Passionate thinkers

At the time of her death more than a quarter century ago, Hannah Arendt was perhaps the best-known political philosopher in America, if not the world. In the years since, her reputation has, if anything, grown. Her major works, from “The Origins of Totalitarianism” in 1951, which reflects her experience as a German-Jewish refugee, to “The Life of the Mind,” an equally personal series of reflections on thinking and the will, published posthumously in 1978, have proved durably fascinating. Among her many contemporary admirers are the German philosopher Jurgen Habermas -- and also the Pulitzer Prize-winning American political commentator Samantha Power.

Besides preparing an incisive introduction to a new edition of Arendt’s study of totalitarianism, Power has recently resurrected Arendt’s paradoxical idea that some evils are unpunishable, using it as a springboard for her own reflections on how America ought to bring Saddam Hussein to justice in Iraq. As Power justly noted in the New Republic, Arendt’s “test for philosophy was not its ‘vapors of cleverness,’ but its capacity to improve the human condition.” At the same time, Arendt’s life and work have never been more controversial. Cleverness in philosophy has its limits -- but as her detractors delight in pointing out, it is not entirely clear (to borrow her own description of Nietzsche) “if the astounding accumulation of questions and problems and the constant experimentation with them that never leaves an unequivocal result can be called a philosophy.”

Meanwhile, her works have been in danger of being overshadowed by new details about her involvement with Martin Heidegger, the would-be philosopher-king of Germany’s Third Reich. Their correspondence, first published in Germany in 1998, makes one thing clear: Heidegger was not only a lover who became Arendt’s lifelong interlocutor. He was also her ineluctable muse, a sphinx whose riddle she could never quite solve -- and understanding their relationship is crucial for appraising the unusual turns that her moral thinking took.

A secular mystic steeped in the rigors of medieval theology, Heidegger was perhaps the most charismatic philosopher in Weimar Germany. He pored over the sacred texts of the classical tradition with scholastic precision, meanwhile pronouncing anathemas on a contemporary world that he regarded as hopelessly depraved. Alienated young students flocked to his seminars. And in his 1927 magnum opus, “Being and Time,” he offered not only a striking new account of the nature of being but also the electrifying prospect of radical change: a redemptive transfiguration of personal existence, a collective new beginning. Yet in 1933, to the shock of many, Heidegger placed his bets for a collective new beginning on Hitler’s National Socialist movement.

Arendt’s initial encounter with Heidegger had occurred a decade earlier, in the fall of 1924, when she took a course with him called Plato’s Sophist at the University of Marburg. By February 1925, when the correspondence begins, Arendt had embarked on a furtive affair with the older married man that lasted for a year and a half. On the evidence of surviving letters, almost all of them from Heidegger, this was the love of his life -- and there is circumstantial evidence that this was also true for Arendt.

At first, they exchanged poems and discussed books. Arendt sent Heidegger a gloomy essay in autobiography, and he exhorted her to have courage and to pursue her philosophical studies. Suddenly, at the start of 1926, and apparently out of concern for Heidegger (as she explains in a letter written a quarter century later), Arendt transferred from Marburg to Heidelberg, where she would complete her philosophical studies. For several years, Arendt and Heidegger kept in touch. But Hitler’s rise to power made their relationship untenable. Arendt was understandably upset by the rumors she was hearing about Heidegger’s political conduct. In response, in a grotesque letter written in the winter of 1932-1933, Heidegger defensively lists examples of his kindness toward Jews: “Whoever wants to call that ‘raging anti-Semitism’ is welcome to do so.” Shortly afterward, Arendt fled from Germany, eventually settling in New York City.

Their correspondence stopped for nearly two decades. In 1950, Arendt found herself in Freiburg on a mission for the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction Agency. Acting (in her own words) “on the power of the impulse,” she notified Heidegger that she was in town. He replied with a written invitation for her to visit him. When he went to her hotel to hand-deliver it, he (perhaps also on impulse) asked if Arendt were in: “When the waiter spoke your name,” she wrote him two days later, “it was as if time suddenly stood still.”

