The Courage of Judgment
"Men=earthbound creatures, living in communities, endowed with common sense, sensus communis, a community sense; not autonomous, needing each other’s company even for thinking (“freedom of the pen”)=first part of the Critique of Judgment: aesthetic judgment."
-Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy
This fragment from Arendt’s Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy is easy to overlook, as upon first glance, it seems to do little more than restate her reliance on Kant’s concepts of the sensus communis and “enlarged thought” to define judgment. These lines are notes she has jotted down, expressing early sketches on the finished product of judgment as the idea that judgment is the mental operation of “placing [oneself] at the standpoint of others” to become an individual of “enlarged thought."
But upon closer examination, a puzzle emerges. In these lines, the sensus communis and the community that is presumed in this sense seems to encroach upon thinking—that faculty that Arendt insists occurs only in isolation. Thinking is the silent dialogue, the “two-in-one” that exists only when I am alone, for in appearing to others, “I am one; otherwise I would be unrecognizable.” In these notes in the Lectures, however, Arendt seems to reject the very terms by which she herself establishes the category of thought, undermining the boundary between the thinking self and the community, which she herself establishes. (“You must be alone in order to think; you need company to enjoy a meal.”)
One obvious solution to the puzzle is to say that the community sense arises from imagining others’ standpoints, rather than from actual others who could constitute “real” company. But given how often Arendt describes the two-in-one of thinking as a “duality” by which I keep myself company, drawing the line between imagined others and actual others seems too crude to capture what Arendt means by company. We do not need others, imagined or otherwise, to have company, as one can—and should be—one’s own company.
Another solution, and the one that has come to define Arendtian judgment, has been simply to ignore the solitude that thinking imposes onto judgment and to instead describe the operation of the latter as an imagined discourse that one might have with others. Here, judgment seems to introduce into the two-in-one of thinking other individuals such that it is not myself, but other people, who keep me company in thought.
But this characterization of judgment should make careful readers of Arendt uncomfortable, for in reducing the “thoughtfulness” of judgment to a dialogue with others in their specific circumstances, we not only veer dangerously close to empathy, but also lose conscience and responsibility as gifts that accompany thinking in its solitude. Without conscience telling us that we must live with ourselves, it becomes too easy to lose in the company and noise of others who we are and what we do. It becomes too easy to perform tasks that exposed in the solitude of thought; we might not be able to live with.
What then could Arendt mean when she says that we might need each other’s company for thinking? I submit that the interpretive problems that I’ve so far identified emerge from associating the “general standpoint” of enlarged thought too much with the visiting of other standpoints at the expense of another prominent metaphorical figure in Arendt’s Lectures—the figure of the Judge. As Arendt acknowledges, the “whole terminology of Kant’s philosophy is shot through with legal metaphors: it is the Tribunal or Reason before which the occurrences of the world appear.” It is as an impartial judge in a tribunal, not as an individual who engages or empathizes with the specific circumstances of others, that one achieves a “general standpoint.” In one’s position as a judge, one gives up not only one’s own “factual existence,” but also factual existence as such. The judge “lays down his verdict” not with the multiplicity of human life in mind, but rather with the impartiality that comes from giving up “the dokei moi, the it-seems-to-me, and the desire to seem to others; we have given up the doxa, which is both opinion and fame.” The judge is not impartial because he has seen all the partial perspectives of the world, but because he is importantly isolated from any of these perspectives.
But despite this language that seems to move us away from what we usually see as Arendt’s politics, Arendt chose to focus on Kantian judgment, shot through with all of its language of reason and the law, to develop a political understanding of judgment. She did so, I submit, because she saw that the courtroom also demands the openness and publicity that is the hallmark of the political. The impartiality of the judge lies in the simple fact that for the judge and the court, “justice must not only be done but must be seen to be done.” And when it comes to judgment properly understood, the audience is the world itself with all of its multiplicity and plurality, which would overwhelm any individual’s attempt even to begin imaginatively to apprehend, much less visit, the universe of perspectives it contains.
One must simply accept this plurality as a sheer given and a fact, acknowledging that such a world will be the tribunal in which one will be judged. To again borrow words that Arendt used in a different context, judgment is fundamentally about the willingness to “share the earth” with whoever happens to occupy it such that “member[s] of the human race can be expected to want to share the earth” with us as well and be willing to judge us. Judgment does not require that we attempt to know the specific circumstances of these others. In fact, it demands that we do not attempt to understand or know it, and instead to accept and reconcile ourselves to the fact that there are others and, more importantly, that it is in front of an unknown, cosmopolitan world that contains them that we will be seen and judged.
Eichmann lacked judgment because he refused to live in such a world, choosing instead to follow a regime whose policy it was to try to remake this world more familiar and friendly to it. And as difficult or impossible as the project of the Third Reich was to bring to fruition, carrying it out certainly did not require the bravery demanded in politics. The cowardice of the Nazis was evident in the trials of Nuremburg and Jerusalem, as well as in their reaction to resistance even during the war, when the “courage” of the soldiers “melt[ed] like butter in the sun” in the face of Danish resistance. The courage of politics, the courage of judgment demands that one be able to stand in front of and be willing to be judged by world full of strangers whose particular perspectives, standpoints, ideas, or circumstances we could not begin to appreciate.
-Jennie Han
MOOCs: The Debate Continues
After months in which university after university signed on to the bandwagon for Massive Open Online Courses called MOOCs, the battle over the future of education has finally begun. This week Duke University pulled out of EdX, the Harvard/MIT led consortium of Massive Open Online Courses called MOOC’s.
The reason: Its faculty rebelled. According to The New York Times,
While [Duke provost Peter] Lange saw the consortium as expanding the courses available to Duke students, some faculty members worried that the long-term effect might be for the university to offer fewer courses — and hire fewer professors. Others said there had been inadequate consultation with the faculty.
The Times also reports that faculty at Amherst College, my alma mater and former employer, voted against joining EdX. Again, the faculty saw danger. My former colleagues worried that the introduction of online courses would detrimentally impact the quality and spirit of education and the small liberal arts college. They also, as our friends over at ViaMeadia report, worried that MOOCs would “take student tuition dollars away from so-called middle-tier and lower-tier” schools, pushing their colleagues at these institutions out of their jobs.
And that brings us to ground zero of the battle between the faculty and the MOOCs: San Jose State University. San Jose State has jumped out as a leader in the use of blended online and offline courses. Mohammad H. Qayoumi, the university's president, has defended his embrace of online curricula on both educational and financial grounds. He points to one course, "Circuits & Electronics," offered by EdX. In a pilot program, students in that course did better than students in similar real-world courses taught by San Jose State professors. Where nearly 40% of San Jose students taking their traditional course received a C or lower, only 9% of students taking the EdX course did. For Qayoumi and others, such studies offer compelling grounds for integrating MOOCs into the curriculum. The buzzword is “blended courses,” in which the MOOCs are used in conjunction with faculty tutors. In this “flipped classroom,” the old model in which students listen to lectures in lecture halls and then do assignments at home, is replaced by online lectures supplemented by discussions and exercises done in class with professors. As I have written, such a model can be pedagogically powerful, if done right.
But as attractive as MOOCs may be, they carry with them real dangers. And these dangers emerge front and center in the hard-hitting Open Letter that the philosophy department at San Jose State University has published addressed to Michael Sandel. Sandel is the Harvard Professor famous for his popular and excellent course “Justice,” that has been wowing and provoking Harvard undergraduates for decades. Sandel not only teaches his course, he has branded it. He sells videos of the course; he published a book called Justice based on the course, and, most recently, created an online video version of the course for EdX. San Jose State recently became one of the first public universities in the country to sign a contract paying for the use of EdX courses. This is what led to the letter from the philosophers.
The letter begins by laying out the clear issue. The San Jose Philosophy department has professors who can teach courses in justice and ethics of the kind Sandel teaches. From their point of view, “There is no pedagogical problem in our department that JusticeX solves, nor do we have a shortage of faculty capable of teaching our equivalent course.” In short, while some students may prefer a course with a famous Harvard professor, the faculty at San Jose State believe that they are qualified to teach about Justice.
Given their qualifications, the philosophy professors conclude that the real reason for the contract with EdX is not increased educational value, but simply cost. As they write: "We believe that long-term financial considerations motivate the call for massively open online courses (MOOCs) at public universities such as ours.
In short, the faculty sees the writing on the wall. Whatever boilerplate rhetoric about blended courses and educational benefit may be fashionable and necessary, the real issue is simple. Public universities (and many private ones as well) will not keep paying the salaries of professors when those professors are not needed.
While for now professors are kept on to teach courses in a blended classroom, there will soon be need for many fewer professors. As students take Professor Sandel’s class at universities around the country, they will eventually work with teaching assistants—just as students do at Harvard, where Professor Sandel has pitifully little interaction with his hundreds of students in every class. These teaching assistants make little money, significantly less than a tenured or even a non-tenured professor. It is only a matter of time before many university classes are taught virtually by superstar professors assisted by armies of low-paid onsite assistants. State universities will then be able to educate significantly more students at a fraction of the current cost. For many students this will be a great boon—a certified and possibly quality education at a cheap price. For most California voters, this is a good deal. But it is precisely what the faculty at San Jose State fear. As they write:
We believe the purchasing of online and blended courses is not driven by concerns about pedagogy, but by an effort to restructure the U.S. university system in general, and our own California State University system in particular. If the concern were pedagogically motivated, we would expect faculty to be consulted and to monitor quality control. On the other hand, when change is financially driven and involves a compromise of quality it is done quickly, without consulting faculty or curriculum committees, and behind closed doors. This is essentially what happened with SJSU's contract with edX. At a press conference (April 10, 2013 at SJSU) announcing the signing of the contract with edX, California Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom acknowledged as much: "The old education financing model, frankly, is no longer sustainable." This is the crux of the problem. It is time to stop masking the real issue of MOOCs and blended courses behind empty rhetoric about a new generation and a new world. The purchasing of MOOCs and blended courses from outside vendors is the first step toward restructuring the CSU.
The San Jose State philosophy professors are undoubtedly correct. We are facing a systematic transformation in higher education in this country and also in secondary education as well. Just as the Internet has revolutionized journalism and just as it is now shaking the foundations of medicine and law, the Internet will not leave education alone. Change seems nigh. Part of this change is being driven by cost. Some of it is also being driven by the failures and perceived failures of our current system. The question for those of us in the world of higher education is whether we can respond intelligently to save the good and change out the bad. It is time that faculties around the country focus on this question and for that we should all be thankful to the philosophy professors at San Jose State.
The Open Letter offers three main points to argue that it is bad pedagogy to replace them with the blended course model of MOOCs and teaching assistants.
First, they argue that good teaching requires professors engaged in research. When professors are engaged in active research programs, they are interested in and motivated by their fields. Students can perceive if a professor is bored with a class and students will always learn more and be driven to study and excel by professors who feel that their work matters. Some may wonder what the use of research is that is read by only a few colleagues around the world, but one answer is that such research is necessary to keep professors fresh and sharp. We all know the sad fate of professors who have disengaged from research.
Second, the philosophy professors accept the argument of many including myself that large lectures are not the best way to teach. They teach by the Socratic method, interacting with students. Such classes, they write, are much better than having students watch Professor Sandel engage Socratically with faculty at Harvard. Of course, the MOOC model would still allow for Socratic and personal engagement, just by much lower paid purveyors of the craft. The unanswered question is whether low-paid assistants can be trained to teach well. The answer may well be yes.
Third, the philosophy faculty worry about the exact same moral justice course being taught across the country. We can already see the disciplinary barricades being drawn. It may be one thing to teach Math to the whole country from one or two MOOCs, but philosophy needs multiple perspectives. But how many? The philosophy professors suggest that their highly diverse and often lower-middle-class students have different experiences and references than do Professor Sandel’s Harvard students. They can, in the classroom, better connect with these students than Professor Sandel via online lectures.
