Hannah Arendt was no philosopher—according to Hannah Arendt. She eschewed the title for a number of reasons, not least the failure of philosophy to forewarn against the political times she found herself thrown into, and the moral failure of many of the philosophers with whom she worked and studied. And yet if she is—as she claimed—a political theorist first and foremost, and one who—as others have claimed—is one of the greatest of the 20th century, what is key to her brilliance is precisely that for her, the stakes of her work were human, and the questions to be put, if not answered, were about what this meant. As Samantha Rose Hill points out in Hannah Arendt, even in works such as The Origins of Totalitarianism—surprise bestseller of the Trump era—the political is invariably brought back to the personal.
Born in Hanover in 1906, Arendt studied philosophy at Marburg from 1924—26 under Martin Heidegger, with whom she notoriously had an affair. Their relationship—including her subsequent forgiving of his Nazi associations after the war—is one of the central threads running through Ann Heberlein’s new biography, On Love and Tyranny: The Life and Politics of Hannah Arendt. It was, as Heberlein shows, a complicated, messy relationship. Their correspondence oscillates between deep engagement with the most serious of philosophical themes, to glutinous and sickly-sweet baby talk.
One should not call Heidegger’s influence on Arendt’s thought decisive—an intelligence such as hers would no doubt have flowered in any number of directions—but one aspect of it was pivotal. Heidegger had lectured on Saint Augustine in 1920; in 1929, Arendt would present her doctoral thesis and first book-length work, “On the concept of love in the thought of Saint Augustine.” It introduced some of the deepest themes of her later work.
In Augustine’s various concepts of love—for one’s neighbour, for God—the self reveals and defines itself by giving itself to the other. The self is not a “thing” which exists in the world like other “things”, like chairs or trees, or even colours or sounds. Rather, it is an endless process of becoming. Inspired by Augustine, Heidegger took to task René Descartes’s theory of the self, most famously expressed in the statement “cogito ergo sum” (“I think therefore I am”). The statement posits that individual consciousness is an object prior to all other objects—the only thing of which we can be certain.
In Heidegger’s reading, Descartes had leapt from the verb “I think” to the noun of a “thing” which thinks. This was, for Heidegger a “perversion” and failed to capture the malleability and ever-shifting nature of human existence. Heidegger’s own word for the self was Dasein, which can be translated as “Being-there.” As Augustine posited, “being” is a process, rather than a thing. Rather than cogito ergo sum, Heidegger offers cogito me cogitare—‘I think myself thinking.’"
For Arendt, this insight was to inform her work. The self reveals itself in action and through doing rather than being. It is through our engagement with the world—including and perhaps most importantly through acts of love—that we “become” ourselves. And, as a process, the self is ever-changing and ever-changeable. As she put it in The Human Condition (1958):
“The fact that man is capable of action means that the unexpected can be expected from him, that he is able to perform what is infinitely improbable. And this again is possible only because each man is unique, so that with each birth something uniquely new comes into the world.”
We are, each of us, a process of becoming—we can grow, develop, learn and engage in acts such as forgiveness and love.
From Augustine, she was also to borrow the phrase amor mundi (love of the world) and planned to write a book on political theory with that title. It remained unwritten, but the concept underpins all her later work. Amor mundi is no abstract, diffuse love: rather it is the difficult duty of loving one’s neighbour, and loving the world, as they are presented. Like Heidegger’s later concept of “care” (Sorge), it demands a total involvement in the world. Barriers to this relationship, such as the atomised condition of the contemporary world—including our withdrawal from others due to the pandemic—lead to an inauthentic connection to the world, and thus an inauthentic self.
In failing to involve ourselves in others—to care for them and be cared for by them, we cannot achieve what Augustine called benevolentia—to wish one’s neighbour to be “one’s equal before God.” This is to wish for the ultimate good for the other, and is an act of absolute generosity. In placing the other before us, our own self becomes authentic through the process of this generosity.
Arendt would later become famous for her phrase “the banality of evil.” Evil need not be, in her words, “perverted nor sadistic,” but it can be terrifyingly bland and normal. It can be, as in the case of the Nazi operative Adolf Eichmann, whose trial she covered, a form of thoughtlessness and a form of disengagement. To a great extent, for Arendt, this banality comes from a failure to rise to the challenge of being human in all its potential generosity and capacity for responsibility to the world—and thus to fail as a human. As she wrote, “The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.” It is a failure of care.
We currently find ourselves in a time of great isolation, politically and personally. Aside from the physical fact of lockdown, society continues to become more atomised and more divided. For Arendt these are neither new challenges, nor insurmountable ones. But there are ways to resist, as she spent her life doing, and perhaps the first of these is the most present to hand. As she put it, “Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but antipolitical, perhaps the most powerful of all antipolitical forces.”
On Love and Tyranny: The Life and Politics of Hannah Arendt, Ann Heberlein (Pushkin Press, £18.99)
Hannah Arendt (Critical Lives), Samantha Rose Hill (Reaktion Books, £11.99)
