Karl Jaspers, Arendt, and the Love of Citizens
Ian Storey
The voluminous tracks of Hannah Arendt’s correspondence over her lifetime—her letters with her dear friend Mary McCarthy, the contestatory exchanges with Martin Heidegger, and the intense and complex love in her conversations with Heinrich Blücher—provide a kind of affective tableau, an image in the written word of the relationships that structured her life. Arendt’s academic work describes actors, archetypes of players in the public, social, and private worlds, but her letters show even more vividly the sheer complexity of those archetypes as forms of lived and shared experience. If her philosophy provides a template for seeing and knowing the positions, drives, and acts of the abiding subject, it is in her letters that we begin to see in greater detail what it means to construct those subject positions, and what it means to embrace the vulnerable process of allowing oneself to be influenced, changed, and built up by the love of others. Of those structuring exchanges of senses and sensibilities, few are as striking in expanse and depth as Arendt’s long connection with Karl Jaspers.
It has become a common reading of Arendt’s understanding of love that, as Shin Chiba puts it, “love is basically regarded by her as an unpolitical entity . . . one cannot overemphasize Arendt’s political aversion to the notion of love.”1 It is certainly hard to read the account of love in The Human Condition otherwise, in the face of passages that suggest that “love, in distinction from friendship, is killed, or rather extinguished, the moment it is displayed in public . . . because of its inherent worldlessness, love can only become false and perverted when it is used for political purposes such as the change or salvation of the world.”2 “For a long time,” Tatjana Noemi Tömmel notes, “we had little reason to question that ‘worldless passion’ was Arendt’s main, if not her only concept of love.”3 This leads Chiba and others to the suggestion that “her political theory of amor mundi is based mainly on friendship” and “Arendt does not consider friendship to be love”;4 amor mundi must be a useful but misleading name. But as Chiba notes, this is difficult to square with the two accounts of love that bracketed her writing career, the accounts of Augustinian love in “Der Liebesgriff des Augustins” and The Life of the Mind. Is this simply the result, as Chiba suggests, of an essential “aporia” in Arendt between a “premodern, objective understanding of love” and a “rather modern, subjective understanding of it as mere sentiment or emotion,”5 or was the story of love’s position in the architecture of The Human Condition always more complicated than the friendship-not-love narrative suggests? The most decisive answer may lie not in Arendt’s writings on love alone but in understanding them as intertwined with the way she played out her own philosophy in the living loves of her world.
To this end, the case of Arendt and Jaspers, as the relationship to the thinker with whom she shared the most in their philosophies of public life, may be the most telling manifestation in practice of the specific relationship Arendt understood between love and the life of the public. To see it in action (and that is, I will suggest, precisely the correct Arendtian term) is to see the meaning of Arendt’s late account of love played out in all its importance for her and Jaspers’s shared understanding of that public, the reason that the phrase is properly amor and not amicitia mundi. One can see in it a complex unspooling of how Arendt could simultaneously hold both of her apparently disparate descriptions of love and publicity. The story of that interrelation appears in her critique of Thomastic love in Willing, in which, in a classically Arendtian maneuver, Thomas inaugurates the essentially modern mistake of translating Augustinian love as an “activity that has its end in itself”6 into mere subjective sentiment. The problem of love in its modern incarnation is the abandonment of precisely the public significance that made it, to the Augustinian mind, the antidote rather than the cause of collapsing of space between two who love.
The relationship Arendt cultivated with Jaspers was a model for the prior kind of love, a kind of love that appears most clearly in her eulogies for him: a love for each other that was simultaneously a deeply personal one, and a love for each other as citizens of the world. Arendt describes Jaspers as someone who “loved light so long that it has marked his whole personality,”7 but that was, for her, more than a status and worldly practice that she revered: it was the form of a relationship between them. Arendt’s love of Jaspers, and his love of her, showed a synthesis that appears in her relationship to love itself as a philosophical question. To truly love the “who” of a person, to unabashedly embrace and celebrate their existence of the world, is not at all to separate them from how they live that being; love, in this Augustinian mode, does not put forward a model of love as and for public virtue in distinction to private sentiment, but suggests a relationship between the two in which the private practices of loving each other are co-constitutive of the possibility of love as a public force. For Arendt, there was no binary between the subjective “sentimental” love of Jaspers as Jaspers and the love of him as a citizen of the world: to love Jaspers was to love a figure who constantly and resolutely appeared before the world, and to love the staunchness of that commitment to bringing all that he could be before the eyes of the public.
