Hannah Arendt - Thought & Moral Propositions (1970)

A rare talk by Hannah Arendt on the banality of evil, thinking, and moral propositions given at Loyola University Chicago in 1970.
#Philosophy #Arendt

[@fabiodeoliveiraribeiro1602]

I was lucky enough to come into contact with the work of Hannah Arendt as an adult, intellectually mature and with time to read and reflect on her books. Over the last 15 years she has become more and more important to me as an indispensable reference for observing politics, reflecting on international conflicts, and even thinking about Law as a broader and more complex phenomenon than I traditionally thought of. Repositioning Hannah Arend's thinking in a world that is rapidly changing as a result of the internet has been a task that I greatly appreciate. The intellectual versatility and great erudition of this great thinker is truly admirable.

[@megaperl]

Same here; I would even as far as to confess that I truly knew nothing at all about politics, morals and justice until I started reading Arendt as an adult

[@letdaseinlive]

This is even the way Kristen Stewart looks into the abyss of learning strangly Daseining in world greatness with Arendt's teaching. 🎉

[@OCTF]

The Bb 27:20 27:20

[@jameswelch7523]

This is fantastic, thank you!

[@robertb1138]

Wow this is one of the greatest lectures I've ever heard. Arendt really illuminates the connection between thinking and meaning in a way I haven't quite heard from others. Profoundly important.

[@jakecarlo9950]

Wow, so brilliant, so apt and timely too - thank you very much for posting. Accomplishes so much in the way of the political ends that the French, thinking of Derrida here, would claim but then drown in navel-gazing, willful obscurantism, and defeatism. Very powerful. Thanks again.

[@syedadeelhussain2691]

A superb mind.

[@noexit4458]

Along with the philosophy, I also hear the deciliated respiratory tract epithelia crying for help.

[@eternaldoorman5228]

And she insisted she wasn't a philosopher. So what are philosophers supposed to talk about? ❤️

[@die_schlechtere_Milch]

And yet she posed for that picture

[@rosecoloredglasses5913]

The quip has the inverse meaning that if you think she's doing Philosophy then it follows that those around her aren't. Few Philosophers actually think.

[@josephg.3771]

She rejects the tyranny of philosophy as developed by Plato where truth-claims kill any political engagement and reduce other people as someone you teach instead of convincing

[@freegene5365]

Thank you 🌷

[@shan4145]

Her and Bertrand Russell

[@rozalialuks6583]

It needs to get subtitled. This Wonderful Thinker speaks English with German "in her tongue and heart".

[@ghamessmona]

❤

[@Junksaint]

Who knew we'd see the banality of evil in pur friends and family the last 4-7 years. History is going to get pretty bumpy the next decade.

[@KrunoslavStifter]

There were a lot of criticisms of the "banality of evil" hypothesis and remarks. Adolf Eichmann was no banal bureaucrat ; he knew what he was doing all the time. He just used the "banality" part to defend himself. I was just doing my job's routine. I don't know to what extend Hannah Arend believed in it, but some people took it as easy explanation. “Caution in handling generally accepted opinions that claim to explain whole trends of history is especially important for the historian of modern times, because the last century has produced an abundance of ideologies that pretend to be keys to history but are actually nothing but desperate efforts to escape responsibility.” ― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism “Historians have a word for Germans who joined the Nazi party, not because they hated Jews, but out of a hope for restored patriotism, or a sense of economic anxiety, or a hope to preserve their religious values, or dislike of their opponents, or raw political opportunism, or convenience, or ignorance, or greed. That word is "Nazi." Nobody cares about their motives anymore.” ― A.R. Moxon “Malice lies dormant in all of us and anyone who knows how to exploit it, how to turn it sharply in one direction can hope for an echo.” ― Golo Mann “As far as the Jews were concerned, the transformation of the "crime" of Judaism into the fashionable "vice" of Jewishness was dangerous in the extreme. Jews had been able to escape from Judaism into conversion; from Jewishness there was no escape. A crime, moreover, is met with punishment; a vice can only be exterminated.” ― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism “Humankind has long since become accustomed to the mass destruction of those identified as enemy combatants-and the enslavement of others taken in war. In the past, millions have been put to the sword arbitrarily, because of their ethnic origin or their religious convictions. But it was the twentieth century that managed to bring even more capriciousness and inhumanity to the mayhem. By the mid-twentieth century, mass murder came to typify an entire class of political regimes. Even before the coming of the Second World War, millions of citizens were destroyed by those who governed, even though their rulers were nominally at peace with everyone. Untold numbers were threatened with ‘shunning,’ incarceration, expulsion, or death-because of membership in a proscribed class, ethnic, or religious community. However prepared those threatened might have been to abandon those identities-to become whatever they wished by those who ruled-that possibility was foreclosed. Those afflicted with ‘counterrevolutionary class consciousness’ could do little, if anything, to have themselves restored to good favor. Those so unfortunate as to have ‘bourgeois’-landlord or capitalist-backgrounds were denied schooling or employment, and were often marked for destruction. Rulers sometimes sentenced them to thankless labor, exiled them, transported them, incarcerated them, and frequently, if not always, killed them. Finally, those deemed members of a scorned race or despised class could do very little to earn tolerance, much less security. Minimally scheduled for abuse, many, if not most, were ultimately consigned to martyrdom. In the twentieth century, hundreds of millions of human beings suffered unnatural deaths at the hands of those who governed them. Of course, mass murder has not been unique in history, but its sanction by public rationale-providing motives to rulers, and influencing the behavior of the masses-may well be. That such a rationale licenses the systematic destruction of entire groups within a community at peace, contributes to the enormity. That such a homicidal public enterprise has behind it the persuasiveness of moral counsel, the force of law, and the power of the state, renders its enormity almost incomprehensible. In such instances, the murder of those the state is expected to protect is not random, but governed by principle, and facilitated by carefully contrived organization. Murder on such scale, supported by public endorsement, and employing public instrumentalities, must necessarily engage the overt or tacit participation of large segments of the community-so that virtually all are made complicit. In substance, in the twentieth, humanity has experienced a century in which governments have sponsored, sanctioned, and created special facilities for the mass destruction of innocent lives. It has engaged almost everyone in the doing. All of which makes the mass murders of the twentieth century perhaps unique in history.” - Totalitarianism and Political Religion An Intellectual History, 2012 by A. James Gregor As for 21st century.... Hold my Bud Light!

