Hannah Arendt: A Question of Character

CHAPTER 8 ❆ Hannah Arendt A Question of Character ‘The trouble with the Nazi criminals was precisely that they renounced voluntarily all personal qualities. . . . The greatest evil perpetrated is the evil committed by nobodies, that is, by human beings who refuse to be persons.’ Hannah Arendt, ‘Some Questions of Moral Philosophy’ ‘Philosophy constantly brings conceptual personae to life; it gives life to them.’ Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy? My final chapter concerns the ethical importance of ‘character’ or ‘personality’ in Hannah Arendt’s political philosophy. As we discussed in the last chapter, after her caustic repudiation of Enlightenment versions of reason and Bildung in the late 1920s and early 1930s, Arendt became increasingly reconciled to Lessing and Kant’s Aufklärung ethos of Selbstdenken, an ethos she deemed capable of expressing admirable traits of ethical independence, worldly friendship, and communicative sociability, ethical qualities resistant to the dictates of History, ideology, and social conformity. The following discussion explores Arendt’s particular contribution, from a Jewish perspective, to a post-Kantian tradition of character analysis. I explore Arendt’s illumination of politically relevant and ethically significant Jewish character traits that have emerged in interaction with worldly and diasporic conditions. I suggest that Arendt’s mature interest in acquired character, that ‘valid personality which once acquired, never leaves a man’, is one of her most interesting and enduring contributions to a liberal Jewish tradition of virtue ethics.1 In this chapter I discuss Arendt’s theorization of ‘character’ as a form of, in Judith Butler’s words, ‘rogue subjectivity’, whose capacity for internal dialogue militates against fluctuating moral norms. Arendt’s discussions of CURTHOYS 9781782380078 PRINT.indd 194 03/04/2013 14:35 Hannah Arendt: A Question of Character | 195 the ethical qualities that constitute ‘character’ or personality is of axiomatic importance in her attempt, after the atrocities of the Second World War, to overturn the philosophical privileging of contemplation and eidetic intuition, and to promote thinking and judgement as quintessentially worldly human activities. Arendt’s interest in character reprises a liberal Jewish enthusiasm for the ethos of Bildung, the dialogical formation of a distinctive subject or ‘personality’ capable of impressing their personal style or ‘character’ upon the world. Arendt’s analysis of moral character converses with attempts by modern Jewish thinkers to articulate and justify the social function and universal ethical validity of post-traditional diasporic Jewish characteristics, such as critical scepticism and ethical universalism. Like Arendt, Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin placed great emphasis on resistant and refractory versions of moral character that were unburdened by the inertia and parochialism of tradition and habitual modes of thought.2 For Arendt, reflection on character and personality is politically and ethically important, because it enhances judgement, the consideration of particulars that cannot be subsumed under a general rule. Evoking the merits and importance of personalities who are at once exemplary characters and idiosyncratic individuals, who display luminous qualities in ‘dark times’ and ‘borderline situations’, means eschewing normative moral codes and supercessionist meta-narratives of history that stress the rise of one people, class, or idea at the expense of others. Arendt’s idea, by contrast, is that political judgement requires a certain kind of cosmo-political spectatorship that journeys freely across space and time, appreciative of individual, ethically significant human qualities wherever and whenever they are displayed. Such cosmopolitical spectatorship involves an equilibrium of disinterested judgement of and engaged participation in human affairs that helps to ensure that the ‘exemplary figures of all people are available for all people’.3 Let’s think about the reasons why the issue of character and its exemplary ethical force and cosmopolitan possibilities assumed tremendous importance in Arendt’s thought. There is a letter in the Arendt/Jaspers correspondence of 29 September 1949, in which Arendt is just coming to terms with the reality of the Holocaust and the shocking news of Heidegger’s involvement with National Socialism. Responding to Jaspers’ assessment of Heidegger’s ‘impure’ character, Arendt counters that Heidegger is in fact completely lacking in character, ‘in the sense that he literally has none and certainly not a particularly bad one’. She goes on to pour scorn on Heidegger’s desire to crawl back into a ‘mouse hole’ by retreating to his hut in Todtnauberg in the Black Forest, grumbling about civilization, writing Sein with an archaic ‘y’, and only wishing to receive admiring pilgrims. Heidegger, Arendt feels, is trying to ‘buy himself loose from the world’, to fast-talk himself out of everything unpleasant, so he can do nothing but philosophize.4 CURTHOYS 9781782380078 PRINT.indd 195 03/04/2013 14:35 196 | The Legacy of Liberal Judaism Arendt’s distaste for Heidegger’s evasions of reality are no less evident in her published work of this period; consider her 1946 essay ‘What is Existential philosophy’ where she refers to Heidegger’s ‘obvious verbal tricks and sophistries’ and where, in the second note to the original Englishlanguage version of the essay, Arendt sardonically refers to the ‘comic aspect’ of Heidegger’s Nazi involvement. Perhaps, she reflects, Heidegger is the last of the German Romantics, someone whose ‘complete lack of responsibility’ stems in part from ‘delusions of genius’ and in part from ‘despair’.5 This is not a trite accusation when we recall Arendt’s argument in ‘Some Questions of Moral Philosophy’ that ‘all radical evil comes from despair’.6 Nor is such a judgement merely empirical and personal, when we consider that Arendt’s view of Heidegger’s want of character, discrimination, and thoughtfulness (‘absence of thought is not stupidity; it can be found in highly intelligent people’)7 anticipates her ‘banality of evil thesis’ as applied to Adolf Eichmann, where Arendt was ‘struck by a manifest shallowness in the doer that made it impossible to trace the incontestable evil of his deeds to any deeper level of roots or motives’.8 By way of contrast to this devastating assault on Heidegger’s character or lack of it, at around the same period Arendt found herself very impressed with the vigorous cosmopolitanism of the French-Algerian writer Albert Camus, whom she first met in Paris in 1946. Camus, Arendt enthuses to Jaspers, is one of those ‘young men from the Resistance’ who is ‘absolutely honest and has great political insight’. Camus embodies a ‘new type of person cropping up in all the European countries, a type that is “simply