James McAuley - Hannah Arendt: pariah and 21st-century cosmopolitan
"I have never in my life ‘loved’ any people or collective – neither the German people, nor the French, nor the American, nor the working class or anything of that sort. I indeed love ‘only’ my friends and the only kind of love I know of and believe in is the love of persons.."
Courtesy Aeon magazine
Philosophy: Kwame Anthony Appiah - how to swing honour away from killing & towards peace
Hannah Arendt died 40 years ago. Her legacy remains uncertain. Born in 1906 to a secular, assimilated German-Jewish family in what is today Hanover, she rejected the designation ‘political philosopher’, preferring instead to be called a ‘political theorist’. Theory, as she saw it, allowed her to expand from philosophy’s singular man to the experiences of plural men, and to say something enduring about the collective struggle of humanity as it confronted the unprecedented violence of the 20th century.
Philosophy: Kwame Anthony Appiah - how to swing honour away from killing & towards peace
Hannah Arendt died 40 years ago. Her legacy remains uncertain. Born in 1906 to a secular, assimilated German-Jewish family in what is today Hanover, she rejected the designation ‘political philosopher’, preferring instead to be called a ‘political theorist’. Theory, as she saw it, allowed her to expand from philosophy’s singular man to the experiences of plural men, and to say something enduring about the collective struggle of humanity as it confronted the unprecedented violence of the 20th century.
Of course, what that something was remains elusive, perhaps
even muddled. Mirroring the course of her life, her work defied a single
programme, embracing instead a host of scattered projects with conclusions that
were often as contradictory as they were controversial.
The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), her
attempt to understand the Nazism that had uprooted her life and the postwar
Communism that she observed from exile in the United States, is vaguely
historical in its analysis. The Human Condition (1958), her
delineation of the ‘active life’ as the essence of the political sphere, is
generally theoretical. On Revolution (1963), her study of the
French and American revolutions, reads almost like a love letter to her adopted
country, where, in her view, the vitality and diversity of the ancient Greek
polis was reborn and reclaimed in the modern age.
With Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963),
the book that emerged from her articles in The New Yorker on
the 1961 trial of the Nazi Adolf Eichmann, she ventured into reportage, coining
a phrase – ‘the banality of evil’ – and inciting in the process a ‘civil war’
among New York intellectuals.
Arendt was not just a spectator to the Holocaust. Driven
into exile after 1933, she went first to Czechoslovakia, then to Geneva, Paris,
the French internment camp of Gurs and, finally, to the US, where she settled
in New York City. There, she became one of the most prominent figures in
postwar American intellectual life. She knew tout le monde: as a
student at Marburg in Germany, she’d had a brief affair with her tutor, the
philosopher (and future Nazi sympathiser) Martin Heidegger. Later, at Gurs, she
was interned with the philosopher Walter Benjamin (a cousin of her first
husband Günther Anders); Benjamin committed suicide in September 1940 to avoid
Nazi capture.
Arendt survived, and she was among the millions of
deracinated Europeans forced to remake themselves on foreign shores, in foreign
languages. As she wrote in her poignant essay ‘We Refugees’ (1943): ‘A nice
little fairy tale has been invented to describe our behaviour; a forlorn émigré
dachshund, in his grief, begins to speak: “Once, when I was a St Bernard…”’
This particular émigré dachshund fared well in the US, even
if she didn’t always understand its social dynamics. Writing in 1957 about the
forced integration of black students in public schools in Little Rock,
Arkansas, she said: ‘If as a Jew I wish to spend my vacations only in the
company of Jews, I cannot see how anyone can reasonably prevent my doing so;
just as I see no reason why other resorts should not cater to a clientele that
wishes not to see Jews while on a holiday.’ One winces somewhat at that.
In the US, Arendt was rewarded handsomely for her intellect
and tenacity, becoming a bestselling author published by the most prestigious
trade presses as well as the first woman appointed to a professorship at
Princeton. She also enjoyed a celebrity presence at the University of Chicago
and the New School in New York, the stages on which she fashioned herself an
eminence in the republic of letters. This is how she appears in Margarethe von
Trotta’s 2012 biopic: a dowager queen of Riverside Drive, sparring with pundits
such as Norman Podhoretz and Kurt Blumenfeld by day and entertaining authors
such as Mary McCarthy and Philip Rahv by night. Add wine, cigarettes and
scandal, and this Arendt becomes a kind of monument, the avatar for a bygone
era when the literary feud was still a line in the sand, and the personal was
not merely political, but ideological.
