In 1975, mere months before the end of her life, Hannah Arendt traveled to Copenhagen, Denmark, to receive the Sonning Prize for contributions to European civilization. In her acceptance speech, she engaged in a sort of public dialogue , half with the audience and half with herself. I take it as a model of her thought as a whole given that, in the speech, she gives a public performance, thinks aloud, makes judgments and even shows the ambivalence of her will. That is, we see all the components of Arendt’s philosophy in a compact space such that we are afforded a singular perspective on her project. In this moment, I think, we find some surprising revelations that call into question some of our core assumptions about the nature of that project.
One of those surprises is that Arendt publicly confessed to being in one of the most clichéd states of the 1970s: an identity crisis. And, even more remarkably, she proceeded to work her way through a public self-therapy session. “Let me try and sort these things out,” she asked her Danish audience.
Arendt began that task by reflecting on the oddness of the occasion. She was given an award for contributions to Europe after having left it involuntarily. She fled from the Nazis twice, from Germany to Paris in 1933 and from France to America in 1941. However, she did not just reluctantly resort to American citizenship. Her naturalization, after careful study of the American Founding, involved a voluntary, conscious identification with the political and philosophical project of American republicanism and a rejection of European civilization. 1 She told her audience that she came to associate Europe with everything she stood against: “homogeneous populations,” an “organic sense of history,” class divisions and a politics that revolves around “national sovereignty.” And yet, Arendt confessed that she maintained her Europeanness with a “slightly polemical stubbornness,” despite her American loyalties and the fact that she “never wished to belong [to any identity], not even in Germany.” She associated this Europeanness with her “mother tongue,” her “rather happy years in France,” and moments like the Danes’ refusal to allow their German occupiers to round up Jews with “mere words, spoken freely and publicly.” 2 Taken together, along with her recognition of her Jewishness and femaleness, Arendt’s introduction to her speech accepted “what” she was, her collective memberships: German, American, Jew, woman, and European. However, these sorts of identifications were, crucially, not the source of her identity crisis. She apparently only brought them up as if to say that an identity crisis occasioned by these associations would constitute an inability to reconcile with rather simple and obvious realities. 3
The pressing issue of Arendt’s crisis, instead, was that the Danes had recognized her in a way that she had not recognized herself, as a public figure who made contributions to European civilization on par with Churchill, Niels Bohr, and Bertrand Russell. We might call this identity public-Arendt. This by itself shouldn’t have been much of a problem for Arendt, since she had “always believed that no one can know himself, for no one appears to himself as he appears to others .” 4 This, after all, is a core principle of Arendt’s thought. For Arendt, “Being and appearing coincide,” so, if the reality of Hannah Arendt appeared only to her audience, then she could hardly complain when they judged her.
So why the crisis? Well, for one thing, Arendt knew that she had “instinctive impulses” to shyness such that she could not show everything to the public. To me, that means she recognized that the public was missing something about Arendt the physical person. We might call this person of private impulses and drives natural-Arendt.
Arendt then immediately admitted to the irony of her introversion, for she recognized it would seem hypocritical for someone who wrote books about the glory of showing off in a public realm to be only a theorist instead of an activist. However, she insisted that it “is indeed quite possible to understand and to reflect about politics without being a so-called political animal.” 5 So, now her crisis is coming more into focus. We already have three Arendts. We will call this last person who reveals her understandings and reflections in books professor-Arendt.
But then she went on to describe even more Arendts, the identities influenced by anti-political “trends” of her formative years, the 1920s. The first of those was the trend that favored “a contemplative way of life,” philosophy , over public life. For Arendt herself, this simply meant thinking , “a soundless dialogue between me and myself [which] is the only way I can keep myself company and be content with it.” 6 It is not the same professor-Arendt that she revealed inadvertently in her books, but the Arendt that appeared to herself in her own consciousness. We might call this person thinking-Arendt.