European” without any “European nationalism”’. Such a type is ‘at home everywhere’ even if they don’t know the language very well, perhaps a reflexive allusion to Arendt’s contemporaneous struggle to master English in her new homeland of the United States. Sartre, by contrast, is ‘much too typically a Frenchman’, too literary, ‘way too talented’, and too ambitious. Before the war, Arendt writes, she had barely encountered this ‘European’ type that Camus represents, and she muses that the experience of fascism may have forged a kind of moral quality in some people which had previously only been an ‘idealistic program’.9 We should note here, as it will become a resonant theme in Arendt’s ethical and political judgement, that Camus’ character type, the post-national ‘European’, is much more important to her than the more philosophically gifted Sartre; not for the first time Arendt expresses a preference for an intellectual with character over the amour propre of the professional philosopher.10 As we shall see, Arendt’s interest in Camus as a cosmopolitan outsider figure is analogous to the way she later extols Jaspers as a ‘citizen of the world’ and exemplary philosopher. In implicit contrast to the reclusive master philosopher Heidegger, Arendt construes Jaspers as a luminous model of engaged, communicative thinking and judgement. CURTHOYS 9781782380078 PRINT.indd 196 03/04/2013 14:35 Hannah Arendt: A Question of Character | 197 When pondering Arendt’s insistent preference for admirable personality over philosophical talent, it would be a mistake, I think, to claim that Arendt’s search for cosmopolitan ‘citizens of the world’ was more politically motivated and pragmatic than philosophically relevant, responsive to the ephemeral needs of the historical moment while neglecting the enduring worth of the philosophical oeuvre. For one thing, there is an interesting genealogy of thinkers, including Kant, Nietzsche, and Erich Fromm, who were interested in the historical, philosophical, and psychological significance of ‘character’ or its less ambiguous synonym, ‘personality’. I would suggest that Arendt is invoking and renewing this philosophical interest in character when she not only pours scorn on the empirical Heidegger’s want of character but also critiques and overturns Heidegger’s model of philosophical profundity, his desire to be a prophet in the wilderness, a maître à penser standing aloof from the decadence of his era and garnering awe-struck disciples. Arendt’s remarks on Heidegger and Camus adumbrate her feeling that philosophy must recast itself as a form of life which preserves a reference to the world by ceaselessly re-presenting itself, communicating its personae and exemplary activities. It seems to me that Arendt was well served here by another philosophical citizen of the world, Immanuel Kant, whose observations on ‘the character of the person’ in his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798, 1800) were an indispensable reference point. Kant on Character: The Anthropologist as Citizen of the World One of the most interesting aspects of Kant’s analysis of the ‘character of the person’ in Part II of his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View is that it is written from the perspective of the citizen of the world, providing an incomplete, provisional, and eclectic knowledge gleaned from many sources and observations.11 As Kant comments in the preface to the published volume of his long-running lecture series on anthropology that he had given every year since 1772, a pragmatic knowledge of humanity is neither natural nor physiological; pragmatic anthropological knowledge pertains to that which man as a free agent makes, or can and should make, of himself.12 Kantian anthropology has practical applications; it is not theoretical or definitive but a knowledge of the world that ‘must come after our schooling’ by dint of maturity, experience, and wider spheres of social intercourse. This kind of knowledge, Kant writes, cannot be reduced to the cognition of things in the world; it is only considered pragmatic, rather, when it is ‘knowledge of man as a citizen of the world’. To orient oneself to the world of human affairs, to ‘have the world’ as opposed to simply having knowledge if it, Kant argues, is CURTHOYS 9781782380078 PRINT.indd 197 03/04/2013 14:35 198 | The Legacy of Liberal Judaism not a localized or empirical knowledge of ‘things’; rather, to use a metaphor, it presupposes that one has not simply understood a play but ‘participated in it’.13 As Foucault argues in his introductory essay on Kant’s Anthropology, the Anthropology has a kinship with Goethe’s great Bildungsroman Wilhelm Meister to ‘the extent that here, too, we find that the world is a school’.14 In the second part of the Anthropology, the ‘Anthropological Characteristic’, Kant turns to a consideration of moral character. In a section entitled ‘The Character of the Person’ (Der Character der Person), Kant writes that moral character is something which ‘can only be one (nur ein einziger), or nothing at all’. As opposed to physical character, the distinguishing mark of the human being as a sensible or natural being, to have character is the distinguishing mark of the human being as a rational being endowed with freedom. The ‘man of principles’, from whom one knows what to expect, not from his instinct but rather from his will, ‘has a character’ (hat einen Character).15 To say of a human being, Kant writes, that ‘he has a character’ is in fact ‘to have said a great deal about him, but it is also to have praised him a great deal’, for it is a rare phenomenon and ‘inspires profound respect and admiration toward him’.16 To have character signifies that ‘property of the will by which the subject binds himself to definite practical principles that he has prescribed to himself irrevocably by his own reason’. Even if these principles might occasionally be mistaken and imperfect, the formal element of his volition in general, to act according to firm principles, has something precious and admirable about it, for it is also ‘something rare’.17 Kant critiques physiological and physiognomic conceptions of character in the work of contemporaries such as Lavater when he stresses that when it comes to character it is not a question of what nature makes of the human being, but of ‘what the human being makes of himself’. For character is not the same as the more passive and innate concept of temperament, in that it cannot be immediately observed; rather, character is only revealed over a temporal duration and is exemplified in a variety of situations. Kant suggests here that character demands expansive narration and in its singularity provokes reflection and wonder rather than peremptory judgement.18 For Kant, character is unique and inimitable: it is precisely originality in one’s way of thinking (Denkungsart). He who has character has himself tapped the spring from