Philosophers · 哲學家 · The 1900s to Today
Hannah Arendt 漢娜・鄂蘭 · Johanna Arendt
A refugee who was stateless for fourteen years and then explained how states come to destroy their own people, who heard in a war criminal’s clichés a new kind of evil, and who held that the most hopeful fact about human beings is that new ones keep being born.
一位做了十四年無國籍者的難民；後來她解釋了國家是怎麼走到毀滅自己人民的地步的。她在一個戰犯的陳腔濫調裡，聽出了一種新的惡；她還主張，關於人類最有希望的一項事實，就是不斷有新的人出生。
- Born 出生
- October 14, 1906, Linden, near Hanover, Germany
- Died 去世
- December 4, 1975, New York
- Studied 求學
- Marburg (with Heidegger), Heidelberg (doctorate under Jaspers, 1929)
- Status 身分
- Fled Germany 1933; stateless until she became a United States citizen in 1951
- Main works 主要著作
- The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), The Human Condition (1958), Between Past and Future (1961), Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), The Life of the Mind (1978)
- Taught 任教
- Chicago, the New School for Social Research
中文翻譯Every paragraph has a Chinese translation. Tap 中譯▾ under a paragraph to open that one, or use Show Chinese · 顯示中譯 at the top to open them all. 每一段都有中譯：點段落下方的「中譯」只開那一段，或按上方的「顯示中譯」一次全部打開。
Life · 生平
A life in three scenes 三幕人生
Königsberg to Paris 從柯尼斯堡到巴黎
Arendt grew up in Königsberg, Kant’s city, in a secular Jewish family. Her father died when she was seven. She read Kant at fourteen, and at eighteen went to Marburg to study with Martin Heidegger, the most exciting philosopher in Germany, with whom she had a love affair. She moved to Heidelberg and wrote her doctoral thesis under Karl Jaspers on the idea of love in Augustine. Jaspers remained her teacher and friend for life.
鄂蘭在柯尼斯堡，也就是康德的那座城市，在一個世俗的猶太家庭裡長大。她七歲時父親去世。她十四歲讀康德；十八歲到馬堡，跟隨馬丁・海德格學習。海德格是當時德國最令人振奮的哲學家；她與他有過一段戀情。她後來轉到海德堡，在卡爾・雅斯培的指導之下寫了博士論文，談奧古斯丁的「愛」的觀念。雅斯培終其一生都是她的老師與朋友。
In 1933 Heidegger joined the Nazi party and Arendt began collecting evidence of antisemitic propaganda for a Zionist organization. She was arrested by the Gestapo, held for eight days, and released by an officer she managed to charm. She left Germany without papers and reached Paris, where she worked for seven years for an agency that sent Jewish children to Palestine. She said later that what shocked her in 1933 was how her friends among the intellectuals fell into line. The conduct of her enemies had shocked her less. From then on she distrusted the life of the mind when it is cut off from the world.
1933 年，海德格加入了納粹黨；而鄂蘭開始為一個猶太復國主義組織蒐集反猶宣傳的證據。她被蓋世太保逮捕，關了八天；一位被她設法打動的警官放了她。她沒有證件就離開了德國，到了巴黎；在那裡，她為一個把猶太兒童送往巴勒斯坦的機構工作了七年。她後來說，1933 年讓她震驚的，是她那些知識分子朋友怎樣乖乖地靠攏。她的敵人的所作所為，倒沒有那麼讓她震驚。從那時起，她就不信任那種與世界切斷了的心智生活。
Stateless 無國籍
In 1940 the French interned her as an enemy alien in the camp at Gurs. She walked out during the confusion of the French defeat, found her husband Heinrich Blücher by chance, and with him obtained visas for the United States. Their friend Walter Benjamin gave them a manuscript to carry and killed himself at the Spanish border a few weeks later. They reached New York in May 1941 with very little money and no English.
