Wu Jing
One
Hannah Arendt was born on October 14, 1906, to a Jewish family in the small town of Cohen, Hanover, Germany, an identity that constituted her destiny throughout her life. At the age of 3, when her father Paul contracted syphilis and her mother Marta moved her family to Königsberg, the hometown of the philosopher Immanuel Kant, the sensitive little Hannah soon realized the decay of her father's body, which undoubtedly cast a shadow over her young mind. At the age of 7, Hannah experienced the death of both her grandfather and father, a double whammy that darkened and calmed her mind, but fortunately her grandfather Marx bequeathed her gift of storytelling, an ability that was extremely important to her later life and writing, dating back to the famous critical report on the Eichmann Trials.
Hannah Arendt
The ten-year study in Königsberg was the first golden age of Hannah's life, and she was tired of the dullness of the school curriculum, immersed herself in Greek literature and philosophy all day long, interested in classical poetry, and her good linguistic talent allowed her to read Greek and Latin fluently. It is worth mentioning that Arendt began to read Kant's works at the age of 14, and Kant's ideas had a profound influence on Hannah's thinking about the relationship between politics and truth, politics and philosophy. Subsequently, the study of the existentialist pioneer Kierkegaard made her even more excited and trembling, and later her critique of Hegelianism, the abandonment of systematic, "objective" ideas, and the pursuit of "subjective" ideas in all the insertion processes all stem from this. Fate was destined to embark on a difficult philosophical adventure.
At the beginning of her brilliant personal career, Hannah seems to have a vague feeling that she must meet someone through whom she can completely change her destiny, which is exactly what she dreamed of. In 1924, as an adult, Arendt was shy and independent, modest and kind but a little arrogant, and his radiant eyes were filled with a full mental state and clear judgment, which was a rare beauty that combined appearance, intelligence, shyness, and maverickness. In his later years, the master of hermeneutics, Gadamer, said emotionally: "She is a striking girl who always appears on various occasions in green clothes." This was not only the most beautiful year of her life, but also the year in which she questioned existence and touched destiny.
The girl in green, like many of her peers at the time, inquired around which university was the best and which teacher was the most learned, and these young people who knew the roots of classical philosophy were very discerning, and they understood the essential difference between parrot-tongue imitation and genuine thought. It was then that a Jewish friend recommended to Hannah a young lecturer in Marburg, Martin Heidegger, who eloquently described the mesmerizing magic of Hayes's lectures that made her mind take its own place, and her eyes lit up. Finally, in the winter semester of the 1924-1925 school year, the young Arendt followed Heidegger to study in Marburg, and she chose The Wise Man and Feribe, which Heils offered, and made the two fields of philosophy and Greek linguistics her degree specialization. In a Plato "Wise Man" class shortly after the beginning of the school, the eyes of the two met by chance, and the message of love was exchanged in the autumn water, and the two geniuses were trembling in their hearts and would understand God.
Arendt and Heidegger: The Story of Love and Thought
More than 20 years later, Heidegger recalled in a letter that the mind in the class was magical, and he still had a feeling of excitement. In view of the special teacher-student relationship between the two, the spread of love is extremely careful, subtle and full of tension. It was not until February of the following year that the lightning-like love and passion finally broke through the cage of reason, and in a letter titled "The Approaching and Drifting Away of Love", Heidegger's words showed the pure lover relationship between the two. While Heidegger was immersed in the storm of love, Arendt felt growing fear and uneasiness, and then she sent him an article titled "Shadow" as a self-analysis of the practice of Hayes's thoughts, which climbed and twisted between direct emotion and hard thinking, and described the omnipresent fear in the third person "she":
An animal-like fear that always wants to hide herself, because she wants to protect herself and cannot protect herself, and in addition to the anticipation of weighing almost on the level of things in the original state of any life, the simplest things and the most natural things in life are becoming increasingly impossible for her.
