Lyndsey Stonebridge on the Life and Mind of Hannah Arendt
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This is Philosophy Bites with me, David Edmonds. And me, Nigel Warburton. Philosophy Bites is available at www.philosophybites.com. Hannah Arendt was born in 1906 in Germany and died in 1975 in the US. She established her reputation with The Origins of Totalitarianism, which appeared in 1951. This set out to explain the preconditions of totalitarianism and how it differed from other types of government.

Lindsay Stonebridge is the author of a new book on Arendt. This interview on the link between Arendt's life and work is part of BioBytes, our mini-series within Philosophy Bites. Lindsay Stonebridge, welcome to Philosophy Bites. Thank you, Nigel. It's great to be here. The topic we're going to focus on is the life and mind of Hannah Arendt. Before we get into that, briefly, could you just say something about who she was?

Who is Hannah Arendt? She was many women, but I think most listeners will know her through two books, The Origins of Totalitarianism.

and Eichmann in Jerusalem, a report on the banality of evil. What some people may not know is she lived the themes she wrote about. She lived through totalitarianism, and her battle for understanding that phenomenon, the phenomenon of modern evil, was also part of her way of living. So she began as a thinker, as a philosopher, as I understand it, as a student of Heidegger's,

And that's a really interesting element of her life. Yeah, she was a very precocious child. I mean, Hannah Arendt was reading Kant and Schopenhauer at 15 by herself. And she went to Marburg because she wanted to follow the neo-Kantian tradition. And in some ways, you can say she never stopped being Kantian. And when she got there, she walked into classroom 11, which is in the basement of the Marburg philosophy and ethology faculty, and met Martin Heidegger. And that changed everything.

Heidegger was charismatic, he was eloquent, he was pulling the ground philosophy from under the students feet just at the moment when they needed, they were hungry for something new. You think it was a chance meeting? Not entirely. One of Norent's boyfriends had been to Marburg before and he said you've got to check this guy out, he'll blow your mind. So it was yes a chance meeting and it was in Heidegger's seminars on the sophist.

that their eyes locked along the classroom. It was when Heide was explaining that there was language and there was thinking and that is all there is, is just your language and your thinking. Arendt looked up, locked eyes. He looked up, locked eyes with probably very different motives and that was the beginning of a philosophical relationship and a personal relationship that would last until the end of Hannah Arendt's life. I think it's fair to say that she was a sapiosexual then.

Yes, she was. Yes. And she never stopped in that way of being someone who was fully embracing her sexuality as part of her life, as part of having a mind. So she had this controversial, well, in retrospect, very controversial relationship that was both intellectual and sexual with Martin Heidegger, who was her teacher, was married, and that was clandestine.

Yes, it was clandestine to the point where I think it was she was in her third year. Heidegger suggested that she go to Freiburg to work with herself. She was quite happy in Marburg and Heidegger said, well, you don't seem to be getting on very well here. And she said, fine.

Well, fine, actually. But clearly he wanted her out the way. He is my feminist hat on. He paved pretty disgracefully. He did push me, pull me. He wanted her in her place. He always wanted a reflection of his own brilliance in the face and mind and body of Hannah Arendt. And he never stopped wanting that and never stopped not actually getting the woman, not actually appreciating her work.

So how would you say that Heidegger influenced her, that relationship, the combination of mind and body that she was engaging with him with? How did that change her? It gave her the confidence to think. There is thinking, there is language, there is being. I can embrace this as a total experience. It gave her confidence.

that confidence. In terms of her work, if you look at things like her masterpiece, The Human Condition, and her book on Augustine, which is the book she wrote after the relationship with Heidegger, you very much get the sense of here is someone who thinks, okay, the ground has been taken away. There is no groundwork for metaphysics. There is no groundwork for morals. But I can read, I can interpret, I can make something new happen.

out of this through my mind and she never ever lost that despite the breakup with Heidegger and Heidegger's embrace of Nazism. But as a writer she was very different from Heidegger. I mean Heidegger is notoriously obscure, full of jargon and often to my mind quite pretentious and obfuscatory.

I would agree with that, Nigel. I think we're of the same generation. I still kind of resent the fact I was made to read so much Heidegger and no Arendt. When I got to read Arendt, I thought, here are these ideas being put to me by someone who wants to communicate. I remember she was a student of Carl Jaspers as well, so the communication was really, really important. Someone who's really wanting to communicate with me. And she was a poet. She's a beautiful poet, but she wasn't vatican.

