Women in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt, Agnes Heller, Eveline Goodman-Thau

My thanks are due to my colleague Silke Wahle for her wise comments which motivated me to change this essay from scratch, to Agnes Heller for living inspiration, to Eveline Goodman-Thau for her companionship in thinking and reliance on me; and to Jerome Kohn for sharing important pieces of the life of his teacher Hannah Arendt with me with so much cordiality and kindness. But more than from any of them I learnt from the life of the mind.

To Dr. Ralf Balke
Who has supported the philosophy, the man, the ideas, the struggle and the life

"For the same reasons this, is all in a certain sense true, and in a certain sense false"
-St. Augustine

Women in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt, Agnes Heller & Eveline Goodman-Thau

In memory of the Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt
100 Years 1906 - 2006

Humanity is usually understood these days as a form of education that is often available only to the few privileged who do not need worry about pursuing a lucrative career and to those feeble-minded whose spirits are filled with worldly questions and doubts; accordingly most of us were raised up to believe that the "humanities" person is that who has attained an academic degree and that most likely is a jobless cynical reformer of the world or one of those "intelligentsia" people who have understood the world and have formed cults from within the academic halls with initiates and converts; the latter are also known as ill-stricken by the Ph.D syndrome.

It has not always been so; for the German dramatist Lessing for example, humanity did not mean an academic degree but rather experiencing the world in anger and laughter, experiencing the artifacts that complement our life on earth only in regard to their effect in the world; for Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers it meant to include those who were pariahs and outsiders and the mentally-ill; and even St. Augustine had his own thoughts, he believed that humanity was the community of believers bound by sin. In fact they might have been talking about humanity as the mere quality of being human.

Being human is one of the greatest tasks of the 21st century; whose predecessor the 20th had failed in attaining by declaring as some self-proclaimed intellectuals did, freedom not only from God -who was declared dead not by the old crowd of unbelievers and heretics but by the theologians and men of faith, but also from the human. "We are living in a post-human world", so said a British artist who drafted the "post-human manifesto" and surrendered with his weakness for life, his feelings, his pasts, his memories, surrendered to the technological imagination and called for the day when the last bound left to men with earth will disappear - the creation of life. By then people will be able to dwell on cities removed from the earth -the quintessence of the human condition[1], removed from the sight of nature and from injustice - all the houses will look alike, the funerary and the kindergarden, the concentration camp and the church.

A world eminently just and egalitarian, a world in which all people will be one and the same. This could be perfectly translated into a modern library where the lives of the authors and the suffering they endured in their promethean task has been turned into numbers of a catalog, properly stored and carefully updated with new sticker-labels into tidily sorted-out boxes. "Humanity" has become 00456, "Natural Landscapes" is called 06543 and "History" falls under the rubric TL4301; does it not resemble in some way the world of Auschwitz? Whereby Moshe and Frieda were 04567 and 04566, the beautiful girl with the red freckles was 05678 and the neighbor was known as 07880.

I am not exercising here a Marxist critique of capitalism or fingering at the discontents of neo-liberalism and calling for the retrieval of an ancient glorious past. I am just making sure while I write that we are living in dark times; yet for those of us "newborn" of this generation the difference is hardly noticeable, we have not known any other world but instead are often faced with the most serious questions of contemporary philosophy that no matter what their content is, finish with "....of the human world, if it is going to have a future at all". Perhaps you can call this a form of anarchy, political disappointment or the simple ranting of an overqualified and jobless youth. I am just pointing at a world where our language has been rendered ineffective; in fact we all have a language we call a mother tongue, that we associate with our childhoods and memories, with the first love and whether it was the movies or the poems or the songs in the radio, it immediately become a referential point for what we are, that language is indeed what we are.

Yet the language is no longer fit to describe the world, reason for which we can often fail to observe the sombre character of our age; this language we speak and that expresses our desire to love, to live, to enjoy, is not a humanizing language. Perhaps it is good for McDonald's and Seinfeld, but it is not the language of Shakespeare. It is some form of esperanto in which you can say "SOS" and "breaking news" like you do in a morse code that allows only a certain number of combinations; it is not a language to write sonnets and certainly not a language to write history. "And God said, let there be light. And there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good; and God divided the light from the darkness"[2]. If this was the same language God used to create the world, no wonder the theologians have reached a verdict and hastened his execution; but perhaps that is the only proof of the divine shadow, it is a quest for language. If indeed we would speak that language then we could create life afresh and send God on paid retirement.

