No paradox of contemporary politics is filled with a more poignant irony than the discrepancy between the efforts of well-meaning idealists who stubbornly insist on regarding as 'inalienable' those human rights, which are enjoyed only by citizens of the most prosperous and civilized countries, and the situation of the rightless themselves.
Hannah Arendt, "The Decline of the Nation State and the End of the Rights of Man" from Origins of Totalitarianism
Hannah Arendt, "The Decline of the Nation State and the End of the Rights of Man" from Origins of Totalitarianism
Life as the highest value cannot, of course, be demonstrated; it is a mere hypothesis, the assumption made by common sense that the will is free because without that assumption -- as has been said over and over -- no precept of a moral, religious, or juridical nature could possibly make sense. It is contradicted by the 'scientific hypothesis' according to which -- as Kant, notably, pointed out -- every act, the moment it enters the world, falls into a network of causes, and thus appears in a sequence of occurrences explicable only in the context of causality. For Nietzsche, it is decisive that the common-sense hypothesis constitutes a 'dominant sentiment from which we cannot liberate ourselves even if the scientific hypothesis were demonstrated.' But the identification of willing with living, the notion that our urge to live and our will to will are ultimately the same, has other, and perhaps more serious consequences for Nietzsche's concept of power.
Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind: Willing
Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind: Willing