But there is more to Arendt’s unsettled legacy than glamour,
controversy and a provocative set of historical and philosophical
interpretations. Forty years after her death, perhaps the most enduring
contribution of this decidedly 20th-century thinker is her thinking about a
cosmopolitanism suited to the challenges of the 21st century she’d never see.
T
hese days, the term ‘cosmopolitan’ mostly refers to a cocktail, a
magazine or anything sophisticatedly international – a restaurant with an
extensive wine list, perhaps. London, for instance, is ‘cosmopolitan’ because
of its global population and amenities, as are its well-heeled denizens,
equally eloquent in French or English, at home both in Paris’ Marais and on
Manhattan’s East Side. But when the term is used as a synonym for what used to
be called the “jet-set” crowd, a deeper meaning is lost.
Since the release of Wes Anderson’s film The Grand
Budapest Hotel last year – the centenary of the outbreak of the First
World War – there has been considerable nostalgia for the film’s inspiration,
the world of Europe before the wars. Stefan Zweig, the Austrian writer whose
work helped inspire Anderson’s film, characterised this bourgeois European
ideal as a place where ‘every citizen became a supernational, a cosmopolitan, a
citizen of the world’.
Even before 1938, when the German Anschluss moved
to make Zweig’s beloved Vienna into what Hitler described as the ‘newest
bastion of the German Reich’, Zweig’s cosmopolitan ‘world of yesterday’ was an
ideal. Arendt alleged it could be an illusion too, for instance in her 1943
review of Zweig’s sentimental memoir: ‘Had the Jews of Western and Central
Europe displayed even a modicum of concern for the political realities of their
times, they would have had reason enough not to feel secure.’
What, on a continent of mass graves, do we call the
fetishising of an entirely mythic ‘cosmopolitan’ past?
Even ancient Greece, where Diogenes Laërtius first
introduced the term kosmou politês, was a deeply patriarchal
slave society. Despite the flaws and horrors of ancient Greece, and the modern
West, the idea and ideal of cosmopolitanism has fascinated thinkers for
centuries. In the Boston Review in 1994, the philosopher
Martha Nussbaum advocated what she called a ‘cosmopolitan education,’ one that
would create a generation of Americans ‘whose primary allegiance is to the
community of human beings in the entire world’. In 2004, the political
scientist Seyla Benhabib argued for a cosmopolitan politics that could serve as
a model for the legal frameworks of nation states.
As romantic and appealing as these ideas often seem, to
some, perhaps a recast 21st‑century cosmopolitanism might better focus on the
quantum unit of the single person, the 21st-century individual, who inhabits a
complicated, multifaceted identity with any number of (often contradictory)
associations and affiliations. With this in mind, a 21st-century
cosmopolitanism must take into account cosmopolitan individuals rather than
merely an abstract cosmopolitan ethic.
Cosmopolitan individuals are those self-conscious of that
fact that there is never a single criterion of identity. While the traditional
identity categories of nationality, religion, gender, class and race survive,
there are also new vocabularies of identities at the intersections and
exteriors of those age-old categories. Many people now have real autonomy in
deciding for themselves what each of those identifications means to them, and
how much value they wish to assign them. Identity is always a composite in a
unified whole. Recognizing the individual as a quantum unit, however, risks
ceaseless self-riddling at the expense of external commitments, projects of
justice and humanity. A cosmopolitanism for the 21st-century must
therefore also not surrender universalism, but acknowledge too that there are
also multiple universalisms. People can be rooted in the particular selves of
their own design, and they can choose different universal frameworks with which
to construct those selves. In other words: everyone is different but no
one ‘fits in’, largely because there is very little to ‘fit in’ to.
That, in essence, is the potential for cosmopolitan
individuals: people with multifaceted identities who neither sacrifice nor
efface their particular affiliations but who can find within those
particularities the vestiges of a shared humanity. In his 2007 work on
cosmopolitanism, the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah put it this way: the
challenge ‘is to take minds and hearts formed over the long millennia of living
in local troops and equip them with ideas and institutions that will allow us
to live together as the global tribe we become’.
In an increasingly globalised world, those ‘ideas and
institutions’ will undoubtedly vary. The best place to start is by
recognising that the humanity of those ‘minds and hearts’ is a function of
their particularity, and that a meaningful cosmopolitan revival would rely on
the fundamental difference of individual identities, not their alleged
uniformity.
