Hannah Arendt
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" >, I don't know who I am</h1>
In November 1972, an academic conference on Arendt was held at the Canadian Society for the Study of Social and Political Thought in Toronto, Canada, at which Arendt was asked, "What are you?" Are you a conservative? Are you a liberal? Where do you stand in the contemporary framework of possibilities?" Arendt's answer was that she didn't know. She really didn't know, and never knew. She thought she had never occupied such a position. The left sees her as a conservative, and the conservative thinks she's a leftist or an outsider or God knows what it is. Arendt said she wasn't interested. She does not believe that the real problems of the 20th century can be clarified in this way.
However, for those who have become accustomed to ideology or Cold War mentality, it is inconceivable that political thinkers who do not belong to any one faction are inconceivable. Controlling people's "no/is" way of thinking makes Arendt for a long time an alternative that can't be "hated" or labeled, a completely marginal person whose thoughts are either misunderstood or considered unworthy. Isaiah Berlin, for example, in a conversation with an Iranian philosopher, dismissively stated that he did not think are are of any point of view, and that he had found any of her writings that aroused interest, thought, or inspired people. Her views are just a series of metaphysical free associations. She jumps from sentence to sentence, without any logical connection, nor rational or imaginary connection. He also quoted the Jewish scholar Solem as saying that no cultivated and serious thinker could tolerate her.
This is, of course, an extreme example. There must be more people who know and like Arendt than people who know and like Solem; a man with a little academic acumen would think of Arendt as an original thinker, while Berlin is not. In fact, interest in Arendt, one of the most original and great political thinkers of the twentieth century, has been rising steadily for nearly a decade or two, and is gaining so much recognition that some believe she is no longer marginal. In fact, whether a thinker is marginal or not does not necessarily depend on his popularity; whether he is marginalized or not depends on whether he can be included or integrated into the mainstream, and if he does not enter the (main) stream, he will inevitably be misunderstood repeatedly; because what does not enter the (main) stream is indeed incomprehensible with the habitual thinking. Arendt's creative and visionary ideas made her presence unavoidable to any man with a brain; and the bankruptcy of mainstream ideology forced people to find new sources of thought, which are objective reasons for Arendt's rising status; but the growing interest in Arendt is not directly proportional to the growth of her understanding. Arendt claims to be most interested in understanding, but she has struggled to get a real understanding, which cannot but be said to be a pity. This also determines that she is still just a marginal person.
Arendt's difficulty in understanding, first and foremost, was because people couldn't categorize her. After a century of ideological antagonisms and struggles, it is difficult to identify a thinker without a certain doctrine. But none of the current doctrines seemed appropriate to Arendt. Her parents were both socialists, and her beloved second husband, Heinrich Blücher, was a member of the Spartan League led by Luxemburg and Liebknecht in his youth, a staunch socialist, an early leader of the KPD. But Arendt himself was never a socialist, and he was never a socialist. Although she almost completely rejected capitalism, she did not embrace social justice because of it. She had great respect for Marx, but she did not take his ideas seriously.
According to the logic of some people, if you do not approve of social justice, oppose totalitarianism, and criticize Marx, you must be liberal. But Arendt, like she was never a socialist, was never a liberal. She also openly stated that she "never believed in liberalism." Her disdain for liberalism is also evident in the fact that her extensive writings rarely discuss the views of liberal thinkers. Her critique and attack of totalitarianism did not lead her to liberalism; on the contrary, she did not believe that the system espoused by liberalism had nothing to do with totalitarianism. Her experience of McCarthy's America reinforced this belief.
