Tragedy & genius: Hannah Arendt & Phillis Wheatley in dialogue

Also, come see me in DC today! Some recent book coverage, the museum of failure, and a giveaway!

Gracious reader,

In case you’re new here, I wanted to take a moment and share with you what Civic Renaissance is, and why I’m thrilled you’ve chosen to be here.

I am passionate about the way that storytelling and ideas can change people’s lives. I love looking to the wisdom of the past to help us lead better lives in the present. CR revives stories of people forgotten and familiar to show us how beauty, goodness and truth can enable richer, more grace-filled lives today.

Today is a “this day in history,” post which I’m fond of. It also revives the life stories of two lesser known women in history, and puts them in dialogue to help us glean wisdom for our own lives.

Thank you for being here—and write to me with what you think about today’s post! I can be reached at ah@alexandraohudson.com

This week, we’ll explore:

• Lessons from the lives and work of two women who are central to The Great Conversation:

  • Hannah Arendt, a Jewish German-American philosopher and journalist ( and refugee from Hitler’s Third Reich and Holocaust survivor), who was born in 1906 and died 46 years ago yesterday, on December 4th, 1975

  • Phillis Wheatley, a poet, a slave, and the first African American to be a published author, born in 1753 and died 237 years ago today, on December 5th, 1784

• Come see me at the Cato Institute in D.C. today!

• For your reading pleasure: The Museum of Failure

Hannah Arendt and Phillis Wheatley: Lessons on tragedy and genius from two women central to The Great Conversation

Hannah Arendt & Phillis Wheatley were separated by an ocean and two centuries. But they shared many similarities. They died centuries apart, and yet only one day apart: Arendt on this day, Dec 4th, 1975 and Wheatley Dec 5th, 1784.

They were both women born in times where women were not seen as full equals to men—Wheatley in the 18th century, Arendt in early 20th century. And they were both from ethnic and racial groups that were in their eras seen as something short of fully human—Arendt was Jewish, Wheatley was of African descent.

They also both endured profound suffering and discrimination. Wheatley was ripped from her home and family, brought from West Africa to America when she was only nine years old and sold into a life of bondage. Arendt was Jewish in an increasingly anti-Semitic era in Europe and Germany in particular, and she spent time in a Nazi detention camp before coming to America as a refugee.

Yet both women found a way to create beautiful, ingenious work from the deep suffering and tragedy they endured. For Wheatley it was poetry about her life as a slave, and how she had found hope and joy despite the injustices she endured. For Arendt it was reporting and social commentary investigating the evils and loss that she experienced and witnessed throughout her life.

Their lives and legacies help us explore the the relationship between tragedy and genius.

Phillis Wheatley on finding beauty in tragedy

Phillis Wheatley was born in West Africa—some think in what is modern-day Gambia—on May 8th, 1753. At the young age of seven or eight, she was ripped from her family and homeland, and brought to America to be a slave.

Nineteenth century portrait of Phillis Wheatley featured in the Parisian journal, Revue des Colonies.

She was transported on a boat called the “Phillis,” and was sold to John Wheatley, the head of a wealthy merchant family in Boston. She took her name from this slave ship and these slave owners: Her freedom and her entire identity were thus destroyed. Even her name reflected her fate as a slave.

For reasons that remain unclear, the Wheatley family chose to educate Phillis. Her education was spearheaded by the Wheatley children: They taught her English, which she mastered in eighteen months after her arrival to America, and then proceeded to teach her Greek and Latin, as well as classic books. The Wheatleys recognized her intellectual gifts and gave her opportunities to cultivate them—extraordinary in an era where it was wrongly but widely believed that dark-skinned people lacked the cognitive abilities of light-skinned people. Indeed, Phillis’s education was remarkable for a woman of any class or race.

She surprised everyone around her with her giftedness with language—she was fluent in Greek and Latin by the age of twelve—and English in particular. She was intimately familiar with the classics that constitute The Great Conversation, and particularly loved Homer, Horace, Virgil, Milton, and Pope.

