The short article below was published in Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics, edited by Roger Berkowitz, Jeffrey Katz, and Thomas Keenan (Fordham University Press, 2010). It was earlier a presentation at a Bard College conference to celebrate Arendt’s centenary in 2006. You can visit the Bard College Hannah Arendt Center at its website, which is connected to the Bard College Library, housing the library Arendt left the College in her will.
ARENDT’S JEWISH IDENTITY
The topic of Hannah Arendt’s Jewish identity could be approached from many directions. In my remarks, I am going to consider Arendt in the context of the vision of world history articulated by her teacher and mentor Karl Jaspers, in which her people, the Jews of Palestine were considered as one of the “Axial Age” peoples.
In the later years of the Second World War, when Arendt was writing The Origins of Totalitarianism, Jaspers was writing The Origin and Goal of History. His book, published in 1949, came into her hands as she was finishing hers. They both knew that they shared the project of thinking about what kind of history was needed for facing the events of the war and the Holocaust and for considering how the world might be after the war. They agreed that the needed history should not be national or for a national purpose, but for humankind.
When he was writing The Origin and Goal of History, Jaspers was not the first to observe that in the period of approximately 900-800 BC to 400-300 BCE five great peoples had reached pinnacles in their development, generating civilizations which were exemplary ever after among their descendants. But Jaspers was the first historian to grasp the significance for his own time of the fact that, independently –or relatively independently—of each other, in China, India, Persia, Greece and Palestine, these five peoples had stepped out of their domination by mythical, tribal ways of thinking and supported something new: the emergence of philosophers or sages or prophets who were open to the wider world –who were cosmopolitan—and who reflected on how their people should organize themselves politically. The Taoists and Confucians in China, the Vedantic sages in India, the Zoroastrians in Persia, and the Jewish prophets in Palestine were teaching and preaching while a line of philosophers, scientists, poets, and political leaders in Greece created a legacy in which political freedom was more central than in any of the other traditions.
The legacies of each of these peoples were quite distinct, Jaspers argued, but they had in common their attention to the world as it was before them and as it might be –they did not invoke mythic golden ages in the past or submit to simple determinisms or concepts of fate. It was this common thread that Jaspers thought could be taken up from the Axial Age people by modern people who found themselves living at a historical juncture, in a world made one by a worldwide war and by technological developments that had united all peoples, for better or for worse.
In the world after the war, Jaspers wrote, modern people could have an experience of opening to the world and thinking cosmopolitanly about the future of the human species –they could be self-conscious about their shared humanity—or they could suffer further the ill effects of their own prejudices and technological progress, which had made the worldwide war possible. He posed a great Either/Or. And over the next decade he elaborated on his view, especially by writing the articles that he drew together in The Atom Bomb and the Future of Mankind, first published in Germany in 1961.
Jaspers and Arendt had lost direct contact with each other when she fled Germany in 1933, but when they were able to renew their relationship by correspondence and then by Arendt’s visits to the Jaspers’s post-war home in Basel, Switzerland, the two (later joined by Arendt’s husband, Heinrich Bluecher) had many conversations about what the cosmopolitan thinking of the Axial Age descendents might be like. She spoke about this publicly when she delivered two addresses about Jaspers himself–“Karl Jaspers: A Laudatio” and “Karl Jaspers: Citizen of the World?” both published in Men in Dark Times — but her ideas were present throughout their correspondence (now published) and, inter linea, in her books, especially The Human Condition. They are also present in all of her writings on “the Jewish question,” which Jerome Kohn has now so helpfully collected in the volume called The Jewish Writings, published in her centenary year 2006. There, as in the Antisemitism section of The Origins of Totalitarianism, the cosmopolitan tradition that was established for the Jews by their Axial Age prophets is continually invoked as an antidote to tribalist Jewish thinking, parochial and governed by mythic notions about the Jews as a chosen people, an exceptional people, transcendently oriented rather than in and of this world and its inter-related peoples.
It is Arendt’s Jewish identity –not just the identity she asserted in defending herself as a Jew when attacked as one, but more deeply her connection to the Axial Age prophetic tradition—that made her the cosmopolitan she was, while Jaspers’s cosmopolitanism was more learned than inherited and reinforced by group experience. He learned from Kant (History with a Cosmopolitan Intent) and the Germans indebted to Kant, right on up through Jaspers’s older contemporary Max Weber, a world historian who counted among his friends the Sinologist Richard Wilhelm and the Indologist Heinrich Zimmer.
Neither Arendt nor Jaspers ever made a survey of the ingredients of cosmopolitan thinking that they shared and appreciated in each other, but I would like to do so here –in a very rudimentary fashion—as a tribute to them both, and to the common ground of the North German Protestant teacher and his Prussian Jewish student.
Key to cosmopolitan thinking is the capacity for and exercise of “enlarged mentality” (in Kant’s phrase). Arendt often invoked this capacity for thinking your way into the viewpoint, the position, the experience, of other people, past and present (perhaps future, too). You ask yourself how the world would look and feel to different people (without thinking that you could have their experience or be them). In a sense, this capacity –a capacity requiring imagination–is the capacity to appreciate the plurality of people; the fact that no person’s experience is the same as any other’s. But this appreciation comes from making the effort of enlarging your own experience by imagining others’ –to the point of potentially embracing all.
The second ingredient of cosmopolitan thinking is what Jaspers called “a sense of history.’ To both of them, this meant primarily a sense for the unpredictability of human affairs. Arendt emphasized throughout her writings the events and eras she considered to be “unprecedented” (and thus not predictable on the basis of what has been). No person and no group has a privileged view of history or a vantage point that is advantaged. Only a world historical sense –one embracing all times, all peoples, all precedents—can ultimately judge an event or an era unprecedented. Judging an event or an era unprecedented is a necessary step in judging what is needed after a break in history or in tradition, when old ways of thinking and acting will not do for new realities.
The third ingredient of cosmopolitan thinking is what might be called a sense of the human condition, or the human conditions (as they change over time, they are not fixed once and for all). How, Arendt asked, are the basic elements of human life affected by change, affected through historical differences? Humans exist on earth, for example, but they have learned to leave their earthly condition for space travel; they are living beings, but they have learned to manipulate the genetic ingredients of life, so now their life condition is to a degree manufacturable. But each condition –she named six conditions: earth, life, world, natality, mortality, plurality–although susceptible to change, is human, common to all mankind, so only cosmopolitan thinking can compass it. Jaspers, for his part, spoke of “boundary situations” common to all people.
And fourthly, I think this cosmopolitan thinking that Arendt and Jaspers were considering in the immediate after-the-war period depended upon an appreciation of what I, as a psychoanalyst, would call unconscious desires and motivations. The word “unconscious” was not part of Arendt’s vocabulary, and both she and Jaspers were decidedly hostile to psychoanalysis (he wrote his critique into his General Psychopathology). But I nonetheless think that the psychoanalytic terms point to something they both understood deeply: that people are shaped by their particular historical experiences–Arendt by her experience as a Jew–but that they are also moved, usually unconsciously by needs and experiences and conditions shared by all human beings (understandings first articulated or made conscious in the Axial Age cultures). Arendt, for example, was as aware of the human need to act politically as any thinker of her generation, and Jaspers (so their post-war correspondence shows) knew this well. Particular historical experiences make people look and behave and sound more different than they are, as an aphorism by Kant’s contemporary Georg Christoph Lictenberg that Hannah Arendt once quoted to me conveys: “People do not think about the events of life as differently as they speak about them.”
