The Power of Past Prejudices

Roger Berkowitz
Wolfram Eilenberger finds in Hannah Arendt’s encounter with Rahel Varnhagen a paradox between the rational individual and the power of past prejudices. 

For Arendt, the case of Rahel is also exemplary of an entire age in that two forms of necessary courage collide in her situation. On the one hand there is the progressive courage to use one’s own intelligence, and so to define oneself as a creature of reason. But there is also the courage required to acknowledge that this attempt at self-creation is always contingent on historical and cultural conditions, from which no individual can fully escape. In Rahel’s own time, this is expressed in the tension between progressive and romantic ideals of becoming oneself; between reason and history, pride and prejudice, thought and obedience; between the dream of the complete self-determination of the self and one’s ultimately inescapable definition by others.

According to Arendt, progressive reason can “liberate from the prejudices of the past, and it can guide the future. Unfortunately, however, it appears that it can free isolated individuals only, can direct the future only of Crusoes. The individual who has been liberated by reason is always running head-on into a world, a society, whose past in the shape of ‘prejudices’ has a great deal of power; he is forced to learn that past reality is also a reality. Although being born a Jewess might seem to Rahel a mere reference to something out of the remote past, and although she may have entirely eradicated the fact from her thinking, it remained a nasty present reality as a prejudice in the minds of others.”
No human being can escape being subjected to the tension between these forces—and no one should reasonably wish to be able to. And if it were possible, it would mean the loss of everything that deserves to be called world and reality.