A Filosofia de Hannah Arendt - As Origens do Totalitarismo | Prof. Anderson

Friedrich Nietzsche Course: https://hotm.art/arendt-nietzsche Online History of Philosophy Course: https://hotm.art/arendt-filosofia ------------------------------------------------------ Hannah Arendt - TOTALITARIANISM ------------------------------------------------------ Political philosopher Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) was born in Hanover, Germany, in 1906, the only child of secular Jews. During her childhood, Arendt moved first to Königsberg (East Prussia) and then to Berlin. In 1922-23, Arendt began her studies (in classical and Christian theology) at the University of Berlin, and in 1924 she entered the University of Marburg, where she studied philosophy with Martin Heidegger. In 1925, she began a romantic relationship with Heidegger, but it ended the following year. She moved to Heidelberg to study with Karl Jaspers, the existentialist philosopher and friend of Heidegger. Under Jaspers's supervision, she wrote her dissertation on the concept of love in the thought of Saint Augustine. She remained close to Jaspers throughout her life, though the influence of Heidegger's phenomenology would prove to be the greatest in its lasting influence on Arendt's work. Arendt's first major work, published in 1951, is clearly a response to the devastating events of her own time—the rise of Nazi Germany and the catastrophic fate of European Jewry at its hands, the rise of Soviet Stalinism and its annihilation of millions of peasants (not to mention free-thinking intellectuals, writers, artists, scientists, and political activists). Arendt insisted that these manifestations of political evil could not be understood as mere extensions in scale or scope of already existing precedents, but rather that they represented a “completely new form of government,” built on terror and ideological fiction. Where older tyrannies used terror as an instrument to achieve or maintain power, modern totalitarian regimes exhibited little strategic rationality in their use of terror. Instead, terror was no longer a means to a political end, but an end in itself. Its necessity was now justified by appeal to supposed laws of history (such as the inevitable triumph of a classless society) or of nature (such as the inevitability of war between “chosen” and “degenerate” races). For Arendt, the popular appeal of totalitarian ideologies, with their ability to mobilize populations to do their bidding, rested on the devastation of the ordered and stable contexts in which people lived. The impact of World War I and the Great Depression, and the spread of revolutionary unrest, left people open to the promulgation of a single, clear, and unequivocal idea that would allocate responsibility for misfortunes and indicate a clear path that would secure the future against insecurity and danger. Totalitarian ideologies offered precisely these answers, supposedly discovering a “key to history” with which events of the past and present could be explained, and the future guaranteed by making history or the order of nature. Thus, the submission of European populations to totalitarian ideas was the consequence of a series of pathologies that eroded the public or political sphere as a space of freedom and independence. These pathologies included the expansionism of imperialist capital with its administrative management of colonial repression, and the usurpation of the state by the bourgeoisie as an instrument to advance its own sectional interests. This, in turn, led to the delegitimization of political institutions and the atrophy of the principles of citizenship and deliberative consensus that had been at the heart of the democratic political enterprise. The rise of totalitarianism should, therefore, be understood in light of the accumulation of pathologies that undermined the conditions of possibility for a viable public life that could unite citizens while simultaneously preserving their freedom and singularity (a condition Arendt called “plurality”). In this early work, it is possible to discern some of the recurring themes that would organize Arendt's political writings throughout her life. For example, the investigation into the conditions of possibility for a humane and democratic public life, the historical, social, and economic forces that came to threaten it, the conflictual relationship between private interests and the public good, the impact of intensified cycles of production and consumption that destabilized the common global context of human life, and so on. These themes would not only surface repeatedly in Arendt's subsequent work but would be conceptually elaborated through the development of key distinctions to delineate the nature of political existence and the faculties exercised in its production and preservation.