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

by Lyndsey Stonebridge

The Life of the Mind,

revolutionary Left led by Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht’s Sparticists.

Tobias Rathjen,

Hermann Cohen,

Martin Heidegger’s

“numpty.”

Professor Dr. Martin Heidegger (aged thirty-six) to his student, “Miss Arendt” (aged eighteen),

Plato’s Sophist.

Hans Adolf Bühler’s

modest humanism,

This humanism lay at the heart of the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl’s philosophy, without which Heidegger could not have made his break with metaphysics.

Raymond Aron,

Heidegger had failed to connect his thinking to the reality of the world he lived in, and that was unforgivable.

Kant taught that every individual represents humanity, that’s why we have moral obligations to one another.

Heidegger’s self, by contrast, lived in absolute isolation, under self-imposed lockdown, and represented no one but himself.

Karl Jaspers,

comparativists,

Ernst Cassirer

Aby Wa...

Weltanschauungen or views of the world which tell people compelling and meaningful stories about themselves and work pretty well until, that is, they don’t—when

a perpetual shaking up, a perpetual appeal

to the powers of life in oneself and

o...

Jaspers, existence can develop only in the togetherness of men in the common given world

We are running on air but we run together—if only we can find ways of communicating between ourselves. There is always hope.

faith in the possibilities of human communication.

Arendt had gone to Heidelberg to work with Jaspers on her doctoral thesis on Saint Augustine and his writings on love, neighborliness, and community.

Benno von Wiese

Günther Stern,

Jerome Kohn.

The Jews are dying in Europe and are being buried like dogs, Hannah Arendt concluded in a letter she wrote to the philosopher and historian Gershom Scholem in October of 1940. She was writing to tell him about the death of their mutual friend, the so brilliant, so hopeless, Walter Benjamin (“Benji”), who had just taken his own life in Portbou on the Spanish border, having been told that the papers he had obtained in Marseilles may have been the right ones when he left, but the visa rules had now changed, and he was going nowhere except back over the mountains.

Today, Israeli artist Dani Karavan’s memorial sculpture, Passages, Homage to Walter Benjamin, stands next to that cemetery on the cliff in Portbou.

Theses on the Philosophy of History

“It is more arduous to honor the memory of anonymous beings than that of the renowned. The construction of history is consecrated to the memory of the nameless,”

she would show how the long history that made mass displacement an everyday reality began with racism, imperialism, and the seemingly insatiable expansion of global capitalism.

Hannah Arendt argued for a harder truth: the anonymity and vulnerability of placeless people is also, potentially at least, everybody’s problem because it exposes the weak spot at the heart of a system that relies solely on the reliability of nation states and human goodwill.

Arendt’s generation discovered that all it took to become a refugee was to be born into the wrong race, religion, class, place, or time.

boomerang effect to describe how imperialism’s unique brand of administrative and racist dehumanization had spun back home to Europe in the 1930s and 1940s

Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, and the late Albert Memmi, also pointed out that from where they were standing the tearing of people from their land and homes, pushing them into camps and slave labor, turning lives into commodities and wars into a means of ethnic cleansing, appeared neither novel in their coolly administered execution nor unprecedented in their cruelty.

holes of oblivion.

These were the concentration camps and ghettos, the detention centers, as well as the unmarked graves, whose aim was to make those who dwelled in them invisible.

The aim was to render people’s experience of the world itself superfluous.

Labor and detention camps, once popular even in nontotalitarian countries, she pointed out, were also useful for getting undesirable elements of all sorts—refugees, stateless persons, the asocial, and the unemployed—out of the way (OT 574).

Rahel Varnhagen.

propaganda effect of infallibility:

the trick of appearing omnipotent by prophesying a future that you then make happen.

Green Front route through the forest of the Ore Mountains.

Robert Lowell,

Lifting himself free of the warring sides, the poet told the story of the Trojan Wars as though from above—like

Homer may have inherited this viewpoint from the generations of refugees uprooted by the wars.[15]