Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 8 Number 3, December 2007
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Arendt, Hannah. Reflections on Literature and Culture. Edited with an introduction by Susannah Young-Ah Gottlieb. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007. ISBN: 978-0-8047-4499-7. $25.95 (pb).
Reviewed by
University of Winnipeg
The years leading up to 2006, the centennial year of Hannah Arendt’s birth, saw a lot of scholarly activity in the form of conferences, articles and book ventures, celebrating her legacy. Arguably what Arendt bestowed was an appreciation of the consequences of reflective thinking over against determinate thinking, and her great skepticism of overarching systems of thought. I.e. when you read Arendt on a topic you won’t necessarily know her conclusions before you’ve begun. That doesn’t mean that she isn’t consistent, she does “speak in agreement with herself,” and she takes seriously her engagement in thought and judgment. Not needing to focus on class-struggle, for instance, she was able to come to a much more clear and efficient understanding of totalitarian regimes like Hitler’s and Stalin’s than was possible for thinkers on both the left and the right. It also meant that she was able to suggest totalitarian elements and dangers to otherwise democratic societies without exaggeration. Likewise, undeterred by ideological or theological commitments she was able to perceive evil as a form of thoughtlessness.
She was Socratic in her outlook, but not Platonic. “The opposition of truth and opinion was certainly the most anti-Socratic conclusion Plato drew from Socrates’ trial.” (Arendt (2005), 8) She, like Socrates, revered opinion and the investigation of them. “In the Socratic understanding, the Delphic “know thyself” meant: only through knowing what appears to me – only to me, and therefore related to my own concrete existence – can I ever understand truth. Absolute truth, which would be the same for all men and therefore unrelated, independent of man’s existence, cannot exist for mortals. For mortals the important thing is to make doxa truthful, to see in every doxa truth and to speak in such a way that the truth of one’s opinion reveals itself to oneself and to others.” (Arendt (2005), 19)
Reading this collection of essays, lectures, reviews and pieces is a wonderful experience as one follows Hannah Arendt’s thinking on specific artists as well as on general themes. Culture for Arendt is that public space in which artifacts and objects nourish our relations to the world. Cultural objects are “a worldly-objective set of things” that are quite different from what is produced by the entertainment industry which “serve to pass the time as we say; but this means that they serve the life-process of society which consumes them in the same manner it consumes other objects of consumption.” (181). The role of the critic is central to her concerns. A passage in The Life of the Mind suggests an analogy in this way, “as a spectator you may understand the “truth” of what the spectacle is about; but the price you have to pay is withdrawal from participating in it. (…) The actor, being apart of the whole, must enact his part, not only is he a “part” by definition, he is bound to the particular that finds its ultimate meaning and the justification solely as a constituent of a whole. Hence withdrawal from direct involvement to a standpoint outside the game (the festival of life) is not only the condition for judging, for being the final arbiter in the ongoing competition, but also for understanding the meaning of the play.” (Arendt (1978), 94) This withdrawal, Arendt is careful to point out is not like the philosopher’s withdrawal from the world. Judgment withdraws from participation in order to contemplate “the world of appearances,” not from the world in order to contemplate eternal verities.
Arendt’s focus is on artistic thinking. Her assessment of the works and writers under her review tends to be contextual and often concerns the manner a work or a writer represents an era, whether in confluence or in reaction, and the extent to which they face reality as it is given to them.
For this reader there are five essays in the collection that are particularly edifying; “Berlin Salon” where Arendt describes the salon held by Rahel Varnhagen in the 1790s as an exemplar of cultural discourse in a transitional time, an opportunity that was destroyed by 1806; “The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition” in which, among other things, she gives a powerful analysis of Kafka’s The Castle, reading K as “the average small-time Jew who really wants no more than his rights as a human being: home, work, family and citizenships” (85); In “Culture and Politics,” she discusses how “A conflict between the political and the cultural can arise only because the activities (acting and producing) and the products of each (the deeds and the works of people) all have their place in public space” (187) and makes the distinction between the work of an artist and that of an artisan in this way, “Artistic objectification has its root in thought, just as the artisanal kind has its roots in use” (191); two essays on Bertolt Brecht, “Beyond Personal Frustration: The poetry of Bertolt Brecht” and “What Is Permitted to Jove…: Reflections on the Poet Bertolt Brecht and His Relation to Politics.”
The two essays on Brecht typify Arendt’s prowess as a critic. She shows multi-layered appreciation for Brecht’s artistry and a perceptive understanding of his anti-psychological approach. “Brecht escapes all temptations of mere psychology,” she says,” by realizing that it would be deadly, as well as ridiculous, to measure the flood of events in which he is caught up by the yardstick of individual aspirations (…) This anti-psychological insistence upon the events themselves is the chief reason for Brecht’s employing the poetic forms he does: the ballad (as contrasted with the lyric) in poetry, and the “epic theatre” (as contrasted with tragedy) in drama.” (137). Her respect for Brecht as a writer of masterpieces does not, however, mean that she is blind to his less successful or even terrible pieces. Her observation is that Brecht began to lie when he needed to put historical events into a frame of explanations that didn’t take the facts on the ground into account. Brecht “wrote the wooden prose dialogue in Fear and Misery of the Third Reich that anticipates later so-called poems, which are journalese divided into verse lines. By 1935 or 1936, Hitler had liquidated hunger and unemployment; hence, for Brecht schooled in the “classics,” there was no longer any pretext for not praising Hitler. In seeking one, he simply refused to recognize what was patent to everybody – that those persecuted were not workers but Jews, that it was race, and not class that counted. There was not a line in Marx, Engels, or Lenin that dealt with this (…). (250). This relationship between bad art and lying, or not facing the facts of life, and good art as an articulation of things as they are runs through the collection. Arendt’s mind is attuned to picking up false notes as well as perfect notes in her critiques and “listening” to this is both fascinating and satisfying.
Susannah Young-Ah Gottlieb has committed a fine work of scholarship with this collection. Her “Introduction” is erudite and it leads the reader into the texts with an appropriate amount of knowledge. Her notes to the texts are most helpful.
WORKS CITED
Hannah Arendt (1978), The Life of the Mind NY: Harcourt Inc, 1978
Hannah Arendt (2005) The Promise of Politics edited with and introduction by Jerome Kohn. NY: Schocken Books, 2005.