WHAT AND HOW WE LEARNED FROM HANNAH ARENDT: AN EXCHANGE OF LETTERS
Elisabeth Young-Bruehl and Jerome Kohn
8.23.99
Dear Jerry,
I am delighted that you want to take up Professor Gordon’s proposal that we write an essay for his anthology on Hannah Arendt and education. And delighted, too, that you like the idea of an epistolary essay, an essay by mail, a contribution constructed long distance but with this miraculous conversation-like quick back-and-forth. For the thirty years we have known each other, we have had to depend on our abilities to get to the same place to talk about Hannah Arendt and her ideas and about the way in which she educated us, both when we were her students and after her death, while I wrote her biography and then you edited her papers, while we read and reread her books. This epistolary exchange is a completely startling possibility, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it has an effect on how we talk. And I think this new communication possibility should be one part of what we talk about, too.
But we can come back to this. Let me start us off by stating in a capsule form the topic we agreed to consider. Is there, so we put it, a kind of education that is particularly suited to prepare people for understanding politics? Hannah Arendt’s essay “Understanding and Politics” presents her vision of how under’ standing and politics are—or can be—related; we want to ask about how a person can be educated for “understanding,” in the sense she gave to that rich word.
Our topic is the relation—or relations—between education and politics. But we should, I think, acknowledge right away that Hannah Arendt thought about education, which, for her, was certainly not the same thing as teaching or instructing in skills, from two fundamentally different angles. First, she considered the education of children, and in those passages, she always stressed that the human condition that is crucially involved is natality, the fact that children are born as “new beginnings,” born to rejuvenate and renew the world. Their education must foster them in this essential function. She insisted, then, that children should be educated conservatively, in the sense that they are introduced to the past that is conserved for them, as their legacy; it orients and grounds them as their education takes them from the shelter of their private, familial lives into the public world. Being educated is being protected by responsible adults who have the authority to shape the child’s transitional growth into the world.
Adult education is altogether different. The human condition crucially involved in it is worldliness. Adults educate one another to be in the world, which, in varying historical circumstances, may mean to be at home in the world, or to be alienated from it, or some mixture of these modes. In the modern world, adults do not conservatively give one another a shared tradition, they have to make a common world. In the wreckage of shared traditions, they read traditional authors, for example, “as though nobody had read them before.”
This adult education, which is the education that adults can offer one another, can be a preparation for political understand
ing if it promotes what Hannah Arendt, following Kant, called “enlarged mentality.” You learn to put yourself in another’s place and see the world—through your own eyes—from there. That Arendt considered this the key education for political understanding was apparent in the first course we took with her, back in 1969. It was called “Politics in the Twentieth Century,” and it was designed with readings that allowed you to follow the life of a “representative man” from his birth around 1900 up through the sixties. A man of her generation—like her husband, Heinrich Bluecher, who had been a worker, a member of the Sparticist Bund, a refugee and stateless person, a wartime correspondent, a college teacher.
As I recall this seminar, it seems to me that what we were doing was focusing on this “representative man” as an exemplary man. He was experiencing the twentieth century as a century of crises; and each crisis revealed to him an essential human condition in a new context. All the essays in Between Past and Future are like this, too: Each one identifies a crisis—like “The Crisis in Education,” “The Crisis in Culture.” Each essay then delves down into the crisis, making distinctions right and left, to get to one or more of the human conditions Arendt had identified in The Human Condition—life, earth, world, natality, mortality, plurality—and the activities relevant to those conditions: action, work, labor. She then studies how the conditions have changed in relation to one another, as the crisis makes clear. “The Crisis in Education” that she analyzes shows not only that Johnny cannot read, but how adults have—she thinks—given over their responsibilities for educating children, which means for responding to children as “new beginnings,” for responding to children’s natality. The crisis of education turns out to be a crisis of natality, and one would understand this if one were able to put oneself in the place of a contemporary child.
The education Arendt practiced, I’m suggesting, was designed to show one how to imagine an exemplary figure as a kind of crossroads where one can see elementary human conditions in flux, reconfiguring. These exemplary lives, then, are like parables. I think Hannah Arendt operated this way from the first book she wrote, where Rahel Varnahagen exemplifies a vast shift in relations between the private realm and the public realm—the emergence of society as an intermediary realm. She plays an exemplary role, again, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, which is a book replete with exemplary figures—Disraeli, Proust, Cecil Rhodes—each of whom allows you to see down into the historical depths, the places where political processes are brewing. Many social scientists, of course, look down their noses at Arendt’s method as anecdotal. But she, I think, thought that the well-chosen anecdote was worth a thousand statistics or citations or evidences.
Let’s see what this preliminary set of remarks provokes in you, and we’ll go from there, my dear,
Elisabeth
June 11, 2000
Dear Elisabeth,
When you wrote to me at the end of August last year, I was, as you know, just starting up the Hannah Arendt Center at New School University. That work was and continues to be exhilarating, but it also proved so demanding that I kept putting off answering you. At the same time, I was well aware that I should respond. Part of the purpose of the center is educational, and I thought our correspondence might help elucidate that. But in addition, I felt a real sense of chagrin, due to the fact that of all the contributors to this volume, only you and I had actually studied with Arendt. That experience was formative for both of us, no doubt in distinct ways, which in itself, I thought, might be of interest to readers. Subsequently, we have both had occasion to work formally with Arendt’s thought—and in your case, with the story of her life as well—but what seemed most important to me is the fact that we have continuously talked about her during all the many years of our friendship. We have done that because we wanted to, such conversations affording us a real and rare pleasure. That pleasure has something to do with the way Arendt educated us and something to do with politics, and I thought that in our correspondence, those “somethings” might become clear, just as they have achieved a measure of clarity in our talk itself. The attempt to communicate the pleasure of having studied with Arendt, of having known her, and of still encountering her, so to speak, between us as a presence in our ongoing conversation seems to me something that ought not to be left out of this volume. It has been our experience, and if further justification were needed, one might cite Arendt’s conviction that thought not only arises from experience, but that “the ground of experience,” as she once put it, is what keeps thought from becoming lost in “all kinds of theories.” It is likely that most of the essays in this volume will assume, quite naturally, that Arendt had a theory of education. Hence my chagrin.
