Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) writes the following: 'It seems as
if certain people are so exposed in their own lives (and only their lives, not
as persons!), that they become, as it were, junction points and concrete
objectifications of life.'
These lines anticipate her own fate, when she was
only twenty-four years old. She had already met and loved Heidegger, a
fascinating presence throughout her whole life, and had defended her doctoral
thesis, The Concept of Love in Saint Augustine,2 under the direction of Karl
Jaspers, to whom she is confiding here. From the outset, she knew herself to be
'exposed/ to the point of being fixed as 'a junction and objectification of
life.' Having thought about becoming a
theologian, then devoting herself to studying and 'dismantling' metaphysics, life
came instead to be the essential domain of the young philosopher's thought. In
the first instance, simply life itself: since Hannah Arendt, in order to
survive, had to leave Germany in 1933, thus escaping the Shoah by choosing
exile. She fled across a ravaged Europe, stayed in Paris at first, and finally
left for New York in 1941, where she obtained American citizenship ten years later.
She became a political commentator and produced a major study on the history of
anti-Semitism and the origins of totalitarianism, before triumphantly coming
back to her fundamental meditation on the life of the mind.
Caught up from the
outset by this passion in which life and thought are one and the same, her
varied yet profoundly coherent intellectual odyssey never ceased to place life -
in and of itself, and as a concept to be elucidated - at the centre. For, far
from being a 'professional thinker,' Hannah Arendt puts her thought into action
in her Hannah Arendt: Life Is a Narrative her life: in this specifically
Arendtian trait, we might be tempted also to see something unique to women,
since 'repression' (in the Freudian sense) is said to be 'problematic' for
women and thus they are prevented from isolating themselves in the obsessive
fortresses of pure thought, where men compete so successfully, and are anchored
instead in the reality of their bodies and in relationships with others.
But
even more, throughout her writings, the theme of life guides her thought as she
discusses political history and metaphysics, to the point that in the course of
its multiple occurrences, this theme becomes ever more refined and sharpened.
It subtends Arendt's thought when she establishes, with great intellectual
courage (and meeting such resistance!), that Nazism and Stalinism are two faces
of one and the same horror, totalitarianism, because they converge in the same
denial of human life. Her grave tone, in which anger is tinged with irony, betrays
a concern that sometimes reaches apocalyptic accents, as when Arendt's
diagnosis declares that a 'radical evil' resides in the 'perverse will,' in the
Kantian sense, to render 'men superfluous': in other words, the totalitarian
man, both past and latent, destroys human life after having abolished the
meaning of all lives, including his own. Even worse, this 'superfluity' of
human life, whose presence Arendt notes with emphasis in the rise of
imperialism, does not disappear - on the contrary - in modern democracies that
are dominated by automation: ... we may say that radical evil has emerged in
connection with a system in which all men have become equally superfluous.
The manipulators of this system believe in their own
superfluousness as much as in that of all the others, and the totalitarian
murderers are all the more dangerous because they do not care if they
themselves are alive or dead, if they ever lived or never were born. The danger
of the corpse factories and holes of oblivion is that today, with populations
and homelessness everywhere on the increase, masses of people are continuously
rendered superfluous if we continue to think of our world in utilitarian terms.
Political, social, and economic events everywhere are in a silent conspiracy
with totalitarian instruments devised for making men superfluous. In the face
of this threat, Arendt constructs a vehement defence of life in The Human
Condition.
At the opposite extreme to life that is just routinely reproduced in
the spirit of the vitalist determination of consumerism and modern technology's
commitment to the Vital process/ Arendt raises a hymn to the uniqueness of each
and any birth that might inaugurate what she does not hesitate to call 'the
miracle of life': The miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs,
from its normal, 'natural' ruin is ultimately the fact of natality, in which
the faculty of action is ontologically rooted. It is, in other words, the birth
of new men and the new beginning, the action they are capable of by virtue of
being born. Only the full experience of this capacity can bestow upon human
affairs faith and hope, those two essential characteristics of human existence which
Creek antiquity ignored altogether ... It is this faith Hannah Arendt: Life
Is a Narrative in and hope for the world that found perhaps its most glorious
and most succinct expression in the few words with which the Gospels announced
their 'glad tidings': 'A child has been born unto us.' Today, it is rather
difficult for us to accept that life, a value sacred to Christian and
post-Christian democracies, is the recent product of an historical evolution,
and to envisage the possibility of its being threatened.
It is, precisely, the
inquiry into this fundamental value, into the way it has been constructed
within Christian eschatology, and into the dangers it faces in the modern world
that can be traced throughout Arendt's work - from her 'dissertation' on Saint
Augustine to the unfinished manuscript on the capacity to judge - and perhaps,
indeed, this very inquiry structures, in its own secret way, her entire oeuvre.
