Hannah Arendt, Pearl-Diving, and the Humanities

08-29-2024

And this thinking [poetically], fed by the present, works with the “thought fragments” it can wrest from the past and gather about itself. Like a pearl diver who descends to the bottom of the sea, not to excavate the bottom and bring it to light but to pry loose the rich and the strange, the pearls and the coral in the depths and to carry them to the surface, this thinking delves into the depths of the past—but not in order to resuscitate it the way it was and to contribute to the renewal of extinct ages. What guides this thinking is the conviction that although the living is subject to the ruin of the time, the process of decay is at the same time a process of crystallization, that in the depth of the sea, into which sinks and is dissolved what once was alive, some things “suffer a sea-change” and survive in new crystallized forms and shapes that remain immune to the elements, as though they waited only for the pearl diver who one day will come down to them and bring them up into the world of the living—as “thought fragments,” as something “rich and strange,” and perhaps even as everlasting Urphänomene.

(Hannah Arendt, “Walter Benjamin: 1892-1940,” in Men in Dark Times. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1970: p. 205-206)

 
This is one of the most arresting passages and images in Arendt’s works. I read it as a highly original defence of the humanities, which are now greatly endangered throughout the world. It is rarely interpreted in this light, but I think it distills better than many other accounts the essence of a genuinely meaningful vocation of a humanities scholar and/or teacher. At least personally, it provides me with a self-interpretation that illuminates my teaching experience at the university.

Arendt uses the figure of a pearl-diver to describe the fragmented nature of her friend Walter Benjamin’s writing “method,” but it equally applies to her own writing style, particularly the way she delves into the past to retrieve the “lost treasures” of Western political thought and experience. Predictably, Arendt has been criticized as a sloppy, inaccurate historian who interprets the past unsystematically and unscientifically. But that is precisely Arendt’s point: she wants to challenge the prevailing positivist method that approaches history merely chronologically without any connection to present circumstances and concerns. Arendt believed that the Western tradition had been broken by the 20th-century horrors and totalitarianism, and the positivist approach had not prevented the collapse of tradition, so teaching the tradition “traditionally” was not an option anymore. That is the reason why Arendt, Benjamin, and a few other thinkers began searching for ways to interpret the contents of inherited past differently—as pearl-divers. They are not trying to resuscitate a comprehensive picture of a bygone era (an unrealistic positivist wish), but rather to salvage “the rich and the strange,” i. e., unfamiliar, original fragments of thought and experience that may inspire us to reinterpret our own way of being and thinking. A pearl-diver’s imagination goes visiting, expanding her thought horizons to seek new impulses in alien epochs with very different premises about the most important things in life. We need this kind of mental escape from our current “common sense” to critically reflect upon our customs from a novel perspective, to understand what we have lost and what we might be missing.

The pearl-diver passage powerfully rebuffs the charges that Arendt was a “nostalgic” of the Greeks who wished to “go back to Antiquity” (whatever that would entail). She was never an uncritical admirer of the Greeks: Arendt acknowledged the Greek legacy of slavery and the severe limitations of the Athenian understanding of citizenship, and, in some respects, she valued the Romans more than the Athenians. In this case, the point is not to copy any of the Greek notions verbatim or in their entirety, but to extract the Urphänomene—in this case, the original experience of the political. Thus, Arendt’s general philosophical aim, as writes in the Preface to Between Past and Future, is “to discover the real origins of traditional concepts in order to distill from them anew their original spirit which has so sadly evaporated from the very key words of political language – such as freedom and justice, authority and reason, responsibility and virtue, power and glory – leaving behind empty shells with which to settle almost all accounts, regardless of their underlying phenomenal reality.”