Forgive me if I approach this matter indirectly, but you are used to that! I want to ask you if you think Arendt had or held to a theory of anything—of totalitarianism or politics, or of action or revolution, or of society or culture or education, or of authority or religion or history, or of human freedom, or of the distinct temporal dimensions of the activities of the human mind? Those are certainly among the topics that engaged her, but did she formulate anything that could he called a “theory” of them, either individually or cumulatively? That she theorized them is obvious, but the distinction between theorizing, “thinking,” and a theory that can be stated as its outcome seems to me to have been crucial for her. In fact, the blurring of that distinction is among the shibboleths of modern thought that Arendt increasingly came to question, precisely because a finely tuned appreciation of common, communicable experience, the experience of a common world, tends to vanish in that blurring.
To give a single example of what I am driving at—one of Arendt’s own examples—Karl Marx resolved the old and vexed matter of the relation of theory to practice in terms of his own dialectical theory of the laws of economic development. He achieved this at the cost, according to Arendt, of ignoring the spontaneity of action in his conception of human praxis. Although Marx’s theory did not cause totalitarianism, the ideological use made of it was a significant element in Stalin’s determination to destroy human spontaneity—that is, human freedom—the only guarantee of a common world. Part of Arendt’s attempt to comprehend and reveal Stalin’s crimes for what they were lies in theorizing the activities of acting and thinking, but she rejects any attempt to solve the riddle of their relation by uniting them in a theory different from Marx’s. There are many indications that, in her own way, she intended to deal with that relation in the book on Judging that she did not live to write. How that might have turned out we cannot know; but we do know that, for Arendt, judging is an activity different from either acting or thinking, and we can be pretty certain that she would have theorized it without fitting it into a theory. The potential danger to human freedom implicit in the finality of any theory, however well or even nobly intentioned it may be, is, I believe, what she assiduously avoided.
That last statement stands in need of explication, but for now, let me just cite another of Arendt’s own examples. To formulate a coherent theory of justice would seem to be a worthwhile philosophical endeavor, one with Platonic roots but also current today, and at worst a harmless one. Would it not be worthwhile to know the truth of what we are talking about when we talk about justice? Would not such knowledge instruct us how to deal with injustice when it occurs, even if it does little to prevent injustice from occurring? But Arendt suggests something quite different. If we knew what justice was, then theoretically we could construct a great grid to lay over all possible human actions, informing us whether they are just or not. A certain amount of calculation might still be necessary, but we would no longer have to think about the meaning of justice. Insofar as philosophers from Plato to John Rawls make us think, well and good, but if the outcome of such thought were to be taken as knowledge and institutionalized, then not totalitarianism but what Arendt calls a “tyranny of reason,” which would also be a denial of freedom, would result. Is not the point of justice to be just (“What I do is me … the just man justices,” as Gerard Manly Hopkins wrote)? Arendt is convinced that it is not knowing what justice is, but rather thinking about justice, culminating in the individual act of judgment, that lets justice appear in the world. For her, this is what Socrates, the purest of thinkers, taught others by his own example: His discussions not only of justice but of all human excellences ended not in theories but in perplexity (aporia), so that he had to go on thinking about them, becoming ever more just, more courageous, more selfcontrolled—in short, more himself than he was before. I think that one reason Arendt continues to fascinate us is that she was, if ever there was one, a teacher who embodied the spirit of Socrates. Like him, she never forgot that she was a human being among a plurality of human beings who share a common world, all of whom are potentially free, even from the coercion of truth. To use an old-fashioned word, this constituted her “dignity,” and it goes almost without saying that she tried to foster that same freedom from coercion, of being coerced or exercising coercion, in her students.
At this point, I am tempted to consider the controversiality of Arendt’s thought, not because, as has been alleged, she held eccentric opinions and marshaled or even manipulated evidence in support of them, but because in considering the opinions of others, she proceeded to argue, with them and with herself, in order to form her own distinct opinions and convictions. That was of the utmost importance to her as a political thinker and an educator, the condition sine qua non of political responsibility. Apart from conviction, political action is futile and meaningless, giving rise to a version of what Kant saw as the “haphazard melancholy” of human affairs in which the sense of a common world comes undone. But I don’t want this letter, the main purpose of which has been to provide a sense of the pleasure that thinking about Arendt has afforded us, to turn into a little essay! As we continue this correspondence, I promise to respond to what you wrote about the importance today of recovering a common world and about the roles played by an “enlarged mentality” and “exemplarity” in doing what the tradition, the handing down of the past from generation to generation, conspicuously failed to do in the twentieth century. There is certainly much more to say about the experience of studying with Arendt, especially about that experience as a transition from private to public life, about becoming willing and fit to take one’s place in a common world. My hope is that our letters will show that adults continue to learn from one another, as you and I in fact have done. But it may not be prudent to call that “adult education,” for as Arendt remarks in “The Crisis in Education”: “Education can play no part in politics. . . Whoever wants to educate adults really wants to act as their guardian and prevent them from political activity.”
There is only one minor quibble I have with what you wrote in regard to the first course we took with her, which you called “Politics in the Twentieth Century.” It was, I think, called “Political Experience in the Twentieth Century,” and that has some significance because, in it, if you remember, we read poetry, fiction, memoirs, and biographies but not a single work of political theory. Here again, it is a question of what political “experience” means to Arendt, a question of what she called the “underlying phenomenal reality” of freedom and justice, which, in terms of theories that deal with a reality underlying appearances, is virtually a contradiction in terms. I will close by simply noting that, for me, the primary benefit of having studied with Arendt is what I would like to call, at least for now, “the peculiar pleasure of particularity.” Do you think we can recapture in this correspondence the quality of our conversations, which have been so very meaningful to me?
With love, Jerry
6.27.00
Dear Jerry
Your letter of June 11 has provoked a cluster of ideas in me, and I’m going to spin some of them out here. But first I want to say two things about this letter-writing. The first is funny: You and I may find ourselves able to carry on our conversation in writing, but it is important to acknowledge that the meeting we had last weekend to talk over the letter-writing—not to mention three or four hours of other things—before I went off to catch a train to Philadelphia saying, “I’ll write to you soon,” is part of the letter-writing. Our friendship is so much about presence and talking; we always have—it can be said in retrospect—several guiding themes or questions in our conversations, but the manner is free associational and depends, I think, so much on being there. This letter, like my first one, is a precipitant of a talk.
While we are experimenting with having our conversation in writing, I think we should also acknowledge that this alteration in mode comes after a long period in which the conversation changed for other reasons. I have been thinking historically about it and considering how this history shows the education our conversation has been for us.
