I have just completed one of my favorite teaching experiences ever, a semester of reading Hannah Arendt with about 20 students who were deeply committed to understanding her, debating her ideas critically, and living up to her expectations for integrity and rigor. On the first day, we watched a portion of her 1964 interview on German national television; and at the end of the semester, I think we agreed that she had cast a spell.
I have posted many short essays on Arendt here over the years.* For anyone who wants a taste of her distinctive thought, I could recommend this sentence from an article she published in The New Yorker on February 18, 1967:
The actual content of political life [is] the joy and the gratification that arise out of being in company with our peers, out of acting together and appearing in public, out of inserting ourselves into the world by word and deed, thus acquiring and sustaining our personal identity and beginning something entirely new.
This sentence contains several ideas that are characteristic of Arendt.
First, politics is intrinsically valuable. As she emphasizes a bit later in the paragraph, politics is not everything. However, it is a way of living well, of experiencing and earning joy and gratification. Almost everyone assumes that politics is a means to other ends–a necessary evil, or at least a necessary basis for justice, freedom, security, or other desirable goods. For Arendt, politics is a good.
But what is politics? Voting in a national election does not sound like what Arendt has in mind. For her, politics is being in company with peers–people who are equal and who can act together.
Arendt believes that individuals become peers when they can talk and act in a political forum whose rules and norms give them equal say. They need not have equal amounts of wealth, strength, or status to be equal in a fair political forum. My class debated this claim extensively, but it could be partly true, even if Arendt overstates it at times. Therefore, one reason that politics is good is that it enables equality. It makes us into peers.
Politics as acting-together also brings joy or gratification. This is because when we argue about what our group should do and commit to acting the way we have advocated, we make ourselves visible to others. And only by appearing before others and receiving a response do we know who we are as individuals. In this sense, appearing in public allows us to acquire a personal identity.
Bosses, dictators, and oligarchs fail to develop worthy identities because they never interact with peers. When they speak, everything they hear back from their subordinates is calculated and transactional. Only in the company of people who are free to agree or disagree do we learn what we are made of.
Finally, politics is about starting something new. A keyword for Arendt is “natality.” We are mortal creatures, which means not only that we must die–as many philosophers have emphasized–but also that we are born. Each human birth is a beginning of a story, and each new person changes the others’ stories.
About three weeks before Arendt published “Truth and Politics” in The New Yorker, I had turned one woman into a mother and one man into a father by being born. My story had just begun and had begun to change others’ stories. By acting together in this mortal world, we produce a legacy of “word and deed” that can outlast us.
For Arendt, “the world” is what people make by acting together. We are limited by nature, “by those things which men cannot change at will.” Failing to recognize stubborn facts prevents us from building a genuine world, within which “we are free to act and to change” (“Truth and Politics”). Science tells us what must be, and then politics allows us to make new things.
I suspect that Hannah Arendt’s ability to love the world was shaken by the Holocaust, from which she barely escaped. But the love came back. In 1955, she wrote to her former professor and lifelong friend Karl Jaspers, who was somewhat isolated at age 72, still living in German-speaking Europe as an anti-Nazi thinker with a Jewish wife. Arendt’s letter bubbles with enthusiasm for the books and ideas that she wants to share with him from her cosmopolitan life in New York. She writes:
Yes, I would like to bring the wide world to you this time. I’ve begun so late, really only in recent years, to truly love the world that I shall be able to do that now. Out of gratitude, I want to call my book on political theories ‘Amor Mundi.’ I want to write the chapters on work this winter, as a lecture series for Chicago University, which has invited me there in April.
This book was actually published as The Human Condition, and it represents the most comprehensive statement of her thought. Apparently, Arendt believed that it could have been entitled Amor Mundi: love of the world.
Another statement of that core idea came in her essay on “The Crisis in Education” (1955), which concludes with these sentences:
Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it and by the same token save it from that ruin which, except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and young, would be inevitable. And education, too, is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world.
*See also: living life as a story; how Hannah Arendt moved away from pure thinking; Hannah Arendt seminar; Hannah Arendt: “The problem wasn’t what our enemies did, but what our friends did”; Hannah Arendt: I’m Nothing but a Little Dot; Reading Arendt in Palo Alto; “Complaint,” by Hannah Arendt; Hannah Arendt and thinking from the perspective of an agent, etc.