[HN Gopher] Not Belonging to the World: Hannah Arendt Holds Firm
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Not Belonging to the World: Hannah Arendt Holds Firm
Author : lermontov
Score : 16 points
Date : 2021-10-21 01:09 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.laphamsquarterly.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.laphamsquarterly.org)
| motohagiography wrote:
| Arendt is a vice of mine, where if I could be considered
| ideological, it would be the logic of her ideas that I have
| iterated as a framework for interpreting political experiences.
| When you challenge at the level she did, you make very powerful
| enemies. What people really go after her for was not _Origins_
| but her assessment of Eichmann at his trial, where by recognizing
| him as merely contemptible, she simultaneously deprived Israel of
| a super anti-human monster as an easy foil (edit: to have
| overcome something huge and evil) for their founding story, and
| made us each individually responsible for moral complicity in
| evil, and I think many people (mainly secular, I suspect) treated
| it as an unforgivable betrayal. They found allies among the
| marxists in academia she had burned pretty hard with _Origins_ ,
| and her work has been pushed into the backwaters of contrarianism
| since.
|
| Over the last couple of decades, there have been a few posthumous
| hit pieces on her, mainly by post-marxists who are among the
| architects of our current wave of the totalitarian strategy, and
| whenever I read attacks on Arendt I always ask, "why, what are
| you planning?"
|
| Perfect? No. But between Arendt and Solzhenitsyn, however this
| wave today plays out, we can't say we weren't warned.
| magicink81 wrote:
| My God yes, we have been warned. But have we listened? And have
| we told everyone? Is Arendt, specifically Origins, required
| reading at a majority of public and private universities in the
| US and Europe? Let alone government high schools, and community
| colleges? I didn't discover her until recently. Solzhenitsyn
| also. I still think it's not too late to popularize their work,
| and explain it's high degree of relevance to contemporary life.
| magicink81 wrote:
| For an elegant "Cliffs Notes" version of Origins, I recommend
| this recent book by Grasso published in 2020:
|
| Reading The Origins of Totalitarianism in 2020: A Short Guide to
| Mass Movements and Ideology - Daniel Grasso
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Reading-Origins-Totalitarianism-2020-...
|
| From an Amazon review, which I agree with: "Grasso has clearly
| and effectively translated the twentieth-century's totalitarian
| crisis into the modern day.
|
| As someone who struggles to grasp Arendt's philosophy, I
| appreciate Grasso's synthesis of her thoughts and how he relates
| them to our modern political climate. He does this in a very
| objective/unbiased way--exposing growth areas in both
| conservative and liberal thought. Overall, this is a fair,
| helpful, thoughtful, and necessary work."
| frashelaw wrote:
| Hannah Arendt was famously a Nazi sympathizer, married to
| prominent Nazi philosopher Heidegger.
|
| In her writings, she also argued that colonialism was good, and
| that ending racial segregation would be totalitarian. That itself
| should demonstrate the absurdity and moral background invoked in
| her nonsense theory of totalitarianism, existing only to further
| the US's propaganda war by equating fascist colonial terror with
| people's progressive movements.
|
| I hope she is remembered as what she really is, just another
| white supremacist propagandist.
| rsj_hn wrote:
| Hannah Arendt was a German Jew who was twice arrested by the
| Gestapo and forced to flee first Germany and then France.
| Stripped of her German citizenship, she fled for the U.S.
|
| While she did have a brief affair with Heidegger when she was
| his student, she never married him (she was 19 and he was 36,
| married with two kids). She did however, maintain
| correspondence with him, seeing as how he was a pretty
| brilliant philosopher. Moreover calling Heidegger a "prominent
| Nazi philosopher" is nonsense. He did join the Nazi party
| immediately after being promoted to rector, given that it was a
| requirement to do so. Which is not to say that Heidegger was a
| closet liberal. He was a philosopher working under a Nazi
| regime. You can read more about this issue here:
|
| https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/is-heidegger-con...
|
| Her first husband was a jew, but her second husband (the one
| she married in the U.S.) was a German-American gentile, however
| the fact that he wasn't jewish doesn't make him a Nazi. In
| fact, he was a communist and in his youth participated in the
| demonstrations and street violence put on by the German
| communist movements.
|
| You can read about Blucher here:
| https://louisproyect.org/2007/05/23/heinrich-blucher-and-han...
|
| Please stop with the name calling and dismissing the works of
| famous philosophers because of who they slept with as
| university students.
|
| These types of facile outrage-inducing posts do not add value
| to this site, particularly when the facts are so wrong. Arendt
| was a prominent critic of totalitarianism and the totalitarian
| mindset, of which the parent post is a good example.
| crateless wrote:
| I didn't know much about her but color me intrigued. She sounds
| like an antidote to the zeitgeist and a voice that is sorely
| needed.
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