6 ms·

Not Belonging to the World: Hannah Arendt Holds Firm

111 points by lermontov 5y ago

crateless 5y ago
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.
- RNCTX 5y ago
  She wrote about things everyone writes about, but she put them in contexts that other people ignored. That's why she's still relevant. It's not just that a thing happened and what the author thinks about the prevailing opinion of why that thing happened, but what was the historical, social, cultural context that led to it? That sort of thing she had a talent for explaining, without worrying about who she offended the ideology of in the process, as the article states.
- divbzero 5y ago
  Her ideas are over half a century old but are frighteningly applicable to current events. As a species we seem doomed to repeat the same mistakes again and again.
  - telesilla 5y ago
    We do make the same mistakes, probably the same our ancestors made millions of years ago. Just happens to look a bit different each century thanks to technology.
frashelaw 5y ago
[flagged]
- rsj_hn 5y ago
  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-contaminated-by-nazism 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-hannah-arendt/ 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.
  - kristopolous 5y ago
    Also sincere and thoughtful people are often complex, nuanced, and contradictory; as messy as the world they live in. Cancelling people for not being a true Scotsman acts as a filter to either ideological doctrinaires oriented towards a narrow philosophy or more likely image conscious mountebanks selling a theatrical persona to the world. It reminds me of the tech interview practice of brain teasers. Out of the pool of people that service you a correct answer, some already know the answer and fraudulently misrepresent their problem solving skills while others are truly gifted geniuses. Because the number of scammers greatly outnumbers the number of geniuses in society writ large, this process creates a pool of say, 95% fraudsters and 5% prodigies. Therefore, without additional information, it's a statistically sound decision to give someone a hard pass that seems to miraculously come up with the answer. What more, the obvious next step of investigating by interview to find out if they're a phony or not likely gives you no additional information. The genius who had just seen the problem for the first time a few minutes prior would likely be far less able to quickly give articulate responses than the liar who likely came prepared with the common follow-up questions. Or you could be dealing with a truly extraordinarily competent person who really is that good. So now the stakes are higher and you know even less. Great (This is why I don't do this practice and the companies that do seem to have quite a few fast talking phonies)
    - candiodari 5y ago
      The issue with that is that interviewers are just as contemptible as candidates. They do not have 10 spare brain teasers to ask. If you tell them "you know this one" they'll either just lie or say (technically truthfully) that they "haven't been able to assess your ability". So for candidates, the fraudster approach is really the only one.
  - cyber_kinetist 5y ago
    Of course, Arendt having a history of having an affair with Heidegger shouldn’t make her a contrarian by association. Even if Heidegger was a closet Nazi, it hasn’t really swayed her overall philosophy even one bit. Still, you can’t still deny the relationship between Heidegger and Nazism after some of the contents of his Black Notebooks from 1931 to 1941 (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Notebooks https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Notebooks) were revealed, which contained explicit anti-semitic comments. The relationship between Hedeigger’s philosophy and Nazism actually seems like a genuine controversy even among scholars and philsophers, and shouldn’t be taken lightly.
- dang 5y ago
  You got a nice detailed rebuttal already, but I need to add that HN is not a place for ideological battle, and we ban accounts that use the site primarily for that (regardless of which ideology they're for or against). Not only have you been using HN primarily for that*, you've been posting a ton of low-quality flamebait comments. That's really not what this site is for, so I've banned the account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. * though I did see one comment about D!
  - toiletfuneral 5y ago
    [dead]
motohagiography 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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.
  - toyg 5y ago
    In Europe, as far as I know Arendt is well-known and always popular, particularly on the left. The "problem" I have with her writings is that, in their precise rationality, they feel utterly bleak. Yes, there are all these terrible dynamics at play, generating totalitarianism from loneliness and monsters from banal people - so what should we do? Is there hope? That doesn't seem to come up. So the reader is left somewhat depressed. (Or at least this is what I remember feeling when I read them, 10-15 years ago.)
magicink81 5y ago
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-Movements/dp/B08QW7WCQR 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."
- Geezus-42 5y ago
  A fantastic book by Robert Evans from Behind the Bastards discussing the rise of the fascist groups currently active in the US. http://www.thewaroneveryone.com/ http://www.thewaroneveryone.com/
billfruit 5y ago
How does her work compare with that of Rebecca West, who also wrote on some of the same themes.
slibhb 5y ago
I like the piece. Samantha Rose Hill is a good interpreter of Arendt. If you're interested in reading Arendt, I reccommend Between Past and Future. The chapter called "What is Authority?" is where my political views come from when I'm thinking clearly.
ogurechny 5y ago
The first half feels quite like a glimpse on a forbidden text given the circumstances most of “civilized world” currently lives in.
dmoo 5y ago
For some background and discussion the In Our Time podcast did an episode on her https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08c2ljg https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08c2ljg
Emma_Goldman 5y ago
I read Eichmann in Jerusalem a while back and it was a good read, but I was surprised to find the basic thesis disproven by ten minutes of research. Arendt wants to argue that Eichmann's evil is banal in origin, not malicious or ideological. But in interviews with Eichmann while he was in Argentina, he openly confesses to being a fanatical and long-standing anti-Semite, and to seeing the Holocaust as the eradication of an inferior people. More recently, I read what is supposed to be Arendt's magnus opus and one of the greatest works of political philosophy of the last century, The Human Condition. I was surprised to find, given the reputation, that it was a conceptual mess. Arendt builds much of the book around a distinction between 'work' and 'labour', but they are neither mutually exclusive nor clearly specified. Her attempt to argue otherwise just leads to compounding error. That aside, I do like Arendt's short book 'On Violence', which is simple but powerful.
- helloworld11 5y ago
  Eichmann was a poor example for Arendt's main idea of evil's banality in certain people and groups, but the idea is far from being invalidated. One book I strongly recommend that reinforces the idea in the modern age is "Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland" by Christopher Browning. His thoroughly researched book describes the basic nature of most of the members of Nazi death squads in the eastern occupied territories, and yes, he strongly underscores just how ordinary and otherwise banal so many of them were or would have been had they not been guided into the German order police battalions (ordnung polizei)
  - helloworld11 5y ago
    Also, being an anti-semite does not make one an unusual person, especially if we're talking about the central European culture of the mid 20th century, where this idea was extremely common even among many otherwise ordinary people. Eichmann may have been fanatically hateful towards jews, but this was for one thing far from uncommon and secondly, far from something that would have probably led him to participating in their systematic extermination had the Nazi regime not come into existence with all that it did.
  - 5y ago