which he draws his conduct. He is not an eccentric, however, for he takes his stand on principles that are valid for everyone. Nevertheless, someone with character is liable to be held up as an eccentric or crank because ‘he does not take part in evil once it has become public custom (fashion)’.19 However, just so Kant’s audience don’t become a touch bored and think they are back in the morally pure world of the categorical imperative immune to contingency and sensuous inclination, Kant suddenly surprises us by praising a man of ‘evil character’, the Roman dictator Lucius Cornelius Sulla. Kant CURTHOYS 9781782380078 PRINT.indd 198 03/04/2013 14:35 Hannah Arendt: A Question of Character | 199 writes that although the violence of Sulla’s firm maxims arouses disgust, we ‘admire strength of soul generally, in comparison with goodness of soul’.20 Indeed, Kant goes so far as to insist, as Patrick Frierson puts it, that ‘character, even when evil, is better than a lack of character’. After pointing out in his lecture notes that a ‘human being is truly renowned when he has a determinate character, even would this be an evil one’, Kant goes on to say of Sulla, reminding us of Arendt’s damning judgement of Heidegger, that ‘here truly is found more excellence than with a human being that has no character, even if he already has a good heart and soul . . . Character has inner moral worth’.21 In the Anthropology, Kant makes it clear that character cannot enter into a system of equivalencies. Character is not a good or useful property of a human being that has ‘a price that allows it be exchanged’; it is not a talent that has a ‘market price’ and is open to manipulation, nor is it an enjoyable temperament that makes a person a transiently pleasant companion. Rather character has ‘an inner worth, and is beyond all price’, intuitively and performatively articulating Kant’s famous precept that human beings must always be regarded as ends in themselves.22 Soon after invoking Sulla in the Anthropology Kant goes on to slightly qualify the pleasure we take in unyielding, even evil character, by prosaically reiterating that ‘character requires maxims that proceed from reason and morally practical principles’.23 Still, it is clear that while Kant the moralist praises true character as bound to reason and moral principle, Kant the citizen of the world, the urbane spectator of human affairs, admires and enjoys the enigma and critical force of character as someone who challenges, provokes, and transgresses social norms, who inspires the kind of admiration that cannot be referred back to the formal imperatives of practical reason. Characters inspire a play of affects evoked in story-telling, vignette, doxography. In a note illuminating his argument for the inner moral worth of character, Kant offers the story of how the nurse who had taken care of King James I of England pleaded with him to make her son a gentleman. James answered: ‘That I cannot do. I can make him an Earl, but he must make himself a gentleman’. In the same note he gives us the tale of Diogenes the Cynic, notorious for his corrosive misanthropy and public obscenities, who was captured in Crete during a voyage and put on the block in a public sale of slaves. When asked by the merchant who had put him up for auction what he could do and what he knew, Diogenes’ imperious response was ‘I know how to rule’ so ‘find me a buyer who needs a master’. The initially perplexed merchant was so impressed by this singular response that he had his own son educated, admirably, by Diogenes.24 Kant’s examples of ornery historical characters that resist habitual social conventions and obligations leads him to deduce that the principles that have to do with character are perhaps best expounded negatively.25 Characters resist CURTHOYS 9781782380078 PRINT.indd 199 03/04/2013 14:35 200 | The Legacy of Liberal Judaism and defy social norms of behaviour in such a way that they demand that their lives are narrated as a meaningful whole. Never a function of their class or nation, to have character is to establish an important ethical nexus between past, present, and future in the life of the individual. To have character is to refuse to break legitimate promises, which includes honouring the memory of a friendship now broken off and never abusing the former confidences of said friend; it means refraining from associating with evil-minded men, paying no attention to gossip that issues from shallow and malicious judgement, and resisting, in oneself, that natural fear which does not want to offend against prevailing fashion and opinion, always a fleeting and changeable thing. Character has a negative or resistant quality because it proceeds from a self-reflexive act of will. A man who is conscious of having character in his way of thinking does not have it by nature; he ‘must always have acquired it’. The act of establishing character is ‘like a kind of rebirth’, involving the ceremony of making a vow to oneself with a solemnity which makes it unforgettable to him that does it, ‘like the beginning of a new epoch’.26 The usual socializing processes of education, example, and instruction, Kant writes, cannot produce this firmness and steadfastness in our principles gradually, but only, as it were, by ‘an explosion’ that results from our being weary of the precarious and unstable state of our instincts. The act of establishing character is usually that of a mature man, who insists upon the ‘absolute unity of the inner principle of conduct as such’.27 So how can one decide whether one has character? Kant suggests that the sole proof a man’s consciousness affords him that he has character is his having made it his supreme maxim to be truthful, both in his ‘confessions to himself as well as in his behaviour toward everyone else’. Since to have character is both the minimum required of a reasonable man and the maximum of inner worth or human dignity, to be a man of principles, that is, to have determinate character, ‘must be possible for the most ordinary human reason and yet, according to its dignity, be superior to the greatest talent’.28 There are some important aspects of the Kantian description of character that resonate strongly for Arendt in her attempts to narrate and exemplify the importance of moral personality. As we shall see, Arendt responds to Kant’s argument for the acquired and self-willed nature of character, the idea of character as a rebirth of the soul, arguing for exemplary intellectuals as those who has reinvented themselves in such a way that their conduct, the way they present themselves to the world, is animated by a unifying and coherent principle, an ethos. Arendt construes thought and consciousness in Kantian terms as forms of self-relation and self-awareness. She seizes on Kant’s Enlightenment era argument that character is a potentiality of anyone capable of using their reason, deploying Kant’s analysis to repeatedly critique