When the snow mountain collapses, no snowflake is innocent, because the snowflake commits the "evil of mediocrity."
Text/Full History Of Kasuga Kane Snow
On October 14, 1906, The German-Jewish thinker and political theorist Hannah Arendt was born.
She was a disciple of the great philosopher Heidegger and a doctor of philosophy under the personal guidance of Jaspers, the proposer of the "Axial Age". She was one of the most original thinkers and political theorists of the 20th century, and her deep reflections on Nazism concerned each and every one of us. Now her ideas have become popular among scholars.
So, what kind of person is she?
First of all, she is an independent woman who dares to love and hate, and can afford to put it down.
Arendt went to college at the age of 18, had a love affair, and soon fell in love with a young teacher. This teacher was 17 years older than her, married, and had children, which was the later famous existentialist philosopher Heidegger. It was the first time she had encountered fiery love, so she was particularly engaged. But it didn't take long for her to realize that the relationship wouldn't bear fruit, because Heidegger wouldn't abandon his wife and son for her, and he was concentrating on writing for the title, so he deliberately snubbed Arendt.
Arendt is very strong, with a calm attitude and action to get rid of the predicament of feelings, since you can afford it, you must also put it down. She chose to step out of the shadow of the relationship and transfer to another university, rarely seeing Heidegger ever since. Later, Heidegger defected to the Nazis, and the two broke up completely. But more than a decade later, the two meet again, and Arendt smiles and hates, and Heidegger resumes friendship and defends his mistakes during Nazi rule.
Arendt was married twice in his life. Her first husband divorced her supposedly because he couldn't stand her smoking cigars like a man. However, she eventually found the right person, her second husband, Bruch, and the two grew old and lived happily.
Second, she was a Jewish refugee persecuted by the Nazis.
Arendt was born into a middle-class Jewish family in Germany and lived a carefree life. But the rise of the Nazis undermined that beauty. When she was in elementary school, Arendt could feel the strange eyes of the people around her, but she didn't take it too seriously. It wasn't until her Ph.D. that she truly felt the horrors of Nazism. Because she was Jewish, she was disqualified from academic study.
After Hitler came to power, the persecution of Jews became more intense, and Arendt went out of his study to join the Jewish organization, helping Jews and Social Democrats immigrate, only to be arrested and imprisoned by the Gestapo. Fortunately, the person who arrested her was not particularly bad, and after 8 days of detention, he released her, which saved her from the disaster.
To avoid being persecuted again by the Nazis, Arendt went into exile in Paris, France. To make a living in France, Arendt suffered a lot. She worked two jobs to help Jewish immigrants, and her life was temporarily secured. During her time in Paris, she met many sympathetic French writers such as Camus and Sartre, as well as the Jewish intellectual Benjamin, who was also an exile. They often met in cafes, and it was in this group that Arendt found his home and forged a friendship with Benjamin. Later, France fell, and arendt emigrated to the United States to escape persecution. Benjamin delivered all manuscripts, including the Compendium of the Philosophy of History, to Arendt. The Arendtto published Benjamin's Compendium on the Philosophy of History, while Benjamin committed suicide by poisoning himself because of his failed transit.
In the end, she is a genius female thinker who rebels against the "evil of mediocrity."
Arendt began reading the philosophical works of Kant and Kierkegaard at the age of thirteen or fourteen, and at the age of 18 was admitted to the philosophy department of the University of Marburg and became a student of Heidegger. Later, he also listened to the lessons of Husserl, the father of phenomenology, and finally studied with Jaspers, and received his doctorate at the age of 22. With three masters as their own teachers, it is difficult to think of a thinker.
But Arendt's great influence was not in the strictly philosophical field, but focused on reflection on Nazi crimes, because she was a victim herself, and later she knew that what the Nazis were doing in the concentration camps was even more heinous, and she was hit so hard that she began to systematically study Nazism.
Arendt believed that there were two kinds of evils of Nazism, one was the "extreme evil" of the totalitarian rulers themselves, represented by Hitler; the other was the "banal evil" of the ruled or participating, represented by Eichmann. Hitler is familiar to everyone, but who was Eichmann? He was a German officer who had been in charge of transporting and slaughtering Jews, and after his arrest and trial, Arendt went to the scene and found that Eichmann was just an ordinary man of mild character, not looking like a psychopathic murderer, and Arendt summed up the evil of people like Eichmann as "the evil of mediocrity" (also translated as "the mediocrity of evil").
Arendt believed that the evil of mediocrity was more terrible than the evil of extremes, because it was latent among the general public, and a person who loved his family and his job could also blindly follow a totalitarian ruler and become an executioner who carried out orders, and Eichmann was such a person. (See Law 31 - Groups Dare to Do Evil: Why Do Good People Become Bad?) )
So how to fight against the "evil of mediocrity"?
Arendt's approach is to think and act, and she sees Eichmann as the epitome of lack of thinking. She said that thinking is an open thinking, to dialogue with others, but also to reflect on their own, the most typical example is Socrates's "midwifery", in the process of debate with others to absorb different opinions, and finally reach a consensus, at this time the heart is harmonious and unified. The opposite of it is not to raise objections to other people's views, so that people's hearts are not reflective, and in fact they will not be harmoniously unified. Her actions are also included in this process, that is, to speak up on the public stage, to pick her not only to say so, but also to do so, she often attends parties, participates in social activities, and expresses her views.
Evaluation of the past
1) The cornerstone of Arendt's existence is an attachment to reality, and she exists as a person in the original sense.
- Jaspers
2. Although she is not the kind of scholar who is numb to the profession, she is not the kind of smart scholar who keeps pace with the times, but the scholar who rebels against the current. She was against the tide, against her times, because she was convinced that the times she lived in were an extreme age, a dark age.
--Lin Kenji