1940 年，法國人把她當作敵國僑民，關進了居爾的拘留營。法國戰敗的混亂當中，她走了出去；碰巧找到了丈夫海因里希・布呂歇，與他一起取得了前往美國的簽證。他們的朋友華特・班雅明把一份手稿交給他們帶走；幾個星期之後，他在西班牙邊境自殺了。1941 年 5 月，他們抵達紐約；身上沒有什麼錢，也不會英文。
She learned the language, wrote for the émigré press, and worked for an organization that recovered Jewish cultural property looted in Europe. In 1951 she published The Origins of Totalitarianism, which argued that Nazism and Stalinism were a new form of government that worked by isolating people and destroying their ability to tell fact from fiction. At its center is the experience she had lived. A person who has lost a country, she wrote, has lost what she called the right to have rights, since rights are in practice guaranteed only to members of some political community. She became an American citizen in the same year.
她學了英文，為流亡者的報刊寫稿，並且為一個追討在歐洲被掠奪的猶太文化財產的組織工作。1951 年，她出版了《極權主義的起源》。這本書主張：納粹主義與史達林主義是一種新的政體；它運作的方式，是把人孤立起來，並且摧毀他們分辨事實與虛構的能力。這本書的中心，是她親身活過的經驗。她寫道：一個失去了國家的人，就失去了她所稱的「擁有權利的權利」；因為在實際上，權利只對某個政治共同體的成員才有保障。同一年，她成為美國公民。
Jerusalem and after 耶路撒冷，以及之後
The Human Condition, in 1958, gave her account of what political life is for, and made her reputation as a thinker. In 1961 she went to Jerusalem for The New Yorker to report on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, who had organized the transport of Jews to the death camps. She expected a monster and described a functionary who spoke in stock phrases and seemed unable to think from anyone else’s point of view. Her report, with its subtitle on the banality of evil and its harsh pages on the Jewish councils that had dealt with the Nazis, cost her many friends. She did not withdraw it.
1958 年的《人的條件》，說明了她認為政治生活是為了什麼；也奠定了她作為思想家的聲望。1961 年，她為《紐約客》前往耶路撒冷，報導阿道夫・艾希曼的審判；艾希曼組織了把猶太人運往滅絕營的運輸。她原本預期會看到一個怪物；而她描述的，是一個滿口套話、似乎無法從任何別人的立場來思考的官員。她的報導，連同那個談「惡的平庸」的副標題，以及談到與納粹打交道的猶太委員會的那幾頁嚴厲文字，讓她失去了許多朋友。她沒有收回。
She taught at Chicago and then at the New School in New York, and never held a chair of philosophy; she preferred to be called a political theorist. Her last years went to a study of the three activities of the mind, thinking, willing, and judging. She had finished the first two when she died of a heart attack in December 1975, while entertaining friends. The first page of the third part was found in her typewriter with only its title and two epigraphs.
她在芝加哥任教，後來在紐約的新學院任教；她從來沒有擔任過哲學的教席。她寧可被稱為政治理論家。她最後的幾年，用在研究心智的三種活動上：思考、意志與判斷。她寫完了前兩部；1975 年 12 月，她在招待朋友的時候心臟病發作去世。第三部的第一頁還在她的打字機上；上面只有標題與兩則題詞。
- 1906Born near Hanover; grows up in Königsberg生於漢諾威附近；在柯尼斯堡長大
- 1924Studies with Heidegger at Marburg在馬堡跟隨海德格學習
- 1929Doctorate under Jaspers, on love in Augustine在雅斯培指導下取得博士學位，論奧古斯丁的愛
- 1933Arrested by the Gestapo; flees to Paris被蓋世太保逮捕；逃往巴黎
- 1940Interned at Gurs; escapes被關進居爾拘留營；逃出
- 1941Arrives in New York抵達紐約
- 1951The Origins of Totalitarianism; becomes a U.S. citizen《極權主義的起源》；成為美國公民
- 1954Lectures on “The Crisis in Education”發表〈教育的危機〉
- 1958The Human Condition《人的條件》
- 1959“Reflections on Little Rock”〈小岩城事件的反思〉
- 1963Eichmann in Jerusalem《艾希曼耶路撒冷大審紀實》
- 1975Dies in New York在紐約去世
The central idea · 核心觀念
We are born to begin 我們生來是為了開始
Philosophers since Plato had taken death as the fact that defines human life. Arendt chose the other end. Every human being arrives as someone who was not there before and who may do what no one expected. She called this condition natality, and she held that it is the root of the human capacity to act, which for her means to start something new among other people. The term she borrowed from her old study of Augustine, who wrote that man was created so that there might be a beginning. Because new people keep arriving, no state of the world is final, and that is the ground of what hope there is in politics.
