Hannah Arendt
May 10, 2023•978 words
Life
- Early life
- Born 1906 into a German-Jewish family in Hannover
- Also lived in Konigsberg, Prussia
- Expelled at the age of 15 after an argument with a teacher that she subsequently started a boycott against that teacher
- In 1924, went to Marburg University
- Studied with Martin Heidegger, with whom she had a brief love-affair, had a lasting influence
- He became an important Nazi philosopher
- After a year, she moved to Freiburg University and spent a semester attending the lectures of Edmund Husserl
- Spring 1926: Went to Heidelburg University to study with Karl Jaspers
- Completed her doctoral dissertation under his supervision in 1926
- Later life
- Forced to leave Germany in 1933
- Went to Prague, then Geneva, finally to settle in Paris for 8 years and working with a number of Jewish refugee organizations
- Other jews wanted to flee or underestimated the danger, she wanted to actively oppose it
- She was imprisoned’
- Separated from her first husband and married again four years later
- Forced to leave France because of French internment, successfully fled to New York
- 1941: Immigrated to the US and became part of an intellectual circle in New York
- Worked as a journalist and editor in a Jewish German newspaper
- Authored several books
- Lectured at Princeton, Berkeley, and Chicago but most closely associated with the New School for Social Research
- Eichmann trial: Jerusalem, 1961 has profound effect on her thinking
- Dies in 1975
Philosophy
- Overview
- Philosophy based on her personal experience
- No one unifying work
- Phenomenological method: use of common experiences
- More of an observer like traditional philosophers
- Focused on nature of politics and political life
- Freedom and justice important themes
Society
- Totalitarianism
- Reconciliation with holocaust
- It is an attempt of total domination over all areas of life, based on terror and ideological fiction
- Typically imperialist with agenda of spreading ideas
- Power held by autocrat
- Destruction of western civilization
- Caused by totalitarianism, imperialism, world wars
- Degradation of western traditions
- Totalitarianism is important in the 20th century
- It is a “new and radical form of evil” that makes certain people unwanted
- Wide liberal distinctions between war and peace in the West and the conflict in colonies was cognitive dissonance
- Saw similarities between communism and fascism, J.P Faye comes up with horseshoe theory
- Political action and life
- Cannot be controlled through philosophical thoughts
- Politics is the accumulation of power
- More power a state has the more its rulers dominate
- Violence was the only method rulers could employ to gain power and dominate other rulers
- Violence and power go hand in hand
- She did not believe they were the same
- Society The Human Condition
- Human plurality: we are equal and yet individual in being humans
- We all have similar capacities but are unique with individual experiences
- Place for communication is politics, must be preserved
- Debate and speech is the lifeblood of politics
- Compares it to the markets of Greek cities
- Public spirit: responsible citizens should inform themselves of facts, form their own opinion, and then should be willing to communicate and debate (inspired by Socrates)
- Power
- She believed it was the capacity of a group of people to act together and achieve their common goal
- Exists between citizens as they engage in politics, from authority imposed it is violence
- Peaceful politics is free of domination and hierarchy
- Power does not need to be justified
- Needs to be legitimate and conform to law
- Believed WWII was necessary for political transformation
- Truly human life needs the public dynamic, it is a defense against totalitarianism when there is no public debate
- Violence
- Must be justified
- Civil disobedience of injustice is the expression of the public reclaiming their space
- Politics
- Not the act of violence and struggle between leaders
- Politics is the ability for a state to sit be represented among equals and debate to determine the course of action for the common good
- Leaders coming together is the formation of a public world
- Leaders are able to find out more than they would have in the absence of such debates and speeches
- Insists on speeches in the public word
- They register some divergence of opinion
- Christian principles should not concern political action
- Rights
- Universal Declaration of Human Rights - she sees a paradox of these rights being protected by national governments
- Argued against natural rights, they are independent of the national authority
- Implies they need to be members of certain national governments
- It then cannot protect the stateless
Eichmann Lawsuit
- Had a high paramilitary rank in the Nazi party
- Put on trial in Jerusalem for crimes against humanity
- Stood in place for those that escaped and the atrocities committed against the jews
- She reported on the lawsuit
- She described it as the “banality of evil”, those that committed these atrocities were bureaucrats
- Innocuous individuals blindly following orders or malicious capacity for evil behavior
- Failure of sound thinking and judgement
- She was critical of how Israel conducted the trial
- “There is not a right to obey” - response to common objection or excuse
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Impact
- Legacy
- One of the most influential and original political thinkers of the 20th century
- Inspired many philosophers and the “New Left”
- Concept of totalitarianism and reflections of modern democratic revolutions also impacted thought and social movements
- Women
- Paved the way for female philosophers
- First full professor at Princeton
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