111 points by lermontov 5y ago

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.

RNCTX 5y ago
She wrote about things everyone writes about, but she put them in contexts that other people ignored. That's why she's still relevant. It's not just that a thing happened and what the author thinks about the prevailing opinion of why that thing happened, but what was the historical, social, cultural context that led to it? That sort of thing she had a talent for explaining, without worrying about who she offended the ideology of in the process, as the article states.
divbzero 5y ago
Her ideas are over half a century old but are frighteningly applicable to current events. As a species we seem doomed to repeat the same mistakes again and again.
- telesilla 5y ago
  We do make the same mistakes, probably the same our ancestors made millions of years ago. Just happens to look a bit different each century thanks to technology.

frashelaw 5y ago

[flagged]

rsj_hn 5y ago
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-contaminated-by-nazism 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-hannah-arendt/ 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.
- kristopolous 5y ago
  Also sincere and thoughtful people are often complex, nuanced, and contradictory; as messy as the world they live in. Cancelling people for not being a true Scotsman acts as a filter to either ideological doctrinaires oriented towards a narrow philosophy or more likely image conscious mountebanks selling a theatrical persona to the world. It reminds me of the tech interview practice of brain teasers. Out of the pool of people that service you a correct answer, some already know the answer and fraudulently misrepresent their problem solving skills while others are truly gifted geniuses. Because the number of scammers greatly outnumbers the number of geniuses in society writ large, this process creates a pool of say, 95% fraudsters and 5% prodigies. Therefore, without additional information, it's a statistically sound decision to give someone a hard pass that seems to miraculously come up with the answer. What more, the obvious next step of investigating by interview to find out if they're a phony or not likely gives you no additional information. The genius who had just seen the problem for the first time a few minutes prior would likely be far less able to quickly give articulate responses than the liar who likely came prepared with the common follow-up questions. Or you could be dealing with a truly extraordinarily competent person who really is that good. So now the stakes are higher and you know even less. Great (This is why I don't do this practice and the companies that do seem to have quite a few fast talking phonies)
  - candiodari 5y ago
    The issue with that is that interviewers are just as contemptible as candidates. They do not have 10 spare brain teasers to ask. If you tell them "you know this one" they'll either just lie or say (technically truthfully) that they "haven't been able to assess your ability". So for candidates, the fraudster approach is really the only one.
- cyber_kinetist 5y ago
  Of course, Arendt having a history of having an affair with Heidegger shouldn’t make her a contrarian by association. Even if Heidegger was a closet Nazi, it hasn’t really swayed her overall philosophy even one bit. Still, you can’t still deny the relationship between Heidegger and Nazism after some of the contents of his Black Notebooks from 1931 to 1941 (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Notebooks https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Notebooks) were revealed, which contained explicit anti-semitic comments. The relationship between Hedeigger’s philosophy and Nazism actually seems like a genuine controversy even among scholars and philsophers, and shouldn’t be taken lightly.
dang 5y ago
You got a nice detailed rebuttal already, but I need to add that HN is not a place for ideological battle, and we ban accounts that use the site primarily for that (regardless of which ideology they're for or against). Not only have you been using HN primarily for that*, you've been posting a ton of low-quality flamebait comments. That's really not what this site is for, so I've banned the account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. * though I did see one comment about D!
- toiletfuneral 5y ago
  [dead]