The points the San Jose State philosophy professors raise are important. In many ways, however, their letter misses the point. Our educational system is now structured on a few questionable premises. First, that everyone who attends college wants a liberal arts education. That is simply not true. Many students simply want a credential to get a job. If these students can be taught well and more cheaply, we should help them. There is a question of whether we need to offer everyone the same kind of highly personalized and expensive education. While such arguments will be lambasted as elitist, it is nevertheless true that not everyone wants or needs to read Kant closely. We should seek to protect the ability of those who do—no matter their economic class—and also allow those who don’t a more efficient path through school.
A second questionable premise is that specialization is necessary to be a good teacher. This also is false. Too much specialization removes one from the world of common sense. As I have argued before, we need professors who are educated more generally. It is important to learn about Shakespeare and Aristotle, but you don’t need to be a specialist in Shakespeare or Aristotle to teach them well and thoughtfully to undergraduates. This is not an argument against the Ph.D. It is important to study and learn an intellectual tradition if you are going to teach. But it is an argument against the professionalization of the Ph.D. and of graduate education in general. It is also an argument against the dominance of undergraduate curriculum by professionalized scholars.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, is the premise that everyone needs to go to college. If we put a fraction of the resources we currently spend on remedial education for college students back into public high schools in this country, we could begin the process of transforming high school into a serious and meaningful activity. For one thing, we could begin employing Ph.D.s as high school teachers as are many of the emerging early colleges opening around the country.
I am sympathetic to the philosophy professors at San Jose State. I too teach a course on Justice called “The Foundation of Law: The Quest for Justice.” It is a course quite similar and yet meaningfully different from Michael Sandel’s course on Justice. I believe it is better, no offense meant. And I would be upset if I were told next year that instead of teaching my course I would be in effect a glorified TA for Professor Sandel. I hope it doesn’t come to that, but I know it might.
The only response for those whose jobs are being replaced by computers or the Internet is to go out and figure out how to do it better. That is what happened to journalists who were fired in droves. Many quit voluntarily and began developing new models of journalism, including blogs that have enriched our public discourse and largely rejuvenated public journalism in this country. Blogs, of course, are not perfect, and there is the question of how to make a living writing one. But enterprising bloggers like Andrew Sullivan and Walter Russell Mead are figuring that out. So too are professors like Michael Sandel and Andrew Ng.
We need educators to become experimental these days, to create small schools and intensive curricula within larger institutions that make the most of the personal interaction that is the core of true pedagogy. If that happens, and if teachers offer meaningful education for which students or our taxpayers will pay, then our jobs will be safe. And our students will be better for it. For this reason, we should welcome the technology as a push to make ourselves better teachers.
The Open Letter to Michael Sandel deserves a response. I hope Professor Sandel offers one. Until then, I recommend that this beautiful Spring weekend you read the letter from the San Jose State Philosophy Department. It is your weekend read.
-RB
Amor Mundi 4/7/13
Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.
Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.
"My Republican Friends Ask if I've Gone Crazy."
A favorite exemplar of American intellectual is the reformed proselytizer, which in part explains the celebrity of David Frum. A lifelong Republican and official in the George W. Bush administration, Frum was part of the neo-conservative movement. For the last few years, however, Frum has positioned himself as a centrist, the thinking man's Republican. In 2011 he published a manifesto of sorts, breaking with the extremes of his party: "I've been a Republican all my adult life. I have worked on the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, at Forbes magazine, at the Manhattan and American Enterprise Institutes, as a speechwriter in the George W. Bush administration. I believe in free markets, low taxes, reasonable regulation, and limited government. I voted for John McCain in 2008, and I have strongly criticized the major policy decisions of the Obama administration. But as I contemplate my party and my movement in 2011, I see things I simply cannot support." The full essay is well worth reading today. So is Frum's blog, one of the best. Take a look, and then come hear Roger Berkowitz and Walter Russell Mead talk with Frum in NYC on Tuesday, April 9th, as part of the Hannah Arendt Center's series, "Blogging and the New Public Intellectual." More information here.
In honor of National Poetry Month, The Big Think asked Robert Pinsky, the 39th Poet Laureate of the United States, about The Favorite Poem Project, which he founded in 1997. In the course of the interview, Pinsky speaks about teaching poetry: The best thing I know of about teaching art is in William Butler Yeats' great poem, "Sailing to Byzantium." He says-in the first draft he said, "There is no singing school, but studying monuments of its own magnificence." He doesn't say there's no singing school but going to an MFA program or to Julliard or to Conservatory. He says the way, indeed the only way, you learn singing or any other art is to study, not just sample or be exposed to, but to study. Not just things that are pretty good or not bad or that are in fashion this year, but monuments of the arts magnificence. And that's how you learn something.
In William Carlos Williams' poem, the Saxifrage is the flower of insight and invention, the flower that "splits the rocks." For Tim Cook (not that Tim Cook for you Apple fans), the Saxifrage School is the two-year old effort to re-imagine college education. The school has no buildings and few permanent staff. "Saxifrage is woven into the bustle of three East Pittsburgh neighborhoods. A graphic-design course is taught in a coffee shop. A course on organic agriculture uses the boiler room in an abandoned city pool house for its seed-starting workshop. Other offerings are computer programming and carpentry & design. The courses are taught by working professionals and craftsmen, and the plan is to hire adjuncts and Ph.D students from traditional colleges to teach humanities classes as they are added." The advantage is low cost and high flexibility. And it is part of a growing trend of alternatives to traditional college education.
Marian Wang points to one of the reasons that college is so much more expensive than it appears to be: fees. Fees amount to a "second tuition" that often means that students end up paying far more than the sticker price for an education. Driven by decreased state support, colleges and universities are using these extra charges as a way to close the funding gap. Wang uses Massachusetts as a particularly egregious example: "At state schools in Massachusetts, where the state board of higher education has held tuition flat for more than a decade, "mandatory fees" wind up far outstripping the price of tuition. At the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the flagship of the UMass system, mandatory fees are more than six times the cost of in-state tuition."
Late last month, The New Statesman asked several thinkers about what purpose religion might serve for an atheist. Among the most popular answers is Karen Armstrong's: "Throughout history, however, many people have been content with a personalized deity, yet not because they "believed" in it but because they learned to behave - ritually and ethically - in a way that made it a reality. Religion is a form of practical knowledge, like driving or dancing. You cannot learn to drive by reading the car manual or the Highway Code; you have to get into the vehicle and learn to manipulate the brakes."
Blogging and the New Public IntellectualAn Ongoing Series of discussions moderated by Roger Berkowitz and Walter Russell Mead.
April 9, 2013 at Bard Graduate Center
David Frum, blogger for The Daily Beast & The Huffington Post.
David Frum is back. And he's jockeying to be the front and center of the post-Romney American conservative movement". - Eddy Moretti
Learn more here.
From the Hannah Arendt Center Blog
This week on the blog, Jennie Han considers how Arendt's idea of critical thinking was influenced by Kant's idea of a "world citizen." Jeff Champlin discusses Seyla Benhabib's essay, "Hannah Arendt and the Redemptive Power of Narrative." And Roger Berkowitz thinks about the line between human and animal consciousness.
Critical Thinking, Judgment and Empathy
Critical thinking is possible only where the standpoints of all others are open to inspection. Hence, critical thinking, while still a solitary business, does not cut itself off from ‘all others.’ To be sure, it still goes on in isolation, but by the force of imagination it makes the others present and thus moves in a space that is potentially public, open to all sides; in other words, it adopts the position of Kant’s world citizen. To think with an enlarged mentality means that one trains one’s imagination to go visiting.
-Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, 43
Arendt’s appeal to the “enlargement of the mind” of Kantian judgment is well known and is often discussed in relation to Eichmann’s failure to think and recognize the world’s plurality. To the extent that we find lessons in these discussions, a prominent one is that we might all be vulnerable to such failures of judgment.
While recognizing how easy it is for us to not think, especially in the bureaucratic structures of the contemporary world, I want to focus here on the moments of thinking and judgment that do occur but fail to garner recognition.
I was recently involved in a discussion about educational and other support programs in prisons around the country. During the conversation, someone made the observation that these programs seem to appeal especially to women. It was the case that each of the women in this conversation had been involved in some prison program, either as an attorney or an educator. But the observation was intended, of course, to go beyond this relatively small group.
I don’t know whether it’s true that many more women than men are involved in programs like Bard’s Prison Initiative or the Innocence Project or any number of such programs. But what struck me about this conversation was that despite no one claiming to possess any knowledge beyond his or her personal observations, many seemed relatively certain about the possible explanation about this phenomenon (or non-phenomenon): that women might have a greater capacity to empathize with others, not because we are innately sensitive beings, but because we can more easily recognize the suffering of others and respond to that suffering.
Many readers of Arendt will immediately react to this description with Arendt’s critique of empathy in mind. For Arendt, empathy destroys critical thinking to the extent that it tries to “know what actually goes on in the mind of all others” as opposed to the comparing our judgment with the possible judgments of others (Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, 43). In trying to feel like someone else, empathy makes it impossible to respond politically, as it destroys the distance between individuals that makes a response to another as other possible.
But if not empathy, what might better describe those, whether they are women or men, who are open to the sufferings and injustices of others? The answer, I submit, is critical thinking.
For Arendt, critical thinking is necessarily imaginative, as it requires that the thinker make “the others present.” The presence of others is not achieved by imagining what goes on in each of the minds of these imagined others. Rather, this presence is what allows one imaginatively to construct a public space in which one’s actions are visible to other people.
Critical thinking thus most importantly lies not in the ability to compare our judgment with the possible judgments of all others, which is what is often stressed in discussions of Arendtian judgment, but rather in the adoption of the position of Kant’s “world citizen.” Adopting such a position is less about imagining others as such and more about recognizing that one is always putting oneself out there for others to judge. Insofar as it is necessary to construct the audience to which the thinker presents herself, the imagination of others is the first step to critical thinking, but only the first step. Critical thinking is, as Kant writes in “What is Enlightenment?,” “addressing the entire reading public” such that that one presents oneself for judgment by this learned group of which one purports to be a member. Like a politician or a writer or an actor, the critical thinker acts with the understanding that she will be judged not just by friends, lovers, or like-minded compatriots, but by an entire learned public whose judgments are tempered neither by love nor even self-serving support.
The space in which women moved has always been “public” to the extent that women who acted always did so with the knowledge that they are opening themselves up to the judgment of others. Thus acting takes courage and a true living of the motto of the enlightenment “Sapere aude! Have the courage to use your own understanding!” (Kant, “What is Enlightenment?”).
But acting also necessarily engages critical thinking in another sense: one’s actions are always public to the extent that in acting one presents oneself for judgment to the world and discloses oneself. The thinking of women might, in this way, have been “forced” into the realm of the critical, for as solitary as the activity of thinking necessarily is, it occurs in a space in which the others are present by not only the “force of imagination,” but also the force of history. Thus, if certain professions, causes, or activities do draw relatively more women than men, part of the explanation might be that women think more critically. The world that one sees, with all its injustices and its suffering, does not move one to action or service. But this world is not the world in which one thinks or acts. Rather, one moves in and responds to the imagined one in which what one does is meaningful because one’s actions are being judged and because as vulnerable as one might feel in being judged, judgment brings along with it the implicit recognition that what one does is visible to others and, quite simply, that it might matter.
Arendt’s understanding of judgment is closely tied to Kant’s Critique of Judgment for a good reason: she herself builds her ideas directly on Kantian judgment. But reading Arendtian judgment through Kant’s shorter piece, “What is Enlightenment?” opens up to us aspects of the former that have previously been obscured. And it opens us up to acts of thinking, judgment, and courage to which we are often blind. Again, I don’t know that more women than men engage in work that supports prisoners and advances the cause of prisoners’ rights. But I don’t think it is controversial to say that the perception that they do exists and that women’s ability to empathize with others, whether because of their backgrounds or simply because they are women, is frequently an accompanying discourse. This could be the right explanation. But it could also be an expression not only of prejudices of what women are, but also of an insufficiency of our conceptual vocabulary to capture what it is that is going on in a way that does not simply reassert these prejudices.
-Jennie Han
Reading Like a Writer
How does one read closely on the internet? I ask this question as I prepare to co-host a series of conversations on “Blogging and the New Public Intellectual” with my Bard colleague and blogger Walter Russell Mead. What we hope to explore in these talks with bloggers and writers-who-blog is the impact of blogging, tweeting, and online writing are having and will have on our public culture of thinking.