Dark times in the other hand are not something you can unfeignedly presence or ward off with a hand, they simply dawn on us all of a sudden - "As the sun was setting, Abram fell into a deep sleep, and a thick and dreadful darkness came over him. Then the Lord said to him, "Know for certain that your descendants will be strangers in a country not their own, and they will be enslaved and mistreated four hundred years" [3]. Dark times might sometimes also resemble the sleep of a baby, because humanity seems not to have reached its adolescence and the uninterrupted sleep of the infant continues unhindered by catastrophes, bombs, exiles, genocide, poverty, injustice. He might know better, and deliberately not awaken. Hannah Arendt said in her last public appearance: "We may very well stand at one of those decisive turning points of history which separate whole eras from each other. For contemporaries entangled, as we are, in the inexorable demands of daily life, the diving lines between eras may be hardly visible when they are crossed; only after people stumble over them do the lines grow into walls which irretrievably shut off the past. At such moments of history when the writing on the wall becomes too frightening, most people flee to the reassurance of day-to-day life with its unchanging pressing demands." [4] They always come uninvited like a stranger at a feast[5].

Humanity in Dark Times. But couldn't this be somehow a deception? One could just as well claim in a very Christian sense that the times have been dark ever since Eve and the apple, which turned all knowledge into falsehood. Literature shows that exiles, homelessness and specially darkness have accompanied humankind since its earliest memories in Homer and Hesiod; darkness is not a prodigal son of the modern imagination. Poor Odysseus had been trapped for long with the nymph inside the cave and no light reached them. "Then the Lord said to Moses, "Stretch out your hand toward the sky so that darkness will spread over Egypt- darkness that can be felt" [6]. Yet dark times contain a magic elixir of creativity and human power, one of the starkest driving forces for progress and improvement of one world upon the other, but the deliverance from evil does not go unpaid; the creativity of dark times comes with the boredom that always follows their end.

Freedom remains one of the most sought-for commodities of the human race, but its achievement rarely turns out to be a source of happiness; the prophet has promised that "The spirit of the Lord God is upon me because God hath anointed me to gladden the humble; he hath sent me to bind up the broken hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and to those bound a complete opening of the eyes" [7]. The opening of the eyes is perhaps the most paradoxical description of what the modern world is, because the opening can remind one of Hesiod's words that nearing the end of times children will be born with their eyes wide-open; so open from such an early age to realities of many different kinds and manifold truths that can eventually cause blindness and this blindness in itself is a double-bind, curse and blessing but unavoidably comes in the company of the most abject darkness. "I will lead the blind by ways they have not known, along unfamiliar paths I will guide them; I will turn the darkness into light before them and make the rough places smooth. These are the things I will do; I will not forsake them." [8].

Immediately thereafter we turn to the experts for advise and bring about an Exodus from the aridness and crumbling structures of Athens in a pilgrimage toward Jerusalem; we want to unearth the ever-alert prophets and renew the works of Creation. We want answers but they cannot be given to us, we could not live them yet we proclaim "They answered: Your servants have come from a very distant country because of the fame of the Lord your God. For we have heard reports of him: all that he did in Egypt" [9], as though we were before the Delphic oracle bringing sacrifices for the burnt offering to the Gods and demanding the prophetic vision just like Oedipus did, brining upon himself endless misery; the prophet scorns us and responds by saying "but where is the lamb for a burnt offering? God himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering" [10]. We've been mistaken once again, a sin replaced with a crime. A world-Christology does not seem to be of much help here.

This is where we turn to the Jewish philosophers of the 20th century, and despite controversies and historical arguments, disagreements and bans, we find a group of women who lived through times darker than ours and that throughout their lives did not cease to call the world to a court, not to pass judgement and a verdict on its end like most of the philosophers, the theologians and religious traditions did but to teach you us that it is not in the courts but in the minutiae of everyday life that we are called to pass judgement. Faculty that has obviously falled into desrepute following the horros of the 20th century which hold very little significance for us today other than the way (often unnoticed) in which they shaped the modern mind that creates the modern world.