motohagiography 5y ago

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 5y ago
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.
- toyg 5y ago
  In Europe, as far as I know Arendt is well-known and always popular, particularly on the left. The "problem" I have with her writings is that, in their precise rationality, they feel utterly bleak. Yes, there are all these terrible dynamics at play, generating totalitarianism from loneliness and monsters from banal people - so what should we do? Is there hope? That doesn't seem to come up. So the reader is left somewhat depressed. (Or at least this is what I remember feeling when I read them, 10-15 years ago.)

magicink81 5y ago

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-Movements/dp/B08QW7WCQR 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."

Geezus-42 5y ago
A fantastic book by Robert Evans from Behind the Bastards discussing the rise of the fascist groups currently active in the US. http://www.thewaroneveryone.com/ http://www.thewaroneveryone.com/

billfruit 5y ago

How does her work compare with that of Rebecca West, who also wrote on some of the same themes.

slibhb 5y ago

I like the piece. Samantha Rose Hill is a good interpreter of Arendt. If you're interested in reading Arendt, I reccommend Between Past and Future. The chapter called "What is Authority?" is where my political views come from when I'm thinking clearly.

ogurechny 5y ago

The first half feels quite like a glimpse on a forbidden text given the circumstances most of “civilized world” currently lives in.

dmoo 5y ago

For some background and discussion the In Our Time podcast did an episode on her https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08c2ljg https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08c2ljg

Emma_Goldman 5y ago

I read Eichmann in Jerusalem a while back and it was a good read, but I was surprised to find the basic thesis disproven by ten minutes of research. Arendt wants to argue that Eichmann's evil is banal in origin, not malicious or ideological. But in interviews with Eichmann while he was in Argentina, he openly confesses to being a fanatical and long-standing anti-Semite, and to seeing the Holocaust as the eradication of an inferior people. More recently, I read what is supposed to be Arendt's magnus opus and one of the greatest works of political philosophy of the last century, The Human Condition. I was surprised to find, given the reputation, that it was a conceptual mess. Arendt builds much of the book around a distinction between 'work' and 'labour', but they are neither mutually exclusive nor clearly specified. Her attempt to argue otherwise just leads to compounding error. That aside, I do like Arendt's short book 'On Violence', which is simple but powerful.

helloworld11 5y ago
Eichmann was a poor example for Arendt's main idea of evil's banality in certain people and groups, but the idea is far from being invalidated. One book I strongly recommend that reinforces the idea in the modern age is "Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland" by Christopher Browning. His thoroughly researched book describes the basic nature of most of the members of Nazi death squads in the eastern occupied territories, and yes, he strongly underscores just how ordinary and otherwise banal so many of them were or would have been had they not been guided into the German order police battalions (ordnung polizei)
- helloworld11 5y ago
  Also, being an anti-semite does not make one an unusual person, especially if we're talking about the central European culture of the mid 20th century, where this idea was extremely common even among many otherwise ordinary people. Eichmann may have been fanatically hateful towards jews, but this was for one thing far from uncommon and secondly, far from something that would have probably led him to participating in their systematic extermination had the Nazi regime not come into existence with all that it did.
- 5y ago