Arendt’s multiple elegies for Jaspers contain a circuit of personal and intellectual meaning, not only in making sense of the influence that he had on her and on the world but also in “[praising] the man rather than his work”8 establishing in image of him as a figure in the kind of formal figuration she performed of the laborer or the actor or the maker in The Human Condition. There is a transfer of sensibility from personal intimacy to a realm in which “personality is anything but a private affair”:9 a conscious act of constructing a sense of the true character of the person who is to appear to the world. If “the place in which Jaspers belonged by nature” was “the full light of world opinion,”10 to love him was by necessity to love in the space of appearance and for its sake. In describing Jasper’s love, his love for the world and his love as a force in the world, Arendt is simultaneously describing her own love for him, and the way in which it was proper to love such a person. This peculiar kind of publicity of the private is the nature of a love among citizens. Arendt wrote of Jasper’s marriage to Gertrude11 that “if two people do not succumb to the illusion that the ties binding them have made them one, they can create a world anew between them,”12 but there is little doubt that, in the context of her laudatio, she is equally describing her own long path through the world with him.
The Cradle of Caring
The chief concern of Arendt’s laudatio for Jaspers is not only to describe him as a man with a certain kind of public and political character but also to redescribe that character as itself exemplifying a paradigmatic relationship of responsibility to and care for the shared world. Unsurprisingly, since that paradigm was an aspiration that they shared in their thought and lives, one of the most vivid illuminations we have of what Arendt thought that responsibility and care looked like lies in her relationship to Jaspers, and the thought and writing that passed between them. If exemplars need specification, translation of their abstract archetypes into concrete examples of how to live daily life, Arendt and Jaspers’s correspondence provides a lens to deconstruct Arendt’s figure of the public intellectual “Karl Jaspers” into a relation of practices that they carried out not only in the public sphere but between them.
A major shift in the relationship between Jaspers and Arendt occurred in the immediate postwar years, as Arendt became a critical lifeline for Jaspers and Gertrude in their struggle to survive in a decimated Europe. The intensity of that mutual concern is carried in the pressing immediacy of their letters, which from Arendt’s side usually came enclosed in a regular stream of packages containing the double sustenance of material needs and publications from across the Atlantic. Arendt frets about “rumors going around here that sending packages would become more difficult,”13 and begs Jaspers to “please allow me to worry a little. I have worried for many years anyhow, that is, without your permission.”14 Jaspers hastens to mollify Arendt’s fears, reporting that “my wife and I are in excellent health again,” detailing how they are gaining weight (“back up to 150 pounds, and my wife to 101”15 ) and overcoming various illnesses. But even and perhaps because of this time in which materially keeping Karl and Gertrude sustained was the primary order of the day, Arendt and Jaspers’ correspondence takes on a new intellectual tone as well, opening up into a relation of mutual exploration of their new worlds: Arendt of the republic in which she had made her home, itself quite new and still showing it, and Jaspers of the political world arising out of the ashes of a fractured and decimated Europe. This postwar personal transformative moment became, with deliberate effort, an intellectually transformative moment in which Arendt made “empathizing with Jaspers’ personal transformation by the experience of wartime insecurity and deprivation” into a vehicle by which “to understand contingency, rupture, and loss as constitutive dimensions of historical narration.”16
Here, Arendt and Jaspers’ relationship shows one of its most enduring and fundamental qualities: a constant and insatiable desire to mutually explore and untangle their surrounding worlds. Particularly during this phase when both have new worlds to explore, their discourse takes on a quality of reportage that is central to the relation both have to their work and their more public lives. Despite their long history together, there is a demanding contemporaneousness to their reports on the affairs of the day, and “this contemporaneity or rather this living in the present,”17 as Arendt later described it, marks these exchanges as an important part of their larger projects of public thinking, as sharing an essential form of engagement. This commitment to public thinking as a kind of reportage, which Arendt att ributes to Jaspers in her Denktagebuch as part of the essential political relationship to truth—“it’s basically, politically speaking, not about us; it’s about the world”18 —is perhaps Jaspers’s deepest and most lasting impact on the thought-style of Arendt, the reason her writings for Aufbau and The New Yorker fit strangely neatly alongside her larger, more traditionally academic works like The Human Condition. Underneath the monthly and yearly stream of their publications and interviews is a constant, at times almost frenzied, exchange of the same form of reportage-discourse that would mark the careers of each.
