Reading Arendt in the Era of #MeToo
01-29-2020“I am not at all disturbed about being a woman professor because I am quite used to being a woman.”— Hannah Arendt, at Yale University 1968[i]
More often than I would like, my work on Hannah Arendt and my work as a feminist theorist and activist seem to pull in different directions. I sometimes find myself frustrated not only by Arendt’s relative silence on questions of gender and her occasional sexist remarks (among other things, she once remarked that it was unbecoming for women to occupy positions of authority),[ii] but also, like many feminist readers before me, I am frustrated by her seemingly rarefied vision of politics, which makes scant room for examining the politics of power inherent in human interactions and institutions.[iii]
Reflecting on The Human Condition, the great feminist poet and essayist Adrienne Rich commented: “To read such a book, by a woman of large spirit and great erudition, can be painful, because it embodies the tragedy of a female mind nourished on male ideologies.” She continued: “In fact, the loss is ours, because Arendt’s desire to grasp deep moral issues is the kind of concern we need to build a common world which will amount to more than ‘life-styles.’”[iv] In certain moods, I agree with Rich’s point, one that has been forcefully advanced by scholars such as Hanna Pitkin in her seminal book, Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt’s Concept of the Social. As Rich, Pitkin, and others have observed, Arendt asks us to recover what has been lost to politics by admiring the likes of Achilles and Pericles. Her project seems to involve a certain reverence for machismo, or for its performance, at the very least.
Numerous scholarly examinations have taken on the subject of feminism vis-a-vis Arendt’s political theory in far greater detail than I can do here.[v] Suffice it to say, for many of these critics, the line Arendt draws between social and political issues in her major theoretical works (especially On Revolution, in addition to The Human Condition) is problematic or even untenable, whereas other aspects of her work — e.g. natality, plurality, narrative, etc. — are considered generative for feminist theorizing, even though Arendt herself did not apply those concepts in gendered ways.
Nevertheless, when I read The Human Condition, I can’t help but feel that there is something deeply feminist going on: a woman thinker is leveling a piercing and thoroughgoing critique against the inherited biases of the litany of men authors who make up the Western tradition of philosophy — including, arguably, her own teachers. The text crackles with irreverence. Its confidence is magnetic.
More than two decades before publishing The Human Condition, in 1933 Arendt wrote a brief and fascinating (especially for her feminist readers) book review called “On the Emancipation of Women” in which she considers the intersection of class and gender vis-a-vis politics. Distinguishing between formal and substantive equality, Arendt writes: “although today’s women have the same rights legally as men, they are not valued equally by society. Economically, their inequality is reflected in the fact that in many cases they work for a considerably lower wage than men.”[vi] Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
Despite her later insistence that household matters are social rather than political and that “freedom is the raison d’être of politics,” in this short review Arendt entertains a view of freedom (or rather, unfreedom) that is arguably consistent with the mantra of second-wave feminism: the personal is political. Arendt writes: “[professional woman] must continue to do socially and biologically grounded tasks that are incompatible with her new position. In addition to her profession, she must take care of her household and raise her children. Thus a woman’s freedom to make her own living seems to imply either a kind of enslavement in her own home or the dissolution of her family.”[vii] Although Arendt is discussing the “incompatible” activities of the professional (i.e. social) realm and the home here, her comments prefigure The Human Condition’s demarcation between the realm of necessity and the realm of freedom.
Given her equivocal position on gender’s relevance to politics and her comments about the inequities facing professional women, it’s striking to consider Arendt’s claim that she was entirely at home — or, at least “undisturbed” — as a woman professor. Yale College had only just begun admitting women the year that she gave the talk that occasioned this remark. At the time of Arendt’s death in 1975 she was still the only woman to become a full professor at Princeton.[viii] An internationally renowned woman political theorist in a sphere that still largely excluded her gender, Arendt’s presence in these spaces was transgressive. (Though, on second thought, I suppose it should not surprise those familiar with her confident irreverence to note that she felt perfectly comfortable with such transgression.)
