Leonard Peikoff Quote
Hannah Arendt, the best and most philosophically inclined of the commentators, is also, in regard to her ultimate conclusions, the worst, i.e., the most perversely wrong-headed. In a final warning, she singles out for special attack the attitude which she regards as a major source of the Nazis’ evil and of their success: an unswerving commitment to logic. The Nazis, she says, and the masses attracted to them, were too consistent in pursuing the implications of a basic premise (which she identifies as racism); they gave up the freedom of thought for the strait jacket of logic or the tyranny of logicality; they did not admit that complete consistency exists nowhere in the realm of reality, which is pervaded instead by fortuitousness.
Hannah Arendt, the best and most philosophically inclined of the commentators, is also, in regard to her ultimate conclusions, the worst, i.e., the most perversely wrong-headed. In a final warning, she singles out for special attack the attitude which she regards as a major source of the Nazis’ evil and of their success: an unswerving commitment to logic. The Nazis, she says, and the masses attracted to them, were too consistent in pursuing the implications of a basic premise (which she identifies as racism); they gave up the freedom of thought for the strait jacket of logic or the tyranny of logicality; they did not admit that complete consistency exists nowhere in the realm of reality, which is pervaded instead by fortuitousness.
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