In their letters, reportage as a model is distilled down by the demands of time and space to a striking density that only thinkers like these could exchange so freely. For example, in a paragraph of one long letter, Arendt reports in a handful of sentences her summation of an entire American complex of freedom, class, society, and race that only someone as intimately acquainted with her thought as Jaspers could map in shorthand onto the complex contours of her thought:
The fundamental contradiction in this country is the coexistence of political freedom and social oppression. The latter is, as I’ve already indicated, not total; but it is dangerous because the society organizes and orients itself along “racial lines.” And that holds true without exception at all social levels, from the bourgeoisie down to the working class. This racial issue has to do with a person’s country of origin, but it is greatly aggravated by the Negro question; that is, America has a real “race” problem and not just a racial ideology.19
If we take the description she gives in her laudatio, beneath this reportage is not only a layer of care but also a specific kind of responsibility to the world. Of course, it is not at all clear that those two layers can even be separated; in reporting on the world to each other, they are invoking a responsibility to the world for which they care, a responsibility that arises precisely because of that care. Reportage is itself the mode this responsibility must take. To describe this kind of responsibility in Jaspers, Arendt turns explicitly to the language of love: this is a responsibility that “is not a burden and it has nothing whatsoever to do with moral imperatives,” but rather “flows naturally out of an innate pleasure in making manifest, in clarifying the obscure, in illuminating the darkness.”20 Between the two of them, this was a private love that mirrored the public one, a way to share between them an “affirmation of the public realm” that “is in the final analysis only the result of . . . loving light and clarity.”21
Perhaps more importantly, on Arendt’s account, this small corner of responsibility between them, embedded in the much wider sphere of public responsibility, exists precisely because they are sharing in the mutual construction of a world, “creat[ing] the world anew between them.”22 As she puts it in her later argument on collective responsibility, this “essentially political” responsibility, where “the center of consideration is not the self”23 but the world, comes into being when one enters into a community (even a community of two), and could be dissolved only by the dissolution of that community itself. As Andrew Schaap puts it, for both Jaspers and Arendt “the object of responsibility is therefore the world one shares in common with others.”24 This was not an abstract concern for the pair, but a matter of practice. Their action and speech, “which . . . can be actualized only in one of the many and manifold forms of human community”25 and which is always the subject of that political responsibility, remained a constant object of discussion, even in this nominally private space of exchange.
This political responsibility that arises in concern for the world speaks to one of the questions that have been rightly understood as central to Arendt’s thought: the political form of thought itself. Unsurprisingly, in her Denktagebuch, Arendt credits Jaspers directly with originally raising the central question, “Is there thinking that is not tyrannical?”26 Her initial hint of an answer speaks to the process of communication between them that helped sustain both of their thinking: “communication, in contrast to discussion—advokatorischen thinking—does not want to make sure of the truth by superiority of argumentation.”27 The kind of reportage that passes between them—the light disagreements that evolve and dissolve over the course of months, the casual passing of assessments and counter-assessments—is not just a search for truth, but the distinctive kind of anti-tyrannical search that she invokes, a search in which the seekers do not attempt to bludgeon each other’s positions with arguments, but rather through a dancing and melding and turning of thought, to discover what the world is revealing to us. Nowhere is this more evident than their exchanges surrounding the trial in Jerusalem of Adolf Eichmann, and through the extended furor that followed.
