"The question, however, does not stop at the limits of our knowledge of things."
Karl Jaspers
There has never been a greater need to talk, and we have never talked less, in this time full of talking or, more modernly, information. We have overcrowded the language with a priori attitudes and significantly reduced the space for it to be what it is best suited to be - the conductor of our thoughts. In that small, remaining space, we are very lucky to be able to turn to people who have enriched the universal languages of noble and free thinking. Philosopher and political theoretician Hannah Arendt is most certainly one of them. Without it, the XNUMXth century cannot be well understood, but one gets the impression that at many points of our contemporary stumbling blocks in social and political life, the principles of her thinking are invoked for help. There are numerous essays on why you should read Hannah Arendt now. The one I'm writing was created under the influence of Hannah Arendt's new biography, which she summarized perfectly in two hundred pages Samantha Rose Hill, in a particularly beautiful edition Critical lives. An introductory biography (as defined by the author herself) to the life and work of Hannah Arendt, comprehensively focuses attention on the most important aspects of her work, which subtly immerses her in her life. Because Hannah Arendt is her work. In the hope that one day the book will be translated into one of our languages, with this text I want to highlight what seemed to me the most important in it for getting to know this extraordinary person, as well as what I think can inspire us to some new reflections on the times in which we live. .
Born in Hanover on October 14, 1906, Hannah Arendt grew up in Kant's the town of Königsberg (present-day Kaliningrad, Russia) in East Prussia, where her well-to-do, secular family of Russian-Jewish origin had lived for generations. She lost her father at an early age, and from an early age she spent time in his library, satisfying her, very early, conscious need for understanding. She became aware of her Jewishness and diversity outside, through the expressed anti-Semitism of other children towards her. It was not discussed in the house, except in her mother's message "If someone attacks you as a Jew, then you have to defend yourself as a Jew", which would later become one of the foundations of her way of political struggle. Her mother, who had a social-democratic orientation, took her to listen to speeches even as a little girl Rose Luxemburg. Hannah Arendt was 13 years old when Rosa Luxemburg was murdered. Her influence on Arenta's political thoughts and actions was of enormous importance.
The path from her father's library, reading Kant, Greek mythology and poetry led her to study philosophy in Marburg, where she met Martin Heidegger, one of the most important people in the history of philosophy, and in her life. Heidegger was then a married thirty-six-year-old professor of philosophy at the beginning of writing his most important work, Being and Time. Raised in a Catholic family, prepared for the role of a priest all his life, he turned to the path of philosophy for reasons similar to Hana's - to understand better. In setting up his philosophy, he wanted to re-examine being and the pre-theoretical conditions for thinking. Although years apart and somehow on the same path, love and a two-year secret relationship developed between Hana and Martin. They were an inspiration to each other for thinking and discovering themselves or the self, which is shown in relation to the other, until the moment when love became too much of a burden for both of them. Soon followed Heidegger's sympathies with the Nazis, his appointment as rector of the University of Freiburg and the signing of a decree banning the work of all professors of non-Aryan origin. With that signature, Heidegger banned the work of the great philosopher to Edmund Husserl, Heidegger's teacher and role model. Leaving the party in 1934 did not absolve him of complicity and responsibility. In her essay "Heidegger, the fox", Hannah Arendt brilliantly sketches the actions of an intellectual, trapped in the form of his thinking, from which, at least in terms of value, he himself will suffer. Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger did not speak for seventeen years.
Going to the University of Heidelberg to write her doctoral dissertation, Hannah Arendt met Karl Jaspers, psychiatrist and philosopher. Specialists in psychiatry today know him as someone who most beautifully explained and wrote about psychic functions in the capital work "Psychopathology", while philosophy students know him from the domain of phenomenology and philosophy of existence. Karl Jaspers will become one of the most important people in Arenta's life, and their friendship, which will endure all geographical and temporal boundaries, is one of the most beautiful and moving stories in the history of philosophy, but also in the history of friendship. Unlike Heidegger who was turned inward, Jaspers taught Hanna to look at the world through dialogue and pluralism. For Jaspers, the lectures were a conversation, not a mere communication of some facts and truths. For him, the conversation process is one of the main ways of learning. He was interested in language. That language that was large enough and open to the possibilities of human experience, requiring a heightened receptivity of those in conversation. Karl Jaspers believed that the reasons why man thinks, acts and makes choices in certain situations must be seen through active questioning of the world, and not through pure philosophical contemplation. The essence of Jaspers' teaching laid the foundation for Hannah's work. Her main concept of thinking - "two in one", dialogue with herself, will mark the source of her further creation.
Perhaps a little unusual, he chooses a Christian topic for his doctoral dissertation - "Love and St. Augustine". He approaches the subject existentially, stressing that the need to love the world, to enter into its self, is the only way to understand the world and create community. Man is realized through relationships with the world, and love must set these relationships in motion. The idea of love - "amor mundi", that is, love for the world, is a theme that Hannah Arendt will return to in the works "The Sources of Totalitarianism" and "Conditio humana". It is also a theme that will color her entire self.
Unlike many intellectuals of that time, Hana did not remain trapped between the walls of academic life. The early political impulse and instinct always kept her alert for political events, which for many were unimaginable, but for her they were not unexpected. An important detail in her understanding of the roots of anti-Semitism can be seen in the writing of Fr Rahel Varnhagen, the first Jewish intellectual at the beginning of the XNUMXth century who was friends with Goethe and other German romantics, and using her example to explain the needs of Jewish assimilation in German society. In that work, Arendt explains the concepts of parvenu or skorojevic who accept complete assimilation and pariah-outsiders, those who proudly wear their diversity and authenticity. Hana chose to be the latter. She remained faithful to that choice for the rest of her life. For her, the establishment of a new personality, without origins, is as hopeless as the new creation of the world. A man who wants to lose his discovery also loses the boundless possibilities of his existence. It is interesting to note that after the end of World War II, during her life in the USA, she kept a certain distance from the English language, although she successfully taught it, maintaining an honorable position, for her mother tongue - German. Her pariah attitude will also protect her in the future from lifelong adherence to an ideology.
(Continued in the next issue of Art)
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