Hannah Arendt and Her Passion for Philosophy I Want to Understand

Arendt sits, legs crossed, in an armchair she seems to inhabit completely, her presence deliberate. She appears at ease, as if the camera does not exist. Her legs are shapely and slender, her wrists delicate, their movement graceful. In her left hand, she holds a cigarette. Her only jewellery is a watch, a bracelet, her wedding ring and a brooch in the shape of an edelweiss adorning her dark jacket. Behind thick-framed glasses, her eyes sparkle with keen intelligence. Her raspy smoker’s voice carries a subtle irony as she articulates her thoughts – warm, assured and entirely free of doubt.

Arendt, the philosopher

“My profession – if one can still call it that – is political theory. I do not feel at all like a philosopher, as you kindly suggest. You may be right that philosophy is commonly considered a male pursuit. But it need not remain that way!” She smiles at her interviewer, the journalist Günther Gaus. “It could well be that a woman will one day be a philosopher.” Perhaps she does not realise that 50 years after her death, 61 years after this interview, she would be universally recognised as one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century. Hannah Arendt, educated in a world dominated entirely by men. At the University of Marburg, she met Martin Heidegger, with whom she had a brief love affair. She was very young; he was a 35-year-old professor. Whenever Arendt is discussed, this relationship is inevitably mentioned – a love that was short-lived and likely rather cruel. While Heidegger’s support of the Nazis is often emphasised, little attention is paid to the grace with which Arendt – by then a prominent intellectual – refused to be embittered by his coldness towards her. On the contrary, she consistently and nobly acknowledged the significance of her mentor.

A typically male question

Arendt completed her doctorate under the supervision of Karl Jaspers in Heidelberg. At 23, she married the philosopher Günther Anders, but the marriage did not last long. Unlike her marriage to philosopher and poet Heinrich Blücher. The couple emigrated to the United States in 1941, where they lived together until his death in 1970. In her interview with Gaus, she openly admits to being “rather old-fashioned”, explaining that, more or less consciously, she considered certain occupations unbecoming for women. She immediately adds, however: “This problem played no role for me personally. I simply did what I wanted to do.”

And that was indeed how it was. Her preoccupation with philosophy was driven purely by a desire to understand. She gently chides her interviewer for approaching the subject from a male perspective: “You ask about the effect of my work on others. This is a typically male question. Men always want to be terribly influential; but I see it from the outside, so to speak.” Hannah Arendt forged her own path and remained true to herself throughout. She was driven by her pursuit of insight, not by a desire for power or influence – which she nevertheless continues to have, even 50 years after her sudden death.

From the perspective of a friend

Like all people who remain true to themselves, Arendt’s strong presence is compelling. In the interview for the programme Zur Person, broadcast in October 1964, she strikingly evokes the portrait Mary McCarthy would later create of her. The author was a close friend; for over 30 years, the two women regularly exchanged letters, spoke on the phone, read each other’s proofs, shared recipes and comforted each other as their lives unfolded almost in parallel. Mary, born in Seattle, wrote mostly from Europe, while Hannah, born in Hanover, wrote from New York, having been forced to flee Europe to escape the Nazi machinery of annihilation. In the interview with Gaus, she summarises with disarming simplicity how she first learned she was Jewish: “I never heard the word ‘Jew’ at home when I was a small child. The first time I encountered it was through antisemitic remarks from children on the street.” At Arendt’s funeral on 8 December 1975, at the Riverside Memorial Chapel, Mary dedicated a poignant portrait to her friend. It was written from the loving perspective of a woman who understood her better than the man always mentioned in connection with Arendt’s life – her teacher and lover, Martin Heidegger. It is a portrait that endorses Arendt’s unique appeal: “She was a fascinating woman. Above all, her eyes: sparkling when she was happy or excited, but also deep, dark, distant. She had something unfathomable about her, something that seemed to lie in the reflective depths of those eyes. […] Hannah had something of a great actress about her. […] And yet no one could have been less like an exhibitionist. Whenever she spoke in public, she suffered terrible stage fright and afterwards would only ask: ‘Was it all right?’”