They are not rooted on any philosophy -for its demise has been advertised since the rise of modern science and the technological imagination as the supreme ruler, ideology, but on the long-forsaken faculty of thinking, it is only in thinking what we are doing that the world can be made a better place. No promises of a glorious past or of redemption in the distant future; the answers do not lie anywhere and the questions cannot be formulated in the yesterday or tomorrow, in heavenly kingdoms and utopias but only today, right now and in this world. They who lived in that world of European Jewry and that perhaps were their last representatives,a culture that echoes today only in very dim and feeble memories. This is the world they loved, they love this world. And as a philosopher the only thing left to you is your love's work, and this love quintessentially is the only salvation from the thoughtlessness of the technological man; the one who no longer awaits anything, no longer hopes, he is in himself a terminated project, an artifact, an object of instrumental value.

This is the legacy of Hannah Arendt, one of the forerunners and bearer of a philosophical revolution that did not pretend to reform the world, but to show us that it cannot be repaired by eliminating its frailty, since it is actually this frailty and lacking in something what makes it livable and different from the concentration camp. Hannah Arendt was not a typical philosopher and today one has a problem trying to classify her into something that belongs only in the categories of a world that no longer exists, of a world in which she perhaps did not live either. She is no prophet of any sorts but she speaks in the words of the prophet through the only language that we moderns can grasp - the language of reason, that of philosophy and the books, but she is no philosopher of the books. Hannah Arendt philosophized because she wanted to understand and she went wherever her thinking led her showing us even in her mistakes and misunderstandings the limits of philosophy, the limits of humanity and the rich-well that springs from the life of the mind.

She who studied under some of the most brilliant minds of the 20th century and saw the public eye much more than most of her contemporaries had a concern which was not simply that of a Platonic philosopher calling for interlocutors and discussions; she believed that this understanding will never bring us to the answers but the process shall make some space for reflection "when the chips are down". We shall be able somehow to recover the world we have turned over to the hands of machines and artifacts, "the recovery of the public world". She was a political scientist because it was in her view not Man but Men in the plural who populate the earth and they are the only ones from whom a solution to the frailty of this world might come, not by eliminating it in the search for an ideal world but to recognize that this world in fact is the only one we have in our possession and until some answers will come from heaven we must engage with this world; the frailty can only become a gain - a kernel of sociological faith. We can only achieve it by thinking, thinking not as a consequence of philosophy but a companion, and acting in the world not as something deliberate but as the obvious consequence of our thoughts; this is what she meant by recovering the public world. She found the first sources of this plurality not in the Greek historians or the Christian fathers but in the Bible, "And God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female created he THEM" [11].

When Hannah Arendt wrote the book that caused her utmost disrepute (Eichmann in Jerusalem) she was not simply accusing or defending anybody but claiming something much more universal than her many detractors have seen; she was not playing the historian or the judge but showing that after the concentration camps the categories we had for judgement had fallen into a disrepute such that it was necessary to unearth all of our traditions since the beginning of the memory and use them to move in the invisible space of the mind; this has proven our major difficulty in understanding her because for most of us anything intangible and not immediately visible is often demised as unworthy of inspection, but everything there is in the world belongs to invisible images, the way we get to know things, how they are constructed and disappear. She maintained altogether the vision of the uniqueness of Auschwitz and the extermination of the Jewish people; this phenomenon can only be dealt comically, there exist no pre-established categories to describe the monstruous deeds, no rationale can be brought forward politically or philosophically, at least not anymore.

She called for a recovery of the memory and as early as 1929 she wrote "It is memory and not expectation that gives unity and wholeness to human existence"[12]. The cause of her major disrepute is not only the crooked interpreters but also that there is no discussion as heated as the one on a book no one has read. Hannah Arendt thought that we should stop for a second the over-academizing and speculating at our universities and look at the world, turn around - like Moses did in the wilderness and met God; to realize things do not look like they did before and who if not she understood, she who had lived in that world which preceded ours.

She was the daughter of a philosophical revolution that started in the 19th century as the Jewish thinkers became aware that the course taken by Modernity since its painful and glorious birth will lead not only to its destructive power but to its endlessness, this intellectual Genesis and Exodus that had become apparent with Spinoza. It would blur forever the lines of history and condemn humanity to a blind world in which things will seem just what they were; "there's presence but no real essence" (Agnes Heller). But there is no more Hannah Arendt and the universities continue their programs, teaching Aristotle and Heidegger to people that are grandsons of Holocaust survivors and who saw the world crumbling before them, they saw the lines that divided not life and death, but beginnings and ends; now we can only speak about ends of every possible thing on earth.

