Hannah Arendt, active person

The “theorist” (as she called herself) Hannah Arendt is a person with an exciting and bizarre fate. A student of the influential and “fashionable” German thinkers Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers, she was strikingly beautiful in her youth. With a married 37-year-old Heidegger, she had a stormy romance (during which they wrote philosophical letters to each other about their love). And she wrote her dissertation on love. Then “suddenly” (being a non-believer and having grown up in a German Protestant culture) she became fascinated by the “Jewish question”. With the rise of the Nazis to power, this interest intensifies, she flees Germany and begins to cooperate with international Jewish organizations, urging Jews to resist the Nazis. After the release of the fundamental The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt made a brilliant academic career at American universities. She is engaged in the socio-political interpretation of German existential philosophy in a free but unfailingly brilliant style (in which a passionate, powerful and always feminine voice is heard). An important milestone in her journey was a reflection report on the trial of the Nazi criminal Adolf Eichmann. According to Arendt, the irony is that Eichmann was unable to think and act, he lived by inertia – in this banality of evil, and not in the villainous will, the real danger of Nazism. What can give hope in the situation of the catastrophe of the middle of the 1871th century, which Arendt experienced and analyzed all her life? How to live, knowing that people are capable of such a radical evil? Only by relying on a new, “different” (as Heidegger said) beginning. Arendt seeks the experience of such beginnings – in ancient Athens, in the French Revolution, in the councils of deputies that are spontaneously created during revolutions – in Paris in 1956, in Hungary in XNUMX. And he insists: if we relax, relying on nature, on technology, on experts, we will perish as humanity.

Possibility of action

Man by himself, by nature, by inertia, within himself, is nothing. Neither the “soul” nor the mighty “mind” exhaust its essence. Only action is truly worthy of a person: it makes his life joyful and meaningful, as it takes a person beyond his limits – towards other people and towards a new future. Arendt derives the possibility of action from two existential premises: the ability to be born (each is unique at birth, each promises something different) and multiplicity (by definition, there are always several people at once, and one person is not enough to consider, he is only a fragment of the multitude).

Power as potential

The philosophical treatise “The Condition of Man” describes the “correct” structure of the human world, which was deliberately destroyed by Nazism and Stalinism. Power is the ability of people to act together, the potential for joint action. And where people are scattered and apathetic, there is no power at all. Despots in such societies have only violence, not power.

Separation of beginnings

Modern society mixes two bearing principles of human life – public and private. For example, the leading subjects of general discussion are the family and sexuality. However, according to Arendt, their separation is more correct – for the public sphere, equality of participants, equality of opinions and actions is important. The political activity of people and the public sphere where it takes place is the main thing for a person and human society. In the private sphere, hidden from prying eyes, there can be both inequality and selfish calculation. In modern society, this principle is outdated, but Arendt insists on it as a principle. From these ideas of hers went the intellectual fashion for the “public sphere” as the basis and even in many respects the replacement of political democracy. But at the same time, they were severely criticized by feminists: how can one call for the preservation of traditional roles in the family, demanding freedom and equality only in politics?