanted. So, he went to the University of Leipzig to study with his professor, Edmund Husserl, for a semester before going to the University of Heidelberg to write his dissertation on love and Saint Augustine with the great existentialist philosopher and psychologist, Karl Jaspers. /p>
That’s pretty amazing. Those three masters, Heidegger, Husserl and Jaspers, are great names in German philosophy.
absolutely. when she arrived in marburg, heidegger was writing being and time, which is her great work on the study of being, and she was talking to him while he was working on it. Then, when she got to Heidelberg University, Jaspers was starting her three-volume philosophy of work, which became incredibly important to her thinking.
was influenced by Jaspers’ understanding of philosophy as primarily a dialogic activity; while heidegger always understood it as something you do alone. because the thought of jaspers was very worldly, and of constituting the world in common. That stayed with Arendt for the rest of his life, and is very evident throughout his work.
it’s unfortunate that people don’t read jaspers the way they read heidegger today. To get a deep understanding of Arendt, it is very important to read Kant and then Jaspers and then Heidegger.
Are there any jaspers books you would recommend as accessible to a general reader?
I would recommend the philosophy of existence, which was originally presented as a series of lectures at the german academy in frankfurt after the nazis expelled jaspers from his professorship. And I would recommend his working philosophy in three volumes, which is important for Arendt’s thought. there is also elizabeth young-bruehl’s book on jaspers, freedom and the philosophy of karl jaspers.
So what does Arendt do after that incredible initiation into German philosophy?
post love in st. agustin in 1929 with the help of jaspers. It is the same year that she meets and marries her first husband, Günther Anders. They met at a masked ball in Berlin, at a fundraiser for a Marxist magazine. she was dressed as a harem girl.
They married shortly after meeting and then moved to Frankfurt so that Anders could write his Habilitation at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt. At the time Arendt was a journalist writing for newspapers, mostly book reviews. He took classes with Ralph Mannheim and was working on her habilitation, Rahel Vahnhagen: The Life of a Jewish Woman, which was intended as a critique of German Romanticism and Jewish assimilation. After a year, Paul Tillich and Theodor Adorno rejected Anders’ musical work, so they returned to Berlin.
“Because she tried to understand why someone like Heidegger could become a Nazi, she is often seen as an apologist for him. but I don’t see it as an apology. it is an attempt to deal with and fully understand the actions of someone close to her”
There, he wrote short articles and book reviews and worked on Rahel’s book. She befriended Kurt Blumenfeld and began working with the World Zionist Organization in 1933. The Reichstag fire was a turning point in Hannah Arendt’s life. after the burning of the reichstag, she said: “she could not be a spectator”.
after bertolt brecht’s address book was compromised, anders fled to paris, fearing arrest, leaving her behind in berlin. Ella’s mother, Martha de Ella, came to stay with her and, for several months, they used her apartment as a stopover to help the communists escape.
Faced with the rise of National Socialism, Arendt belittled Rahel Varnhagen and moved away from philosophy. she was genuinely appalled at the way her friends, professional thinkers, had been blinded to the reality of what was happening in germany. she thought there was something in the tradition of philosophy that kept people from coming face to face with the world and allowed for a kind of “accompaniment”.
It was a bit more extreme than that in Heidegger’s case…
absolutely. she broke ties with heidegger. There are many different ways to read his response to Heidegger’s joining the Nazi Party, becoming head of the University of Freiburg, and Husserl’s firing. In one of his letters to Jaspers, he wrote something like, ‘For what he did to Husserl, he is basically guilty of murder.’ I don’t understand how someone as smart as him could do something like that.”
As horrified as I was at these actions (seeing the people I was close to or not seeing what was happening or as if heidegger joined the Nazi party), I wanted to understand what it was about this thought that made it people will accept such things instead of resisting them. she was curious to understand, and because it wasn’t a total rejection and instead she tried to understand why someone like heidegger could become a nazi, I think she’s often read as an apologist for him. but I don’t see it as an apology. it is an attempt to deal with and fully understand the actions of someone close to her. For Arendt, forgiveness is something that happens between two people, and reconciliation requires seeing the good with the bad, which does not mean accepting it.
so, you have the rise of Nazism and she is separated from her husband. she must have been very vulnerable as a jewish woman in berlin.
certainly she was vulnerable in a political sense, being a jewish woman in germany and participating in the kind of political activities she was involved in, but arendt was an incredibly resilient person. From what I know of her, I don’t think she considered herself vulnerable in a personal or emotional sense. she never saw herself as a victim. she never talked about it that way, and she was very reluctant to use that kind of language. she believed in personal responsibility.
