Stranger from Abroad: Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Friendship and Forgiveness

Stranger from Abroad: Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Friendship and Forgiveness PDF Author: Daniel Maier-Katkin
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393077315
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Two titans of twentieth-century thought: their lives, loves, ideas, and politics. Shaking up the content and method by which generations of students had studied Western philosophy, Martin Heidegger sought to ennoble man’s existence in relation to death. Yet in a time of crisis, he sought personal advancement, becoming the most prominent German intellectual to join the Nazis. Hannah Arendt, his brilliant, beautiful student and young lover, sought to enable a decent society of human beings in relation to one other. She was courageous in the time of crisis. Years later, she was even able to meet Heidegger once again on common ground and to find in his past behavior an insight into Nazism that would influence her reflections on “the banality of evil”—a concept that remains bitterly controversial and profoundly influential to this day. But how could Arendt have renewed her friendship with Heidegger? And how has this relationship affected her reputation as a cultural critic? In Stranger from Abroad, Daniel Maier-Katkin offers a compassionate portrait that provides much-needed insight into this relationship. Maier-Katkin creates a detailed and riveting portrait of Arendt’s rich intellectual and emotional life, shedding light on the unique bond she shared with her second husband, Heinrich Blücher, and on her friendships with Mary McCarthy, W. H. Auden, Karl Jaspers, and Randall Jarrell—all fascinating figures in their own right. An elegant, accessible introduction to Arendt’s life and work, Stranger from Abroad makes a powerful and hopeful case for the lasting relevance of Arendt’s thought.

Stranger from Abroad: Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Friendship and Forgiveness

Stranger from Abroad: Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Friendship and Forgiveness PDF Author: Daniel Maier-Katkin
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393077315
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Get Book

Book Description
Two titans of twentieth-century thought: their lives, loves, ideas, and politics. Shaking up the content and method by which generations of students had studied Western philosophy, Martin Heidegger sought to ennoble man’s existence in relation to death. Yet in a time of crisis, he sought personal advancement, becoming the most prominent German intellectual to join the Nazis. Hannah Arendt, his brilliant, beautiful student and young lover, sought to enable a decent society of human beings in relation to one other. She was courageous in the time of crisis. Years later, she was even able to meet Heidegger once again on common ground and to find in his past behavior an insight into Nazism that would influence her reflections on “the banality of evil”—a concept that remains bitterly controversial and profoundly influential to this day. But how could Arendt have renewed her friendship with Heidegger? And how has this relationship affected her reputation as a cultural critic? In Stranger from Abroad, Daniel Maier-Katkin offers a compassionate portrait that provides much-needed insight into this relationship. Maier-Katkin creates a detailed and riveting portrait of Arendt’s rich intellectual and emotional life, shedding light on the unique bond she shared with her second husband, Heinrich Blücher, and on her friendships with Mary McCarthy, W. H. Auden, Karl Jaspers, and Randall Jarrell—all fascinating figures in their own right. An elegant, accessible introduction to Arendt’s life and work, Stranger from Abroad makes a powerful and hopeful case for the lasting relevance of Arendt’s thought.

Unlearning with Hannah Arendt

Unlearning with Hannah Arendt PDF Author: Marie Luise Knott
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 1590517490
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Short-listed for the Tractatus Essay Prize, an examination of the innovative strategies Arendt used to achieve intellectual freedom After observing the trial of Adolf Eichmann, Hannah Arendt articulated her controversial concept of the “banality of evil,” thereby posing one of the most chilling and divisive moral questions of the twentieth century: How can genocidal acts be carried out by non-psychopathic people? By revealing the full complexity of the trial with reasoning that defied prevailing attitudes, Arendt became the object of severe and often slanderous criticism, losing some of her closest friends as well as being labeled a “self-hating Jew.” And while her theories have continued to draw innumerable opponents, Arendt’s work remains an invaluable resource for those seeking greater insight into the more problematic aspects of human nature. Anchoring its discussion in the themes of translation, forgiveness, dramatization, and even laughter, Unlearning with Hannah Arendt explores the ways in which this iconic political theorist “unlearned” recognized trends and patterns—both philosophical and cultural—to establish a theoretical praxis all her own. Through an analysis of the social context and intellectual influences—Karl Jaspers, Walter Benjamin, and Martin Heidegger—that helped shape Arendt’s process, Knott has formed a historically engaged and incisive contribution to Arendt’s legacy.

Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt PDF Author: Anne C Heller
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1504073371
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 134

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Book Description
The acclaimed biographer presents “a perceptive life of the controversial political philosopher” and author of Eichmann in Jerusalem (Kirkus Reviews). Hannah Arendt was a polarizing cultural theorist—extolled by her peers as a visionary and berated by her critics as a poseur and a fraud. Born in Prussia to assimilated Jewish parents, she escaped from Hitler’s Germany in 1933. Arendt is now best remembered for the storm of controversy that surrounded her 1963 New Yorker series on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a kidnapped Nazi war criminal. Arendt’s first book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, single-handedly altered the way generations around the world viewed fascism and genocide. Her most famous work, Eichmann in Jerusalem, created fierce debate that continues to this day, exacerbated by the posthumous discovery that she had been the lover of the philosopher and Nazi sympathizer Martin Heidegger. In this comprehensive biography, Anne C. Heller tracks the source of Arendt’s contradictions and achievements to her sense of being a “conscious pariah”—one of those rare people who doesn’t “lose confidence in ourselves if society does not approve us” and will not “pay any price” to gain the acceptance of others.

On Love and Tyranny

On Love and Tyranny PDF Author: Ann Heberlein
Publisher: House of Anansi
ISBN: 1487008120
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 189

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Book Description
In an utterly unique approach to biography, On Love and Tyranny traces the life and work of the iconic German Jewish intellectual Hannah Arendt, whose political philosophy and understandings of evil, totalitarianism, love, and exile prove essential amid the rise of the refugee crisis and authoritarian regimes around the world. What can we learn from the iconic political thinker Hannah Arendt? Well, the short answer may be: to love the world so much that we think change is possible. The life of Hannah Arendt spans a crucial chapter in the history of the Western world, a period that witnessed the rise of the Nazi regime and the crises of the Cold War, a time when our ideas about humanity and its value, its guilt and responsibility, were formulated. Arendt’s thinking is intimately entwined with her life and the concrete experiences she drew from her encounters with evil, but also from love, exile, statelessness, and longing. This strikingly original work moves from political themes that wholly consume us today, such as the ways in which democracies can so easily become totalitarian states; to the deeply personal, in intimate recollections of Arendt’s famous lovers and friends, including Heidegger, Benjamin, de Beauvoir, and Sartre; and to wider moral deconstructions of what it means to be human and what it means to be humane. On Love and Tyranny brings to life a Hannah Arendt for our days, a timeless intellectual whose investigations into the nature of evil and of love are eerily and urgently relevant half a century later.

Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger

Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger PDF Author: Antonia Grunenberg
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253027187
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 341

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Book Description
A biographical account of two major thinkers of the twentieth century, a relationship marked as much by estrangement and distance as reunion and friendship. How could Hannah Arendt, a German Jew who fled Germany in 1931, have reconciled with Martin Heidegger, whom she knew had joined and actively participated in the Nazi Party? In this remarkable biography, Antonia Grunenberg tells how the relationship between Arendt and Heidegger embraced both love and thought and made their passions inseparable, both philosophically and romantically. Grunenberg recounts how the history between Arendt and Heidegger is entwined with the history of the twentieth century with its breaks, catastrophes, and crises. Against the violent backdrop of the last century, she details their complicated and often fissured relationship as well as their intense commitments to thinking. “Focuses on a relationship that began when Arendt was a student in the 1920s, was broken between 1933 and 45, and resumed after the war.” —The Chronicle of Higher Education

The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World

The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World PDF Author: Barry Gewen
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 1324004061
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 496

