We who stand to differ: Hannah Arendt on maintaining otherness

Abstract

This essay examines the story of Hannah Arendt's emigration to America in the midst of World War II and its implications on Arendt's thought and development as a central figure in the American political arena. At times her ideas were controversial, leading her to clash with the American liberal elite of her time and also with central Jewish Israeli and non-Israeli figures, sometimes over Zionism. After her arrival in New York on May 1941, Arendt sought to situate herself as a Continental cultural agent with a unique German phenomenological position, operating within the heart of the elite of the East Coast liberal thinkers during the second half of the twentieth century. Arendt considered herself to be an important participant in the process of reshaping American political discourse and even in the remolding of American citizenship and social conscience, certainly more as a philosopher in the strictly academic sense. Arendt's vita activa and vita contemplativa are stretched between two poles: Bertolt Brecht's poem “The Legend of the Origin of the Book Tao Te Ching on Lao-Tse's Way into Exile,” as well as Walter Benjamin's commentary on the poem (1939), and the 1958 events surrounding the desegregation of schools in Little Rock, Arkansas, in light of Hannah Arendt's “Reflections on Little-Rock,” published more than a year later in Dissent, the loud criticism it provoked, and the seminal discourse it stimulated.

Keywords:

• Hannah Arendt
• Walter Benjamin
• Bertolt Brecht
• Ralph Ellison
• friendliness
• otherness
• phenomenology
• refugees

Notes on contributor

Dr Moshe Goultschin is a lecturer at the Department of Literature of the Jewish People at Bar-Ilan University.

Notes

1. Two of his Dadaist partners, Louis Aragon and Philippe Soupault, joined him in posing this provocative question. Paul Valéry's answer was perhaps the most intriguing: “Par Faiblesse” [for weakness].

2. Two key concepts in Arendt's thought referring to her two books The Human Condition (first published in 1958) and The Life of the Mind (published two years after Arendt's death in 1978).

3. Lao Tsu, The Tao Te Ching, 84.

4. Arendt, “We Refugees,” reprinted in Robinson (ed.), Altogether Elsewhere, 110.

5. Tillich, “Autobiographical Reflections,” 19 (my emphasis).

6. Arendt, “We Refugees,” 110.

7. “We were told to forget; and we forgot quicker than anybody ever could imagine. In a friendly way we were reminded that the new country would become a new home; and after four weeks in France or six weeks in America, we pretended to be Frenchmen or Americans.” Arendt, Arendt, “We Refugees,” 110.

8. Arendt, “We Refugees,” 111.

9. Arendt, “We Refugees,” 111.

10. As Arendt wrote in her controversial article “Reflections on Little Rock”: “The United States is not a nation state in the European sense and never was. The principle of its political structure is, and always has been, independent of a homogeneous population and of a common past.” Arendt, “Reflections on Little Rock, 47.

11. Arendt, “We Refugees,” 111.

12. See: Diner and Bashaw, “Hannah Arendt Reconsidered,” 177–90.

13. The United States Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP).

14. Young-Breuhl, For Love of the World, 165.

15. “Der Grundwiderspruch des Landes ist politische Freiheit bei gesellschaftlicher Knechtschaft,” Young-Breuhl, For Love of the World, 166.

16. Regarding the stateless person, Giorgio Agamben writes in his 1995 article that addresses Arendt's article of 1943, which he also entitles “We Refugees”: “We are accustomed to distinguishing between stateless persons and refugees, but this distinction […] is not as simple as it might at first glance appear. [M]any refugees who technically were not stateless preferred to become so rather than to return to their homeland,” referring to political exiles whose return would mean certain death, or Polish and Romanian Jews who were in France or Germany at the war's end.” Agamben, “We Refugees,” 115.

17. Benjamin's friendliness stretches between a favorable disposition someone might have toward another person, another consciousness or even a different zeitgeist and the initial connection between the two. This notion might be defined as a well-disposed friendly-like relationship between two persons or ways of thinking reflecting a certain sense of decorum and ethics almost excluding direct friendship.