從柏拉圖以來的哲學家，都把死亡當作界定人類生命的那項事實。鄂蘭選了另一端。每一個人來到世上的時候，都是一個先前不在那裡的人；而且可能做出沒有人預料到的事。她把這個條件稱為「誕生性」；並且主張，它是人類「行動」能力的根源。對她來說，行動的意思是：在別人當中開啟某件新的事。這個用語，她是從自己早年對奧古斯丁的研究裡借來的；奧古斯丁寫道，人被創造出來，是為了能有一個開始。因為不斷有新的人到來，世界的任何一個狀態都不是最終的；而政治裡若有什麼希望，根據就在這裡。
The idea has a second half that concerns the old. The newcomers arrive in a world they did not make, and it must be in a fit state to receive them. Arendt distinguished the earth, which is given, from the world, which is the human-made home of buildings, institutions, stories, and laws that outlasts each of us. To care for the world is to keep that home standing for people we will not meet. In her lecture on education she drew the conclusion for teachers. Education is where we decide whether we love the world enough to take responsibility for it, and whether we love our children enough to prepare them for the task of renewing it. The teacher’s authority, she said, rests on being able to say to the child: this is our world.
這個觀念還有與年長者有關的另一半。新來的人，是來到一個並非他們所造的世界裡；而這個世界必須處在一個適合迎接他們的狀態。鄂蘭把「大地」與「世界」分開：大地是被給予的；世界則是人造的家，是由建築、制度、故事與法律構成的，比我們每一個人都活得久。照顧世界，就是為了我們不會見到的人，讓那個家繼續立著。在談教育的那場演講裡，她為教師推出了結論。教育，就是我們決定「是否愛這個世界愛到願意為它負起責任」的地方；也是我們決定「是否愛我們的孩子愛到願意讓他們準備好去承擔更新世界的任務」的地方。她說，教師的權威立足於：能夠對孩子說，這是我們的世界。
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.極權統治的理想臣民，並不是堅定的納粹黨人，也不是堅定的共產黨人；而是這樣的人：對他們來說，事實與虛構的區別（也就是經驗的真實性），以及真與假的區別（也就是思考的標準），都不再存在了。
Written about the 1930s and 1940s. It is the sentence of hers most quoted in the present century, for reasons that need no comment. 寫的是 1930 與 1940 年代。這是她在本世紀最常被引用的一句話；原因不需要說明。
The strongest objection · 最強的反駁
Thoughtless, or acting a part? 艾希曼真的是「不思考」嗎？
Arendt’s portrait of Eichmann as a man without motives beyond his career, who never realized what he was doing, was attacked at once. Her friend Gershom Scholem wrote that she lacked love for the Jewish people and that the phrase about banality was a slogan. The more damaging objection came later and from the archives. Recordings that Eichmann made in Argentina in the 1950s, studied closely by the historian Bettina Stangneth, show a committed and boastful antisemite who was proud of his work and regretted that it had not been completed. On this evidence the man in the glass booth in Jerusalem was acting a part, and Arendt was taken in by the performance.
鄂蘭把艾希曼描繪成一個除了仕途之外沒有動機、從來沒有意識到自己在做什麼的人；這幅肖像立刻受到了攻擊。她的朋友格肖姆・朔勒姆寫道：她缺乏對猶太民族的愛；而那個談「平庸」的說法是一句口號。更具殺傷力的反駁來得比較晚，而且來自檔案。艾希曼 1950 年代在阿根廷留下的錄音，經過歷史學家貝蒂娜・施湯內特的仔細研究，顯示出一個堅定而自誇的反猶主義者：他以自己的工作為榮，並且遺憾那件工作沒有完成。照這份證據，耶路撒冷玻璃亭裡的那個人是在演戲；而鄂蘭被那場表演騙過了。
Her defenders grant the facts about Eichmann and hold that the thesis survives them. Arendt did not say that Eichmann was innocent, ordinary, or without convictions. She held that he should hang. Her claim was that great evil does not require demonic depth. It can be done by people who have stopped examining what they say and do, and who take their words ready-made from those around them. A fanatic who speaks in slogans fits that description as well as a clerk does. She may have been wrong about the man and right about the phenomenon, and the experiments of Milgram and others in the following years gave it uncomfortable support.
