Arpad Kadarkay

Arpad Kadarkay

HANNAH ARENDT

The Human Condition

You are one of those people I count

among the great gifts of this world

-Karl Jaspers

There are a few moments in life when the height and depth of the significance of the occasion become too great for utterance, when the thrill of electric sympathy touches the whole generation at once, and brings us to our feet with a spiritual shock. Three of these happened in my time- the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and the life and work of Hannah Arendt.

If one were to write the intellectual history of the twentieth century, not in terms of successive generations, where the historian must be faithful to the sequence of ideas and attitudes, but as the biography of a single person, attempting no more than a metaphorical approximation of what transpired in the minds of people, that person would be Hannah Arendt.

To enter the haunted and haunting world of Arendt is to encounter, face to face, the political and moral Inferno of the twentieth century. Her life spanned the blood stained convulsions of two world wars, the rise of totalitarian regimes, the man-made domain of terror, violence, and the deliberate massacre of some seventy million human beings in Europe and Russia, between the start of the first World War and the end of the second, and the annihilation of human communities- the suicidal impulse of Western civilization.

Needing Hell, we have learned how to build and run on it on earth. In locating Hell above ground, in Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia, we have reached a turning point in Western civilization. As Arendt put it, [1]

Even in the darkest of times we have the right to expect some illumination. [This] illumination... may well come less from theories and concepts than from uncertain, flickering, and often weak light that some men and women in their lives and works, will kindle under almost all circumstances and shed over the time span that was given them on earth.... Eyes so used to darkness as ours will hardly be able to tell whether their light was the light of a candle or that of a blazing sun. But such objective evaluation seems to me a matter of secondary importance which can be safely left to posterity.

Even eyes so used to darkness as mine, who grew up in Communist Hungary, will be able to tell that the light Hannah Arendt kindled, one of the foremost political philosophers of the twentieth century, for me and my generation was more than the light of a candle, and it was a blazing sun.

The circuit of Arendt’s life and creativity, the horizon in which her work moved, was not actually a circle. Rather, it resembles a triangle whose sides can be accurately labeled: Philosophy-Freedom-Action. Only this woman in her uniqueness could fill and did fill with brilliance the area of that triangle. Her Jewishness and the Jewish question marked the terrible inner condition of her generation. No matter how insignificant or remote this problem may appear to us in the face of what actually happened later, we cannot disregard it here, for neither Kafka nor Arendt can be understood without it.

When Karl Jaspers asked her whether she is a German or a Jew, she replied:[2]

To be perfectly honest, it doesn’t matter to me in the least on a personal and individual level.... I’d put it this way: Politically, I will always speak only in the name of the Jews whenever circumstances force me to give my nationality. That is easier for me than for your wife [a Jew], because I’m at a further remove from this whole question and because I never felt myself, either spontaneously or at my own insistence, to “be a German.” What remains is the language, and how important that is one learns only when, more nolens than volens, one speaks and writes other languages. Isn’t that enough?

Although Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers confronted directly the rise of Hitler and the problem posed by Nazism, Arendt had no sympathy for Jaspers’s Germanism and the great “intellectual tradition” of Germany with which he had felt connected from an earlier age. When Jaspers cites her Max Weber as the ideal type of “the German essence”, she minces no words about “German essence” and sharing the same intellectual tradition: [3]

But let me come back to the Jewish question. I recall our disagreement very well. In the course of it, you once said (or wrote) to me that we were all in the same boat. I can’t remember whether I answered you or only thought to myself that with Hitler as captain (this was before ’33) we Jews would not be in the same boat. That was wrong, too, because under the circumstances you weren’t in the boat much longer either or, if you were, then only as a prisoner. In condition of freedom every individual should be able to decide what he would like to be, German or Jew or whatever. In an a-national republic like the United States, in which nationality and state are not identical, this becomes more or less a question with only social and cultural meaning but not political meaning.

As an émigré, Arendt belonged to two worlds: the world of her origin, Germany, and the encounter with a new world, the United States. Jewish-German-American mind: tripartite, plural, and expansive. Her search for the ideal definition of politics was influenced by her confrontation with the inhuman, perverted politics under the guise of National Socialist totalitarianism in her native country. The answer to the question of what constitutes the authentically political, where human dignity and possibilities are once again realized, she found in the great republic of her refuge.

The totalitarian regimes she dealt with, Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia, the focus of The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), the magisterial study of those “hidden” elements of modern European history that “crystallized” in the Final Solution and the Gulag Archipelago. Totalitarianism did not kill truth, it discovered the absolute truth that authorized killing and achieved the satanic greatness that arrogated to itself the right to build crematoriums and factories to produce corpses.

The plural identity of Hannah Arendt, German-Jew-American, the three strands in her extraordinary life, enabled her to recognize the capacity for freedom as the source of human plurality. The human condition is plurality based on labor, work, and action. For Arendt, they are fundamental because each corresponds to one of the basic conditions under which life and pursuit of happiness has been given to man- freedom. The human condition is that of plurality because it is men, not Man, who labor, who work, and who act on the earth and inhabit the world.

In tracing and mapping the vast continent of Arendt’s thought that shows the various stages on her itinerary as a political thinker, we are dealing with something which may not be unique but is certainly extremely rare: the gift of thinking poetically. And this thinking, inspired by the present, works with the thought fragments it can rescue from the past and gather about itself.