the ways in which professional thinkers with vested interests have attempted CURTHOYS 9781782380078 PRINT.indd 200 03/04/2013 14:35 Hannah Arendt: A Question of Character | 201 to elevate thought and contemplation beyond the flux of phenomenal life and the diversity of human opinions. For Arendt, character is formed in the public gaze, and demands to be narrated in the tradition of philosophical doxography, that is, against a textured social and historical background in which the philosopher is one character, or dramatis personae, amongst others. As Arendt argues in The Human Condition, the disclosure of who somebody is is ‘implicit in both his words and deeds’, but this revelation of a unique personal identity is embedded in a social context, it ‘can almost never be achieved as a wilful purpose, as though one possessed and could dispose of this “who” as one can dispose of his qualities’.29 Typologies of Character In her excellent study Mind and the Body Politic (1989), Arendt’s biographer Elisabeth Young-Bruehl argues that Arendt’s great contribution to political theory is her revival of traditional discussions, from Plato to Montesquieu, of forms of government, in which Arendt attempts to add to the traditional types a new and unprecedented one, totalitarianism.30 I think we can extend YoungBruehl’s insightful comment and reflect on whether Arendt did not also share, with Kant, an aesthetically sensitive and typologically motivated interest in the ethically robust qualities of the self-formed character and relationally articulated personality, that is, a formal, spectatorial interest in characteristic ‘ways of thinking’ about the world. Like Kant, Arendt was interested in those characters traversing the panorama of our melancholy history that are determinately individual and uncompromisingly resistant to the normative impositions of society and the transience of fashion and convention. For example, in her article ‘Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship’ (The Listener 72, 6 August 1964) Arendt argues that as character types, the rebel and the sceptic are more likely to resist totalitarian rule and the criminal ‘moral’ code it attempts to impose because they are habitually prone to ‘doubt and think for themselves’. Arendt makes this point about the political potential of what are by no means unequivocally positive or wholesome characteristics on several occasions in her work. In her lectures at the New School University and the University of Chicago in the mid-1960s, later published as ‘Some Questions of Moral Philosophy’, Arendt argues in reference to the Nazi era that in Germany there was a total collapse of moral and religious standards among people who to all appearances had always firmly believed in them. She points out that those people who managed not to be ‘sucked into the whirlwind’ of Nazi criminality were by no means the ‘moralists’, people who had always upheld rules of right conduct, but on the contrary very often those who had been convinced, even before the debacle of Nazi rule, of the CURTHOYS 9781782380078 PRINT.indd 201 03/04/2013 14:35 202 | The Legacy of Liberal Judaism ‘objective non-validity of these standards per se’. We hardly need experience to tell us, Arendt comments, that: narrow moralists who constantly appeal to high moral principles and fixed standards are usually the first to adhere to whatever fixed standard they are offered and that respectable society . . . is more liable to become very nonrespectable and even criminal than most bohemians and beatniks.31 In a similar vein Arendt asserts that ‘morally the only reliable people when the chips are down are those who say “I can’t”’.32 Arendt associated this ethical refusal with the ‘negative, marginal qualities’ of Socrates, whose refusal to do wrong under any circumstances is the ‘only working morality in borderline situations’.33 Like Kant, Arendt admires the considerable ethical and political potential inherent in nonconformist character types who may in fact be difficult, cynical, resistant to authority, and abhor their social environment. I would suggest that Arendt is also invoking Georg Simmel’s classic sociological defence of ‘the stranger’ who, ‘like the poor and sundry “inner enemies” is an element of the group itself ’.34 To be a stranger is ‘naturally a very positive [form of human] relation; it is a specific form of interaction’. The stranger’s ‘position as a full-fledged member [of a group] involves being both outside and confronting it’.35 For Simmel, the classic example of the ‘stranger’ who intrudes as a supernumerary into an established group is the ‘history of European Jews’ who are restricted to intermediary trade, a situation which gives the stranger the ‘specific character of mobility’.36 Simmel lauds the ‘objectivity of the stranger’ who is ‘not radically committed to the unique ingredients and particular tendencies of the group’ and therefore possesses a certain freedom.37 The stranger, a potential wanderer who has not quite overcome the freedom of coming and going, is ‘bound by no commitments which could prejudice his perception, understanding, and evaluation of the given’, nor ‘tied down in his action by habit, piety, and precedent’.38 This objectivity, Simmel stresses, does not simply involve passivity and detachment but is composed of a ‘particular structure of distance and nearness, indifference and involvement’. The stranger indicates a specific form of social participation of which a typical instance is the tendency of Italian cities to call in their judges from outside so they would be free of entanglement in family and party interests.39 Arendt’s interest in defiant and resistant characters who prove the most reliable when social norms collapse also echoes her friend Walter Benjamin’s interest in the Nietzschean vitalism and historical pathos of ‘the destructive character’, someone whose ‘need for fresh air and open space is stronger than any hatred’.40 The destructive character, writes Benjamin: CURTHOYS 9781782380078 PRINT.indd 202 03/04/2013 14:35 Hannah Arendt: A Question of Character | 203 has the consciousness of historical man, whose deepest emotion is an insuperable mistrust of the course of things and a readiness at all times to recognize that everything can go wrong. Therefore the destructive character is reliability itself.41 Arendt’s paradoxical point, following Simmel and Benjamin’s Jewish coded, anti-functional sociology, is that it is just these recalcitrant personalities who are and must remain a part of any community, regardless of their eccentricity, individuality, and sub-cultural difference from normal social values. For it is in the ‘borderline’ situation of a moral emergency, in which the usual moral injunctions such as ‘thou shall not kill’ have been completely overthrown, that people with resistant, sceptical, pessimistic, and ‘strange’ characteristics will demonstrate admirably independent ethical