She wasn't narcissistic in that way. She was the opposite. She was generous in her writing and thinking. So when I first read Arendt, it was such a relief because they're very similar sets of ideas, but there's someone who is anxious to communicate, anxious to be in the world with others rather than to carve a philosophy which is like anxious about being in the world with others and wants to transcend that, a la Heidegger.

You hinted that that might have come partly from being Jaspers' student. For somebody who's never heard of Jaspers, could you just say roughly what his stance was? Karl Jaspers was a PhD supervisor, psychologist. His wife was Jewish, a lot of his students were Jewish. He was one of the kind of first world comparativists.

So he looked at different belief systems, he looked at different myth-making traditions. The point is to see what's similar and what's comparative, and the point is to see how we're communicating. And he had this idea of what you can really tell what a belief system or a mythology is like in times of crisis. And if you look at Arendt's work, you never lose that sense of thinking has to respond to the now, to crisis, and that's when you really see what is at stake.

He was also an incredibly kind and generous man who lived his philosophy as he lived his life. Hannah Arendt lived through the worst times of the 20th century and was right at the heart of that as a Jewish woman in Europe. Obviously that affected her and this sort of sense of responding to the moment. How could you not respond to the moment, you might think, but there were philosophers who were still not responding to the moment. What was it, do you think, that made her into the thinker that she was?

She says a very famous interview that she gives with Gunther Gauss in 1964, and he introduces her as, you know, Johanna around famous woman philosopher. All these things are going to upset her. She says, I am not a philosopher. You can call me a political theorist, but I have no time for philosophy. This seems, when we read it now, I think, what are you talking about? I mean, like...

I've been in your archive. You're pretty much a philosopher. But what she was saying was what her generation of philosophers revealed to her was their inability to connect with moral judgment in the here and now, which is to say there were specialized philosophers. Chief among was Martin Heidegger.

who signed up to the Nazi regime, at worst, or at best were complicit, unthinking. So very clever people are capable of very bad judgment and not thinking well. Aristotle said something similar, but she really pushes it and she really meant it. So she had no time for professional thinkers.

Because the kind of understanding she wanted was one that was always going to be grounded in the real world. She really hated big theories. Long before we learned to hate big theories, in the end of the 20th century, she was on it. And she saw where that led. So that's why she would always say, you know, call me a political theorist if you must, but I'm not a philosopher. And it was Heidegger, I think, who taught her that through his, you know, mistaken, stupid alliance with the Nazi regime.

Do you think it was partly also a sense that philosophers are system builders, that they have to have a metaphysic, they have to have an ontology, they have to really spell out the whole of their apparatus, their architectonic, and she wasn't really in that business?

I think that's a really good observation. Even though she was influenced by Heidegger, who was supposed to be destroying philosophy, what of course happened is a kind of vatic system that emerges out of that. And of course, you know, she was one of the first theorists of totalitarianism, so she knew what happened when system building turned into ideology and when a certain kind of logic took

took over, what happened was the evacuation of moral judgment and the evacuation of a human sense of the world, which means the human sense of each other. Was that alertness to changing situations and the possibility of rethinking things what she meant when she talked about thinking without banisters? The other thing you can't really underestimate with Arendt is she was a self-claimed pariah. She was a Jewish woman growing up in a rapidly not-sifying country and

She had to leave Berlin in 1933, having been arrested by the Gestapo. She went to work with refugee kids in Paris.

She was acutely aware of what things looked from the outside, and she embraced that position. She was always nerdy and awkward as a kid, not so much awkward, she was always very charming, but knew she was different. But when she saw that played out, she took that position as a starting point. What do things look like from the outside? Because she had no choice. She has a lovely line in her book on Rahel van Hagen, the Jewish saloniere who she wrote her first book on.

on and she says no one understands what the rain is really like than the person who's out there in it without an umbrella. A bit later in 1955 she wrote to her second husband and says one day, don't know when, I will describe the domain of political life because nobody understands better what's inside than the person who's walking around from the outside. So way beyond before post-structuralism but with actually a far more moral sense, she didn't stop being Kantian in that way,

She was asking what the inside-outside looked like, what philosophical systems looked like, what political systems looked like, what the world looked like. Crudely, she was a potential victim of totalitarianism whilst in Europe, and then she managed to cross the Atlantic and start a new life in America. That's the inside and the outside, as it were. So, like many of her generation, she had this kind of distance, but also painful human experience to draw upon.

