This essay speaks of the political scientist and philosopher Hannah Arendt.
All quotes are from Elisabeth Young-Bruel’s wonderful biography of Arendt, For Love of the World.
And my method in writing on this difficult (at least to me!) subject are taken from Arendt’s own hard won sensibility about philosophy — that after two World Wars, so much of the theories and philosophies that were given such respect showed their own inability to reach the people, to prevent war, and so the question arose, what use were they?
For a Jew who was brought up in Germany and studied philosophy at the finest universities in Marburg and Heidelburg, and who after Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 spent years as a stateless person in Paris and the United States, her “ivory tower” learning left her with a far different view of the value of the learning of the past.
She stopped looking for either categories of thinkers or historical influences, thought genealogies, and she developed a method as informal as the title she gave it, “Perlenfischerei,” pearl fishing. The pearls that were full fathom five beneath the historical surface were the sea-changed, rich and strange jewels she sought.
I think we are at a similar time in history now, and I find Arendt’s words resonate with me.