"Quote" of the Week

May 7, 2012

Quote: “It is perfectly true that ‘all sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them,’ in the words of Isak Dinesen, who not only was one of the great storytellers of our time but also—and she was nearly unique in this respect—knew what she was doing.”

-Hannah Arendt, Truth and Politics, p. 262

“‘All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them’ –Isak Dinesen” (The Human Condition, 175 [one of two mottos for Chapter 5: Action])

Scholar: Michael Weinman                                           Click here to read "Speaking Through the Words of Others."

__________________________________________________________

May 14, 2012

Quote: "We need to learn ‘simplicity’ and to unlearn ‘the simplification of abstract thinking’, to become fluent in the art and the language of ‘concrete’ thoughts and feelings, and thus to comprehend that both abstract notions and abstract emotions are not merely false to what actually happens but are viciously interconnected.”

-Hannah Arendt: Introduction to J. Glenn Gray: The Warriors. Reflections on Men in Battle, New York: Harcourt 1970, p. viii

Scholar: Wolfgang Heuer                                               Click here to read "The Marriage of Reason and Emotion."

__________________________________________________________

May 21, 2012

Quote: Acting and Thinking: Thinking is rather complete concentration or absolute waking, that through which and in which all other "faculties" concentrate themselves.

 -Arendt, Denktagebuch, vol. 1, 12

Scholar: Roger Berkowitz                                               Click here to read: The Relation Between Thinking and Acting

__________________________________________________________

May 28, 2012

Quote: "The human condition comprehends more than the condition under which life has been given to man. Men are conditioned beings because everything they come in contact with turns immediately into a condition of their existence.  The world in which the vita activaspends itself consists of things produced by human activities; but the things that owe their existence exclusively to men nevertheless constantly condition their human makers."

-Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 1958, p. 9

Scholar: Lance Strate                                                          Click here to read "We Create the Conditions that Condition Us."

__________________________________________________________

June  4, 2012

Quote: "From a humdrum life without significance and consequence the wind had blown him into History, as he understood it, namely, into a Movement that always kept moving and in which somebody like him—already a failure in the eyes of his social class, of his family, and hence in his own eyes as well—could start from scratch and still make a career."

-Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 33

Scholar: Jennie Han                                                  Click here to read "Sacrificing the Individual for the Movement.

__________________________________________________________

June 11, 2012

Quote: "The alternative to forgiveness, but by no means its opposite, is punishment, and both have in common that they attempt to put an end to something that without interference could go on endlessly. It is therefore quite significant, a structural element in the realm of human affairs, that men are unable to forgive what they cannot punish and that they are unable to punish what has turned out to be unforgivable."

- Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

Scholar: Andrew T. Dilts                                      Click here to read "The Alternative to Forgiveness".

__________________________________________________________

June 18, 2012

Quote: It is true that totalitarian domination tried to establish these holes of oblivion into which all deeds, good and evil, would disappear; but just as the Nazis' feverish attempts, from June, 1942, on, to erase all traces of the massacres - through cremation, through burning in open pits, through the use of explosives and flame-throwers and bone-crushing machinery - were doomed to failure, so all efforts to let their opponents "disappear in silent anonymity" were in vain. The holes of oblivion do not exist. Nothing human is that perfect, and there are simply too many people in the world to make oblivion possible. One man will always be left alive to tell the story.

            —Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem

Scholar: Roger Berkowitz                                                 Click here to read, "Banishing Oblivion."

___________________________________________________________

July 9, 2012

Quote: “‘[T]he revolution was effected before the war commenced,’ not because of any specifically revolutionary or rebellious spirit but because the inhabitants of the colonies were ‘formed by law into corporations, or bodies politic,’ and possessed ‘the right to assemble … in their town halls, there to deliberate upon the public affairs."

—Hannah Arendt, quoting John Adams, in On Revolution

Scholar: Stephen Haswell Todd                                    Click here to read "To Deliberate Upon the Public Affairs."

