Hannah Arendt, "What Is Freedom?" скачать в хорошем качестве

Hannah Arendt, "What Is Freedom?"

Join me for a live discussion of Hannah Arendt's essay, "What is Freedom?" Thursday 10/23 @ 10AM CT. In her essay, Arendt provokes us to consider that freedom is not fundamentally an internal quality of the will, an “obscurity” in the human heart, but a “demonstrative fact.” Freedom, Arendt suggests, is a quality of action, and specifically the quality par excellence of political action. Arendt thinks this concept of freedom as action was eclipsed by a focus on the will’s internal capacity for choice. She traces this non-political understanding of freedom in part to Stoicism, with its emphasis on indifference to circumstance, but especially to St. Paul as mediated by St. Augustine. She explains: "Our philosophical tradition is almost unanimous in holding that freedom begins where men have left the realm of political life inhabited by the many, and that it is not experienced in association with others but in intercourse with one’s self—whether in the form of an inner dialogue which, since Socrates, we call thinking, or in a conflict within myself, the inner strife between what I would and what I do, whose murderous dialectics disclosed first to Paul and then to Augustine the equivocalities and impotence of the human heart." This philosophical idea of freedom is one that Arendt wishes to distinguish from a different, politically-oriented notion of freedom.