On the face of it, Arendt seems to be hellish, and likes to go back to the source of the Western tradition in her discussions, but she is not a conservative. She never believed that we could restore tradition, nor did she think it was meaningful or necessary. Instead, she argues that every generation should re-recognize tradition. She spoke of Greece or Rome in no way to restore the concepts and categories of tradition, but to reconstruct the meaning of the past outside the framework of tradition. Only by saving the past in this way can we restore the meaning of our lives and see clearly the conditions in which we live today. On issues of tradition and history, she was deeply influenced by Benjamin. Although traditions have been broken and people are destined to live in the ruins of the times, the process of decay is also a process of crystallization. People should dive into the depths of the sea like people who dive into the sea and bring out the pearls and corals that have survived the vicissitudes of the sea and still survive in the form of crystals. Not for the past, but for the present and the future. She always remembered Tocqueville's famous quote: "When the past no longer illuminates the future, the human heart will linger in darkness." "Saving from the past what is worth preserving is not to preserve for the sake of preservation, but to rediscover the past and give it meaning today." Arendt never saw the past as a way out or a prescription for today. Instead, she agrees with her teacher Heidegger's deconstructive hermeneutics, and does not hesitate to be violent to tradition, digging deeper into (emptying) tradition in order to find its "positive possibilities." Arendt is not to restore tradition, but to transcend tradition.
Perhaps the best hat for Arendt's ideas is republicanism, as many people think. Republicanism can be divided into two types: classical republicanism and modern republicanism. Classical republicanism emphasizes the virtue of man, emphasizes the unity of all people, and the public interest above all else. But Arendt denied the role of virtue in politics, which in her view was only related to private conduct and should not have a place in public affairs. Although Arendt also emphasizes the public interest, the premise is the diversity of people, and only under the premise of recognizing the diversity of people will the emphasis on the public interest not become an excuse for totalitarian politics. Modern republicanism no longer emphasizes human virtue, but recognizes the dark side of human nature, thus focusing on institutional design and power checks and balances. But Arendt wasn't very interested, and she was concerned about how to always have a public space where different people could freely discuss. Modern republicanism invokes the idea of popular sovereignty to justify representative democracy, but Arendt never believed that under representative democracy people can enjoy true democracy and freedom, rather than the monopoly of the minority or the tyranny of the majority. The democracy in her mind can only be direct democracy.
<h1 class = "pgc-h-arrow-right" > second, the independent spirit of marginalized people</h1>
In today's era when political thinking is still supreme, Arendt seems destined to be a marginal man with nowhere to settle. In fact, Arendt herself did not care about her marginal position at all, on the contrary, she seemed to deliberately maintain this marginality. In a letter to her former teacher, Jaspers, she said she increasingly felt that only people on the margins of society could survive with dignity. She openly said she did not love any people, any group; she did not love the Germans, nor the French or the Americans. Not only did she not want to be placed in any group, but she did not even recognize her innate identity, Jews and Germans, at first. She was First and Foremost Hannah. Arendt, and then the Germans and the Jews. Her Jewish roots prevented her from identifying herself as German, and although she did not speak Hebrew, she loved German. She did not initially feel inferior, although anti-Semitic sentiment always prevailed in Eastern Europe. But when the Nazis began to persecute the Jews, she not only recognized herself as a Jew, but also actively participated in the Zionist movement. In her own words, it was: "If a man is attacked as a Jew, he must defend himself as a Jew." Not as a German, not as a citizen of the world, not as a holder of human rights, or whatever. ”
In discussing Jewish identity, Arendt proposed the concepts of "pariah" and "parvenu." In her view, the Jew had both options when he was seen as an outsider by the mainstream society in which he lived. One is to become inflamed and cling to the trend, striving to move closer to the mainstream society and striving to be assimilated; striving to climb up, striving to be absorbed by the mainstream society and becoming one of them. Worldly success is their only pursuit, and the small successes that have been painstakingly obtained will make them forget; any slight failure will make them feel that the sun and the moon are lost. Intellectuals compromise because they care too much about being respected and accepted, and want to "have an impact." She had always been dismissive of Adorno, not only by disagreeing with the adoption of her first husband, Günter Stern's thesis on his professorship, but also because after the Nazis came to power, he also tried to reconcile with the Nazi tyranny by changing the Jewish father's surname to The Italian mother's surname Adorno, as an "exceptional Jew".