Hannah Arendt wrote in her last book: "Hence the possible advantage of our situation, following the demise of metaphysics and philosophy would be twofold. It would permit us to look on the past with new eyes, unburdened and unguided by any traditions, and thus to dispose of a tremendous wealth of raw experiences without being bound by any prescriptions as how to deal with these treasures; "Our heritage comes to us by no-will and testament". The advantage would be even greater had it not been accompanied, almost inevitably, by a growing inability to move, on no matter what level, in the realm of the invisible; or to put it in another way, had it not been accompanied by the disrepute into which everything that is not visible, tangible, palpable has fallen, so that we are in danger of losing the past itself together with our traditions" [13]. And late in her life she said that judging as the political consequence of thinking may indeed prevent catastrophes, in the rare moments when things are at stake[14].

But this is not to be done only in the academia and in classes and seminars on ethics and "life-management" but in everyday life, aspect in which she leaves altogether the Western traditions of philosophy and thinks like the Sages of the Talmud; she does not want answers but rather desires those fleeting moments stricken on us by the routine in which we can surely distinguish good from evil. Not from a religious or moral standpoint, but simply from the perspective of the community life, what is good for us, a social contract that lies beyond politics and then becomes philosophy again after having passed through the world; it was she who claimed that one must think with body and soul or not at all. Prof. Jennifer Ring said in 1997 that it was Arendt who came closer to thinking as a Jew (something downplayed by intellectuals anywhere in the world today) in that she related the life of the mind to the life of the community[15]; but in a world ill with a contingency for philosophical understanding Prof. Ring has become a lone voice, the current trends in the "professional" thinking world are simply theoretical speculations that resemble the sleep of a baby, and that imaginary flight into a distant past that in itself caused the ills of modernity; not because modernity is an ill-artifact but because since its base is freedom one can as well use it to save mankind from tyranny or just as well to completely destroy it, yet without noticing that anything changed. The grass still grows next to the gas chambers in Auschwitz and children can still play undeterred in Chernobyl. A popular song of Shabbat reads: "He shall summon freedom for the son and the daughter, he shall guard over you as the beloved one; pleasant are you names and they shall never cease, for in the seventh day they shall dwell and rest"[16].. only that there was no seventh day in Auschwitz.

A philosophical system that cannot be a guide in the blindness of our interesting times, that fails to approach what happens in the world, is not worthy of pursuance. Jerome Kohn, a former student of Arendt and editor of a book recently published on Arendt wrote in the introduction: "Young men and women in many countries have begun to understand that being at home in the world requires rethinking the past and reconstituting its treasures and disasters. They recognized that "thinking without fences", in Arendt's phrase, it the condition under which the will to act still makes sense to them. These youths, who turn to "Hannah" (as they call her) as a guide they trust, will find the difference and urgency of what faces them nowhere more decisively than in her writings. Those are addressed to the "newcomers" as Hannah Arendt called them, on whom the future of the human world, it if it to have one, depends"[17]. It is in our hands to recover the Jewish Arendt "in this world" and use those legacies; Arendt never wanted to be a philosopher of the institutions but a thinking companion, and in companionship one can always choose the good and reject the rest; companionship is the only way left to us to think, whether we use philosophy to achieve this at all or not, the important thing is that we try.

Hannah Arendt was not alone in her efforts but instead those have been silenced by the old Platonic adage "the beautiful must be the good"; one is reluctant to face a world that excels any other in paradoxes; the destruction of the thin layer of ice on which our freedom rest is just across the street, knocking on the door with a friendly eye and us left without any protection other than skyscrappers and the cable TV. Two women have joined her efforts; a social philosopher and a religious thinker - Agnes Heller and Eveline Goodman-Thau. Quasi-contemporaries of Arendt, Jews, Holocaust survivors and therefore reminders of our situation; even when they are not blind completely, but struggle everyday to shut off the shadow in order to bring us closer to that light the God of the narrative created with language on day one. Agnes Heller and Eveline Goodman-Thau live today sheltered by the language their access to traditions and people unknown to us provide them with, their voices cry out in the dark and lead us somewhere, to a place where a voice can be heard at all; where language is something more than the SOS code for buddies and e-bay.