“she thought that the nation-state as a political institution was one of the reasons totalitarianism could arise in the 20th century in the first place”
At that time, she began to work more intensively with the World Zionist Organization and Kurt Blumenfeld, who had recruited her to collect antisemitic research propaganda from the Prussian State Library to send to world leaders for use in the next world. Zionist conference. one day, when she was doing this work in the library, she went to lunch with her mother and they were both arrested by the gestapo.
when did you leave germany?
the day after the gestapo freed her. she was held for eight days and the next day she fled with her mother, first to prague, then to switzerland and then to paris. She was in Paris for about eight years, working for Jewish organizations, learning Hebrew and Yiddish, helping prepare young Jews to emigrate to Palestine.
was she herself a Zionist at the time?
yes, she was a Zionist. she went to palestine in 1935. i think it was a panel discussion in 1972 that says something like, ‘i’m not a marxist. I’m not a socialist, I’m not even a liberal. The only thing I have ever been in my life has been a Zionist, and that was while she was working in Paris and it was the result of the political conditions of the moment.”
he broke with the zionist party after coming to the united states. she was very involved in the debates about the future of zionism that were taking place in new york with people like theodor herzl, but she broke with him when she started to move towards the defense of a nation-state, towards the constitution of a state for the Jewish people. she thought that the nation-state as a political institution was one of the reasons totalitarianism was able to emerge in the 20th century in the first place and that, as a political/institutional model, it failed to protect the rights of citizens.
so when did you leave paris?
She was buried in Gurs in 1940 by the French as an enemy alien. she and blücher were told to report for internment. She was sent to Gurs in the South of France, which was the first and largest internment camp built for Spanish Republicans fleeing Francoism. she was there for about five and a half weeks. she was part of a mass escape with sixty-two other women, made possible by the approach of the German front.
went to lourdes to look for walter benjamin. She then made her way to Montauban, which was a well-known meeting point, and accidentally ran into her second husband, Heinrich Blücher, walking down the street one afternoon. then, with the help of varian fry, they were able to secure the output documents. They took a train across Spain and then to Lisbon, where they stayed for about three months. They finally made it to the United States, arriving in New York City on May 22, 1941.
She didn’t know any English when she arrived. she had little money and she signed up through an aid organization to become a housekeeper with a family in massachusetts for the summer so she could learn english. she then she began to get writing and teaching jobs. Her first teaching job was at Brooklyn University, teaching a history course on modern European history as an adjunct professor. she was beginning to write about the origins of totalitarianism at the time; this was her first major work of hers, published in 1951, the same year she received US citizenship.
in new york you went from brooklyn university to columbia, right? she had a successful academic career and also a journalistic career.
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He never accepted or held a permanent position in academia. After the publication of Origins in 1951, he was offered a professorship at Princeton University. She was the first woman to be offered such a position at Princeton. Throughout her career, she taught at Princeton, the University of Chicago, the University of California Berkeley, and Williams College. Her longest and most permanent academic home was at the New School for Social Research in New York, and that was at the end of her life.
but why didn’t you take a permanent job?
She didn’t want one, and it wasn’t until later in life that she was offered a permanent position at the new school. in her letters she writes about the preparation work she did to teach her courses and it is clear that she put everything into them. but she was primarily a writer and public speaker, and she traveled quite a bit. she would travel to chicago from riverside drive.
It’s a long ride! maybe we should skip to all five books because that will tell the story differently, but before that, just tell us where your incredibly detailed knowledge of arendt comes from.
I fell in love with Hannah Arendt in college, when I first read The Human Condition. I had been wandering around the library looking for erich fromm’s book, marx’s concept of man and somehow found the human condition. when I started reading it, I really had the experience of falling in love. I was very aware that I didn’t understand anything she was talking about, but I desperately wanted to understand.
“says that loneliness is the underlying cause of all totalitarian movements. why loneliness? because loneliness radically separates us from human connection.”