Our first guest in the series is Francine Prose, author of 16 novels and numerous essays and non-fiction books, not to mention a children’s book. Prose also teaches as a Visiting Professor of Literature at Bard, and, she blogs for the New York Review of Books.
I first sought out Francine Prose years ago because I kept hearing amazing things from students about her class, “Literature, Language and Lies.” I was captivated by the course description:
Throughout history, written language has been used to create masterpieces and to pump out propaganda, to delight and delude, to reveal and obscure the truth. But unless we read closely--word by word, line by line, sentence by sentence--it can sometimes be hard to tell the difference. In this class, we will close-read the short stories of great writers (James and Joyce, Cheever and Chekov, Mansfield and O'Connor, Beckett and Bowles, etc.) as well as this week's issue of The New Yorker and today's copy of The New York Times as we look at the ways in which words are used to convey information and insight, to transmit truth and beauty, and to form and transform our vision of the world.
My own courses focus on close readings of books and often I teach an entire course on one book that we read slowly and carefully. I teach a course on Plato’s Republic, another on Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphsyics of Morals, one on Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, and then courses on Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism and her The Human Condition. In these classes, students meditate on single words for an entire period, sometimes for a week. We pay attention to metaphors and allusions, deepening our understanding of the full work by tarrying with individual parts. There is a tradition of teaching this way in philosophy and also in political theory, but one rarely reads the New York Times that way, and Prose’s course struck me as deeply provocative.
I recently picked up and re-read parts of Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer, her book full of examples of the kind of slow and painstaking reading I imagine she teaches in her course. It is full of careful and powerful sentences that remind me of what writing can and should be:
And as I wrote, I discovered that writing, like reading, was done one word at a time, one punctuation mark at a time. It required what a friend calls “putting every word on trial for its life”: changing an adjective, cutting a phrase, removing a comma, and putting the comma back in.
It is a book comprised of readings of excerpts from texts; there are beautiful meditations on the richness of certain words and examples of the power of sentences as well as the expressiveness of gestures. Prose celebrates revision, editing, and craftsmanship. She points out how to read and shows that reading is training for thinking and writing. Of course, she can make one feel guilty for not reading with care and for writing too quickly. She admonishes at one point:
With so much reading ahead of you, the temptation might be to speed up. But in fact it’s essential to slow down and read every word. Because one important thing that can be learned by reading slowly is the seemingly obvious but oddly underappreciated fact that language is the medium we use in much the same way a composer uses notes, the way a painter uses paint.
As Walter Russell Mead and I conceived our series of discussions on the impact of blogging, inviting Francine Prose made great sense. Blogging offers many things, but one thing it does not promote is the kind of slow, word by word, sentence by sentence reading that Prose defends. Not only does it not promote such reading on behalf of readers, but also for bloggers themselves, who are under incredible pressure to post frequently and quickly. There are different kinds of blogs, of course, but the most popular blogs all post multiple items every day and compete to break new stories quickly. Speed is part of the blogger’s world. And yet, even Prose is blogging today.
The need for speed in blogs is less true for cultural blogs, like the NYRB blog (or even the Hannah Arendt Center blog, where we don’t usually rush posts out to beat a news cycle). And yet even here one of the advantages of blogs is their informality. Blog posts do not typically go through the process of editing and revision of essays in a conventional journal. While we do edit some of our blog posts especially for first-time or new writers, the editing process is quick and informal. There is not the usual relationship between a writer and editor that can seek to hone an essay over weeks or months. Blogs are fun, often short, and easy to read. Perhaps they can attract wider audiences and rile the waters more than crafted essays, which are often toned down by editors who lop off the ragged edges. While blogs offer much, they are not honed with the precision of a full-blown essay to be published in a popular magazine or an academic journal. In short, the increasing prevalence and influence of blogs suggests a threat to both the reading and writing for which Prose is such an advocate.
For this weekend, put down the computer and pick up Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer. And then come join Francine Prose, Walter Russell Mead, and myself for a discussion of “Blogging and the New Public Intellectual” on Tuesday, March 5, at 6:30 pm at the Bard Graduate Center (38 West 86th St) in NYC. You can RSVP Here.
-RB
John Adams on Education
One of the great documents of American history is the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, written in 1779 by John Adams.
In Section Two of Chapter Six, Adams offers one of the most eloquent testaments to the political virtues of education. He writes:
Wisdom and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused generally among the body of the people, being necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties; and as these depend on spreading the opportunities and advantages of education in the various parts of the country, and among the different orders of the people, it shall be the duty of legislatures and magistrates, in all future periods of this commonwealth, to cherish the interests of literature and the sciences, and all seminaries of them; especially the university at Cambridge, public schools, and grammar-schools in the towns; to encourage private societies and public institutions, rewards and immunities, for the promotion of agriculture, arts, sciences, commerce, trades, manufactures, and a natural history of the country; to countenance and inculcate the principles of humanity and general benevolence, public and private charity, industry and frugality, honesty and punctuality in their dealings; sincerity, and good humor, and all social affections and generous sentiments, among the people.
Adams felt deeply the connection between virtue and republican government. Like Montesquieu, whose writings are the foundation on which Adams’ constitutionalism is built, Adams knew that a democratic republic could only survive amidst people of virtue. That is why his Constitution also held that the “happiness of a people and the good order and preservation of civil government essentially depend upon piety, religion, and morality.”
For Adams, piety and morality depend upon religion. The Constitution he wrote thus holds that a democratic government must promote the “public worship of God and the public instructions in piety, religion, and morality.” One of the great questions of our time is whether a democratic community can promote and nourish the virtue necessary for civil government in an irreligious age? Is it possible, in other words, to maintain a citizenry oriented to the common sense and common good of the nation absent the religious bonds and beliefs that have traditionally taught awe and respect for those higher goods beyond the interests of individuals?
Hannah Arendt saw the ferocity of this question with clear eyes. Totalitarianism was, for here, the proof of the political victory of nihilism, the devaluation of the highest values, the proof that we now live in a world in which anything is possible and where human beings no longer could claim to be meaningfully different from ants or bees. Absent the religious grounding for human dignity, and in the wake of the loss of the Kantian faith of the dignity of human reason, what was left, Arendt asked, upon which to build the world of common meaning that would elevate human groups from their bestial impulses to the human pursuit of good and glory?
The question of civic education is paramount today, and especially for those of us charged with educating our youth. We need to ask, as Lee Schulman recently has: “What are the essential elements of moral and civic character for Americans? How can higher education contribute to developing these qualities in sustained and effective ways?” In short, we need to insist that our institutions aim to live up to the task Adams claimed for them: “to countenance and inculcate the principles of humanity and general benevolence, public and private charity, industry and frugality, honesty and punctuality in their dealings; sincerity, and good humor, and all social affections and generous sentiments, among the people.”
Everywhere we look, higher education is being dismissed as overly costly and irrelevant. In many, many cases, this is wrong and irresponsible. There is a reason that applications continue to increase at the best colleges around the country, and it is not simply because these colleges guarantee economic success. What distinguishes the elite educational institutions in the U.S. is not their ability to prepare students for technical careers. On the contrary, a liberal arts tradition offers useless education. But parents and students understand—explicitly or implicitly—that such useless education is powerfully useful. The great discoveries in physics come from useless basic research that then power satellites and computers. New brands emerge from late night reveries over the human psyche. And those who learn to conduct an orchestra or direct a play will years on have little difficulty managing a company. What students learn may be presently useless; but it builds the character and forms the intellect in ways that will have unintended and unimaginable consequences over lives and generations.
The theoretical justifications for the liberal arts are easy to mouth but difficult to put into practice. Especially today, defenses of higher education ignore the fact that colleges are not doing a great job of preparing students for democratic citizenship. Large lectures produce the mechanical digestion of information. Hyper-specialized seminars forget that our charge is to teach a liberal tradition. The fetishizing of research that no one reads exemplifies the rewarding of personal advancement at the expense of a common project. And, above all, the loss of any meaningful sense of a core curriculum reflects the abandonment of our responsibility to instruct students about making judgments about what is important. At faculties around the country, the desire to teach what one wants is seen as “liberal” and progressive, but it means in practice that students are advised that any knowledge is equally is good as any other knowledge.
To call for collective judgment about what students should learn is not to insist on a return to a Western canon. It is to say that if we as faculties cannot agree on what is important than we abdicate our responsibility as educators, to lead students into a common world as independent and engaged citizens who can, and will, then act to remake and re-imagine that world.
John Adams was one of Hannah Arendt’s favorite thinkers, and he was because he understood the deep connection between virtue and republicanism. Few documents are more worth revisiting today than the 1780 Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. It is your weekend read.
-RB
The HAC blog covers the humanities, politics, and education extensively. For more, click here to read "The Humanities and Common Sense," and click here to read "The Progeny of Teachers."
A Politics of Appearances
“To be alive means to live in a world that preceded one’s own arrival and will survive one’s own departure. On this level of sheer being alive, appearance and disappearance, as they follow upon each other, are the primordial events, which as such mark out time, the time span between birth and death.”
-Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind
I credit my undergraduate advisor, the late Kenneth Reshaur, for one of my obsessions: I refer to the crack in the spine, between the Work and the Action chapters that divides my undergraduate copy of Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition. That fissure finds sustenance in the passage above, which appears at the very beginning of Arendt’s “Thinking” volume of The Life of the Mind.
It is a telling quote for many reasons, not the least of which because in it, Arendt explicitly echoes Maurice Merleau Ponty’s treatment of “primordial perception” in some of his late writings on painting, but also because it testifies to Arendt’s relentless commitment to thinking as primordially bound to the phenomenality of life, and especially to the life of politics. Politics is, for Arendt, apparitional in nature. It regards the appearance of things, both human and inhuman. And to appear is also what it means to be alive. To be sure, for Arendt there is the fact of natality that regards a coming into life; but that differs from an appearance. Natality is of the order of the new; but an appearance persists regardless of its newness or oldness. We might say that an appearance is indifferent to qualities like newness or oldness. Hence Arendt’s emphasis on the sensoriality of appearances, their ingression, but also their departure. It is an unavoidable fact for her that peoples, things, events appear and disappear in the way in which the sound of a note or of a voice appears and then fades away; what Arendt appreciates about this primordial condition of sensoriality is that the appearance and disappearance of things marks a domain of sheer aliveness; “sheer” in the sense of not having qualifications or conditions for their bodying forth.
For Arendt, the sheerness of the apparitional world of politics means that appearances are not mere appearances. This fact marks, to my mind, her great friction with some aspects of the Platonic tradition from which she also draws. The aspectual alliteration of “sheer” and “mere” resonates with her emphasis on appearances as being a site of care. To be more precise, Arendt’s elaboration of a politics of appearances bespeaks a commitment to a curatorial disposition to the world that she associates with the ability to trust others to “tend and take care of a world of appearances” (The Crisis in Culture). To consider appearances as “mere” (as opposed to “sheer”) suggests a disregard for life itself, for the way in which, as she goes on to affirm a few paragraphs after the quote, “To be alive means to be possessed by an urge to self-display which answers the fact of one’s own appearingness.” (The Life of Mind).
To be alive, in this sense, regards an urge to be felt, to be attended to by others. This is what the spectacle asks of the spectator: not so much “pay attention to me”, but “attend to what appears before you.” Such attention is what spurs on judgment, for Arendt, which is the activity sine qua non of “sharing-of-the-world-with-others” (Crisis in Culture). But before judgment may take place, before what captures our attentions can be morphed into thoughtful reflection, there is the sheerness of appearance that strikes at our curatorial dispositions.
And for Arendt, this primordial capacity to strike is disinterested.
What do I mean by this? Simply put, Arendt’s call to attend to the sheer appearance of the world forces us to come to terms with a domain of experience that precedes any and all capacities to formulate judgments, interests, and ideas: This is the primordial world of disinterest. And “disinterest” here does not mean either “indifferent” or “detached”; nor does this amount to a reassignment of the “Archimedean point.” On the contrary, the domain of disinterest is a domain of absorption and immersion in the facticity of lived sensations: it is the domain of the aesthetic that Arendt rightly identifies as the source of Kant’s political thought.
