Who was Hannah Arendt? This simple question might be more complicated than it seems, especially when it comes to Arendt’s case. To ask who she was, involves knowing the most fundamental experiences of her life, lived at the edge of tragedy— marked by her exile from Nazi Germany and the difficult reconstruction of a personal and professional life in the United States — and her ever-current theoretical work. The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951, 1956), The Human Condition (1958), Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil had an immediate resonance thanks to their subject matter and their novel and counter-hegemonic positions, withstanding the test of time and criticism.
If we ask ourselves who Arendt was, we are already operating in a specific domain within Arendt’s thought. In The Human Condition, we find the distinction between the “who” and the “what” of a person.1 Such a distinction enables us to analyse her character beyond mere biography and reconstruction of her thought. Let us, for a moment, put aside her vast bibliography and focus exclusively on Arendt, an original and perhaps unique figure within 20th-century theory.
The distinction between who a person is and what a person does is the ground of Arendt’s theory of political action. Through its differentiation from practical-productive action — such as writing books, poetry, painting, promulgating constitutions and laws, producing a financial balance, or building a table or an automobile —, Arendt retrieves political action from an age-old atrophy. Books, novels, artworks, objects, and machines add something new to the world we live in, they represent the way in which individuals discover and test their abilities. Yet, Arendt warns us, what a person has said, done or produced does not imply anything concerning that person’s essence, for example someone’s “greatness”. This is why we can often perceive a gap between a philosopher’s or a scientist’s theoretical contributions to a field and what concerns their more human and individual aspects. Who one is concerns something other than whatever sublime and excellent theoretical or practical work they might have produced. Rather, it concerns the person’s actions in the world: their creative and productive faculties, of course, but most importantly the intersubjective domain: exchanges between individuals, possibilities of care, communication and perception of and with the other, maintaining and preserving one’s position all the while. We are confronted with one of Arendt’s fundamental theses: the highest form of action, the one which fully expresses the dignity of the human condition is not, as one might assume by looking at the modern period, productive action, but political action. Through political action one can transcend their individualistic attitude — be it directed towards sublime entities such as truth and beauty, or materialities such as money — and reach a relational attitude through which one can live in the world not as a usable and manipulable entity and as the sole protagonist, but rather as part of communal participation and action, the only realm in which action itself is able to be meaningful.
Arendt’s political philosophy is bound to a tradition which is alternative to and precedes the modern discourse of nation states and governments (one of her regulatory ideals is the greek polis). Politics is the realization that the human condition is a condition of plurality; politics is leaving the protective isolation of private life, of familiar and ethnic groups, and accepting the risks of conviviality and coexistence with others. This was Arendt’s response to individual annihilation in totalitarian regimes: a retrieval of public life and of the dialogical dimension of participatory democracy. Her conception of political action as the revelation of who one is, is the explication of the essential bond between individual and political, social, cultural, and historical reality. It expresses a general belief: every human being is able to escape the mechanism which fatally conditions them and to find meaning in their own existence, asserting their freedom as the capacity to initiate and innovate, the capacity for self-expression and of taking on the responsibility for their actions, turning the context of relations, traditions, and rules which make up external reality into a communal experiential rooting in a shared destiny.
Although Arendt was a political thinker, she never was, by her own admission, a political animal: her discretion about her private interests was as high as her idiosyncrasy for affiliating herself to groups and parties. Saying who Arendt was thus implies analysing who she was through her teachings, seminars, writings — books, essays, and letters (many of which have now been published) —, and her many friendships. Arendt was a highly original and independent thinker, who — in the words of Lessing, a German Enlightenment thinker who she admired deeply — "thought on her own", in total autonomy and freedom. For her, intellectual and philosophical labour implied the reality of the world, not of her own personal excellence.