After we got to know each other in Hannah Arendt’s last seminars, our conversation was all about her and her work. A kind of ongoing memorial service, I think, as we both felt so bereft when she died, so without our compass. I was so impressed that you could express this publicly, at the official memorial, with such composure and dignity, because I could only talk privately and write—to this day, I cannot speak about her publicly without finding myself right back in tearful, raw mourning. Then, while I was writing the biography, remember, we talked often about different periods and phases in her lifework, exploring the parts of it that had been unknown to us while she was alive. I recall long conversations about her relationship with Heidegger, personally—after Hans Jonas told me about her youthful affair—and philosophically; about her doctoral dissertation and St. Augustine; about her correspondence with Jaspers. That was when we first became aware that there was an extraordinary trove of uncollected short publications and unpublished things—all the things that you are now editing. Interspersed throughout those conversations of vie et oeuvre were those about how she might have viewed this or that political event as the years went on.
Of all those conversations, the one that went on longest—it was three or four years in the early 1980s—and was the most
challenging to us had to do with the “what might have been” of the unfinished Judgment manuscript, which Mary McCarthy then edited. The piece I wrote about The Life of the Mind (Political Theory, 1982) was really worked out in the early stages of that conversation—and then we both found that approach too schematic and systematic. I have always been more of a theorizer than you; or, to put that the other way around, you have always been more Socratic than I am. Thus, it is hard for you to write, to come to rest in a statement, whereas it is hard for me to resist making order and formulation out of disparate strands and paths of thinking.
We hit this difference between us right out of the gate in this letter-writing—and on the territory of Judging, too. You had trouble responding to my opening letter because it was too formulated. It felt to you like I was on my way to delineating Hannah Arendt’s theory of education and that I was concerned with her method of theory-making. In fact, I agree with you completely that she had no such thing as a theory of education and that she did not really make theories of anything. There is no Arendtian theory or any Arendtism. But she did have characteristic ways of thinking, which involved concepts or distinctions she had clarified and historical elements and existentials that she had identified as fundamental; and she had characteristic ways of judging. These make it possible to imagine what she might have thought of something or how she might have judged something—the kind of imagining we did at length over the unfinished Judging volume. It was characteristic of her ways of thinking that she disparaged theory and had no interest in the deductive judging of science.
I have always felt that the difference in our thinking styles is crucial to how our conversation has been educational to us. I don’t remember that we have ever—in thirty-two years!—had a conversation about Hannah Arendt or her work end in a disagreement, although we have often (as in the case of your reaction to my letter) had to work our way carefully through the differences produced by our differences until the common understanding emerged. But, on the other hand, it is the case that after about 1985, when I first went into psychoanalytic training in New Haven and started work on my biography of Anna Freud, our conversation shifted. It is almost as though we became a threesome: you, me of the old days, and me of this new way of thinking, with whom you did not feel very comfortable. The new me was speaking a different language—and, further, a language that we both knew Hannah Arendt had viewed with the utmost distrust. However, I have never felt at odds with myself or split internally. As for me, the ways of thinking we encountered in Hannah Arendt, which were Hannah Arendt and which we each—each in our own way—took into our ways of thinking, were not so different from those of the psychoanalysts I have learned most from, starting with Freud. But it has taken quite a time for this internal conversation of mine to be in our conversation familiarly.
One of the things that Arendt and Freud had most deeply in common—and this I want to note to speak right to your “peculiar pleasure of particularity”—was their attitude, starting in their youths, toward theory. Freud had had to overcome his bent toward theory and speculation—something he did not accomplish to the full but something he accomplished to a rare degree. He was very fond of telling about how, when he was in his late twenties and visiting in Charcot’s Paris clinic, the young visitors from abroad, all trained in German academic physiology, kept questioning Charcot about his clinical work because it contradicted the theories that they took for granted. Charcot, not fazed, unfurled an aphorism that stunned Freud: La theorie c’est bon, mais cela n’empeche pas d’exister—Theory is fine, but it doesn’t prevent what exists. As Freud noted, astutely, Charcot was not just insisting that clinical facts should come first and theory (or revision of theory) follow, although he believed this and was masterful at clinical description and fact-collecting. He was a phenomenologist, in the best sense of the word. But, much more radically, Charcot had said that there was something that could not be denied by theory. What exists will, like a secret, come out, helped by means other than theory—by observation, intuition, experiencing fully, receptively. (And, I would add, by human caring about what exists.) That is what Arendt believed, too, and she was a superb observer, taking pleasure in the particulars.
Hannah Arendt never made any study of Freud, so she could speak about him and psychoanalysis in charming ignorance—sometimes sad ignorance, it seemed to me, as she was, I think, quite frightened of mental illness, as is not surprising in someone whose father died when she was a child of paretic syphilis—that is, he died quite insane. But her distrust was also of a piece with her most characteristic way of thinking about the distinction between the private realm and the public realm—which, although it does not constitute a theory, is certainly a key distinction. As we were saying when we met in New York last weekend, she was a sexual conservative, in a very specific sense: not conservative morally, not puritanical, but conservative in her opinion that sexual matters should exist entirely in the private sphere. What she most deeply held against psychoanalysis, I think, and I think we agree about this, was that people who practiced it or submitted to it became self-preoccupied to the point of losing their sense of public things, and, worse, psychoanalysts took it for granted that discussion of private matters—of sexuality, of fantasy—in public was a good thing, a liberating thing. She felt just the opposite: that making the private public destroyed the private as a place and a mode of refuge, restoration, re-creation. It contributed to that awful realm she called “the social,” which she saw as taking over the globe like a weed.
I can very well imagine that had I reached adulthood in a totalitarian state in which privacy had disappeared, in which there was not an inch of it to protect you from, not “the state,” but “the movement,” the antistate (or antipolitical, antipublic) as well as antiprivacy forces of “everything is possible,” I might be much more sympathetic to the way Hannah Arendt drew her distinction. But I do find this the most troubling feature of her work. It is like a defense mechanism that has great value except when it ceases to be a defense mechanism and becomes an offense mechanism. Maybe it is too close to being a theory or an ingredient of ideology, an Arendtism.
Well, I could go on, but let me stop here and send this to you. More would be too much, as though we had forgotten to get up from a conversation and take a walk, have a drink, fix dinner.