18. “The manifestations of the friendliness of the world are to be found at the hardest moments of existence: at birth, the first step into life and at the last one, which leads out of life […] It recurs in the Lao Tzu poem in the form of the maxim: ‘you get me: the hard things give way.’” Benjamin, Understanding Brecht, 74.

19. Arendt comments on this in the introduction she wrote to Benjamin's Illuminations, which she edited and published in English in 1968: “Both Adorno and Scholem blamed Brecht's ‘disastrous influence’ (Scholem) for Benjamin's clearly undialectic usage of Marxian categories and his determined break with all metaphysics; and the trouble was that Benjamin, usually quite inclined to compromises albeit most unnecessary ones, knew and maintained that his friendliness with Brecht constituted an absolute limit not only to docility but even to diplomacy, for ‘my agreeing with Brecht's production is one of the most important and most strategic points in my entire position’ (Briefe II, 594).” Arendt, “Introduction” to Benjamin, Illuminations, 15.In her remarks about Brecht's state of mind during his exile, written in Men in Dark Times (also published at 1968), Arendt testifies: “Although he would have denied it to his dying day, the poetic evidence is that Brecht was slowly beginning to forget [during his exile in Denmark] the ‘classics,’ and […] his mind had started turning on themes that had nothing to do with capitalism or the class struggle.” Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 244.

20. The use of the term “liminal” in this paper is based on Victor Turner's definition: “The attributes of … liminal personae are necessarily ambiguous, since this condition and these persons elude or slip through the network of classifications that normally locate states and positions in cultural space. Liminal entities are neither here nor there, they are betwixt and between positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention and ceremonial.” Turner, “Liminality and Community,” 147.

21. Benjamin, Understanding Brecht, 73.

22. This concept, in my opinion, was at the heart of Benjamin's rejected habilitation essay of 1925 (published only subsequently in 1928).

23. The liminal concept, so central to Benjamin's thought, was not only inherent in Arendt's personal development, but she paid it conscious attention in her intellectual life as well. In the early 1930s, Arendt created her own lexicon of liminal concepts, her first serious attempt to respond to the challenge posed by her professional and personal relationship with Heidegger. Her calling was to both import his thought and introduce her own independent political philosophy into Anglo-American culture. At the heart of this lexicon were three elements that condition human existence: labor, work (in the sense of productiveness), and action (in the sense of initiative, renewal and change). All of these are liminal concepts created and formulated by Arendt placing herself at a marginal area of consciousness (always at a boundary that was painful and brutally realistic) – a space of transition and limit.

24. Young-Bruehl, For Love of the World, 150–1.

25. This is the non-conventional transliteration Brecht uses for the name of the Chinese wise man, as opposed to the accepted “Lao-Tse” referencing his friend Benjamin's second thesis (On the Concept of History [1940]), in which he plays on the homophones Lao-Tse and Lotze, referring to the German philosopher Rudolf Hermann Lotze, 1817–1881. Further, in German, “Lotze” is a homophone of “Lotse,” which means a guide, especially through difficult waters.

26. Bertolt Brecht, “The Legend of the Origin of the Book Tao-te-ching on Lao-Tse's Way into Exile” translated by Michael Hamburger; in: Walter Benjamin, Understanding Brecht, 70–2.

27. “Gebrechlich” in the original German rhyming with the “schwächlich“ which are almost synonyms meaning frailty, creating an analogy between the old sage's frailty and the state of things in the country he decided to leave.

28. Or perhaps he was forced to think about rest; the term “drängte” can be understood both as a forced decision and as a decisive act of will. Again, analogous to the state of the land which was possessed by evil or perhaps has willingly accepted its appearance. Brecht purposely leaves this issue in its ambiguity.

29. Here, again, it seems that Benjamin's usage of the Freundlichkeit idiom resonates semantically between friendliness and friendship.