__________________________________________________________

July 16, 2012

Quote: "What makes us think? Hegel's answer: Reconciliation. Reconciliation with what? With things as they are. But this we do constantly anyhow by establishing ourselves in the world. Why repeat it in thought?"

- Hannah Arendt's Denktagebuch, 782.

Scholar: Roger Berkowitz                                                Click here to read "Why Think?"

__________________________________________________________

July 23, 2012

Quote: “What in thinking only occasionally and quasi-metaphorically happens, to retreat from the world of appearances, takes place in aging and dying as an appearance… in this sense thinking is an anticipation of dying (ceasing, ‘to cease to be among men’) just as action in the sense of ‘to make a beginning’ is a repetition of birth.”

-Hannah Arendt, Denktagebuch, p. 792

Scholar: Ian Storey                                                          Click here to read "The Intimate World"

__________________________________________________________

July 30, 2012

Quote: “The highest laws of the land (America) are not only the constitution and constitutional laws, but also contracts.”

-Hannah Arendt, Denktagebuch, p. 131

Scholar: Tracy B. Strong                                                    Click here to read "The Highest Law of the Land"

__________________________________________________________

August 6, 2012

Quote: “The accusative of violence, like that of love, destroys the in-between, crushes or burns it, renders the other defenseless, strips itself of protection.  In contrast to this stands thedative of saying and speaking, which confirms the in-between, moves within it.  Then again there is the accusative of the singing poem, which removes and releases what it sings from the in-between and its relations, without confirming anything.  When poetry and not philosophy absolutizes, there’s rescue.”

-Hannah Arendt, Denktagebuch, vol. 1, p. 428 [August 1953], (my translation.)

Scholar: Patchen Markell                                               Click here to read "Hannah Arendt & the Case of the Poetry."

__________________________________________________________

August 13, 2012

Quote: “Plurality of languages: [...] It is crucial 1. that there are many languages and that they differ not only in vocabulary, but also in grammar, and so in mode of thought and 2. that all languages are learnable.”

-Hannah Arendt, Denktagebuch, i.e. Thinking Diary, p. 42f

Scholar: Thomas Wild (with Anna Posten)             Click here to read "Arendt's Plurality of Languages."

_________________________________________________________

August 20, 2012

Quote: “We are born into this world of plurality where father and mother stand ready for us, ready to receive us and welcome us and guide us and prove that we are not strangers.”

-Hannah Arendt, Denktagebuch
Notebook 19, Section 39, Feburary, 1954

Scholar: Jeffrey Champlin                                            Click here to read "Born into a World of Plurality."

_________________________________________________________

August 27, 2012

Quote: “What connects thinking and poetry [Dichten] is metaphor. In philosophy one calls concept what in poetry [Dichtkunst] is called metaphor. Thinking creates its “concepts” out of the visible, in order to designate the invisible.”

-Hannah Arendt, Denktagebuch, vol. 2, p. 728 (August 1969) (translation my own)

Scholar: Wout Cornelissen                                           Click here to read "Thinking Metaphors"

__________________________________________________________

September 3, 2012

Quote: It can be dangerous to tell the truth: “There will always be One against All, one person against all others. [This is so] not because One is terribly wise and All are terribly foolish, but because the process of thinking and researching, which finally yields truth, can only be accomplished by an individual person. In its singularity or duality, one human being seeks and finds – not the truth (Lessing) –, but some truth.”

-Hannah Arendt, Denktagebuch, Book XXIV, No. 21

Scholar: Ursula Ludz                                                Click here to read "One Against All"

_________________________________________________________

September 10, 2012

Quote: “Everything that is appears; everything that appears disappears; everything that is alive has anurge to appear; this urge is called vanity; since there is no urge to disappear and disappearance is the law of appearance, the urge, called vanity, is in vain.‘Vanitas vanitatum vanitas’—all is vanity, all is in vain.”

-Hannah Arendt, Denktagebuch, 796

Scholar: Anne O'Byrne                                                Click here to read "Vain, Like a Butterfly."