It is not difficult to read that "Shadows" is an autobiographical document, Hannah tries to present the fear and uneasiness of a young woman who has nowhere to live and no place to settle when she first encounters love, a sense of oppression brought about by the huge tension between vulgar daily life and high-intensity new philosophical ideas. Hannah's uneasy words also implicitly confide in her solitude as a Jew: maverick self-awareness, self-knowledge of nowhere, and fear of being unable to protect herself. In the face of such a revealing heart, Heidegger gave her the necessary comfort and encouragement in his reply, and implied that the shadow and the discreet were some kind of representation of her personality maturity and self-release. Comfort to comfort, in order to truly achieve transformation, young Arendt still has to go alone, to explore and debug the inner trajectory.
Fortunately, she has such extraordinary potential, by the summer semester, Arendt has become very relaxed, and the relationship between the two has subtly evolved into a confidant, they exchange manuscripts, exchange poems, study Augustine, explore the secrets of love, meet at concerts... Perhaps this period was the happiest time in Arendt's life, and the abundance of love made her so obsessed and intoxicated. However, under the huge aura, the appearance of shadows is inevitable. For a young woman who has tasted love for the first time, love is all she has, and any sacrifice and abandonment for it is impossible to turn away, but for heidegger, a 36-year-old philosophy lecturer, once the philosophical luck is initiated, everything else disappears, and in order to find an oasis of "existence", it is necessary to trek like an ascetic in the desert, not to mention that he is about to usher in the peak of his career - he began to write "Existence and Time" that would later establish his worldwide reputation.
Heaven and earth are not kind, and fate is often absurd. When they discussed the topic of love, they believed that the secret of love lies in contact, whether physical or spiritual. However, after Heidegger plunged headlong into the world of thought, the obsessive happiness of his selfless work caused Arendt great pain. She came up with the subjective impression that Heidegger wanted to forget her, and in Heidegger's January 1926 letter, this impression seemed reinforced:
Yes, I forgot about you, this is not to say that you are dispensable, not that you are indifferent, not that there are external conditions that happened during this period, but because I can't help but forget you, I often work with all my strength, when I work with all my heart, I often forget everything...
As Heidegger immerses herself in the intense and intense writing of Being and Time, Arendt chooses to leave on that earthly April day, and she seems unable to bear the entanglement between attraction and alienation, between fervent symbiosis and cold separation, which makes her return to the shadows again. The more secret reason is that Hannah read a terrible image in his philosophy - Hays's abandonment of "ordinary people", thus outlining the image of a "lonely god" ordinary person, she realized that the love affair between the two was entangled with Hay's philosophical thoughts, was she just a worshipper and admirer of his great ideas? No! Hannah is acutely aware that she must maintain an independent personality, she does not want to completely disappear into the glare of Heidegger's thoughts, she needs to complete a dash and escape from fate.
In this way, Arendt fulfilled her resolve with action.
Two
Although Arendt's letters to Heidegger remain unaccounted for or have long since been burned in all correspondence during their love affair, an surviving letter two years later (1928) gives a glimpse into Arendt's tangled and painful inner world. Like an inner sonata, the theme of fear in "Shadows" resurfaced:
What I want to say to you now is nothing more than a very sober description of your inner situation. I love you, as I did, you know, this love has never gone away... If I lose my love for you, I lose the right to live with it, but if I avoid the mission that love has given me, I will lose that love. "If God has eyes, I'd better still love you in the afterlife."
The end is a quote from Elizabeth M. B. Browning's verse in his poem "How do I love thee" is read by the man who loves you, and "every word reads blood." She sees loneliness as the mission of their relationship, and the absolute estrangement brings them closer together. Perhaps Arendt has already seen the enchanted relationship between the two, and far away is both a prelude to death and a pathway to new life. Soon after, she decided to live with Gunter Stern, Benjamin's cousin and Heidegger's student, seemingly saying goodbye to her past life. However, for this relationship, Arendt only uses the words "home" and "destination" to describe it, and never uses the word "love". Yes, her "love soul" was permanently left in Marburg, dedicated to the man named Martin Heidegger, and all the escape could not change the doom of the soul being lost at once.
