Arendt, “Humanity in Dark Times”

I. In Section I (page 4) Arendt discusses Lessing’s relation to Christianity and its many Enlightenment critics. While some of his contemporaries were busy investigating the rational side of theology to defend the Church against the skeptics and atheists, Lessing had a different approach, “taking sides for the world’s sake.” It is also true that he:
1. found Christianity more “dubious” the more people tried “to prove it.”
2. was a critic of the Church, but defended it when he thought it was being attacked too much
3. defended not the truth promulgated by the Church, but its place in the world, its right to exist
4. exercised his aesthetic judgment without feeling compelled to be self-consistent
5. All of the above.

II. In Section II (page 7-8) Arendt discusses the “warmth of persecuted peoples” and explains that it is “a great thing” that comes at the heavy price for the world. The price for the world is,
1. the fact that pariah peoples enjoy the great privilege of a life of responsibility-free unworldliness
2. the fact that pariah peoples are lazy and just suck off the state
3. the fact that pariah peoples make us squares feel depressed when we see how they exhibit kindness and goodness that doesn’t seem possible or normal among other more repressed people

III. In Section II (page 8), after discussing Aristotle’s aesthetics and its Stoic variation, Arendt rejects the notion that human beings are necessarily so egoistic. Explicitly she rejects the claim that the sufferings of others arouse in us fear for ourselves. Indeed, she insists that the true opposite of compassion, which is natural, is cruelty, which is “a perversion.” The naturally compassionate “selflessness” (philanthropia) that she claims is “in fact the precondition for “humanity” is best understood as,
1. wearing ugly clothes and cutting your hair short
2. talkative gladness that is permeated with affirmative, non-envious pleasure in the other person
3. anything that reminds you that others have it worse
4. taking sublime pleasure to feel oneself alive as one watches others perish, e.g. in the Roman coliseum, in a shipwreck

IV. In section III (page 10) Arendt discusses the phenomenon of “inner emigration,” for example the Germans during the Nazi period who withdrew to “an interior realm,” of how it ought to be or once was. While it was not necessarily for some people to choose this, in her analysis the Germans should understand:
1. that this “inner emigration” has not come to an end, but is evidenced continuing in their present inability to face the horror of the past
2. that they should give up trying to “master their past,” accept that they can only live with it, endure it in a way
3. that insofar as art and aesthetic experience have a role to play in tragic reconciliation, the pain and suffering must be experienced again. The actor must become the passive spectator in the reflection of memory, and in the narratives of storytelling, that is, in human speech
4. actually it doesn’t matter whether we are escapists or not; everyone has a right to their own opinion and it is nobody’s business if someone else just lives in a fantasy
5. the inner emigrants were the good people because they did not intend to hurt anyone; one cannot be guilty of something one does not intend to do.
In section IV (page 12-13) Arendt recommends that we should think about the worldly, political significance of friendship in aesthetic terms. Friendship, she argues, is part of the art of critical thinking (of making distinctions) that we can learn from Lessing and
1. moderns who understand friendship as intimacy, and humanity as a mere effect of education
2. the Romans who understood “humanitas” as a tool of political assimilation
3. revolutionaries inspired by Rousseau, who sees all men as alike, unified in their identical “nature,” their animal compassionateness and suffering.
4. the Greeks (but not Aristotle) who understood philanthropia to be a readiness to share the world with other men; according to a life in which friends rejoice with each other in the world and nature and the cosmos
5. contemporary Americans who think we live in a post-racial world
6. all those who have more than 3000 facebook friends