Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World

"Even though I’m writing a biography of Hannah Arendt myself, I wanted to include the major intellectual biography of her on the list. It was published in 1982 and remains the go-to Arendt biography. It’s quite long. Elizabeth Young-Bruehl knew Arendt. When Arendt died in 1975 she really wasn’t that well known outside of New York intellectual circles… Yes. It wasn’t until the 1980s and Young-Bruehl’s biography and then the discovery of the Heidegger letters that she became so well-known and a figure of interest in contemporary philosophy and political theory. She’s still not as recognized in Germany today as she could be. She’s not recognized in the way Adorno is, for example. This biography a wonderful telling of Arendt’s life. It is from a letter to Karl Jaspers that I believe was written in 1956 and also occurs as an entry in one of her thinking journals. In one of her thinking journals, “ Warum ist es so schwer, die Welt zu lieben ”—“why is it so hard to love the world?” Yes, I did, together with the picture of the actual entry. When she was finishing The Human Condition , she wrote to Karl Jaspers, ‘Only now, only this late in life, am I beginning to understand what it means to love the world. To love the world is to love it with all of the evil and suffering in it, and I would like to dedicate my magnum opus The Human Condition to you and to call it Amor Mundi , ‘for the love of the world’.’ So, the intended title for The Human Condition was Amor Mundi. Of course, Arendt was quite fond of flipping Nietzsche on his head. So, this is a playful flip of amor fati —’the love of fate.’ She’s thinking about what it means to build the world in common, poiesis , the fabrication of the world that we collectively make through language, through architecture, through art, through sculpture, through building. What always strikes me is that Hannah Arendt saw the worst her century had to offer, and her question was how to love the world. I don’t know if I would say that’s Young-Bruehl’s framing mechanism for the biography. The book is a deep-dive intellectual history of Hannah Arendt. One of the frames that Young-Bruehl uses is friendship, which is so important to Hannah Arendt and certainly relates to ‘love of the world’. But ‘love of the world’ as an idea in Arendt’s writing relates to this idea that we have to see the world and to take the good and the bad with equanimity, that we can’t be attached to either radical hope or radical despair or some idea of what it is we might want the world to be, but rather that we have to face the world as it is and love it anyway. My biography is an introductory biography to the life and works of Hannah Arendt. I have tried to fill in some of the gaps that have been left empty, simply because materials were not publicly available at the time. I talk about Hannah Arendt’s poetry and about her internment in Gurs and escape, which I’ve pieced together through different accounts that have emerged since Young-Bruehl’s biography was published. The framework for my biography comes from a panel discussion about her work where she says: “What is the subject of our thought? Experience and nothing else.” I’ve tried to tie the life of action together with the life of the mind. That’s a great question. Hannah Arendt is somebody whom I think with, but I don’t always agree with her. Her writing provokes me to thinking, and if I’m completely honest the thinker I feel closest to is Walter Benjamin. Reading Walter Benjamin is the only time I ever feel at home in the world. Adorno is also somebody who’s very important for me. I’m that word people love to use but don’t love in reality—interdisciplinary. Marx and Freud are also very important for me. But just as important for me are people like Virginia Woolf and Tennessee Williams and D H Lawrence . These are thinkers I also return to, to hold on to something in my own thinking. The other day I was teaching The Human Condition and a student called me an Arendtian. I laughed and said, ‘I must protest.’ As a friend says, I’m Arendtian enough to know not to be an Arendtian. Arendt’s work isn’t a roadmap into the future, but it is something we can hold on to in thinking about the world."