Hannah Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen and the Beginnings of Arendtian Political Philosophy

Home , Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen, Rahel Varnhagen (book), The Human Condition

Carolina Armenteros

Introduction

Beginnings are formative. In a writer's life work - and especially in the case of a philosopher - the early scholarly efforts are the ones that define and shape later ones, the ones that fix and tame still-nebulous ideas about the world and give them the palpable quasi-reality of the word; the ones that unite disparate ideas and make their ensemble unique. The early works give birth to a writer's art and science: they delimit those aspects of reality that will conserve interest and fire the fancy later in life, and provide the method with which to look upon and engage that reality. To be sure, a writer may later transgress the bounds of her first works, and rebel against her own prescriptions; but such transgression and rebellion is usually reactive, and done in the spirit of one who willfully breaks previously binding laws. Beginnings can be re,. nounced by conviction and distorted through disuse, but rarely forgotten: echoes of one's early works remain always, even if they are the echoes of a call no longer heeded. So it is with Hannah Arendt's biography of Rahel Varnhagen. Memories of Rahel recur repeatedly throughout Arendt's life and work, whether in her political writings on the Jewish question, or in her more philosophical endeavors. Many of the cardinal principles Arendt developed in her philosophy and political theory can be read as abstractions and elaborations of her critiques of Rahel, expanded and rearticulated with the aid of time and 81 82 Carolina Armenteros experience; and indeed many of the great philosophical themes and psychological methods she elaborated in her intellectual maturity - whether in The Origins of Totalitarianism or in The Human Condition or in Eichmann in jerusalem - can be found embryonically in Rahel's life, as commentaries and rationalizations of her sorrows. Scholars have long admired and wondered about the fierce philosophical independence and dialectical politics of Hannah Arendt's thought. They have explained her originality as the rare blessing of an innate genius; as the liberating and ground-breaking spirit of Existenzphilosophie; or as the sophisticated, cosmopolitan intellectualism of the German Jewish bourgeoisie from which she came. Doubtless all these general factors contributed to the molding of Arendt's unique mind. But what I intend to do here is to give a specific historical-intellectual explanation of Arendt's political thought that traces its broad features genealogically to Rahel's biography; and to argue that any historical explanation of Arendt's philosophical originality is inseparable from an under- standing of the intellectual, personal and historical circumstances that surrounded her book on Rahel. The historical aspect is crucial here: it is not simply a question of historicizing Rahel and locating the book as a product of Arendt's life and times, but of retrieving Arendt's intellectual immersion in the Romantic history of German Jewry, and seeing how her brief excursion into the past at a desperate time radically shaped her thought and politics forever. Specifically, I will argue, by comparing Rahel with Arendt's later writings and situating both within Arendt's life and times, that many of the great philosopical concepts of Arendtian political theory find a first articulation in Rahel's life. If the writing of Rahel was a formative moment in Arendt's political thought, an epistemological dilemma immediately arises. Were the Arendtian philosophical themes that we see nascent in Rahel's biography original in Rahel's own life? Or were they original in a preconceived philosophical/interpretive framework Arendt imposed on that life? There is, in addition, the problem of interaction and contingency: how Arendt's heuristic predisposi- tions interacted with Rahel's self-reflections, and how Arendt wrote in some circumstances what she might have written differ- ently, or not at all, in others (the distinct tenor of Rahel's last two chapters, written in exile in Paris, is pertinent here).