But their voices aren't heard, people want philosophy but not ethical questions; of what interest are they anyway? We want to write books that will have numbers on them and after our demise will be buried in the library storehouse until the next colloquium; right thereafter we will place them back into their shelf-grave and join the choirs of murderers and clowns; but we are not guilty, we do it only to protect our sanity even if we are giving up our humanity on the way.

Agnes Heller is a professor of philosophy at the New School in New York but no students flock in mass to her classes, certainly not Jewish students; we only want the new stuff, the fun stuff... because in our insecure world we have no time to hear those antiquities on paper, we need to reinvent our world before it will collapse. Her books do not exist in the Hebrew language, her name does not ring a bell for anybody but for those lunatics that waste their time and miss out on the last chapter of the soap opera. A former student of one among the greatest sociologists of the century, a dissenter of Hungarian Communism, Marxist at some point and today a more refined conservative thinker. It was Heller who first recognized the obvious, that one needs to ask whether modernity will survive or not, because its death wish plays a major role in the modern imagination. She is no philosopher of books, but a philosopher of the obvious and in a world turned so abstract then one needs thinkers like that; the obvious of life has become so estranged that one can only see the sparks of humanity from within the stickers with the numbers that differentiate one creature from another, the only thing that differentiates them.

Heller pointed out the wonders of radical thinking; one needs radical thinking, no? Well there the obvious is being stated again. But she goes on to clarify that this is because liberalism is boring and conformist, it never asks new questions, but radical thinking is very Socratic, it makes people angry and irritated. But she's no professional radical like our country flows rich of, radicals who are radical for the sake of modern show. Not a theatrical act a-la-Dante but a TV interview that will fade away as quickly as genocide in Darfur and the birth of a million new babies. What is it that bothers Heller about professional radicals? It is that they seem to know the answer before they ask the question; has anybody ever wondered what is there to it in the secular political parties of our continents? A radical is a living critique of society, and critique is not a symptom of failure but of renewal; a society that cannot be criticized becomes soon a regime. Critique builds bridges in between us and the artifacts of the world. Heller is a radical, because she questioned the nature of justice and inequality, not because she thinks those artifacts will evaporate one day, but because criticism shows that anything on earth can be improved upon with common effort; was is not also common effort what brought the Nazis to almost succeed in their enterprise to wipe out European Jewry? Not alike Hannah Arendt, Heller is someone who thought because she saw the obligation, the duty. She thought and she thinks because she loves.

In an interview from 1997 she said: "My work is my whole life. I would start with my experience of the Holocaust. My father was killed and many of my childhood friends. So this experienced exercised an immense influence on my whole life, particularly on my work. I was always interested in the question: how could this possibly happen, how can I understand this? And this experience of the holocaust was joined with my experience in the totalitarian regime. This brought up very similar questions in my soul-search and world investigation: how could this happen? how could people do things like this? so I had to find out what morality is all about, what is the nature of good and evil, what can I do about crime, what can I figure out about the sources of morality and evil? That was the first inquiry. The other inquiry was a social question: what kind of world can produce this, what kind of world allows such things to happen? what is modernity all about? So it was ideas like these that interested me, and very passionately from the beginning onwards. And I felt I had a debt to pay as a survivor. Writing moral philosophy and philosophy of history for me then became a way to pay my debt as a survivor to the people who could not survive. So in this respect my philosophy became a sacrifice but a sacrifice I enjoyed. And this is not contradictory, I can sincerely say my whole life became a sacrifice to pay my debt and simultaneously enjoyed writing philosophy. For example, the great painters enjoyed painting the crucifixion of Christ, the greatest possible suffering. And they did it by putting color on the canvas. And this apparent contradiction is what what characterizes my life: the things that I have done have been a sacrifice to pay a debt I owe and the ways in which I have done them has been the enjoyment I have derived from philosophy". [18]

Agnes Heller has received prizes that once were awarded to Hannah Arendt, and by means of her critique she has been one of the only people who reached international status to deal extensively enough with Arendt's legacy. Hannah Arendt turns a hundred-years this month and in November one among many conferences will be held in Germany to commemorate the event. In one of them Agnes Heller will receive a medal for her contributions to philosophy that comes with a different undertone, specially for Heller since she has received any possible honor and award that philosophy can bestow - except fame, that is something a thinking companion can never aspire to, it is a gift only awarded in posterity when they will find out the answers if at all while we remain searching.