Hannah Arendt never wrote explicitly on cosmopolitanism, or
indeed even used the term, but she was a model cosmopolitan. She loved her
adopted US, but never effaced her past to fabricate a new present. Her
understanding of Jewish history and her experience of her own Jewishness
remained central to her life and to her work, helping to illuminate a
disparate, difficult whole. Arendt was fascinated by the concept of ‘the
pariah’, the outcast, which in her mind conveyed the Jewish experience in
Europe. As she wrote in Origins of Totalitarianism, Jews ‘always
had to pay with political misery for social glory and with social insult for
political success’.
For Arendt, being a pariah was not an inherently negative
position; it could also bring a certain value. In a series of essays written in
the 1940s, she referred to the poets and writers Heinrich Heine, Rahel
Varnhagen, Bernard Lazare, and Franz Kafka as conscious pariahs.
By this, she meant they never escaped their Jewishness but also used their
difference ‘to transcend the bounds of nationality and to weave the strands of
their Jewish genius into the general texture of European life’, who
administered ‘the admission of Jews as Jews into the ranks of
humanity’. In other words, who did not efface their particularity but
celebrated it, finding within it a world of substance on a universal scale.
This was the crux of her cosmopolitanism. Uprooted,
deracinated, but always resilient, Arendt was marked by her own dark times, but
it was precisely because of them that, throughout her long and audacious
career, she could articulate the contours of a cosmopolitan vision more attuned
to the world she entered than the world she left behind. Arendt’s life and work
is the story of a person seeking the abstraction of a universal humanity from
the perspective of a particular community – in her case, the Jewish community
(though she was at odds with it nearly constantly).
By recognising what was universal within her own ‘pariah’
status, she was a true cosmopolitan. Among her innumerable legacies is that her
memory is a testament to plurality – the notion that people are not all the
same, but, in respectful recognition of their differences, can transcend
boundaries that have kept them apart. Arendt’s cosmopolitanism was thus
devoted not to the supremacy of human life but to the specificity of particular
human lives, informed and inspired by difference.
B
ut Arendt's name is still a synonym for controversy. The reason for
this is Eichmann in Jerusalem, which has sold more than 300,000
copies to date. And yet it is this book that best illustrates the nature of
Arendt’s cosmopolitanism.
In 1960, the Mossad captured Adolf Eichmann – one of the
principal organisers of the Holocaust, charged with coordinating the mass
transports of hundreds of thousands of Jews to their deaths – in Buenos Aires.
They smuggled him out of Argentina in an El Al flight attendant’s uniform. His
‘show trial’, as Arendt described it, was the first televised event where the
world was made to confront the atrocity later called ‘the Holocaust’. Reporting
on the first event to give voice to hundreds of victims – some of whom,
overwhelmed, collapsed in the courtroom – Arendt displayed no particular
sympathy to their experience.
Herself a victim of men such as Eichmann, she had come to
Jerusalem to lay eyes on the devil himself, only to find instead a mediocre
bureaucrat animated not by murderous rapture but by careerist ambition.
Eichmann represented, for Arendt, the ‘banality of evil’, an interpretation
that led many readers to wonder whether she had exonerated her villain. But it
was the way she treated Jewish victims and survivors – in terms of both the
caustic tone she took and the conclusions she drew – that caused the heat of
the firestorm.
From the snobbish prejudice of her elite background, Arendt
described Gideon Hausner, the chief prosecutor, as ‘a typical Galician Jew,
very unsympathetic, boring, constantly making mistakes. Probably one of those
people who don’t know any language.’ Meanwhile, the Palestinian Jews outside
the courthouse were an ‘oriental mob’. She dubbed Leo Baeck, the erudite Berlin
rabbi and wartime leader of the city’s Jewish community, who himself had
scarcely survived the concentration camp at Theresienstadt (Terezin), the
‘Jewish Führer’.
What she wrote on the Judenräte – the
Jewish leadership in the Nazi ghettos – would place her at the frontline of a
bitter battle between history and memory:
Wherever Jews lived, there were recognised Jewish leaders, and this leadership,
almost without exception, cooperated with the Nazis. The whole truth was that
if the Jewish people really had been unorganised and leaderless, there would
have been chaos and plenty of misery but the total number of victims would
hardly have been between 4.5 and 6 million people.
Arendt’s project in Eichmann in Jerusalem was
to describe the totality of the moral collapse under Nazi rule, a theme she had
already explored in her Origins of Totalitarianism more than a
decade before. For Arendt, that the Jundenräte were made
complicit in the liquidation of their own people was simply an illustration of
that totality, a haunting landscape in which the perpetrator transforms the
victim into a perpetrator himself. Unfortunately, her tone obscured her point.
