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Article Excerpt
EY-B: WHEN JEROME KOHN AND I FIRST MET HER--AND EACH OTHER--IN A spring and summer 1968 seminar at the New School, Hannah Arendt was 62, smoking away nervously and talking with that astonishing intensity and energy of thought. During the "cascade of events" (to use one of her phrases) of that spring--Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination, student riots in Paris, the occupation of Columbia University (and a less dramatic sit-in at the New School itself), Robert Kennedy's assassination, the violence at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia--there was certainly a great deal for her to talk about in our seminar, which had the title "Political Experience in the Twentieth Century." The part of the twentieth century cascading by was never far from our minds as we focused in the course on the period through the Second World War and the midcentury totalitarianisms, about which she had, of course, written the discussion-setting work, The Origins of Totalitarianism.
We thought we would begin this conversation (1) by talking about that course, "Political Experience in the Twentieth Century," as an introduction to Hannah Arendt's way of thinking since it is crucial to have some feeling for her way of thinking in order to grasp what she had to say about our conference theme, truth and lying and the media. This was certainly not a class like any other in the philosophy department; it was worldly--about and for the world. The texts for the seminar reflected her remarkably wide reading and were quite a mix--everything from novels to drama to history, all arranged to explore the experience of an imaginary person, born in 1890, who might have come into public life, into politics, at the beginning of the twentieth century, in the First World War. She was making, as it were, a biography of an imaginary person, although we always thought that there was a very specific referent in her husband Heinrich Bluecher, who had had political experiences close to the ones she was re-creating n her imagination. Bluecher, born in 1899, was a crucial decade younger than her imaginary subject--so he had missed serving in a war that left over 7 million of his countrymen dead, wounded, or missing (65 percent of the German forces), along with 9 million Russians, 6 million French, and more than 3 million from Great Britain and its empire. Altogether, from all over the world, 37 million soldiers dead, wounded, or missing. Her husband was not the "unknown soldier" Arendt conjured: a man who had slogged through years of horrendous--and quite senseless--trench warfare, experiencing for the first time in history aerial bombardments and chemical warfare. But Bluecher was familiar with the older brothers' common experience of complete disorientation, confusion, lostness, and he shared the common determination to change the world with a revolution, from the left (like all those inspired by the Bolsheviks) or from the right (like all those who would gather around he Nazi banner). His entry into politics came in the wake of the war, during the brief German Revolution of 1919, when the 20-yearold Bluecher associated himself with Rosa Luxemburg's faction of the German Social Democratic Party and the nascent network of councils or Rate that sprang up in the revolution, and he stayed active until Rosa Luxemburg was brutally assassinated and Germany headed off decisively toward the destruction of what little political life existed, a descent into violence and a culture of lying.
JK: Hannah Arendt's first words in the seminar were: "No theories! Forget all theories! We want to be confronted with direct experience, to relive this period vicariously." She then distinguished thinking, which she said would certainly be required of us, from encompassing our thoughts in theories, which she said would be difficult for us to resist. In other words, she was reviving the ancient Greek distinction between theoria and theoremata, between the activity of thinking and its outcome in "true" theorems. That distinction has long since collapsed; it runs against the grain of both philosophy and the natural and human sciences as they have been understood and taught for centuries. But for Arendt the activity of thinking issues not in truths of any kind but in a plurality of meanings, and that distinction was essential for her in comprehending experience, and all important in her teaching. In the seminar she assigned no philosophic or theoretical texts, but some historical writings and an array of novels by Faulkner, Hemingway, Malraux, Orwell, Sartre, and Solzhenitsyn, among others. When Joseph Heller's Catch-22 was discussed the author was present--he was a relative of one of the students--but he said scarcely a word and seemed intimidated by Arendt, which frustrated and disappointed her. We read a lot of poetry by Bertolt Brecht and W. B. Yeats; numerous biographies of Hitler and Stalin; and firsthand accounts of wartime experiences in Rene Char's Hypnos Waking (the richly paradoxical title of the journal he kept while fighting with the French Resistance), Glenn Gray's The Warriors, and T. E. Lawrence's The Mint. We read Tadeusz Borowski's This Way to the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, a collection of stories fashioned out of his experiences in Auschwitz, at least four narratives of the development of, and decision to use, the atomic bomb that incinerated the city and people of Hiroshima, and so forth and so on.
Arendt wanted us to experience for ourselves experiences that were not our own, to experience them not immediately but "vicariously," as she put it, mediated through the works we would be reading. She spoke of a way of reading fiction as well as nonfiction, which she distinguished from the more common one of being "swept away," of being "taken out of oneself" for as long as--but no longer than--one reads or daydreams of experiences different from one's own. She said she might have called the seminar "Exercises in Imagination," indicating that our success in this uncommon enterprise would depend on the most mysterious of our mental faculties. But by that she did not mean remembering what we have seen with our eyes or heard with our ears, nor recognizing what we have touched, tasted, or smelled--in all of which, to be sure, the imagination also plays a role. She meant, first, the ability of human beings to form images of things never given to their senses and, second, their submission of those images to the processes of thought. She made it very clear that she was not referring to the productive imagination ("Let no one become creative here!"), but to the capacity of the reproductive imagination to re-present, to make present what is absent via mediated images that then become the actual matter of thinking. Thinking your own thoughts, she said, is the condition of the possibility of vicarious experience. In the concept of experience this deep connection between the imagination and the activity of thinking is Kantian, and Arendt went on to speak directly of Kant. What he called an "enlarged mentality" is the capacity, in her words, "to make present in your own person" others than yourself. There is a lot of talk today about empathy, but that notion was utterly alien to Arendt. She did not believe that we could or should feel or think what another person feels or thinks, but that we can and must, if we are to experience events at which we were not present, imagine what those who were present, through the medium of their words, felt and thought. Only then can we think for ourselves in circumstances and from points of view that are not our own. Only then can we begin to comprehend the meaning of a common world, and insofar as the common world of 1968 was already becoming less limited by national boundaries, the need for an increasingly "enlarged mentality" was reflected in the diversity of Arendt's curriculum.
We were asked by our hosts at Goethe-Institut to consider Hannah Arendt as a public figure. There are different ways that can be done, but right now I want to state that for me it was in her seminar room, which somehow she managed to turn into a miniature polis, a polity of equals, that this very private...
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