She will receive a prize from an institution that does not belong to any institution other than the faculty of thinking, and that alike Heller has the only purpose to pay a debt to the world not by bringing back the students and teachers who were murdered but by creating a living tradition that will protect our souls and minds for whenever it will happen again. This institution is headed by no ordinary thinker, Heller's contemporary Eveline Goodman-Thau; a foremost religious thinker. Someone who has lived in Jerusalem for some 50 years and has spent more than half of them thinking, thinking life. Both Goodman-Thau and Heller represent Hannah Arendt not in that they formed an Arendt-lobby but in that the life of the mind is what feeds them life itself; but not many read Goodman-Thau because her language is foreign, her appearance and her words are burdened by the fog of the remembrance, of the oblivion, of love's work. Eveline is a teacher unlike most because she doesn't want to teach you, to instruct you, only you can find the instruction yourself but she wants to be a companionship, a partner and a source of clarity in the obscurity that the knowledge of the past with its treasures and tragedies instills in her. Her teaching is all translation, her work is a big enterprise of translation - Trying to find a language that will create life, that will celebrate life. At times it all turns blurry and you lose the thread but it is a matter of persistence, of desires.

It is with her that I wiped away the dust from the books and saw the human being behind them, the reality that unfolds with terrible pangs before us yet hiding behind screens of unstoppable cars and modern machines, of insurmountable libraries and files. It is that everyday life that one discovers afresh. It is an hermeneutics of the experience, in that by interpreting the text one creates a present presence from an old sentence, one creates and creates and creates; no matter what, the issue at stake is not to destroy. But her living room doesn't hear the voices of the students, her voice remains ignored because often comes attached with the knife of the memory and we don't want to remember, we know all about that. Who cares about what happened in Vienna in 1934, we all have our problems; what does really philosophy have to do with anything? It is designed for rich useless people, on second thought also the concentration camps were but not exclusively, what matters is that they also went there and because of that Goodman-Thau lives beyond her seventies and thinks.

From an published text of Goodman-Thau:
"The edifice of the world is supported only on justice, certainly the edifice of the Jewish heritage; every book has been chosen and placed with love and care. Every book is after all somebody's life, but now all what counts are the numbers, the catalogs. Men and book are numbers alike, perhaps it is difficult to grasp - but how do they then grasp their content? You want to see the other side, to understand others, to appreciate them, but how much, how much compassion is one capable to summon up? Is that the meaning of survival: To tend to your compassion?" [19]

Her legacy is not that we all must become survivors of some sort, one can spare himself those horrors, but instead her voice is pointing toward one difficult truth; that it is in this suffering from the world that one can really experience life, one needs to think a little bit and decide for himself. You cannot escape those choices, those sufferings, and you shouldn't; like Arendt, Heller and Goodman-Thau. Kafka illuminates for us: "You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world: this is something you are free to do and is in accord with your nature, but perhaps this holding back is the only suffering that you might be able to avoid" [20]. In making those choices you become part of the world, you live among others, you live one of many truths and even though it can be daunting soon it turns into a bliss. It is this gift that is only given to the pariah and the outsider, to the one who refuses to fall into this logic categories that also produces catalogs and boxes into which every human being on earth can be caged. It is an ever-lasting comedy whose last act never comes.

It has nothing to do with being a woman or with being a Jew, but rather with being so entirely human as to become abnormal in our eyes, already deformed from the plastic trees and pentobarbital-fed gardens that unfold before our gates as though forming a dead landscape. Nature has died, make space for the new human being!, well if he's human at all.

It is about maintaining a dialogue and it is about being a witness. These women cannot solve the troubles of the world, perhaps they are not to be solved; but unlike us they remember what it looked like when speech was available, when not every word of was an electronic translation.