Her poetry was so beautiful and impressive that her owner, John Wheatley, as well as an assortment of some of the most powerful men in Massachusetts—including the Governor, John Hancock, and many others—wrote an affidavit to a book publisher on her behalf, testifying that the poems were in fact Phillis’s own work and imploring the publisher to publish her poems.

Phillis’s poetry ultimately found a publisher, and today you can read the book (as well as the affidavit and John Wheatley’s personal note to the publisher).

In October 1775, amid the American Revolutionary War, Phillis wrote a letter to George Washington, encouraging his efforts for the American cause and commending the loyalty he inspired as well as his well-known character and virtue. She also wrote Washington a poem, which you can read here, that she enclosed in the letter. The poem lauds the American revolutionary cause and praises Washington in particular, especially in these passages:

Thee, first in place and honours,—we demand

The grace and glory of thy martial band.

Fam’d for thy valour, for thy virtues more,

Hear every tongue thy guardian aid implore!

…

Proceed, great chief, with virtue on thy side,

Thy ev’ry action let the goddess guide.

A crown, a mansion, and a throne that shine,

With gold unfading, Washington! be thine.

Washington responded in February 1776, praising her poem and thanking her for her gracious words. He declined her request to publish her work only because—eternally modest—he thought himself undeserving of “such encomium and panegyrick.”

He invited her to visit him, but to our knowledge, Phillis never availed herself of the invitation. Washington ended his letter: “If you should ever come to Cambridge, or near Head Quarters, I shall be happy to see a person so favoured by the Muses, and to whom Nature has been so liberal and beneficent in her dispensations.”

After her book of poetry was published, when Phillis was 20 years old, the Wheatley’s emancipated her. Yet she died a tragically early death—still relatively unknown in her day—at the age of 31—237 years ago today, on December 5th, 1784.

I encourage everyone to enjoy her book of poetry, called Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (again, freely available here). One of the most famous poems in that collection is called Being Brought from Africa to America, and I’ve reproduced it here in its entirety. The poem reflects how Phillis used the power of personal narrative and art to re-frame and redeem an atrocious injustice in her life—being taken from her family and sold into slavery. She transformed her story of pain and sadness into a narrative that she owned. Instead of being a point of shame, it became a strength. The full poem is below:

'Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land,

Taught my benighted soul to understand

That there's a God, that there's a Saviour too:

Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.

Some view our sable race with scornful eye,

“Their colour is a diabolic die.”

Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain,

May be refin'd, and join th' angelic train.

Despite the fact that she was violently taken from her homeland, she remarkably calls it a “mercy.” This is rather incredible. How could she say this? She explained that it is only because of her being sold into slavery that she found God and her faith in Jesus Christ—a faith that was incredibly important to her throughout her life. But while she found inner peace notwithstanding the horrible injustice done to her, Phillis doesn’t let those complicit in injustice—past or present—off the hook. She continues,

Some view our sable race with scornful eye,

“Their colour is a diabolic die.”

Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain,

May be refin'd, and join th' angelic train.

Some people, she is saying, can’t see past the color of her skin to see their shared humanity. Thomas Jefferson, interestingly enough, was one of the many contemporaries who discredited her work, questioning her authorship of her poetry and work. But she reminds them that even people with different color skin can be “refined” and “join th’ angelic train.”

Some readers of Wheatley think that in this poem she is being ironic, sarcastic, and satirical.

If one didn’t know the rest of her biography—for example, the fact that she was incredibly devout and wrote many poems praising George Whitefield in particular and America’s Great awakening more generally—this might be a reasonable view.

But in light of this background, I’m compelled to disagree.

I read her work—and this poem in particular—as a powerful example of self-construction. To me, she seems completely candid and earnest here—both in her view of the consequences of her enslavement as well as in her pointed criticism of her enslavers, who are too quick to dismiss the humanity of African-Americans.