qualities. We should note Arendt’s resistance to rigid code morality and normative theories of historical progress and socialization, since her thesis amounts to the suggestion that it is preferable to have a variety of personality types, with different dispositions, interests, and orientations in a society, regardless of whether they pose some threat to the commonweal, to the organic integration of a given community, the Volksgemeinschaft. Indeed a minority of such characters, whose existence embodies the resilience of difference and the insuperable phenomenal diversity of the world, are worth more to Arendt than millennia of normative political, educational, and theological attempts to inculcate moral codes and ethical virtues. As Arendt puts it, ‘an individual’s personal quality is precisely his “moral” quality’.42 What constitutes someone with moral personality, as far as Arendt is concerned, and here she follows Kant, is a kind of active self-relation, a dialogue of the self with the self in the process of thinking which is incessant and which avails itself of all the communicative resources of a socially constituted language and a sensus communis: In this process of thought in which I actualize the specifically human difference of speech, I explicitly constitute myself a person, and I shall remain one to the extent that I am capable of such constitution ever again and anew . . . What we call personality . . . has nothing to do with gifts and intelligence, it is the simple, almost automatic result of thoughtfulness.43 Arendt understands conscience itself as a temporally extended self-relation rather than as innate or intuitive, a dialogue with the self in which multiple perspectives are considered and debated, in which the self dramatizes its deliberations and is its own spectator. Conscience is not a faculty of knowing and judging right and wrong but is what we now call consciousness, that is, ‘the faculty by which we know, are aware of, ourselves’.44 Only the incessant CURTHOYS 9781782380078 PRINT.indd 203 03/04/2013 14:35 204 | The Legacy of Liberal Judaism Kantian ‘re-birthing’ of the subject in the dialogue of thinking, as catalysed by language, can guarantee ethics. As Arendt puts it, ‘my conduct towards others will depend on my conduct towards myself ’.45 Kant’s precept that someone with character despises any kind of internal dishonesty or bad faith is echoed by Arendt’s argument that: moral conduct . . . seems to depend primarily upon the intercourse of man with himself. He must not contradict himself by making an exception in his own favour, he must not place himself in a position in which he would have to despise himself… The standard is neither the love of some neighbour nor self-love, but self-respect.46 This dialogic process of thinking, this incessant self-renewal, enables the ethical subject to constitute themselves through remembrance, ‘striking roots and thus stabilizing themselves, so as not to be swept away by whatever may occur – the Zeitgeist or History or simple temptation’. If I refuse to remember, warns Arendt, ‘I am actually ready to do anything’.47 For what we usually call a person or personality, as distinguished from a mere human being or a nobody, ‘actually grows out of this root-striking process of thinking’.48 I would suggest that Arendt’s concept of moral personality as striking roots in the self-relation and self-honesty of remembrance affirms a liberal Jewish interest in Bildung as the formation of character through an eclectic awareness of admirably heterodox personalities and moral qualities. Arendt thereby casts an acerbic glance towards the banal, ethically void Heideggerean discourse of primordial ‘rootedness’ in earth, tradition, and nation. Far from indulging a misanthropic and elitist sense of authenticity, the ethical personality is a humanist, open to the sheer variety of human and earthly phenomena; in questions of ethics and practical judgement, s/he desires to be guided by example, to be confronted with concrete, singular instances of virtue which enhance her or his common sense and relatedness to other human beings past and present: ‘what we need for common-sense thinking are examples to illustrate our concepts’.49 Common sense thinking dwells on the singularity of human encounters and the representative significance of what is exemplary, encouraging imaginative reflection: ‘the validity of common sense grows out of . . . intercourse with people – just as we say that thought grows out of . . . intercourse with myself . . . the more people’s positions I can present in my thought and hence take into account in my judgment, the more representative it will be.’50 A thinking and acting being who is constantly imaginatively reprising the perspectives of others, the ethical personality is never simply alone, even in their solitude they have themselves for company, they enact the unity in difference that they are: ‘solitude means that though alone, I am together CURTHOYS 9781782380078 PRINT.indd 204 03/04/2013 14:35 Hannah Arendt: A Question of Character | 205 with some-body (myself, that is)’.51 The ethical personality is not egoistic but a medium of plural perspectives and forces. Far from being narcissistically wrapped up in itself as if it were the whole world, the self regards itself as a citizen of the world, its doxa or opinion by no means automatically superior to any other, needing testing, experimentation, and perspectival enlargement. Judith Butler, in conversation with the thought of Kant, Foucault and Arendt, has recently articulated just such a form of critical ‘self-invention’ that would not be ‘based on an ontology of individualism’ but rather presupposes that individuation is ‘always, even constitutively, jeopardized by the impingements of sociality’. For Butler, the critical task of self-inventing subjectivity is not to become free of all impingement but to ‘distinguish among those modes of impingement that are illegitimate and those that are not’.52 Drawing on Arendt’s interest in the political significance of civil disobedience, Butler theorizes a ‘rogue subject’ that refuses fluctuating norms of political rationality while retaining a ‘critical relation to existing modes of intelligibility’.53 As Butler argues in Giving an Account of Oneself, the subject’s ‘self-crafting’ always takes place in relation to an imposed set of norms, such that its ethical agency is ‘neither fully determined nor radically free’. The struggle of the self-forming ethical personality, its ‘primary dilemma’, is to ‘be produced by a world, even as one must produce oneself in some way’.54 This is an acute issue for the active Jewish personality as Arendt conceived it, who would ironize, parody and transvalue the epithets and values attributed to them by a hostile society, rather than simply hide or deny those differences which they, like Rahel Varnhagen, would not have missed for the world. The Socratic Jaspers In Men