By Elizabeth Young-Bruehl [Hannah Arendt Center] – The first thing that I would like to say about Hannah Arendt is that she was not afraid; that her anxieties  simply did not go over into fear.  She lived through a time which was even more frightening than our own, but which was, also, like our own, defined by a combination of economic disaster –the Great Depression—followed by a prolonged political crisis in which some regimes went in the direction of a new form of government, totalitarianism, and some in the direction of trying to save their half-formed democracies and their political freedom. She thought and wrote as the division of the world into totalitarian regimes –chiefly in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union—on the one side and struggling democracies on the other, turned into the Second World War, a war novel in its extent and in the technologies used to carry it on, including technologies used in what Arendt called “factories of death.” But she did not become fearful, or write out of fear.

I think it is chiefly this that compelled attention to her writing then and again today and that marks its relevance for today. Her courage was certainly not based on failure to grasp what was frightening in the world during and after the Second World War. Indeed, her courage came from her deep understanding of that frightfulness and her ability to describe it as unprecedented. She grasped that there were factors and forces in the world that were unprecedented in their potentiality to be lethal, for the world and for all individuals.

Courage is a virtue that actualizes in a crisis,  that actualizes –or fails to actualize–when a person realizes that courage is called for, summoned by the state of the world. A courageous person is able to call  forth courage from within herself, from within her inner world, where, I think she must feel the courage of others, internalized  in herself by identification.  A courageous person must have, in herself, both the latent virtue and the inner company and companionship of courageous individuals. If she is lucky, she will have these companions as comrades in the present as well. To say the same thing in cultural terms: a person being courageous must have the virtue of courage ready and must have examples of courage in others to draw upon  as part of her culture, existing in her memory and in the legacy she has internally.  Otherwise, there is only fear in a frightening situation. There is only fright or flight.

How is courage manifest in thinking and writing?

Continued at the Hannah Arendt Center | More Chronicle & Notices.