Love, Elisabeth
July 7, 2000
Dear Elisabeth,
Your fine letter of June 27 brings up a number of topics to which I want to respond, as well as some questions that I want to ask. One of the things it makes most clear is the distinction between conversing and letter-writing. As I read your letter, I wanted to stop and say something to you, to interject an opinion here or ask a question there. But as you say, that depends on the presence of the other. Our effort to approximate our ongoing conversation in writing, therefore, will necessarily be less immediate and more reflective, holding the other present in imagination, to be sure, and thinking with the other but following a train of thought without the give-and-take of actual talk. That also sheds light on what Arendt meant by thinking as an “internal dialogue” and on what she found so right about Aristotle’s definition of the true friend as “another self,” a “conscience,” as we might say today, or something like that.
Your letter, because of the holiday, arrived only after July 4. The television showed a few splendid pictures of tall ships (replicas of old ships) in New York harbor, but each one lasted barely a second and was followed by an endless commentary, summed up in “umbrella” remarks from the president, all woefully inadequate and insubstantial compared to the photographs themselves. Today, public speech lacks not only profundity, for which only rarely in history has it shown much need, but pungency and even significance. Publicly expressed convictions change so rapidly that they can hardly be called “convictions,” and a public realm all but devoid of conviction brings to mind Yeats’s lines from “The Second Coming”: The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.
On the other hand, it was of the twentieth century, now past, that it might be said, “The blood-dimmed tide is loosed” and “The ceremony of innocence is drowned,” as Yeats wrote in the same poem. I suppose we should be grateful that even among “the worst,” the “intensity” of public discourse seems largely feigned today. Nevertheless, the present apathy of the people toward what concerns them in common is worrisome, and I wonder if education can—or to what extent it can—do anything about it. Ever more elaborate, essentially democratic public spectacles are produced but for eyes that have ceased to be conduits to the mind. They seem to come with a warning: “Don’t think about this!” And except on a strictly private, critical level, we do not. It is not the case that spectacles are needed as a sop to distract an already acquiescent mass society, but rather that they seem, even from their producers’ point of view, to be nothing but entertainment, lacking any common meaning at all. I know that the education we received from Arendt has prompted this train of thought, and I would like to think that it could still awaken others.
The aphorism you quote from Charcot—”Theory is fine, but it doesn’t impede existence”—resonates in more ways than one. I have no doubt that the process of psychoanalysis, perhaps especially with your own distinctively articulated contribution of “caring” added to observation and intuition, may bring forth what is hidden or repressed in individuals undergoing it and that that liberating effect somehow adjusts those individuals to the world and enables them to live more satisfying lives. Perhaps private “adjustment” is not exactly what Arendt had in mind when she spoke of public “orientation” to the world, but I don’t suppose that she had any such doubt either, however much she may have inveighed against the “language” of psychoanalysis. When we were her students, I believe we felt that Arendt both exemplified and spelled out the conditions of a decent world, and later we wondered why so many people resist, really seem
not to want such a world. The first question I want to ask you is: Has that anything to do with your interest in psychoanalysis? You are quite right that I am not “comfortable” with psychoanalytic thought (I’m sure you have a psychological explanation for that!), yet increasingly, perhaps especially, since your last letter, I feel that, for you, psychoanalysis may be a form of action, especially in America, which seems, to put it mildly, disillusioned with almost all forms of political action. But as for the “language” of psychoanalysis, I would place a somewhat different emphasis from yours on Arendt’s reasons for believing that sexual matters, and the entire realm of the intimate, are unfit to appear in public. Which is to say that I think her insistence on the preservation of privacy as a realm of human existence, without which existence would not be human, along with its relation to education—all of which you recognize—may warrant further questioning.
How is privacy to be preserved? First of all, for Arendt, in the institution of private property, but the past three centuries have constituted an age of increasing expropriation. If our bodies are our last inviolable “property,” where does one draw the line? Arendt was a woman and was glad to appear as one but not as a feminist. That is very different from responding as a Jew when being attacked as a Jew, which Arendt of course did do, but the two have been confused. Her point, I think, is that publicly, every one of us appears as a unique and equally free person, whether male or female, rich or poor, Jew or Gentile, gay or straight, black or white, but never as a specimen of gender, class, religion, sexual orientation, or, perhaps most challenging because most visible, race. Politics does not deny but transcends what each one of us is in private. In other words, the private and the public are distinct but interdependent realms of human plurality, and that is a frequently overlooked sense in which plurality is the essential condition of political life as Arendt conceives it. As you suggest at the end of your letter, that interdependence is precisely what totalitarianism destroyed, by destroying both realms. If, to a great extent, world alienation, the opposite of belonging to a world held in common, arises
from private otherness, and if politics begins where world alienation ends, what can education, as an intermediate process, do to provide an introduction into the world? That’s my second question.
But to revert to Charcot’s epigram: In a public sense, the human catastrophes of the twentieth century demonstrate that theory in the guise of ideology can and did impede tout court the existence of countless men, women, and children. That threat, as a threat to the entire world, is now diminished. But the growing numbers of uprooted, homeless, and stateless people throughout the world, to which the Nazi ideology of naturally determined inferior races and the Stalinist ideology of historically determined dying classes supplied “answers,” remain today as a political problem of the first order. Would you agree that the psychoanalytic process is unlikely to resolve that problem, not only because of the vast numbers involved, but also because politics, in Arendt’s sense, first and foremost, is not about caring for people but for the world? That is an important distinction for her: The failure of the French Revolution as a social rather than a political phenomenon lay precisely in its “care” for les malheureux, who had no public voice, and resulted in transforming them into les enrages, enraged at the world, thereby not alleviating but increasing their misery. That’s a political consideration, and it is a recurrent theme throughout Arendt’s work. Of course, it does not detract from the individual benefits of psychoanalysis, but on the other hand, how exactly did Arendt as a teacher prepare the ground for the political resolution of the problem of “superfluous” peoples?
