On Arendt's Lessing Prize
“In 1959, Hannah Arendt received the city of Hamburg’s Lessing Prize. Her lecture on that occasion drew attention to key features of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s enlightenment era notions of tolerance and humanism. In so doing, she both graciously acknowledged the importance of Lessing’s legacy, as well as critiqued the inadequacy of his ideas in the shadow of the second world war. While she shared with Lessing a life lived in what she would call ‘dark times’, her own response differed in important respects... Arendt’s lecture on Lessing provides a distillation of her vision of a political life beyond religious concerns. This has led some commentators to obscure her relevance to contemporary debates about the persistent and new interactions between religion and politics. However, Arendt never shied away from citing religious contributions to the development of her own viewpoints, nor did her vision of political spaces exclude religion as such.”
“Applying Arendt’s Vita Activa to Religion,” Politics, Religion and Ideology. By coincidence my essay on Hannah Arendt was published in the online release of this journal just prior to this year’s 27 January, holocaust memorial day. This essay is part of a series I’ve been writing the past few years which address ways to revitalize deliberative democratic practices in light of ongoing religious divisions oft-cited as the source of expanding fissures opening up in our societies. For instance, around this time last year, “Religion in Deliberative Democratic Systems Theory,” appeared in Religions, and the year before that, “The Pragmatist Question of Sovereignty,” appeared in a special issue of Political Theology, which also included a brief “Introduction.” A monograph is planned to bring together their increasingly urgent themes. It will begin with Arendt because she so adeptly identified many of the problems we still face in multicultural democracies.
“The world lies between people, and this in-between – much more than (as is often thought) men or even man – is today the object of the greatest concern and the most obvious upheaval in almost all countries of the globe.”
