Hannah Arendt: Self
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Quotes
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Hannah Arendt : For this kind of person there is neither pure luck nor pure grief, since both are sources of inspiration. That is the price of talent. The fortunate say- correctly- that success and luck are linked, something that never dawns on fools. It never dawns on fools that, as Benjamin once said, there is a place where weakness and genius are one.
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Hannah Arendt : Ever since Homer, metaphor has been the knowledge-communicating element of the poetic. With its help, in the Homeric epic those things most remote to the senses are given their most exact counterparts- as when the approach of the armies to battle is likened to the tide driven by the wind, first rising up far away at sea in order to break, thundering and foaming, on the craggy shore. In philosophy, conceptually speaking, this is the phenomenon of analogy. For Kant it was important because it concerns not so much an imperfect similarity of two things as perfect similarity of relationships between completely dissimilar things.
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Hannah Arendt : The bindingly truthful was replaced by the randomly significant, which for Benjamin meant that the consistency of truth had been lost. Part of the consistency of truth had been lost. Part of the consistency of truth, at least for Benjamin, lies in its having to do with a secret, and in the disclosure of this secret having authority. Truth, said Benjamin, shortly before he became fully aware of the irreparable break with tradition and the loss of authority, is not an unveiling that destroys the secret but rather the disclosure that does it justice. It was this peculiar consistency of truth that rendered it manageable, so to speak and capable of being handed down. Tradition transforms truth into wisdom, and wisdom is the consistency of transmissible truth. In other words, even if truth existed in our world, it could not lead to wisdom, because it no longer possesses the qualities it can attain only through the universal recognition of its validity.
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Hannah Arendt : Quoting Walter Benjamin: No poem is meant for the reader, no painting for the viewing, no symphony for the listener.
