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| hannah_arendt [2024/11/01 22:34] – created mchiasson | hannah_arendt [2024/11/01 22:46] (current) – mchiasson |
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| Arendt's work appears to have focused primarily on the ways individuals and collectives could think and act in ways that escape the constraints and assumptions of the past which inhibit free ethical and imaginative possibilities, broadly speaking. Her experiences arose out of the tragedy and chaos of World War II and the holocaust, as an escaped Jewish woman to the United States. | Hannah Arendt's work focuses primarily on the ways individuals and collectives can think and act in ways that escape the social and political conditions which inhibit ethical and imaginative thinking and action, broadly speaking. Her work emerges out of the tragedy and chaos of World War II and the holocaust, having escaped as a Jewish woman to the United States. |
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| From my reading at this point, she draws upon Kant, Heidegger, Socrates, and even Nietzsche's diagnoses, within various continental traditions, to develop novel perspectives grounded in Kant's Critique of Judgment, Socrates views on the polis and enlarged mentality through free men conversing with each other beyond the myopia of private lives (in contrast to what we think now of limiting politics so we can be free individuals), and Heideggerian critiques of rationality and technology. | From my reading at this point, her diagnosis and response draws upon Kant, Heidegger, Socrates, and even Nietzsche's nihilistic diagnoses, to develop novel perspectives grounded in Kant's Critique of Judgment (and in various ways, [[:reflective judgment]], Socrates' views of the Greek [[:polis] and [[:enlarged mentality]] from the conversing of free men with each other beyond the myopia of private lives (in contrast to what we think now of restricting politics so we can be free individuals, and appointing experts to carry out the tasks), and Heideggerian critiques of rationality and technology. |
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| | She also draws on Kafka's work, exploring the meaningless misery of life aimlessly and often viciously delivered by people through rules -- perhaps the basis of her [[:banality of evil]] in explaining how German guards like Eichmann were able to deliver evil without being evil, but simply dumbed-down individuals delivering violence and death through the mindless following-of-rules, divorced from human conditions and [[:existential]] responsibility. In concluding in this way, her work is an indictment of political [[:nihilism]] -- ie. the empty following of unrooted rules connected to nothing -- as opposed to the psychological nilhilism expressed by [[:Nietzsche]] |
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