They bear silent witness. Like the Tzadik that renounced his paradise in order to burn in hell with the rest of the inmates; he prefers to stay with us but will not derive pleasure from the world nor provide it relief. He can only bear witness. And more than loving the world, it is philosophy who becomes a witness of the world, it writes on the memory words that no one can pronounce, it writes sparks of fire within the imagination and save one from the exhausted modern mind that can only imagine a death wish, but not naturally produce it because the technological imagination has not been able to overcome the weakness of people for remembering their history; every corner of the world has a human weakness and an imperfect world is indeed the only one we could be able to live in. The Jewish philosophers are these witnesses, and they are called philosophers not because of the Ph.D syndrome but because they have used revelation and prophecy, this is no compliment or exaltation; it is simply the use of the raw materials of the invisible world. Their prophecy is not prophetic and their revelation doesn't reveal anything new. It only shatters the hollow-ware of the blank pages and write on them over and over. This love's work can be done for as long as one lives, if he lives at all. Hannah Arendt is no longer to teach, she can only be read in a library; Heller and Goodman-Thau live but do not want to write everything they think, because otherwise who will come to listen to their stories? They have no autobiographical legacy, that is unimportant - the facts of one live can be so particular or not, it is irrelevant. But when one has been a philosopher for most of his life looking back there's no past to recount (Etienne Gilson). Other than memories of all sorts one can only leave a testament behind; and their testament is the possibility so entirely human to start anew, to think. This testament comes in the form of one's love's work.

And after they will be gone perhaps the last bridge to connect us with our past and the past of our minds will disappear forever, throwing us into the abyss of our freedom, into an inability to make choices because they are themselves invisible in a world not too visible; they are what makes us different from other species, they are what gives us a world to live in - a token of eternity, of things we can build, build, build, until something rather nice will come out. It is not about coping with life, for who really does by his own choice in the mature age? It is about regaining our vision, and wanting to understand what we see... because once one can see again it is only the beginning, nothing has been solved.

Kafka wrote in his diary: "Anyone who cannot cope with life while he is alive needs on hand to ward off a little his despair over this fate... but with this other hand he cannot jot down what he sees among the ruins, for he sees different and more things than the others; after all, he is dead in his own lifetime and the real survivor" [21]

This philosophy is about choices, reason for which is called thinking. Just like humanity is not merely a form of education, thinking isn't the material activity but the consequence, it is a new beginning. And precisely because these three women longed for those beginnings, for the shelter of light they started to see with the eyes of humanity: "God full of mercy, who dwelleth on High, cause the soul which hath gone to its rest to find shelter under the wings of the spirit, among the souls of those and pure as the firmament of the skies, for they have offered charity for the memory of his soul; for the sake of of this, conceal him in the mystery of thy wings forever, and bind up his soul in the bond of life; may the Lord be his inheritance, and may he repose in his resting-place in peace"[21a]. Sometimes a vision can be heard only after terrible efforts. It is not a coin-machine for candies, and not even candies are there in store.

The paradox of our freedom is that all these things are possible, both the destruction and the creation; but the freedom itself is not a foundation; freedom alone can be followed only by the most terrible form of disappointment and discontent, it must be used in the same utilitarian way that one applies to thinking or to his own life, as a means for something. Freedom only opens an abyss. This is obviously not a denial of freedom but a warning! It is only a call for responsibility and judgement, and even when these things cannot be learnt from life so easily at times one needs to hear, just like when God promises through the prophet that he will bestow freedom to those who hear, and if they don't then the freedom will come by water and fire, written on Rosh Hashanah and sealed on Yom Kippur.

Once more we hear the words of Goodman-Thau: "Now it is only a matter of time. The breach is there already, soon it will become another time breach. Not simply a temporal breach, but a fresh demolishing of what I built over the years. Not because it is still standing but because it stands for something. Not for me, but for all those students of Hermann Cohen that are no longer there, for all those books that were never written, all those lectures that never took place. Conferences, symposia and colloquia, all those things cannot bring people back nor evoke the memory unless a living tradition is created by those who are living, created by those still surviving. Unless a voice out of the empty space and the silence rises to reach all those who were murdered, unless the lesson of Auschwitz is learnt so that it will not happen again... But it does happen again every day, every hour, right here, but now right before our eyes. "O foolish people, and without understanding; which have eyes and see not; which have ears and hear not". What is the point of all the books and all the speeches? But when they all plunge their ears, you up there do hear. Through the tears we shed together the waters above can encounter the waters below. We channel open-ended pathways again."[22]