After the breakup, Arendt went to Heidelberg University to study philosophy under Jaspers, studying both classical linguistics and theology. In Yasch, Arendt qualified as a doctoral candidate and made "The Concept of Augustine Love—An Attempt at Philosophical Interpretation" the title of his doctoral dissertation. It is not difficult for those who have a heart to find that this is directly related to Arendt's use of Augustine as a witness to the love of that year. In this well-intentioned doctoral dissertation, she attempts to take a deep dive from Augustine's dual image as a post-classical thinker and an early priest to analyze how a person who is isolated from the world's mundane objects can still be interested in people, thus demonstrating the great significance of fraternity. It must be noted that Jaspers was another nobleman of Arendt and gradually developed into a close friend in her life. He admired Hannah's talent and helped her apply for a follow-up research grant, which was the starting point for are the future totalitarian research on which Arendt became known for his world-famous totalitarian studies.
Just as Arendt's career was beginning to dawn, new shadows began to strike her—she felt the world begin to shake, the continuation and spread of nationalist and racist agitation in the 1920s, and the succession of events that gave her the smell of disaster. Soon after, the polarizing voices of the streets seeped into the ivory tower, and Heidelberg University became a battlefield for political struggle. When she came to Berlin in the early 1930s for research and reporting, she was choked and suffocated by the ubiquitous smell of gunpowder. She was truly aware of the awkwardness of being a Jewish woman struggling to survive in the German-Jewish gap—the pain and contradiction that hovered between German existentialism and Zionism.
At the turn of 1932-1933, the swift transition of the Weimar Republic to the Nazi regime shocked the world. Fate once again knocked on Hannah's door to life, as the Zionist fighter Blumenfeld described: "February 28, 1933 ... All guarantees of civil liberties have been stripped away, and this day is the end of Jewish history." The choice to go into exile was not so much forced by Nazi tyranny and killing as the behavior of Hannah's many intellectual friends—the ugliness of completely abandoning her independent personality and intellectual dignity. She shouted angrily, "Never! I will never listen to any intellectual nonsense again! I don't want to have any connection with this society anymore. ”
In August 1933, Arendt and his mother Marta fled Germany, crossing a hidden path through dense woodlands in the mining area, passing through Prague, Genoa and Geneva with the help of a Czech fugitive rescue organization, and arriving in Paris to meet the early arrival of Stern. Although the two were married in 1929, due to many differences of opinion, Arendt and Stern were strangers in Berlin, and soon after arriving in Paris, the two separated, which heralded the end of this weak marriage. Despite the red light of her private life, Arendt was clearly more concerned with political life, and in the face of the collective degeneration of German intellectuals, she resolutely chose to switch from theory to action, one of the reasons was not to withdraw from the intellectual circle, but precisely to respond to the identity of intellectuals, and at the same time she wanted to use this action to explore her identity and self-perception as a Jew, in order to answer her own confusion over the years.
The so-called "great difficulty does not die, there will be a blessing." In 1936, the year of her founding, Arendt ushered in a double breakthrough in love and career, and she met the exiled intellectual Heinrich Blücher, and soon fell in love, whose kindness, wisdom, and high independence gave Hannah a sense of security that she had not realized but had longed for a long time. At the same time, Arendt frequented the major libraries of Paris and became acquainted with the most famous intellectuals of Europe at that time, including Alexander Kojève, Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, Arnold Zweig, etc., in various extensive and in-depth exchanges to discuss and argue their respective views, she was proud of her homelessness and statelessness, and she would only feel nostalgic when she freely communicated and understood with those who shared her ideas.
No matter how proud Hannah may be of being marginalized, the fact that Nazi anti-Semitism in Germany was escalating has come to her. In March 1938, Nazi Germany annexed Austria and a year later invaded the Czech Republic. On September 1, 1939, Germany blitzed Poland and World War II broke out. On 3 September, France declared war on Nazi Germany. In May 1940, the Germans invaded France, France was split in two, Blücher and Arendt were imprisoned in concentration camps, and the situation took a sharp turn for the worse. Soon, Arendt took part in a mass exodus from the concentration camp, and she and Brucher agreed to meet in the small city of Montague in the south of France, where they actually met in the chaotic streets of Montagnard. Subsequently, they will cross the Pirentian border into Spain, from where they will take a train to Lisbon. Arendt must not have imagined that after six years, she had once again experienced a terrifying escape, and what she did not expect was that she was about to leave Europe for a long time, the land where she had been deeply rooted...