in Dark Times (1968), a series of biographical portraits which should itself be considered as an eclectic contribution to the Kantian discourse on character, Arendt situates Jaspers as a Kantian character, a subject renewed through creative volition and exposure to public affairs. Like Kant, Jaspers has more than once ‘left the academic sphere and its conceptual language to address the general reading public’.55 Jaspers concurs with Kant that a philosophy that is not susceptible to popularization is more meretricious than genuine.56 Emulating the urbanity and ethical consistency of the Socratic personality, Jaspers articulates a ‘certain cheerful recklessness’ in that he ‘loves to expose himself to the currents of public life, while at the same time remaining independent of all the trends and opinions that happen to be in vogue’.57 Jaspers possesses a spirited independence because he is not even in rebellion against the conventions of his society, which are always recognized as such, CURTHOYS 9781782380078 PRINT.indd 205 03/04/2013 14:35 206 | The Legacy of Liberal Judaism hence never taken seriously as ‘standards of conduct’.58 Jaspers’ confidence in the public sphere does not stem from misanthropy or elitism however, but from a ‘secret trust in man’, in the humanitas of the human race.59 Jaspers is a moral character in the Kantian sense because he has accepted the gift of freedom and re-invented and ‘renewed’ himself since the rise of Nazism and the Second World War.60 While other intellectuals in their middle age acquiesce to temperament and habit, Jaspers has become an active political philosopher and cosmopolitan citizen of the world, a ‘public figure in the full sense of the word’.61 In the aftermath of the war he embarked on new eras of productivity, taking it upon himself to answer for his thinking before the tribunal of mankind, desiring to live in the bright light of publicity, in that ‘luminosity in which oneself and everything one thinks is tested’.62 Jaspers also embodies the role of the philosopher as world-citizen and world-spectator, ‘as linked with the world as ever and following current events with unchanging keenness and capacity for concern’.63 A cosmopolitan thinker, Jaspers has renounced the binding authority of tradition and of his own national past, inventing a historically reflexive philosophy that speaks to the contemporary needs of a global public sphere, in which the ‘great contents of the past are freely and “playfully” placed in communication with each other’.64 Jaspers’ interest in the Axial Age in The Origins and Goal of History (1953), in which philosophical forms of living and thinking simultaneously emerge in India, China, Palestine, and Greece, is not simply historical, but rather a means of critiquing Eurocentrism and communicating the works and deeds of great philosophical personalities (Confucius, Lao-tse, Zarathustra, Heraclitus, the Jewish Prophets) to a transnational audience.65 Interestingly though, when it comes to discussing the emergence of Jaspers’ ‘unviolable, untemptable, unswayable’ personality,66 Arendt differs from the Stoic inspired Kantian interpretation of character as emanating from a form of masculine will and pride, commensurate with the desire to display virtuosity and heroism in the public sphere while repudiating dissimulating feminized traits such as gallantry. Rather than ascribing Jaspers’ character to a Stoic mastery of the will over fear and baser inclination, Arendt construes Jaspers’ personality as forged through his receptiveness to sexual and cultural difference. It is due to singular good fortune, Arendt writes, that Jaspers could be isolated in the course of his life, losing his position under Nazis rule, but never driven into solitude.67 That good fortune is due to his marriage with a German Jewish woman, Gertrud Jaspers née Meyer, who stood by his side all his life, who helped him to create a ‘world’ of thought, discussion, and value judgement immune to the vulgarizations of nationalism, the heady passions of mob sentiment, and the temptations of power. From this ‘world in miniature’, Jaspers learned, ‘as from a model, what is essential for the whole realm of human affairs’.68 CURTHOYS 9781782380078 PRINT.indd 206 03/04/2013 14:35 Hannah Arendt: A Question of Character | 207 Within the space of this supportive and intellectually stimulating marriage, Jaspers learnt and practised an incomparable faculty for dialogue, for the art of listening, a constant readiness to give a candid account of himself, and the patience to linger over any matter under discussion. Rosa Luxemburg If Arendt gives the Kantian analysis of character a new wrinkle, it is precisely in the idea that steadfast and distinctive personalities actively translate arts of social intercourse that are learnt in dialogue across differences of sex, ethnicity, and milieux, into their conduct in the public sphere. This is a point that Arendt also makes in relation to the generous sociability and discerning moral taste of Rosa Luxemburg, another poignant character study in Men in Dark Times. It is her essay on Rosa Luxemburg that tells us more about the Jewish inspired ‘world in miniature’, an inspiration to robust moral conduct, that Arendt has in mind. I would suggest that Arendt’s interest, in this essay, in a diasporic Jewish social microcosm that nourished vigorous forms of cultural and political agency draws on a tradition of liberal Jewish sympathy for pluralist diasporic milieux such as Andalusian Spain and republican Amsterdam. In ‘Rosa Luxemburg’, Arendt evokes Luxemburg’s Polish-Jewish ‘peer group’ as a ‘highly significant and totally neglected source’ of the revolutionary spirit in the twentieth century.69 Its nucleus consisted of ‘assimilated Jews from middle-class families’ whose cultural background was German, whose political formation was Russian, and whose moral standards in both private and public life ‘were uniquely their own’.70 These Jews, a tiny percentage of the diaspora, ‘had no conventional prejudices whatsoever’. They were formed, Arendt tells us, by a Jewish family background that ‘treated one another as equals’, a ‘childhood world in which mutual respect and unconditional trust, a universal humanity and a genuine, almost naïve contempt for social and ethnic distinctions were taken for granted’. Members of this peer group possessed ‘what can only be called moral taste’, which, Arendt reminds us, is very different from so called ‘moral principles’.71 It was this milieu, and never the communist movement, which remained Rosa Luxemburg’s home; a home that was ‘movable up to a point’, since it was ‘predominantly Jewish’ and did not ‘coincide with any “fatherland”’.72 Arendt then moves on to discuss Rosa Luxemburg’s obstinate critique of the nation state, which Arendt interprets ambivalently as both admirable yet lamentably unrealistic. It was Nietzsche, Arendt suggests, who first pointed out that the position