To recall, Kant’s crucial insight in the Critique of Judgment is that there can be no necessary conditions for something to count as beautiful, and hence there can be no rules for the category of the aesthetic. This is an insight that Kant borrows from Hume’s critique of consequentialism; but whereas for Hume, the heterogeneity that arises from the absence of necessity is a part of life, for Kant it is restricted to aesthetic experience as he defines it.
The aesthetic is the source of Kant’s political thought, then, not because the aesthetic provides normative guides to help us make judgments (it can’t), nor because there is anything specifically political about the beautiful (there can’t be because according to Kant aesthetic experience is disinterested in the sense of unqualifiable). Rather, the aesthetic is a source of political thinking, and political life in general, because it is only through aesthetic experience that one encounters a mode of valuing that is non-instrumental and not reducible to its use value. Indeed, aesthetic experience is that experience that annihilates our reliance on a sense of necessity; and it is precisely the annihilation of necessity – necessity being the concept that Arendt likens to the a-political qualities of the private and the social – which makes aesthetics and politics so intimately entangled for her.
Arendt’s politics of appearances, encapsulated in the quote from The Life of the Mind, thus speaks of the possibility of a life devoid of the force of necessity, and of things not having to go on as they have.
This is why she seems so resistant to the privative nature of the private, and the biologism of the social: what binds Arendt’s characterization of these entities (and I think it important to regard her use of these terms as characterizations and not descriptions), is their inexorable reliance on the force of necessity as sovereign.
For me, moreover, Arendt’s aesthetics of politics evokes the possibility of always having at one’s recourse the polemical claim that “this need not be”, that things need not continue in this way, that the continuity of any form of political subjectification is not necessary. This also means that the assembly of things – as they are at any one point in time – is not necessary in the manner in which an instrumental rationality demands that they must be. The possibility to admit of a resistance to necessity regards a curatorial disposition that attends to the sheer fact of appearance—of peoples, things, and events in the world. Such is the nature of Arendt’s politics of appearances.
-Davide Panagia
The Destiny of Freedom from Kant to Heidegger
The modern era is the age of the enlightenment, in which man throws off the shackles of religion and tradition and stands on his own feet. And yet it hardly seems as if we are living in the age of freedom. In an age of mass bureaucracy and scientific determinism, we are more wont to hear of helplessness and despair than of self-rule. For Hannah Arendt, freedom, like politics, is endangered by the rise of a social realm of government, scientific rationality, and bureaucratic administration. For Max Weber, the modern age is marked by a Herrenlose Sklaverei, a servitude without a master. The enlightenment, it seems, has taken an unexpected turn. What then is the Destiny of Freedom?
That is the question Professor Philippe Nonet poses in a two-part lecture he gave recently at the Hannah Arendt Center.
We are, Nonet argues, before the necessity of a decision regarding freedom. Until now, freedom has been thought as an attribute of the will. But freedom of the will leads, Nonet argues, to the rise of modern technique that threatens to extinguish the freedom of man. Freedom of the will thus threatens to transform itself into utter servility—the Herrenlose Sklaverei of Max Weber's famous formulation. This is the destiny of freedom insofar as freedom is thought from out of the will.
And yet, there is the possibility of a new opening of freedom, understood as freedom from the will, that Nonet finds in the thinking of Martin Heidegger.
We hope you enjoy these extraordinary lectures. You can watch them here.
The Burqa and the Political Realm
“The presence of others who see what we see and hear what we hear assures us of the reality of the world and ourselves.”
-Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition
Over the past decade, European public opinion has roiled with controversy over the full face covering – the niqab or burqa - of Muslim women. According to a Pew Global Attitudes Survey, conducted between April 7th and May 8th 2010, the majority of citizens in France, Germany, Britain, and Spain approve of banning veils that cover the whole face. Subsequently, France and Belgium have implemented national laws that ban the full veil in public places.
Municipal bans are sprinkled across Europe as a whole. Is there an Arendtian angle on the discomfiture that one finds in Europe over the niqab and the burqa (hereafter N/B), a properly political angle that avoids pathologizing the response as simply Islamophobic or xenophobic?
Arendt claimed that the word public evokes two “interrelated phenomena”. First:
everything that appears in public can be seen and heard by everybody and has the widest possible publicity. For us, appearance – something that is being seen and heard by others as well as by ourselves – constitutes reality. Compared with the reality which comes from being seen and heard, even the greatest forces of intimate life – the passions of the heart, the thoughts of the mind, the delights of the senses – lead an uncertain, shadowy kind of existence unless and until they are transformed, deprivatized and deindividualized, as it were, into a shape to fit them for public appearance…The presence of others who see what we see and hear what we hear assures us of the reality of the world and ourselves…
The second referent of public is “the world itself, in so far as it is common to all of us and distinguished from our privately owned place in it.”
Arendt captures an idea prominent in Western traditions: the notion, both intuitive and articulated, that being visible to one another is an integral part of politics. This expectation is registered in theories of judgment (consider the role played by the “spectator” in Adam Smith and Kant’s theories of judgment) and in some of our most potent democratic metaphors: enlightenment, openness, transparency, illumination, recognition, social legibility, accountability, “publicity” and, not least, public. Liberals trumpet the virtue of the Open Society and liberalized Marxists idealize the translucent speech-situation. Socialists and radicals extol debunking, the heir of Rousseau’s crusade to remove the “deceitful veil of politeness” which conceals “fear, coldness, reserve, hate, and fraud”. Negating these images are opacity, the Dark Ages, the dark arts, dark times, heart of darkness, artifice, living in the closet, a shadowy realm, cave-like illusion, Stygian gloom, moral blindness, the id, concealment, inscrutability, subterfuge, murkiness, obscurantism, and backroom deals - notions which variously imply various states of ignorance, menace and deceit. True, prominent French intellectuals of the last century sought to demote vision’s status in the pantheon of sensibility, while conservatives still remain attached to the “decent drapery of life” (Burke). Yet these perspectives have done little to impede the centrality of seeing within the Western, Apollonian political aesthetic.
This formulation suggests what is discordant about the N/B’s existence in the Western political space. While for its bearer the N/B may be understood as a badge of tradition and piety, from the standpoint of a constitutional pluralist citizenry it is a mode of concealment incompatible with public recognition in which visibility of face is central. The N/B denudes facial and, to a degree, vocal recognition. It standardizes human features and hence contributes to the very stereotyping that N/B wearers themselves deplore. Faces and voices are all different, evidence of human plurality. The N/B literally effaces these variations, with the partial exception of the eyes that may sometimes be seen. The N/B also symbolically ruptures the bond of citizenship reciprocity because while its wearer can see her real or potential interlocutor, can take advantage of the visibility of others, non-wearers are denied such access.
Consider two objections to this line of reasoning.
Users of the Internet are often obscured from view and no one assumes that their being invisible is uncitizenly. Indeed, under some definitions of politics, the internet might be considered the quintessentially modern medium of political life: informing the public of political events, orchestrating voting, requesting or inciting people to participate in demonstrations, directing attention to abuses of rule, mobilizing citizens for collective action. Search engines like Google ever more assume traditional government functions. Its engineers claim that the company’s predictions of flu epidemics and employment trends are already more accurate than those of the Centers for Disease Control and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Even so, in Western societies the Internet is an ancillary to public display not a substitute for it, a tool to expand communication, rather than an obstacle to constrict it. Computer webcams are employed between interactants and in web chat rooms; interviews of foreign job applicants conducted via Skype grow daily in popularity. And it is no coincidence that the world’s most prominent social networking site is called Facebook. Moreover, where Internet use takes place without face recognition (as with email or instant messaging) it typically does so reciprocally: both users are in the same position and hence issues of visibility imbalance and citizen asymmetry do not arise.
A second objection to the claim that N/B attire in public places is uncitizenly turns the tables on the author: it draws on the Graeco-Roman tradition itself, the origins of Western notions of citizenship. In that tradition, being a public person was considered a kind of theatricality in which an agent adopts a persona, a mask. But the comparison between the N/B and the persona is superficial and not only because one mask is made of cloth while another is a metaphor. In antiquity, the function of persona was not to conceal public visibility but precisely to do the opposite: to shine the light of the polis on the political actor, to dramatize the fact that the individual had entered the public stage and that, as such, had left the private world of intimacy so as to consort freely with his peers and deliberate on political affairs. The political persona was, then, an addition to, or rather a rupture with, private life, not a replication or extension of it, a vehicle of distinction, not a mantle contrived to expunge from public view the unique personality of the woman beneath its folds. Politics, in Western traditions, entails a split within the being that engages in it, the construction of a second self: as an equal of others who are familial strangers bound together by the common tie of citizenship; a self able to cooperate with these strangers, to “see” things from multiple points of view and be seen seeing.
The N/B, however, is not a fictive mask designed to open up its wearer to the public recognition of peers acting in concert or in conflict; it is a carapace projected into the public space, a material mask that signals exclusivity, an emblem of segmental occlusion, of what Durkheim, discussing the primacy of resemblance in tribal societies, called the politico-familial.
Nor is the N/B artificial or dualistic. On the contrary, it signifies Sharia’s total claim on the individual in all her activities, the type of claim that the public-private distinction expressly repudiates. It transpires that the classical concept of the mask and the N/B have nothing substantively in common.
These brief reflections, prompted by my reading of Arendt, are not a rationale for banning the full veil but they do allow us to think of the European response to it in a political way. Readers who are interested in the more extensive argument that Dan Gordon (UMass Amherst) and I have developed on this topic, contrasting American and European legal regimes, may wish to read our “On the Edge of Solidarity: The Burqa and Public Life,” and “From the headscarf to the burqa: the role of social theorists in shaping laws against the veil,” Economy and Society 2012 (forthcoming).
-Peter Baehr, Lingnan University Hong Kong
“The Origin and Character of Hannah Arendt’s Theory of Judgment” – Jeff Marshall
“The Origin and Character of Hannah Arendt's Theory of Judgment”
David L. Marshall
Political Theory 2010 38 (3) 367-393
Drawing chiefly on entries between 1952 and 1957 in Arendt's recently published Denktagebuch, David Marshall proposes an account of the origin of Arendt's theory of judgment based on her early readings of Hegel, Aristotle, and Kant. Marshall sets the broader frame of his argument in terms of the shift between Arendt's negative appraisal of Kant's philosophy in the second Critique as recorded in her (unpublished) Berkeley lecture of 1955 and her embrace of the third Critique in 1970 (in Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy). Arendt saw the categorical imperative as concerning only the individual and thus ignoring the plurality of the world. Kant's aesthetics offers her the resources for a bold shift in political thinking but critics argue that too much emphasis on the individual's subjective decision (for example in the idea of taste) potentially undermines an eventual group judgment.
One of Marshall's strongest contributions helps explain how these group judgments develop in Arendt's view. Taking up an entry from December 1952 in the Denktagebuch on Hegel's Logic, he argues that Arendt's early understanding of judgment involves a move from particular to general characterized by “continuity” rather than “subsumption” (Hegel, cited by Marshall, 373). As an example, the judgment “Cicero is great” would not place Cicero under the already existing definition of greatness, but lead to a reconsideration of both terms. For Arendt this reconsideration points the way to a discussion about the shifts in meaning involved. Thus “in an Arendtian gloss, Hegel's emphasis on reflective judgment is a commitment to worldliness, to history, and to the particular” (375). From a broader perspective, Marshall's reading complicates Hegel's influence on Arendt by showing how he positively impacted her thought. Further work in this direction (drawing on the Denktagebuch) will be of great value in drawing a contrast with her general use of him in her published work to indicate an automatic development of history that threatens freedom.
The following section focuses on Aristotle's use of the term krinein in the Rhetoric and Arendt's double translation of the term as urteilen and entscheiden (judging and deciding). Marshall points out that the judge in Aristotle's text is not merely a spectator but also at least potentially and actor. As in the section on Hegel, Marshall sees this in terms of a turn away from the general and towards “a logic of the example” (379). One intriguing point for future research mentioned briefly relates to the connection between Arendt's reading of the Rhetoric and that of Heidegger in the summer semester of 1924 (published as Grundbegriffe der Aristotelischen Philosophie).