為她辯護的人承認關於艾希曼的那些事實；並且主張，她的論點經得起這些事實。鄂蘭並沒有說艾希曼無辜、平凡，或者沒有信念。她主張他應該被絞死。她的主張是：巨大的惡並不需要魔鬼般的深度。做出它的，可以是那些已經不再檢視自己所說所做的人；他們的話，是從周圍的人那裡拿來的現成品。一個滿口口號的狂熱分子，跟一個辦事員一樣符合這個描述。她對那個人也許看錯了，對那個現象卻看對了；而接下來幾年裡米爾格倫等人的實驗，給了它令人不安的支持。
How we know · 史料
Little Rock 小岩城
In 1957 nine Black students entered a white high school in Little Rock, Arkansas, under the protection of federal troops, through crowds of screaming adults. Arendt saw a photograph of one of the girls and wrote an essay arguing that the policy was mistaken. Children, she said, were being sent to fight a political battle that adults had failed to win, and schools belong to the social sphere, where people may choose their company, and not to the political sphere, where equality must be absolute. She thought the first target should have been the laws against marriage between the races.
1957 年，九名黑人學生在聯邦軍隊的保護之下，穿過一群群尖叫的成年人，進入了阿肯色州小岩城的一所白人高中。鄂蘭看到了其中一個女孩的照片，寫了一篇文章，主張這項政策是錯的。她說，孩子被派去打一場成年人沒能打贏的政治戰役；而學校屬於社會領域，在那裡人們可以選擇自己要跟誰在一起；它不屬於政治領域，在那裡平等必須是絕對的。她認為，第一個該針對的，應該是那些禁止不同種族通婚的法律。
The essay was a serious error, and it came from her own best ideas. Her concern to shield children from the adult world was the concern of her lecture on education. Her distinction between the social and the political led her to treat a system of public humiliation as a matter of private preference. The novelist Ralph Ellison replied that she had no understanding of what Black parents were doing when they sent their children through those lines. They were teaching them, at a cost they knew, what it would take to live as free people in that country. Arendt wrote to Ellison that he was right, and that she had not grasped the ideal of sacrifice involved. A thinker’s distinctions are instruments. This episode shows what happens when they are applied from a distance, without asking the people concerned.
這篇文章是一個嚴重的錯誤；而它正是出自她自己最好的那些觀念。她想把孩子擋在成人世界之外的那份關切，就是她談教育的那場演講裡的關切。她對「社會的」與「政治的」所作的區分，使她把一套公開羞辱人的制度，當成了私人偏好的問題。小說家拉爾夫・艾里森回應說：黑人父母讓孩子穿過那些人牆的時候是在做什麼，她毫無理解。他們是在付出一份自己很清楚的代價，教孩子明白：要在那個國家以自由人的身分生活，需要什麼。鄂蘭寫信給艾里森，說他是對的；說她沒有掌握到其中所涉及的那種犧牲的理想。一位思想家的區分，是工具。這段插曲顯示：當這些工具被人從遠處套用，而沒有去問當事人的時候，會發生什麼。
Dharma and the West · 佛法與西方哲學
Arendt and the Buddha 鄂蘭與佛陀
On birth the two stand far apart, and the contrast is instructive. In the Buddha’s teaching birth is a link in the chain that leads to aging, death, and sorrow, and the path aims at the end of being born. For Arendt birth is the source of everything new and the reason that the world can be renewed. The difference is less a disagreement about one fact than a difference in what is being looked at. The Buddha is speaking of the round of craving that drives a being from life to life. Arendt is speaking of the appearance of a new person among others, in a shared world. A Mahāyāna Buddhist can accept her point without strain, since the bodhisattva chooses to be born again and again for the sake of that shared world.