The book incited what one prominent critic called a ‘civil war’ among New York
intellectuals. As the historian Anthony Grafton wrote in 2009, recalling his
childhood in the secular Jewish literary circles of 1960s New York, it seemed
that ‘in the world’s largest Jewish city – in the nation’s most serious,
best-edited magazine – Jew had apparently betrayed Jew’. With one short book,
Arendt, an eminent political theorist, had herself become a pariah.
There was a gender dimension to Arendt’s pariah status (as
there was for Varnhagen, the 18th-century assimilated German-Jewishsalonnière whose
biography Arendt had begun in the 1930s). Arendt’s friends and critics regarded
her as a woman who had invaded the intellectual realm of men. In 1964, for
instance, she appeared on Zur Person for a TV interview with
Günter Gaus, a German equivalent of Charlie Rose or David Dimbleby. ‘Hannah
Arendt, you’re the first lady to be portrayed in this series,’ Gaus began. ‘A
lady with a profession some might regard as a masculine one. You are a
philosopher.’
Similarly, in his review of Elisabeth Young-Bruehl’s
biography of Arendt, the US literary critic Alfred Kazin introduced his subject
not as a thinker but as a woman, confined to the domestic space of the ‘shabby
rooming house on West 95th Street’ she shared with ‘her strenuous husband’, the
German poet and philosopher Heinrich Blücher. ‘She was a handsome, vivacious
40-year-old woman,’ Kazin wrote in The New York Review of Books in
1982, ‘who was to charm me and others, by no means unerotically.’
As constraining as these prejudices were, they did not
imprison Arendt. They were the reasons for her pariah status, to be sure, but
they were also the foundations of her particularity, and the essence of her
cosmopolitanism.
I
n the aftermath of the Eichmann controversy, Arendt had a heated
exchange of letters with her friend, the German-born Israeli philosopher
Gershom Scholem, who’d questioned her right to judge events at which she’d not
been present. ‘Nor do I presume to judge,’ he wrote in 1963. ‘I was not there.’
More central to his objection, however, was what he
considered to be Arendt’s lack of Ahavat Israel – love of the
Jewish people. Arendt’s response says something about her particular view of
cosmopolitanism:
I am not moved by any ‘love’ of this sort, and for two reasons: I have never in
my life ‘loved’ any people or collective – neither the German people, nor the
French, nor the American, nor the working class or anything of that sort. I
indeed love ‘only’ my friends and the only kind of love I know of and believe
in is the love of persons.
Regarding his questioning of her Jewish identity, she wrote:
To be a Jew belongs for me to the indisputable facts of my life, and I have
never had the wish to change or disclaim facts of this kind. There is such a
thing as a basic gratitude for everything that is as it is.
Her response is ultimately an emphatic defence of her own
pariah status. What she conveys to Scholem is that her Jewishness, an
‘indisputable fact’ of her life, is ultimately a particular association she
refuses to denounce because of the potential it affords her as an element in
her identity.
The letter recalls the final scene of her 1957 biography of
Varnhagen, who, in many ways, is Arendt’s alter ego. In an embellished
quotation – Arendt omitted pieces of Varnhagen’s correspondence where she
confirms her conversion to Christianity – the author allows her subject to die
a peaceful death, having reconciled, at long last, the tension that has
governed her life: ‘The thing which all my life seemed to me the greatest
shame, which was the misery and misfortune of my life – having been born a
Jewess – this I should on no account now wish to have missed.’ The narrator’s
voice then returns to give Arendt’s final verdict on Varnhagen: ‘[She] had
remained a Jew and a pariah. Only because she clung to both conditions did she
find a place in the history of European humanity.’ The judgment applies as well
to Arendt.
In certain respects, as a Jew in Nazi Europe, a refugee on a
checkerboard of nation-states, and a woman in an intellectual world of men,
Arendt was a pariah figure. But this isolation also made her an iconic
cosmopolitan, not so much a ‘citizen of the world’ as a citizen of several
worlds among many others, fully at home in none but adept in them all. If she
considered herself a political theorist, she was also herself a living theory,
a poet of plurality.
http://aeon.co/magazine/philosophy/what-makes-hannah-arendt-a-cosmopolitan/
"It's all business. One murder makes a villain. Millions, a hero. Numbers sanctify" "Von Clausewitz said that war is the logical extension of diplomacy; Monsieur Verdoux feels that murder is the logical extension of business."
