(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
Einar Øverenget, philosopher and rector of the Academy of Humanities, writes: “Arendt's claim is that the radical evil of totalitarianism springs from the active hands, from those who immediately follow up a useful action with another – with no other desire than to do their duty. The terrible thing is that these hands are coveted in the modern world. ”
In other words, we quickly realize that this must be a dangerous thinker for the rulers of our own time, a time that should have been anything but totalitarian. But as a formal logician would have said: one must not mix is and should.
Critical to the State of Israel
Hannah Arendt was a Jew, born in 1906 and grew up in Königsberg, the philosopher Kant's hometown and former capital of East Prussia. Kant's thinking also meant a lot to Arendt's intellectual development, but according to Øverenget, Marx was the modern thinker who, alongside Martin Heidegger, was to be at the heart of her own thinking. The latter was then also her philosophy teacher and for a short period her lover – yes, perhaps the great love of her life for better or worse. In 1940, Arendt received a visa to the United States and arrived in New York the following year. She never moved back to Europe, but until her death in 1975 was on countless visits.
Although she was a Jew and wanted freedom and justice for her people, she thought this freedom was of little value if it were to be reserved for only one ethnic group. “Therefore, she was also critical of a state rooted in an ethnic or religious basis. Such a state would quickly be able to develop in an exclusive direction, she believed. It could easily end up applying certain criteria to become part of the rights community, criteria that would actually deprive a number of individuals of fundamental political rights instead of guaranteeing them. ”
Even Kåre Willoch today admits how right Hannah Arendt got in this.
Roses revolutions
For Arendt, the right to have rights is the most basic political right. And this is what all people must have – there she is uncompromising.
In 1951 she published the book The Origins and Totalitarianism, and was suddenly regarded as one of the greatest thinkers of our time. Against the totalitarian society she set the free human action – vita activa – the active life.
In his concept of action, Arendt lays down a type of activity that should not be subject to goal-benefit thinking. So it is not about doing something to achieve something else, but doing something by virtue of oneself and without one single purpose. An artwork can be a product of such an act.
Other key concepts at Arendt are freedom and plurality. "She believes that revolutions are the only political event that confronts us directly with the initial problem. This is because they represent an attempt to establish a new political space, a space where freedom can emerge as a secular reality, and not just as an idealized entity. In such cases, the individuals break with routine activities and do something new and unexpected. ”
According to Arendt, the revolution is – if it really is a revolution – the counterpart of totalitarianism. Unfortunately, however, all modern revolutions have failed to create a political space for individual freedom, both French, American and Russian.
Philosophical fundamentalism
A chapter in the book is called "the totalitarian terror", a title that is frighteningly relevant. Even though Arendt is not completely up to date (died in 1975), with her thoughts as ballast it is easy to see the totalitarian features of today's fundamentalists, whether they represent Islam, Christianity
or pure capitalism, whether they are Afghans or represent the leadership of God's Own Country. Hannah Arendt would certainly not have liked any of this.
The totalitarianism that Arendt went to war against was the mass society that makes the individual superfluous. Paradoxically, the danger of such a mass society is very much present in our own individualistic time. Øverenget writes: “Potentially free and spontaneous individuals are reduced to easily manageable human material that can be the raw material for the production of the new human being. This is what totalitarianism is ultimately about. " Philosophical theories and political ideologies that support the totalitarian are those that try to replace the individual with a super-individual force that works in history with absolute necessity.
According to Øverenget, Hegelianism is such a philosophical system. According to Arendt, there is a similar tendency in Marxism as well. Arendt was never a Marxist herself, but she undoubtedly had sympathy for Marxism. Despite her respect for Marx's political thinking, however, she believes that it has certain weaknesses which make it no coincidence that it was developed in a totalitarian direction. "
Husserl, Heidegger and Hannah
The upper mound uses some ink to point out that Arendt is difficult to place politically. The left side thinks she is conservative, the conservatives think she is on the political left. This is a common practice for all intellectuals who do not raise a clean and nuanced flag. And who bothered to do that?
Hannah Arendt is a moderate humanist, suggests Øverenget, and believes that she with her actor-oriented position represents a break with both Marxism and liberalism. Life is awkward. The philosopher Edmund Husserl, the father of phenomenology, had a favorite student – Martin Heidegger, who devoted parts of his life to a movement that wanted the Jew Husserl to die and refused him to act as a philosopher. Heidegger's favorite student – Hannah Arendt spent much of her time fighting the totalitarian thinking behind the Nazism of which Heidegger was once a part. Yes, the ways of life are unfathomable, as it is called in Hebrew.
And even though Arendt had a philosophical doctorate, she was a political thinker. The skepticism of philosophy, the pure, abstract thinking, she retained until the very end. For thinking easily becomes self-sufficient – totalitarian, she thought.
For everyone politically interested
This book is not a biography, but an introduction to Hannah Arendt's thinking. And it is a book Einar Øverenget will have all the honor of. The prose is objective and honest without putting difficult philosophical terminology in the way of readers' understanding. It is a good example of how deep thoughts and a bad reality can be described with words that are understandable. He could certainly have used more difficult terminology, but has put it aside for the purpose of understanding. It is bravely done in a time when we are drowning in bland terminology.
However, some sentences lag a bit grammatically, and some words and letters have dropped out here and there. A better language wash would have been in order, but these are trifles. The most important thing is that Øverenget presents the political thinking – and the philosophical basis for this – to a very exciting thinker. And these are thoughts that may be more useful than ever. For all politically interested people, this book should be a must read.
Øverenget has contributed with a first introduction to Arendt's drawing, and since her main work is available in English, there is no reason to stop here. According to the book's laundry list, Einar Øverenget will be an expert on Heidegger's thinking. With all due respect to Guttorm Fløistad and a myriad of philosophy-historical introductory books: Do we at Øverenget dare to hope for a similar book like this one about Martin Heidegger – or is the time not yet ripe?