By then, Arendt was happily married and exploring what would become a central theme in her subsequent thought. “The problem of evil,” she averred in 1945 with characteristic brio, “will be the fundamental question of postwar intellectual life in Europe.” Heidegger, alas, had no idea what she was talking about. “I never understand what you mean by the phrase ‘radical evil,’ ” he wrote her in 1950. Still, despite their unspeakable differences over what had happened under Hitler, they kept contact from then on. Arendt proved fiercely loyal, acting as a broker between Heidegger and his American publishers. She even forgave his awkward silence about her own published works, especially “The Human Condition,” which she had wanted to dedicate to him.

And in 1969, on Heidegger’s 80th birthday, she composed an encomium to her beloved friend, an apologia that doubled as a private birthday present (she sent a copy of a typescript to him directly). In this carefully wrought piece, she addressed Heidegger’s “mistake” in the 1930s, but only in the most ambiguous of terms, delicately suggesting that Heidegger, like Plato, suffered from “what the French call a ‘deformation professionelle,’ ” and closing with a kind of wan prayer in which she alluded simultaneously to Brecht’s famous poem “To Those Born Later” and to an equally famous passage in Plato’s “Republic”: “May those who come after us, when they recall our century and its people and try to keep faith with them, not forget the devastating sandstorms that swept us up, each in his own way, and in which something like this man and his work were still possible.”

Despite -- or perhaps because of -- her lifelong loyalty to Heidegger, Arendt in these later years became more obsessed than ever with the problem of evil. A focus of her most controversial essay, “Eichmann and Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil” (1963), it also inspired her last major work, “The Life of the Mind.” The newest anthology of Arendt’s previously uncollected lectures and essays, “Responsibility and Judgment,” is particularly welcome because it throws this preoccupation into fresh relief. In a fascinating series of 1965 lectures, Arendt contends that “the few rules and standards according to which men used to tell right from wrong” had collapsed “without much notice” in Germany in the 1930s, making it seem as if “morality suddenly stood revealed in the original meaning of the word, as a set of mores, customs and manners, which could be exchanged for another set with hardly any more trouble than it would take to change the table manners of an individual or a people.”

To make sense of this, Arendt hypothesized that great evil may be the result of sheer thoughtlessness -- and that doing the right thing, especially in a time of crisis, may simply require an ability to “stop and think.” She had in mind Socrates, who was famously constrained by his personal daimon, which invariably prevented him from doing anything evil. She even briefly considers the possibility that the example of Socrates represents a universal aspiration for those living in dark times: “If every man could be made to think and judge by himself, then indeed it might be possible to do without fixed standards and rules.” To this end, what was needed was to develop a “ ‘subjective’ criterion of the kind of person I wish to be.” War criminals like Eichmann were shallow because they lacked any such criterion: “The greatest evil perpetrated is the evil committed by nobodies, that is, by human beings who refuse to be persons.”

As one follows this curious line of argument, one cannot help but wonder: How does a tyrant like Saddam Hussein fit into this framework? (Not very well, I fear, despite Power’s heroic efforts to make Arendt’s views seem contemporary.)

And -- even harder to say -- where does Heidegger fit into Arendt’s unusual approach to moral philosophy? After all, Heidegger was able, surely more than most, “to think and judge by himself.” In his own philosophical terms, he did in fact try “to do without fixed standards and rules.” He certainly upheld a strenuous criterion (described in “Being and Time”) of what kind of person he wished to be. Yet when the chips were down, he behaved abominably.

That Arendt was haunted by this knowledge gives a pathos to her Sisyphean struggle to understand evil. Her last works are endlessly suggestive -- and hopelessly inconclusive. But I suspect that long after her tortuous efforts to answer “some questions of moral philosophy” are forgotten, Hannah and Martin are liable to be recalled, not unlike Eloise and Abelard: two thinkers joined in passion, helplessly bearing witness to the overwhelming power of love, before which even the greatest minds are humbled -- and the greatest sins forgiven. *