Hannah Arendt citations

Page 2

“L’homme gagne sa liberté non pas en travaillant, mais davantage en créant, et surtout en se confrontant à la pluralité, en ayant le courage de dire ce qu’il pense quelles que soient ses chances d’être véritablement entendu, comme le veut la fragilité des affaires
humaines.”

“La « reconnaissance » ne peut nous reconnaître que « comme » ceci et cela, c’est à dire comme quelque chose que fondamentalement nous ne sommes pas.”

“Bien plus fiables sont ceux qui doutent et sont sceptiques, non parce que le scepticisme est bon ou le doute salutaire, mais parce qu'ils servent à examiner les choses et à se former un avis. Les meilleurs de tous seront ceux qui savent seulement une chose : que, quoi qu'il se passe, tant que nous vivrons, nous aurons à vivre avec nous-mêmes”

“Il y a des pensées qui sont plus fortes que l'individu chez qui on les rencontre et qui les porte.”

“Contrairement à l'égocentrisme, le mal consiste à considérer la personne humaine comme inutile, voire superflue.”

“Tant que nous souffrons, dans les conditions du désert, nous sommes encore humains, encore intacts.”

“Le danger consiste en ce que nous devenions de véritables habitants du désert et que nous nous sentions bien chez lui.”

“La pensée se dédouble entre pensée abstraite et jugement dès qu’elle fait intervenir le dialogue avec soi.”

“si personne ne peut rendre la justice, c’est que tout le monde est coupable.”

“Seuls ceux qui sont amoureux de la sagesse auraient envie de penser. Cela revient à une tautologie décevante. Pour être apte à penser, il faudrait aimer la beauté et la justice et donc avoir une âme bonne. Le monde serait divisé en bons et en méchants sans qu’on sache pourquoi. Cette division, c’est exactement ce que nous ne cherchions pas. Dès lors il faut reprendre l’analyse.”

“Ce n’est ni une question d’intelligence ou de stupidité. Celui qui ne connaît pas le dialogue avec lui-même ne verra aucune difficulté à se contredire luimême, ce qui signifie qu’il ne sera jamais capable de – ni ne voudra - rendre compte de ce qu’il a dit ou fait; il ne pourra non plus s’inquiéter de commettre quelque crime puisqu’il peut être sûr qu’aussitôt il l’oubliera”

“C’est par le verbe et l’acte que nous nous insérons dans le monde humain, et cette insertion est comme une seconde naissance dans laquelle nous confirmons et assurons le fait brut de notre apparition physique originelle.”

“Ce monde d’objets révèle de façon spectaculaire la partie non mortelle des êtres mortels. Tout se passe comme si la stabilité du monde se faisait transparente dans la permanence de l’art”

“Les spécialistes de la solution de problèmes ont quelque chose en commun avec les menteurs purs et simples: ils s'efforcent de se débarrasser des faits et son persuadés que la chose est possible du fait qu'il s'agit de réalites contingentes.
En vérité, on ne peut jamais y parvenir, que ce soit au moyen de la théorie ou par la manipulation de l'opinion publique- comme si, pour annuler une réalité, il suffisait qu'un nombre assez élevé de personnes soit persuadé de son inexistance. On ne peut y parvenir que par un acte de destruction radicale.”

“Je n'ai jamais aimé un peuple. Pourquoi devrais-je aimer les juifs? Je n'aime que mes amis, c'est tout! C'est le seul et unique amour dont je suis capable.”

“Depuis quelques temps, un grand nombre de recherches scientifiques s'efforcent de rendre la vie « artificielle » elle aussi, et de couper le lien qui maintient encore l'homme parmi les enfants de la nature. C'est le même désir d'échapper à l'emprisonnement terrestre qui se manifeste dans les essais de création en éprouvette, dans le vœu de combiner « au microscope le plasma germinal provenant de personnes aux qualités garanties, afin de produire des êtres supérieurs » et de « modifier leurs tailles, formes et fonction »; et je soupçonne que l'envie d'échapper à la condition humaine expliquerait aussi l'espoir de prolonger la durée de l'existence fort au-delà de cent ans, limite jusqu'ici admise. Cet homme futur, que les savants produiront, nous disent-ils, en un siècle pas davantage, paraît en proie à la révolte contre l'existence humaine telle qu'elle est donnée en cadeau venu de nulle part (laïquement parlant) et qu'il veut pour ainsi dire « échanger contre un ouvrage de ses propres mains.»”