She tells Jaspers that she borrowed an epigraph from his Philosophische Logic (Munich, 1958). It reads, “Give yourself up neither to the past nor to the future. The important thing is to remain wholly in the present.” That sentence, Arendt tells Jaspers, “struck me right in the heart, so I’m entitled to have it.” [4]

In The Human Condition (1958) Arendt challenges at every turn our received ideas of what politics is and should be. She returns to her beloved Greeks, to Athens of Socrates and Plato in particular, in order to show to the survivors of dark continent- Europe’s twentieth century- how and why political action was the very opposite of its totalitarian variance of violence, coercion, and domination. Unlike the violence and coercion used by ordinary tyrants, Hitler and Stalin incarnate evil and exemplify total domination which reaches its climax by crushing out all human individuality. The omnipotent leader needs total power so that he can speed up the execution of death sentences pronounced by the laws of nature or of history.

The birthmark of tyranny had always been lawlessness. Legitimate, constitutional democracy is limited by laws, whereas tyranny of Stalin is nothing but the breach of these boundaries so that he could unleash terror at his will over the country. Total terror is designed to rage freely through society, unhindered by any spontaneous human action. Human beings are there merely to serve these forces of terror, “either riding atop their triumphant car or crushed under its wheels.” [5]

When Arendt was confronted with the totalitarian perversion of the political, philosophical, and cultural sphere, she was confronted with the inadequacy the traditional concept of politics. She made it explicit; there was no place for the human, democratic politics within specific German framework, where there existed a tradition- in Realpolitik to legitimize unchecked power or domination as such. This led her to identify res publica, the political thing, this new political realm, the consent of the governed, with her conception of the American republic, and the paradigmatic role that the Constitution of the United States played in her thinking.

One major consequence in the political theory of Arendt is the replacement of the European relation of “to rule/to govern” and “to be ruled/to be governed” by the American relation of “to found/to establish” and “to preserve/to continue” as the key to understand the political in an authentic, human, and constitutional way. “To found”, the American Revolution; “to establish”, the Constitution; “to preserve/to continue”, the political thinking of Abraham Lincoln, which is focused on the problem of preserving the Union, the Republic- this is the new science of politics that Hannah Arendt celebrates, this is the Americanization of Hannah Arendt.

It is in the American context that Arendt affirmed her newfound love of the world, and, excited, tells Jaspers that she will name her book on political theory, On Revolution (1963), Amor Mundi, love of the world, a phrase she borrowed from St. Augustine on whose concept of love she had written her doctoral dissertation. On Revolution is Arendt’s sign of gratitude to her host country, her gift of admiration for the Republic and the American experience which is deeply colored by her study of the Founding Fathers- John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Jefferson, and her reading of the Federalist Papers, authored by Hamilton, Madison, and John Jay. Here she met a kind of realism and of thinking that was totally absent in the philosophy of her former lover, Martin Heidegger.

The Germans have no Hamilton, no Jefferson, no Madison, and no Federalist Papers. For German thinkers, even for Max Weber, American constitutionalism has no importance at all. For Arendt, the reflection on the German inability or unwillingness to understand constitutionalism, that is, of the limits of power, the American experience is all about. Passionately committed to constitutional limits on modern political power, Arendt does not produce a state-centered political theory but rather an anti-state political theory.

Her admiration of and love for America was the first thing that impressed me as naturalized American citizen. Here is the voice, the spirit, the affection of Arendt:[6]

I’m eternally grateful that it was here I was washed ashore [United States]. For my citizenship test, or, rather, in celebration of it, I’ve learned a little American constitutional history. Truly wonderful, right down to every last formulation….

I’m immersed in American history and preparing my Princeton lectures on the concept of revolution [On Revolution]. It’s breathtakingly exciting and wonderful, the American Revolution, the Constitution. Madison, Hamilton, Jefferson, John Adams – what men. And when you look at what’s there now- what a comedown.

She attributes the stability, the endurance of the young American republic to the secular holiness of the Constitution. The authority of the American republic derives, she claims, not from some immortal, Platonic legislator, but rather from a secular founding act. Her writing after The Human Condition (1958) and Between Past and Future (1961) becomes a celebratory admiration of and fascination with American politics and history.

Like the Book of Genesis, Hannah Arendt is the preeminent political theorist of beginning, founding, and the creation of the political world. Liberty said, let there be Republic, and there was the United States of America; and Jefferson saw that the Republic was good, and in the Declaration of Independence he separated Republic from Monarchy. He called the Republic pursuit of happiness, and the Monarchy tyranny. So evening came, and morning came on July 4, 1776, the first day of a new nation.

Here is Arendt’s moment of Genesis, her moment of illumination:[7]

There is an element of the world-building capacity of man in the human faculty of making and keeping promises. Just as promises and agreements deal with the future and provide stability in the ocean of future uncertainty where the unpredictable may break in from all sides, so the constituting, founding, and world-building capacities of man concern not so much ourselves and our own time on earth as our “successor,” and “posterities.” The grammar of action: that action is the only human faculty that demands a plurality of men; and the syntax of power: that power is the only human attribute which applies solely to the worldly in-between space by which men are mutually related, combine in the act of foundation by virtue of the making and the keeping of promises, which, in the realm of politics, may well be the highest human faculty.

This concise passage powerfully captures Arendt’s political thought: the creation of a human world through the capacity of men to make and keep promises among a plurality of humans- men, not Man- who mutually respects one another. Neither the elementary grammar of political action nor its more complicated syntax, whose rules determine the rise and fall of human power, is evident in totalitarianism. Its iron bond of terror destroys the plurality of men and designates man the One, Stalin, who acts and rules as though he himself incarnates History and executes its mandate. It is interesting to quote Jaspers’s reaction to The Origins of Totalitarianism:[8]