The Eichmann Trials
Jaspers’s unflagging support of Arendt through the Eichmann trial, which extended to giving interviews on the topic in Germany and serving as a center point for organizing her support there, is perhaps unsurprising. Although he was an omnipresent source of comfort, to characterize Jaspers simply as a perennial cheerleader for Arendt through the crisis would miss the important intricacies of their relationship and what they reveal about how they each viewed their intellectual projects. Nor would it be quite right to say that Jaspers took the attacks on Arendt personally, although that is closer to the mark. Rather, the relationship of Arendt and Jaspers through the Eichmann period reveals the profound interpenetration of their spheres of personal and public, the way the two begin to fuse together if one heeds Jaspers’s call to live the life of the public. It seems quite right of Curthoys to suggest that the “intensive modes of intersubjective communication that [were] so enabling of Arendt and Jaspers burgeoning friendship” became an integral part of how they understand “post-national agency” itself.28
Jaspers wrote to Arendt that “now you are experiencing what you have never wanted; the ‘risks of public life.’ You’ve stumbled into it, and you’ll have to stick it out. It pains you. It is no help to you to wish you some of my ‘thick skin.’”29 Jaspers understood Arendt’s sensitivity, but also he also understood that the way the public furor penetrated into her deeper life was not a matter of personal character, but an essential trial of publicity, which always crosses and erases the line between public and private. For Jaspers, the assault on Arendt was not merely a sustained attack on someone he loved; it was an assault on the model of public life they shared and the public and private preconditions that make that life possible.
In the face of his prescient “bad presentiments”30 about the trial and what it might mean for Arendt, Jaspers is conscious to establish as a baseline for Arendt an unwavering support:
I thought: Could Hannah ever destroy the bond between us? We have disagreed so often and on crucial matters, or at least so it seemed. No, I said to myself, that is impossible. Even to voice that doubt is inadmissible. For it leads to the point where everything crumbles, and then it is the doubter himself who is at fault.31
But note that Jaspers is careful in his phrasing to distinguish that unassailability from unconditionality. Disagreement, even “on crucial matters,” is placed as an integral part of that bond; to suggest that disagreement threatened it would be an error about the nature of the relationship itself. This distinction proves to be essential in the Eichmann period, in which the entire conversation begins, well before the trial, in a principled disagreement both over the legal basis for the trial32 and over the state of Israel itself (which Arendt says “relates to a number of questions bearing on the so-called Jewish problem, questions on which we have never been in total agreement”33 ). In keeping with Arendt’s and Jaspers’ distinction between communication and advocatory thinking, though, this disagreement does not become the basis for static camps that endure through their joint exploration of the trial. Instead, their two positions meld and twist into new ones, with Arendt’s initial staunch support for the trial shifting as she reacted to the course and social milieu of the trial, and Jaspers’ initial pessimism moderating as he took in Arendt’s more complicated view of the facts on the ground. Robert Fine suggests that it is in the letters between them that Arendt first “began to take seriously the notion of ‘crimes against humanity’ as having a literal truth.”34 It is not just the presence of disagreement but its form as communication that is integral to its role in their private relationship as public thinkers.