And the Untouchables, especially the "Self-Conscious Untouchables," are inherently rebels, and she writes in her essay "The Jews as Untouchables: A Hidden Tradition," that the Conscious Untouchables "are the brave characters who try to make the emancipation of the Jews what it really is—not to imitate non-Jews or to have the opportunity to play vassals, but to become human classes." The self-conscious pariah is destined to rebel and isolate, and he does not care about the recognition of others or the jealousy that "everyone in the world wants to kill." In Arendt's view, Rosa Luxemburg is such a self-conscious pariah. She can tolerate obscurity and loneliness, but she cannot tolerate the injustice of the world. She consciously lives with the oppressed and exploited in a community of interests. In fact, Arendt himself has many similarities with Luxemburg: they are all Eastern European Jews, independent thinkers, desperate to express their true views, which are often unorthodox. They all love life extremely much and value personal and public freedom above all else. Their personalities and their minds are equally charismatic.
The "conscious untouchables" do not consciously identify with a group, but consciously practice freedom. At a time of persecution for the Jews, Arendt identified with the Jewish community without hesitation. But that didn't make her lose her mind about the Jews. Instead, she insisted on her own sober observation and judgment, even at the expense of making enemies of the Entire Jewish community. The years-long debate surrounding her book Aikman in Jerusalem is a testament to that. Ekman was the notorious mastermind and executor of the "Final Settlement" or "Holocaust," through whom he killed five or six million Jews, according to witnesses. After the war he fled to Argentina to hide, where in 1960 Israeli agents captured him and brought him back to Israel for trial. Upon learning of this, Arendt asked The New Yorker to travel to Jerusalem as a special correspondent to cover the highly anticipated trial. The New Yorker magazine immediately granted her request. But Arendt's series of reports is not simply a documentary, but a deep reflection of a first-rate political thinker on a horrific crime unprecedented in human history. These reflections were so unusual, so unexpected, so earth-shattering, that Arendt became the enemy of the Jews almost overnight.
Arendt believed that the purpose of the trial should be to show justice, not anything else. But this trial showed nothing more than that: pain, cowardice, betrayal, shame, and perhaps especially revenge. The justice of the trial has a terrible basis for retribution from the outset. Therefore, we can consider it barbaric. Second, the concept of justice is rooted in natural law, which requires man to be punished for undermining the moral order itself. Nevertheless, justice itself should be a universal standard. Ekman should have been tried for his crimes against humanity, not against the Jews. ”
The disgust of many people is derived from why this distinction is proposed? The nazis' crimes were so great that Eckman's complicity in them, large and small, was well understood, and why not let the trial itself be a symbolic event? Why ask abstract questions like that Ekman should be judged for crimes against humanity, not against Jews? This involves the question of one's self-identity and conception of the world. There has always been a tension of varying degrees and inexplicable degrees between local identities and universal human standards. The Jewish people, in particular, have a cultural and historical encounter that has led it to focus on local identity. Arendt, on the other hand, rejected any racial or local identity, though she respected the Jewish cry for revenge. She despises liberal nonsense, which obscures political or local motives by talking about the "rule of law." She does not focus on the victim, but on the act itself. In her opinion, Ekman is just an "ordinary person", neither a "depraved man nor a sadist", but only "extremely and horribly normal". But how an ordinary person could commit such a heinous crime is the question that Arendt wants to pursue.
Arendt also noted that the Israelites had tried to judge Ekman not as a person, but as a symbol. Before the trial, Israeli Prime Minister Ben-Gurion said: "It is not an individual who is on trial in the dock, not just the Nazi regime, but anti-Semitism that runs through history." Arendt keenly identified several motives hidden behind this end: to show the world the fate of the Jews, to capture the conscience of the nations of the world as a means of defending the State of Israel; to show the Jews in the diaspora around the world the misery of living as a minority; and to show the people of Israel the effectiveness of Zionism in restoring Jewish heroism. These motives are clearly motivated by considerations for the survival of the Israeli State and have nothing to do with justice. It was this incrimination against the Israeli government that provoked a storm of israeli anger.
