We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt's Lessons in Love and Disobedience

by Lyndsey Stonebridge

You think your own thoughts but in the place of somebody else,[*]

But she also teaches that it is when the experience of powerlessness is at its most acute, when history seems at its most bleak, that the determination to think like a human being, creatively, courageously, and complicatedly, matters the most.

Arendt teaches that if you really love the world (and she did) you must have the courage to protect it—to disobey.

Having a free mind in Arendt’s sense means turning away from dogma, political certainties, theoretical comfort zones, and satisfying ideologies. It means learning instead to cultivate the art of staying true to the hazards, vulnerabilities, mysteries, and perplexities of reality, because ultimately that is our best chance of remaining human.

Fundamental questions about the human condition are not beside the point in dire political times; they are the point.

Anti-semitism, imperialism, and totalitarianism were the three modern political evils

Labor, work, and action

private, social, a...

“As a woman I have no country…As a woman, my country is the whole world,” Virginia Woolf

Apparently nobody wants to know that contemporary history has created a new kind of human beings—the kind that are put in concentration camps by their foes and in internment camps by their friends, she added.

We are free to change the world and to start something new in it (CR 5). That freedom begins not with what she once called reckless optimism, but with the determination to exist as a fully living and thinking person in a world among others (OT xxvi).

She had fled Germany in 1933 after the Reichstag decrees made life there impossible for Jews

Totalitarianism was not just a new system of oppression, it seemed to have altered the texture of human experience itself.

Totalitarian regimes did not simply command obedience from the top, as had most tyrannies over history, but rather were organized like an onion. There was a dark heart at the center, but the system’s inhumanity soaked through every layer.

up until the late 1940s relatively few, including Arendt, used the word totalitarianism, which was first coined by the Italian “philosopher of fascism,” Giovanni Gentile, in the 1920s).

Willem Sassen

Heinrich Blücher,

(we might pause here for a moment of envy for those students taught to read Machiavelli that autumn by Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy)

Thinking means that each time you are confronted with some difficulty in life you have to make up your mind anew, she wrote in her final book, The Life of the Mind (LM 177).

When people talk of a particular view as being “Arendtian,” they’re often referring to this stubborn insistence on the messy reality of history.

She believed that reality required responsiveness, not dogma.

Comprehension…means the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and resisting of reality—whatever it may be or might have been

mutterings about an “Arendt cult” first emerged in the 1950s from a committed Left that objected to her anti-communism

She was sometimes wrong, principally about the politics and history of race in America, and her tone was sometimes arrogant. But she was never stupid,

She was fearless in her thinking because she felt, although without grandeur, that that was what her age demanded.

This puts the moral and political onus squarely on each new generation.

But unlike some of her philosophical contemporaries, she did not think this groundlessness made existence itself absurd.

persistence of moral thoughtlessness—and

she worried that an obsessive preoccupation with living an authentically free life meant that people had lost the capacity to see that what had gone wrong was not individual existence but our plural existence—our politics, in other

words (PP 202). It’s not you, it really is us.

danger lies in becoming a true inhabitant of the desert and fe...

Totalitarianism thrived in desert conditions, she warned them. There

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, called this Selbestdenken, which translates literally as “self-thinking,” but which is more commonly translated as “thinking for oneself.”

The image that Arendt used to describe Lessing’s thought later could equally apply to her own: instead of fixing his identity in history with a perfectly consistent system, he scattered into the world, as he himself knew “nothing but fermenta cognitionis.”[3]

Rahel Varnhagen.

Leonhard Euler

Euler’s Graph,

There was Vernunft, reason, the means by which you worked things out, and Verstand, intellect, understanding, and reflection, which we use to search for meaning.

Our existence depends on how we think for ourselves and so for and with one another, he reasoned.

that we think and that how we think has moral consequences.

Kant’s whole ethics amounts to the idea that every person, in every action, must reflect on whether the maxim of

his action can become a general law. In other words…it really is the complete opposite of obedience! Every person is a lawgiver. In Kant, nobody has the right to obey.[3]

She was barely sixteen when she first read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781).

the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment,

Nobody is ever allowed to retreat from the world into their own minds completely, and racism and sexism keep some visible whether they like it or not.

Søren Kierkegaard

Adolf Eichmann’s

Elisabeth Young-Bruehl,

The thinking ego is sheer activity and therefore ageless, sexless, without qualities and without a life story

Arendt valued perplexity over identity;