[@trevorcrowley5748]

You sir, are very witty and wise. Agree to the parallels: 'Eichmann found in the Nazi movement a sense of importance. That desire to prove himself meaningful, combined with his use of clichés and bureaucratic role morality, rendered him unable to think clearly about what he was doing. This is what Arendt means by her famous and famously misunderstood dictum of the, “fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.”' Bud Light, indeed.

[@KrunoslavStifter]

​@@trevorcrowley5748 Yes. I agree with it, except the part "rendered him unable to think clearly about what he was doing." I think he was thinking very clearly about what he was doing. He was even pushing for more trains to camps when all else was collapsing and he wanted to kill as many as he could to the last minute and when it was obvious NAZI regime collapse he escaped, clearly knowing what he did and he kept false identity of a long time in Argentina before captured. I see no evidence of him not thinking clearly about what he was doing, but I do see evidence of being loyal to a terrible ideology. However, he did not continue the practices when he was Argentina, pointing to the first part of what you quoted.: "'Eichmann found in the Nazi movement a sense of importance. That desire to prove himself meaningful" I think that is true. Because I saw transcripts with the people he worked for in Argentina when he assumed another identity, and he did not put the same effort into it at all. Nor did he continued to kill Jews in Argentina. He was simply hiding, knowing what would be the punishment if captured. So I think I would not share her view of "banality of evil" . Furthermore if I'm not mistaken when Eichmann was in Austria he would torment Jews with deals he had no intentions of fulfilling, and years before Eichmann was brought to Israel to stand trial, the notorious mass-murderer visited Mandatory Palestine in 1937 while disguised as a journalist. I don't know what you think, but that does not seem very banal to me, but calculated.

[@cheri238]

She was a deep thinker. I agree!!! Hold my Bud light. Look at us now in 2023. What we have now is an inverted Tolertarism. Sheldon Wollin. I don't think he drank Bud Light either. (Lol) "Thought will never make men live." Wow!! Love? It can not be measured by thought. The ending of time is the beginning of love. " The Awakening of Intelligence." Krishnamurti

[@KrunoslavStifter]

