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For the first time in SADHO history, we present something not written in the usual hilarious and eager-to-please house voice. Here you will find something refreshing and new. A voice of one crying in the Interwilds … and in the vulnerable first person. Here is the voice of Harpocrates, Lord of Silence, Babe in the Egg of Blue, guardian of the heart’s secret center, which is freedom in its most terrifying Meetup aspect: the taking on of full responsibility for a reading.

Hear the voice of the finite human heart, bound by the conditions of its existence: by labor and necessity, by a work-made world that must be built and maintained, by plurality among irreducibly distinct others, by natality as the power to begin, and by mortality as the limit that gives judgment its weight. Give ear to a fragile speech that arises only after silence has cleared away automatic discourse and ready-made systems—and that appears exposed to judgment before mortal, plural others.

Ladies and gents, after many years of circling Arendt as a monument at the Hannah Arendt Center, please welcome the decidedly non-monumental, fully answerable, fully human voice of our very own Jeff Glaza.

Introduction

Over the next two hours, somehow I will introduce you—or re-introduce you—to a thinker who was “Othered” and knew it, accepted that state of affairs, and resolved herself to understand the state of “otherness,” no doubt in hopes of making the world a better place to live in. I don’t maintain she completely succeeded, but she may well have been one of the few European intellectuals to really try. Her main asset in that endeavor was her vaunted fearlessness, often mistaken for arrogance; her main defect, perhaps, unshakeable loyalties to her “tribes”: the Jews, the intellectuals, the Europeans [and maybe more]. What she got right was the centrality of judging—not coincidentally the title of what was to be the capstone third volume of her “groundbreaking investigation on how we think.” What she got wrong was to address The Life of the Mind to academic philosophers, instead of the garden-variety thinking person who tends to offload the often arduous task to these curious servants. I will “remix” Arendt’s ideas so as to demonstrate what a little less “loyalty”—a not-so-loyal opposition—might have led her to. As I take her unfailing opposition to philosophical “systems” to heart, I believe that she would be intrigued, even pleased, with the result.

An Intellectual Biography

This talk is organized into the four “decades” of Arendt’s working life: roughly, the 1940s, 50s, 60s, and 70s. Each decade of her life exhibits a concrete form of “otherness”; each decade of her work illustrates specific aspects of her signature concepts, Action and Plurality; to an unusual degree, perhaps, her life and work affected each other, resulting in a liveliness in both that might have been hard to live down.

The 1940s includes everything from her habilitation on the socialite Jewess Rahel Varnhagen, her many articles compiled in The Jewish Writings, up to and including her breakthrough historical study, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). We glean from these her personal experience with being an outsider, mostly as a Jew in European society, until she had to flee first Germany and then France, as a stateless person, this period culminating in US citizenship. If, as Nietzsche posits, a philosopher’s life experiences inform their views, hers explain her firm commitments to freedom, representative democracy, and friendship.

The 1950s featured many difficult, incisive essays but we’ll focus on her most popular work, The Human Condition (1958), in which she discusses her signature concepts of Action and Plurality in depth, which depend on the controversial notion of a “public realm.” Her mediation of social relations through manufactured products—her slippery category of Work—might be useful (in the remix) in modeling social effects that operate “at a distance.” We do well to bear in mind the conditions under which this most theoretical work appeared—the Cold War of socialism vs. capitalism, the McCarthy hearings, the advent of busing—for these highlight the drawbacks of social embeddedness Arendt and her formerly-Communist husband faced. Once stateless, it stands to reason that one might be “othered” again.

The 1960s are pivotal: despite works such as On Revolution achieving new heights of relevance and clarity, Arendt will forever be associated for many with her most journalistic work, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). Had she sought to create a sensation? Or did she simply misjudge people’s reaction to her inclusion of testimony that Jewish leaders “cooperated” with Eichmann? Couldn’t she have foreseen that her picture of an unthinking Eichmann, incapable of moral reflection, would deeply offend people in search of a worthy villain? Add to this the anti-intellectual turn of the Sixties: Arendt was telling people precisely what they didn’t want to hear (such as that politicians are meant to lie), but it seems as though it was they who changed, not her (her silence on feminism might be seen as “blatant” nonconformity). Regardless, it was she who became “other” again—and not just “unfeeling” to the public, but even traitorous to many of her Jewish friends.

The 1970s began with the loss of her husband to a heart attack, and a turn inward that lasted until heart attacks killed her. Like any rockstar, she sometimes revived her greatest hits by applying them to current events (eg, the Pentagon Papers), but she also seemed to be trying to understand “what happened.” Life of the Mind, Volume 1—Thinking—supplies what might be a belated behind-the-scenes look at how her mind worked—or, it might be a record of how she was seeking to reinvent herself. To escape the pain of the Eichmann stigma, was she trying—by, say, mining Kant’s work for a political philosophy—to retreat into the safe, because worldless, domain of philosophy, or had that chapter become itself a challenge to her belief that the whole purpose of Denken was not to find Truth, but to create Meaning? The title of the second chapter of the Willing volume of Life of the Mind, returning to Saint Augustine, subject of her dissertation, seems indirectly to admit the latter: “I have become a question for myself”. If rockstars can reach new heights by plumbing their emotional depths, why can’t a political thinker after forty years of being reminded how close she was to social exile—for being a Jew [bound to raise eyebrows, as it did mine, but I think I meant the Jewish reverence for the Word in general, and promises in particular], for thinking that put her loyalties in question, for reporting events that raised doubts about the loyalty of Jews to one another, and perhaps even the fidelity of all to humanitarian ideals—why wouldn’t she fix her sights on “understanding,” in order to at least love the world for what it is?

Outline

  • Part 0 — Introduction. Intellectual biography.
  • Part 1 — Centrality of judgment. Origin of otherness. 1940s. Q&A.
  • Part 2 — The public realm. The social. Action, Work, Labor. 1950s. Q&A.
  • Part 3 — 1960s. Q&A.
  • Part 4 — 1970s. Thank yous. Q&A.

METHOD

Do as little or as much prep as you like. But please check out the truly massive trove of materials we’ve spent way to many hours assembling for the current episode:

Among them are two amazing Hanna Arendt videos, both of which are gripping and essence conveying. Here’s a link that will take you straight to those videos:

As always, summaries, notes, event chatlogs, episode transcripts, timelines, tables, observations, and downloadable PDFs from all our episodes can be found in THORR:

ABOUT PROFESSOR TAUBENECK

Professor Taubeneck is professor of German and Philosophy at UBC, first translator of Hegel’s Encyclopedia into English, and SADHO CΦO. Most impressively, he has also been wrestling with the core texts of 20-cent. phenomenology and existentialism for over 30 years, and has worked and collaborated with Gadamer, Derrida, and Rorty.

View all of our coming episodes here.

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