A fervent admirer of the 'narrated life/ of bios-graphie, Hannah Arendt
nonetheless wrote neither an autobiography nor any novels. Just one text from
her youth, Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess,* comes close to that kind of
narration to which this philosopher and student of politics granted, along with
Aristotle, the privileged status of giving the finishing touches to life,
according to the dignity of 'action/ The work was finished in 1933, after the thesis
on Saint Augustine and before Arendt left Berlin, that same year, all except,
that is, the last two chapters, which were added later, in 1938. It was not
published until 1958. Relying on intellectual life, all the while criticizing
the metaphysical tradition that grants privileged status to the
contemplative life to the detriment of active life, Arendt sets out to assign
greater value, to 'valorize,' the active life, arguing that activity means
life.
Nonetheless, The Human Condition also leads her to an unprecedented rejection
of the notion of 'life' as the nihilistic value par excellence. Vitalist
activism - which brings homo faber to an apotheosis, but which also imprisons
him within the robotization of a kind of knowledge that 'calculates' without
'thinking' - is strongly denounced. Thus, echoing Augustine's thoughts on the
'negligible' life, a life not engaged in beate vivere and summum esse, Arendt vituperates
against a consumerism that swallows up human life, when that life has lost
sight of what is lasting. She denounces the cult of 'individual life/ and
even more the 'life of the species' which tries to impose itself as the supreme
modern good, but without having recourse to any aspiration to immortality. The
vital 'process' replaces the search for immortality: this notion is raised up
as a fundamental nihilistic value. In the course of this long drawn-out
paradigmatic change (from immortality to vital process) grounded in technology and
science, Arendt takes a stab in particular at Marx, who 'naturalizes' man by
stipulating that 'the process of thought is itself a natural process.' This is
done without sparing the determination of scientists who ensure the triumph of
animal laborans behind the mask of a sacralizing of life in and of itself,
devoid of any sacred dynamic. In opposition to those currents of thought,
Arendt offers a life that is 'specifically human': the expression designates
the 'moment between birth and death/ as long as it can be represented by a
narrative, and shared Hannah Arendt: Life Is a Narrative with other men. This
is a superb recasting of her earlier reading of Augustine and is supported by
her later political experience as a woman-philosopher. It is enunciated as
follows: The chief characteristic of this specifically human life, whose
appearance and disappearance constitute worldly events, is that it is itself
always full of events which ultimately can be told as a story, establish a
biography; it is of this life, bios as distinguished from mere zoe, that
Aristotle said that it 'somehow is a kind of praxis.' Thus, the possibility
of representing birth and death, to conceive of them in time and to explain
them to others - that is, the possibility of narrating - grounds human life in what
is specific to it, in what is non-animal about it, nonphysiological.
While
implicitly evoking Nietzsche, who sees 'the will to power' as a normal desire
in life, and also invoking implicitly Heidegger, who steers Nietzsche's biologism
toward the 'serenity' of poetic expression, Arendt rehabilitates the praxis of
the narrative. Challenging the remoteness of the poetic work, only action as
narration, and narration as action, can fulfil life in terms of what is
'specifically human' about it. This concept, whose Aristotelian provenance is
obvious, links the destinies of life, narrative, and politics: narrative
conditions the duration and the immortality of the work of art; but it also accompanies,
as historical narrative, the life of the polls, making it a political life, in
the best sense of the word (one that, ever since the Greeks, has been under
threat).
Finally, Hannah Arendt's thought moves on to a third stage: without being abandoned, her meditation on the vita activa recedes into
the implicit, to become anchored at the heart of her thinking of 'the life of
the mind/a thinking that Arendt clarifies by dismantling its three components:
thought, will, and judgment. But this work had already begun in The Human
Condition. Although it is true that one cannot with impunity overturn the
hierarchy of human activities (work, oeuvre, action; vita activa/ vita
contemplativa), and also true that such an overturning simultaneously threatens
thought and life by destroying both, it is of the utmost urgency to save life
by coming back to the ongoing exploration of the various forms it takes, its
manner of becoming other, and the complex figures that result from all of this.
Having inherited the interlacing of life and thought that is part of Christian eschatology,
and of philosophy too, Arendt makes History resonate with the deconstruction of
the Mind, in order to show that life is not a 'value' in and of itself, as is believed
by humanist ideologies. Life does not fulfil itself unless it never ceases to
inquire into both meaning and action: 'the revelatory character of action as
well as the ability to produce stories and become historical, which together
form the very source from which meaningfulness springs into and illuminates
human existence.'
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