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Abstract
This paper discusses Hannah Arendt’s model of the Jewish pariah, developed in her study of Jewish assimilation. The argument is that Arendt’s model represents her early efforts to move beyond Martin Heidegger’s philosophy. The paper focuses on Arendt’s concept of a conscious pariah as a model for political resistance, independence, and agency. It shows how Arendt infused elements of Heidegger’s philosophy into her early vision of Jewish politics, while also transcending the limits of Heidegger’s ontological project with her political vision. The paper suggests that Arendt’s book on Rahel Varnhagen shares similarities with Heidegger’s work on Mitsein in Being and Time, while her 1944 model of the conscious pariah, especially the focus on the pariah as a rebel, illustrates her concerns with Heidegger’s work on the Volk.
I deeply thank the College of Liberal Arts Office of the Dean at Towson University for a faculty research grant that supported this publication. I would also like to express my gratitude to Ghilad H. Shenhav, Ori Rotlevy, and Elad Lapidot for their helpful suggestions and comments. This article was partly written visiting the Bucerius Institute for Research of Contemporary German History and Society at the University of Haifa. I thank Cedric Cohen-Skalli for the hospitality and kind help.
disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
I deeply thank the College of Liberal Arts Office of the Dean at Towson University for a faculty research grant that supported this publication. I would also like to express my gratitude to Ghilad H. Shenhav, Ori Rotlevy, and Elad Lapidot for their helpful suggestions and comments. This article was partly written visiting the Bucerius Institute for Research of Contemporary German History and Society at the University of Haifa. I thank Cedric Cohen-Skalli for the hospitality and kind help.
1 Heidegger’s association with the Nazi regime, and the incessant focus on the personal relationship of Arendt and Heidegger during Arendt’s short tenure in Marburg, are often the main reasons behind the reservation of some about their connection. See, for example, Thomas Pangle, who finds in Arendt’s political theory threatening echoes of Heidegger’s philosophy: “Arendt was the popularizer, within America,” he argues, “of Heidegger’s political brooding. She rarely conveyed her enormous debt to Heidegger, […] But she in effect endowed a watered-down version of Heideggerian political thought with an allure that it previously lacked all together in the Anglo-American world” (49). Elżbieta Ettinger in Hannah Arendt/Martin Heidegger (1995) suggests that Arendt was in a psychological state of dependence on and infatuation with Heidegger in this period, which the latter manipulated after they came to be back in contact in 1950, in the hope of regaining his philosophical and personal status. See Grunenberg for a different outlook on these relations.
2 See also a note by Lewis and Sandra Hinchman: “Although Arendt developed the mass society and behavior themes far beyond anything in Existenz philosophy, most of her distinctions and even her terminology were anticipated by Heidegger and Jaspers” (157). See also Jones.
3 Jacques Taminiaux notes that Arendt’s two major philosophical works, The Human Condition and The Life of the Mind, “reveal at every page not at all a dependency upon Heidegger […] but rather a constant, and increasingly ironic, debate with him” (ix).
4 In truth, the reason for the neglect of Arendt’s early works by her readership has little to do with Heidegger, and much to do with the place of this period in her oeuvre. Political theorists rarely read Arendt’s dissertation or her Varnhagen book and almost conclusively overlook her early essays on Judaism and Zionism. This habitude has been challenged in recent years by several works, starting with Elisabeth Young-Bruehl’s 1982 biography Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World and Judith Shklar’s 1983 essay “Hannah Arendt as Pariah” in the Partisan Review, which demonstrated the importance of Arendt’s earlier work in general, and her work on Jewish politics and the Jewish pariah in particular, to her more developed political model. In what follows I draw on Richard Bernstein, who aptly notes in Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question:
one should not forget that The Human Condition was published in 1958, when Arendt was 52. Her political education had begun 25 years earlier, and her primary concern had been to understand Jewish politics or, rather, the failures of Jewish politics. (31)
5 In “Zionism Reconsidered,” an essay Arendt wrote not long after the publication of “The Jew as Pariah,” her criticism of Zionism is indeed focused in part on the refusal of the Zionist establishment in Palestine to accept their pariah position. The Zionists, she complained, were so eager to form a modern Jewish nation that they forgot their own history as pariahs and “sold out at the very first moment to the powers that be.” Instead, the Zionists should have led “a great revolutionary movement” by way of an alliance with other progressive forces in Europe and the Near East (Arendt, Jewish Writings 363).
6 “[O]ut of their personal experience Jewish poets, writers, and artists should have been able to evolve the concept of the pariah as a human type – a concept of supreme importance for the evaluation of mankind in our day” (Arendt, Jewish Writings 276).
7 Arendt’s characterization of Heidegger in her correspondence with Jaspers during the 1930s, as well as her first attempt at assessing Heidegger’s philosophy in her 1946 article “What is Existential Philosophy?,” were “relentlessly critical” (Wolin, Heidegger’s Children 49).
8 Obviously, much has been written on this topic. It is important to see in the context of this work, however, how Heidegger’s Jewish followers and students relate to his association with Nazism. For Emmanuel Levinas’ response, for example, see the 1990 preface to his 1934 “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism.” Karl Löwith, another student of Heidegger, shares similar observations in “The Political Implications of Heidegger’s Existentialism” (1988). For an introductory reading, I’d recommend Wolin (Heidegger Controversy), Wolfson, and Herskowitz.
9 In Habermas’ words, Heidegger’s fundamental ontology “[ran] off into the blind alley of the philosophy of the subject it was supposed to stay steering clear off” (Philosophical Discourse 151). See also Habermas’ well-cited claim that in Heidegger “history of Being is disconnected from political and historical events” (“Work” 159). Elsewhere Habermas reprimands Heidegger for “the evacuation of all moral content from a temporalized Being” (“How to Answer” 153).