30. Benjamin, Understanding Brecht, 72.

31. Benjamin, Understanding Brecht, 73.

32. My emphasis.

33. Benjamin, Understanding Brecht, 72–3.

34. Young-Bruehl, Love of the World, 150. Brecht's poem is based not only on the poetic structure, but also on the contents of the 81 theses of the Tao Te Ching, and the reworking of the Chinese folk story about the wise monk who composed it. Beyond the similarity that every proto-Protestant ear is likely to hear between the 81 revolutionary theses of Lao-tse and the 95 theses posted by Martin Luther in 1517, the two works share the quality of bringing a message of consolation as well as a message of reform. It is a revolution in the course of Western thought that adopts 3000-year-old Chinese theses, and a revolution in the perspective that this culture offers to itself, specifically at the height of the World War II.

35. Young-Bruehl, Love of the World, 150–1.

36. Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 244–5 (my emphasis).

37. Young-Bruehl, Love of the World, 150.

38. I am well aware of the customary ways in which Arendt's thought is interpreted, not to say preconceived, as a thinker who, like others, shares the opinion that “narrative is a retrospective construction that does not inform the phenomenology of daily life: ‘No one and nothing lives a narrative’” (Steele, M. 2002), “Arendt versus Ellison on Little Rock: The Role of Language in Political Judgment” Constellations, 9: 184). All I suggest here is to allow ourselves, from time to time, a reconsideration of some of Arendt's writings and remarks on modern society. If Arendt dared to describe Walter Benjamin's entire life as haunted by a hunchback who sprung out of one of his mother's children's songs (as described in Men in Dark Times) I suspect we can use a similar intuition following Arendt's writings, sayings, and doings.

39. Penn Warren, Who Speaks for the Negro, 342.

40. Young-Bruehl, Love of the World, 162. Young Breuhl adds, however, that “two years passed before Hannah Arendt responded in writing to Benjamin's last gift of friendliness. In the fall of 1942, the Blüchers began to read newspaper stories from Europe that again brought them close to the despair they had known and surmounted in the summer and fall of 1940.”

41. Benjamin's view of friendliness, developed by Arendt, can be enriched and augmented by Gilligan's theory portrayed in her well-known essay In a Different Voice (1982). The gap between others, as described by Benjamin, is demonstrated in Gilligan's thought as a liminal space of potential. In a sense similar to Arendt's concept of friendliness, Gilligan suggests understanding the insights derived from mutual impact between perspectives as a critical and inimitable source of vitality, or at least as a studied challenge that cannot be ignored. The polar difference between ways of encountering the world is precisely what makes distortion a motivating power available to anyone discerning enough to recognize it and understand its potential. Yet while friendliness can be a blessed distortion, Gilligan does not ignore the dangers – blindness and misunderstanding, and in some cases conflict leading to crisis. This is the main reason why the concept of distortion remains in a liminal domain.

42. And despite her refugee status, paradoxically, Arendt herself was at times suspected, due to her German nationality, of being a Nazi collaborator: “In Paris we could not leave our homes after eight o'clock because we were Jews; but in Los Angeles we are restricted because we are enemy aliens.” Arendt, “We Refugees,” reprinted in Robinson (ed.), Altogether Elsewhere, 116.

43. The “Little Rock Nine” continued to suffer blasphemies and attacks for a long period following the first incident.

44. Arendt also criticizes the Supreme Court for its decision to force desegregation on the Arkansas education system: “For Arendt, court ordered school desegregation in Little Rock was problematic for three reasons: it targeted the wrong battle; it took place in the wrong context, the schools; and it used the wrong combatants, children.” Firer Hinze, “Reconsidering Little Rock, 30. Further, see Firer Hinze's thorough exploration of Arendt's retrospective assertions 40 years later.

45. Arendt, “Reflections on Little Rock,” 55.

46. Arendt, “Reflections on Little Rock,” 45.

47. Arendt, “Reflections on Little Rock,” 45, (my emphasis).

48. Arkansas Democrat, September 4, 1957.

49. Borren, “Towards an Arendtian politics of in/visibility: On stateless refugees and undocumented aliens,” 213–237. Regarding the issue of the black minority's visibility, we must mention Ralph Ellison's novel, Invisible Man, published in 1952.