在「生」這件事上，兩人相距很遠；而這個對比很有啟發性。在佛陀的教法裡，生是那條通往老、死與憂悲的鏈條上的一環；而道的目標，是不再受生。對鄂蘭來說，生是一切新事物的來源，也是世界之所以能夠被更新的理由。這個差別，與其說是對同一項事實的意見不合，不如說是所看的東西不同。佛陀談的，是驅使眾生一生又一生流轉的渴愛之輪。鄂蘭談的，是一個新的人在別人當中、在一個共有的世界裡出現。一位大乘佛教徒可以毫不勉強地接受她的論點；因為菩薩正是為了那個共有的世界，而選擇一再受生。
They come close on the nature of action. Arendt observed that a deed, once done, cannot be undone, and that its consequences run on without limit and beyond anyone’s foresight. This is very nearly a description of karma. She proposed two remedies that lie within human power. Against irreversibility there is forgiveness, which releases a person from what he has done so that he can begin again. Against unpredictability there is the promise, which sets up islands of reliability in an uncertain future. Buddhist practice has both, as repentance and as the vow. Her account of Eichmann’s fault, a failure to stop and think about what one is doing, is close to what the Buddha called heedlessness, which he named as the path to death, with heedfulness as the path to the deathless.
在「行動」的性質上，兩人很接近。鄂蘭觀察到：一件事一旦做了，就無法收回；而它的後果會無止境地延續下去，超出任何人的預見。這幾乎就是對「業」的描述。她提出了兩項在人力範圍之內的補救。針對不可逆轉，有寬恕：它把一個人從他所做過的事裡釋放出來，使他能夠重新開始。針對不可預測，有承諾：它在不確定的未來裡，立起一座座可靠的島。這兩樣，佛教的修行裡都有：懺悔，以及誓願。她對艾希曼的過失的說明，也就是「沒有停下來想一想自己在做什麼」，很接近佛陀所說的「放逸」；佛陀說放逸是死路，不放逸是不死之路。
Terms of art · 哲學術語
Words that come with her 跟著她一起來的詞
L. natalis ‘of birth’
The fact that each human being is a new beginning, and the capacity to begin that follows from it.
每一個人都是一個新的開始這項事實；以及由此而來的「開始」的能力。
In Arendt, starting something new among others by word and deed, as distinct from labor and work.
在鄂蘭那裡：以言語與作為，在別人當中開啟某件新的事；有別於勞動與製作。
The durable human-made home of things and institutions that outlasts individual lives.
由器物與制度構成的、人造的、持久的家；它比個人的生命更長久。
Her phrase for great wrong done without demonic motives, by people who do not think about what they are doing.
她的說法：巨大的錯事，並非出於魔鬼般的動機，而是由不去想自己在做什麼的人做出來的。
A form of rule that seeks total domination by terror, isolation, and the destruction of the sense of reality.
一種統治形式：以恐怖、孤立，以及摧毀人的現實感，來追求全面的支配。
Membership in a political community, without which other rights cannot be claimed.
作為某個政治共同體成員的資格；沒有它，其他的權利都無從主張。
Reading check · 理解測驗
Did it land? 讀懂了嗎
1. What does Arendt mean by natality?
2. On what, for Arendt, does a teacher’s authority rest?
3. What did she claim about Eichmann?
4. What did Ralph Ellison say she had failed to understand about Little Rock?
Go further · 延伸
Where she appears 她出現在哪幾課
- Hannah Arendt, “The Crisis in Education,” in Between Past and Future (1961) ↗Her lecture for teachers. The link is to a survey of her thought. 她為教師所作的那場演講。連結是她思想的概述。
- Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (1958), chapter 5 ↗Action, natality, forgiveness, and the promise. The link is to a summary. 行動、誕生性、寬恕與承諾。連結是一篇摘要。
- Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) ↗The report and the controversy. The link is to a summary. 那份報導，以及那場爭議。連結是一篇摘要。
- Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Hannah Arendt” ↗A clear account of her main books. 對她幾本主要著作的清楚說明。
- Walter Benjamin, in this series ↗The friend whose last manuscript she carried to New York. 那位朋友；他最後的手稿是她帶到紐約的。