Why Hannah Arendt matters? Why Elisabeth Young-Bruehl
matters?
Laudatio – Elisabeth Young-Bruehl 1946-2011 /
Correspondences with Jerome Kohn
“Yes, I
would like to bring the wide world to you this time. I’ve begun so late, really
only in recent years, to truly love the world, that I shall be able to do that
now. Out of gratitude, I want to call my book on political theories ‘Amor Mundi’[1].”
The first time I heard the name “Elisabeth Young-Bruehl”
was at a legendary bookstore in Jerusalem known as “Shatz” because it is
located on a street of the same name, only a few blocks away from the both
modern and ancient city center of West Jerusalem. I had walked into the store
captured by the curiosity of the passer-by always invited to look into this
place through the glass panels that run from ceiling to floor and that offer in
plain sight, a peek into the thousands of books –old and new, that can be found
in this place, for long already a landmark in Jerusalem culture.
At the time I was not even in my twenties and
was a religious student in one of those Talmudic academies known as “yeshivas”,
only a few blocks away from “Shatz” but yet located in a remote universe of
thoughts and ways. It was not that I didn’t enjoy the long hours of discussions
and the intense friendships that developed between the four walls of the Talmud
and the Mishnah, as the tradition says, fenced by the authority of the Torah.
The idea itself – of authority – was a difficult concept for me to grasp when I
escaped from the yeshiva dorm at night, to give myself into the turbulent jolts
of the rather provincial city that sometimes offered a lapse out of the eternal
religious truth into other realities, both shallower and deeper at the same
time.
I had read what at the time I considered a lot
of philosophy – mostly Pre-Socratics and Heidegger – in the previous years
before joining the religious institution in which I found myself always
socially inept but intellectually and spiritually intact. Yet I felt that there
was something missing not necessarily in the life of the mind but in the conversations
with people that were often geographically located inside the fence of the
Torah, even for the most private feelings.
Curious as I was, I decided to turn to
philosophy again without being aware of the long journey that would await me. I
had been curious about Hannah Arendt as far back as half a decade before those
days when I half-read “The Origins of Totalitarianism” in the library where I
took shelter from the inanity of schooling and only because of my passionate
fascination with Heidegger, fostered by an unusual Greek teacher who used to
smoke heavily in the classroom as she explained to us with great paucity
aphorisms from the great philosophers and walked around erratically as if peripatetically
set ablaze by what was on her mind, spoken with a thick Greek accent.
The experience of reading Hannah Arendt began
with a book that had only appeared then, a collection of essays titled “Responsibility
& Judgment” and though the book was written in that beautiful and thick
prose typical of Arendt, and that I know recognize, I must confess that I
understood next to nothing even though I read and re-read chapters and
chapters, wondering if I could ever find a teacher that could explain to me all
the intricacies in Plato, Tocqueville, Machiavelli and many others.
That was the moment when in an attempt to
remedy the curse of my ignorance, I read Elisabeth Young-Bruehl’s biography of
Arendt, bought from Shatz with the little money I had at the time and which I
devoured from cover to cover in one or two days, lying on my bed at the yeshiva
dorm and feigning illness as not to be called out for the interminable long
morning prayers, then followed by three or four hours of Talmudic discussions,
through which I dreamt myself elsewhere and wrote a journal that though
childish, set the foundation for what I would do later on in life.
It was reading of Young-Bruehl’s biography the
moment when I fell in love with Hannah Arendt and decided in a matter of days
that there would be nothing more important for me than to read all of her
works, understand all of her thoughts and be able to penetrate the issues that
the biography had masterfully elucidated with a style – somewhere in between
literature, observation and criticism – that I now recognize to be a
characteristic feature in the Arendt scholars. It was the most important moment
for the life of the mind in my case. All I wanted to do at the time was to pack
my bags, get on a bus all the way to the gates of the Hebrew University in Mt.
Scopus and ask for someone to teach me Hannah Arendt.
Life inside the confines of the yeshiva was
rather comfortable and pleasant – very different from the insecurity and
constant anxiety of the world – and being unprepared as I was for the
challenges of philosophy, I decided to wait as someone who awaits a well-known
and identifiable Messiah – the greatest fallacy – and often used to sit in the
back of the large hall where the Talmudic discussions happened, placing single
pages of Hannah Arendt’s texts inside the large Talmudic tractates and as I
pretended to be absorbed in the words of Torah, I leafed through the mysterious
philosopher’s words and flew to faraway places.