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Book Description
A new portrait of Henry Kissinger focusing on the fundamental ideas underlying his policies: Realism, balance of power, and national interest. Few public officials have provoked such intense controversy as Henry Kissinger. During his time in the Nixon and Ford administrations, he came to be admired and hated in equal measure. Notoriously, he believed that foreign affairs ought to be based primarily on the power relationships of a situation, not simply on ethics. He went so far as to argue that under certain circumstances America had to protect its national interests even if that meant repressing other countries’ attempts at democracy. For this reason, many today on both the right and left dismiss him as a latter-day Machiavelli, ignoring the breadth and complexity of his thought. With The Inevitability of Tragedy, Barry Gewen corrects this shallow view, presenting the fascinating story of Kissinger’s development as both a strategist and an intellectual and examining his unique role in government through his ideas. It analyzes his contentious policies in Vietnam and Chile, guided by a fresh understanding of his definition of Realism, the belief that world politics is based on an inevitable, tragic competition for power. Crucially, Gewen places Kissinger’s pessimistic thought in a European context. He considers how Kissinger was deeply impacted by his experience as a refugee from Nazi Germany, and explores the links between his notions of power and those of his mentor, Hans Morgenthau—the father of Realism—as well as those of two other German-Jewish émigrés who shared his concerns about the weaknesses of democracy: Leo Strauss and Hannah Arendt. The Inevitability of Tragedy offers a thoughtful perspective on the origins of Kissinger’s sober worldview and argues that a reconsideration of his career is essential at a time when American foreign policy lacks direction.

Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Friendship

Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Friendship PDF Author: Jon Nixon
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1472505107
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. For Hannah Arendt, friendship had political relevance and importance. The essence of friendship, she believed, consisted in discourse, and it is only through discourse, she argued, that the world is rendered humane. This book explores some of the key ideas in Hannah Arendt's work through a study of four lifelong friendships -- with Heinrich Blücher, Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers and Mary McCarthy. The book draws on correspondence from both sides, illuminating our understanding of the social contexts within which Arendt's thinking developed and was clarified. It offers a cultural history of ideas: shedding light on two core ideas in Arendt - of 'plurality' and 'promise', and on how those particular ideas emerged through a particular set of relationships, at a significant moment in the history of the West. This book offers an original and accessible 'way in' to Arendt's work for students and scholars of politics, philosophy, intellectual history and literature.

Thinking in Dark Times

Thinking in Dark Times PDF Author: Roger Berkowitz
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823230759
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
Hannah Arendt is one of the most important political theorists of the 20th century. This book focuses on how, against the professionalized discourses of theory, Arendt insists on the greater political importance of the ordinary activity of thinking.

Hannah Arendt and the Fragility of Human Dignity

Hannah Arendt and the Fragility of Human Dignity PDF Author: John Douglas Macready
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498554903
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 153

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Book Description
Professor John Douglas Macready offers a post-foundational account of human dignity by way of a reconstructive reading of Hannah Arendt. He argues that Arendt’s experience of political violence and genocide in the twentieth century, as well as her experience as a stateless person, led her to rethink human dignity as an intersubjective event of political experience. By tracing the contours of Arendt’s thoughts on human dignity, Professor Macready offers convincing evidence that Arendt was engaged in retrieving the political experience that gave rise to the concept of human dignity in order to move beyond the traditional accounts of human dignity that relied principally on the status and stature of human beings. This allowed Arendt to retrofit the concept for a new political landscape and reconceive human dignity in terms of stance—how human beings stand in relationship to one another. Professor Macready elucidates Arendt’s latent political ontology as a resource for developing strictly political account of human dignity hat he calls conditional dignity—the view that human dignity is dependent on political action, namely, the preservation and expression of dignity by the person, and/or the recognition by the political community. He argues that it is precisely this “right” to have a place in the world—the right to belong to a political community and never to be reduced to the status of stateless animality—that indicates the political meaning of human dignity in Arendt’s political philosophy.

Reconsidering Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness

Reconsidering Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness PDF Author: Christopher Peys
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1786615193
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 199

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Book Description
Reconsidering Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness presents a world-centric, ‘caring’ conceptualization of cosmopolitanism and forgiveness grounded in the thought of two radical, twentieth-century continental thinkers: Hannah Arendt and Jacques Derrida. It fundamentally re-evaluates what it means to care for the world in ‘dark times’ and develops a political theory of repairing, preserving and cultivating the relationships which constitute the human community. This interdisciplinary book reveals how cosmopolitanism and forgiveness each care for the powerful experience of human freedom: the power to begin new courses of political action with a plurality of people in the public realm. It not only casts new light on the political thought of both Arendt and Derrida but also contributes to ongoing debates about the nature of political spaces, the possibility for collective political action, and the importance of cultivating encounters with the unknown Other in today’s digitally interconnected world.