Tao Te Ching
Hannah Arendt
1906 – 1975 CE
Fearless researcher into the darker reaches of the human psyche
An influential philosopher, historian, and deep thinker; Arendt developed some of the most important political theories of the 20th century. An early, 1932 critic of the Nazi Party; she was arrested the year Hitler came into power, imprisoned, escaped, and her German citizenship was taken away in 1937. Arrested again in France, she escaped again and eventually came to the USA in 1941
Influenced by and a major influence on Martin Heidegger, she studied under him and had a four-year affair when she was 17 and he 35. She also studied with Karl Jaspers who became her doctorate degree supervisor.
Her research and thinking focused on the formation of nationalistic, fascist, and totalitarian systems and how ordinary people become controlled into following them. She applied these theories in covering the trial of Adolf Eichmann for the New Yorker in 1961 which created one of the biggest controversies of the era.
Instead of accepting the common depiction of Eichmann as an evil monster, she described him as a victim of an unwillingness to think clearly and instead mindlessly take orders. This refuted the dualistic understandings and accepted ideas of the time about unquestioning obedience to superiors. These were some of the most relevant issues in preventing more totalitarian take-overs but brought about intense criticism of her from many sides.
Perhaps Jung's ideas about projection were at play here: people not seeing or admitting the pulls toward this kind of evil in themselves and projecting it out completely on Eichmann whom she described as only "banal," ordinary, fixated on the duty of obedience, and abandoning critical thinking — qualities possibly shared too closely by the critics.
Lineages
Apostles of Doubt Jewish Women of Wisdom
Eras
Western
Post-Romantic Age (1850 – 2018 CE)Great Depression (1929 – 1941 CE)
Roaring Twenties (1920 – 1929 CE)
Unlisted Sources
Crises of the Republic (1969)
Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963)
The Life of the Mind (1971/1978)
The New Yorker
The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)
Quotes by Hannah Arendt (70 quotes)
“This role of the Jewish leaders in the destruction of their own people is undoubtedly the darkest chapter in the whole dark story.”
Comments: Click to comment
“The hours run down.
The days pass on.
One achievement remains:
merely being alive.”
Comments: Click to comment
“Violence always rises out of impotence. It is the hope of those who have no power to find a substitute for it and this hope, I think, is in vain. Violence can destroy power, but it can never replace it.”
Comments: Click to comment
“Going along with the rest and wanting to say 'we' were quite enough to make the greatest of all crimes possible.”
Comments: Click to comment
“The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.”
Comments: Click to comment
“Absence of thought is indeed a powerful factor in human affairs—statistically speaking, the most powerful.”
Comments: Click to comment
“The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.”
from The New Yorker
Comments: Click to comment
“This, is the real problem of every philosophy of history: how is it possible that in retrospect, it always looks as though it couldn’t have happened otherwise?”
Comments: Click to comment
“If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer.”
Comments: Click to comment
“a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.”
Comments: Click to comment
“Totalitarianism appeals to the very dangerous emotional needs of people who live in complete isolation and in fear of one another.”
Comments: Click to comment
“Kant... stated that he had 'found it necessary to deny knowledge... to make room for faith,' but all he had 'denied' was knowledge of things that are unknowable, and he had not made room for faith but for thought.”
from The Life of the Mind (1971/1978)
Comments: Click to comment
“To expect truth to come from thinking signifies that we mistake the need to think with the urge to know.”
from The Life of the Mind (1971/1978)
Comments: Click to comment
“If a given science accidentally reached its goal, this would by no means stop the workers in the field, who would be driven past their goal by the sheer momentum of the illusion of unlimited progress.”
from The Life of the Mind (1971/1978)
Comments: Click to comment
“The emotions I feel are no more meant to be shown in their unadulterated state than the inner organs by which we live.”
from The Life of the Mind (1971/1978)
Comments: Click to comment
“The need of reason is not inspired by the quest for truth but by the quest for meaning. And truth and meaning are not the same. The basic fallacy, taking precedence over all specific metaphysical fallacies, is to interpret meaning on the model of truth.”
