Hannah Arendt on Revolution & Freedom (1968)

Part of a lecture of Hannah Arendt discussing freedom and revolution (only the second half of the lecture is available). I'm unsure of the exact year of the talk, but it was between 1967-1969. More details will be added at a later date. Note, this is a version of an upload from the previous channel. I added captions to make it easier to follow. More Arendt: • Hannah Arendt
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#Philosophy #Arendt

[@Gabreal_Gabriel]

This might be the most important thing I've ever heard, specifically the difference between how violence qua political action leads to war, whereas violence qua social action leads to terror. (I just changed my doctoral thesis topic; thanks Philosophy Overdose!)

[@thetruthis24]

How did the thesis turn out ?

[@JingleJangleJam]

I think Arendt's dismissal of a change in philosophy accompanying the change from slavery in the world to be quite wrong. If anything even novels like ''Gone with the Wind'' lament a kind of lost gallantry and mode of traditional life. Lincoln said in the conclusion of the 1862 message to congress that ''It is not "can any of us imagine better?" but, "can we all do better?" The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise -- with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.''
There Lincoln used the metaphor of ''thraldom'' with the opposite of slavery. If it is true the Greeks inherited slavery as unique to their democratic ideals, in Athenian life, I see this more as a by-product of the very real oriental and Asiatic, African influences on Greece, which did not develop as a society fully out of a vacuum from the past, there must have been influence on the Greeks from the civilizations they followed . . .
Will Durant discussed this when he said that, ''apparently from Crete, as well as from Asia, came that prehistoric culture of Mycenae and Tiryns which slowly transformed the immigrating Achaeans and the invading Dorians into civilized Greeks,'' naturally a culture that colonizes parts of Western Asia, and Africa and Italy adjacent to the Black Sea, would not be totally alien in all of its common sense principles to the ancient civilizations whose existence before them was a necessary stepping stone to their culture.
Here Hegel is right, that the existence of the Master and Slave dialectic of history did not begin in the world of the Greeks but before it, with the ancient empires like Egypt before it. It was only because of this thousands-years long history of philosophies from all of the world spirit informing our necessity of maintaining slavery not merely as an economic system, but as a philosophical way of life, that Lincoln spoke so heavily about the inertia and resistance of centuries-old ''dogmas of the past'' that made change almost irrevocably only possible through the worst type of mass violence in civil strife, and not through peaceful means. . .

[@mochhaekal3416]

Thanks Madam arendt

[@brucefranklin1317]

I know we can live together on earth... i hope we can sort it out and be happy... pursue our passions ect.... live free but yes some rules we need too... that all people agree on or at least most do...

[@Robert…Schrey]

that‘s nice, but unfortunately Freud discovered the Oedipean inheritance of habits.

[@Anicius_]

That's not as credible as they make it appear..

[@piezoification]

Our modern day American government has devolved into a pseudo enlightened despotism the just poverty alluded to is no longer discernible now economic deprivations are too often an imposition from policies and corruption of the parties litterally and figuratively which have the power to make them in service not for the aggregate of beginners but for themselves,admixing only enough to appease the "citizenry." Opportunities for Clever calculation talent merit deliver less while the elite expand their wealth and power . Politically we are asleep but it is not the quiet sleep of trains running on time and freedom from want it is fitful, the sleep of masses reduced to ignorance usury and isolation into false allegiances propaganda and institutionally sanctioned lies. One two three steps is thus our uneasy sleep from an Orwellian nightmare. If we don't become political through real action to a far greater extent any claim we have to our American stroke of good luck will burn with the world itself.

[@piezoification]

To the degree we ignore Arendt, Popper, Adler, to name a few, is the measure of how much educated people and the isntitutions charged with esucating, are useless to the society in which they "began."

[@kellyw8017]

Someone was just saying that listening to the news is conflated with taking action. They were right.