»Faith in the World« (eBook)

Post-Secular Readings of Hannah Arendt

Rafael Zawisza, Ludger Hagedorn (Herausgeber)

eBook Download: EPUB

2021 | 1. Auflage
251 Seiten
Campus Verlag
978-3-593-45092-6 (ISBN)

Infos

Dieses Buch greift ein zentrales, aber wenig beachtetes Thema im Werk Hannah Arendts auf: ihr ambivalentes Verhältnis zum jüdisch-christlichen Erbe. Schon in ihrer Dissertation über den Liebesbegriff bei Augustinus entwickelte sie die Hauptmomente ihrer Lesart. Arendts starkes Konzept der »Weltlichkeit« könnte gerade heute hilfreich sein für einen Ausgleich zwischen Säkularismus und dem offenkundigen Fortwirken religiöser Überzeugungen. Obschon Arendt sich erklärtermaßen als säkulare Denkerin verstand, öffnet ihr Werk Perspektiven einer neuen, vielleicht sogar messianischen Haltung zur Weltlichkeit und Endlichkeit des Lebens. In einer berühmten Formulierung der Vita activa charakterisiert sie diese mit den Worten »Vertrauen« und »Hoffnung«.

Rafael Zawisza, Dr. phil., gewann mit seiner Dissertation an der Universität Warschau den Majer Ba?aban-Preis 2020. Ludger Hagedorn, Dr. phil., ist Permanent Fellow am Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen (IWM) in Wien.

Autor

Rafael Zawisza, Dr. phil., gewann mit seiner Dissertation an der Universität Warschau den Majer Bałaban-Preis 2020. Ludger Hagedorn, Dr. phil., ist Permanent Fellow am Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen (IWM) in Wien.

Textauszug

Faith in the World or: The Philosophical Contraband of a Hidden Spiritual Tradition

An Introduction by Rafael Zawisza and Ludger Hagedorn

On the 7th day of Tevet, 5687, Gershom Scholem wrote, from Jerusalem, a letter addressed to Franz Rosenzweig, who at that time was already unable to speak. It was at the invitation of Martin Buber and Ernst Simon that Scholem composed this text, one among forty prepared by Rosenzweig’s friends. In Germany, it was the 26th of December, 1926, just one day after Christmas. Characteristically, Scholem wrote this letter about the »renaissance« of the Hebrew language… in German. It is a unique document that captures an extraordinary moment, when new inhabitants of Palestine—themselves speaking all the languages of the world, including Yiddish, Polish, Russian and German—prepared the first generation of young people who, not having any other common tongue, would speak only Hebrew, this reborn language in which they would have to live and love, laugh and swear. Scholem is aware of the cruelty inscribed in the fate of those newcomers: »a generation of transition,« doomed to »live within that language above an abyss.« He repeatedly writes to Rosenzweig about »our children,« although he never had any of his own—it is clearly the kind of voice that comes from a father of a nation, a patriarch who awaits his progeny with a gaze full of passion, hope and, above all, fear. Scholem noticed that the Hebrew spoken in the streets was often a »ghostly language« (gespenstische Sprache) that created an »expressionless linguistic space« (ausdruckslose Sprachwelt), a space he saw as arising from a secularization that he fiercely rejected: »the secularization of the language is no more than a manner of speaking, a ready-made expression. It is impossible to empty the words so bursting with meaning, unless one sacrifices the language itself.«

It was due to a justified fear for that crucial generation—who would have to live without tradition in an »abyss« (Abgrund) and »emptiness« (Leere)—that Scholem, in his letter, made such a powerful proclamation of faith in the autonomous life of names, stored in the holy language, always ready to erupt with revolutionary force. Scholem wanted to believe that when this hidden »force« of sacred language is evoked daily, even if unconsciously, that it does have unforeseeable consequences »[b]ecause at the heart of such a language, in which we ceaselessly evoke God in a thousand ways, thus calling Him back into the reality of our life, He cannot keep silent.«1

Just four years later, in 1930, Hannah Arendt co-authored with her then husband, Günther Stern, an essay dedicated to Rilke’s Duino Elegies, which also touched upon the topic of secularization. The authors observed that since Jewish and Christian religions were of an acoustic character—one has to listen to God—modernity brings a specific crisis whose final result is not a logical passage to atheism but rather a »religious ambiguity« (Arendt and Stern 2007, 3). The fact that God is no longer audible can be interpreted as God’s hiddenness or God’s non-existence. Our time is characterized by »the absence of an echo« (ibid., 1). In stark contrast to Scholem, who expected God to speak again through Hebrew, the twenty-four-year-old Arendt dismissed the idea that God could ever speak again. Secularization doesn’t lead to one particular destination that can be known in advance but, at the same time, it is a process that cannot be undone once it has happened. »The absence of an echo,« with its double negation, is the most salient metaphor for a God who has evaporated, or better yet, a God whom the various sonars of the Enlightenment revealed as »residing« beyond the boundaries of Creation. It is as if there was a very thick wall, impenetrable to any sound coming from outside the world.