I took nine directed studies in college and read nothing but hannah arendt and the frankfurt school thinkers. I did my thesis work on Arendt and Benjamin and Adorno, and then my postdoctoral work at the University of Heidelberg studying German Romanticism and German Romantic poetry, while translating the poems of Hannah Arendt. i also spent a year at the institute for social research at the institute of philosophy at goethe university. so for almost 20 years of my life i have been reading hannah arendt. she is someone I think about. she is someone I go to and who gives me a sense of rootedness and place in the world.
but you also just completed a biography, didn’t you?
yes, the non-personal answer as to why i have all this detailed knowledge in my head is because for the last year i have been writing a hannah arendt biography. furthermore, for the last 10 years I have been translating his work. the poems are scheduled to appear in 2021.
let’s move on to the books you’ve chosen by or about hannah arendt. the first is the origins of totalitarianism. Could you give us an idea of what the position of that book is? what are the origins of totalitarianism? what is its angle?
I started this book because it is his first major work published in English. When I introduce Hannah Arendt at a conference, I often start by saying that her work deals with two interconnected issues. the first question is, ‘how can we protect the spaces of freedom?’; the second question is, is there a way of thinking that is not tyrannical? I start with the origins of totalitarianism because it is a study of the various elements that crystallized in the appearance of totalitarianism in the twentieth century. Arendt writes about the decline of the nation state, the privatization of public political institutions. she writes about the rise of what we would today call “fake news” and political propaganda. she writes about our inability to distinguish fact from fiction. she writes about mass uprooting, homelessness. and she writes about the need for solitude and the dangers of solitude.
What does loneliness have to do with the origins of totalitarianism?
It is a 597-page book. when you get to the last ten pages, he says that loneliness is the underlying cause of all totalitarian movements. why loneliness? because loneliness radically separates us from human connection. makes us desperate for meaning. it turns us against ourselves in a dangerous way that leads us down rabbit holes in thought that make it impossible for us to judge and distinguish between fact and fiction. she says it is one of the most desperate experiences a human being can have. when we experience loneliness, we are hungry, desperate to find meaning and connection. ideology, or ideological propaganda, provides simple solutions to complex human problems that feed that hunger, that need for place and meaning.
So are loners particularly vulnerable to totalitarian thinking?
yes. loners are particularly vulnerable to ideological thinking in whatever form it may take. More importantly, for Arendt, loneliness also means that we are not only cut off from conversation with others, but that we are cut off from having a conversation with ourselves. So loneliness fundamentally compromises our ability to think and our ability to judge. loneliness, she says, is that condition where I keep myself company. and that is very different from loneliness.
is loneliness good and loneliness is bad?
solitude is necessary. the private sphere is necessary. the space of the four walls is necessary. we need to be able to withdraw from the public world to be alone with ourselves and think in a way that nurtures us.
Is this a piece of history, would you say, or is it something different?
No, I wouldn’t call it a piece of history. Arendt says that it is not history. she is employing walter benjamin’s understanding of ‘constellation’, bringing together the elements that crystallized into totalitarianism and gestures to that in her book’s first preface. she is thinking about how the different parts fit together. she doesn’t want to offer a historical account that is reductive in any way, or that seems to follow some kind of logical sequence of events, because some things are not completely understandable, like the death camps, for example. and then how do we try to understand what is incomprehensible? also, importantly for her, a historicist argument would imply that the holocaust was somehow destined to happen: because x happened, y happened, z happened, and so there it is. she doesn’t want to offer that type of account.
Let’s move on to the second book, The Human Condition, which you said was the one that drew you to Arendt. great title you see it on the shelf and it’s hard not to pick it up. it seems that it will give you the secret, it will tell you what it is about.
oh yes. the human condition. in German he titled it activa oder vom tätigen leben, which translated means life of action. I read the human condition as a study of protection of the spaces of freedom necessary for human action in the world. he writes about these tripartite distinctions between private, social, public, and between labor, work, and action. she speaks of worldly alienation in the modern age. she is thinking about the different activities that we engage in on a daily basis and the different realms of life that we constantly navigate and the activities that correspond to those realms.
“The human condition began as a study of totalitarian elements in Marx”
I think we are experiencing something similar right now, this collapse between the private, social and public spheres in our quarantine conditions. everything is taking on a new color. but when we see that the boundaries between the private, the social and the public are collapsing, when we see the politicization of private life, that is indeed a warning sign that totalitarianism is emerging.
