The Book Depository Responsibility and Judgment by Hannah Arendt
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Price: £16.99
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Description: Responsibility and Judgment : Paperback : Schocken Books : 9780805211627 : 0805211624 : 09 Aug 2005 : Responsibility and Judgment gathers together unpublished writings from the last decade of Arendt's life, where she addresses fundamental questions and concerns about the nature of evil and the making of moral choices. At the heart of the book is a profound ethical investigation, " Some Questions of Moral Philosophy," in which Arendt confronts the inadequacy of traditional moral "truths" as standards to judge what we are capable of doing and examines anew our ability to distinguish good from evil. The Book Depository Responsibility and Judgment by Hannah Arendt - shop the best deal online on thebookbug.co.uk
Category: Books
Merchant: The Book Depository
Product ID: 9780805211627
MPN: 0805211624
GTIN: 9780805211627
Author: Denin Srmic
Rating: 5
Review: This was one of most interesting books of Hannah Arendt with which she was trying to depict the moral and ethical condition of human being through the lenses of great thinkers such as Bible, Meister Eckhart, Plato to St. Augustine, Cicero, Kant and many others. "How should we act towards other people without causing distress and harm? What philosophy should we apply, biblical, philosophical ?How is it possible that one human being as Eichman was was capable of conducting such atrocities on Jews could call upon the ethical precepts of Kant? "Ich habe mich an die Lebenspholosophie von Kannt immer gehalten" were the words of Eichmann. Hannah, going through so many works of Philosophy even literature, was citing and indicating that moral and ethical precept can be imputed to all human beings but that under certain circumstances they simply lessen save their inner consciousness vociferously and foremost vicariously is taking the upper hand. As she puts it: "one does not to read all the works of Kant, Plato ... in order to discern bad deed from the good one. One does have this consciousnesses within one self or not. No books can teach or do that for you ...! I found thees words very interesting and stunning given the last most unfortunate wars in former Yugoslavia. I would definitely would recommend this book, for it is well written and interesting to read. In addition as Herbert Marcuse said one has to read Kant much more frequently as Hannah Arendt too and need to inculcate into the minds oformost of politicians to keep to their moral ethical values rather political intrests only! Great book!
Author: G. B.
Rating: 3
Review: Home to Roost, the final essay of this collection, reflecting on the decades preceding the U.S. bicentennial and written shortly before her death, is among the best of her works. It provides relevant lessons for today. For example, she regrets that “Madison Avenue tactics under the name of public relations have been permitted to invade our political life.” And as an example, she notes that “the terrible truth” revealed by the Pentagon Papers that rather than “particular tangible interests” the Vietnam War’s “only permanent goal had become image [as a superpower] itself…” From there she considers the Watergate era and the cumulative effects on the collective American psyche of various political disasters. In considering President Ford’s amnesty of Nixon, she compares them to the Adenauer administration’s whitewashing of the crimes of Nazi officials and Khrushchev’s replacement of Stalin. Her sarcastic conclusion: “not amnesty but amnesia will heal all our wounds.” One cannot help but wonder how harshly she might have judged President Obama’s similar approaches in both the Iraq War and the financial crisis of 2008. She concludes memorably: “When the facts come home to roost, let us try at least to make them welcome. Let us try not to escape into some utopias—images, theories, or sheer follies. It was the greatness of this Republic to give due account for the sake of freedom to the best in men and to the worst.” As we consider how this nation responds to the current abomination in the White House, how the world no longer looks to the U.S. for support, Arendt's final words resonate more than ever. The eight essays, which are divided under the themes of responsibility and judgment were written late in Arendt’s life. The strength of the essays get progressively better as the book goes along. If I were to reread it, I would start with the last essay and work my way back. I would give 5 stars to the final essay, 4 to the others in the final section, and 2 to the first two-thirds of the book. The last third of the book, the judgment essays, are much more readable. Arendt considers issues as varied as school integration in Little Rock, Rolf Hochhuth’s play Der Stellvertreter (The Deputy) about the silence of Pope Pius XII about the Holocaust, the German Auschwitz trials of the 1960s and the aforementioned one anticipating the U.S. bicentennial. The responsibility essays, which take up the first two-thirds of the book, are heavy on philosophy and are generally focused in Arendt’s much misunderstood theme of “the banality of evil” that came out of her writings on the Eichmann trial. Arendt fiercely objected to being classified as a philosopher; she considered herself a political theorist. This comes through in the muddled theses of these writings as they meander a bit with repetitive themes.