Her basic teaching, the source of everything that followed, was (and I think we agree on this) the unprecedented event of totalitarianism. Its essential phenomena, the “laboratories” of slave labor and extermination camps, succeeded in rendering even free human beings superfluous by reducing them to the status of conditioned animals. The dynamism of totalitarian movements would have, if those movements had not been stopped, laid waste incalculable portions of the world. This is a huge topic, and it is not necessary here, to you of all people, to go into it in more detail. What I want to stress is that Arendt tried to make clear to her students (and this was, I think, what motivated every course she gave, whether “Philosophy and Politics,” “Ancient Political Thought,” “Modern Political Thought,” “Kant’s Critique of Judgment,” and so on) that totalitarianism occurred right in the heart of Western civilization, that it was not imported into it from the outside, “not from the moon,” as she used to say, or from anywhere else. Above all, she wanted her students to realize that the occurrence of totalitarianism in the twentieth century exploded the categories of traditional political thought, a tradition that began with Plato, who, in an effort to cope with the crisis of Athenian politics following the Peloponnesian War, introduced the category of “making,” of constructing a polity according to a preconceived pattern. Free action, the power generated by a plurality of human beings acting “in concert” and out of conviction, whose source lies not in any theory but in pretheoretical political experience, was thereafter displaced, fatefully, from political thought. By definition, old categories are not and never can be equipped to deal with something entirely new, and in a sense, that is borne out in the history of political thought. Hobbes’s, Locke’s, and Rousseau’s variations on the category of “the state of nature,” for instance, or the changes Marx rang on the Hegelian category of “world history,” account for genuine political changes occurring in their worlds. But something much more radical was in question for Arendt: There was no longer the possibility of redefining traditional categories, as if she were dealing with an emergency and at the same time was intent on maintaining, in a modified fashion, the traditional structure of political thought. On the contrary, it was the advent of totalitarianism that sent Arendt back to free action, the source of political experience; for although totalitarianism did not succeed in destroying the world, it made clear that our entire tradition, not only of political but of moral and legal thought as well, of religion and authority in general, had come to an end. There may be a faint echo of this insight in postmodern thought, but for Arendt, this was not an academic but a factual matter, a matter, as she said, of “the history of our world.”
Reflecting later on the moment in 1943 when she first learned about Auschwitz, Arendt said: “This ought not to have happened.” That is no purely moral “ought,” I think, but rather as strong a statement as possible that there was something wrong with the world in which Auschwitz could and did happen. And yet, and this is where things get a bit complicated, Arendt’s attempt to understand totalitarianism seeks reconciliation, not, certainly, to totalitarian crimes, but to the world in which they came to pass. She went about this by telling her students a strange and terrible story the significance of which lies entirely in the present, and she was fully aware that her “method,” a matter she was always loath to discuss, went against the grain not only of political and social scientists, but also (and this was far more important to her) of those reporters, historians, and poets who, in their own distinct ways, seek to preserve in or out of time what they record and imagine. Even before she wrote The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt spoke of the desperate need to tell the “real story of the Nazi-constructed hell”: “Not only because these facts have changed and poisoned the very air we breathe, not only because they now inhabit our dreams at night and permeate our thoughts during the day—but also because they have become the basic experience and the basic misery of our times. Only from this foundation, on which a new knowledge of man will rest, can our new insights, our new memories, our new deeds, take their point of departure.” That says, I think, all that can be said about becoming reconciled, not to totalitarianism, but to the world that gave birth to it, a world made by human beings and that only human beings can change. But in that there is much more at stake than our victory in World War II.
And this brings me to my last question, for this has gone on long enough, although it also seems scarcely to have begun. Faced with useless categories of understanding, Arendt began anew by making distinctions, by the time-honored distinguo, which, since Aristotle, has been the hallmark of many great thinkers who have set out to understand what previously had not been understood. A is not B, totalitarianism is not tyranny, force is not power, action is not work, work is not labor, the private is not public, the social is neither private nor public; thinking is not willing, willing is not judging, sympathy is not compassion, and compassion is not empathy (“I” am not “Thou”). These and many other of her distinctions, although obvious to her, are difficult to grasp by anyone, including, of course, most of her students, who are accustomed to a way of thinking that tends to blur distinctions, especially unusual ones. I am convinced that Arendt intended her teaching to be practical. Was it?
Love, Jerry
July 22, 2000
Dear Jerry,
The letter you started on July 7 came in with the same post that took out to DU magazine in Switzerland that piece on Hannah Arendt’s place in American intellectual life, which we discussed the last time I saw you in New York. It contains this paragraph: In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt first articulated her most fundamental thought—as an alarm, a dire warning. She claimed that politics—the speaking and acting of citizens in a public space, variously secured by different forms of government and law—only appears under certain historical conditions, and can disappear. Further, a form of government can come about that has the unprecedented and hideously contradictory consequence of making politics disappear completely. Totalitarianism, a novelty, neither a tyranny nor a one-party dictatorship, is the radical elimination of politics brought about by methodically eliminating the very humanity of, first, selected groups and eventually any group, by making humans superfluous as human beings.
This is, as you so rightly said, the core content of her teaching; this is what she wanted her students, us—and her readers—to grasp. And she wanted to show the consequence for thinking of finding out not only that the European intellectual tradition has no concepts for this novelty, but that the tradition was implicated in this novelty, which grew up on the very ground of the tradition. The consequence for thinking is that the tradition is at an end and any new thinking must go forward without it. It must go forward, first, by going back historically to understand how the tradition’s concepts came to be so useless for our world and how the tradition itself became implicated in horrors. So every one of her essays and hooks begins with a historical tour in the service of the new thinking—thus all the distinction-making that we have been remarking again and again, her educational practice. As her student, I think that the attention she gave to historical preparatories impressed me as strongly as anything; and it was here that I felt—to address the last question in your letter—that she absolutely thought she was being practical. She was like an excavator, getting the land cleared and ready, freeing thinking of customary ways, habits, rule-boundedness, uselessness.
And new thinking must go forward, second, by both envisioning and making an effort to live in what you called—and it is just the right phrase—”a decent world.” Not a utopia, not a palace of ideology, not an arena for heroics, not a moral dictation, but a decent world. In Hannah Arendt’s terms, I think this meant a world in which totalitarianism is not possible, in which the elements of totalitarianism—present in all modern mass societies—could never crystallize. In the preface to the first edition of Origins, she dramatically juxtaposed totalitarianism and freedom, using the “free world” rhetoric of the 1950s and long afterward, but she really meant by “a free world,” I think, what you have captured with that phrase “a decent world.”