@@cheri238 I don't know what you mean by "Inverted Totalitarianism" because the totalitarianism is the goal and attempted methodology is quite clearly borrowing from previous totalitarian regimes. If by "inverted" implication is that there is some kind of bottom up movement, that would be false assumption. Because the only protests and riots that work are the ones that are approved by the regime. The goal is to support useful idiots and mobilize political activists such as BLM and Antifa the brown shirts to attack from bellow, to capture institutions and trough social engineering of culture change body politics into voting or supporting their own demise. But it was always supported by the top with goal being of crushing the middle class. Class that is least dependent on the state and most prone to protect what they have to lose , so goal is to crush the middle class and only leave state and does dependent on the state, which have no choice but to support the "current thing" The aristocracy of victimhood Op-ed by Auron MacIntyre April 05, 2023 Western liberal democracies have been engaged in a narrative of political and social progress, believing themselves superior to all that came before. According to this story, the scientific revolution led to the Enlightenment, which produced new social technologies to replace the backward superstitions and traditions that once governed human relations. Armed with a more scientific and rational understanding of human affairs, these new political technologies would free those who had once been subjects of the state. Popular sovereignty, rule of law (doctrine that advocates that every citizen, including those in government, is subject to the law of the land), and constitutional government were supposed to protect the rights of the individual from the whims of capricious rulers. This ambitious project has now proven a failure, as democracies across the West seem to be, in unison, creating an aristocracy of favored groups. In America, trans activists can storm state capitol buildings and BLM protesters can riot for weeks on end while January 6 protesters rot in jail. In Canada, transgenderists can punch their opponents in the face without penalty while police chuckle in approval. In the United Kingdom, those praying silently outside abortion clinics are arrested while Muslim grooming gangs prey on women with little to no fear of reprisal. These nations all share a tradition of Western liberal democratic government and also seem to have simultaneously developed a social class with special privileges and the ability ignore the rule of law as long as they are punishing the political opponents of the ruling elite. For many this feels like a radical shift in the way that Western nations are run, but in truth, this has been happening for a long time and has been formalized in U.S. law for decades. Affirmative action and disparate impact have warped the American legal system, not only allowing bias, but in many cases legally mandating it as long as that bias benefits groups that have been granted the status of victim. Even when the practice is not formally mandated by law, it is enforced culturally by institutions like corporations and universities. Harvard is currently arguing in a Supreme Court case that it must continue to use racial bias in its admissions if it wishes to obtain a diverse student population. The university’s lawyers take for granted that labeling those groups who are elevated through racial preference as “disadvantaged” absolves the institution of any wrongdoing. What many in the West never grasped was that the leftist concept of social progress was always destined to dismantle classically liberal constitutional government. The left is a coalition of groups who benefit from the destruction of natural hierarchies. The organic limitations inherit in family, church, community, and even biological sex are an unacceptable barrier to the leftist conception of progress. While legal equality was originally the stated goal, when it failed to reliably produce equal outcomes, there was no way the left was simply going to shrug, assume this was the natural order of things, and go home. Many conservatives attempt to hold the left to account for the linguistic transition from equality to equity, but this is a mistake, because for progressives, these terms were always one and the same. In order to “progress” beyond the natural social hierarchies, one must engineer society itself. If legal equality is achieved but inequality of outcome persists, then the only remaining option is to privilege some and suppress others in hopes of deriving the desired result. Legal equality must be dismantled because it failed to generate the unstated expectation: equality of outcome. At first, people did not object to special privileges being granted to those who were characterized as disadvantaged. Most Americans are generous and kind people who would genuinely like to see others succeed and are happy to help those who have ended up on the bottom of the social pyramid. This is especially true when it comes to the civil rights movement, which many Americans saw as a noble correction of a deep wrong that had previously existed in their society. The population at large was willing to grant a form of emergency power to the movement, often ignoring the violation of legislative procedure and prior understandings of constitutional rights in order to fix a historical wrong. Activists took notice, and it quickly became standard practice for groups who had no claim to the specific historical legacy of the civil rights movement to join themselves to its narrative. Any group that did so successfully gained access to the supra-constitutional framework and moral authority granted by the civil rights movement. As this trend continued, and more traditional understandings of religion and American identity collapsed, the civil rights narrative took their place. America became defined by its ability to discover human rights for increasingly obscure minority groups and export those rights to the rest of the world. Instead of going to war for security interests, America and the wider West now go to war on behalf of democracy and LGBTQ rights. Anyone who opposes those rights basically opposes the new Western religion and is probably in league with both Hitler and Putin. The wrong side of history is a scary place to be. Each of these increasingly obscure social minorities is grafted onto the civil rights narrative and given a quasi-sacred victim status that grants them access to the special privileges that lie beyond rule of law and constitutional order. Eventually society reaches a tipping point where the incentives for being an oppressed minority are greater than for being someone who is naturally elevated due to the legal equality granted under the rule of law and the constitutional order. Couple that fact with the almost deistic elevation through victimhood, and the drive to achieve this new aristocratic status becomes overwhelming. Who would not want to be on the right side of history while getting to punch people they hate in the face? This has brought us to a very strange place where Western regimes must continually parrot the rhetoric of freedom and constitutional rights while exercising an ever-increasing level of totalitarian state control to impose their artificial and inverted social hierarchy. Joe Biden and Justin Trudeau lecture countries like Iran or Russia about human rights violations while arresting their own political opponents, stealing the bank accounts of protesters, and jailing meme makers. The West now values the maintenance of a totally artificial social hierarchy over its commitment to legal equality, but this feat of social engineering is by its very nature incredibly fragile. The weight of the inverted social pyramid makes it increasingly unstable, and the social engineers who erected it must search relentlessly for any remaining barriers to power that they can dismantle. Progressives hope that by securing enough power, the state will be able to preserve this artificial construct before it comes crashing down around them. The West has a vast amount of wealth and can fight for a very long time, but those who make war on reality will always find that it ends in disaster. Maintaining an aristocracy of victimhood will inevitably cost more social capital than any civilization can produce. Let us hope that progressive hubris is brought to heel before that final bill comes due. www.theblaze.com/op-ed/macintyre-the-aristocracy-of-victimhood