from The Life of the Mind (1971/1978)
Comments: Click to comment
“Kant—in this respect almost alone among the philosophers—was much bothered by the common opinion that philosophy is only for the few, precisely because of its moral implications. [He] discovered 'he scandal of reason,' that is the fact that our mind is not capable of certain and verifiable knowledge regarding matters and questions that it nevertheless cannot help thinking about.”
from The Life of the Mind (1971/1978)
Comments: Click to comment
“Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality.”
from The Life of the Mind (1971/1978)
Comments: Click to comment
“Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power's disappearance.”
from Crises of the Republic (1969)
Comments: Click to comment
“The point, as Marx saw it, is that dreams never come true.”
from Crises of the Republic (1969)
Comments: Click to comment
“The chief reason warfare is still with us is neither a secret death-wish of the human species, nor an irrepressible instinct of aggression, nor, finally and more plausibly, the serious economic and social dangers inherent in disarmament, but the simple fact that no substitute for this final arbiter in international affairs has yet appeared on the political scene.”
from Crises of the Republic (1969)
Comments: Click to comment
“No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes. On the contrary, whatever the punishment, once a specific crime has appeared for the first time, its reappearance is more likely than its initial emergence could ever have been.”
from Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963)
Comments: Click to comment
“The essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy, is to make functionaries and mere cogs in the administrative machinery out of men, and thus to dehumanize them.”
from Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963)
Comments: Click to comment
“The only man for whom Hitler had ‘unqualified respect’ was ‘Stalin the genius’, and while in the case of Stalin and the Russian regime we do not… have the rich documentary material that is available for Germany, we nevertheless know since Khrushchev’s speech before the Twentieth Party Congress that Stalin trusted only one man and that was Hitler.”
from The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)
Comments: Click to comment
“Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.”
from The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)
Comments: Click to comment
“No philosophy, no analysis, no aphorism, be it ever so profound, can compare in intensity and richness of meaning with a properly narrated story... Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.”
Comments: Click to comment
“Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it and by the same token save it from that ruin which, except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and young, would be inevitable.”
Comments: Click to comment
“Political questions are far too serious to be left to the politicians.”
Comments: Click to comment
“Forgiveness is the only way to reverse the irreversible flow of history.”
Comments: Click to comment
“The greatest enemy of authority, therefore, is contempt, and the surest way to undermine it is laughter.”
Comments: Click to comment
“Politically, the weakness of the argument has always been that those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil.”
Comments: Click to comment
“Philosophy is called upon to compensate for the frustrations of politics and, more generally, of life itself.”
Comments: Click to comment
“Solitude is the human condition in which I keep myself company. Loneliness comes about when I am alone without being able to split up into the two-in-one, without being able to keep myself company.”
Comments: Click to comment
“When evil is allowed to compete with good, evil has an emotional populist appeal that wins out unless good men and women stand as a vanguard against abuse.”
Comments: Click to comment
“Thinking does not lead to truth; truth is the beginning of thought.”
Comments: Click to comment
“Every generation, civilization is invaded by barbarians – we call them ‘children’.”
Comments: Click to comment
“Courage is indispensable because in politics not life but the world is at stake.”
Comments: Click to comment
“The law of progress holds that everything now must be better than what was there before. Don’t you see if you want something better, and better, and better, you lose the good. The good is no longer even being measured.”
Comments: Click to comment
“The most striking difference between ancient and modern sophists is that the ancients were satisfied with a passing victory of argument at the expense of truth, whereas the moderns want a more lasting victory at the expense of reality.”
Comments: Click to comment
“Could the activity of thinking as such be among the conditions that make men abstain from evil-doing or even actually 'condition' them against it.”
Comments: Click to comment
“the way God has been thought of for thousands of years is no longer convincing; if anything is dead, it can only be the traditional thought of God.”
from The New Yorker
Comments: Click to comment
“Was it not precisely the discovery of a discrepancy between words, the medium in which we think, and the world of appearances, the medium in which we live, that let to philosophy and metaphysics in the first place?”
from The New Yorker
Comments: Click to comment
“if men were ever to... cease to ask unanswerable questions, they would lose... the capacity for asking all the unanswerable questions upon which every civilization is founded.”
from The New Yorker
Comments: Click to comment
“Unthinking men are like sleepwalkers.”
from The New Yorker
Comments: Click to comment
“Plurality is the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live.”