“Le bonheur des méchants qui réussissent a toujours été l'un des faits les plus gênants de la vie, qu'il n'apporte rien d'expliquer.”

“Pour les êtres humains, penser au passé veut dire se mouvoir dans la dimension de la profondeur, poser des racines et ainsi se stabiliser, afin de ne pas se laisser balayer par ce qui peut se produire — le Zeitgeist, l'Histoire ou la simple tentation. Le pire mal n'est pas radical, il n'a pas de racines, et parce qu'il n'a pas de racines, il n'a pas de limites; il peut atteindre des extrêmes impensables et se répandre dans le monde tout entier.”

“Pour un juif, cette participation des chefs juifs à la destruction de leur propre peuple est sans aucun doute le plus sombre chapitre de toute cette funeste histoire.”

“Mais avant de nous jeter la première pierre, souvenez-vous qu'être Juif ne confère aucun statut légal en ce monde. Si nous commencions par dire la vérité, à savoir que nous ne sommes que des Juifs, cela reviendrait à nous exposer au destin d'êtres humains qui, parce qu'ils ne sont protégés par aucune loi spécifique ni convention politique, ne sont que des êtres humains. Je m'imagine mal une attitude plus dangereuse puisque nous vivons actuellement dans un monde où les êtres humains en tant que tels ont cessé d'exister depuis longtemps déjà; puisque la société a découvert que la discrimination était la grande arme sociale au moyen de laquelle on peut tuer les hommes sans effusion de sang, puisque les passeports ou les certificats de naissance et même parfois les déclarations d'impôts ne sont plus des documents officiels, mais des critères de distinctions sociales.”

“Comme on lui en avait donné l'ordre, Eichmann était simplement incapable de penser.”

“La philosophie est une affaire solitaire.”

“Le mal peut être à la fois banal et extrême. Seul le bien est radical.”

“Nos jeunes gens reprochent à leurs parents une conduite déshonorante et injustifiable : ils estiment que seuls les criminels ou les putes ont pu survivre dans les camps.”

“Le système de gouvernement représentatif connaît aujourd'hui une crise en partie parce qu'il a perdu, avec le temps, toutes les institutions qui pouvaient permettre une participation effective des citoyens et, d'autre part, parce qu'il est gravement atteint par le mal qui affecte le système des partis: la bureaucratisation et la tendance des deux partis à ne représenter que leurs appareils.”

“The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.”

“The point, as Marx saw it, is that dreams never come true.”

“No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes. On the contrary, whatever the punishment, once a specific crime has appeared for the first time, its reappearance is more likely than its initial emergence could ever have been.”

“And the distinction between violent and non-violent action is that the former is exclusively bent upon the destruction of the old, and the latter is chiefly concerned with the establishment of something new.”

“As citizens, we must prevent wrongdoing because the world in which we all live, wrong-doer, wrong sufferer and spectator, is at stake.”

“For politics is not like the nursery; in politics obedience and support are the same.”

“There are many great authors of the past who have survived centuries of oblivion and neglect, but it is still an open question whether they will be able to survive an entertaining version of what they have to say.”

“Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.”

“The new always happens against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability, which for all practical, everyday purposes amounts to certainty; the new therefore always appears in the guise of a miracle.”

“Action, as distinguished from fabrication, is never possible in isolation; to be isolated is to be deprived of the capacity to act.”

“the greatest evil perpetrated is the evil committed by nobodies, that is, by human beings who refuse to be persons”

“Revolutionaries do not make revolutions! The revolutionaries are those who know when power is lying in the street and when they can pick it up. Armed uprising by itself has never yet led to revolution.”

“Could the activity of thinking as such, the habit of examining whatever happens to come to pass or to attract attention, regardless of results and specific content, could this activity be among the conditions that make men abstain from evil-doing?”

“Man's urge for change and his need for stability have always balanced and checked each other, and our current vocabulary, which distinguishes between two factions, the progressives and the conservatives, indicates a state of affairs in which this balance has been thrown out of order. No civilization — the man-made artifact to house successive generations — would ever have been possible without a framework of stability, to provide the wherein for the flux of change. Foremost among the stabilizing factors, more enduring than customs, manners and traditions, are the legal systems that regulate our life in the world and our daily affairs with each other.”

“The cultural treasures of the past, believed to be dead, are being made to speak, in the course of which it turns out that they propose things altogether different than what had been thought.”