In a recent exchange with my friend and mentor Dana Gioia—poet laureate of California and one of the most esteemed poets in America today—he agreed that Phillis is being sincere here: He noted that Wheatley spent her energy on being clear, not on creating layers of ambiguity for post-modern critics to plumb.

It’s powerful to see how she used storytelling to create a narrative of her life that empowered her, and didn’t place her as a victim—that allowed her to criticize an unjust system from a position from which people who were a part of that injustice might actually listen.

Phillis Wheatley created beauty out of tragedy. Though she has been overlooked by many attempts to define “the canon” of great authors, she deserves to be read: Her work is ennobling and offers us insight into the human experience, into the greatness and misery of the human condition. In my opinion, that is what The Great Conversation—and the humanistic project of education in general—is all about.

Do you agree? Disagree?

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this, as I’m exploring this question—to which books, creators and authors and works of art should we devote our attention?—in my second book on the what, why, and how of the intellectual life outside the classroom. Please do write!

Hannah Arendt on the Human Condition

Hannah Arendt was born on October 14, 1906, near Hanover in Northern Germany. She was born into a secular Jewish family, and had an early and lifelong passion for the classics—that is, the study of Ancient Greek and Roman language, literature, ideas, and culture.

Mural of Hannah Arendt in Hanover.

[Note: there are two films about Arendt—one from 2012, and one from 2015—that I haven’t yet seen. The one from 2015 is a documentary, called Vita Activa: The Spirit of Hannah Arendt, and can be rented on many platforms, including Amazon Video. Unfortunately, though, I cannot seem to find the 2012 biopic, called Hannah Arendt, available anywhere to buy or rent; if you find it available somewhere, please do let me know!]

Arendt studied philosophy and theology at the University of Marburg. There, she met and began an affair with philosopher Martin Heidegger, widely thought to be among the most brilliant thinkers of the 20th century. Arendt ultimately had a falling out with Heidegger because of his decision to join the Nazi Party—a decision he never renounced, not even at his death in 1976. (Interestingly enough, another of Heidegger’s famous students—German philosopher Jürgen Habermas—was also deeply disillusioned by his professor’s unabashed Nazi sentiments.) Some scholars think that Arendt left the University of Marburg for University of Heidelberg because of this falling out. In any case, she went on to earn her doctorate at Heidelberg in 1929 on the topic of Love and Saint Augustine, studying under existentialist philosopher and psychiatrist Karl Jaspers.

1920s Germany was a rising tide of anti-semitism. World War I had ended in 1919 with the Treaty of Versailles, which required Germany to pay the equivalent of $33 billion—an impossibly high sum—in reparations to other countries. Germany also lost 10% of its land, was barred from having a military, and subjected to many other punitive measures. The result was low morale and deep bitterness among the German people—as well as widespread economic instability and inflation.

Almost immediately after the Treaty of Versailles had been signed, a conspiracy theory began to gain popularity: The Jewish people were responsible for negotiating the Treaty’s unfavorable terms, all in an attempt to undermine and control Germany and its people.

Enter Aldolph Hitler, one of many people who capitalized on the anti-semitic sentiments of the day. His Beer Hall Putsch, a failed coup d'état led by his Nazi Party—took place in 1923, just four years after the signing of the Treaty of Versailles (Hitler wrote and published his virulently anti-Semitic Mein Kampf in 1925 while in prison for the coup attempt).

Hitler ultimately came to power in 1933, and Arendt was arrested and imprisoned as part of his anti-Semitic campaign. She was eventually released, however, and she fled to Switzerland and France, where she remained until the Nazi invasion in 1940. Arendt managed to escape the Nazis once again and obtained refuge in America in 1941. She spent the remainder of her life based in New York, reflecting on the nature of totalitarian rule, which she had spent nearly a decade of her life evading.

The Origins of Totalitarianism

Among Arendt’s most famous works is The Origins of Totalitarianism. Published in 1951, it explores the rise of Nazism and Stalinism.

