Bluesky

And are these your own views too? I thought you said you didn't know what to make of her.

Oh I get that comes across weird, I'm looking all this stuff up as you're challenging me on it and what I'm finding is starting to solidify my views a bit more.

I have to admit I'm not particularly invested in this issue, but I do think it's a gross mischaracterisation to say the letters post relationship somehow constitute an ongoing affair. They quite obviously don't.

That doesn't seem as obvious to the New Yorker

In 1950, seventeen years after they had last communicated, Arendt and Heidegger met again, when she went to Germany to help track down stolen Jewish cultural treasures. At times, she had been publicly critical of Heidegger’s behavior during his rectorship and afterward, but the renewal of their ties banished all her suspicions. “This evening and this morning are the confirmation of an entire life,” she wrote to him after their meeting. For the next two years, their love enjoyed a brief afterlife, as Heidegger wrote poems about her and told her things like “I wish I could run the five-fingered comb through your frizzy hair.”

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/01/12/beware-of-pity-Hannah-Arendt

(The author betrays a very obvious bias about what we're supposed to take away to be fair)

When I quoted her, my intention was simply to communicate that specific idea, with which I agree - not to evoke her as if she were some kind of infallible god.

Yeah I'm with you there.

As far as I'm aware historians have not found any evidence that Arendt was any more aware of the content of the notebooks than anyone else was.

That I'm not sure.

I don't think I really know enough to have a right to that strong a view when the historical record seems to be changing so recently and most of her letters are lost whole she kept all of Heideggers, but what I'm finding is a bit troubling tbh.

For over half a century she was considered the best source of insight into Eichmann and Nazi psychology.

With new knowledge about her conflict of interest and defence of Heidegger I'm left wondering how much of an expert she should be considered.

It seems from the evidence, Heidegger was a willing and complicit Nazi who wrote about genuinely antisemetic views. In that light, Hannah's defence of him is surprising.

I'm unsure of what go make of her psychological evaluation capabilities if she had such a glaring blindspot here.

I'm not in favour of abandoning the concepts of ideology and interpretation because Althusser murdered his wife, similarly I'm not going to abandon the concept of the banality of evil because Arendt was deluded about a creepy professor she had an affair with.

Right, neither am I.

That's why I didn't abandon it and instead said I am unsure what to make of it.

I'm not trying to come to a black or white conclusion, I think this is a complicated subject.