50. Arendt, “Reflections on Little Rock,” 47.

51. Arendt, “Reflections on Little Rock,” 48.

52. Ellison, Invisible Man.

53. Penn Warren, Who Speaks for the Negro, 344.

54. Penn Warren, “Ralph Ellison and the Problem of Cultural Authority,” 160. Penn Warren continues: “However powerful and compelling Ellison's sentiments may be, his interpretation, in effect, looks past the children as individuals compelled by their own motives in order to see them as the fulfillment of something ancient. Facing what may have been an unprecedented moment in American life, Ellison described it as something ‘old.’ The Little Rock Nine had not broken with the past – they embodied it.” Penn Warren, Who Speaks for the Negro, 162.

55. “It certainly did not require too much imagination to see that this was to burden children, black and white, with the working out of a problem which adults for generations have confessed themselves unable to solve […] The girl, obviously, was asked to be a hero – that is, something neither her absent father nor the equally absent representatives of the NAACP felt called upon to be […] Have we now come to the point where it is the children who are being asked to change or improve the world? And do we intend to have our political battles fought out in the school yards?”; Arendt, “Reflections on Little Rock,” 50.

56. “It certainly did not require too much imagination to see that this was to burden children, black and white, with the working out of a problem which adults for generations have confessed themselves unable to solve […] The girl, obviously, was asked to be a hero – that is, something neither her absent father nor the equally absent representatives of the NAACP felt called upon to be […] Have we now come to the point where it is the children who are being asked to change or improve the world? And do we intend to have our political battles fought out in the school yards?”; Arendt, “Reflections on Little Rock,”, 49.

57. “It certainly did not require too much imagination to see that this was to burden children, black and white, with the working out of a problem which adults for generations have confessed themselves unable to solve […] The girl, obviously, was asked to be a hero – that is, something neither her absent father nor the equally absent representatives of the NAACP felt called upon to be […] Have we now come to the point where it is the children who are being asked to change or improve the world? And do we intend to have our political battles fought out in the school yards?”; Arendt, “Reflections on Little Rock,”, 51.

58. Ellison, Shadow and Act, XXI. This intuition regarding the necessary confrontation of the African-American writer with the foundation stones of his heritage and of the collective memory into which he was born, so central in the thought and creativity of Ellision, is the subject matter of Warren's “Ralph Ellison and the Problem of Cultural Authority.”

59. Penn Warren, Who Speaks for the Negro, 343–4.

60. Some two months prior to the Little Rock incident, on 30 June 1958, the United States Supreme Court ruled, in the case of NAACP v. Patterson, 357 US 449 (1958) based on this very same logic, in favor of the NAACP, which, in the name of the freedom to assemble, refused the demand of the local government to expose its list of members in the state of Alabama.

61. Arendt, “Reflections on Little Rock,” 45–56 (my emphasis).

62. As Warren points out in his somewhat paradoxical approach to Ellison: “This is not to say that Ellison always valued the past over the present. On the contrary, the Ellisonian project often called for criticizing tradition and convention. As much as he revered the past, he also believed ‘that to embrace uncritically values which are extended to us by others is to reject the validity, even the sacredness, of our own experience.’ Respecting one's own experience often meant challenging the truths imposed by authority and questioning the values handed down from one generation to the next. The children in Little Rock might have been avatars of an ‘old universal urge,’ but they were also acting out of motivations deriving from having come of age in a world that was in many ways unlike that of their parents. The culture and traditions that authorized these youthful challenges to segregation were themselves part of the Jim Crow world that was under assault; consequently, ‘these children’ could fulfill the dreams of the previous generation only by challenging that generation's authority and wisdom” (Warren, “Ralph Ellison and the Problem of Cultural Authority,”162–3).

63. The book was first published in 1959, and then did not receive the attention it deserved, perhaps due to the social tensions and rifts surfacing in American society of those years manifested, for example, in the Little Rock affair and perhaps also due to the sense of the United States’ impending involvement in the Vietnam War.

64. Glenn Gray, The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle, xii–xiii.

65. Glenn Gray, The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle, xiii.

66. Glenn Gray, The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle, xiii.

67. Arendt, Men in Dark Times, xi–xii.

68. Arendt, Men in Dark Times, xi–xii.

69. Glenn Gray, The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle, viii.