Why would anyone not want a decent world? That question does propel anybody who works as a psychoanalyst, as you guessed. What we specialize in studying is the inability of people to want—and insist upon, working for it materially or spiritually—a decent world; this is the political corollary of their inability to want love and work that are satisfying and growth-promoting. Why don’t they want what is in their best interests and in the best interests of all? If the question is put the other way around, it is even more awful: Why do people want an indecent world?—for example, one in which they can order cattle car loads of people to their deaths in a camp? … The matter comes up clearly if you consider the (totally naive) Christian instruction “Love your neighbor as you love yourself” and then ask: What about people who do not love themselves? How are they to love their neighbors? . . . I think Hannah Arendt made a profound step when she rejected her first understanding, expressed in the last section of Origins, that evil is radical and began to think about “the banality of evil”—neither something devilish in-born in people nor something psychopathological in the psychiatric sense, but something banal, nonradical, in people. She set such a challenge to think about this—and that, of course, is one reason why it is so sad not to have her own reflections from the unfinished Judging.
Speaking in the psychoanalytic language makes me want to respond to another part of your letter—and come back to the topic of education. You suggested that the way I practice psychoanalysis may be a form of action in today’s world, in a world that “seems, to put it mildly, disillusioned with almost all forms of political action.” (Disillusionment with action, which is, thank God, not the same as embracing a form of government that makes action impossible, relieves you of even considering it for yourself or others.) Yes, and psychoanalysis is (or can be) a practice concerned precisely with disillusionment, which is another way of describing self-hatred or lack of self-love. But more, I think of my practice as a form of education, and I think of myself as an educator who moved out of a classroom and into a consulting room. Of course, most psychoanalysts, hearing that, would distrust my clinical qualifications, assuming that I had not learned the basic lesson that psychoanalysis is not supposed to be, as they say, “didactic.” You do not educate your patients. But this injunction usually reflects a very narrow concept of education as an imparting of information (scientific education) or prescription and prohibition (moral education). When I think of psychoanalysis as educational, 1 am thinking of the analyst/patient relationship in terms of the root of “education.” That is, I reflect in the way Hannah Arendt taught me, looking into the words, “unfreezing the concepts,” as she put it. E-ducere is to draw out. I draw my patients out (and they draw me out).
But since I always stumble after the first step in Latin, because I did not have one of those amazing Gymnasium formal educations, I go to Greek, which I could share with Hannah Arendt so pleasurably, for thinking further about “education” and what it has meant and means and could mean. As you know, there are two basic word clusters in Greek for “education”: the one around the noun paideia, which focuses on the child (pais) who is educated or encultured; and the older one around the verb trepho, which focuses on raising, rearing, tending, cherishing, often analogizing children and plants and animals. The Greek noun for “education” that is derived from the verb trepho is trophe, and this has all kinds of associations to feeding and nursing. In both the word clusters, but particularly in the second, older one (woven all through the agricultural metaphors in the Homeric epics), the idea is to help children grow, to garden them, not to put knowledge in them or tell them what to do. But, of course, part of helping them grow is helping them become at home in the world, enter into the common world. In the Platonic dialogues, you find the wonderful compound koinotrophike for a system of public education—it literally means education in common (which also means into what is held in common—like “common sense”).
I draw out of my patients what they know about themselves and then, much more slowly, what they do not know about themselves, what resides in their unconscious minds. The process releases them for growth, for getting past whatever held up or stopped their growth, for maturing. (The Greek verb for healing, therapeuein, is related to trepho.) The technique is less active than Socratic questioning, but the goal is similar. The goal as I understand it is to help the patient realize that he or she has had experiences, now represented in conscious stories and unconscious stories, of disappointed love and that these profoundly shape present experience and the capacity to love and be loved—and thence to work, to labor, or to act, to think, to will, or to judge, all of the human activities. Most importantly and intimately, the patient’s caretaking loved ones have disappointed the expectation to be loved. Experiences of fulfillment of the expectation to be loved or of disappointment set the foundations in people for their later feelings of being at home in the world or being alienated from and in the world—feelings that develop around events in the world.
Another way to describe the worldless self-hating I was writing about before is to say it is “educating” yourself in grievance, tending to and nourishing only your disappointment in people and the world. Educators have to counter, to cultivate, this kind of self-education—this perversion of education; so they have to love well, give the student a relationship to be in, a connection to the world. There is no such person as a self-hating educator; it’s a contradiction in emotions. (Recently, I read an article that contained a statement of Goethe’s to the effect that it was not the most brilliant teachers who had had the greatest influence on him, but those who loved him the most. But imagine the power of the teacher who is both brilliant and loving!)
To me, the connection between the elemental human experiences of fulfillment or disappointment in love and the lesson that Hannah Arendt set out to teach, which we agree was the core of her teaching, is in her judgment about Auschwitz: “This ought not to have happened.” There is something wrong with the world in which Auschwitz could and did happen. A person deeply disturbed in the capacity to love, self-hating, does not feel: “This ought not to have happened.” At an extreme, in the present historical moment, a self-hating person will announce: “Those who say this did happen are lying, they are in a conspiracy to blame the German people,” etc. etc.—the Holocaust deniers. At less of an extreme: “So what? Who cares? It was a long time ago.” That is disillusionment and indifference.
Funny, having written along on this all evening, and being now quite tired, I feel this enormous desire to talk with you!
That’s in part because when we talk, it doesn’t matter whether I have been particularly coherent or put things in a way I want to stand by and not amend in the next conversation, refine, rework. I don’t want to wake up tomorrow and read this through and find myself thinking, Oh, for heaven’s sake, that is so superficial, or such a repetition of things you’ve said before, or whatever. In our conversations, I don’t ever criticize myself. So it’s safer, and I am more drawn out, educated, than when I am alone and only imagining you, or being aware that this is WRITING, which has a whole burden of public meaning to it.
Well, enough. It is quite remarkable, isn’t it, that thirty years later, we are still thinking through the things Hannah Arendt challenged us to think about. She was quite a force—like the force of the Taoist sages, doing nothing to keep their followers except set an example of great constancy. Decency.