10 Arendt hints about the same point in her dissertation, in a footnote on the Augustinian concept of the world. In a previous work (“Von Wesen des Grundes”), Heidegger distinguished two meanings of the term: the world as created, and the world conceived “for the lovers.” However, as Arendt notes, he addresses only the former, and in that, she argues, he supports a limited and, more importantly, lifeless and loveless conception of the world, which she intended to counteract in her dissertation (Love 66fn80). See Wolin (Heidegger’s Children 42).
11 For Heidegger’s Volk and destiny, see Fritsche and Swazo.
12 It thus appears that “the social world as conceived by Heidegger [is] radically dichotomous” (Wolin, Politics of Being 45). Dana Villa rejects this reading, since “such a polar opposition [between these spheres of social relations] seems to open an ‘unbridgeable gulf’ between the authentic and the inauthentic” (214).
13 See, for example, Critchley, Duff, McMullin, and Olafson.
14 The general agreement is that, as Arendt’s biographer Elisabeth Young-Bruehl comments, the book is a biography written as an autobiography, and presenting Arendt’s own complicated relations with her Jewish identity (85). Jaspers similarly writes to Arendt: “The book is only in part a biography of Rahel […] this work still seems to me to be your own working through of basic questions of Jewish existence” (Arendt and Jaspers 192).
15 As Arendt admits in the preface to the book, her work was written “with an awareness of the doom of German Judaism,” and therefore presents a “contribution to the history of the German Jews” (Rahel Varnhagen xvii). For an introduction to Arendt’s Varnhagen book, see Hertz. Note that Hertz emphasizes the importance of Romanticism to Arendt’s book.
16 In one of the few works on Arendt’s Varnhagen book and Heidegger, Kimberly Maslin argues that
Arendt’s “peculiar biography” of Rahel Varnhagen becomes far more than an idiosyncratic or self-revelatory work; it can be understood as an ontological examination of rootlessness in which Arendt humanizes fundamental ontology by illustrating thrownness, fallenness, and projectivity, as well as the political implications of each, at work in the life of her subject. (85)
This is the version of Rahel’s life that Arendt tells because it is the version that most allows her to speak her own story. But this is also the story that cannot actually be described in its factuality, and will not be until both Arendt and Heidegger are dead. (36)
17 For good entry points to the discussion on Jewish assimilation in a modern German Jewish context, see Mosse and Katz.
18 See Botelho.
19 Judith Shklar, alternatively, argues that Rahel was “for many years a parvenu, who tried to be accepted by gentile society” (64).
20 Arendt’s historicization of Heidegger’s Dasein presents a possible critique of Heidegger’s treatment of history in Being and Time, especially his distinction between the unique events of history and the mundane science of historiography.
21 In a letter to Karl Jaspers, who read an advanced draft of the Rahel Varnhagen manuscript in 1952, she notes: “Judaism doesn’t exist outside orthodoxy on the one hand or outside the Yiddish-speaking, folklore-producing Jewish people [Folklore produzierenden jüdischen Volk] on the other” (Arendt and Jaspers 199–200).
22 In a letter to Jaspers, Arendt further declares: “I still believe today that under the conditions of social assimilation and political emancipation the Jews could not ‘live’ [nicht recht leben könne]” (Arendt and Jaspers 198).
23 For a detailed account of these similarities that is focused on Rahel as a figure of Jewish pariah, see Maslin (86–94).
24 Arnaldo Momigliano explains that Weber’s treatment of the term is in fact relatively neutral, as the accent of his definition of the Jewish people as pariah nation is on their quality of “Guest People [Gastvolk]” (314).
25 Elisabeth Young-Bruehl adds that
the friends of every sort and also the historical figures with whom Arendt felt special affinities, like Rosa Luxemburg and Rahel Varnhagen, had one characteristic in common: each was, in his or her own way, an outsider. In Hannah Arendt’s personal lexicon, wirkliche Menschen, real people, were “pariahs.” (xv)
26 Shklar’s “Hannah Arendt as Pariah” (1983) is one example of many.
27 Rahel, in Arendt’s book, is repeatedly self-described as schlemiel. The context of the description is, however, often dark and castigatory. See, for example, Arendt (Rahel Varnhagen 25).
28 For the importance of Lazare to Arendt’s conception of the political, especially in the context of the Eichmann controversy, see Parvikko.
29 As Lazare notes,
he [the Jew] is a pariah; […] So it is as an outcast that he must defend himself, through duty to his own being, for every human creature must know how to resist oppression and preserve his right to total development, his freedom to be and to be himself. (85; emphasis in original)
30 In On Revolution (1963), Arendt differentiates revolutions, whose aim is the establishment of a new political order and ultimately a new freedom, from rebellions to the effect that
medieval and post-medieval theory knew of legitimate rebellion, of rise against established authority, of open defiance and disobedience. But the aim of such rebellions was not a challenge of authority or the established order of things as such; it was always a matter of exchanging the person who happened to be in authority […] for a lawful ruler. (40)
31 The term “Volk” is featured extensively in The Origins of Totalitarianism, but it appears much less in Arendt’s earlier work. The term is mentioned mostly in the context of Hitler’s vision of the Volksgenosse. And yet, in an early essay on anti-Semitism, which Arendt was writing in France in the last years of the 1930s (it was not published until much later) and bears considerable similarities to the first part of The Origins of Totalitarianism, she notes:
The Volk lives between these two extremes, organically subservient to the “princes of blood” and ruled over by the “living totality” of the state. Both disdained and idolized, the Volk excludes itself from history in order to serve as its dark foundation and is always ready for every appeal to its instincts, which in their animal brutality proceed to become divine judgments. (99)