Three
Most German exiles did not expect to find a new homeland, and the United States was the last refuge for them, an inevitable but temporary foothold, hoping that the Nazi demon would be ended soon and return to their homeland. In this way, Arendt and Blücher, after struggling to obtain a visa, sailed to the United States in May 1941 in Lisbon on the ship "S/S Guiné". After 12 days, they arrived in New York. For Hannah, America is another world of great novelty.
As Nazi anti-Semitic operations continued to expand and escalate, New York soon became an important city for expelled European intellectuals, and heavyweights in philosophy, literature, art, mathematics, physics, architecture, and even engineering and technology gathered here, and the course of history was quietly changing subtly. The new language, the dense flow of people, the noisy sounds, and the fast pace make Hannah feel both fresh and difficult. Generally speaking, exiled intellectuals have three possible ways of surviving in the United States: one is to completely abandon the original culture and position and completely break into a new field; the second is to retain the old traditional ideas as a whole, either seeking to merge with American ideas or hiding in their own ivory towers; and the third is to try to combine the new experience with the old traditions. For Arendt, she clearly prefers the latter two. But how it does depends on her ability to reconstruct her discourse in an unfamiliar culture. As it turns out, her genius lies in this.
Unlike the serious difficulties that Blücher encountered in learning English, Arendt completely threw herself into the world of English, coupled with her natural talent for language, her English skills improved rapidly, and the social skills developed over the years made her more successful on the vast social scene in New York. After a period of adaptation, she quickly blew a whirlwind in New York, meeting new people, visiting old friends, knocking on the doors of important Jewish organizations and entering the editorial boards of many magazines. What is particularly valuable is that Arendt gradually operated two important circles of friends in the early 1940s, the American circle of friends and the European circle of friends, and the collision of ideas and the ideological vitality stimulated by the two concepts, as well as the tension between European and American ideas, became the ideological resources for her subsequent decades of research.
Arendt's circle of friends
Just as Hannah was walking through a trajectory of life from a low point to a peak, her former teacher and lover Heidegger experienced a great ups and downs in her life and entered an unprecedented embarrassing situation - Heidegger, who tried to put his existential philosophy into practice, eventually went to the Nazis, became the president of the University of Freiburg, and cooperated with the Nazi instructions to carry out many reforms contrary to the spirit of the university, turning it into an ideological institution. Although he gradually found that his appointment was gradually drifting away from his original intentions, and resigned a year later, this absurd behavior became a stain that he could not erase in his life. After World War II, he confessed to his old friend Jaspers, who had been abandoned by him, that he had lost himself by getting caught up in the machines of power struggle and Nazi politics. Arendt later gave a sober and thorough interpretation of Heidegger's tragic act from the perspective of the times, arguing that the generation that experienced the defeat of World War I had different degrees of heart knots to shoulder their own mission. For Hayes, it was imperative to transform the power of philosophy into an act of emancipation, and although he boasted of great responsibility, he was completely blinded by totalitarian rule and imperialist tyranny, losing his healthy human rationality and the personality and dignity of intellectuals.
The Origins of Totalitarianism
In May 1945, Nazi Germany collapsed. At the end of June of the same year, the Committee for the Elimination of Nazis began the lengthy trial of heidegger's case. Just as Hayes was facing the difficult years of her life, Arendt on the other side of the ocean began writing the book "The Origins of Totalitarianism", which will later earn her a worldwide reputation. During the writing period, Arendt constantly retraced and applied the knowledge and methods she learned in Marburg and Heidelberg, the practical experience of various jobs in Berlin and Paris, the ideological resources that collided and stimulated in the circle of friends in Europe and the United States, the in-depth conversation with her close lover Brucher day and night, and her many exiles as a Jew. All her horror, anger, despair, and loneliness turned into a clear light of reason and speculation, illuminating the broad stage of twentieth-century political philosophy and deeply influencing the post-war generation. Arun breathed a long sigh of relief at the birth of long-accumulated thoughts, but there was still a hidden knot in her soul, and there was a person who always made her unforgettable, and she was about to relive this great love.