The impossibility of my mediocre patience began
to show rapidly as cracks made their way into my religious faith with worrying
and fatal symptoms: The discovery of homosexual love embodied in a Catholic
priest from Austria whom I often saw at night when I escaped into the turbulent
world of the Old City, the mosques, the smells of baklava and frankincense, the
Franciscan pilgrims; then there was also the increasing anxiety over one’s
autonomy, the desire to be free, to think for oneself and to lead a different
life than that offered by reality – to resist it by all means. Soon enough I
found myself exiled and evicted from the community of faith and with nothing
but Hannah Arendt’s books and Young-Bruehl’s biography.
It wasn’t a lack of religiosity or atheism what
drove me but rather heresy – the desire to ask many questions. In the coming
years, hopping between philosophy classes and other types of religious
seminaries, whose education I found as inane as I had found my secondary school
years when I ran after Heidegger and Greek philosophy. Nothing seemed able to
meet the level of engagement offered by Hannah Arendt which I had learnt to
appreciate through Elisabeth Young-Bruehl. Even though in the course of the
following years I met many great men and women, scholars and writers, that
teacher I had been looking for was nowhere to be found to this very day and
whenever the world turned its back on me, I found shelter in Hannah Arendt as
if she had become a portable home that I could take with me anywhere.
At the time, naïve as I was about the practical
and institutional demands of academic life – to which I never submitted to this
very day – I decided to keep looking for the keys into Hannah Arendt’s world
and even for a brief while, I exchanged some letters with Jerome Kohn, who had
been Arendt’s last teaching assistant at the New School for Social Research. I
remember that Jerome Kohn responded to my letter saying to me that he thought
there was no such a thing as a “way” to study Arendt’s ideas on judgment and
that when he himself tried to do that, he spent a lot of time reflecting upon
specific works of art.
Half a decade has passed since then, but that
insight has remained with me through the years and makes Hannah Arendt the
unavoidable guest today when I reflect not only about the Arab Revolutions in
my articles but also when I take delight in contemplating the works of art of
my great artist friends. In his first letter he quoted his little poem written
by Arendt in 1954, that is one of the only poems I’ve ever learnt by heart and
that come to mind whenever I think of the work of Elisabeth Young-Bruehl that I
came to know later: “Ich liebe die Erde / So wie auf der Reise / den fremden
Ort / und anders nicht”. Who knows if Hannah Arendt ever felt at home in
the world as she expressed it to Jaspers? I remembered then having written then
to Jerome Kohn telling him that this was the point where I disagreed with
Young-Bruehl’s biography.
Later on, innocent as my view was, I wrote him
about whether it wouldn’t be the case that as much as there’s a banality of
evil – the most famous thesis of Arendt, re-worked from her radical evil of an
earlier period when she wrote “The Origins of Totalitarianism” – there was also
a banality of good and he replied this to me: “I am impressed by what you
say about the banality of goodness – by which, I take it, you mean good works.
About that, I think Hannah Arendt would agree[2]”.
That might have been one of my happiest moments in those years. He went on to
explain: “Do you remember in “The Human Condition” how she differentiates
between goodness and good works? Following Jesus of Nazareth, she says that the
goodness of good works – however useful they might be for a variety of purposes
– vanishes as soon as the works appear in the world. She goes further than
Jesus when she says that the attempt to make goodness appear in the world is
not only fruitless in itself but is also destructive of the space of the
appearances.[3]”
I then wrote a long and complicated – rich in
everything but clarity – letter in which I laid out a systematic view relating the
value of the good deeds of that banality of good to Kant’s moral philosophy by
saying that “Now if we understand that the usefulness or purposiveness or a
deed, particularly a good one, vanishes as soon as the work leaves the world of
absolute free will (thought) and enters the world as “it is” (action)[4].