And that's not all, Arendt also holds Jewish leaders accountable in wartime. Instead of leading the Jews in their rebellion, they went along with the Nazis in completing the "final solution" to their crimes. Without their cooperation and cooperation, such a huge evil plan could not be completed. This amounts to pouring another barrel of gasoline over the anger of Israelis and Jews all over the world. The German Jewish Association immediately publicly "declared war" on her. Friends over the years have cut off contact with her. The accusations from all over the world are overwhelming. Arendt was accused of being "an anti-Semite, a nazi supporter and Ekman's shameless apologist." But Arendt was not intimidated, and she always insisted on her views.
Like many of her books, Arendt often makes false statements about factual descriptions, but we cannot demand thinkers like her with a positivist eye. In her case, facts, like Weber's "ideal type," are more of an instrument of discourse than a proof of experience. That's why the debate surrounding the Ekman Trial has long since dissipated, but Ekman in Jerusalem still has a large readership. In it, people not only share Arendt's profound thoughts, but also admire her amazing courage. As a Jew, it takes astonishing courage to say that Ekman is an ordinary man who committed crimes against humanity under a totalitarian system and to give a truthful description of his performance in court; it takes a double courage to expose other motives hidden by the Israeli government under the demands of justice; and it takes three times more courage to dare to question the responsibility of Jewish leaders for Nazi crimes. And this courage comes from the desperate pursuit of truth. Susan Sontag once said, "If I had to choose between truth and justice — and of course it was better not to choose — I would choose truth." Arendt seemed to be the same way. Behind this courage is a truly independent personality and ideological character. This kind of character is rare in today's academic fashion, which is one of the reasons why Arendt is difficult to understand.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > three, in front of her "Martin", she is always Hannah Arendt</h1>
Arendt's independent intellectual character is also well represented in her relationship with her teacher and lover Heidegger. Arendt's feelings for Heidegger are complex and, by and large, can be summed up in the words "love and hate." On the one hand, she did always love the teacher she somehow called a "pirate", whether it was when she was forced to leave Marburg for Heidelberg in 1926 to join Jaspers, or when the two reunited after 17 years apart, her love for Heidegger was always "like the first day", although she had two marriages and some other love affairs during the period. Even the "great love" of her second husband could not shake her love for Heidegger. Although Arendt likes to use the image of a "strange girl" in one of Schiller's poems, she is not a naïve girl. Strong feelings did not make her lose her mind, and she never had a high opinion of Heidegger's personal moral character, and even said to her other great teacher, Jaspers, that Heidegger was always lying. Heidegger's "loss of temperance" during the Nazi period made her even more distressed. But none of this could change her love for Heidegger.
Could it be that Arendt was really obsessed, or, as one American scholar thought, had been enchanted by Heidegger, the "wizard", and could not extricate himself? Of course not. The relationship between Arendt and Heidegger is, in addition to the private affairs of men and women, there is also a close relationship of thought. Arendt had sufficient understanding and appreciation for Heidegger's philosophical genius and the meaning of his philosophy, and her own thought was greatly influenced by Heidegger's thought. On the occasion of the publication of the German edition of her Condition of Man, she wrote to Heidegger: "It arose in the days when Marburg, and in any case all this is attributed to you. Anyone who has read that book and knows anything about Heidegger's philosophy will not think that Arendt is just a scene. In fact, she had intended to dedicate the title to Heidegger. Although she did not do so later, she wrote her heartfelt words on a note: "The title of this book is empty. How shall I give it to you, the man I trust, I am loyal to him, and I am not loyal to him. Both are for love. It is true that Arendt never betrayed his love for Heidegger, but she was critical of Heidegger's thoughts and actions. In a note to her article "What is the Philosophy of Survival", she refers to Heidegger's attitude toward Husserl when he was president of the University of Freiburg, and even says that Heidegger is a "potential killer". This is probably what she means by "infidelity" to Heidegger, not that she also loved others. Her love for Heidegger was irreplaceable by any other lover of hers.
However, under the pen of Polish-American Elzbieta Ettinger, the maverick Arendt became a "little woman" who completely lost her self-judgment and devoted herself to Heidegger. According to his view, Arendt became Heidegger's agent in the United States after World War II, either busy translating and publishing his works or helping him wash away that ugly history and restore his reputation as much as possible. The American scholar Richard Wolin is even worse. He published an article in the American magazine New Republic that there is a hidden similarity between Arendt's use of "mediocrity" in "Ekman in Jerusalem" to excuse Ekman and her washing of Heidegger in the "Heidegger 80th Birthday" article. In his view, Arendt was at best a "left-wing Heideggerian," a thinker as hostile to democracy and constitutional government as her teacher.