_________________________________________________________

September 17, 2012

Quote: "The history of humanity is not a hotel where someone can rent a room whenever it suits him; nor is it a vehicle which we board or get out of at random.  Our past will be for us a burden beneath which we can only collapse for as long as we refuse to understand the present and fight for a better future.  Only then—but from that moment on—will the burden become a blessing, that is, a weapon in the battle for freedom."

-Hannah Arendt, "Moses or Washington" (March 27, 1942)

Scholar: Lance Strate                                                    Click here to read "History and Freedom".

________________________________________________________

September 25, 2012

Quote: “Hence it is not in the least superstitious, it is even a counsel of realism, to look for the unforeseeable and unpredictable, to be prepared for and to expect “miracles” in the political realm. And the more heavily the scales are weighted in favor of disaster, the more miraculous will the deed done in freedom appear.”

—Hannah Arendt, What is Freedom?

Scholar: Roger Berkowitz                                              Click here to read, "Does the President Matter?"

___________________________________________________________

October 1, 2012

Quote: “What is necessary for the pubic realm is to shield it from the private interests which have intruded upon it in the most brutal and aggressive form.”

-Hannah Arendt

Scholar: Kathleen B. Jones                                           Click here to read Withered Public, Disappearing Private

__________________________________________________________

October 8, 2012

Quote:‘They must remember that they are constantly on the run, and that the world’s reality is actually expressed by their escape.’

 -Hannah Arendt, ‘On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts about Lessing’

Scholar: Lyndsey Stonebridge                                  Click here to read "Refugee Writers and Inner Emigrants"

___________________________________________________________

October 15, 2012

Quote: Political thought is representative. I form an opinion by considering a given issue from different viewpoints….This process of representation does not blindly adopt the actual views of those who stand somewhere else, and hence look upon the world from a different perspective; this is a question neither of empathy, as though I tried to be or to feel like somebody else, nor of counting noses and joining a majority but of being and thinking in my own identity where actually I am not.

-Hannah Arendt, “Truth and Politics” in Between Past and Future, p. 241

Scholar: Jennie Han                                               Click here to read "The Political Weakness of Empathy"

____________________________________________________________

October 22, 2012

Quote: "Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it and by the same token save it from that ruin which, except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and young, would be inevitable."

—Hannah Arendt, The Crisis in Education

Scholar: Roger Berkowitz                  Click here to read 'For the Love of the World.'

__________________________________________________________

October 29, 2012

Quote: “The presence of others who see what we see and hear what we hear assures us of the reality of the world and ourselves.”

-Hannah Arendt,  The Human Condition

Scholar: Peter Baehr                                                 Click here to read "The Burqa and the Political Realm."

_________________________________________________________

November 5, 2012

Quote: “…the enormous pathos which we find in both the American and French Revolutions, this ever-repeated insistence that nothing comparable in grandeur and significance had every happened in the whole recorded history of mankind…”

-Hannah Arendt, On Revolution

Scholar: Ian Storey                                             Click here to read, "The Election: What's Freedom Got to do with it?"

_________________________________________________________

November 12, 2012

Quote: “The teacher's qualification consists in knowing the world and being able to instruct others about it, but his authority rests on his assumption of responsibility for that world.  Vis-à-vis the child, it is as though he were a representative of all adult inhabitants, pointing out the details and saying to the child:  This is our world."

-Hannah Arendt, "A Crisis in Education"

Scholar: Ellen Rigsby                                    Click here to read "Leading Students Into the World"

________________________________________________________________

November 19, 2012

Quote: “In solitude a dialogue always arises, because even in solitude there are always two.”

-Hannah Arendt, Denktagebuch

Scholar: Louise Brinkerhoff                        Click here to read "Even in Solitude There are Always Two"

_________________________________________________________

November 26, 2012

Quote: “To be alive means to live in a world that proceeded one’s own arrival and will survive one’s own departure. On this level of sheer being alive, appearance and disappearance, as they follow upon each other, are the primordial events, which as such mark out time, the time span between birth and death.”

-Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind

Scholar: Davide Panagia                       Click here to read "The Politics of Appearances."

