Hannah Arendt's Cosmopolitanism
12-09-2011
In the year of Hannah Arendt's centennial, 2006, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl spoke at the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College's inaugural conference: Thinking in Dark Times. Young-Bruehl was, along with Jerry Kohn, instrumental in establishing the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard, and she has been a good friend of the Center since its inception. It is with great sadness that we at the Arendt Center mourn her untimely passing. At such times it is important to recall the power of her thought and the beauty of her writing. One example of her thoughtful prose is the talk she gave at that inaugural conference, a talk that has since been published in the volume Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics.
Titled "Hannah Arendt's Jewish Identity", Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's talk traced the roots of Arendt's cosmopolitanism to her Jewish identity, amongst other sources. It is not unimportant, Young-Bruehl begins, that Arendt's teacher, Karl Jaspers, identified the Jews of Palestine as one of the five Axial Age peoples:
The topic of Hannah Arendt’s Jewish identity can be approached from many directions. In this essay, I am going to consider Arendt in the context of the vision of world history articulated by her teacher and mentor Karl Jaspers, in which her people, the Jews of Palestine, were considered as one of the “Axial Age” peoples—the five great peoples who reached pinnacles in their development between 900-800 BC to 400-300 BC. Jaspers was the first thinker to see these great Axial civilizations as the origins of a worldly cosmopolitan civilization, one that attends to the world as it is, and one that could imagine "a world made one by a worldwide war and by technological developments that had united all peoples, for better or for worse."
Arendt too, writes Young-Bruehl, had a connection to common cosmopolitan world.
It is Arendt’s Jewish identity—not just the identity she asserted in defending herself as a Jew when attacked as one, but more deeply her connection to the Axial Age prophetic tradition—that made her the cosmopolitan she was....
In her essay, Young-Bruehl identifies four common characteristics of cosmopolitan thinking that she finds in common between Karl Jaspers and Hannah Arendt. These four ingredients are:
1. The capacity for and exercise of “enlarged mentality.” Arendt often invoked this capacity for thinking your way into the viewpoint, the position, the experience, of other people.
2. What Jaspers called “a sense of history.” For Arendt, this meant a sense for the un-predictability of human affairs. Since no one group can have a privileged view of history, the view encompasses the entire world.
3. What Arendt called a sense of the human condition. Arendt named six human conditions—earth, life, world, natality, mortality, plurality—that, although susceptible to change, are human, by which is meant "common to all mankind."
4. That people are shaped by their particular historical experiences—e.g. the way that Arendt was shaped by her experience as a Jew—but that they are also moved, usually unconsciously, by needs and experiences and conditions shared by all human beings.
This last characteristic of cosmopolitanism is most interesting, for Young-Bruehl here argues that Arendt, in spite of her well-known disdain for psychology, had a deep understanding of the unconscious motivations of the human condition.
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For example, Arendt's well-known recognition of the human need to act politically shows her understanding of unconscious and cosmopolitan human drives. While particular historical experiences might make people look and behave and sound more different than they are, they share more than their differences would suggest. Young-Bruehl concludes:
"As an aphorism by Kant’s contemporary Georg Christoph Lichtenberg that Hannah Arendt once quoted to me conveys: “People do not think about the events of life as differently as they speak about them.”
Read the entirety of Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's essay here.
-RB
Click here to visit the Elisabeth Young-Bruehl Memorial Page.