If the who aspect is what one encounters in the intersubjective dimension — the relation with others and the world —, why not try to understand Arendt from this perspective, through the eyes of the people who met her? Let us see two examples, one through a woman’s eyes and one through a man’s. Her sentimental and intellectual relationship with Martin Heidegger was lasting, though discontinuous — him being both her lover and one of the thinkers who had the strongest influence on the development of her thought. Heidegger, who was sixteen years older than her and at the time was teaching in Freiburg, already married and with children of his own, wrote this love letter to eighteen-year-old Hannah Arendt in 1925:
When a storm rages outside the cabin, I remember «our storm» [they encountered a thunderstorm during one of her walks] — or I walk on the quiet path along the Lahnor during a break I daydream about the young girl who, in a raincoat, her hat low over her quiet, large eyes, entered my office for the first time, and softly and shyly gave a brief answer to each question — and then I transpose the image to the last days of the semester — and only then do I know that life is history. 2
These images evoke the sweet and absorbed expression one can see in a photograph of eighteen-year-old Hannah Arendt, so unlike the pictures taken of her in Paris during the 1930s, a cigarette in hand, a tense and worn face. This image of a young, intense Arendt and her deep expressive eyes was not only expressed by Heidegger with his keen romanticism, but also by Karl Jaspers, with whom Arendt had an almost filial relationship, and who always thought of her as "Das Mädchen aus der Fremde" (The Girl from a Foreign Land), a barely graspable creature, obstinate and stubborn, strong – not as in aggressive but rather as in self-affirming.3
Who was Arendt, on the other hand, in the eyes of a woman, perhaps her closest friend: American writer Mary McCarthy? In the eulogy she delivered on the occasion of her friend’s passing on December 5th, 1975, McCarthy draws a portrait of a beautiful and confident woman, describing how her bodily movements reflected her spiritual ones, the rhythms of her concentration and introspection:
You had only to see her on a lecture stage to be struck by those feet, calves, and ankles that seemed to keep pace with her thoughts. […] Watching her talk to an audience was like seeing the motions of the mind made visible in action and gesture. Peripatetic, she would come abruptly to a halt at the lectern, frown, consult the ceiling, bite her lip.4
This is not a fictional being — a man’s dream rather than a real creature — but a woman with a body that moves, who finds her expression in those movements.
After examining Arendt through the eyes of fellow philosophers and friends, one might ask how Arendt perceived herself, through her own eyes. Indeed, when Arendt briefly talked about herself, in her introspection, she portrayed herself focusing on the aspects of her character which had historical and intellectual relevance.
The truth is I have never pretended to be anything else or to be in any way other than I am, and I have never even felt tempted in that direction. It would have been like saying that I was a man and not a woman—that is to say, kind of insane. […] I have always regarded my Jewishness as one of the indisputable factual data of my life, and I have never had the wish to change or disclaim facts of this kind. […] What confuses you is that my arguments and my approach are different from what you are used to; in other words, the trouble is that I am independent. By this I mean, on the one hand, that I do not belong to any organization and always speak only for myself, and on the other hand, that I have great confidence in Lessing’s selbstdenken for which, I think, no ideology, no public opinion, and no “convictions” can ever be a substitute. Whatever objections you may have to the results, you won’t understand them unless you realize that they are really my own and nobody else’s.5
In this passage from her correspondence with Gershom Scholem following the scandal caused by the Eichmann trial, Arendt is forced to reveal herself in a way which was closer to the image others had of her. In a deeply troubled move exempt from psychological reasoning, she presents herself through the aspects of her position in the social world: a Jewish woman who studied philosophy in 1920s Germany. Once these facts have been highlighted, what defines her and what can’t be changed (a German speaking Jewish woman), the actual self-portrait, marked by impossibility and negation, starts to emerge: the emphasis on her identity is replaced by the absence of any affiliation. Her being a Jewish woman, born and raised in Germany, can’t be replaced by affiliation to any group, ethnicity, party, or faith. Attempting to transform the hardness of such "natural" or historical circumstances (the inner struggle of a Jewish woman forced into exile but who still remained bound to German culture, though actively opposing Nazi political persecution) which define the identity of our being in the world would be nothing but a fatal illusion. The only way to transform that which is given into an embodied human element is by taking on the responsibility of being oneself, being accountable for one’s actions and thoughts, by choosing interlocutors with common interests.
We can find Arendt’s most complete self-portrait in a letter written to Mary McCarthy on February 9th 1968:
I have a feeling of futility in everything I do. Compared to what is at stake everything looks frivolous. I know this feeling disappears once I let myself fall into that gap between past and future which is the proper temporal locus of thought. Which I can't do while I am teaching and have to be all there.6
Seldom does one encounter such a strong, yet unforeseen, connection between thought and personal experience in Arendt’s work. One might not expect that someone who exalted public happiness and vita activa would discuss the feeling of futility pervading her work, though this feeling withers away once she starts collecting her thoughts. What might seem an antithesis between thought and action is overcome via a further dimension, teaching, during which she is not allowed to access the quietness of thought, but which forces her to be fully present in the moment. This is an instant synthesis of Arendt’s thought: what one does or produces appears futile and senseless if one, like Arendt, does not believe in an ideologically better future nor does nostalgically escape into an idealised past. Every action brings something new into the world, but to preserve the freedom of such an action, one should not try to control its outcomes, unforeseeable because they entwine with the actions of others. Thought expresses a way to grant completeness to action. On the other hand, the quietness of thought is a locus without place or time in which the individual forgets themself and retreats from the world. The self reemerges instead in its fuller presence — body and soul — through teaching, in the public dimension, where the education of humanity’s youth is at stake. In these words lies the tension between thinking as a focus in and on the self, the futility felt at a time of uncertainty (the letter is written during the Democratic primaries of 1968 which ended with the defeat of Eugene McCarthy and the win of Hubert Humphrey) and the "full existence/presence" as lived through teaching, in which the self exists, acts and communicates with others.