Totalitarian arises, Arendt says, in social contexts of extreme personal loneliness, isolation, and atomization. When our social bonds are weakened, when our meaning is misplaced, we become primed to embrace ideologies and public figures that help us forget our loneliness and that help give our lies meaning. A strongman arises to meet those needs; he offers a story that explains people’s unhappiness, and conversation, dialogue, and discourse shut down. Arendt coined the phrase “the rule from within” to explain how totalitarianism colonizes peoples minds, and renders them unable to think their own thoughts outside of a “party line.” In light of the crisis of loneliness and meaning in our own day, this a concerning insight.

In addition to isolation and ideology, Arendt also considers the concept of terror as a contributing factor to the rise of totalitarianism. Totalitarian terror takes away a person’s name, rights, and identity; it reduces a person to their body alone. Once a human being is no longer a human being, but just a body, they are more easily rendered disposable and superfluous.

Arendt also offers an explanation of why totalitarian regimes become so bureaucratic, and why critical or creative thinking is a threat to both bureaucracy and the regime. It starts in minor, creeping ways, but bureaucracies can lead the way for authoritarian regimes to gain power. And once in power, the regime’s aim is total control over the human mind, body and spirit. Arendt writes,

Intellectual, spiritual, and artistic initiative is as dangerous to totalitarianism as the gangster initiative of the mob, and both are more dangerous than mere political opposition. The consistent persecution of every higher form of intellectual activity by the new mass leaders springs from more than their natural resentment against everything they cannot understand. Total domination does not allow for free initiative in any field of life, for any activity that is not entirely predictable. Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.

The opposite of a society that promotes human liberty and free inquiry is a society where the individual’s mind is no longer capable of independent thought. It is one where facts and reality are contradicted by the “party line,” and where one must choose to exchange reason for loyalty.

Central to Arendt’s thinking throughout her work, including Origins, is personhood and human dignity. For example, in Origins she discusses how totalitarian regimes function by stripping certain people in society of their dignity and personhood. Once they are able to do this, it becomes “okay” in the public consciousness to strip people of basic rights, to persecute them, to even murder them en masse.

The vita activa and the vita contemplativa

For Arendt, the best buttress against totalitarianism was the individual, localized activity of every citizen. She thought that public life is for everyone, and that each citizen has a duty to protect human dignity and to fight against the gross injustices perpetrated by totalitarian regimes.

On this theme, in The Human Condition Arendt introduces a dichotomy of human life: the vita active, or the active life, and the vita contemplativa, or the contemplative life. Socrates was the model that Arendt had in mind when writing this book, and when considering how best to protect against the injustices of totalitarianism. Arendt thought that Socrates was the last citizen-philosopher, someone who successfully blended the life of the mind with his public duties; he did so by engaging his fellow citizens in pluralistic dialogue and debate—an essential safeguard against hegemony.

She thought that Plato was wrong to advocate focusing on the world of ideas alone, because that left a vacancy in public life that could be too easily filled by bad actors who fail to seek the public good.

Notably, Arendt argues that neither the contemplative life nor the active life is better than the other. Both are part of what it means to be human. And here she is in good company. Across history, philosophers and theologians have reflected on the relationship between the mind and the body, which have different needs and possibilities. Our bodies have physical needs—food, shelter, community. Our minds have intellectual needs—nourishment, stimulation, cultivation. Arendt reminds us that to be fully human and to lead meaningful lives, we must pursue two vocations. We must pursue a vocation that allows us to provide for the physical needs of ourselves and our loved ones. And at the same time we must pursue a vocation that meets our intellectual needs, and feeds and nourishes our minds. Too often, we focus on one over the other. But both are essential to being human.

Arendt also strongly believed in the importance of storytelling to being human. During her lifetime, she was referred to as a “philosopher,” a “writer,” and a “journalist,” but she frequently evaded questions about what discipline she fit into by calling herself a “storyteller.” She thought that storytelling helps us understand who we are as human beings, and she believed that examining the stories we tells ourselves—and that people in other times and places have told themselves—reveals important insights into our shared fate and promise as human beings. In The Human Condition, Arendt says that in “the great storybook of mankind,” we are each the authors of our own stories. This can be a vulnerable thing, since we do not know how our stories will end or be received in the future; but, Arendt says, we must boldly take this chance all the same, and tell our stories to lead fully enriched lives.