There's a sense in which autobiography can overpower thought as well as inform it. Is there any risk of that with her? That's a great question. I think the example of this would be Eichmann in Jerusalem, which is a brilliant book and one of the key texts of the 20th century for understanding modern evil, but bombed. And it bombed because of her calling out of pieties. It bombed because of her furious moral irony.

It bombed because people thought she was saying the Holocaust was banal. She wasn't at all. She was saying the way in which that evil was conducted was banal. I think that is a case of biography overclouding, not judgment, but overclouding aesthetic judgment rather than moral judgment.

Arendt was documenting the horrors of the Holocaust as they were being lived. So if you look at Origins of Totalitarianism, I mean, I'm trained as a literature person. I read this as an epic piece of work. It's made out of fragments. It's made out of essays she wrote between 1933 and

and 51 that she then crafted into a thesis after she got to America so yes it's a brilliant piece of theory but it also bears the traces of its making I call it a work of archive fever you know she's archiving the experience that she doesn't want to lose but she also wants to make sense of it she understood what was happening in the camps very early on I mean 1943

And she documented it and she wrote reviews and she read every single report. And that feeds into origins of totalitarianism. And that sense of disconnect when she talks about banality, she realised that that was still happening. She went back to Germany just when she'd finished the last draft of Origins of Totalitarianism. And the level of denial...

there, really shocked her. I mean, she loved Germany, so it was a ruin. So that was one point of grief. But people were saying things like, well, where did you stay during the war? And she said, well, I'm Jewish. I left because you were killing us. And I think she was very well aware that there was this level of fungus, Carl Jaspers called it, this sort of evil that got in. But she also thought that everyone knew what had happened in the Holocaust and what was happening in the camps. So when 15 years later,

The trial in Jerusalem, Eichmann's trial, actually presented the Holocaust to a worldwide audience, including the American Jewish audience, for the first time. She thought people already knew.

But they didn't. So Arendt went to the trial as a journalist, but one of the more controversial things that she did was imply that some people in ghettos had a greater degree of agency than other people thought they did in the sense that they could have resisted pressure to collaborate with Germans to get quotas of people into the camps.

She did. She called out what she saw as collaboration by Jewish leaders. The important thing to bear in mind is there had been a famous trial in Jerusalem literally just before on Kastner, who was the Hungarian Jewish leader, who had indeed, according to this case, it looked like he'd been complicit. So she wasn't alone in doing that. She was mistaken in a couple of cases.

And it was, to put it mildly, an insensitive thing to do. Although, as she points out, the prosecution also said to people who were testifying, why didn't you do more? But it was tactless. It was insensitive. But I think she was trying to say, and it was a philosophical point that didn't land in a journalistic audience, that Nazi totalitarianism exploded the categories of good and evil. We need to understand that. We need to understand you can't just pop them back on.

because something has been deeply corrupted now, which is why she says very famously, and I don't think we yet really to understand this, is that evil's not deep. Good is deep. And that's the thing that I think we need to work more on. Good can be radical, but evil is now like fungus on the surface in our culture. So that's why she was doing it. She wanted to say, you know, it corrupts everybody. That's the point of modern evil.

And of course there's a risk of making mistakes when you respond to things as they're happening. I mean, that's the risk that somebody like Arendt took and the slower-moving philosophers didn't. I mean, this is always a difficult ground between journalism and philosophy. And if you read Eichmann in Jerusalem, a lot of it's really just good journalism. A lot of it, she'd had an accident before she wrote the stuff up, and so she'd been put on rest for three months. She wrote that book in a fury over six weeks, and it was mainly trying to digest...

the material, the court material, which is amazing, by the way, there's so much of it. And that in itself is a kind of journalistic and actually a historian's feat with the philosophy threaded through. And that's what she set out to do. Some people have said that her background as a well-to-do middle-class German affected how she perceived some of what unfolded in the camps and in the ghettos. Would you agree with that?

I'm not so sure it affected how she felt about people in the camps and the ghettos. I don't think that's the case. Certainly how she responded to some people at the trial. I mean, she was a middle class, very cultured, Western European Jew. And so when you read her stuff, when she walks into Israel and says, my God, it's full of Asiatic types. Frankly, it's racist and it won't be the only time that she's racist.

