ELISABETH YOUNG-BRUEHL
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Finally, I think few people would doubt that we all
need
exemplary myths and exemplary lives-the products of biog–
raphy in the last mode. We need them in our adulthood, so that
we do not lose, but rather creatively transform, the project of
growing up-that is, the project of reacquiring the past, the
world into which we were born and in which we do our piece of
the road. "Life must be lived forwards," Kierkegaard said, "but
can only be understood backwards."
We need examples, yes, but the sense of limits should come
with the realization that we do not need-and are even harmed
by-examples completely determined by historical model mak–
ing and historiographical pedagogy. We need examples who
lived in the world and were very much of the world-who were
neither beasts nor angels, neither antiheroes nor heroes, but hu–
mans. I think Aristotle was wrong-though, as always, for good
reasons-when he set poetry and philosophy over against his–
tory, saying that the former two are concerned with universals
while the latter treats only particulars . Lord Bolingbroke seems
to me to have been more correct when he quoted Dionysius of
Halicarnasus's saying: "History is philosophy teaching through
examples." Biography is, I think, philosophy teaching through
stories. But lest this seem programmatic or just dogmatic, I
should confess that the life stories that please me please me be–
cause they are philosophical.
This last piece of subjectivity brings me to my own practice
as a biographer. The subtitle of my biography of Hannah Arendt
is not
Life and Thought, A Life, The Story of A Life,
or
Life and
Times;
it is
For Love of the World.
To Hannah Arendt, the
phrase
amor mundi
stood for an attitude opposite to the tradi–
tional philosophical perspective of
contemptus mundi.
To me,
as I wrote about her, the phrase stood for an attitude toward her
life and my readers.
It
seems to me that there are two different but related ques–
tions that a biographer has to consider, before setting out upon
the project of presenting to readers another person's life story.
One question is philosophical, the other political.
When biographers use a phrase like" the essence of a life"
(which is borrowed from Leon Edel, author of
Henry James),