The human condition began as a study of the totalitarian elements in Marx. he read marx very seriously. he influenced her thinking in various ways, but she also deeply disagreed with him. she starts her chapter on “work”, “in the next chapter, she will criticize karl marx”.
arendt disagrees with marx’s elevation of work as the fundamental activity of the human condition. If our fundamental quality is our ability to work, and Marx wants to liberate man from work, then what will we do with a society of workers who do not have to work? As Arendt says, she did not share Marx’s great faith in capitalism.
Marx in that sense was the opposite of Aristotle, in a way.
Yes, quite the opposite, in the sense that Arendt reads the exaltation of Marx’s work as a break in the tradition of Western political thought.
I think it’s also a great work to read right now, to think about world building and plurality. his understanding of plurality is the idea that men and not man inhabit the earth and make the world in common. we live together with each other.
but the title of the book makes it sound like we’re talking about universals.
no, arendt always stays away from universal statements. she always defends the particular over the universal. she is a conceptual thinker. she is struggling with these terms to begin to understand the contemporary moment she is writing about. something that for her happens with the rise of totalitarianism, and part of her turn against philosophy, was the idea that concepts and categories, the railings that we cling to in our thinking to help us understand the world, are no longer relevant. we need a new language; we need new concepts to understand today’s world. but that doesn’t mean we can just get rid of old concepts like ‘authority’, ‘freedom’, ‘justice’ or ‘the good life’. we have to think with them; but neither can we simply rely on them as frameworks for understanding.
So, is there a sense that in every age people have to reinvent the framework for understanding, using elements of the past to do so? Is that what she’s saying, that you have to think again about where you sit in relation to power and authority relationships, but you’re stuck with a lot of the building blocks that your predecessors used?
yes. the way you frame it reminds me of her metaphor for walter benjamin’s methodology in her introductory essay to the edited volume of her work that she compiled, illuminations. It’s about a pearl hunter and the need to dive through the remains of the past to recover what can be saved. she does not argue that we must do away with the past. and she is not in favor of making analogies with the past to understand the current situation, but we also, in a certain sense, carry those gems, those conceptual ideas as ‘the good’ and we have to rethink them as a tradition. problem of metaphysics. we have to engage and think about these questions again. we can’t just reflexively trust them in our thinking.
what about the next book, men in dark times? another good title. presumably they are men and women in dark times.
yes, they are men and women in dark times, but “man” is not always used. The title of this book is taken from Bertolt Brecht’s great poem, ‘an die nachgeborenen’, which translates as ‘to posterity’ or ‘to those who will come after’ beginning ‘wirklich, ich lebe in finisteren zeiten!’ (‘Really, I’m living in dark times’). this is a collection of essays about people close to her, and also some people she was not so close to, but who had a significant impact on her intellectual development, like rosa luxemburg, who she actually went to see once with her mother at a rally.
met amazing people…
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I know. Have you ever wondered if people will look back on our time and think of the public intellectuals we have today and their surroundings in the same way that we look back on those in Paris in the 1930s?
it really doesn’t feel like that! I’ve interviewed hundreds of philosophers for the philosophy bites podcast and some of them are big names today, but they don’t seem to endure and be revered in the same way for sure.
When you asked me to choose the five best books, I thought of the word “best” and felt it was a sacrifice not to include Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil on the list. But thinking of people who might go to this website and look for a set of books to introduce them to a thinker, I wondered what were the books that made me fall in love with hannah arendt as a thinker and which included the most beautiful books by him. writing. and I really think some of his most beautiful writing is about men in dark times.
His essay on “humanity and our times,” which he delivered as his closing speech when he received the closing prize, is a timeless meditation on what it means to preserve one’s humanity in dark times. i also find myself continually coming back to your ‘laudatio’ for karl jaspers, which is a brilliant piece of writing about the importance of listening and conversing and allowing silence and world-building and common humanity. These essays are so intimate that I believe they are made available to any reader and offer portraits of some of the most important political thinkers of the 20th century.
It’s not a book I’ve read, but I should from the sound of it. when was it published?
It was first published in 1955 and then went through a few editions. It’s also worth mentioning that here are essays on Hermann Broch, Walter Benjamin, and the poet Randall Jarrell. What you also get in this book is a sense of Arendt’s poetics and his engagement with poets. there is his essay on bertolt brecht and the brecht controversy and how we hold poets responsible, his essay on walter benjamin and how he was not a poet but a poetic thinker.
