Quote of the Weeks

Achilles, too, is a ‘speaker of great words’

Arendt’s historical analysis of speech before the polis prefigures her more focused and forceful treatment of speech and action in Chapter V. Connecting these two sections reveals something of Arendt’s unique sensibility for interpreting historical texts and figures, as well as her deft hand at weaving historical sources into her own positions. Even if we cannot know precisely what Arendt gleaned from Phoinix, I am grateful that her footnotes offer us a way to peer over her shoulder and share in her objects of wonder.

Arendt’s Anton Schmidt

During the Second World War, Anton Schmidt, a Viennese forty-year-old reserve soldier in the Wehrmacht, did something deeply unexpected: he helped Jews, and then also the Jewish underground, intentionally and consistently, for several months, until he was arrested in January 1942 and, a few months later, executed for treason. The story of his heroic acts, which moved Arendt and the rest of the audience in the courtroom in Jerusalem so profoundly, was not wholly unknown at the time of the Eichmann trial. Arendt notes that it was already published in Yad Vashem’s Hebrew Bulletin and that, following this publication, it was also mentioned in a few Yiddish-American papers. However, it does seem to have found its way into Arendt’s report as if by accident––told in the Israeli courtroom and then commemorated by Arendt only due to the prosecution’s interest in a relatively insignificant comment Schmidt once uttered. Apparently, Schmidt had told Abba Kovner, one of the leaders of the Jewish resistance in the Vilna Ghetto, who later became a renowned poet and a leading public figure in Israel, that he had heard rumours about “a dog, called Eichmann,” who “arranges everything.”

Anti-Fascism 101

The hidden heart of this quote, and of Arendt's thought in my view, is thoughtlessness. And the pathetic paragon of thoughtlessness in her body of writings is of course Adolf Eichmann, whom she treats—with a surprising degree of humor—as a comical figure. Arendt describes the "horrible" phenomenon of Eichmann's thoughtlessness as "outright funny." For example, “officialese,” as she terms it, “became his language because he was genuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliché.” As such, Eichmann’s role as an actor in the theater of his trial, according to Arendt, is “not a ‘monster’,” but rather “a clown.” The reason for this clownishness, Arendt concludes, is that Eichmann was—shockingly—too completely “normal,” specifically in a horrific Nazi context in which “only ‘exceptions’ could be expected to act ‘normally’.”

Stubborn Things: The Problem with a World that Won’t Fade

In The Human Condition, which is where the quote I have chosen comes from, Arendt famously assigns a central theoretical place to the distinction between the perishable character of the outcome of labour – goods that are either extinguished by consumption or immediately returned to nature – and the durability of the products of work – things that outlast their use. She is also very clear, however, that such durability – this unnatural, artificial attribute that men willingly bestow to the products of their work – is never absolute. It is only for a limited time, indeed, that things can escape the metabolism of nature.

Hannah Arendt, Pearl-Diving, and the Humanities

This is one of the most arresting passages and images in Arendt’s works. I read it as a highly original defence of the humanities, which are now greatly endangered throughout the world. It is rarely interpreted in this light, but I think it distills better than many other accounts the essence of a genuinely meaningful vocation of a humanities scholar and/or teacher. At least personally, it provides me with a self-interpretation that illuminates my teaching experience at the university.

When the World is at Stake: Arendt on The Value of Emersonian Wisdom

"What attracts me to this quote is that Arendt is expressing the value of Emersonian wisdom in the context of a world facing unprecedented meaninglessness. More specifically, this is a world where totalitarianism and the Nazi regime revealed to us that anything is possible, and our abilities to confront both understanding and independent judgment have become increasingly difficult. Further, Arendt identifies Emerson as occupying a unique space in the Western Tradition that is concerned with chiefly human matters and who embodies a kind of thinking that does not belong to the vita contempletiva – the philosopher’s way of thought that Arendt critiqued as detached from the world, experience, and the unpredictability of the realm of human affairs."

Time as Broken in the Middle

Arendt understands Kafka’s parable, "He," as describing what happens when we think. When we think about anything – and, Arendt is interested in thinking through political questions – the past exerts a force on our thought. But, contrary to expectation, the past is not some ‘burden’ or ‘dead weight’ placed upon the shoulders of the human person. The past is never simply dead, nor even past. It propels thought into the future and battles with it, which, again, contrary to expectation, drives the human person back into the past and seems to want to be rooted in something in the past.

What would an “Arendtian naturalism” look like?

I have always been intrigued by Arendt’s relationship to materialism and the natural sciences. On a first reading, Arendt seems to be a committed humanist, in the sense that she sees human beings as possessing a distinct set of qualities that are the basis of morality and politics. As a consequence, she is distrustful of observing human affairs through the lenses of the natural sciences, which disregard freedom and spontaneity. This quote, however, shows that things are not so simple.

In the midst of darkness

In the 1968 preface of Men in Dark Times, Hannah Arendt invites us to explore the life of some extraordinary human beings that, with their unconventional lives, shed some light when darkness prevailed in history and freedom was not in sight. Seeking the exemplary dimension of deeds and actions of these non-ordinary individuals is a practice common to politics, philosophy, historiography, or poetry, but Arendt’s unique way of doing it has a strong appeal for the reader and it still has it for us now.