Love, Elisabeth
August 1, 2000
Dear Elisabeth,
When your letter of July 22 arrived, I was finishing another article, so a few days have passed before finding time to respond. But while working on that other piece, I was thinking about what you had written, and I believe we may want to retain some of that for future conversations. For instance, to pursue here a discussion of what you wrote about the tradition being “implicated” in the advent of totalitarianism, which seems to me an important but extremely complex question, would, I think, take us too far afield. Also, what you said about self-hatred being an element in the rise of totalitarian movements—well, doesn’t that diminish the distinctness of the world in which those movements arose, the actual conditions in Germany and Russia between the wars? In the latter case, our difference hinges on the introduction of general psychological principles into contingent political matters, a difference that will surprise neither of us! But I think both of these questions would be better thrashed out viva voce, and perhaps we will do that when you come here in ten days’ time. As always, I greatly look forward to your visit! I have also been thinking more generally about the letters we have exchanged to date, and perhaps a good way to begin this one would be to comment on what seem to me some of their salient points.
The first thing I want to say is that I feel torn between talking about the substance of what we learned from Arendt and how she imparted it, both of which are relevant to our contribution to a book on Hannah Arendt and education. The difficulty is that when we reflect on what we learned from her, the process of how she educated us tends to become eclipsed by political considerations. Arendt never taught her own opinions, but she instilled in us the ability to form our own opinions impartially. An impartial opinion is the condition of a responsible conviction, the political importance of which I mentioned in my first letter. In that sense, the transmission of knowledge was not uppermost in her mind, at least not in graduate school, which is where we studied with her. Her own knowledge was vast and, of course, she did impart some of it, but what really mattered to her was too political, too rooted in her own experience, too “existential” to be transmitted pedagogically—all of which illustrates her point that politics is not a matter of instruction. I want to add, however, that the palpable shadow of her knowledge served to protect us, her students, from illusions, and in this singular way, she exemplified the authority of the teacher, which she found vanishing from modern theories and contemporary practices of education.
In your first letter, you mentioned almost en passant that Arendt’s understanding of education “was certainly not the same thing as teaching or instructing in skills.” That is true, and there is a sense in which it cuts to the heart of at least part of what we have been writing about in these letters. Education (from educare, to bring up, which itself derives from educere), and particularly primary and secondary education, was not originally conceived as a specialized “training,” but rather as the development of potentialities innate in human nature. Every child has distinct potentialities, of course; and for Arendt, one of the main purposes of education is the development of the uniqueness of the person each child is in the process of “becoming.” But today, millions of kids are being trained—that is, ever more elaborately prepared—to have their “aptitudes” determined, not by their development as individuals, but by the S.A.T. The measure of their success on that standardized test is viewed as the key to mastering the world in which they will live. That is one way of seeing what Arendt means by instruction “in the art of living,” to which she sharply contrasts her understanding of education as teaching “children what the world is like.” “The Crisis in Education,” an eloquent, trenchant, but to me somewhat problematic essay, makes clear that the reason for introducing a child into the world is that he or she can come to “love the world enough to assume responsibility for it and by the same token save it from that ruin which, except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and young, would be inevitable.” That essay unequivocally states the distinction between “the realm of education,” in which the principles of authority and tradition are essential, and the actual “world that is neither structured by authority nor held together by tradition.” In other words, what is valid in early education is no longer valid in political or adult life in general. A corollary of her distinction is that in order to develop a sense of responsibility for the world, children must, since they are newcomers to an old world, “turn toward the past.” Elsewhere, Arendt says that all humanistic education deals with the past, which we know from our own experience as her students and from which follows the “historical tour” you mentioned with which she began her courses and much of her writing. Thus, although she was not a conventional historian—she once told me she didn’t know “what history is”—there is a historical dimension to her thought, which is nowhere more evident than in her political and philosophical concern with the historical development of the concept of history itself.
But in your first letter, you also quoted from a different essay, “The Crisis in Culture,” which is not about the education of
children. I want to cite the full quotation: “The thread of tradition is broken, and we must discover the past for ourselves—that is, read its authors as though nobody had ever read them before.” This is still dealing with the past but differently. What she did, and endeavored to teach us to do in graduate school, was to retrieve the past, not as a historical whole handed down by tradition, but rather by salvaging its “rich and strange” fragments from the destruction of time. This is not child’s play or child’s work, but it nevertheless seems discordant with her emphasis on tradition and authority in primary and secondary education. It may well be that one has to know the tradition, as Arendt did, before realizing the significance of its discontinuity, which she herself thematized. But that is what I find problematic in the essay on the “crisis” in education, insofar as it suggests a view of tutelage that is at odds with her own experience of the world. Be that as it may, Arendt does not go into the techniques of how children can be educated as she thinks they ought to be, of how interest in a broken tradition can be renewed, and certainly I am not equipped to do that. I hope other contributors to this volume, colleagues who are professionally involved with the process of education, will deal with that matter, and I look forward to reading what they have to say.
At this point, let me try to address the question of what we, who were not children, learned from Arendt and of how she introduced us into the world by teaching us, largely by her own example, to retrieve its past. The point of that was, I think, to develop in us an ability to respond without prejudice to the great plurality of men and women who share the world, thereby helping to sustain the common world that totalitarianism sought to destroy. Such responsibility, although not a matter of knowledge, requires thought. Arendt did not stuff our heads with knowledge but taught us to “think”; and in her sense of the word, that was practical insofar as the habit of thinking is, as she said, “among the conditions that make men abstain from evil-doing.” To have lost sight of a common world is one way to speak of “world alienation” or, if you prefer, of worldlessness, Weltlosigkeit, world loss. Arendt educated us to take part in a
possible and pleasant exercise of common sense—which she understood as the sense both of community and communication, the condition of a common world—by informing our vision through the vision of others, both living and dead. To partake of another’s vision is to enlarge one’s own mentality, as we’ve said, and I want to give an example of what that means to me.