It is no longer a question of theology, it is a question of responsibility. A certain German thinker spoke about Hannah Arendt and Hans Jonas as "philosophical theologians of the world-responsibility". Tirelessly has Agnes Heller repeated that "curious as we are, we do not know when, how and where we are to arrive, or whether we will arrive at all; what we know for sure is that the next installment of history will be written by us"[23]. This is not a pessimistic warning, but rather a loving warning; if the technological imagination will write the next chapter of human history then even the beautiful will disappear and there will be no longer any good to choose from. Because Arendt did and Heller and Goodman-Thau do bear witness to what it means to be entirely human again their witness cannot be silenced by the books and the libraries and the prizes, their legacy is a living legacy, reason for which one often fails to see it so clearly from the books; it is not a solution but rather a realization, a difficult one. Gillian Rose said once "I've told you the tale, the Midrash is not beautiful, it is difficult"[24]. We're given choices and that's the secret of freedom's power to both annihilate and construct anew.

"This day I call heaven and earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live". [25]

Because Arendt, Heller and Goodman-Thau chose life they're women from dark times, they've paid their debt and as long as they lived in a conflict never resolved it can be said that they truly live to use the closing sentence of Stefan Zweig's autobiography. Arendt has her answers now perhaps, Heller and Goodman-Thau are still asking. asking about solitude and loneliness - the solitude of the thinker and the loneliness of oblivion; modernity enables both and it is our task to choose. This is not a celebration of the irrational, but of everything that is uniquely creative and vivifying in humanity. Can we perhaps leave the TV for a second and recognize ourselves in their radical madness? Elie Wiesel said once in a novel that Messiah will never come, but that we have to wait in any case because it is a little late; is it also a little late for us to be "hourly" as in the lines of Goethe? Only time has the answers, but for sure we are the ones to discover them with the risk that once we find them there might be no one left to live them on. Books are simple numbers of an ISBN system; can we start to believe that perhaps it is not freedom that will makes us free, but our actions, and that they need to be reconsidered once or twice? Are we able to live with all this? with Arendt, Heller and Goodman-Thau as companions?

Perhaps an ideal world like that promised by Stalinism and the Nazis and nowadays prompted by Islamic terror, could be an answer; but once the utopia would come boredom would settle in and mass suicide would become the rule.

In the last days of her life Hannah Arendt found prophetic inspiration for herself in the words of Cato, a Roman stateman: "I feel like a man nearing harbor after a long voyage; I seem to be catching sight of the land". I still house the fearful doubt that at the end of our lives we will feel having journeyed at all; I can only conclude with a poem written in 1975, the year of Arendt's death:

Perhaps someone has seen
The birth of radio and TV
The conquest of the moon and
The plastic heart, the electric too
And yet he doesn't know
Happiness, or Unhappiness
(Ugo Canonica, Switzerland)

[1] H. Arendt, "The Human Condition"

[2] Genesis 1:4-5
[3] Genesis 15:12-13
[4] H. Arendt, "Home to Roost", public speech 1975.
[5] Sentence used by Arendt referring to Martin Heidegger
[6] Exodus 10:21
[7] Isaiah 61:1
[8] Isaiah 42:16
[9] Joshua 9:9
[10] Genesis 22:6-8
[11] Genesis 1:27
[12] H. Arendt, Ph.D dissertation, "Der liebesbegriff bei Augustin"
[13] H. Arendt, "The Life of the Mind"
[14] H. Arendt, "Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy"
[15] J. Ring, "The Political Consequences of Thinking: Gender & Judaism in the work of H. Arendt"
[16] Dror Yikra, zmira of Shabbat.
[17] H. Arendt, "Responsibility & Judgement". J. Kohn ed.
[18] A. Heller, interview with Csaba Polony, 1997
[19] E. Goodman-Thau, "In the Ark of Innocence", A. Akkermans trans.
[20] F. Kafka, The Octavo Notebook
[21] F. Kafka, Diaries
[21a] El Ma'ale Rachamim, Jewish prayer.
[22] E. Goodman-Thau, "In the Ark of Innocence", A. Akkermans trans.
[23] A. Heller, "Can Modernity Survive?"
[24] G. Rose, "Love's Work"
[25] Deuteronomy 30:19