and function of the Jewish people in Europe predestined them to ‘become the “good Europeans”’ par excellence, something which CURTHOYS 9781782380078 PRINT.indd 207 03/04/2013 14:35 208 | The Legacy of Liberal Judaism could be said of no other group.73 Indeed, although the Socialist movement could not persuade the working class that they were its true fatherland, Rosa Luxemburg was by no means entirely wrong on the national question, since that small minority of Jews that could be called ‘good Europeans’ might well have been the only ones to have a ‘presentiment of the disastrous consequences ahead’.74 We will never know if Arendt had the prescient political thinker Ernst Cassirer in mind here; nonetheless, this remark is emblematic of her mature suspicion of the Zionist critique of Jewish life in diaspora as factitious and delusional. As we have discussed, the figure of the ‘good European’ as a practical ethical subject and not just an idealistic chimera was eventually fulfilled for Arendt by public-intellectuals such as Camus and Jaspers. The Jew as Pariah In the very practice of self-constitution, Judith Butler argues, there is a ‘giving oneself over to a publicized mode of appearance’, whereby a ‘mode of reflexivity is stylized and maintained as a social and ethical practice’.75 I suggest that Arendt interpreted this performative subjectivity in liberal Jewish terms, as an ethically valuable cultural-historical characteristic of Jewish diasporic existence that enabled Jews such as Nathan the Wise and Moses Mendelssohn to mediate between Jewish and non-Jewish worlds. In her lifelong struggle to give an account of herself, to constitute herself as a political philosopher, German Jewish intellectual, and representative of stateless and marginalized peoples, Arendt foregrounds, in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, a conceptual persona, the ‘Jewish pariah’. The ‘Jewish pariah’ embodies the dilemma of, in Butler’s terms, the self-inventing ‘rogue subject’ who needs to acknowledge their irreducible relation to the world while forcefully challenging social norms.76 The preceding discussion of Arendt’s investment in the exemplary public lives of conceptual personae such as Socrates, Jaspers, and Rosa Luxemburg should encourage us to recognize that her mature account of contemporary Jewish identity is more focused on diasporic relational characteristics and socially performed arts of living, nourished by particular European Jewish milieux, than on an essentialist interpretation of Judaism. Arendt’s secular interest in Jewish culture and sensibility falls very much within a liberal Jewish, post-maskilim focus on the social liminality and exemplary humanism of diasporic Jewish intellectuals and philosophers, many of them humble and materially impoverished outsider figures who remained marginal to mainstream Jewish communities. Perhaps we can think about Arendt’s conceptual persona of the Jewish pariah as possessing the now familiar traits of, on the one hand, the CURTHOYS 9781782380078 PRINT.indd 208 03/04/2013 14:35 Hannah Arendt: A Question of Character | 209 ‘destructive character’ who has no faith in the triumphal march of history, and the unsettling play of engagement and distance that typifies the perpetual stranger and conscientious objector in any given community, including the Jewish community. Like Judith Butler’s rogue subject, the Jewish pariah is vigorously relational, choosing their mode of comportment in response to representations that seek to oppress or exclude them or the attitude and social function they represent. The Jew as pariah transmutes the stereotype of the Jew as ontologically lacking, as rootless, imitative, an actor without authentic identity, into a virtue, performing a generous humanity, a joie de vivre and insouciance. Arendt is particularly interested in the poet, essayist, and political iconoclast Heinrich Heine, the ‘first German prose writer really to embody the heritage of Lessing’.77 Of all the poets of his time, Arendt writes, ‘Heine was the one with the most character’, which had much to do with being able to describe himself truthfully, in Arendt’s terms, as ‘both a German and a Jew’.78 The Jew as pariah smiles at the hubris of ethnocentrism and has no desire to be a part of formal or respectable society, with its stiflingly repressive morality and arbitrary codes of behaviour. Drawing on a liberal Jewish tradition of religious humanism excluding clerical mediation, Arendt stresses the ‘basic affinity of the pariah to the people’.79 Of Heine, Arendt notes his sympathy for the common people, since ‘sharing their social ostracism, he also shares their joys and sorrows, their pleasures and their tribulations’.80 Heine’s pantheism, Arendt muses, smiles at human hierarchies; the bare fact that the sun shines on all alike ‘affords him daily proof that men are essentially equal’, an interpretation of Heine that seems to glance back at Mendelssohn’s anti-colonial and egalitarian emphasis on God’s providence as legible in bounteous nature rather than the exclusive Salvationist doctrines of a Revealed truth. Arendt situates Heine as a prophetic Aufklärung thinker when she reflects that he kept his ‘passion for freedom unhampered by fetters of dogma’, viewing life through a long-range telescope rather than ‘through the prism of an ideology’.81 Of Chaplin, another pariah figure, Arendt sees in him the ‘entrancing charm of the little people’, illustrating that the ‘human ingenuity of a David can sometimes outmatch the animal strength of a Goliath’.82 Chaplin’s ‘worried, careworn impudence’, the kind ‘so familiar to generations of Jews’, represents the effrontery of the poor ‘little Yid’, who does not recognize the class order of the world because he sees in it neither order nor justice for himself.83 In a footnote, Arendt casually declares that despite Chaplin’s recent assertion that he is of Irish and Gypsy descent, she has selected him for discussion because, even if not a Jew, he has ‘epitomized in an artistic form a character born of the Jewish pariah mentality’.84 Arendt’s inclusion of Chaplin as authentically Jewish in spirit recalls Hermann Cohen’s willingness to recuperate the reviled Heine as a proud Jew in the Prophetic CURTHOYS 9781782380078 PRINT.indd 209 03/04/2013 14:35 210 | The Legacy of Liberal Judaism tradition, a gesture that looks back to Mendelssohn’s embrace of the heretical Spinoza as Jewish in character if not orthodox belief. Her predilection for Chaplin and other schlemiel figures could be fruitfully compared with Cohen and Cassirer’s Prophetic ethics, with its emphasis on humility and humane solidarity as the authentic characteristics of Judaism. Arendt herself represented and performed the Jew as pariah as a selfwilled and self-renewing ‘character’ in the Kantian tradition, someone who chooses, despite moments of weakness, grief, and anguish, to defiantly and courageously display her difference to a hostile world, exhibiting a luminous personality so as to critique and transform the public realm. Arendt’s interest in character is sustained by a long liberal Jewish preoccupation with the form and function of Jewish character traits within the larger canvas of European modernity and world history. As we have seen, Arendt affirms and revitalizes a counter-historical ethos that affirms Jewish difference while arguing for the ongoing cultural-historical benefits of Jewish participation in world history. Notes 1 Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 73. 