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| "Hannah Arendt Cheat Sheet" by Samantha Rose Hill |
And since thinking, the silent dialogue of me with myself, is sheer activity of the mind combined with complete immobility of the body—“never am I more active than when I do nothing” (Cato)—the difficulties created by metaphors drawn from the sense of hearing would be as great as the difficulties created by the metaphor of vision. (Bergson, still so firmly attached to the metaphor of intuition for the ideal of truth, speaks of the “essentially active, I might almost say violent, character of metaphysical intuition” without being aware of the contradiction between the quiet of contemplation and any activity, let alone a violent one.
"Lies are often much more plausible, more appealing to reason than reality, since the liar has the great advantage of knowing beforehand what the audience wishes or expects to hear." — Hannah Arendt
Along with this “will to the now,” there is a kind of hoarding of the past, an “archive mania” which, paradoxically, denies the past its true character. In its hands the past becomes a mere source of “information.” Unlike true historical scholarship, there is no discrimination between what is worthy of being saved and what is not, what tells a story and what does not. Like Jorge Luis Borges's unfortunate character Funes the Memorius, today's “information junkies” are either unable or unwilling to forget anything.
Evolution has a broad and general tendency to move in the direction of: increasing complexity, increasing differentiation/integration, increasing organization/structuration, increasing relative autonomy, increasing telos.
Benedict Spinoza: “Sedulo curavi humanas actiones non ridere non lugere neque detestari, sed intelligere.”—“I have laboured carefully, when faced with human actions, not to mock, not to lament, not to execrate, but to understand.”