There is also an ease of communication between the two that is essential to how they each responded to the crisis, in which the need for shorthand caveats and long-winded expositions is replaced by a historically built relationship of trust. This was the trust of a life lived in the public eye and their knowledge of each other’s thought combined with a belief that their transparency with each other was mirrored in a kind of permanent and militant transparency of public thought. Jaspers gestures at the idea in analyzing Arendt’s reportage when he notes to her that “I sense more in it: a desire for veracity and for the contemplation of man, but you do not speak explicitly about that.”35 As he fastidiously reads the final collected edition of Eichmann in Jerusalem chapter by chapter, withholding commentary beyond where he has read, his notes on his reading progress and the tiniest slivers of response portion by portion are enough to establish the committed intensity of his engagement. When Jaspers writes with a mild chastening “how infinitely naïve not to notice that the act of putting a book like this into the world is an act of aggression against ‘life-sustaining lies.’ Where those lies are exposed and the names of the people who live those lies are named, the meaning of those people’s existence itself is at stake,”36 Arendt knows both the deeper systemic argument behind the comment and its loving meaning, writing back that “you said: ‘what is revealed here is a deep-seated sense of having been struck a mortal blow’ . . . that is absolutely true.”37
As much as that ease of connection existed in their intellectual shorthand for arguments long-established between them, it extended still more (and perhaps more importantly) to the strata of emotional support that was proving so critical to Arendt in getting through her own trial. Arendt did not need long expositions; it was enough to convey the depth and turmoil of her feelings to write:
In addition, I feel I am not up to this struggle. It isn’t just a question of nerves and also not just that the coincidence of this business with my worries about Heinrich are simply paralyzing me. I’m incapable of presenting myself in public because my revulsion at this ruckus overwhelms everything else in me.38
This small note is typical of the emotional dimension of their messages to each other, a devastating summary that was enough to stand in for everything that was going on. Arendt sometimes details certain events, like her crowded student talk at Columbia, but in general with Jaspers she is able to achieve a degree of affective distance (and even humor) from the upheaval itself, reducing it to episodic commentaries, as when she tells him that “[people who are] slinging mud at me come to me secretly, under cover of darkness, so to speak, to tell me I should sue, this is a hate campaign . . . all this from people who then publish in the next number of Aufbau! Very odd.”39 This forms the affective dialectic of their connection: from vulnerable struggle to bemused (and amused) detachment, and back.
The lesson of Arendt and Jaspers’ relationship through her Eichmann trials is that these aspects of their communication are integral to the meaning of public living as both describe it. Their letters are a vision of something that never appears in Arendt’s account of the actor and the public, but nevertheless in their practice with each other is as articulately developed as anything in The Human Condition: the personal preconditions that make the public life each demanded possible. They shared a commitment to each other in communication, an enabling trust in argument, a dialectic of vulnerability and detachment: these are as much inextricable prerequisites to the life of the actor as the worker’s maintenance of the space of appearance. If Arendt’s and Jaspers’ writings both work to establish the necessary structure of the public space for the vita activa to flourish, their practices with each other show the other side of that necessary structure, the intellectual, affective underpinnings of being Jaspers’ “citizen of the world.”
Conclusion
Arendt made a seemingly curious choice by rendering the title of her second elegy to Jaspers a question: “Citizen of the world?” It was not just the philosophy they shared of world-making and publicity that made it a necessity to open the meditation as a question, but the course of what their shared lives had revealed about the very possibility of that subject position she ascribes to Jaspers. At stake in the requiem is not just the question of what a citizen of the world is and what form contemporary solidarity in citizenship takes, but whether and how there is space for such a person in the public world as it is forming itself. Humankind, Arendt writes, has had a kind of “negative solidarity” forced upon it by the nuclear age and “the fear of global destruction.”40 The question, for Arendt as it was for Jaspers, is whether that negative solidarity can be tied to “the solidarity of mankind” “in a positive sense” by being “coupled” with a novel vision of political responsibility suited to the demands of a new age.41 That new political responsibility was not only one that Jaspers’ philosophy espoused but one that they lived in their lives together.