My misunderstanding was due not only to a very poor reading of both Kant and
Arendt but also to the fact of being clouded by philosophy, to put it mildly, to
understand that this had to do more with thinking for oneself and without “crutches”
– to use Arendt’s expression – than with any reading of Husserl, Kant or
Descartes that I might have been involved in at the time. Jerome Kohn was kind
to respond to my enlightened ignorance with something that has become forever
useful when trying to understand what happened with the promise of politics and
of renewing the common world that came with the felicitous Arab Spring:
“What Hannah says is that regardless of how
useful it may be in and for the world, the goodness of a good work vanishes as
soon as it appears in and for the world, the goodness of a good work vanishes
as soon as it appears as good. This has nothing to do with Kant’s moral
philosophy… For Arendt this makes doing good essentially religious and
anti-political: it is the loneliest of all activities, without even the company
of oneself, and so lonely, in fact, that it would be unbearable without the
presence of God as its witness[5]”. Casual as this comment was, and
although it didn’t occur to me to re-read it in several years, this was exactly
what came to my mind when I wrote different articles about the uprisings in the
Middle East, this time with the particular case of Bahrain in mind. From Jerome
Kohn I learnt to call her simply “Hannah”, what I quickly had to unlearn when
at a seminar in which I had to present a brief lecture on Arendt’s “Thinking
and Moral Considerations”, and all the scholars burst into hysterical laughter
when I called her that way…
But of what good is this good if it serves no
ulterior purpose? It seemed to me as if reading this letter together with
Arendt’s “On Revolution” had revealed to me that it was the emphasis on the
redemption of individual people and not of the world, what turned Bahrain’s
uprising into a stalemate out of which no solution seems visible in the
horizon. It wasn’t the renewal of the world of men as such what was at work
here, but rather, the fact that the uprising meant no harm, it only meant good
in the worst possible manner: The political was destroyed by turning politics
into a private affair of the household and the private affairs of the household
into political causes. How to release public affairs from such utter
meaninglessness? That question would remain unanswered until now.
In my following letter I wrote about Mary
McCarthy, whose novels I had begun reading while I was still at the yeshiva –
though secular literature was strictly forbidden and what in yeshiva slang is
termed “toilet reading” – explaining how they had helped me get a better
understanding of Arendt’s world and also about St. Augustine whom I had loved
much when I was younger. I concluded my letter by saying that “Good works
destroy the world as we know it: the space in between people. In that sense the
otherworldly nature of good deeds turns rather anti-worldly and therefore makes
it impossible to feel at home[6]”.
Once again confirming the thesis I have expounded time
and again this year about the loss of the revolutionary treasure when the aims
of revolution extend beyond the political into questions of instrumental and
social nature. Mr. Kohn appreciated the insight and remarked that “One day
you and I will have to sit down and talk about all the ideas in your letter--especially
about Augustine, who of course was a tremendous influence on Hannah Arendt[7]”. I never met Jerome Kohn
and neither did I continue the conversation with Augustine; what remains true
however is how those ideas helped me shape the concepts with which I would
later on tackle the political experience of this century and that would be
expressed in my cautious but optimistic reservation about the current events in
the Arab world. It seemed to me as if I didn’t entirely grasp at the time the
crucial form that those letters would take in my subsequent work as a
journalist on the complex world of politics and culture in the Middle East.
On that very year was the occasion of the 100 years of
Hannah Arendt’s birth that my mentor at the time – Prof. Eveline Goodman-Thau –
celebrated with a conference in Berlin which I was unable to attend but which I
attended in spirit having shown at the film a movie about Hannah Arendt’s life
which I made with images from the most diverse parts of Arendt’s life set
against the background of Hannah Arendt’s own voice speaking about her teacherKarl Jaspers and his integrity before and in midst of the European catastrophe.
Jerome Kohn wrote me a last letter on December 17th 2006: “Have been away for two months, and in Berlin I had the
pleasure of meeting and speaking a lot with Eveline Goodman-Thau. We spoke of
you, very highly, and I greatly enjoyed the film you made which was shown, at
the old Synagogue, at the opening of Eveline's conference. When I was told that
you made the film in just one day, I was duly impressed! I'm sorry you were not
there in person, but you were very much there in spirit.”
That was the last time I corresponded with Jerome Kohn
and although those were brief exchanges spread in the course of a single year,
I believe they constituted the entirety of my “political education” on and with
Hannah Arendt; a message handed out to me from faraway in time that would serve
as the basis of things that remained dormant in between a couple of emigrations
and a hundred other books and daily entanglements, so that they would never
gain a form until 2011. Looking back at the correspondences, they are really
the bulk not of an interpretation but of an experience of the thought of Hannah
Arendt that would still have the relevance to guide one’s thought through times
as uncertain as those that preceded the great wars through which Hannah Arendt
lived.
When my exchanges with Jerome Kohn came to an end and
after having become very critical of Young-Bruehl’s biography – being at home
in the world, Messianic strains and in particular the overarching Jewish nature
of her hermeneutics; disagreements which have been confirmed by more recent
literature on Arendt, such as the work of Liliane Weissberg, Dagmar Barnow
& Susanna Gottlieb – I felt that I needed to venture into a different field
of visualization to understand whether the message of Hannah Arendt had any
relevance for the modern world: It is often the case with philosophy that
things come and go in seasons, some being more fashionable than others on a
certain year and then quickly forgotten the next, as if the pieces of a runway
collection.