In general, philosophers are not poets. Nietzsche obviously wrote poetry. boethius was a poet, lucretius was a poet, and ts eliot did a doctorate in philosophy. but you have to dig a lot to find them, in general, philosophy and poetry do not mix. it’s quite an unusual mix to have a philosopher who is also a poet.
well, hannah arendt wouldn’t call herself a philosopher. She probably rejected that label most famously in her 1964 televised interview with Günter Gaus, where she says she is a political theorist. she turns away from philosophy after the reichstag fire, and then, when she returns to philosophy in the life of the mind, her final work, she engages in what she calls “the dismantling of metaphysics.” I think she is moving away from any kind of transcendent philosophy to think about materiality and think about how we can orient ourselves in the present. she rejects any platonic idea of truth in that sense. I think we see a real critique of Heidegger there.
yes, but that is the German sense of philosophy as metaphysics. so she’s not a metaphysician in most of his books, but political theorists could just as easily be classified under “philosophy” as “politics”, right?
if we think of it as dealing with these fundamental problems of metaphysics, like ‘what is the nature of being?’, ‘what is meaning?’, ‘how do we create meaning?’, ‘what is the purpose of life? ?’, ‘what is the good life?’, she is certainly engaging in all these questions and she was brought up in the tradition of German philosophy, the Western tradition of political philosophy, but she did not understand that she was doing the work herself . of philosophy she does not fit easily into any box. she sometimes she seems like she’s doing the work of phenomenology. she sometimes she looks like she is doing the work of metaphysics. she sometimes she is a biographer.
not unlike simone de beauvoir. she did all those things.
yes. Arendt did not have much respect for Simone de Beauvoir. she didn’t think she was that smart.
wow. depends where you look I guess. From where I’m sitting, Simone de Beauvoir is pretty smart. I have seen her in some TV interviews, there are very few. she comes across as someone who is fully aware of the issues she is dealing with and has great clarity of thought. did arend not interact with her at all?
interacted with her, and with sartre and camus. she thought nausea was a brilliant book. she said it was sartre’s best book. she wrote to karl jaspers ‘camus is probably not as talented as sartre but he is much more important, because he is much more serious and honest’
That wouldn’t be hard to see…
In one of his first letters to Mary McCarthy, he says something like, “Simone de Beauvoir really isn’t worth getting engaged to.” one should flirt with her instead of her.’ Arendt was not a feminist…
Let’s move on to the next book, thinking without a railing, which seems to me like a nightmare image.
well, we’re all going up and down a stairway with no handrails to hold on to, endlessly, never getting anywhere we’re going because thinking about yourself is a never-ending process. this was the secret metaphor she kept to herself as she thought about how to think about thinking. it is really a reference to the need to find a new language and concepts and categories to hold on to in thought in order to understand our present moment.
and in the picture, what would be the railing? Is it a fixed thing that you can trust to be there, like the building blocks of discard thinking, some bottom that you hit?
yes. was critical with discards. I think of those handrails as the concepts and categories that we hold on to in thought, that allow us to make judgments about what is going on in the world. arendt is not writing systematic philosophy like kant, aiming to arrive at a concept of ‘the judgment of the beautiful’, but she is very interested and committed to the concept of ‘judgment’ and wants to understand what is judgment in our world current.
but if you are someone who is not immersed in the world of philosophy, what is this book about? Is it a very abstract book or is it about particular social situations?
I did a review of thinking without a railing when it was published in 2018 for the book review. It’s an edited volume, which I think is a great introduction to the work of Hannah Arendt. it is full of interviews that give you an idea of her as a person, conversations in which she clarifies what she meant by ‘the banality of evil’; Most Arendt readers are familiar with that phrase, even if they haven’t read Eichmann. . contains some of the earliest works on Marx that were never published, some of her essays on cultural criticism, some book reviews.
i taught an introductory course on arendt two years ago using this as the main text, and it was a wonderful way to get a general idea of who hannah arendt was, but also includes all of her main concepts, categories, and terms, her distinction between labor, work and action, and their understanding of freedom. there are also essays on heidegger and his essay on wh auden.
sounds fantastic.
this is a really wonderful book. It was edited by Jerome Kohn, who was one of Hannah Arendt’s students. He is the literary executor of Arendt’s estate. He has published most of the posthumous volumes we have of Hannah Arendt’s work, and we really have him to thank for Arendt’s legacy as it endures in the world today.
so, between this book and men in dark times, what would you say would be the ideal starting point for someone who has never read anything by hannah arendt?
depends on who is reading hannah arendt for the first time. so if the list of books that i gave you is being picked up by someone who is completely new to hannah arendt i would probably give them to think off the rail first because that way they can play they can pop up they can explore they can get a sense of their language and its concepts and categories and then return to the origins and the human condition, which are his two main works on the rise of totalitarianism and freedom and the protection of spaces of freedom. And Then Men in Dark Times is really a collection of humanistic essays about what it was like to be alive in the 20th century, about poetry and conversation and, very important to Arendt, about friendship.