Before me on my desk is a reproduction of Piero della Francesca’s Resurrezione, but of course the reproduction is only a reminder of the remarkably well-preserved original. The original fresco is in the Pinacoteca Comunale in Sansepolcro, where Piero was born, a small town in the center of the Italian peninsula, not far from Florence and near Arezzo. Aldous Huxley called the Resurrezione the “best” and “greatest” painting in the world, and so it seems to me, though not only or chiefly for the art historical reasons he offers, which are both subtle and accurate. It is unlike any other depiction of the Resurrection I know, all of which portray the risen Christ overwhelming the soldiers guarding the tomb with a spiritual, transcendent power immeasurably greater than their temporal force. Here the soldiers before the tomb are asleep, sound asleep (“the very essence of sleep,” as an Italian friend once put it); one of them is supposedly a self-portrait of the painter, which is meaningful whether or not it is true. Here the power of the Christ is divorced from any relationship with force. His left leg is bent atop the tomb, as if caught at the moment of rising, but there is no sense of motion. He faces full forward, in the direct center of the painting, his eyes staring into yours. If you stare back, they transfix you, and then it may happen that they speak to you, saying, “Wake up, wake up.” The longer you stand in front of this painting, the more you realize that you are or have been asleep, like any one of the soldiers in the foreground—and thus you “enter” the painting. If you remain there long enough, before but also in the world of the painting, you may begin to slough off sleep, and that for me was an experience of intense pleasure. Nor can I doubt that Piero intended to afford that pleasure, though of course I cannot prove it. This shared vision for me has nothing to do with religious authority, but it has, I believe, enlarged my mind and made me aware, even if only intermittently, of the depth of the common world. I never spoke to Arendt about this painting or about Piero. And although she did not “prepare” me for it, apart from having studied with her I would never have enjoyed this particular introduction into a world that I cannot and have no will to master.
This experience is an example of what I meant earlier by “the peculiar pleasure of particularity,” which now strikes me as less “peculiar,” which after all is tautologous, than a difficult and profound pleasure. And I think it must be akin to what you meant when you wrote that a decent world, a world in which we know that we are guests and can become friends, is one in which totalitarianism could not occur. It is a world that is not barbarous, and the sense of belonging to it enhances life. But the hardest part of what Arendt sought to make us understand is that such a world is worth more than life.
Arendt thought that every human being is unique and born for freedom. I sometimes wonder if that is true, but I have no doubt that the main reason you and I are still eager to talk about her and think about what she said to us, after more than thirty years, is that she herself appeared to us as someone who was unique and free. And here I really do mean what she said rather than what she wrote, for you and I were privileged to hear her speak, to listen to her voice. Today, it is not the public mask of the famous woman that is between us in our ongoing conversation, but the “naked thisness,” as she put it late in her life, the “identifiable but not definable” person who continues to sound through—personare—the mask that is no longer visible.
On Arendt’s fiftieth birthday, Karl Jaspers wrote to his former student: “What a life you have led, a life given to you and earned by you with a steadfastness that has mastered the evil, the horror that has come from without and ground so many others down.” That is beautifully said and seems almost exactly right. But to “master” that evil, Arendt had to judge for herself not only those who enacted it, but those who suffered it; and in doing so, she found that what ground them all down did not primarily come “from without.” That is an instance of the difficult judgment she practiced, the other side or mental equivalent of action, neither of which can be taught and both of which are guided by examples. And examples, unlike human lives, are not infected with mortality.
We first studied with Arendt in 1968, a year of student unrest, of violent demonstrations against the war in Vietnam, and of continuous protests against the dreary and, so it seemed, deathly pallor cast over the entire political realm, especially after the King and Kennedy assassinations. In that atmosphere, Arendt was immensely popular—indeed, an inspiration—since the youth of those days found not in themselves but in The Human Condition and On Revolution the possibility of a new beginning. If our initial attraction to Arendt was quixotic, there was nothing quixotic about the Arendt we came to know as a teacher. For this theorist of action, teaching itself was an unrehearsed performance, especially in the give-and-take, what she herself called the “free-for-all,” of the seminar, where she asked her students real rather than rhetorical questions and responded, usually in entirely unexpected ways, to theirs. What impressed me was her nervousness, which was not irritation but agitation. It diminished when she spoke but was essentially different from the stage fright that at times afflicts a great actor before the play begins. It was more a constant state of mind, a constant impatience to get going, the result of the curious fact that she did not seem to experience inertia. Unlike most of us, who seek a starting point, a motive, a source of strength and movement in a situation, Arendt appeared as a beginning. Thus, her tangible agitation sheds considerable light on the words of St. Augustine that resonate throughout her work: “Initium ergo ut esset, creatus est homo” (“That there be a beginning, man was created”), not created to begin something with a predetermined end in view, but simply to be a beginning. That is the heart not so much of what she taught but thought about action and judgment, as well as about plurality as the sole condition of a public life in which every human individual can actualize his or her potential freedom and uniqueness. Although her attitude toward academia was critical, for the sake of this spontaneous performance, in which she exemplified the meaning that Augustine’s words exemplified for her, she did not quit it, as Nietzsche had, to live in isolation and think in solitude. In her seminar, every participant was a “citizen,” called upon to give his or her opinion, to insert him or herself into that miniature polls in order to make it, as she said, “a little better.”
Arendt was convinced that the need to think becomes widespread and urgent, certainly no longer the exclusive experience or sole concern of professional philosophers, in times when the security of the world, of its institutions, and especially of one’s own unique place in it, is thrown into jeopardy. It was the inability of the twentieth century to sustain a common world that opened a vista leading to what Arendt saw as the original source of political life: the clearing, in the midst of a plurality of human beings living, acting, and speaking with one another, of a “public realm,” which they themselves brought into existence, not for security, but for the sake of their freedom. In the world today, Arendt’s conviction of the political urgency of the need to think has struck a deep, responsive chord. Although the Cold War has ended and its antagonists are mollified if not disarmed, it is not at all clear what has begun. There is plenty of evidence that the perplexities that obsessed the twentieth century have not disappeared and that men and women from virtually every corner of the earth who are turning to Arendt are still striving for release from oppression. Less immediate than our own, theirs is a more reflective but still genuinely educational experience. They cannot any longer ask her questions and listen to her answers, but they turn to her as someone they trust to animate their need to think and realize for themselves the meaning of freedom. The lasting lesson of the advent of totalitarianism in the twentieth century is that freedom is fragile and that the common world is provisional and can be destroyed. That does not necessarily mean the destruction of our planet or of our species—the one so tiny and the other so unlikely and seemingly accidental in the universe—but of those public spaces in which alone men and women can appear and be recognized in their uniqueness, which in the last analysis is their equality in freedom. From the point of view ofuniversal nature, in which all entities are generated by automatic processes, and every alteration is either so slow as to be imperceptible or so abrupt as to seem an anomaly in need of explanation, the sensation of actual change is lacking. From that point of view, the appearance of human freedom, the capacity to spontaneously interrupt natural processes, can be regarded only as miraculous. For Arendt, that miracle constitutes human reality, and the joy of knowing her, either immediately or reflectively, was and is the glimpse she provides into that reality.
Looking forward to your visit with anticipation of more conversation, and with love, Jerry.