I came to realize that there were many troubling
aspects in Arendt’s thought that I wouldn’t be completely sure that could stand
the test of time and whether they could become relevant after the generation of
the Holocaust to which I didn’t belong not even by close. I didn’t know if it
was really necessary to mend or repair loose strains in her philosophical
thought and even then didn’t believe it was possible. I needed Arendt to be
relevant for the modern world especially because I didn’t have any academic
affiliation nor did I belong to any school or had any teachers and if anything
had to learn how to think in the open with nothing but the help of books and of
course of other people, that might have been in turn, as misguided as I may have
been. If I could re-write the letters I sent to Jerome Kohn in 2006, I would
definitely change absolutely each and every comma and would ask very different
questions. I understand now how wrong I was not only because of asking
questions that were only technical but also because of placing myself in a
Romantic position to try and understand the thought of a person who battled
against this self-same Romanticism throughout her whole work.
That was when moment – after I finally left Israel,
never to return until present – when as if in my eyes mending thorny aspects in
her earlier biography, I came to know Elisabeth Young-Bruehl’s “Why Arendt
matters?” written also in 2006 and that since then became a Bible not of
scholarship but of reality, whenever it was necessary to translate Hannah
Arendt into our contemporary situation and strictly philosophical as the book
is not, I understood it as one of those Talmudic commentaries that elucidate a
difficult passage in the Bible with the greatest brevity. Elisabeth
Young-Bruehl was what we would call a strange bird in the world of academic
philosophy and to my delight, would avoid each and every trap that has been
proposed by nearly all interpreters of Arendt that following the accepted procedures
of academic thought, focus on narrowly defined parts of her thought in order to
make a cause for as just as narrow theoretical framework that is nowhere to be
found in Arendt.
In her book, Young-Bruehl doesn’t introduce Arendt to
the academic or lay reader; neither does she construct a full framework of
reference to study her books. Instead, she is offering a friendly and (modern)
historically-informed view of what could we do with Arendt’s work today. The
most remarkable aspects that she introduces and that should never be forgotten
whenever we turn to Arendt are, if I may mention them in broader terms:
-
The importance of thinking poetically: It is improbable that there is another think that can
bring this into full view as Hannah Arendt did. In her thick prose, the
prominent place of literature and history is not only an aesthetic device but
an integral part of her thinking strains, she is going wherever there can be
found a source of truth, which she distinguishes as not the task of philosophy
but of poetry. In thinking poetically Arendt humanizes the formal structures of
thought by bringing them into larger surfaces of human experience. Here I am
reminded how in an exchange of letters already published, Jerome Kohn mentions
to Young-Bruehl how in a seminar they both took with Arendt, they didn’t read a
single text of political theory.
-
Terror is not an enemy: Young-Bruehl’s reflections based on the reading of
Arendt’s most political texts and her own experience of our times (particularly
after 9/11) she explicitly says that the “war on terror” in which the free
world has been engaged since 2001 is a self-defeating enterprise because terror
is a means/method and not an enemy or a place. There’s terrorism and terrorists
in every country, beyond national and cultural borders and the current image on
terror serves the purpose of building psychological and social constructions in
binary ways. These insights are not new in Arendt since they were present in
her work during the last years of her life as she reflected on the experience
of the war in Vietnam and what she calls, the latest addition in the arsenal of
follies. This aspect of Arendt’s work highlighted by Young-Bruehl remains in my
opinion the most relevant of all and the best overlooked. The new
fundamentalisms are not fundamentally religious – that all revolutionary
momenta in our times have demanded nothing but freedom attests to the poorly
religious nature of our world – but adaptations of religion for supranational
purposes. From this disease no monotheistic religion is free – Judaism, Islam,
Christianity – and the three of them are subject to the same trend. Lastly she
speaks about the anti-political nature of terror (for which Islamic terrorism
is the best and clearest example) that doesn’t aim to seize the political but
to ultimately destroy it; not to mention the fact that since McCarthyism and
the “Red Scare”, it is not unheard of to use terrorism to fight terrorism as
much as totalitarian means to fight totalitarianism.
