Intellectual conviction alone does not make people act on danger

Evidence

Hannah Arendt, instead, left early on: she had the benefit of a powerful warning. Just after the Nazi takeover, in spring 1933, she had been arrested while researching materials on anti-Semitism for the German Zionist Organisation at Berlin’s Prussian State Library. Her apartment was searched; both she and her mother were locked up briefly, then released. They fled, without stopping to arrange travel documents. They crossed to Czechoslovakia (then still safe) by a method that sounds almost too fabulous to be true: a sympathetic German family on the border had a house with its front door in Germany and its back door in Czechoslovakia. The family would invite people for dinner, then let them leave through the back door at night. From Prague, Arendt and her mother went on to Geneva, then to Paris, and finally to New York, where Arendt settled. She told a television interviewer later that everyone had known from the start how dangerous Nazi Germany was, but knowing it in theory was one thing, while acting on it and turning it into ‘personal destiny’ was very different. They survived. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 317

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘knowing in theory vs. turning it into personal destiny’ distinction resonates with Arendt’s mature philosophy and with the existentialist theme of bad faith/authentic choice developed elsewhere in this book. — connects to: Acquired moral standards do not regulate conduct unceasingly — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 56; A threat to act is only credible if one is committed, not merely willing — Thomas C. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict, 414; Proximity to danger does not make people politically active. — Nina Eliasoph, “Close to home”: The work of avoiding…, 20
• SEED: Potential essay: how philosophers who preach decisive action so often failed to leave dangerous places in time — theory as evasion.

Broader Connections

• Acquired moral standards do not regulate conduct unceasingly #complicates (0.82) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 56
• A threat to act is only credible if one is committed, not merely willing #expands (0.75) — Thomas C. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict, 414