The Sonning Prize honoree defended this thinking-Arendt as necessary when traditions and roles are in flux, like in the twentieth century. Such a person comes to terms with the reality of the world and herself even when not accepting awards from European states. But she then went on to describe other fashionable ways of thinking from the 1920s that separated persons from such genuine thoughtfulness. One was ideological thinking that darkened the public sphere with clouds of chauvinism and propaganda. People who thought this way, Arendt explained, “had the net effect of desubstantializing every issue they touched, in addition to confusing utterly the minds of their audiences.” Her word choice here, “desubstantializing,” implied that ideological discourse dissolved the solidity of substantial realities with a stream of acidic nonsense. It liquefied the public into mere publicity. In that environment, Arendt explained, anyone who entered public life was made a member of either a partisan group or part of “an international ‘society of celebrities’” none of which turned out to have any lasting importance. The implication here, it seems to me, is that such fame would be worthwhile if it were not so fleeting. Then, it would entail a sort of glory that would confer immortality. So, to the extent that Arendt’s identity becomes ideological, where there is true Arendtian philosophy , we have another Arendt I will denote Arendtian-Arendt. You might say that the point of academic scholarship usually is to prove that one’s Arendtian-Arendt = professor-Arendt. And, to the extent that Arendt’s fame becomes akin to Plato, Machiavelli, or Washington rather than a Kardashian, Paul Whiteman or Lincoln Beachey, we could call her glorious-Arendt.
Now, Arendt showed little interest in either Arendtian-Arendt or glorious-Arendt, but she did confess to have been influenced by the philosophical reactions against such ideology and fame. She pointed to Heidegger and Bergson as examples of thinkers who developed notions of the true or authentic self that exists in complete independence from social life. Arendt confessed that the influence of such thought, since it was “acquired in the formative years” of her life, would probably “extend very far.” 7 This identity, authentic-Arendt, is especially interesting, since Arendt said that it leads to a certain secrecy about her real loves in order to protect them from the “taint” and corruption spread by the public’s cheap talk.
Now, given this crowded pack of Hannah Arendts the reason for Arendt’s identity crisis becomes clearer. 8 She must judge herself for herself, which implies synthesizing all of these Arendts. That task was complicated by the fact that she did not want to be misrecognized. Maybe she did not want public-Arendt to be identical with glorious-Arendt, since it was too soon for glory, leaving her with a merely (in)famous Arendt. She stood, after all, accused of supposedly blaming the Jews for organizing their own genocide instead of the one who actually coordinated the logistics for their transportation to Auschwitz, Adolph Eichmann . However, she also recognized that her desire not to be misrecognized was based on those merely historical “trends” she mentioned. The inference she drew, then, is that she did not wish to be “seduced by the great temptation of recognition.” 9 That would seem to be the desire to establish the grand identity of all of these Arendts, to have everyone recognize her as she recognized herself. Of course, this was a temptation because it would have denied the public’s right to judge for themselves, and it would have been inconsistent with her conviction that public-Arendt holds more of the truth of Arendt than what she could encompass in her own identity. To summarize all this, then, the Sonning Prize gave Arendt an identity crisis because all of these identities existed for her simultaneously, and they could not be reconciled into a single identity.
This impasse led Arendt to conclude that, “the trouble here obviously has something to do with me as a person.” But is it really just a personal problem she is talking about? Don’t many (most?) modern people suffer from this kind of crisis? I know I didn’t have to leave the country of my birth and learn a new language, but I did both voluntarily and involuntarily grow up and learn how to make my own way in the world. I see the same conflict in my students who leave hometowns large and small and voluntarily and involuntarily learn the languages of a college education . And I know most of us don’t have to worry about being international celebrities, but we do, nevertheless, suspect that we are failures because we are not rich and famous like the people we spend so much time looking at on our various screens. And we are all torn between loyalty to our pasts and our hopes to be authentic individuals. It seems to me that most of us, then, are “seduced by the great temptation of recognition,” since we all have an analogous constellation identities. Furthermore, the basic problem takes on crisis proportions whenever we have to do anything remotely like striding onto Arendt’s public stage. Speaking up in a group, volunteering a political opinion, even picking a restaurant can bring on a sense of dread and a kind of grief that we are not who we recognize ourselves to be. And we are always both more and less that how others see us. This is a general problem.
And it is also a political problem. Political identities bring on the same sort of crisis. We identify with a party. We do not want to be reduced to partisans. We want to have our own opinions. We do have our own opinions. But, deep down, we know that we don’t know enough to have an opinion. Most of our opinions are, in fact, just borrowed, stolen really, from the chieftains of some tribe we belong to. And we relish the battles between those tribes, even while we hate being trapped in them, both the battles and the tribes. This personal crisis, then, creates a crisis in the republic. The fear , desire, hope, and mourning make us reluctant to enter and maintain political space . But the republic cannot survive without citizens who do both. Nonetheless, the fears of subjectivity, the desire for reconciliation with the Other, the hope for reason, and mourning for the Greek agon have, so far, l...