Julia Kristeva devotes some pages of her recent book on Arendt to her changing appearance, as documented in photographs: from the girlish “seductress” of the nineteen-twenties, gazing poetically at the camera, to the confident intellectual of the fifties, whose “femininity . . . beats a retreat” as her face becomes “a caricature of the . . . battle scars” received during her public career.
The correspondence, which is collected in “Letters 1925-1975,” is revealing, first of all, in its very incompleteness. Arendt kept all of Heidegger’s letters, from the very beginning; he kept few of hers, and none from the early years. As a result, Heidegger’s voice dominates the book, just as his personality and his decisions dominated the affair. As one would expect, Heidegger—an older male professor, who also happened to be one of Europe’s greatest philosophers—treats his teen-age lover with a combination of passion and condescension. He is capable of poetic raptures: “The demonic struck me. . . . Nothing like it has ever happened to me,” he writes not long after their first meeting. Yet while Arendt’s intellect helped draw him to her, he is deeply patronizing about her intellectual ambitions. He urges her to take a “decisive step back from the path toward the terrible solitude of academic research, which only man can endure,” and to concentrate instead on becoming “a woman who can give happiness, and around whom all is happiness.”
Early on, in an autobiographical composition addressed to Heidegger and titled “Shadows,” Arendt described herself in the third person: “Her sensitivity and vulnerability, which had always given her an exclusive air, grew to almost grotesque proportions.” As late as 1929, when Arendt ran into Heidegger at a train station and for a moment he failed to recognize her, she found the experience shattering: “When I was a small child, that was the way my mother once stupidly and playfully frightened me. I had read the fairy tale about Dwarf Nose, whose nose gets so long nobody recognizes him anymore. My mother pretended that had happened to me. I still vividly recall the blind terror with which I kept crying: but I am your child, I am your Hannah.—That is what it was like today.”
The lesson that Arendt drew was that a beautiful soul is not enough, for “it was precisely the soul for which life showed no consideration.” To live fully and securely, every human being needs what Arendt calls “specificity,” the social and political status that comes with full membership in a community.
As she put down roots in New York City—she lived on the West Side of Manhattan until her death—and became a sought-after writer and lecturer, Arendt’s ideas about self-respect, that Rahelian imperative, began to change. Now the solidarity she had once sought in Zionism began to appear not as a source of strength but as another evidence of weakness—a way of clinging to one’s people because one was too weak to stand alone.
What inflames Arendt, on the other hand, is any attempt by the Jewish witnesses to draw attention to what they suffered. “I hate, am afraid of pity, always have been,” she once told McCarthy, and she mocked anything that appeared to her to be an appeal for pity.
“You are quite right—I am not moved by any ‘love’ of this sort. . . . I have never in my life ‘loved’ any people or collective. . . . I indeed love ‘only’ my friends and the only kind of love I know of and believe in is the love of persons.”
Arendt’s unqualified support of Heidegger was important in establishing the convenient myth that his Nazi involvement had been, as she put it, a case of an unworldly man getting carried away by politics, and thus “finally a matter of indifference.” Not until the past decade have scholars in Germany and America demolished this notion, by tracing the profound affinities between Heidegger’s thought and his reactionary milieu. It is a task that Arendt herself was equipped to perform, but her loyalty to Heidegger, and to the German tradition he represented, made it impossible.
Arendt’s experience at the Eichmann trial bolstered the belief that defines her political philosophy: that there must be a rigorous separation between love, which we can experience only privately, and respect, which we earn in and require for our public lives. If it is true that, as Arendt once observed, “in the works of a great writer we can almost always find a consistent metaphor peculiar to him alone in which his whole work seems to come to a focus,” then her thought is certainly focussed on the image of distance or separation. A dignified individual existence, she believes, requires distance from others, the “interspace” that she described in the Hamburg speech. Compassion is dangerous, in her view, because “not unlike love,” it “abolishes the distance, the in-between which always exists in human intercourse.” What preserves that distance, on the other hand, is pride—the pride of equals that she finds exemplified in the political realm, the “public space.”
No one has argued more forcefully than Arendt that to deprive human beings of their public, political identity is to deprive them of their humanity—and not just metaphorically.
Yet the supreme value that Arendt places on individual pride and aristocratic distance, on intellect and excellence, also sharply restricts the human understanding that must be the basis for any confrontation with political evil, especially the evil of the Holocaust. Too much of life and too many kinds of people are excluded from Arendt’s sympathy, which she could freely give only to those as strong as she was. If, as she wrote, “it is the desire to excel which makes men love the world,” then our love for the world actually makes it harder for us to love the people who inhabit it. This is the dilemma that runs through all Arendt’s writing, demonstrating that what she observed about Marx is true of her as well: “Such fundamental and flagrant contradictions rarely occur in second-rate writers; in the work of the great authors they lead into the very center of their work.”