The remainder of the article places these specific engagements with Hegel and Aristotle in the context of Arendt's 1957 notes in the Denktagebuch that document her careful rereading of the Critique of Judgment. While Marshall sees these notes as being largely in line with the published 1970 Kant lectures, he employs the specifications made in his exegesis to respond to five criticisms of Arendt's theory of judgment from contemporary scholars broadly related to the supposed danger of the aesthetic dimension of her thought. Some readers may find this aspect of the article to be posturing and others may think that he sets himself too large a task, since each criticism could be explicated and parsed at much greater length. However, with his pointers to key sections of the Denktagebuch, Marshall offers a key contribution to growing work on the importance of this text and opens a number of lines of future inquiry.
-Review by Jeffrey Champlin
What is “Art” According to Arendt?
“That the arts must be functional, that cathedrals fulfill a religious need of society, that a picture is born from the need for self-expression in the individual painter and that it is looked at because of a desire for self-perfection in the spectator, all these notions are so unconnected with art and historically so new that one is tempted simply to dismiss them as modern prejudices.”
-Hannah Arendt, "Crisis in Culture"
Today, within the context of contemporary art, post-Marcel Duchamp, post-Sherrie Levine, it’s no longer interesting to ask the question “What is art?” Anything and everything can now be appropriated into art’s frame or become part of an artwork. In Andrea Fraser’s words, “It’s art when I say its art.”
Sherrie Levine, Fountain (after Marcel Duchamp: A.P.), 1991. Bronze, 14.5 x 14.25 x 25 inches.
When we approach contemporary art with Hannah Arendt in mind, however, we must begin by understanding what she means when she uses the word, “art.” She works with a traditional idea of what art is. And she is quick to point out that what constitutes art for her may have little to do with what constitutes art for a given population in a given point in time. When we speak of art today in the current discourse surrounding contemporary art, we speak differently from Arendt. Which is reason enough to consider her definition.
One case in point is the cathedral. It is not a coincidence that Arendt chooses an ornate cathedral to exemplify her definition of art, since art for Arendt is distinguished by having no utilitarian purpose. A cathedral is a place of worship, and thus may serve a purpose. And yet a cathedral itself serves no purpose. The people of Chartres, for example, could gather and worship without their infamous building’s spires and rose window. These elements were made, to quote Arendt, ad maiorem gloriam Dei [for the greater glory of God]. Chartres Cathedral possesses qualities above and beyond any functionality. Art, for Arendt, is this totally non-functional thing that exists in the world merely to appear. Art objects may—and almost always do—have other purposes, yet this is not what qualifies them as art.
Chartres Cathedral, France. This cathedral was built over generations in the 12th and 13th Century.
Art, as Arendt understands it, must also be free from its commodification in the art market. When art is commoditized, it is subject to becoming just like any other consumer commodity, which can be purchased, consumed, and therefore destroyed. Still, I don’t believe that an art object’s status as a commodity necessarily disqualifies it from constituting Arendt’s definition as art. As many contemporary critics, such as Diedrich Diedrichsen, have pointed out, art is not a regular commodity, and it is not assigned value or circulated in the same way, even if it is given a price tag.
“Beauty”—another fraught term in contemporary art discourse - is the quality that makes something last forever, and constitutes the world of appearance. Obviously, this quality is threatened by commodification, which, in theory, reduces art to dollar signs, making a painting’s value equal to that of a luxury apartment. And like a luxury apartment, when it circulates freely in the market, it is subject to demolition. Although, even when art is not circulating in this market, it is subject to destruction.( In the example hyperlinked, it is merely art’s comparison to monetary values that became “rationale” for its destruction. This museum director is what Arendt would call a “philistine”.)
The term “beauty,” like the question “What is art?”, is contentious mainly because it has ceased to mean anything. As the idiom goes, “it is in the eye of the beholder.” Not so, according to Arendt, who deploys this quality normally defined by its subjectivity and indefinability, in a super definitive and specific way. Beauty is the quality that transcends all needs and makes something last through time, and it is not a subjective descriptor. Following Kant, she argues that the person who judges whether or not something is beautiful must put themselves in the place of others who are judging the work in the same time and place, and they must produce judgments to “woo the consent of everyone else” (here I quote Arendt, quoting from Kant) in the hopes of coming to some eventual agreement about what is beautiful.
Consent about what is beautiful is important because it determines what is preserved over time. What unfolds in “Crisis in Culture,” the essay from which I’m drawing and to which I will continue to refer in these posts, is what happens to art and “culture” (which I will have to save for another week) within “mass society.” Or, what happens to the world of appearances, a necessary condition for politics, when everything is produced in order to be consumed (and therefore destroyed)?
-Amy Zion
One Against All
It can be dangerous to tell the truth: “There will always be One against All, one person against all others. [This is so] not because One is terribly wise and All are terribly foolish, but because the process of thinking and researching, which finally yields truth, can only be accomplished by an individual person. In its singularity or duality, one human being seeks and finds – not the truth (Lessing) –, but some truth.”
-Hannah Arendt, Denktagebuch, Book XXIV, No. 21
Hannah Arendt wrote these lines when she was confronted with the severe and often unfair, even slanderous, public criticism launched against her and her book Eichmann in Jerusalem after its publication in 1963. The quote points to her understanding of the thinking I (as opposed to the acting We) on which she bases her moral and, partly, her political philosophy.
It is the thinking I, defined with Kant as selbstdenkend (self-thinking [“singularity”]) and an-der-Stelle-jedes-andern-denkend (i.e., in Arendt’s terms, thinking representatively or practicing the two-in-one [“duality”]). Her words also hint at an essay she published in 1967 titled “Truth and Politics,” wherein she takes up the idea that it is dangerous to tell the truth, factual truth in particular, and considers the teller of factual truth to be powerless. Logically, the All are the powerful, because they may determine what at a specific place and time is considered to be factual truth; their lies, in the guise of truth, constitute reality. Thus, it is extremely hard to fight them.
In answer to questions posed in 1963 by the journalist Samuel Grafton regarding her report on Eichmann and published only recently, Arendt states: “Once I wrote, I was bound to tell the truth as I see it.” The statement reveals that she was quite well aware of the fact that her story, i.e., the result of her own thinking and researching, was only one among others. She also realized the lack of understanding and, in many cases, of thinking and researching, on the part of her critics.
"Iustitia" - Martin van Heemskerck, 1478-1578
Thus, she lost any hope of being able to publicly debate her position in a “real controversy,” as she wrote to Rabbi Hertzberg (April 8, 1966). By the same token, she determined that she would not entertain her critics, as Socrates did the Athenians: “Don’t be offended at my telling you the truth.” Reminded of this quote from Plato’s Apology (31e) in a supportive letter from her friend Helen Wolff, she acknowledged the reference, but acted differently. After having made up her mind, she wrote to Mary McCarthy: “I am convinced that I should not answer individual critics. I probably shall finally make, not an answer, but a kind of evaluation of this whole strange business.” In other words, she did not defend herself in following the motto “One against All,” which she had perceived and noted in her Denktagebuch. Rather, as announced to McCarthy, she provided an “evaluation” in the 1964 preface to the German edition of Eichmann in Jerusalem and later when revising that preface for the postscript of the second English edition.
Arendt also refused to act in accordance with the old saying: Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus (let there be justice, though the world perish). She writes – in the note of the Denktagebuch from which today’s quote is taken – that such acting would reveal the courage of the teller of truth “or, perhaps, his stubbornness, but neither the truth of what he had to say nor even his own truthfulness.” Thus, she rejected an attitude known in German cultural tradition under the name of Michael Kohlhaas. A horse trader living in the 16th century, Kohlhaas became known for endlessly and in vain fighting injustice done to him (two of his horses were stolen on the order of a nobleman) and finally taking the law into his own hands by setting fire to houses in Wittenberg.
Even so, Arendt has been praised as a woman of “intellectual courage” with regard to her book on Eichmann (see Richard Bernstein’s contribution to Thinking in Dark Times).
Intellectual courage based on thinking and researching was rare in Arendt’s time and has become even rarer since then. But should Arendt therefore only matter nostalgicly? Certainly not. Her emphasis on the benefits of thinking as a solitary business still remains current. Consider, for example, the following reference to Sherry Turkle, a sociologist at MIT and author of the recent book Alone Together. In an interview with Peter Haffner (published on July 27, 2012, in SZ Magazin), she argues that individuals who become absorbed in digital communication lose crucial components of their faculty of thinking. Turkle says (my translation): Students who spend all their time and energy on communication via SMS, Facebook, etc. “can hardly concentrate on a particular subject. They have difficulty thinking a complex idea through to its end.” No doubt, this sounds familiar to all of us who know about Hannah Arendt’s effort to promote thinking (and judging) in order to make our world more human.
To return to today’s quote: It can be dangerous to tell the truth, but thinking is dangerous too. Once in a while, not only the teller of truth but the thinking 'I' as well may find himself or herself in the position of One against All.
-Ursula Ludz
The Highest Law of the Land
“The highest laws of the land (America) are not only the constitution and constitutional laws, but also contracts.”
-Hannah Arendt, Denktagebuch, p. 131
Having published The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt turned her attention to the country around her. In a sequence of entries in her Denktagebuch for September 1951, she starts by referring to America as “the politically new” – these are thoughts that will eventually result in her argument in On Revolution . Her analysis has often been criticized from an historical point of view, especially as she refers to the Constitution as being the first to be established “without force, without ruling (archein) and being ruled (archesthai). “ Whatever the validity of these criticisms, they strike me as missing an essential point of her concerns. Arendt is trying to work out what she a few pages later calls “the central question of the coming (künftigen) politics,” a problem she sees as lodged in “the problem of the giving of laws.” (ibid, 141). Her aim is to describe a political (i.e. humanly appropriate) system that would not rest upon will and in particular on the will of the sovereign. “That I must have power (Macht) to be able to will, makes the problem of power into the central political fact of all politics that are grounded on sovereignty – all, that is, with the exception of the American.” (idem)
Her concern in these pages (130-143) centers around what a human society would be that was truly political. Her version of America is her entry into this question. What is striking about her discussion in the intervening (and other) pages is that she approaches this question explicitly through the lens of European philosophy. Thus she is attempting an answer to the question of “can we determine the particular excellence of the American polity by viewing it through the lenses of European thought?” The point is not to Europeanize America: it is to see if America does not in some manner constitute a potential instantiation of what has been thought in Europe over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The sequence of European thinkers she invokes is important. She first mentions Marx and then Nietzsche, each of whom she sees as part of and as makers of the “end of Western philosophy.” Marx is held to have inverted Hegel, Nietzsche the same for Plato. The point of her analysis of Marx and Nietzsche is to assert that they released thought from its bond to the “Absolute.” Indeed: to hold to the idea of an Absolute is to “make possible in the present unjust and bestial behavior.” (ibid, 133). As we know, this will be an ever-returning theme in her work. She expects to find in America the elements of the political that does not rest on an “absolute.”
At what might one look to find this vision of a non-absolute political? Nietzsche provides the opening to an answer. We are to look not to his doctrine of the revaluation of values but to his discussion of promising in the second essay of the Genealogy of Morals. She quotes: “To breed an animal with the right to make promises – is that not … the real problem of humans?” For Arendt, the foundation of a new “morality” lies in the right to make a promise; the promise makes possible human relations based on contract. And the grounding on contract, as she writes in the Denktagebuch, was for her the particular excellence of the American polity.
What is the implication of Arendt's claim that contract is the “highest law” and particular excellence of America? One answer is revealed by the end of extended quotation of Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals where he indicates that the person who has the right to make promises can “ für sich als Zukunft gut sagen zu können,”a phrase that might be rendered as “able to give himself as answer for the future.” In Arendt’s gloss, this means that if in making a contract (which is what a promise is) one pledges that each will remain true to him-or herself as the person making the contract, then each has made his or her own being the foundation for a political space.
Such a grounding or foundation is not based either on will or on any external absolute. It is a matter, as the signers of the Declaration made clear, that we “mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.” Temporally speaking, this means that what one did in the past remains alive as the present. Our political present will thereby be tied to the historical, although not, she notes, in a “weltgeschichtliche” [world-historical: i.e. transcendental] manner.
