HANNAH ARENDT: FOR LOVE OF THE WORLD by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl Yale University; 563 pages; $25
Philosophy is concerned with two matters: soluble questions that are trivial, and crucial questions that are insoluble. Hannah Arendt always knew the difference; her critics sometimes did. In the disparity lay the tragedies and consolations of a career still sparking debate 19 years after the appearance of her most controversial book.
Rarely has a character been formed so early. In her vast, indulgent biography, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl records a note made by Frau Arendt in 1908, when Hannah was less than two: "Mostly she talks her own language which she enunciates very fluently. Understands everything." By Hannah's adolescence, that could no longer be considered a mother's exaggeration. She was far ahead of her class at Konigsberg, and at Marburg University she began a lifelong affair with philosophy, and a shorter, scarcely less passionate one with a philosopher.
The liaison prefigured the tension of a lifetime. Martin Heidegger, the great analyst of anxiety and a founder of existentialism, was an upright professor, 17 years older than his star pupil, trained as a Catholic, the father of two sons. Arendt was 18, freethinking, Jewish. These disparities were as nothing compared with the ones that followed. In the '30s, Arendt remained a Jew; Heidegger became a Nazi.
By that time, the intense, attractive scholar had fled the country. She left behind a series of frayed but unsevered connections: with Heidegger and with Germany. In Paris, and later in New York, she and her husband, Heinrich Blücher, lived as stateless persons, their brilliance appreciated only by a growing group of refugees. Blücher was never to regain his European status as orator and political activist. But he was merely a talent; his wife was a genius. Was America preoccupied by war? Never mind, she would observe and wait. Her time would come. Was English new and difficult? Very well, she would immerse herself in it. Her books would benefit. Heinrich made notes of new phrases: "Tickled to death"; "Hit the jackpot"; "Make a mess of it"; "Nifty chick!" Hannah made lists of concepts and categories.
Speaking in her new tongue, she cultivated influential writers: Robert Lowell, Alfred Kazin, Mary McCarthy, Randall Jarrell, W.H. Auden. Writing in a new manner, she searched out The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951. As Young-Bruehl observes, Arendt sustained throughout "500 dense, difficult pages a deep, agonized 'Ach!' before the deeds of infamy she analyzed." The book was an angry, detailed journey over Europe's pitchforked roads to "radical evil": imperialism, racism and antiSemitism.