“Eichmann, much less intelligent and without any education to speak of, at least dimly realized that it was not an order but a law which had turned them all into criminals. The distinction between an order and the Führer's word was that the latter's validity was not limited in time and space, which is the outstanding characteristic of the former. This is also the true reason why the Führer's order for the Final Solution was followed by a huge shower of regulations and directives, all drafted by expert lawyers and legal advisors, not by mere administrators; this order, in contrast to ordinary orders, was treated as a law. Needless to add, the resulting legal paraphernalia, far from being a mere symptom of German pedantry and thoroughness, served most effectively to give the whole business its outward appearance of legality.And just as the law in civilized countries assumes that the voice of conscience tells everybody, "Thou shalt not kill," even though man's natural desires and inclinations may at times be murderous, so the law of Hitler's land demanded that the voice of conscience tell everybody: "Thou shalt kill," although the organizers of the massacres knew full well that murder is against the normal desires and inclinations of most people. Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it — the quality of temptation.”

“The emotions I feel are no more meant to be shown in their unadulterated state than the inner organs by which we live.”

“In its flight from death, the craving for permanence clings to the very things sure to be lost in death.”

“The only man for whom Hitler had ‘unqualified respect’ was ‘Stalin the genius’, and while in the case of Stalin and the Russian regime we do not… have the rich documentary material that is available for Germany, we nevertheless know since Khrushchev’s speech before the Twentieth Party Congress that Stalin trusted only one man and that was Hitler.”

“Kant was also quite aware that "the urgent need" of reason is both different from and "more than mere quest and desire for knowledge." Hence, the distinguishing of the two faculties, reason and intellect, coincides with a distinction between two altogether different mental activities, thinking and knowing.”

“[H]e was genuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliché. […] Eichmann, despite his rather bad memory, repeated word for word the same stock phrases and self-invented clichés (when he did succeed in constructing a sentence of his own, he repeated it until it became a cliché) each time he referred to an incident or event of importance to him. […] The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely to think from the standpoint of somebody else. No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against the words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such.”

“If the inner psychic ground of our individual appearance were not always the same, there could be no science of psychology, which qua science relies on a psychic “inside we are all alike,” just as the science of physiology and medicine relies on the sameness of our inner organs. […] The monstrous sameness and pervasive ugliness so highly characteristic of the findings of modern psychology, and contrasting so obviously with the enormous variety and richness of overt human conduct, witness to the radical difference between the inside and the outside of the human body.”

“Kant … discovered “the scandal of reason,” that is the fact that our mind is not capable of certain and verifiable knowledge regarding matters and questions that it nevertheless cannot help thinking about.”

“Man cannot be free if he does not know that he is subject to necessity, because his freedom is always won in his never wholly successful attempts to liberate himself from necessity.”

“Political questions are far too serious to be left to the politicians.”

“What stuck in the minds of these men who had become murderers was simply the notion of being involved in something historic, grandiose, unique ("a great task that occurs once in two thousand years"), which must therefore be difficult to bear. This was important, because the murderers were not sadists or killers by nature; on the contrary, a systematic effort was made to weed out all those who derived physical pleasure from what they did. The troops of the Einsatzgruppen had been drafted from the Armed S. S., a military unit with hardly more crimes in its record than any ordinary unit of the German Army, and their commanders had been chosen by Heydrich from the S. S. élite with academic degrees. Hence the problem was how to overcome not so much their conscience as the animal pity by which all normal men are affected in the presence of physical suffering. The trick used by Himmler — who apparently was rather strongly afflicted by these instinctive reactions himself — was very simple and probably very effective; it consisted in turning these instincts around, as it were, in directing them toward the self. So that instead of saying: What horrible things I did to people!, the murderers would be able to say: What horrible things I had to watch in the pursuance of my duties, how heavily the task weighed upon my shoulders!”

“Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”

“If a given science accidentally reached its goal, this would by no means stop the workers in the field, who would be driven past their goal by the sheer momentum of the illusion of unlimited progress.”

“The Nazis were ‘convinced that evil-doing in our time has a morbid force of attraction,’ Bolshevik assurances inside and outside Russia that they do not recognize ordinary moral standards have become a mainstay of Communist propaganda, and experience has proven time and again that the propaganda value of evil deeds and general contempt for moral standards is independent of mere self-interest, supposedly the most powerful psychological factor in politics.”