The Banality of Evil

In 1960, Adolph Eichmann, one of the masterminds behind the Holocaust, was arrested by the Israeli Secret Service and tried in Israel for crimes against humanity. The New Yorker sent Arendt to report on the proceedings. While there, what she observed at his trial led her to coin the term “banality of evil.”

Arendt was lambasted by many of her contemporaries, including fellow Jewish people. They claimed that she was calling the Holocaust “banal,” thereby diminishing it. Yet that could not be further from the truth. In her Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Arendt argues that evil comes in many forms. Sometimes it is grand and bloody; other times, it is mundane, or banal, in its triviality.

Those that stamped paperwork that sentenced Jewish people—as well as ethnic minorities, people with disabilities, same-sex attracted individuals, political dissidents, and countless others—to starvation, torture, and death in concentration camps didn’t have to look those they condemned in the eye as their helpless victims were murdered. The people behind these grievous injustices were disconnected and detached from the ultimate evil act, which made their evils easier to commit. Yet most of us recognize now that these people were just as culpable as those who, also following the orders of the “system,” pulled the metaphorical—or, as was often the case, literal—trigger themselves.

Arendt is a profoundly sophisticated thinker, well-deserving of a place in The Great Conversation and our reading lists. She reminds us of duty and ability we each have to promote justice, and fight against evil, in our everyday lives. And her encouragement to find a balance between the contemplative and active life is an idea that is central to the project of Civic Renaissance.

Like Arendt, I also believe that ideas, beauty, goodness, truth, and the wisdom of the past should nourish our hearts and minds—and that such things should compel us to action, propel us to make the world around us, and the lives of others, better.

We owe a debt of gratitude to both Phillis Wheatley and Hannah Arendt for helping us think more clearly about the challenges of our era and of every era; for describing the greatness and the wretchedness of the human condition; and for inspiring us to be part of the solution in small ways, close to home, and in our everyday.

I welcome your thoughts on these amazing figures: Write to me at ah@alexandraohudson.com with any feedback or reflections!

Join me in DC Today!

Today, I fly to D.C. for a discussion on The Soul of Civility at the Invitation of The Cato Institute and Cato’s civil discourse project, Sphere.

I’d love to see you there at 12pm E.T.

Book news

The book coverage continues apace! A selection of recent items you may enjoy…

• Please enjoy these new review of The Soul of Civility in National Review.

• As well as this long form radio interview with Utah Public Radio.

• And this interview on hospitality in Homer’s Odyssey and the hidden relationship between civility and hospitality in my conversation with Spencer Klaven on the Young Heretics podcast.

• Interview with Jonah Goldberg on The Remnant podcast.

For your reading pleasure: The Museum of Failure

I recently came across a delightful archive on the Inter Webs: The Museum of Failure. You can enjoy an online version of their traveling exhibit featuring the greatest failures in tech, history, food and health here.

• 3D TV?

• A McDonald’s burger for the sophisticated adult?

• A hand-held device JUST FOR TWITTER? (I cannot think of anything more useless or nightmarish).

• Crystal Pepsi?

Enjoy learning about all these and more in their virtual collection here.

What others commercial products or initiatives would you include?

ONE YEAR of Wondrium giveaway!

To thank you for being part of this community, and to help you nurture your curiosity and life of the mind, I’m giving away a ONE YEAR subscription to Wondrium, the world’s best resource for the insatiably curious!

To enter, forward this missive to a friend and send me a note at ah@alexandraohudson.com.

Even if you don’t win this month’s giveaway, you can sign up for a FREE month here!

Thank you for being part of the Civic Renaissance community!

I am grateful you are here and part of this movement dedicated to moral, intellectual, and cultural renewal.