This is an eloquent example of Arendt’s most fundamental idea, that thought emerges from lived experience, something which often strikes us with its harshness and senselessness, and is characterised by the incompleteness inherent to every random and uncertain dynamic rooted in historical change. When we reflect — or as Arendts often says, narrate experience — we try to understand (another key term in Arendt’s work) what happens, that is the events caused by our or others’ actions. Thought emerges through a clash with experience and is therefore deeply bound to an individual’s action in the world. This really clarifies the relation between this specific conception of thought and Arendt’s studies on totalitarianism, on the banality of evil, on revolution and action – and how, by trying to place these studies within a specific academic discipline, be it history, political theory, or existential or phenomenological/heideggerian philosophy, we fail to understand their nature.
Arendt’s reflections were brought on by the historical events which disrupted the twentieth century and her life, and which, as she often said, she tried to understand.7 This desire to understand was grounded in her desire to be contemporary, even at the cost of finding an agreement, albeit temporary, with the world which brought about the Shoah, totalitarianism and the atomic bomb.
We are contemporaries only so far as our understanding reaches. If we want to be at home on this earth, even at the price of being at home in this century, we must try to take part in the interminable dialogue with the essence of totalitarianism.8
This attempt toward reconciling has nothing to do with accepting reality as it is nor abandons the idea of the unforgivableness of evil. Rather, it has to do with everyone’s responsibility to act and escape from nightmares and excesses, a responsibility born out of gratitude and love for the world.
In the introduction to her last, unfinished work — The Life of the Mind9 — Arendt recalls Eichmann and how his thoughtlessness was not caused by his stupidity, or a lack of intelligence or culture, but by his inability to distinguish good from evil. Eichmann’s consciousness was an imploded consciousness, ruled at the same time by the chaos of emotions, and a strict observance of norms and obedience to authority. Eichmann, like many other national-socialist war criminals, was able to be kind to his children and appreciate Beethoven’s compositions, and then obey the orders instructing him to efficiently organise the extermination of innocent people. Such a consciousness, in which rationality and emotions are in no way bound to each other and to the other’s existence and suffering, is a consciousness completely replaced by bureaucratic procedures and linguistic clichés, unable to question whether an action is moral or not. To undertake such a reflection would involve a political and moral responsibility, a practice of thinking critically about what is considered a norm, a prejudice, or a habit, and a quest towards the sense of one’s actions.
One can certainly find a moral attitude in this later work of Arendt’s, and its value lies in its addressing humanity – men and women – as a whole, in their capacity to think. The radicalness of Arendt’s notion of thinking resides in considering thinking as the medium for the circulation of meaning in every aspect of existence. Thinking means putting our emotional life in order, as well as attempting to remove unpredictability from action. Thus, it becomes possible to establish a relation between the different aspects of experience and to prepare oneself to stand on the world’s stage, authentically expressing oneself.
Translated by Fabrizio Luca Giannuolo.
1 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, University of Chicago Press, 1958, pp. 178-181.
2 Letter from Todtnauberg, dated 21.03.1925 in Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Ursula Ludz (Editor), Letters: 1925-1975, Houghton Mifflin, Orlando, 2003, pg. 9.
3 Letter no. 337, Jaspers to Arendt (October 22, 1963) in Hannah Arendt, Karl Jaspers, Correspondence 1926-1969, Mariner Books, 1993, pg. 525.
4 Mary McCarthy, Saying Good-bye to Hannah (1907-1975), in Mary McCarthy, Occasional Prose, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985, pg. 39.
5 Hannah Arendt, Letter to Scholem July 24, 1963, in Hannah Arendt, The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age, Random House, 1978, pg. 246, pg. 250.
6 Letter from February 9th, 1968 in C. Brightman (ed.), Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, 1949-1975, Harcourt Brace, 1995, pg. 213.
7 Preface to the First Edition, in Hannah Arendt, The Origin of Totalitarianism, Meridian, 1958, pg. viii.
8 Hannah Arendt, Understanding and Politics, in Partisan Review, vol. 20, no. 4 (July–August 1953), pg. 377–92. Reprinted in Hannah Arendt, Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism, Harcourt, Brace & Co.,1994, pg. 323.
9 Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, Harcourt, 1978, pg. 4.