Week 6 Discussion Obedience, Authority, and Evil
In your initial post, simply respond to the articles, videos, and movies & explore the tensions between Arendt’s personal life and her work as a philosopher. Arendt is often vilified and a significant number of people have accused her of being against the state of Israel and a foe of its people. Yet, she was as much a victim of the Nazis as many others and only very lucky that she was able to flee Nazi Germany. What connections can you make between Arendt’s controversial life and the climate in which she found herself?
What might Arendt say about Summer 2017’s events in Charlottesville, the war in Syria, the persecution of the Rohingya, or any other current event that is described as a manifestation of evil? As always, these questions are intended to help you make connections and to explore; you do not need to attempt to answer all of them.
Week 6 Discussion Obedience, Authority, and Evil
Hannah Arendt is actually a humanist thinker who boldly provoked about her personal life and her professional life like her work being a philosopher. She has provocatively believed to be a part of the shared politics and the ethical world. Thus, her writing is so inspiring that she made certain philosophies based on the political dangers through her abstract philosophy. Thus, she eventually obfuscates the reality of the world. Hence, she fiercely defended the idea of the significance of the public sphere that is intensely private, while defending the significance of privacy and prerequisites of her life in public. Thus, she even embraces as well as enraged with the interlocutors from the political persuasions. As Hannah Arendt wrote about the controversies that took place at the Eichmann trial, she remained a controversial figure among all the intellects in Israel, as she is considered to be a vilified character in Israel (Zertal 2007).
Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, is like a controversial analysis based on the Jerusalem trial. As she gives a description of the mindless acts of the Nazi horrors. As per her, personal experience, with the rise of Nazism in Germany which is like a combination of her statelessness which actually turned her philosophy based on politics. Arendt portrayed Eichmann and all the other Nazi criminals, as hated-filled, anti-Semitic monsters based on the bureaucrats to spoke up openly and boldly based on the Jewish councils within the deportation as well as based on the destruction of the people (Hac.bard.edu 2020). Therefore, Arendt’s central insight is based on “the banality of evil”, which deals with great crimes with mindless conformity about humanity, as compared with the skepticism of Israel. Thus, her clandestinely is collected based on the information on the Nazis which is propaganda, based on the Zionist organization, as this landed her to be in prison for a week, and was released by the German police. Arendt says about Summer 2017’s events in Charlottesville, as she openly asks, as well as to understand the various ways to emphasize the political danger by creating a provocation for the sake of understanding clearly and deeply realizing the issues.
References
Hac.bard.edu (2020). ABOUT HANNAH ARENDT. Retrieved from https://hac.bard.edu/about/hannaharendt/[ Retrieved on 6th December, 2021]
Zertal, I. (2007). A state on trial: Hannah Arendt vs. the State of Israel. Social Research: An International Quarterly, 74(4), 1127-1158.