To make the implications of this clearer, she immediately turns to a consideration of Max Weber’s distinction between the “ethic of responsibility” (which she holds to be the foundation of the pragmatism and genius of American politics) as opposed to the “ethic of conviction,” which, she says, allows for anything as we cannot know “until the day of the Last Judgment” if our conviction be correct. The implication here is that if we base our polity on the conviction of the supposed correctness of our moral judgments (as opposed to our ability to be responsible to ourselves) we will be able to justify anything, as the validation for our claim can be infinitely postponed. (One has but to look at the claims made about bringing democracy to Iraq). Indeed, Arendt sees “central question of our time” to be a change in our ability to make valid moral judgments, that is ones the correctness of which is not postponed indefinitely. (ibid 138). She now turns to an examination of how various thinkers have dealt with the problem of moral judgment. After she worked her way through a partial rejection of the manners in which Hegel, Nietzsche, and the Kant of the Critique of Practical Reason respond to this main question, she turns to the Critique of the Power of Judgment. Those thoughts are not developed at this time in the Denktagebuch -- but they will concern her for the rest of her life.
What is striking here is how the approach from European philosophy brings out the importance of what is new in the American experiment. As Hamilton wrote in the first Federalist:
It has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force. If there be any truth in the remark, the crisis at which we are arrived may with propriety be regarded as the era in which that decision is to be made; and a wrong election of the part we shall act may, in this view, deserve to be considered as the general misfortune of mankind.
To which, in our present day, one may only wonder if at some point a “wrong election“ has not been made.
-Tracy B. Strong (UCSD)
The Intimate World
“What in thinking only occasionally and quasi-metaphorically happens, to retreat from the world of appearances, takes place in aging and dying as an appearance… in this sense thinking is an anticipation of dying (ceasing, ‘to cease to be among men’) just as action in the sense of ‘to make a beginning’ is a repetition of birth.”
-Hannah Arendt, -Denktagebuch, p. 792
One of the wonderful aspects of reading the Denktagebuch is its peculiar intimacy. As with so much of Arendt’s way of thinking about the world, it is a kind of intimacy which is familiar, but unique and strange enough to make us rethink the place of that category in our lives, how we sense it and find it meaningful. The sense of intimacy is present from the very first entry – a long, fluid contemplation of responsiveness and evil written in the wake of her first visit to Germany (and Heidegger) after the war – to the last, when the notebooks trail off into a bare succession of dates and places.
It infuses each echo of her published work with a sense of its interconnection with a hundred fragmentary thoughts, occasions, meditations, and struggles. The Denktagebuch helps renew the liveliness of Arendt’s work as not just a set of arguments, but a profound, rich sensibility, a sensibility in the double sense of a way of sensing what is going on in the world around us, and the dense world-experience of a human, a thinker, a woman, a writer who set herself the gravid task of thinking what we are doing.
Of course, the intimacy found in Arendt’s notebooks was never going to be quite what we usually think of when we use the term. In general, Arendt’s is not a thought that we associate with intimacy. On the contrary, what distinguishes Arendt’s writing, even on the most personal topics, is its resolute publicity, its unwavering concern for what is common, what is shared, and what is political in writing: its specific capacity to make things appear to others. This resolutely public (or perhaps simply political) character to her analysis was a commitment that got her into trouble repeatedly when she moved into topics which were, for her American audience and beyond, violently emotionally charged. A consistent refrain, in the hostile reception of both the Eichmann essays for The New Yorker and “Reflections on Little Rock” in Dissent, was the apparent coldness or withdrawal with which her critics saw her as treating desperately dear subjects. So perhaps it is unsurprising that the peculiar intimacy of the Denktagebuch, even in the time when it was a quasi-private record for her own uses, was what might be called by the paradoxical name of political intimacy, the intimacy specific to what she calls here a “world of appearances.” What can intimacy even mean in a sensibility staunchly committed to rejecting our historical prioritization of the internal (the soul, the mind, the self) over our external lives of appearing to and acting with others?
This passage comes from a section of the Denktagebuch that not only provides an idea of what that form of intimacy might be, but does so in a way that brings out the intimacy already present throughout her work. The 27th notebook is the last substantive one, and it is saturated with thoughts about ends. The two senses of the word in English and German weave in and out of her entries: both purposes – the purposes of thought, of philosophy, of acting, of being in the world – and finality, conclusions, ultimately death itself. At times, there is a deep, almost bitter sadness to the omnipresence of the end in this notebook. She concludes in one entry with Kant’s thoughts in Critique of Judgment about the ends of human life that “no one would go through life again of their own free will.” At other times, there is an old contentment with the prospect of the end, as when she writes that “death is the price we the living pay for having lived. To not want to pay this price, is miserable.” Birth, natality, the human capacity to bring something new into the world was always central to Arendt’s idea of a public and action. Here, death and thought appear together for the first time as the inverse, a retreat initially in mind and then in body from the world in which we write the stories of our lives with others. And the idea of thought as death’s companion, and our companion in the end, gives the first hint of what this uniquely Arendtian intimacy-in-publicity holds.
The Life of the Mind, Arendt’s un-ended work, gives us glimpses of something that comes out even more strongly in the Denktagebuch. In the life-process of Arendt’s thought there seems to be a constant attempt to return to what was put aside, to reckon with, and to a certain extent, redeem the things that at first glance in the earlier works seemed like ideas and practices that were supposed to be the problem or the threat. Her stunning elegies for Heidegger and Brecht – both neither pardon nor disavowal – reflect this process of problematization and partial redemption, turned from the analysis of concepts to telling the stories of lives lost. We should all be so lucky. And so it is here, in the Denktagebuch, in the case of endfulness and end-orientation. In a whole series of the earlier works, this end-orientation was the thing that most threatened what was supposed to be the Arendtian good, whether it was action or culture or the public itself. It was always the baunism of workers (The Human Condition) or philistines (“The Crisis in Culture”) that was the thing that threatened to remove from action and the political life what was peculiar to it. But in this section Arendt returns to the scene to do something like right by ends, to think about whether or not there is a place for endfulness and what that place might be.
In this notebook, thought is the dominion of ends, and the spontaneous, undetermined originality of action and the titanic worldly power of understanding find their end in thought’s retreat from the world’s appearances. Even in her darkest moments of facing the end this is not a tragedy to be mourned: it is simply the price of doing and being and living with others, the inescapable departure point of a world that we enter “confronted with what appears only once, with the sensuously perceptible” (780). After all, as Arendt cautions, action would disappear from the world in the moment of its enactment without being taken up and made a part of our collective story by a process of end-making. This necessary grave of the end gives the Human Condition in particular a different kind of normative bent than we might otherwise read in it – almost an odd kind of Platonism – in which it no longer appears that the natural instrumentality of work threatens everything around it, at least not simply so. Endfulness too has its place, indeed all of these familiar categories (labor, action, the social, the private) in their place are both necessary and productive. It is only those places where the messily amalgamated categories of our living in the world inevitably cross and mix that dangers, but perhaps also possibilities, are produced: every untidy palisade and nook of the shared world in which we can appear to each other.
This is, in the end, the sole place where that uniquely Arendtian sense of intimacy, a political intimacy, can exist. The intimacy of the Denktagebuch, which is no less present in Arendt’s confrontation with totalitarianism and is beautifully echoed in the struggles of those on this site with issues like the punishment of George Zimmerman and the decimations wrought by homophobic schooling systems, is not an intimacy of distilled selves but an intimacy of our selves with our world, an intimacy with what is shared and what forms, for good or for terrible ill, the fabric of what we can experience together. Arendt shows us what it means to be unblinkingly, meaningfully, at times painfully intimate with the human world. To engage in Arendtian politics is to enter into a relationship of intimacy, an intimacy with the terrible and the evil as much as with the beautiful and the good, and to find through that intimacy what we can do and who we can be with each other. And that intimacy, for Arendt, is what makes it possible for us to bear our ends.
-Ian Storey
Reflections on Arendt’s Denktagebuch
The atmosphere around the Hannah Arendt Center this week has been jovial yet intense. Ten Arendt scholars have gathered to read closely Hannah Arendt's Denktagebuch, loosely translated as her "Book of Thoughts." We meet every day for two sessions, each 150 minutes, with no breaks.
One participant leads a discussion about a selection of the book. The sessions have been riveting. The plan is to bring out a book that collects essays based on these presentations. It will be called Reading Arendt's Denktagebuch. We hope it will appear around the time that the English translation of Arendt's Denktagebuch is published.
The Denktagebuch is a "unique artifact," as one participant put it during our opening dinner. It is comprised of two, thick, beautifully rendered, hardcover volumes that together contain over 1,200 pages. It is not really a book, but is comprised of individual entries that Arendt wrote down in 28 notebooks over 23 years from 1950-1973. The entries are chronologically arranged (except for a thematically organized final book containing Arendt's notes on Immanuel Kant's thinking about judgment). The whole, masterfully edited by Ursula Ludz and Ingeborg Nordmann, contains extensive scholarly apparatus at the back.
One question we have asked is how to read the Denktagebuch. Some participants have chosen a particular chronological period and sought relationships and associations amongst Arendt's entries. Others identified recurring themes that Arendt returns to over the years, such as the relation between truth and metaphor, Kant's theory of judgment, and the connection between action and thinking. A few of our sessions have used the Denktagebuch to elucidate passages from Arendt's published work—this is especially fruitful since a full 500 pages of the Denktagebuch reflect entries from 1950-1954, the time when Arendt was at work on The Human Condition. Some excavated ideas are largely absent from the published work but vividly present in the Denktagebuch—for example love, reconciliation, and grammar. Finally, we have tried reading the Denktagebuch as a proper book, namely as a book of short aphorisms or poems, each standing on its own and yet fitting into the totality that is Arendt's thinking.
The origin of the Denktagebuch is interesting in itself. Arendt traveled to Germany in the winter of 1949-50 as the director of the Commission on European Jewish Cultural Reconstruction. Her mission was to search for Jewish ceremonial objects and, mainly, for Jewish books. The Commission recovered 1.5 million Jewish books under Arendt's leadership, part of what Leon Wieseltier calls "a campaign for the re-capture of a people’s dignity." During her visit, Arendt wrote "The Aftermath of Nazi-Rule. Report from Germany,“ which was published in Commentary. Also while in Germany, Arendt visited her old teacher, mentor, and lover, Martin Heidegger.
We know from Arendt's correspondence with Heidegger that they spoke at length about language, revenge, forgiveness, and reconciliation. Heidegger had joined the Nazi Party in 1933 and served for about one year as Rector of Freiburg University. He abandoned many of his Jewish friends and colleagues and promoted a philosophical version of Nazism before he resigned in 1934. The Heidegger case is complicated and controversial. Heidegger was a Nazi, but what kind of Nazi he was is not a simple question; there is no better account of the complexity of Heidegger's Nazism than Tracy Strong's powerful and nuanced retelling of the affair in his recent book Politics Without Vision.
In the 1940's Arendt was deeply critical of Heidegger. Her visit in 1950 provided an opportunity to think through her proper response to his activities. Shortly after her return to New York City in March1950, Arendt received a letter from Heidegger (along with some love poems) that read, in part:
I am happy for you that you are surrounded by your books again. The line with “the burden of the logs” is in “Ripe and dipped in Fire”—around the same time you probably wrote it [presumably a lost letter—RB], I had been thinking about the burden of logs.
The reference is to a poem “Reif Sind” by Friedrich Hölderlin. The poem is about memory, the past, and the question of whether to recall the past or to live in the present. One of the poem's central images is of the burden of logs that one carries on one's shoulders.
Shortly after Arendt receives Heidegger's letter, she begins her Denktagebuch, with the opening line:
The wrong that one has done is the burden on one’s shoulders, something that one bears because he has laden it upon himself.