[@politics4270]

❤❤

[@sublimeister9630]

The banality & sanctity of Good & Evil-this is Holism or Non-duality in Buddhism. 🙏🏻😊

[@321bytor]

Buddhism is as silly as every other religion 🤦‍♂

[@TheRevAndIsWorld]

nut knowing strings

[@rockyfjord5338]

Hannah Arendt's accent makes it difficult for me to follow. An accompanying transcript would be helpful. A video would also be better than just voice. She is an important voice, though I found her book that I read, difficult, the German run on sentences are hard to follow.

[@Eaglepass]

I remember this scar a type Silhouette adores you're doom embrace it onto yourself is a truth of them (Others will defiantly be complaint) ...Acknowledgment vs.displine... Judgmental images informing the Intellectually realistic designed shapes of nature. ...Measurement these days has now sourced humanitys overview is spaced in voluminous amounts. "Basically you're still a sundial question" ...Expirations Expectation. Don't be a waste paper basket case. ...Black friday tells data-stats its now2023. The printing press had already released xerox. ...An Unknown answerd the question of time Itself reasoning Defiance.

[@die_schlechtere_Milch]

How does she know whether or not the evil of e.g. Eichmann was NOT demonic? Is there a way to find out or is she just assuming?

[@asphaltpilgrim]

Strictly speaking (if you believe in real demons) it is an assumption, but I think as a secular person she meant 'demonic' in a more metaphorical sense. Maybe (this is just me) she could have meant he was not demonic compared to Hitler (who was the true mastermind and wanted those things dome)

[@cheri238]

"The Freedom of the Known" Krishnamurti

[@Jalcolm1]

We know the answer. The soviets had a lot of material on Eichmann. She was WRONG. He was a virulent antisemite and very enthusiastic administrator of the final solution. He fooled her. “I’m just a poor little bureaucrat. A mouse, not a man.” He was Penn and Teller and she bought the nonsense. Evil is not banal. Ever. Philosophers are not good at thinking.

[@newtonswig]

She went and watched his trial- made it sort of her life’s work to understand why Eichmann did what he did, and was by all accounts pretty smart and empathetic. She was in a pretty good spot for an accurate vibe check to be fair. I do think the cliff’s notes of Eichmann in Jerusalem are a pretty unthinking cliche in themselves, though. Of course there is another side to that commonly understood. Hate feels good and that is always a possibility for humanity. But that is not so much to be thought of as demonic IMO, so much as that other ‘outmoded’ label of ‘sinful’.

[@die_schlechtere_Milch]

​@@asphaltpilgrim i too think that it is "just" an assumption, at least I do not know about any arguments on her behalf for that thesis. One could argue, that she does not see the need to argue that the evilness of someone like Eichmann was demonic (in the sense of "caused by demons"), because she saw the existence of demons as absurd. But for her that route was not open, as she says that the word "existence" has no meaning when predicated of super-natural or super-sensible entities. Also, if the point would be trivial, so would then be a good deal of her work on evil too. If I am arguing against a position firmly upheld in the philosophical tradition, I better have good arguments instead of mere assumptions. If the force of her work lies in the observation, that modern evil is not demonic but merely banal, but finds it trivial that evil cannot be demonic, then she must find at least the negative part of her work (that evil is not demonic) trivial, or even "banal". The question then would be, what the positive part (evil is banal) would add to the negative part. But if the banality consists in not being caused by anything special, then the information added to the negative thesis is also not anything special, as evil is then just what it is and not caused by anything special, and we should not expect to find any profound answers when we look into the question what caused the particular evil. Eichmann was just doing his job and he had kids and was a bureaucrat. Surely, given the enourmous popularity of Arendt, I must be missing something, don't I ?