In 1949, after 12 years of denial of citizenship, Arendt returned to Germany, a land she had vowed never to return to. She not only traveled all over Germany, but also visited her mentor Jaspers in Basel, Switzerland. However, a more secret purpose of the trip was her attempt to visit Heidegger in Freiburg. In fact, even for a while after coming to Germany, she was torn between whether or not to go to Freiburg im Breisgau. After some internal struggle, she still chose to take the initiative. Upon arrival, she first met her university classmate and friend Hugo Friedrich, and obtained Heidegger's contact details in Freiburg from elsewhere. She then sent a letter to Heidegger from the hotel where freiburg was staying, using it to begin the reunion after a long absence.
On February 7, 1950, when Martin and Hannah looked at each other in the lobby of a hotel in Freiburg, it must have been a shocking moment. After 17 years of separation, the two must have mixed feelings in their hearts. Yes, exactly seventeen years, this happens to be the age gap between the two, is this predestined by God? She accepted Martin's invitation, and the two drove to Zerlingen that night, spending the night at the latter's home. It was a long, knee-jerking conversation that impressed Hannah, about the enmity between Heidegger and Jaspers, Hays' 1933 loss and retreat, Hannah's emotions and exile... As soon as the floodgates of memory are opened, they rush out in a mighty way. Hannah's arrival made Heidegger overjoyed and ashamed. In any case, the two great lovers of the past are reunited.
Two days later, Hannah, who had experienced a reunion, wrote a letter to Martin in a somewhat dramatic way of dealing with their relationship, a sense of inner division that was mixed with old feelings, doubtful anger, relief, and lingering sadness. Like a ruin covered with broken bricks and tiles, in the remnants of the sunset, it leaves a silhouette of the chaos of time:
This night and this morning light witnessed the whole life. A testimony that was never expected in the first place. When the waiter says your name... It was as if time had suddenly frozen. Ever since Hugo Friedrich told me your address, I have carefully protected this providence, and the acceleration of my heartbeat has made me aware of not acknowledging my feelings for you, which is my only truly unforgivable dishonesty, and the acceleration of my heartbeat has also told me that this is the fulfillment of my life.
After this brief reunion, the correspondence between the two became more frequent again, Martin's spirit was rekindled, and poetry and letters continued to fly across the ocean. Hannah also felt at ease after regaining her relationship, and with the publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism, she rose to fame and joined the East Coast intellectual elite. Having taught at Princeton University in the 1950s, the University of Notre Dame, and the University of California, Berkeley, and was a frequent guest on radio academic and political programs, Hannah Arendt has become a prominent public intellectual.
Four
By the 1960s, for many, the haze of war and massacres had dissipated. But for Arendt, whose work is far from over, and whose study of totalitarianism and the evils of human nature is far from over, she is about to participate in and listen to an unusual trial about which critical reports may have become her most famous remarks in her later years. As a public intellectual with a conscience and a responsibility, Arendt once again marched to the center of world public opinion, and as usual, she also drew herself into the center of the storm.
In October 1960, Arendt informed her mentor Jaspers that she would travel to Jerusalem for the Eichmann Trial. Previously, she had asked the famous New Yorker magazine to offer to report on the trial of this case, and the editorial board immediately accepted it. The infamous Eichmann was the organizer of the second level of mass murder of European Jews, and in 1941 he was instructed by rhinehard Heydrich, head of the SS intelligence department, to carry out the "final plan" aimed at the total elimination of Jews. Under his supervision, the slaughter line at Auschwitz set a daunting record: 12,000 people were killed every day, and by the end of World War II, a total of 5.8 million Jews had been killed!
In April 1961, the case began to be tried, in order to follow up the trial process, Arendt traveled to Jerusalem many times, she read thousands of pages of secret agent surveillance records and police interrogation records, talked with the Israeli Prime Minister, foreign minister, minister of justice and the president of the Supreme Court, also communicated with witnesses and observers, listened to their opinions, and even visited the trial site, listened carefully to the opinions of all parties, and tried to form their own independent judgment. As he talked, listened, and pondered, Arendt realized that the trial of the case was strongly mixed with political will and legal certification, and could not be a trial in a purely legal sense, as a young country of Israel, which was only 14 years old, the trial of Eichmann had a multifaceted political appeal: to show the prestige of the great power by deliberately rendering the Eichmann trial, to help the Jewish nation completely get out of the role of the persecuted, and to use it to eliminate the rift between Israeli Jews and European Jews. As the Israeli Prime Minister soberly concluded, sitting in the dock and being tried is anti-Semitism that runs throughout history. It was at this point that the curtain was lifted on Arendt's controversy and criticism.
