The Philosopher
Hannah Arendt
The face
The background
- Nationality:
- German, American
- Schools:
- Continental philosophy, Existential phenomenology, Classical Republicanism, Action theory (philosophy)
- Period:
- 20th-century philosophy
The synopsis
Hannah Arendt (born Johanna Arendt; 14 October 1906 – 4 December 1975) was a German and American historian and philosopher. She was one of the most influential political theorists of the twentieth century. Her works cover a broad range of topics, but she is best known for those dealing with the nature of wealth, power, fame, and evil, as well as politics, direct democracy, authority, tradition, and totalitarianism. She is also remembered for the controversy surrounding the trial of Adolf Eichmann, for her attempt to explain how ordinary people become actors in totalitarian systems, which was considered by some an apologia, and for the phrase 'the banality of evil'. Her name appears in the names of journals, schools, scholarly prizes, humanitarian prizes, think-tanks, and streets; appears on stamps and monuments; and is attached to other cultural and institutional markers that commemorate her thought.
Hannah Arendt was born to a Jewish family in Linden in 1906. Her father died when she was seven. Arendt was raised in a politically progressive, secular family, her mother being an ardent Social Democrat. After completing secondary education in Berlin, Arendt studied at the University of Marburg under Martin Heidegger, with whom she engaged in a romantic affair that began while she was his student. She obtained her doctorate in philosophy at the University of Heidelberg in 1929. Her dissertation was entitled 'Love and Saint Augustine', and her supervisor was the existentialist philosopher Karl Jaspers.
In 1933, Arendt was briefly imprisoned by the Gestapo for performing illegal research into antisemitism. On release, she fled Germany, settling in Paris. There she worked for Youth Aliyah, assisting young Jews to emigrate to the British Mandate of Palestine. When Germany invaded France she was detained as an alien by the French government. She escaped and made her way to the United States in 1941. She became a writer and editor and worked for the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, becoming an American citizen in 1950. With the publication of 'The Origins of Totalitarianism' in 1951, her reputation as a thinker and writer was established, and a series of works followed. These included the books 'The Human Condition' in 1958, as well as 'Eichmann in Jerusalem' and 'On Revolution' in 1963. She taught at many American universities while declining tenure-track appointments. She died suddenly of a heart attack in 1975, leaving her last work, 'The Life of the Mind', unfinished.
The works
Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin
The Origins of Totalitarianism
The Human Condition
On Revolution
The Life of the Mind
The quotes
No cause is left but the most ancient of all, the one, in fact, that from the beginning of our history has determined the very existence of politics, the cause of freedom versus tyranny.
This is the precept by which I have lived: Prepare for the worst; expect the best; and take what comes.
Where all are guilty, no one is; confessions of collective guilt are the best possible safeguard against the discovery of culprits, and the very magnitude of the crime the best excuse for doing nothing.
Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.
Man cannot be free if he does not know that he is subject to necessity, because his freedom is always won in his never wholly successful attempts to liberate himself from necessity.
For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.
The ultimate end of human acts is eudaimonia, happiness in the sense of living well, which all men desire; all acts are but different means chosen to arrive at it.
Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think.
By its very nature the beautiful is isolated from everything else. From beauty no road leads to reality.
The defiance of established authority, religious and secular, social and political, as a world-wide phenomenon may well one day be accounted the outstanding event of the last decade.
Nothing we use or hear or touch can be expressed in words that equal what is given by the senses.
To be free in an age like ours, one must be in a position of authority. That in itself would be enough to make me ambitious.
The Third World is not a reality but an ideology.
Few girls are as well shaped as a good horse.
These are the fifties, you know. The disgusting, posturing fifties.
Action without a name, a who attached to it, is meaningless.
Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.
Poets are the only people to whom love is not only a crucial, but an indispensable experience, which entitles them to mistake it for a universal one.
The chief qualification of a mass leader has become unending infallibility; he can never admit an error.
In order to go on living one must try to escape the death involved in perfectionism.
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.
There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous.
Revolutionaries do not make revolutions. The revolutionaries are those who know when power is lying in the street and then they can pick it up.
The trouble with lying and deceiving is that their efficiency depends entirely upon a clear notion of the truth that the liar and deceiver wishes to hide.
The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.
Promises are the uniquely human way of ordering the future, making it predictable and reliable to the extent that this is humanly possible.
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.
The more dubious and uncertain an instrument violence has become in international relations, the more it has gained in reputation and appeal in domestic affairs, specifically in the matter of revolution.
War has become a luxury that only small nations can afford.
Death not merely ends life, it also bestows upon it a silent completeness, snatched from the hazardous flux to which all things human are subject.
It is my contention that civil disobediences are nothing but the latest form of voluntary association, and that they are thus quite in tune with the oldest traditions of the country.
We have almost succeeded in leveling all human activities to the common denominator of securing the necessities of life and providing for their abundance.
Culture relates to objects and is a phenomenon of the world; entertainment relates to people and is a phenomenon of life.
The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.
The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition.
Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.
Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda.
It is in the very nature of things human that every act that has once made its appearance and has been recorded in the history of mankind stays with mankind as a potentiality long after its actuality has become a thing of the past.
Wherever the relevance of speech is at stake, matters become political by definition, for speech is what makes man a political being.
Our tradition of political thought had its definite beginning in the teachings of Plato and Aristotle. I believe it came to a no less definite end in the theories of Karl Marx.
The new always happens against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability, which for all practical, everyday purposes amounts to certainty; the new therefore always appears in the guise of a miracle.
Total loyalty is possible only when fidelity is emptied of all concrete content, from which changes of mind might naturally arise.
Economic growth may one day turn out to be a curse rather than a good, and under no conditions can it either lead into freedom or constitute a proof for its existence.