2 See E. Fromm. [1942] 1963. Fear of Freedom, London: Routledge, 222 and passim, and T.W. Adorno, E. Frenkel-Brunswik, D.J. Levinson, and R.N. Sanford. 1950. The Authoritarian Personality, New York: Harper and Row. 3 E. Young-Bruehl. 1989. Mind and the Body Politic, New York: Routledge, 45. 4 Arendt to Jaspers, 29 September 1949, in L. Kohler and H. Saner (eds). 1992. Hannah Arendt, Karl Jaspers Correspondence 1926–1969, trans. R. and R. Kimber, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 142. 5 H. Arendt. 1994. ‘What is Existential Philosophy?’ in Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954, New York: Schocken Books, 187, n. 2. 6 H. Arendt. 2003. ‘Some Questions of Moral Philosophy’, in Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment, ed. Jerome Kohn, New York: Schocken Books, 74. 7 H. Arendt. 1978. The Life of the Mind, ‘Thinking’, London: Secker and Warburg, 13. 8 Arendt, The Life of the Mind, ‘Thinking’, 13. 9 Arendt to Jaspers, 11 November 1946, in Kohler and Saner, Hannah Arendt, Karl Jaspers Correspondence, 66. 10 Arendt’s loyalty to Camus proved very resilient; she implicitly preferred his antirevolutionary non-violent humanism to Sartre’s affirmation of anti-colonial violence, expressing her support for an increasingly embattled Camus in 1952 when she wrote him a warm and admiring letter of praise for his book L’Homme révolté. See N. Curthoys. 2007. ‘The Refractory Legacy of Algerian Decolonization: Revisiting Arendt on Violence’, in R.H. King and D. Stone (eds), Hannah Arendt and the Uses of History: Imperialism, Nation, Race, and Genocide, New York: Berghahn Books, 109–129. 11 All references in English are from I. Kant. 2009. Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, R. Louden (trans. and ed.), Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. All CURTHOYS 9781782380078 PRINT.indd 210 03/04/2013 14:35 Hannah Arendt: A Question of Character | 211 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 references to the original German refer to I. Kant. 1799. Anthropologie in pragmatischer hinsicht, Frankfurt: Hubner. Kant, Anthropology, 3. Kant, Anthropology, 4. M. Foucault. 2007. Introduction to Kant’s Anthropology, trans. R. Nigro and K. Briggs, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 54. Kant, Anthropology, 185. Kant, Anthropology, 191. Kant, Anthropology, 192. Kant, Anthropology, 192. Kant, Anthropology, 193. Kant, Anthropology, 193. P. Frierson. 2006. ‘Character and Evil in Kant’s Moral Anthropology’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 44(4), 625–626. Kant, Anthropology, 192. Kant, Anthropology, 193. Kant, Anthropology, 192. Kant, Anthropology, 193. Kant, Anthropology, 194. Kant, Anthropology, 194. Kant, Anthropology, 195. Arendt, The Human Condition, 179. Young-Bruehl, Mind and the Body Politic, 13. Arendt, ‘Some Questions of Moral Philosophy’, 104. Arendt, ‘Some Questions of Moral Philosophy’, 78. Arendt, ‘Some Questions of Moral Philosophy’, 106. Simmel, ‘The Stranger’, in The Sociology of George Simmel, 402. Simmel, The Sociology of George Simmel, 402–403. Simmel, The Sociology of George Simmel, 403. Simmel, The Sociology of George Simmel, 404. Simmel, The Sociology of George Simmel, 405. Simmel, The Sociology of George Simmel, 404. W. Benjamin. 1986. ‘The Destructive Character’, in P. Demetz (ed.), Reflections, trans. E. Jephcott, New York: Schocken Books, 301. Benjamin, ‘The Destructive Character’, 302. Arendt, ‘Some Questions of Moral Philosophy’, 79. Arendt, ‘Some Questions of Moral Philosophy’, 95. Arendt, ‘Some Questions of Moral Philosophy’, 76. Arendt, ‘Some Questions of Moral Philosophy’, 96. Arendt, ‘Some Questions of Moral Philosophy’, 67. Arendt, ‘Some Questions of Moral Philosophy’, 95. Arendt, ‘Some Questions of Moral Philosophy’, 100. Arendt, The Life of the Mind, ‘Thinking’, 103. Arendt, ‘Some Questions of Moral Philosophy’, 141. Arendt, ‘Some Questions of Moral Philosophy’, 98. J. Butler. 2009. ‘Critique, Dissent, Disciplinarity’, Critical Inquiry 35, 789, footnote 12. CURTHOYS 9781782380078 PRINT.indd 211 03/04/2013 14:35 212 | The Legacy of Liberal Judaism 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 Butler, ‘Critique, Dissent, Disciplinarity’, 790. J. Butler. 2005. Giving an Account of Oneself, New York: Fordham University Press, 19. Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 74. Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 74. Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 77. Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 77. Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 77. Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 78. Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 75. Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 75. Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 78. Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 84. Arendt, ‘Karl Jaspers: Citizen of the World’, 88. Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 76. Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 78. Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 78. Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 40. Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 40. Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 41. Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 41. Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 42. Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 42–43. Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 114. G. Deleuze and F. Guattari. 1994. ‘Conceptual Personae’, in Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. G. Burchell and H. Tomlinson, London: Verso, 61–84. Arendt, ‘The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition’, 275–297, on 282. Arendt, ‘The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition’, 281–282. Arendt, ‘The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition’, 279. Arendt, ‘The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition’, 278. Arendt, ‘The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition’, 281. Arendt, ‘The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition’, 286–287. Arendt, ‘The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition’, 288. Arendt, ‘The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition’, note 1, 297. CURTHOYS 9781782380078 PRINT.indd 212 03/04/2013 14:35