Show Notes
Vote on what comes next: https://www.sleepyphilosophyradio.com/vote
What if the worst evil in history was committed not by monsters, but by ordinary people who simply stopped thinking? Fall asleep to the complete philosophy of Hannah Arendt.
In this episode, we trace the full arc of Arendt's life and ideas. We begin with a young Jewish philosopher in Königsberg, studying under Heidegger and Jaspers, and follow her flight from Nazi Germany, her internment in a French camp, and her arrival in New York in nineteen forty-one with nothing but her intellect and a question: how had this been possible? What follows is one of the most extraordinary intellectual careers of the twentieth century. We work through her monumental account of totalitarianism, her philosophical defense of the public realm and political action, her controversial reporting on the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, and her final unfinished inquiry into thinking, willing, and judgment. Along the way we encounter the phrase that made her famous and infamous at once, a careful examination of how bureaucratic participation in mass murder can occur without conventional evil motivation, and a sustained argument that what the modern age has lost is something genuinely irreplaceable: the space in which human beings, in all their plurality, can act together and begin something new.
Please listen only in safe, restful contexts.
(0:00:00) Biography and Formation (0:20:20) The Origins of Totalitarianism, Part One (0:37:21) The Origins of Totalitarianism, Part Two (0:53:10) The Human Condition, Part One (1:08:56) The Human Condition, Part Two (1:24:34) Eichmann in Jerusalem: The Trial (1:40:12) The Banality of Evil (1:56:40) On Revolution (2:12:37) The Life of the Mind (2:29:07) Influence and Legacy
Music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Tracks used: Anguish, Blue Feather, Evening Fall (Harp), Gregorian Chant, Heartbreaking, Lightless Dawn, Lone Harvest, Magic Forest, Mesmerize, Mourning Song, Oppressive Gloom, Promising Relationship, Quinn's Song: A New Man, Relent, Smoother Move, Sunset at Glengorm, Trio for Piano Cello and Clarinet, Wounded
More from Sleepy Philosophy Radio
Fall asleep to Sigmund Freud, from a room full of buried gods to a chosen death in exile.
Fall asleep to Plotinus, the mystic who taught that all things flow from a single source and long to return.
Thank you for listening, whether this is your first episode or your fiftieth.
Fall asleep to the story of Mainländer, the philosopher who taught that God has died and death is our redemption.
Fall asleep to the medieval mystic who taught ordinary people to pray to be rid of God.