That Arendt would initiate her book of thoughts with a meditation on the burden of past wrongs is not surprising. After all, she had recently finished the manuscript for The Origins of Totalitarianism—originally entitled The Burden of Our Times—which explored not simply the elements of totalitarianism, but more importantly the burden that such a past, a recent past, places on people in the present day: to comprehend and come to terms with what men had done as well as to acknowledge what any of us is capable of doing again. And, of course, she had just returned from a reunion with her past in Germany and Heidegger. The past is this burden that we bear on our shoulders, and Arendt begins her Denktagebuch with a reflection that is at once personal and yet also deeply abstract and universal.
The question of how to respond to the burden of wrongful deeds is woven through Arendt's writing. What is fascinating is that in the first pages of the Denktagebuch and then throughout the 1,200 pages, Arendt continues to think about the response to wrongs as a kind of reconciliation. This is surprising because reconciliation is not an idea prevalent in much of Arendt's published work.
In an article published last year, I explore the meaning and sense of reconciliation in Arendt's thinking. In it, I argue,
By focusing on Arendt's discussion of acts of reconciliation and also of non-reconciliation—her response to her reunion with Martin Heidegger in 1950, her judgment of the impossibility of reconciling oneself to Adolf Eichmann, her account of Jesus' forgiving and not-forgiving of petty and colossal crimes in the Gospel of Luke, and her reconciliation to life after the death of her husband, Heinrich Blücher—I show how Arendt places the judgment for or against reconciliation at the center of political action. Above all, I argue that the question—"Ought I to reconcile myself to the world?"—is, for Arendt, the pressing political question in our age.
There are not many articles published on the Denktagebuch in English. My article, focusing on the first seven pages of Arendt's notebooks, offers a glimpse into one way the Denktagebuch can help expand and enrich our reading of Arendt. You'll have to wait a bit for the book Reading Arendt's Denktagebuch, but for now you can read "Bearing Logs on Our Shoulders: Reconciliation, Non-Reconciliation, and the Building of a Common World."
You can also read this account of the Denktagebuch by Sigrid Weigel, at Telos (payment required).
You can also watch a video of Ursula Ludz discussing editing Arendt's work here, from a talk she gave in 2010 at the Hannah Arendt Center.
-RB
Is College Worth It?
Student debt is suddenly spurring the once unthinkable debate: Is college necessary? Of course the answer is no. But who needs it and who should pay for it are complicated questions.
Arendt herself had an ambivalent relationship to academic culture. She never held a tenure-track job in the academy and she remained suspicious of intellectuals and academics. She never forgot how easily professors in Germany embraced the rationality of the Nazi program or the conformity with which Marxist and leftist intellectuals excused Stalinism. In the U.S., Arendt was disappointed with the "cliques and factions" as well as the overwhelming "gentility" of academics, that dulled their insights. It was for that reason that she generally shunned the company of academics, with of course notable exceptions. A free thinker—she valued thinking for oneself above all—she was part of and apart from the university world.
We plan to keep the discussion about college and debt going on the Arendt Center blog. Here are a few thoughts to get the debate going.
First, college is not magic. It will neither make you smart nor make you rich. Some of our best writers and thinkers somehow avoided writing five-page papers on the meaning of Sophocles. (That of course does not mean that they didn't read Sophocles, even in the Ancient Greek.) And many of the most successful Americans never graduated or attended college. On the other hand, many college grads and Ph.D.'s are surviving on food stamps today. Some who attend the University of Phoenix will benefit greatly from it. Many who attend Harvard squander their money and time. Especially today, college is as much a safe path for risk-averse youth as it is a haven for the life of the mind or a tasseled path to the upper classes.
Second, College can be a transformative experience. As I prepare to say goodbye to another cohort of graduates at Bard, I am reminded again how amazing these students are and how much I learn from them every year. I wrote recently about one student who wrote a simply stunning meditation on education. Today I will be meeting with two students about their senior projects. One is a profound, often personal, and yet also deeply mature exploration of loneliness in David Foster Wallace, Hannah Arendt, and Martin Heidegger. The other is a genealogy of whistleblowing from T.E. Lawrence to Bradley Manning, arguing that the rise of whistleblowing in the 20th century is both a symptom of and a contributor to the lost facts in public life. Both are testaments to the fact that college can inspire young adults to wrestle meaningfully and intelligently with the world they must confront.
Third, Most students do not attend college because they want to. Of course some do and I have enormous respect for those who embrace the life of the mind that college can nurture. I also respect those who decide that college is not for them. But the simple fact is that too many college students are here thoughtlessly, going through the motions because they are on a track. College has become a stepping stone to a good job which is a stand in for a good life. Nothing wrong with that, but is it really worth hundreds of thousands of dollars and four years of your time simply to get a credential? College students are young and full of energy. Too often they spend four of their most energetic years studying things they don't care about while they sleep late, drink a lot, and generally have a good time. This cannot be the best use of most young people's time.
Fourth, it is not at all clear that college is a good investment. There is no limit of students who tell me that taking out debt for an education is always a good investment. This is usually around the time they want to apply to law school or graduate school. And I can only repeat to them so many times that they are simply wrong. Finally, the press is catching up to this fact, and we are treated to a daily drumbeat of stories about the dangers of student debt. College debt in the U.S. now exceeds $1 Trillion, more than credit card debt (although far smaller than mortgage debt). The problem is widespread, as 94% percent of those who earn a bachelor’s degree take on debt to pay for higher education — up from 45 percent in 1993. And the problem is deep: The average debt in 2011 was $23,300. For 10% of college graduates, their debt is crippling, as they owe more than $54,000. Three percent owe more than $100,000.
The most egregious debt traps are still the for-profit colleges, which serve the working classes who cannot afford more expensive non-profit colleges. These schools prey on the perception, partly true, that career advancement requires a college degree. But now even public universities and private elite colleges are increasingly graduating students with high debt loads. And then there are law schools and culinary schools, which increasingly graduate indebted and trained professionals into a world in which does not need them.
he result is as sad as it is predictable. Nearly 1 in 9 young graduate borrowers who started repayment in 2009 defaulted within two years. This is about double the rate in 2005. The numbers vary: 15% of recent graduates from for-profit schools are in default. Also 7.2% of public university graduations and 4.6% of private university graduates are defaulting. Each of these groups requires a separate analysis and discussion. And yet overall, we are burdening way too many young people with debts that will plague them their entire lives.
Fifth, to defend college education as a good investment is not simply questionable economically. It also is to devalue the idea of education for its own sake and insist that college is an economic rather than an intellectual experience. One unintended consequence of the expansion of college to a wider audience of strivers is that a college education is decidedly an economic and bourgeois experience, less and less an intellectual adventure. Was college ever Arcadia? Surely not. For much of American history college has been a benefit reserved for the upper classes. And yet to turn education into a commodity, to make it part of the life process of making a living, does further delimit the available spaces for the life of the mind in our society.
Sixth, college is not necessary to make us either moral or enlightened citizens. College education does not make us better people. There are plenty of amazing people in the world who have had not studied Aristotle or learned genetics in college. The United States was built on the tradition of the yeoman farmer, that partly mythical but also real person who worked long days, saved, and treated people honorably.
Morality, as Hannah Arendt never tired of pointing out, is not gained by education. Or as Kant once pointed out to a certain Professor Sulzer in a footnote to his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, morality can only be taught by example, not through study. Arendt agreed. She saw that many of those who acted most honorably during WWII were not the intellectuals, but common people who simply understood that killing neighbors or shooting Jews was inhuman. What is more, it was often the intellectuals who provided themselves and others with the complex and quasi-scientific rationalizations for genocide. To think rationally, and even to use a current buzzword, to think critically, is no barrier to doing evil. Critical thinking—the art of making distinctions—is no guarantee of goodness.
Seventh, college cannot and should not replace a failed primary and high school system. Our primary schools are a disgrace and then we spend a fortune on remedial education in community colleges and even in four-year colleges, trying to educate people who have been failed by their public schools. We would do much better to take a large part of the billions and billions of public dollars we spend on higher education and put them towards a radical restoration of our public grammar and high schools. If we actually taught people in grammar schools and pushed them to excel in high schools, they would graduate prepared to hold meaningful jobs and also to be thoughtful citizens. Maybe then a college education could then be both less necessary and more valuable.
Bard College, which houses the Hannah Arendt Center, has been engaged for years in creating public high schools that are also early colleges. The premise is that high school students are ready for college level work, and there is nothing to prevent them from doing that. These Bard High School Early Colleges are public high schools staffed by professors with Ph.D's who teach the same courses we teach at Bard College. In four years, students must complete an entire four-year high school curriculum and a two-year college curriculum. They then receive a Bard Associates Degree at graduation, in addition to their high school diploma. This Associates degree —which is free— can either reduce the cost of graduation from a four-year college or replace it altogether.
Early colleges are not the single answer for our crisis of education. But they do point in one direction. Money spent on really reforming high schools and even primary schools will do so much more to educate a broad, racially diverse, and economically underprivileged cohort of young people than any effort to reform or subsidize colleges and universities. The primary beneficiaries of the directing public money to colleges rather than high schools are Professors and administrators. I benefit from such subsidies and appreciate them. But that does mean I think them right or sensible.
We would be much better off if we redirected our resources and attention to primary and secondary education, which are failing miserably, and stopped obsessing so about college. Most college graduates, wherever they go, will learn something from their four or more years of classes. But the mantra that one only becomes a full human being by going to college is not only false. It also is dangerous.
-RB
The Voice of Right and Wrong
Whatever the source of moral knowledge might be—divine commandments or moral reason—every sane man, it was assumed, carried within himself a voice that tells him what is right and what is wrong, and this regardless of the law of the land and regardless of the voices of his fellowmen.
-Hannah Arendt, Some Questions of Moral Philosophy, in Responsibility and Judgment, p. 61.
In a series of lectures she wrote for two courses she taught, one in 1965 at the New School and the second in 1966 at the University of Chicago, Arendt mapped out some of her complicated thinking about moral philosophy and the “perplexities inherent in the human faculty of willing.” In these lectures, she drew heavily on Kant and Nietzsche, but began her reflections by calling attention to the historical motivation for her concerns: “We—at least the older ones among us—have witnessed the total collapse of all established moral standards in public and private life during the nineteen-thirties and –forties, not only...in Hitler’s Germany but also in Stalin’s Russia.” (54). The distinction between right and wrong that it was assumed “every sane man” heard like a voice within him had not stood the test of time.
How easily, Arendt observed, ordinary people had changed their habits of mind, exchanging one set of values for another “with hardly more trouble than it [took] to change the table manners of an individual or a people.” (50). How had this happened? If acting morally, and not just legally, depended on the “thinking” conversation one had with oneself about what one should or shouldn’t do, then it was as if large sections of the population in every strata had simply stopped thinking, did what they were told to do, and then proceeded to forget.
Two weeks ago today, Anders Behring Breivik, the 33-year-old Norwegian man who admitted to killing 77 people last July in two separate attacks, entered a specially outfitted courtroom in Oslo to stand trial for criminal acts of terrorism and mass murder. After the charges against him were read, Mr. Breivik pleaded not guilty. "I acknowledge the acts, but not criminal guilt - I claim I was doing it in self-defense." He would have preferred, he added, to appear before a military tribunal; he was, he contended, a political activist involved in a war in Europe.
Since he admitted his acts, the trial now turns on the question of Breivik’s sanity. Two psychiatric reports have produced contradictory conclusions; the first found him insane at the time of the killings, suffering from paranoid schizophrenic delusions, while the second declared him sane. “[E]very sane man, it was assumed, carried within himself a voice that tells him what is right and what is wrong.” In his own words, Breivik was no exception. Before he started shooting, Breivik explained at his trial last week, he heard “ ‘100 voices’ in his head telling him not to do it.” (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-17789206) But that moment of hesitation passed; he had prepared himself for years through a process he described as a deliberate program of dehumanization. Steeling himself against the comprehension of what he had done was important, he added, because “he would break down mentally” if he allowed himself to empathize with his victims.
“The criterion of right and wrong, the answer to the question, what ought I to do? depends in the last analysis neither on habits and customs, which I share with those around me, nor on a command of either divine or human origin, but what I decide with regard to myself,” Arendt observed in the same essay on moral philosophy. (97) What keeps a person from committing atrocities, or “evil” acts, is, for Arendt, the capacity to be a “thinking being, rooted in his thoughts and remembrances, and hence knowing that he has to live with himself.” This same capacity produce “limits to what he can permit himself to do, and these limits will not be imposed on him from the outside, but will be self-set.” These same limits, she continued, “are absent when men skid only over the surface of events, where they permit themselves to be carried away without ever penetrating into whatever depth they may be capable of.”