Let’s move on to the last book. this is a biography called hannah arendt: for the love of the world.
Although I am writing a biography of Hannah Arendt, I wanted to include her most important intellectual biography on the list. It was published in 1982 and remains Arendt’s favorite biography. it’s quite long elizabeth young-bruehl knew arendt. When Arendt died in 1975, she wasn’t really well known outside of New York intellectual circles…
really?
yes. It was not until the 1980s and Young-Bruehl’s biography and then the discovery of Heidegger’s letters that he became so well known and a figure of interest in contemporary philosophy and political theory. she is still not as recognized in germany today as she could be. she is not recognized as an ornament, for example. This biography is a wonderful account of Arendt’s life.
why is it called for love of the world? where is that line from?
is from a letter to karl jaspers which I believe was written in 1956 and also appears as an entry in one of his thought journals. in one of his thought diaries, “warum ist es so schwer, die welt zu lieben” — “why is it so hard to love the world?”
oh yeah, you quoted him on twitter recently.
Yes, I did, along with the actual post image. when she was finishing the human condition, she wrote to karl jaspers, ‘only now, only at this point in life, am i beginning to understand what it means to love the world. to love the world is to love it with all the evil and suffering that is in it, and I would like to dedicate my magnum opus, the human condition, to you and call it amor mundi, ‘for love of the world’. , the intended title for the human condition was amor mundi. Of course, Arendt was very fond of turning Nietzsche upside down. So, this is a playful twist on amor fati—’the love of fate’. she is thinking about what it means to build the world in common, poiesis, the fabrication of the world that we make collectively through language, through architecture, through art. , through sculpture, through construction. What always strikes me is that Hannah Arendt saw the worst that her century had to offer, and her question was how to love the world.
In the biography, is that the central idea, that this is what drove Arendt, or is it too simplistic?
I don’t know if I would say that this is young-bruehl’s framing mechanism for the biography. The book is a deep dive into the intellectual history of Hannah Arendt. one of the frames young-bruehl uses is friendship, which is very important to hannah arendt and certainly relates to “love of the world”. but the ‘love of the world’ as an idea in arendt’s writings is related to this idea that we have to see the world and take the good and the bad with equanimity, that we cannot cling to either radical hope or radical despair or some idea of what we would like the world to be, but rather that we have to face the world as it is and love it anyway.
That sounds pretty Nietzschean to me. accept what you are doesn’t sound anti-nietzsche. How will your bio be different from this one?
my biography is an introductory biography on the life and work of hannah arendt. I have tried to fill in some of the gaps that were left empty simply because the materials were not publicly available at the time. I am talking about hannah arendt’s poetry and her internment in gurs and escape, which I have reconstructed through different stories that have emerged since young-bruehl’s biography was published. the frame of my biography comes from a panel discussion about his work where he says: “what is the subject of our thinking? experience and nothing more.” I have tried to unite the life of action with the life of the mind.
You have spent a lot of time studying Hannah Arendt. will you always be dedicated to arendt or will you move on to someone else?
That’s a great question. Hannah Arendt is someone I think about, but I don’t always agree with her. her writing makes me think, and if i’m completely honest, the thinker i feel closest to is walter benjamin. reading walter benjamin is the only time i feel at home in the world. adornment is also someone very important to me. I’m that word that people love to use but don’t really love: interdisciplinary. Marx and Freud are also very important to me. but just as important to me are people like virginia woolf, tennessee williams and d. h. lawrence. these are thinkers that I also return to, to hold on to something in my own thinking. The other day I was teaching the human condition and a student called me an Arendtian. I laughed and said, “I must protest.” As a friend says, I’m Arendtian enough to know I’m not supposed to be Arendtian. Arendt’s work is not a roadmap to the future, but it is something we can hold onto as we think about the world.
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