And her absolute adoration of the three judges. They are very good looking, this is also true. Going back to your point about her living a sexual life, but they were also Western Germans. And her kind of contempt, she said, why are we having to hold this trial in Hebrew when everyone speaks German? I mean, she's a yucky, right? But I don't think her sense of the people in the camp, she was in a camp herself. I mean, not for long, but she knew what it was like to live without water. I've been to that camp.

It's not a pleasant place. And she lost friends. So I push back against that. I would not push back against the idea that she could be an appalling snob.

Well, you've mentioned racism, and that's another charge that was brought against her in America in her reaction to civil rights activists and busing people into schools. How do you feel about that aspect of her work? I think we need to call it out. To defend her, she was very pro the civil rights movement and saw it as an example, which indeed it was, of action, which is so important today.

to her, human action, making the Constitution come alive and making sure it happens. And that's why she loved constitutionalism. If you work it, you can have that great combination of a framework, a legislation, with human action. That's exactly what the civil rights movement did. She had nothing but praise for that.

The case of the Little Rock Nine is the one that really got her into trouble. Little Rock Nine were a group of nine black kids determined to see good on Brown v. Board of Education and the 14th Amendment and get into a desegregated school.

They were blocked from doing so by the state and there was a very famous photograph of a young woman called Elizabeth Eckford who got separated from her colleagues being abused by racist thugs. And Arendt wrote this piece which was basically saying are we allowing our children now to fight our battles? Coming from a totalitarian system she thought education should have nothing to do with politics.

or the state. She's kind of right on this, we can see how this has played out more recently. So that's why she was appalled. She said, "You've got to protect a place for education, it's different, it can't be the state."

But she also misjudged it because she couldn't see that Elizabeth Eckford and her movement were precisely enacting the promise of politics as Arendt defined it. It was Ralph Ellison who pointed this out, and after she'd published this disastrous article, Ralph Ellison pointed this out and she wrote to him and said, you're quite right, I'm sorry, I did not see it. But her inability to see Elizabeth Eckford as a political agent is racist.

She couldn't see Eckford acting as an agent in a black movement, in a black community. It was a severe blindness. So you've written a biographical study of...

Arendt and obviously you've got reservations about some aspects of what she did but is it difficult to write that kind of book when you're writing about a woman philosopher there aren't that many great women philosophers in the recent history of philosophy and we need to celebrate them do you get torn between celebrating what's great about them and actually revealing through your archival knowledge of the thinker that they did have feet of clay?

Yeah, that's a great question. And it is a real problem. Some reviewer, I can't remember what it was, criticised my book, calling it the cult of Hannah Arendt. Had they read the book, it's not a culty book. As a feminist, my job is to respond to someone's reality, not to make up stories about them or to idealise them. So yes, she did have Feet of Clay. But there's also, if you look at the biographies of women, they're constantly making exception cases, which is something Arendt always pushed back at. The exceptional woman, the exceptional woman.

That's one thing that I was very mindful of. The other thing is constantly trying to give other reasons for why she might be clever. So even her best biographer, the amazing Elizabeth Young-Broil, her book is just great, still tells a narrative where Hannah Arendt lost her father very young and she was constantly looking for substitutes, father substitutes. So then she found, you know, what a list. I mean, I dig up Walter Benjamin. I mean, they're pretty good. Socrates, pretty good father substitutes. But not to say actually, she was just curious and clever.

And the other thing that I really had in my mind was Herent's notion of what a life of the mind was. She hated psychoanalysis because she thought if everyone had a father complex or a mother complex, there's nothing else to say about the mind. And she also had an idea of the mind as not actually developing or progressing or changing. We all have biographies, right? And she enjoyed having a biography and she enjoyed having a personal life and she enjoyed having a sex life. But the mind just...

jumps in response to whatever is there. I mean, she had a really strong sense of a mind not being reducible to biographical narrative or to deterministic causal narratives such as psychoanalysis. In her work, she wanted to, I think, celebrate

and honour and also ask us to be curious about this mind that responds and changes its mind and converses with itself. She talks about the two-in-one conversation which she's borrowing from Socrates that we have in our heads all the time. I found myself having that two-in-one conversation with her. So it was like having a very noisy friend in your head.

for three years, as you wrote, so quite often you didn't agree with. But to try and honour that dialogue. You know, minds aren't gendered. Bodies are, unconsciousness might be, sexualities are, but I don't think minds are gendered like that. I don't think she did either. Lindsay Stonebridge, thank you very much. My pleasure, Nigel. For more Philosophy Bites, go to www.philosophybites.com. You can also find details there of Philosophy Bites books and how to support us.