Word: arendt
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...HANNAH ARENDT: FOR LOVE OF THE WORLD by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl Yale University; 563 pages...
Philosophy is concerned with two matters: soluble questions that are trivial, and crucial questions that are insoluble. Hannah Arendt always knew the difference; her critics sometimes did. In the disparity lay the tragedies and consolations of a career still sparking debate 19 years after the appearance of her most controversial book...
Rarely has a character been formed so early. In her vast, indulgent biography, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl records a note made by Frau Arendt in 1908, when Hannah was less than two: "Mostly she talks her own language which she enunciates very fluently. Understands everything." By Hannah's adolescence, that could no longer be considered a mother's exaggeration. She was far ahead of her class at Konigsberg, and at Marburg University she began a lifelong affair with philosophy, and a shorter, scarcely less passionate one with a philosopher...
...liaison prefigured the tension of a lifetime. Martin Heidegger, the great analyst of anxiety and a founder of existentialism, was an upright professor, 17 years older than his star pupil, trained as a Catholic, the father of two sons. Arendt was 18, freethinking, Jewish. These disparities were as nothing compared with the ones that followed. In the '30s, Arendt remained a Jew; Heidegger became a Nazi...
Speaking in her new tongue, she cultivated influential writers: Robert Lowell, Alfred Kazin, Mary McCarthy, Randall Jarrell, W.H. Auden. Writing in a new manner, she searched out The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951. As Young-Bruehl observes, Arendt sustained throughout "500 dense, difficult pages a deep, agonized 'Ach!' before the deeds of infamy she analyzed." The book was an angry, detailed journey over Europe's pitchforked roads to "radical evil": imperialism, racism and antiSemitism...