Hannah Arendt

the care of the world and of the self

John F. Burke

pp. 87-106

in: John Drummond, Lester Embree, Phenomenological approaches to moral philosophy, Berlin, Springer, 2002

Abstract

Hannah Arendt was born in 1906 in Kant's city, then called Königsberg, in East Prussia. (For her life, see Elizabeth Young-Bruehl's 1982 biography, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World). Whereas for her family and many of the five thousand Jews in Königsberg Moses Mendelssohn was the exemplary social and cultural figure, the Social Democrat and Reform Rabbi Hermann Vogelstein was the religious and political leader. Arendt as a little girl had a crush on Vogelstein. After learning of some of the complexities of a secular Jewess marrying a Rabbi, this little girl was led to remark: "I will marry a rabbi with pork." (When older she proclaimed to the rabbi that she no longer believed in God, and he replied, "And who asked you?") In her teens she was fascinated with Kierkegaard and when sixteen she read Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and Karl Jasper's Psychology of Worldviews.

Cited authors

Arendt Hannah