Yasemin Sari on a new film about a courageous thinker and her views on responsibility and the nature of evil.
http://philosophynow.org/issues/100/Hannah_Arendt
Hannah Arendt
Re: Hannah Arendt
With this latest issue of Philosophy Now, issue 100, the theme is language. So it is interesting to me that a review about the movie Hannah Arendt is included in it because the movie's theme doesn't deal with semantics or language but with thinking. (Coincidentally, I just saw the movie and it was riveting.)
What I am thinking is that some philosophers have put to much emphasis on language as a factor, since in the main it is not a mechanism that has really made our world. In the scheme of things language has not been the grand agent that so many have made of it. In comparison to thinking language has been a trivial agent in developing and shaping our world. Moreover, language is really just a tool, a handmaiden to thinking in bestowing the major principles of life.
Hannah Arendt didn't provoke the wroth of critics with her language, per se. She did it with her thinking.
What I am thinking is that some philosophers have put to much emphasis on language as a factor, since in the main it is not a mechanism that has really made our world. In the scheme of things language has not been the grand agent that so many have made of it. In comparison to thinking language has been a trivial agent in developing and shaping our world. Moreover, language is really just a tool, a handmaiden to thinking in bestowing the major principles of life.
Hannah Arendt didn't provoke the wroth of critics with her language, per se. She did it with her thinking.
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Impenitent
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Re: Hannah Arendt
thinking is great
Autism is a problem for others?
do you not think in language?
-Imp
Autism is a problem for others?
do you not think in language?
-Imp
Re: Hannah Arendt
Judging Arendt
"There is an argument throughout the film about what kind of a person Hannah Arendt was: about how she lived, thought, wrote, spoke, and smoked. Arendt existed with others; she cherished her relationship with her loved ones, and found this to be at the root of her existence. We see the importance of this in a scene where her husband tries to leave the house without interrupting her while she’s writing. He says that philosophers should not be interrupted while they are thinking, and she replies, “But they cannot think without kisses.”
Arendt responded to the world around her in her quest for truth – not for eternal truth(s), but for the meaning found in one’s judgment of what appears to them. Many critics have taken issue with her shift from her analysis of the Nazi terror as ‘radical evil’ in The Origins of Totalitarianism to her later idea, the ‘banality of evil’, in Eichmann in Jerusalem. As we see in the film, this judgment on Eichmann was welcomed neither by Arendt’s close circle of friends, nor by the Jewish community, nor by The New Yorker readership at large. In fact, she was accused by Gershom Scholem of not loving the Jewish people (though in the film his words are uttered by Kurt Blumenfeld, at what we understand to be his deathbed). To this Arendt replies, “I only love my friends. This is the only love I am capable of.”
As she makes clear in The Life of the Mind, thinking is a faculty of the mind, and the (intellectual) mind is different from the soul that moves us, as the seat of the passions. For Arendt, a lack of human sentiment was not enough to explain evil. For her, our shared world can only be meaningful and good when we can be seen and heard by others. The principle of this involves not sentiment, but thought, whose reality can only tangibly appear in conversation, and can be maintained only when we keep this conversation going through our public use of reason. What Arendt does by way of Eichmann’s trial is to argue that evil lies not in the passions of a monster, but rather, in Eichmann’s inability to think with and for himself.
This film urges us to think, and it shows us that the stakes are high. One needs to have the courage to think, and to speak, and to make one’s thoughts public. Von Trotta shows us that Arendt would have been unlikely to give up this courage. To Heinrich Bluecher’s question as to whether she would have written what she had written had she known the consequences, she replies, “Yes,” and so affirms her responsibility to the world."
I have the film from Netflix; however, every time I plan to watch it I discover a basketball game that is a must. I'll watch it one of these days and then report here.
"There is an argument throughout the film about what kind of a person Hannah Arendt was: about how she lived, thought, wrote, spoke, and smoked. Arendt existed with others; she cherished her relationship with her loved ones, and found this to be at the root of her existence. We see the importance of this in a scene where her husband tries to leave the house without interrupting her while she’s writing. He says that philosophers should not be interrupted while they are thinking, and she replies, “But they cannot think without kisses.”
Arendt responded to the world around her in her quest for truth – not for eternal truth(s), but for the meaning found in one’s judgment of what appears to them. Many critics have taken issue with her shift from her analysis of the Nazi terror as ‘radical evil’ in The Origins of Totalitarianism to her later idea, the ‘banality of evil’, in Eichmann in Jerusalem. As we see in the film, this judgment on Eichmann was welcomed neither by Arendt’s close circle of friends, nor by the Jewish community, nor by The New Yorker readership at large. In fact, she was accused by Gershom Scholem of not loving the Jewish people (though in the film his words are uttered by Kurt Blumenfeld, at what we understand to be his deathbed). To this Arendt replies, “I only love my friends. This is the only love I am capable of.”
As she makes clear in The Life of the Mind, thinking is a faculty of the mind, and the (intellectual) mind is different from the soul that moves us, as the seat of the passions. For Arendt, a lack of human sentiment was not enough to explain evil. For her, our shared world can only be meaningful and good when we can be seen and heard by others. The principle of this involves not sentiment, but thought, whose reality can only tangibly appear in conversation, and can be maintained only when we keep this conversation going through our public use of reason. What Arendt does by way of Eichmann’s trial is to argue that evil lies not in the passions of a monster, but rather, in Eichmann’s inability to think with and for himself.
This film urges us to think, and it shows us that the stakes are high. One needs to have the courage to think, and to speak, and to make one’s thoughts public. Von Trotta shows us that Arendt would have been unlikely to give up this courage. To Heinrich Bluecher’s question as to whether she would have written what she had written had she known the consequences, she replies, “Yes,” and so affirms her responsibility to the world."
I have the film from Netflix; however, every time I plan to watch it I discover a basketball game that is a must. I'll watch it one of these days and then report here.