Needful Freedom: on the friendship of Hans Jonas and Hannah Arendt

and why care is worth it

In the mid-1920s, two young Jewish students named Hans Jonas and Hannah Arendt (both to become influential philosophers in their own right) found themselves at the University of Marburg in Germany, drawn by the magnetic pull of two historic teachers.

Those teachers were Rudolf Bultman, a German Lutheran theologian and professor of the New Testament, and Martin Heidegger, a man with the gifts to be among the world’s greatest philosophers but who would later taint that potential by supporting one of the cruelest politicians in history.

As is likely already obvious, there were many uncommon tensions at play as young Hans and Hannah entered the university. Few (if any) could have fathomed the future soon to come. An excited young Jonas left a truly remarkable philosopher and mathematician, Edmund Husserl, to come and study with Heidegger, but Heidegger soon became one of the greatest disappointments of his life. Hannah and Hans had gotten themselves into a cauldron where either/or was dema…