Although she rarely recorded strictly personal views in her Denktagebuch (›thought journal‹), Arendt made the following entry in May of 1965:

Since I was seven years old, I have always thought of God [an Gott gedacht], but I have never really thought about God [über Gott]. I have often wished that I no longer had to go on living, but I have never posed the question of the meaning of life (Arendt 2016, II, 641).2

The enigmatic nature of these words notwithstanding, Arendt expresses here a characteristically Jewish response to a post-Christian modern nihilism, one which culminates in the thought that without God life has no meaning and that everything is permissible. From this point of view, nihilism and traditionalism are nothing but two sides of the same coin. Arendt’s question is not how to rebuild a religious worldview or how to restore the vision of nature (physis) as sacred—something which was exactly the goal of Leo Strauss’ philosophy. Instead, Arendt poses the question in this way: After the demise of metaphysics (closely connected to the Western concept of religious transcendence), must humanity necessarily conform to an absolutely secularized immanence? Hence, the central difficulty lies not in the disappearance of God but in a human nostalgia for the absolute. Hannah Arendt’s response to that was to rescue the world even while God seemed completely irretrievable.

Historical Panorama

Born in 1906, Hannah Arendt grew up into a Jewish secular family from Königsberg. Although her parents were non-religious, they allowed young Hannah to attend synagogue in the company of her maternal grandparents, who belonged to Reform Judaism (liberales Judentum). She mainly learned about Christianity at school and was impressed by stories about Jesus. Later, when she was a teenager, Arendt became a dedicated reader of Søren Kierkegaard, which can be seen as the initial signs of her interest in theology. In 1924, in Berlin, she attended the lectures of Romano Guardini, a Catholic theologian who only reinforced her passion for Kierkegaard. Arendt then studied philosophy and theology with Martin Heidegger and Rudolf Bultmann until she left Marburg for Freiburg in the spring of 1926 to study with Edmund Husserl. In Freiburg she met Karl Jaspers who would become the supervisor of her doctoral dissertation, which was defended in the autumn of 1928 and published in Berlin in 1929 under the title Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin: Versuch einer philosophischen Interpretation. Many themes from the dissertation migrated into her post-war oeuvre in different theoretical languages. In a 1964 televised interview, she told Günter Gaus that studying theology and philosophy »fit together in such a way that for me they both belonged together. I had some misgivings only as to how one deals with this if one is Jewish… how one proceeds. I had no idea, you know. I had difficult problems that were then resolved by themselves« (Arendt 2013, 15).

Although secularization wasn’t Arendt’s central topic in the 1930s, almost all of her writings from that period revolve around the concept of a godless world. In 1930, on the fifteen hundredth anniversary of Augustine’s death, she wrote a short article entitled »Augustin und der Protestantismus« in which she complained that the Protestant world was not adequately celebrating this important figure, unlike the Catholics, who, »[i]n calling him Saint Augustine, […] [have] confiscated him as their own« (Arendt 1994a, 24). Arendt called Catholicism »a distortion of original Christianity« (ibid., 27); by contrast, she saw Protestantism (similarly to Max Weber) as the vehicle through which Augustine’s most crucial anthropological »discovery«—inwardness—came to our times in the form of a deeply introspective and psychological type of Western man (Goethe, autobiographies, novels). This religious achievement, in the last stage of its metamorphosis, became »autonomous self-development« (ibid., 27).

In the same year, in her long review of Karl Mannheim’s Ideologie und Utopie (published in 1929 and entitled »Philosophie und Soziologie«), Arendt criticized the author’s Marxist approach and defended philosophy as irreducible to any...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 24.11.2021
• Co-Autor: Roger Berkowitz, Agata Bielik-Robson, Ludger Hagedorn, Milan Hanys, Martine Leibovici, James Josefson, Vivian Liska, Marci Shore, Christina Schües, Sigrid Weigel, Rafael Zawisza
• Verlagsort: Frankfurt am Main
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Philosophie der Neuzeit
• Schlagworte: Franz Rosenzweig • Fundamentalism • Fundamentalismus • Gershom Scholem • Glaube • Jewish Theology • Jewish Tradition • Judaism • Judentum • Jüdische Theologie • Jüdische Tradition • Laizismus • liberal democracy • Liberalismus • Martin Heidegger • Michael Walzer • Moderne • Modernity • Political Philosophy • Politische Philosophie • Religion • Säkularisierung • Säkularismus • Secularisation • Secularism • Theologie
• ISBN-10: 3-593-45092-5 / 3593450925
• ISBN-13: 978-3-593-45092-6 / 9783593450926