-
Distinction between acting/making and violence/power: This last part is less clear today than ever and
remains the most complex part of Arendt’s political thought which goes back all
the way to criticize Plato and Aristotle and accordingly all the tradition of
Western political thought. Here we are faced with the constitutive elements not
of a theory but of a discernible understanding of human action that is not
strictly reduced to political means/ends as in the work of Hobbes that strange
as it might seem to those philosophically educated, is very much alive in the
United States and everywhere else, actively promoted by political parties,
think-tanks and policy experts.
All of the above can be summed up with the following
words of Young-Bruehl: The elements of Totalitarianism have continued to be
with us, even in the most secure democracies, but they no longer take their mid-20th
century form. The writing is on the wall: Ideologies that explain all of
history (Christian and Islamic fundamentalism), total terror in which politics
disappears from the scene (as it is the case in many parts of the world) that
then deteriorates into the superfluousness of peoples: homelessness,
statelessness and the lack of rights to have rights. In this sense, Arendt’s
work remains as valid today as it was the decade after Auschwitz and might
still be read as an open book to understand and interpret the unprecedented
legacy of the 20th century: That novel form of government known as Totalitarianism.
Hannah Arendt didn’t propose a theory of anything and
this is what is so difficult for scholars to handle: The insights that are
proposed here and highlighted by Young-Bruehl constitute an exemplary testimony
to the use of human faculties but it doesn’t propose solutions and it doesn’t
theorize theoretically – paradoxical as it seems – but rather, points in the
direction of concepts much more basic such as trust, forgiveness and promise
that ultimately release the world and action – good and bad – from the
meaninglessness that I had discussed once with Jerome Kohn.
This is the part where Elisabeth Young-Bruehl becomes
as relevant as Arendt not as an interpreter but as a thinker on her own right:
Her turn to psychoanalysis that might have been in stark contrast with Arendt’s
own view is no traditional lapse into the Romantic world of self-crafted and
crafted-by-others individuals but rather, it is in a world of such emotional
impoverishment, a possibility of action and of a public space in a world where
both have disappeared. I haven’t read anyone argue the same, but I believe
strongly that the particular emphasis of Arendt of story-telling as the
intermediary between theory and action itself (distinguished from praxis) must
have had a great influence on Young-Bruehl when she entered the world of Freud
and turned indefinitely to the practice of psychoanalysis. This story-telling
is no mere exercise in poetics: Story-telling is the basis on which human action
is liberated from endlessness and enters a richer visual field in which the
world is offered to us as a promise – fragile and temporary but true in the
sense that as Young-Bruehl writes: Without reality shared with other human
beings, truth loses all meaning.
Elisabeth Young-Bruehl in her life and in her thought
rescues the value of friendship as that home in the world for those without
traditional families, communities or religious settings. It is here precisely
that she begins to love the world: She turns the practice of psychoanalysis
into a form of education; this education consists not in imparting information
but rather in helping or enabling individual human beings to avoid the escape
into an inauthentic self lost in sentimentality. The avoidance of these
psychological trap enables people to enter at last or re-enter the world and to
make a case for what Susan Sontag tireless argued in the context of art: There
is no distinction between feelings and thoughts – thought is feeling and
feeling is thought – because thinking, as Hannah Arendt always pointed out, is
the condition not of life but of being humanly alive and obviously the
precondition of being able to judge our place and situation in the world.
Her work is not only very loyal to the legacy of
Arendt – if there can be said to be one – but also the confirmation of that “decent
world” that Arendt envisioned: One in which in spite of the overriding
anxieties with which we are faced, it is possible to think in the open without
fear. Now that both Hannah Arendt and Elisabeth Young-Bruehl are gone, we are
left with a little more than fragments that other than enlarge the size of our
bookshelves, should serve as an inspiration to think decently, that is, to
think always for its own sake and not in the ultimate pursuit of other ends. If
I could sum up the work and the life of Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, I would say
that it was “care for the world”. The task of this care was to keep the fragile
world from disintegrating and falling into disjointed entities not bearing responsibility
for their actions so that in returning to the world and making part of its
larger orders of truth and truth, of happiness and unhappiness, it will be
possible to hand out to the next generation a place to live with others – the world.
That task is now handed to us while Young-Bruehl, like Hannah Arendt, has
perhaps mused to herself the words of Cato the Elder that she herself wrote at
the end of her teacher’s biography from which she drew so much inspiration: “To me, indeed, the thought of this “ripeness” for
death is so pleasant, that the nearer I approach death the more I feel like one
who is in sight of land at last and is about to anchor in his home port after a
long voyage.”