___________________________________________________________

December 3, 2012

Quote: "The emergence of society—the rise of housekeeping, its activities, problems, and organizational devices—from the shadowy interior of the household into the light of the public sphere, has not only blurred the old borderline between private and political, it has also changed almost beyond recognition the meaning of the two terms and their significance for the life of the individual and the citizen. Not only would we not agree with the Greeks that a life spent in the privacy of "one's own" (idion), outside the world of the common, is "idiotic" by definition, or with the Romans to whom privacy offered but a temporary refuge from the business of the res publica; we call private today a sphere of intimacy whose beginnings we may be able to trace back to late Roman, though hardly to any period of Greek antiquity, but whose peculiar manifoldness and variety were certainly unknown to any period prior to the modern age. "

-Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

Scholar: Lance Strate                        Click here to read "The Deprivations of Privacy"

_________________________________________________________

December 10, 2010

Quote: “And wonder what you’ve missed”

- W. H. Auden, as quoted in Hannah Arendt’s The Life of the Mind

Scholar: Frances Lee                                     Click here to read 'Arendt & Auden'

____________________________________________________________

December 17, 2012

Quote: “We are wont to see friendship solely as a phenomenon of intimacy in which the friends open their hearts to each other unmolested by the world and its demands...Thus it is hard for us to understand the political relevance of friendship...But for the Greeks the essence of friendship consisted in discourse...The converse (in contrast to the intimate talk in which individuals speak about themselves), permeated though it may be by pleasure in the friend’s presence, is concerned with the common world.”

-Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times, p. 24

Scholar: Kathleen B. Jones                      Click here to read "Remembrance and Gratitude"

__________________________________________________________

January 7, 2013

Quote: “To my dear Hannah,

In these years our friendship has stood the test.

In this relationship we no longer need to have any worries.

Goodbye,

Your Kurt.

New York, April 30^th 1945.”

Scholar: Kerk Soursourian                            Click here to read "See You Again"

______________________________________________________

January 14, 2013

Quote: Power is actualized only where word and deed have not parted company, where words are not empty and deeds not brutal, where words are not used to veil intentions but to disclose realities, and where deeds are not used to violate and destroy but to establish relations and create new realities.

 -Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

Scholar: William Dixon                                           Click here to read "When Power is Lost"

_________________________________________________________

January 21, 2013

Quote: “All thought arises out of experience, but no thought yields any meaning or even coherence without undergoing the operations of imagining and thinking.”

- Hannah Arendt, Thinking

Scholar: Ian Storey                                                        Click here to read  "Violence, and Thinking with Others"

__________________________________________________________

January 28, 2013

Quote: "Exactly for the sake of what is new and revolutionary in every child, education must be conservative; it must preserve this newness and introduce it as a new thing into an old world."

-Hannah Arendt, The Crisis in Education

Scholar: Thomas Wild                                               Click here to read "For the Sake of What is New."

_________________________________________________________

February 4, 2013

Quote: "Heidegger is wrong: man is not “thrown” “in the world;” if we are thrown, then – no differently from animals – onto the earth. Man is precisely guided, not thrown, precisely for that reason his continuity arises and the way he belongs appears. Poor us, if we are thrown into the world!"

"Heidegger hat unrecht: “in die Welt” ist der Mensch nicht “geworfen;” wenn wir geworfen sind, so – nicht anders als die Tiere – auf die Erde. In die Welt gerade wird der Mensch geleitet, nicht geworfen, da gerade stellt sich seine Kontinuität her und offenbart seine Zugehörigkeit. Wehe uns, wenn wir in die Welt geworfen werden!"

-Hannah Arendt, Denktagebuch, Notebook 21, Section 68, August, 1955

Scholar: Jeffrey Champlin                                             Click here to read "Guided Into the World".

___________________________________________________________

February 11, 2013

Quote: "The extreme form of power is All against One, the extreme form of violence is One against All. And this latter is never possible without instruments."

-Hannah Arendt, On Violence

Scholar: Lance Strate                                                   Click here to read "Secondhand Gun Smoke."