On the terms of her own philosophy as well as those she elevates from Jaspers, the essay could never have been a dogmatic statement of purpose. Subtly, Jaspers’ death provides the occasion for one of Arendt’s most condensed articulations of her answer to that question to which she had claimed the essence of Jaspers’ thought was directed. “The principle itself” of “communication” rather than argumentation, which was to lie at the heart of that responsibility, depends in its first instance on the fact that “truth . . . can never be grasped as dogmatic content,” but as “reason” “communicating itself and appealing to the reasonable existing of the other.”42 When Arendt writes of “the good will to reveal and to listen as the primary condition for all human intercourse,”43 the existence and possibility of that good will is itself a political question, that is, a question that depends on the ways in which we speak and appear to each other, subject to the same complex conditions of possibility of all action. As much as Jaspers tried to reassure her through the Eichmann trials that “a time will come that you will not live to see, when the Jews will erect a monument to you in Israel, as they are doing now for Spinoza,”44 the structure of the reaction and its “classic case of character assassination”45 could not but have left Arendt questioning in her public philosophy as much as in her letters to Jaspers whether this good will was something to which the contemporary world could be committed.
Still, even if these things were open questions in “Karl Jaspers: Citizen of the World?” Arendt’s mourning for Jaspers did not extend to a mourning for the passing of the public capacities that made a Jaspers possible in the world. Instead, if the suggestion of a slightly messianic structure can be forgiven, it occasioned a meditation on what would be the necessary demands of the public sphere for a Jaspers to come again, and whether Jaspers own philosophy had provided the groundwork for understanding the conditions for a new public of humankind. It is love that provides a partial but decisive answer to that question of possibility. The second Arendtian story about love, an “experience of love in the sense of an activity” that “like all other activities, does not leave the world, but must be performed within it,”46 already appears in The Human Condition. What we find in her descriptions of Jaspers and her relationship to him is a kind of specification, the provision of substance to her suggestion that love is the first demonstration of the very possibility of true, free action: “love” demonstrates that “there could be an activity that has its end in itself.”47 Love, in “its experience of sheer activity, that is, in a transformation of willing into loving”48 one another and the world that is created between, is expressed as the activities that are the essential conditions for action to exist in the world.
To understand the impact Jaspers’ thought had on Arendt and his influence on her development as a person is to understand that the exploration of those conditions was present not only in their intertwined views in their public philosophy but also in the project of their private lives together. There is no subtle hint of her relationship with Jaspers in Arendt’s description that in this new political responsibility, “thinking becomes practical, though not pragmatic; it is a kind of practice between men, not a performance of one individual in his self-chosen solitude.”49 The influence of that “process of mutual understanding and progressing self-clarification” that, as it had played out between them, must now “take place” on “a gigantic scale”50 can be seen too in the form of Arendt’s writing after the war, and her continued commitment to reportage as to mirror Jaspers “in speaking and listening” and so “[succeed] in changing, widening, sharpening-or, as [Jaspers] himself would beautifully put it, in illuminating.”51
It is true that in her essays after his death, Arendt puts forward Jaspers as the paradigmatic figure of his own thinking, listening, and reasoning citizen of the world, an exemplar of his own model, but it is equally true that those visions of the public that made them both famous gestated and evolved within their relationship with each other. The case for Heidegger’s philosophical influence on Arendt has been made and dissected many times over, but Jaspers’ influence was one in which they not only shared (in the literal sense of communicating) commitments on the centerpiece of both of their philosophies—the public—but also molded, in the way they practised it together, the understanding each had of the lived requisites and demands of Jaspers’ “humanitas; to take it upon oneself to answer before mankind for every thought means to live in that luminosity in which oneself and everything one thinks is tested.”52 In as close as Arendt comes to a public profession of her love for him, Arendt declared that “no one can help us as he can to overcome our distrust of this same public realm, to feel what honor and joy it is to praise one we love in the hearing of all,”53 and this formulation bears the essential structure of their relationship. In Jaspers, Arendt had not only a friend, a mentor, and an interlocutor, but one who by his very existence in her life and in the public made it possible to understand and to feel a love for the public that was the hallmark of her thought. Jaspers left little doubt that he would say the same of her.
Notes
1 Shin Chiba, “Hannah Arendt on Love and the Political,” The Review of Politics 57, no. 3 (1995): 507.
2 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1958), 51–52.
3 Tatjana Noemi Tömmel, “Vita Passiva,” in Artifacts of Thinking, ed. Roger Berkowitz and Ian Storey (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017), 113. Tömmel’s taxonomy of four different narratives on love in Arendt is especially useful, as is her discussion of Arendt’s evolving reading of Augustine.
