Warunkowa apologia przypadkowości. Filozofia narodzin w biografii Rahel Varnhagen autorstwa Hanny Arendt

Miłosz Markiewicz

The article is dedicated to a pre-war oeuvre of Hannah Arendt, namely the book concerning the life of Berlin salonnière, Rahel Varnhagen (1771-1833). Her narration is equally biographical and autobiographical, because Arendt, during writing it in the thirties, has been intending to manage with her own origin and actual political situation, appropriating the position of emancipating Jewess from the Romantic era. A simultaneous development of Zionism and anti-Semitism witnessed the fall of a fragile German-Jewish 'synthesis' inaugurated at the end of eighteen century. Arendt's book constitutes an excellent cultural critique as well as a hermeneutic of modern subjectivity, thrown back at painful consciousness of randomness concomitant with each birth. Similar problem is posed by Odo Marquard in his conception of derivativeness (Herkömmlichkeit), but solutions propounded within it seem very dubious. German philosopher's skeptic bias makes him unable to overcome melancholic repetition and tyranny of time. In comparison to him, Arendt's reflection on natality guards a hope for a promising art of living.