_________________________________________________________

February 18, 2013

Quote: “German Jewry, like Western European Jewry in general, never understood that the simple person is the true center of politics in all democratically governed countries.

And this is also the reason why German Jews often do not understand the just national aspirations of the Jewish people [folk]. Most do not know at all what a people [folk] really is and what it wants. The most beautiful Hebrew in the world will not teach them that. Let the German Jews learn to respect simple person [poshete mentshn], in general, and the simple Jew [yiddishe folks-mentsh], in particular – and then you will be able to speak to them about Jewish politics in all the languages of the world.”

-Hannah Arendt, Op-Ed in Morgen Zshurnal, 1942

Scholar: Na’ama Rokem                                             Click here to read "Hannah Arendt and Yiddish."

__________________________________________________________

February 25, 2012

Quote: "[T]here is another even more cogent reason for [the layman] concerning himself with a critical situation in which he is not immediately involved. And that is the opportunity, provided by the very fact of crisis—which tears away facades and obliterates prejudices—to explore and inquire into whatever has been laid bare of the essence of the matter…"

-Hannah Arendt, "The Crisis in Education"

Scholar: John LeJeune                                                  Click here to read "Learning from Crisis."

__________________________________________________________

March 4, 2013

Quote: Until now the totalitarian belief that everything is possible seems to have proved only that everything can be destroyed. Yet, in their effort to prove that everything is possible, totalitarian regimes have discovered without knowing it   that there are crimes which men can neither punish nor forgive. When the impossible was made possible it became the unpunishable, unforgivable absolute evil which could no longer be understood and explained by the evil motives of self-interest, greed, covetousness, resentment, lust for power, and cowardice; and which therefore anger could not revenge, love could not endure, friendship could not forgive. Just as the victims in the death factories or the holes of oblivion are no longer "human" in the eyes of their executioners, so this newest species of criminals is beyond the pale even of solidarity in human sinfulness.

-Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism 

Scholar: Grace Hunt                                              Click here to read "Arendt on Resentment."

_________________________________________________________

March 11, 2013

Quote: “The wonder that man endures or which befalls him cannot be related in words because it is too general for words….That this speechless wonder is the beginning of philosophy became axiomatic for both Plato and Aristotle.”

-Hannah Arendt, "Philosophy and Politics"

Scholar: Tracy B. Strong                                   Click here to read "The Wonder That Man Endures."

__________________________________________________________

March 18, 2013

Quote: “If it is true that all thought begins with remembrance, it is also true that no remembrance remains secure unless it is condensed and distilled into a framework of conceptual notions within which it can further exercise itself.”

-Hannah Arendt, On Revolution

Scholar: Wolfgang Heuer                                 Click here to read "Do Revolutionaries Always Establish a Dictatorship?"

________________________________________________________

 March 25, 2013

Quote: Trespassing is an everyday occurrence which is in the very nature of action’s constant establishment of new relationships within a web of relations, and it needs forgiving, dismissing in order to go on by constantly releasing men     from what they have done unknowingly.  Only through this constant mutual release from what they do can men remain free agents, only by constant willingness to change their minds and start again can they be trusted with so great a power as that to begin something new.

—Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

Scholar: Grace Hunt                                           Click here to read "Forgiveness."

_________________________________________________________

April 1, 2013

Quote: Critical thinking is possible only where the standpoints of all others are open to inspection. Hence, critical thinking, while still a solitary business, does not cut itself off from ‘all others.’ To be sure, it still goes on in isolation, but by the force of imagination it makes the others present and thus moves in a space that is potentially public, open to all sides; in other words, it adopts the position of Kant’s world citizen. To think with an enlarged mentality means that one trains one’s imagination to go visiting.

-Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, 43

Scholar: Jennie Han                                       Click here to read "Critical Thinking, Judgment and Empathy."

