"#Arendt argues that the underlying fear that attracts one to ideology is the fear of self-contradiction. This fear of self-contradiction is why thinking itself is dangerous – thinking has the power to uproot all of our beliefs and opinions about the world. Thinking can unsettle our faith, our beliefs, our sense of self-knowledge. Thinking can strip away everything that we hold dear, rely upon, take for granted day-to-day. Thinking has the power to make us come undone." https://aeon.co/essays/for-hannah-arendt-totalitarianism-is-rooted-in-loneliness
Très content pour #EmmanuelFaye: la version allemande de "Arendt et Heidegger: la destruction dans la pensée", traduit par Leonore Bazinek. #Arendt#Heidegger@philosophy
Samantha Hill: "Für #Arendt war die politische Emanzipation der Bourgeoisie der Grundstein des modernen Nationalstaates, in dem die politischen Gesetze von den privaten Interessen der Geschäftsleute bestimmt wurden, die es für nötig befunden hatten, den Staatsapparat zu übernehmen, um das Militär für ihre kolonialen Unternehmungen einzusetzen. Diese Kooptation der Nation und ihre Umwandlung in einen Nationalstaat durch private Wirtschaftsinteressen war der Kern ihres Verständnisses. Und was sie betonte - und wofür sie kritisiert wurde - war das Argument, dass der Antisemitismus vom Nationalstaat politisch benutzt wurde, um seine politischen und wirtschaftlichen Interessen zu fördern.
"Arendt hat dieses Argument nie aufgegeben. Tatsächlich griff sie es in ihrem umstrittensten Werk, Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), wieder auf, in dem sie Ben-Gurion vorwarf, einen "Schauprozess" zu veranstalten, um das Leiden des jüdischen Volkes auszunutzen, anstatt den wirklichen Verbrecher, Hitlers Cheflogistiker Adolf Eichmann, für seine Verbrechen zur Rechenschaft zu ziehen. Natürlich sei Eichmann antisemitisch gewesen, aber sein Hass auf das jüdische Volk sei nicht sein Hauptmotiv gewesen. Vielmehr sei es seine banale Hybris gewesen, die ihn dazu gebracht habe, in den Reihen des Dritten Reiches aufzusteigen. Das sei die Banalität des Bösen, und sie definierte die Banalität des Bösen als die Unfähigkeit, sich die Welt aus der Perspektive eines anderen vorzustellen."
Hannah Arendt would not qualify for the Hannah Arendt prize in Germany today - Wonderful article as a response to the reaction on the initial article by Masha Gessen (great article published by the New Yorker) - #Gaza#israel#Arendt
I am reading _ Eichman in Jerusalem_ , and this time through, as an older person confronted by the systematic failure of ordinary people to recognise or act against the environmental crisis, for decades, it has un-wished-for explanatory force.
My children don't understand why anyone would use a car, all those cars driving by every day, or buy water in a plastic bottle, why Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are used as examples of "good" entrepreneurs in their curriculum. I can see the corrupt business practices that meant we were offered a new gas boiler rather than a ground source heat pump in the government-backed scheme...but I don't understand it.
#Arendt did. She understood evil. What a terrible gift.
Hannah #Arendt is a tough read. Blessedly, I found an #audiobook of "The Origins of Totalitarianism" that complements my somewhat clueless read-through.
If anybody is interested in also going through the audiobook, but strapped for cash, I'd love to help (via PM).
"A key corollary of Papert's critique of modern education is that by learning academic's formal representations of knowledge, students come to hate learning"
The arguments from your thread (and from the essay by @cedricchin and the book by @gvwilson) remind me of Martin Heidegger's dialogical concept of teaching as "let learn". A while ago I posted a key passage here on Mastodon,
I think that #asylum needs to be thought of as something #sacred. I haven't quite worked this out yet.
There is the basic necessity of a system of asylum. To believe in asylum is to believe in freedom. It is to accept that an individual who does not fit into the community of her nativity can flee. It is to believe that we cannot be forced to conform by tyrannical masters or norms, that the individual can escape authority.
That is not yet sacrosanct. There are two more aspects. The first is a sort of Fregean context principle but applied to people and communities. Never ask after the meaning of an individual in isolation from the community. Just as the significance of a word is its contribution to the significance of sentences in which it can occur, a person is fundamentally part of community. But see above, there are only sentences because there are words and there are only communities because there are individuals. It is the individuals who count.
The second is that a person outside of a legal system is without standing, without protection and, because of the context principle, has lost her personhood. On a very practical level, the asylum seeker is outside the protection of the law but subject to its force. Border spaces are so violent not because people on the move are criminalised, the criminal can expect due process, but because they are outlawed. You can do anything to a non-person. (All classic #Arendt.)
So we need a process of asylum to bring people in, to end exile, which must then be a sort of rebirth, a new beginning, a rupture. It must be inviolable and unconditional, or perhaps only conditioned on need. We cannot regulate people's mobility, accepting claims only from those who apply through the appropriate channels or travel on '#SafeRoutes' as the #UK establishment wish. Instead we must respond to the unconditional need of the person who has no legal standing and bring her in so that she can be remade. That is something sacred
“Mass #propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in #cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”
― Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism" #quotes#mediaStudies#commOdon#truth#agnotology#history
The masses' flight from reality is a condemnation of the world in which they are forced to live. […] The main disadvantage of reality is that it is not logical, coherent or organised.
~ Hannah Arendt, in "Totalitarianism"
@nicholas_saunders Sure:
The essay #Totalitarianism was fisrt published in 1951 as the third volume of "The Origins of Totalitarianism".
In it, Hannah Arendt argues that totalitarianism was a "novel form of government," in that it applied terror to subjugate mass populations rather than just political adversaries. Further, Arendt states that, owing to the insertion of ideology into the apparatus of coercion, "totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within". She further contends that Jewry was not the operative factor in the genocide of European Jews, but merely a convenient proxy. That totalitarianism in Germany was, in the end, about terror and consistency, not eradicating Jews only.
Adapted from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origins_of_Totalitarianism