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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 f

by 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.
foldr 5y ago
Despite the low quality of OP’s post, Arendt did say some troubling things about race in the US. Of course this was in the 1950s when an awful lot of people were doing the same thing. Even so, this aspect of her writing does sit uneasily with the rest of her work, and some of it (like Reflections on Little Rock) was highly controversial even at the time. I found this discussion of the issue interesting: http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/66694/1/Owens%20%282017%29%20Clean%20version%20of%20Millennium%20resubmission.pdf http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/66694/1/Owens%20%282017%29... (You might find the abstract a bit offputting, but the discussion in the body of the text is quite detailed and nuanced.)

by rsj_hn 5y ago

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.

foldr 5y ago

Despite the low quality of OP’s post, Arendt did say some troubling things about race in the US. Of course this was in the 1950s when an awful lot of people were doing the same thing. Even so, this aspect of her writing does sit uneasily with the rest of her work, and some of it (like Reflections on Little Rock) was highly controversial even at the time. I found this discussion of the issue interesting: http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/66694/1/Owens%20%282017%29%20Clean%20version%20of%20Millennium%20resubmission.pdf http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/66694/1/Owens%20%282017%29... (You might find the abstract a bit offputting, but the discussion in the body of the text is quite detailed and nuanced.)