__________________________________________________________

April  8, 2013

Quote: “The shift from the ‘why’ and ‘what’ to the ‘how’ implies that the actual objects of knowledge can no longer be things or eternal motions but must be processes, and that the object of science is no longer nature or the universe but the history, the story of the coming into being, of nature or life or the universe....Nature, because it could be known only in processes which human ingenuity, the ingeniousness of homo faber, could repeat and remake in the experiment, became a process, and all particular natural things derived their significance and meaning solely from their function in the over-all process. In the place of the concept of Being we now find the concept of Process. And whereas it is in the nature of Being to appear and thus disclose itself, it is in the nature of Process to remain invisible, to be something whose existence can only be inferred from the presence of certain phenomena.”

-Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

Scholar: Kathleen B. Jones                      Click here to read "The New Materialism: From 'Why' and 'What' to 'How'."

__________________________________________________________

April 15, 2013

Quote: No government exclusively based on the means of violence has ever existed. Even the totalitarian ruler, whose chief instrument of rule is torture, needs a power basis—the secret police and its net of informers. Only the development of robot soldiers, which, as previously mentioned, would eliminate the human factor completely and, conceivably, permit one man with a push button to destroy whomever he pleased, could change this fundamental ascendancy of power over violence.
—Hannah Arendt, “On Violence.”

Scholar: Roger Berkowitz                     Click here to read "The Impact of Modern Warfare on Power and Politics."

___________________________________________________________

April 29, 2013

Quote: "It is better for you to suffer than to do wrong because you can remain the friend of the sufferer; who would want to be the friend of and have to live together with a murderer? Not even a murderer.  What kind of dialogue could you lead with him? Precisely the dialogue which Shakespeare let Richard III lead with himself after a great number of crimes had been committed:

What do I fear? Myself? There’s none else by.
Richard loves Richard: that is, I am I.
Is there a murderer here? No. Yes, I am:
Then fly. What from myself?"
-Hannah Arendt, ‘Thinking and Moral Considerations’

Scholar: Lyndsey Stonebridge            Click here to read "Performing Thinking: Arendt's Richard III"

___________________________________________________________

May 6, 2013

 Quote: “[Augustine] distinguishes between the questions of "Who am I?" and "What am I?" the first being directed by man at himself […] For in the "great mystery," the grande profundum, which man is (iv. 14), there is "something of man [aliquid hominis] which the spirit of man which is in him itself knoweth not. But Thou, Lord, who has made him [fecisti eum] knowest everything of him [eius omnia]" (x. 5).”

-Hannah Arendt, Human Condition

Scholar: Jeffrey Champlin                Click here to read "Arendt and Philosophical Anthropology"

___________________________________________________________

May 13, 2013

Quote: "There is perhaps no clearer testimony to the loss of the public realm in the modern age than the almost complete loss of authentic concern with immortality, a loss somewhat overshadowed by the simultaneous loss of the               metaphysical concern with eternity."

Scholar: Lance Strate                        Click here to read "Death and the Public Realm"

__________________________________________________________

May 20, 2013

Quote: "Men=earthbound creatures, living in communities, endowed with common sense, sensus communis, a community sense; not autonomous, needing each other’s company even for thinking (“freedom of the pen”)=first part of the Critique of Judgment: aesthetic judgment."

-Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy

Scholar: Jennie Han                         Click here to read "The Courage of Judgment"

___________________________________________________________

May 28, 2013

Quote: “One feels very lonely in this country; this has to do in particular with the fact that everyone is very busy and that for most people the need for leisure simply ceases to exist after a certain amount of time.”

- Hannah Arendt to Gershom Scholem, November 4, 1943

Scholar: Thomas Wild                 Click here to read "Too Busy to Think"

___________________________________________________________

June 3, 2013

Quote: “There is a difference between a man who sets out to murder his old aunt and people who without considering the economic usefulness of their actions at all (…) build factories to produce corpses. (…) Perhaps what is behind it all is only that individual human beings did not kill other individual human beings for human reasons, but that an organized attempt was made to eradicate the concept of the human being”.  –  “And all this ... arises from – or, better, goes along with – the delusion of the omnipotence (not simply with the lust for power) of an individual man. If an indi