Comments: Click to comment
“Power is actualized only where word and deed have not parted company, where words are not empty and deeds not brutal, where words are not used to veil intentions but to disclose realities, and deeds are not used to violate and destroy but to establish relations and create new realities.”
Comments: Click to comment
“Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but anti-political, perhaps the most powerful of all anti-political forces.”
Comments: Click to comment
“The good things in history are usually of very short duration, but afterward have a decisive influence on what happens over long periods of time.”
Comments: Click to comment
“While strength is the natural quality of an individual seen in isolation, power springs up between men when they act together and vanishes the moment they disperse.”
Comments: Click to comment
“Friendship to a large extent, indeed, consists of this kind of talking about something that the friends have in common. By talking about what is between them, it becomes ever more common to them. It gains not only its specific articulateness, but develops and expands and finally, in the course of time and life, begins to constitute a little world of its own which is shared in friendship.”
Comments: Click to comment
“Truthfulness has never been counted among the political virtues, and lies have always been regarded as justifiable tools in political dealings.”
Comments: Click to comment
“Equality of condition, though it is certainly a basic requirement for justice, is nevertheless among the greatest and most uncertain ventures of modern mankind. The more equal conditions are, the less explanation there is for the differences that actually exist between people; and thus all the more unequal do individuals and groups become.”
Comments: Click to comment
“Politically speaking, tribal nationalism always insists that its own people is surrounded by 'a world of enemies,' 'one against all,' that a fundamental difference exists between this people and all others. It claims its people to be unique, individual, incompatible with all others, and denies theoretically the very possibility of a common mankind long before it is used to destroy the humanity of man.”
Comments: Click to comment
“It is quite gratifying to feel guilty if you haven’t done anything wrong: how noble! Whereas it is rather hard and certainly depressing to admit guilt and to repent.”
Comments: Click to comment
“Wisdom is a virtue of old age, and it seems to come only to those who, when young, were neither wise nor prudent.”
Comments: Click to comment
“Poetry, whose material is language, is perhaps the most human and least worldly of the arts, the one in which the end product remains closest to the thought that inspired it.”
Comments: Click to comment
“Slavery became the social condition of the laboring classes because it was felt that it was the natural condition of life itself. Omnis vita servitium est.”
Comments: Click to comment
“We humanize what is going on in the world and in ourselves only by speaking of it, and in the course of speaking of it we learn to be human.”
Comments: Click to comment
“Man’s chief moral deficiency appears to be not his indiscretions but his reticence.”
Comments: Click to comment
“wealth without visible function is much more intolerable because nobody can understand why it should be tolerated.
”
Comments: Click to comment
“Antisemitism reached its climax when Jews had similarly lost their public functions and their influence, and were left with nothing but their wealth.”
Comments: Click to comment
“The only possible metaphor one may conceive of for the life of the mind is the sensation of being alive. Without the breath of life, the human body is a corpse; without thinking, the human mind is dead.
”
Comments: Click to comment
“I’m more than ever of the opinion that a decent human existence is possible today only on the fringes of society, where one then runs the risk of starving or being stoned to death. In these circumstances, a sense of humor is a great help.
”
Comments: Click to comment
“Without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover; we would remain the victims of its consequences forever.”
Comments: Click to comment
“Every organization of men, be it social or political, ultimately relies on man’s capacity for making promises and keeping them.”
Comments: Click to comment
Quotes about Hannah Arendt (1 quotes)
“Arendt’s political thought is unique among political thinkers because it does not lay out a theoretical program like a social contract or theory of justice. Instead, Arendt’s political thought is existential in attempting to understand how a meaningful space for politics and public debate can be lost and how that space might be re-enlivened through political action.”
Comments: Click to comment
Comments (0)