However, malicious slander out of prejudice does not change the ironclad facts. Although Arendt was deeply influenced by Heidegger, he was not an obedient student, let alone a small woman who was obedient. Her independent personality and intellectual character are also manifested in her unusual relationship with Heidegger, and her feelings never affect her judgment, although sometimes she overdoses them. "What is the Philosophy of Survival" is a critical article that is somewhat extreme due to the mixture of personal feelings, but it can also be seen that Arendt's philosophy is not only critical, but also fundamentally divided. Even in this not-so-extreme essay, Arendt rightly points out that although scholars like Heidegger and Karl Schmidt were bent on contributing their ideas to the Nazis and vainly wanted to become nazi philosophical kings, the Nazis did not need their ideas, because the Nazis had their own ideas. The Nazis simply wanted to make their racial theories "scientific." What the Nazis needed were technologists with technology and no ideas at all. People like Heidegger were of little use to the Nazis. Of course, this does not excuse Heidegger. Heidegger's moral and political folly is unquestionable.
Unlike Arendt's 1954 lecture at the American Political Science Institute, "Political Concerns in Recent European Philosophy," what is the philosophy of survival focuses primarily on philosophy, and his critique of Heidegger also focuses on his early philosophy, his foundational existential ideas. Arendt argues that Heidegger's fundamental existentialism remains a philosophy of subjectivity that allows man to occupy the place previously occupied by God by nihilizing existence. Man is reduced to his mode of existence or his function in the world. But the basic existentialism "does not arise from the spontaneity of man, Kant provisionally defines as freedom, human dignity, and rational human character." That is to say, fundamental existentialism denies man's freedom and spontaneity, and only in this way can he change from an ontological self to a living or phenomenological self. Moreover, this phenomenological self is also an isolated self isolated from the world, with no contact with others. Arendt's critique is not unreasonable, but it is not entirely impartial. Arendt himself admitted that "Heidegger's philosophy is, first and foremost, absolutely and uncompromisingly the philosophy of this life." How can such a philosophy of this life be based on a self without a world? How does Arendt explain Heidegger's existence and coexistence with others as structural features of this being?
Arendt was not unaware of her teacher's true thoughts, and her exaggeration of the subjectivist element of Heidegger's fundamental existentialism was probably due to political rather than philosophical considerations. The main point of her total critique here is to point out that Heidegger, by his phenomenology of the self, that is, after hollowing out, makes man truly alienated from his own world, much less concerned with the actual public affairs. Heidegger's political stupidity, when associated with this. Alienation from the real world, seeing everyday life as unreal makes it impossible for him to have a correct judgment about realpolitik. But in any case, Arendt's critique of Heidegger's philosophy in What is the Philosophy of Survival is simplistic and extreme, although her distance from Heidegger's thought is unquestionable.
In his lecture "Political Concerns in Recent European Thought," Arendt was less extreme of Heidegger's philosophy. She begins by affirming that Heidegger broke through the bystander tradition of Western philosophy (i.e., seeing man or subject as a bystander of existence or truth) by radicalizing Hegel's conception of historical majesty, making it possible for philosophical thought to redirect itself to the political world. She argues that the fact that philosophers no longer think of themselves as wise men at the hands of wisdom allows one to re-examine the entire political sphere in the light of man's basic experience in the political sphere. Still, Heidegger himself did not get to this point. On the contrary, his phenomenological descriptions of the das Mann and the public (offentlichkeit) reproduce precisely the hostility of ancient philosophers to the city-state. Arendt did not completely reject Heidegger's existentialist description of this existence, but Heidegger completely ignored "the core of politics— the man who acts." Thus, Heidegger's concept of historicity prepares well for the understanding of history, but does not lay the groundwork for a new philosophy of history. Heidegger's philosophy was sensitive to the general tendencies of the times, but forgot the fundamental question of political science: "What is politics?" Who are the people who are the political beings concerned? What is freedom? But Arendt no longer considered Heidegger's philosophy to be subjectivist. Rather, she argues, Heidegger's analysis of this structure of existence completely subverts the Cartesian prejudice against a subject who is completely detached from the world and others. Arendt's political theory of cosmopolitanism and diversity could only be developed under this condition.