Two years later, Arendt sent back five reports on the trial to The New Yorker magazine, and the editorial board published it under the title "Comprehensive Report: The Eichmann Trial in Jerusalem," in which she criticized the absurdity of the trial in a consistently sharp style—playing a symbolic political role beyond the scope of the law, and portrayed Eichmann in all directions, especially the scale and organization of the Massacre, which contrasted sharply with the shallow vulgarity of Eichmann himself. To her utter astonishment, the thoughtless, unimaginative, and utterly poorly linguistic "implementer of the plan" did not consider herself guilty at all, claiming to have come together "fatefully" with the authoritarian regime just to make a living, and that she was merely carrying out orders, and this insensitivity without any ideological capacity stunned Arendt, from which she proposed the famous concept of "banality of evil"—a kind of "thoughtlessness" and "thoughtlessness" and "" Disoriented," an anti-human evil deeply rooted in human nature for morality, insubordination, evasion, and distortion, he simply obeyed the instructions of nazi superiors like a machine, without any judgment.
"Eichmann in Jerusalem"
Therefore, Eichmann's crime was not anti-Semitism, but against humanity. As soon as these words came out, the entire Jewish society exploded, and the criticism of Arendt was huge, and the emotional critics denounced Arendt as a Jew for interpreting such a heinous crime as a kind of mediocre innocence, denouncing it as an indulgence of demons and a blasphemy against history. Even a year later, this critique and controversy is still in full swing, including personal attacks on Arendt and even betrayals of friendships, and although she has long been accustomed to such things, the experience is far more intense and time-spanning than ever before, and her correspondence with Jaspers and the writer's girlfriend Mary McCarthy shows the hurt and pressure that Arendt suffered in this controversy.
The controversies caused by the book, in addition to the damage to her and the collapse of many friendships, also had a profound impact on her subsequent writing: in her subsequent academic career, Eichmann became a typical example of the enemy of anti-humanity in her mind, a lens through which she observed any problem. In her last unfinished work, The Life of the Mind, she still clings to the "evil of mediocrity" typical of the character of Adolf Eichmann, and uses this perspective to compare the basic activities of the human spirit—thinking, willing, judging—with the ideology of "the evil of mediocrity" to complete the philosophical shift from "active life" to "contemplative life" in her later years. This shift is not about abandoning politics, but rather that she will continue to explore the spiritual dimension of politics — the big question of "How Politically Thinking."
According to Arendt, thinking is oriented toward the past, all thought is an afterthought, it is an activity carried out in a lonely state after the individual has withdrawn from the world. Thinking does not create value, and there are no boundaries, and the result is the acquisition of meaning, which prompts the conscience to discover and prepare for the distinction between good and evil; the will is oriented to the future, concerned with what "I" intend to do, the willful individual lives for the future, it also makes action possible; judgment is oriented to the present, it is to distinguish between good and evil, right and wrong, or beauty and ugliness, and it is the process by which the individual seeks the approval of others. Similar to the emphasis on action in Active Life, judgment becomes the focus of her exposition in this book, which is a political spiritual activity, while judgment is a specific political ability, a judgment that appeals to others, and is closely related to imagination, which is obviously influenced by Kant's ideas in aesthetic judgment. But while Arendt emphasized the importance of judgment as a specific political capacity, she was equally concerned with the connection between thinking, will, and judgment. None of the three faculties should dominate the other two, each of which is indispensable, and a good state of mind should be a harmonious coexistence of the three. From this, she constructed the framework of the "Republic of Spiritual Order".
Unfortunately, Arendt was unable to complete this last tome in her lifetime, and her sudden departure while writing the chapter of "judgment" that she valued most was a great regret for her personal and for the cause of political philosophy. However, the final gift of her life, the rebuilding and sublimation of her relationship with Martin, gave Hannah the greatest comfort in her later years, perhaps the purest and most peaceful, joyful and comforting time of her life.