For the most part, I try to resist psychologizing Arendt when I’m trying to understand her work. Her comments on the dark recesses of the psyche and the danger of forcing intimacy and authenticity to appear in the light of the public seem to warn readers off this path. Recently, though, as I have been writing about the difference between her ideas and Heidegger’s, I can’t help but reconsider her biography in light of contemporary shifts in gender consciousness. Long before she reached prominence as a leading twentieth-century intellectual, Arendt had an experience we now know is all too common in academia, especially for women: inappropriate (to say the least) sexual advances from someone in a relative position of authority. Arendt was not even eighteen years old when she became sexually involved with Heidegger, her famous teacher who was more than twice her age. Especially in the wake of the #MeToo movement and in an academic environment in which abuse is still rampant, it feels misleading — and possibly unethical — to describe Arendt and Heidegger as “lovers”. Whatever their feelings for each other, Heidegger abused his position by pursuing his students.[ix] Like other doctoral candidates who have who have dealt with these fraught dynamics, Arendt had to leave her university and finish her degree elsewhere.
It is incumbent on those of us who read and write about Arendt from a feminist standpoint not to excuse behavior we would excoriate today by brushing it off as the romanticism of Marburg in the ’20s. We devalue neither Arendt’s intellect nor her agency nor her personal strength if we acknowledge that her middle-aged teacher abused his position by pursuing his teenage student. It is the pernicious logic of victim blaming to conflate surviving predation and abuse with weakness, as certain uncharitable interpretations of Arendt have done.[x] Whatever the status of feminism in Arendt’s writings, a feminist reevaluation of the reception of her personal history with Heidegger is overdue.
Kate Bermingham is a Ph.D. candidate in political theory at the University of Notre Dame and a co-founder of Irish 4 Reproductive Health, a student-led nonprofit that advocates for reproductive freedom and gender justice on campus and in South Bend, IN. Kate is currently finishing her dissertation on the concept of time in Arendt’s political thought. Her work has appeared in New German Critique and HA: the Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center.
[i] I credit Samantha Hill for bringing this quote to my attention. Arendt is quoted as making this comment in a review titled “Arendt Charms Crowd” of a public talk she gave on power and violence at Yale Law School in 1968.
[ii] Essays in Understanding 1930–1954, “What Remains? The Language Remains”, ed. Jerome Kohn, Schocken Books, New York, 1994. (Hereafter abbreviated: EU.) In response to Günter Gaus’s question regarding women’s emancipation Arendt responds: “Yes, of course; there is always the problem as such. I have actually always thought that there are certain occupations that are improper for women, that do not become them, if I may put it that way. It just doesn’t look good when a woman gives orders. She should try not to get into such a situation if she wants to remain feminine. Whether I am right about this or not I do not know. I myself have always lived in accordance with this more or less unconsciously — or let us rather say, more or less consciously. The problem itself played no role for me personally. To put it very simply, I have always done what I liked to do,” 2–3.
[iii] Arendt reconceptualizes power as a positive force that arises from plurality, becoming manifest when people act in concert. OR, 166–67. This is quite different from power to coerce, which stems from formal and informal hierarchies.
[iv] Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence W.W. Norton & Co., New York, “Conditions for Work: The Common World of Women (1976),” 203–214, 212.
[v] See especially Seyla Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt, Rowman & Littlefield; Mary Dietz, Turning Operations: Feminist, Arendt, and Politics, Routledge, New York, 2002 and (ed) Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt, The Pennsylvania University Press, University Park, 1995; Linda Zerilli, Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom, University of Chicago Press. Chicago, 2005; Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, Attack of the Blob, Hannah Arendt’s Concept of the Social, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1998, inter alia.
[vi] EU, 66. “On the Emancipation of Women” reviews Das Frauenproblem der Gegenwart Eine Psychologische Bilanz by Dr. Alice Rühle-Gerstel.
[vii] Ibid., 67.
[viii] David Bird, “Hannah Arendt, Political Scientist Dead”, The New York Times, December 6, 1975.
[ix] Heidegger was also romantically involved with another of his students, Elisabeth Blochmann.
[x] Elzbieta Ettinger’s Hannah Arendt/Martin Heidegger, Yale University Press (1995) and Richard Wolin’s Heidegger’s Children, Princeton University Press (2001) both use Arendt’s relationship with Heidegger against her, portraying her as under his spell throughout her adult life.