Arendt was, in Andreas Kalyvas’s expression, a “thinker of the extraordinary.” For her, politics was not a universal, timeless presence in the human condition. The burst of authentic politics is a rare experience, a potentiality that only occasionally manifests itself as a spontaneous, unpredictable, miraculous event. Most of the time, we have ruling (commandment and obedience) rather than politics. But those rare experiences are enough for Arendt; they provide us with the hope that something similar may once again spring up in our times. Whether it be Athens, 18th-century America, or the Hungarian Revolution of the 1956—all these are pearls of authentic politics that show the world, albeit very irregularly, what freedom, natality, plurality, and genuine solidarity may look like in practice. The American revolutionaries were different from the Athenians of the 5th century BCE, the polis was different from the town-halls of America or the short-lived councils in the Soviet-controlled Hungary, but the Urphänomen was the same: a communal willingness to establish a new political reality, by entering the public realm together and taking responsibility into one’s hands, fighting for one’s vision of the future while respecting the diversity of opinions. And precisely because Arendt managed to capture and conceptualize this Urphänomen, we can recognize it in different contexts in our own age—for instance, in the 2013-2014 Maidan Revolution. As Arendt writes in The Human Condition: “Wherever you go, you will be a polis.” Put differently: a potential to become political is always there wherever diverse humans get together, and it is irreducible to any spatio-temporal particularities or determinations.

But if detection of the Urphänomen of the political leads to a formulation of the essence (or at least the essential characteristics) of politics, why do we need these excursions into the distant past at all? Because the actual deeds show us what humanity is truly capable of; in other words, the actual reveals the potential. Pearl-diving exercises identify the “lost potentials” that were historically opened up by concrete human beings in particular situations, and highlight them as living topics of study in our present times. It is one of the reasons why Arendt refrained from being named a philosopher and always stressed that we have to ground our reflections in experience, in actual deeds and events. Philosophy as pure theory has its own worth (as Arendt discusses in The Life of the Mind), but a philosophy rooted in historical reality is much more truthful. The past is also crucial as an inspiration and a source of hope, a confirmation and a reminder that we are not alone in our difficult predicament, that one can overcome fear or despair and achieve something unimaginable. In this regard, Arendt retrieved not only political, but moral pearls as well: the Danes and Bulgarians who rescued their Jewish co-citizens in WWII, a Wehrmacht sergeant Anton Schmidt who helped the Jews and was shot by the Nazis soon after, or the fighters of the strategically hopeless but morally deeply meaningful Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. It explains why Arendt put so much emphasis on political and moral examples: they are rare, but they illuminate and expand our moral imaginations, revealing the innermost potentialities in the human soul, an ability to rise above the everyday and the typical. Some philosophers might argue that fictional thought-experiments will do the work in such cases, but I believe that real examples from the past are much more powerful as sources of inspiration.

Notably, Arendt sought for pearls not only in Athens or Rome, but also in Christianity (Jesus of Nazareth’s actions and teaching, Augustine’s philosophy), Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Kant, Heidegger, Jaspers, Kafka, Benjamin, various poets from different epochs, and also her friends. Her whole oeuvre reads like a ceaseless crystallization and illumination of meaning-pearls that enrich, if we accept her invitation, our way of looking at familiar things and concepts. Even with regards to Plato, recall how she invokes Cicero’s dictum: “I prefer before heaven to go astray with Plato rather than hold true views with his opponents.” Arendt keeps Plato’s company throughout her life despite rejecting his vision of politics. It is part of her cultura animi.

Humanities can and should take many different forms with their own irreducible criteria, but I believe pearl-diving to be among the most promising and meaningful ones. My personal experience confirms that students relate to past authors most sincerely when we jointly manage to identify and “excavate” Aristotle’s, Machiavelli’s, or Rousseau’s pearls of thought, and, most importantly, to connect them with our reality, our deepest concerns and hopes. Teachers should have freedom to search for pearls and to find their own ways to make those lost treasures speak to students in an understandable, creative, eye-opening manner. The figure of pearl-diver provides us a much-needed positive image of the meaningfulness of humanities.
 
About the Author:
Simas Čelutka is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of International Relations and Political Science, Vilnius University. He teaches three philosophy courses to undergraduate and graduate students: Foundations of Practical Philosophy, Citizenship and Democracy, and Politics and Morality. Čelutka’s research interests include political philosophy, moral philosophy, phenomenology, and the thought of Hannah Arendt and Jan Patočka. His most recent articles have been published in The Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, The European Legacy, and META: Research in Hermeneutics, Phenomenology, and Practical Philosophy.