The Condition of Man is one of Arendt's most obvious works of Heidegger's influences; but in this work her disagreements with Heidegger are equally evident. In her diagnosis of modernity, she basically accepted Heidegger's thinking. But she wasn't just diagnosed. Although Heidegger opened the way for a more secular conception of freedom, there remained no place in the public sphere, and man's daily conversation was merely a "Gerede" (Gerede) of authenticity. But Arendt attaches great importance to public opinion and public conversation, believing that they provide space for public activity. She was not as interested in the "fate of existence" as Heidegger, she was only concerned with specific experiences and events. Heidegger's deconstructive analysis of the Western intellectual tradition allowed her to see through the ills of the Western political tradition, but Heidegger himself did not push his deconstruction into the realm of modern politics. On the contrary, the late Heidegger diagnosis of the disease of modernity led him towards "willless will". Arendt, on the other hand, had to start over by emphasizing the importance of political action, moral judgment, and human freedom. For Heidegger, the real action is the thought; for Arendt, the action is precisely not the thought. Even in Arendt's most Heideggerian work, the difference between her and Heidegger's ideas is evident.
To the likes of Edinger and Walling, Arendt's essay "Heidegger's 80th Birthday" is a testament to her attempt to wash away her teacher's past. Walling argues that Arendt defended her teacher by denying that there was an essential relationship between Heidegger's ideas and his support for the Nazis. Arendt did disagree with Adorno's Heidegger philosophy as outright fascist. Her argument in this article that "Heidegger corrected his own mistakes faster and more thoroughly than those who later sat on his trial" and other points may be arguable, but this article is by no means a defense for Heidegger. In this birthday celebration, Arendt, on the one hand, highly praises Heidegger's philosophical achievements, and on the other hand, sharply points out the fundamental problems of Heidegger's philosophy. Heidegger's problem is that he wants to cling to a dwelling place of thought detached from the world, that the mind itself is concerned only with "things that are not present," and that the so-called "withdrawal of existence" is nothing more than the idea of creating a "place of emptiness" withdrawn from the world. However, as soon as worldly events pull the thinker back from his place of silence back into the realm of human affairs, he is immediately disoriented. This is how terrible errors in political judgment arise.
In the unfinished Life of the Spirit, Arendt devotes an entire chapter to heidegger's critique. The main point remains that Heidegger focuses only on what is not present, the existence of withdrawal, and is not interested in everyday reality. In The Life of the Spirit, Arendt also provides an image of Socrates in contrast to Heidegger. Socrates, who called himself the "spiritual midwife," was also concerned with thoughts, but he was always in the squares of Athens, not in the emptiness of the world. His thinking is to cultivate people's daily thinking ability to reflect on and dissolve conventional moral behaviors and socially prescribed rules of conduct, that is, to better use their judgment and listen to the voice of conscience. Socrates' thought is closely related to the phenomenal world, the public world of diverse human beings. Heidegger's thoughts are just the opposite. Socrates' thought is the prelude to judgment, while Heidegger's thought leads to the death of judgment. Heidegger's political failure is not unrelated to his lack of judgment ideologically.
Arendt was independent and sober until the end, and love did not obscure her sense of justice and right and wrong, nor did it blur her sanity. In front of her "Martin", as in front of anyone, she was always Hannah Arendt, a person who "did not have to think", a person who loved both life and truth, a person who was desperate to be herself. Neither the center nor the periphery matters to Arendt, what matters is understanding and judgment: understanding the world and making our judgments.
The author | Zhang Rulun
Professor distinguished professor of the Department of Philosophy of Fudan University, Dean of the Institute of Humanities and Sciences of ShanghaiTech University