Five
In 1960, a german translation of Arendt's other important book, The Human Condition, was published, and she changed the title to Vita activa or On Active Life, a meaningful change that meant monks living a self-sufficient and secluded life, doing everything themselves and living in action, which was undoubtedly in line with Heidegger's life of seclusion. Moreover, the book runs through her argument with Heidegger, and Arendt once wanted to dedicate the title to Hayes. However, after several hesitations, Arendt finally abandoned the decision, much to Heidegger's annoyance (because he had been informed of the dedication in advance), and the exchange of letters between them was interrupted. In any case, Arendt never got rid of that love, and a short essay found later when she was collating her legacy confirmed this inner struggle:
Returning to Active Living, the title of this book has been left blank. How should I dedicate it to you, a lover who is intimate and confidant, to me, both loyal and unfaithful, loyalty and unfaithfulness are the providence of love.
One autumn six years later, Heidegger took the initiative to impress the silence— on her sixtieth birthday, he wrote her an "autumn letter" to express his birthday greetings. In the letter, Martin fondly recalls the encounter between the two in Plato's wise men class, and the long river of love that began therein, and also talks about his three trips to Greece, and he marvels that greece after a thousand years still has the living existence of the ancient Greek spirit. At the end of the letter, he attached the poem "Autumn Day" by the poet Hölderlin, whom he had loved all his life, and a live-action postcard overlooking the huts of Tottenauburg. After receiving the letter, Arendt was overjoyed, and she confessed to him in her reply: Over the years, she often recalled their encounter in the Wise Man chapter and the soul-destroying moments of the eye meeting, and this letter would accompany her for a long time. Finally, in the twilight of life, this pair of genius men and women who have experienced great changes in life and vicissitudes of the world have returned to sincerity and trust, and realized the sublimation of early love.
Poster for the movie Hannah Arendt
In the years that followed, they met each other every year, and their friendship deepened in arguments and contemplation—expressing concern for each other in correspondence, asking each other about their work and personal situations, and Hannah's book Spiritual Life undoubtedly drew on the spark of ideas exchanged with him. In 1969, to celebrate Heidegger's eightieth birthday, she wrote an article congratulating him, both praising his achievements and analyzing him from her own point of view, both fit him and keep him different, approaching him and keeping distance from him. The theme of fit and difference, closer and farther seems to be some kind of echo of Hayes's early letter titled "The Approach and Drifting Away of Love", and Heidegger responded in his reply:
You are stronger than anyone else in the inner movement of my thoughts and teaching achievements, and this inner movement has been consistent since the course of the Wise Man.
As time passed, the two men's hearts became closer. Their correspondence in their last years read like a flood that broke the dike, allowing each other's trust to flow in essays. In November 1970, When Brücher died of a sudden myocardial infarction, Hannah was so sad that she realized that part of the world had left her. Martin's letter of relief to her was touching, and he deliberately understood the last two words of Hannah's letter" as "there is no ripple in my heart, I was thinking: let's go" as "road", diverting her attention from the illusion of misreading, leading her from the painful experience of losing a loved one to a path. In March of the following year, Hannah finally came out of the shadow of pain, and she wrote to him about her inner wish: Can I dedicate the title of "Spiritual Life" to him? Obviously, this inquiry is more like a confirmation – are you still here? Can I still rely on you? When she saw the affirmative tone of Martin's reply, the stone in her heart finally landed.
When Hannah returned to Europe for the last time in the summer of 1975, her mentor Jaspers had died in the spring of six years earlier. She spent several weeks in the Archives of Marbach, sifting through the documents left behind by Yahweh, including correspondence between the two men. In August, she visited Heidegger again in Freiburg. However, she found that the 86-year-old was really tired, and this had never happened before, and he was like an oil lamp that was about to go out, and a faint mournfulness swept through her heart.
On December 4, 1975, Hannah Arendt died of a heart attack in New York at the age of 69. Six months later, Martin Heidegger died at the age of 87 at his home in Freiburg-Zerlingen. Love has become a memory, love can wait for the next life, and thought has spread in this life, spreading far and wide.
Hannah Arendt, who hastily closed the curtain, has left an immortal legend of love and thought for the world.
Editor-in-Charge: Zang Jixian
Proofreader: Yan Zhang