4 Chiba, “Hannah Arendt on Love and the Political,” 506.
5 Ibid., 510.
6 Arendt, The Life of the Mind (New York: Harcourt Inc., 1978), 123.
7 Arendt, Men in Dark Times (New York: Mariner Books, 1970), 75.
8 Ibid., 71.
9 Ibid., 72.
10 Ibid., 75.
11 It is clear that the marriage of Karl and Gertrude Jaspers was one that she found inspiring; it also appears in her Denktagebuch. See e.g., Hannah Arendt, Denktagebuch, ed. U. Ludz and Ingeborg Nordmann (Munich: Piper, 2003), II:26, 51.
12 Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 78.
13 Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers, Correspondence, ed. Lotte Kohler and Has Saner (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992), 38. A to J, April 22, 1946.
14 Ibid., 64. A to J, November 11, 1946.
15 Ibid., 67. J to A, November 17, 1946.
16 Curthoys Ned, “The Emigre Sensibility of ‘World Literature,’” Theory & Event 8, no. 3 (2005), https://muse.jhu.edu/ (accessed February 24, 2019).
17 Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 78.
18 Arendt, Denktagebuch, XXIV:21, 626.
19 Arendt and Jaspers, Correspondence, 31. A to J, January 29, 1946.
20 Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 75.
21 Ibid.
22 Ibid., 78. See also the wonderful exploration of the relationship of love and plurality in Barbara Hahn, Hannah Arendt: Leidenschaften, Menschen und Bücher (Berlin: Berliner Taschenbuch Verlag, 2005).
23 Hannah Arendt, “Collective Responsibility,” in Responsibility and Judgment, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2003), 155.
24 Andrew Schaap, “Guilty Subjects and Political Responsibility,” Political Studies 49, no. 4 (2001): 754. There is not space here to delve into the distinction Schaap makes between Jaspers’ and Arendt’s versions of cosmopolitan responsibility, but they are important and well-articulated, as is his decisive critique of Jaspers’ critics Rabinow and Barnouw.
25 Arendt, “Collective Responsibility,” 158.
26 Arendt, Denktagebuch, II:20, 45.
27 Ibid.
28 Curthoys, “The Emigre Sensibility in ‘World Literature.’”
29 Arendt and Jaspers, Correspondence, 532. J to A, November 16, 1963.
30 Ibid. 433. J to A, April 3, 1961.
31 Ibid., 541. J to A, December 13, 1963.
32 E.g., ibid., 414. A to J, December 23, 1960.
33 Ibid., 423. A to J, February 5, 1961.
34 Robert Fine, “Crimes against Humanity,” European Journal of Social Theory 3, no. 3 (2000): 297.
35 Arendt and Jaspers, Correspondence, 530. J to A, November 2, 1963.
36 Ibid., 531. J to A, November 16, 1963.
37 Ibid., 535. A to J, November 22, 1963.
38 Ibid., 523. A to J, October 20, 1963.
39 Ibid., 516. A to J, August 9, 1963.
40 Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 83.
41 Ibid.
42 Ibid., 85.
43 Ibid.
44 Arendt and Jaspers, Correspondence, 527. J to A, October 25, 1963.
45 Ibid., 522. A to J, October 20, 1963.
46 Arendt, Human Condition, 77. It is true that this description of love falls within her critique of the specifically philosophical and religious version of it, that the activity is twisted into “fleeing the world” that “negates the space the world offers to men.” In the light of her later reading of Augustine and Duns Scotus, however, it is worth asking whether this quick criticism is really a terminal critique of this kind of love-activity itself, or a contingent one of the way that it was taken up in the “philosopher s” and “Christian[s]” “of late antiquity” (Human Condition, 75).
47 Arendt, Life of the Mind, 123.
48 Ibid., 144.
49 Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 86.
50 Ibid., 84.
51 Ibid., 78–79.
52 Ibid., 75.
53 Ibid., 74.