Breivik’s description of his yearlong “sabbatical” playing a video game, World of Warcraft, for up to 16 hours per day serves as an indication of the program of dehumanization to which he subjected himself. And his years’ long immersion in the ideology and methods of radical terrorism, with, ironically, his endorsement of Al Qaeda as “the most successful revolutionary movement in the world” serves as an example of the kinds of “thoughtlessness” that can become a willed experience, in individuals and in groups, and is a necessary prelude to despicable acts. But then, Breivik never imagined he would survive July 22; he envisioned his action as a suicide mission, perhaps the ultimate act of forgetfulness, the annihilation of the possibility of thought and judgment themselves.
-Kathleen B. Jones
Maikel Nabil and Peaceful Resistance
What if the meaning of peaceful resistance had to be revisited for the 21st century? Where would you turn to then?
Though examples of civil disobedience, conscientious objectors and peaceful protests are by no means rare nowadays, it is necessary to turn to extraordinary events of the kind that attach new meanings to historical circumstances; the meanings are never new but what remains is the novelty of the event.
Revolution is of course the event par excellence in which history is interrupted and something is begun anew. In the 21st century even though the word revolution is constantly heard, there is no more salient example than the Egyptian revolution.
Inspired by Tunisia, on January 25, 2011 thousands of Egyptians took to the streets and assembled at the now iconic Tahrir Square to demand the end of Hosni Mubarak’s rule. On February 11 2011 the long-time president departed from office after the Egyptian army took the protesters’ side and apparently helped to complete the revolution.
A slogan – was coined then: “The Army and the People are one hand”. After weeks during which the same army brutalized the demonstrators and killed hundreds of them, the sudden change of heart was welcome and the power vacuum left by the regime was quickly filled by the army, with the promise implied that a transition to civilian rule would happen eventually.
The rest of the story of the Egyptian revolution is now known all over the world: Military trials, virginity tests, NGO raids, constant clashes – often violent – between demonstrators and the security apparatus, massacres, and more than anything a power vacuum that has left the country sliding into a fierce slope of violence and counter-violence, as it was aptly put by Egyptian businessman Hany Ghoraba in his article “Egypt: The Wild Wild East”.
What happened to the Egyptian revolution and to the peaceful protests that in theory overthrew a regime? The question here for political theory (an expression not free from irony) doesn’t have to do necessarily with the particulars of Egypt – the rise of Islamism, the weakness of liberalism and the fact that leftovers of the deposed regime remain intact in office.
One has to ask himself the question whether a revolution is possible nowadays and under which conditions. It is clear by now that the concept of revolution is challenged today by a variety of circumstances that should bring us to examine briefly two aspects of revolution: The distinction between power and violence and the nature of non-violent resistance.
In his reading of Kant, Foucault tells us what it is that Kant considers significant in revolution: “What is significant is the manner in which the Revolution turns into a spectacle, it is the way in which it is received all around by spectators who do not participate in it but who watch it, who attend the show and who, for better or worse, let themselves by dragged along by it.”
This might well lead us to a very basic insight of Hannah Arendt: “Revolutionaries do not make revolutions. The revolutionaries are those who know when power is lying in the street and then they can pick it up”. What is then this power that Arendt is trying to grasp? There is almost unanimous agreement among her readers that the distinction between power and violence is the most crucial and yet difficult aspect of her political theory.
Power is the human ability to act not as an individual but in agreement within a group and this power remains alive only for as long as the group is bound together; it can disappear anytime and temporary as it might be, it is the only cure known to the fragility and meaninglessness of human affairs.
Violence is the opposite of power that has been for long glorified as its exact equivalent, turning power into an instrument that needs justification to pursue its own ends but is always at risk of outgrowing the means and remaining at the level of instrument only – means without an end. In her words: “And what needs justification by something else cannot be the essence of anything”.
Then we assume that power can become violent and violence but power can never grow out of violence and is in fact destroyed by it. Power – that unmediated action that grows out of common agreement in action between men – is the only thing that can destroy violence and tyranny as it is exemplified in Gandhi, but whatever the reality and success of this non-violent resistance as power is put to test in the modern world often with tragic results.
Arendt is no idealist at this point and she expresses herself with clarity about her reservation on the effectiveness of non-violent resistance after fascism: “In a head-on clash between violence and power, the outcome is hardly in doubt. If Gandhi’s enormously powerful and successful strategy of non-violent resistance had met with a different enemy –Stalin’s Russia, Hitler’s Germany, even prewar Japan, instead of England, the outcome would not have been decolonization, but massacre and submission. However, England in India and France in Algeria had good reasons for their restraint.” Needless to say this has been the outcome of each and every Arab revolution where power hasn’t been enough to defeat violence.
What is required from non-violent resistance to generate the quantity and quality of power that can effectively defeat violence? Here it is obvious that an association with the military and with militarism in general can never be the answer, and while there are no definite answers to draw from tradition or otherwise, there are always singular examples one can meditate on.
On March 28, 2011 an Egyptian blogger, Maikel Nabil, was arrested by the military police and sentenced to three years imprisonment on charges of insulting the military in a long blog post from March 8 2011, titled “The Army and the People Were Never One Hand”.
In his blog, Maikel Nabil provided sound evidence of how activists had been tortured and killed by the army, during and after the revolution and expressed in different words an insight that was already known to Toynbee in his studies of world history: One of the patterns in the breakdown of civilizations is the suicidalness of militarism and its intoxication with victory, out of which periods of freedom have never emerged.
This simple insight proved very dangerous at a time when the power of the people had become a monolithic whole, aptly expressed by Maikel in one fragment written from prison: “Maybe there are many who don’t know the simple distinction between seeking unity and seeking tolerance, but we saw the core difference between the two things and how unity leads to failure while tolerance earns you strength and pushes you to succeed.”
Human action and power – its plural version – can only unfold in plurality and the fact that such was no longer the case attests to the extent to which the suicidalness and intoxication of militarism had already infinitely weakened the power of the revolution. In an entirely un-revolutionary fashion, the sentence delivered on the blogger was celebrated by many and at best met with indifference because of his rather unpopular ideas: Peace with the State of Israel and the end of compulsory military conscription.
Nevertheless, the consensus fostered by militarism and the price paid by the search for unity at the expense of plurality and tolerance was levied on Maikel Nabil not because of a failed analysis but by simple exclusion in a battle of opinions from which truth as a public power – to use the metaphor of Philip Goodchild – was absent; which of course places power in the status of refugee and violence as the supreme ruler.
Arendt insisted that the truths of any age must be always challenged for every generation and it is in this challenge that the power of non-violent struggle resides. It was she who popularized the Austrian adage “there’s no discussion as heated as that on a book no one had read” in reference to the controversy sparked by her book about the Eichmann Trial.
Maikel Nabil wrote from jail that people who supported him should support him for his thoughts and not for his personality because it was his thoughts what put him in jail. It was his thoughts that led him to a hunger strike that lasted over a hundred days. And even after he ultimately was released after a long legal battle of ten months with a clearly illegitimate authority, most of the people who supported him—and those who did not—still don't know much about his thoughts.
Thinking becomes the keyword here: Roger Berkowitz writes of Hannah Arendt that reasoning and thinking are not the same and that thinking for Arendt constitutes a form of action and the basis of all political life and experience – nothing to do with political philosophy or Realpolitik but with our appearance in the world among others.
Thinking and the ability to take responsibility for the consequences of our thoughts is the building block of our ability to appear in the world and as such is the most effective form of resistance under totalitarianism and forms of tyranny in which truth – the material out of which power is made – is absent from the common world.
In an interview of 1974 with Roger Errera, Arendt concluded by saying:
The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only a lie – a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days – but yet get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such people you can then do what you please.
This cynicism is precisely the risk that unthinking unity poses – that thinking, plurality and truth might disappear altogether, and with them power as well. For Arendt, plurality demands the courage for plural individuals to enter the public sphere, which is why courage, she writes, is the first virtue of politics.
Was Maikel Nabil courageous? The answer to this question is obvious but I disagree with Arendt about the political nature of courage as a virtue.
Susan Sontag writes that courage and resistance have no intrinsic value in themselves unless they are coupled with an adjective – for there is amoral courage and resistance too – by means of which it is qualified. The value of courage and resistance depends on the specific content of whatever it is that is being defended. Heroism isn’t what is stake here, for it is something that always comes in hand with tragedy and pathos and it is precisely heroism what the political consequences of thinking mean to dispose of.
Sandra Lehmann writes: “If heroism is to overcome, it can also dispense pathos and vanity. It needs no reward, not even that of great importance and meaning. Probably only heroism without reward is true heroism. It is a matter of the moment and of a far off future.”
What Maikel Nabil was defending was the life of the mind, and in this crusade against those who want to terrorize the life of the mind lies the true nature of non-violent resistance and the potential of every action that might attain revolutionary power – it begins in the solitude of our thoughts one good day and yet, it can unmake the world. All thinking is dangerous.
- Arie Amaya-Akkermans
The Cherry Battle
I won Hannah [Arendt] at the Ball with a comment made while dancing, that loving is that act by which something aposteriori--the by-chance-encountered other is transformed into an apriori of one's own life. --This pretty formula naturally has not been confirmed.
—Günther Anders
In honor of Valentine's week, we offer this account of Günther Anders courtship of Hannah Arendt. The quotation is taken from Günther Anders book, Die Kirschenschlact: Dialoge mit Hannah Arendt (The Cherry Battle: Dialogues With Hannah Arendt). The Cherry Battle is an extraordinary window into Arendt's early thinking.
I am always wary reading a book of biographical or personal content about Hannah Arendt. Her life is fascinating. I am always on guard against the seductive danger of reading too much of her biography into her work. And wow is this a riveting read.
Anders was Arendt's first husband. A fellow Jew, they met in Martin Heidegger's lecture hall where they both heard lectures on Hegel's Logic and participated in a seminar on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Arendt, at the time in love with their Professor, had little time for Anders (who went by his family name Günther Stern). Five years later, in 1929, they met again at a masked ball in Berlin, where he spoke the above words to Arendt while dancing.
Arendt and Anders were married not long afterwards and moved to Drewitz (now Potsdam) where they tried to make lives for themselves as independent writers. It was there, on the balcony of the apartment they sublet, that Arendt and Anders would eat bowls upon bowls of cherries.
We sat across from each other on the tiny balcony, between a colossal basket of cherries; on the left and right were empty marmalade jars, for we pitted the black, plump fruit, in order to cook it—what for her was a great joy, like cooking in general, which she mastered even as well as philosophy. We put the pits in one jar, the fruity flesh in the others. And always a few in our mouths—especially [Hannah], for she was just as desirous of cherries as she was of cigarettes...
Aside from Arendt's passion for cherries, there is much to learn from Anders' account of their early conversations. This is true even though the book is a reconstruction, part truth and part fantasy. As he writes, the dialogue itself is real (as is the scene of the cherry battle), but the words themselves are "just as much poetry as truth."
The topic of the dialogue is one that would occupy Arendt and Anders both for much of their lives: "The Irrelevance of Mankind." That is Anders formulation. What comes through in this magical dialogue is the joy in thinking and sparring by two young and gifted thinkers (Arendt was 22-23 at the time, Anders around 30). They punch and counterpunch, Anders taking up the Darwinian and scientific position that man is, in the end, merely one creature among others, not special or particularly relevant in any way. Or, as Arendt asks him, astonished: "You mean we are fully irrelevant? And unknown? And purely busybodies, things with no sense? Metaphysical busybodies?"
Arendt is, in Anders' words, "too Jewish" to concede that human beings were simply "pieces of the world." The world was, and remained for Arendt, "created for mankind."
At one point Anders insists: "we are simply not mature enough to concede the fact of our cosmic irrelevance; that we are too cowardly and possess too little civil courage to learn to accept that which has been that human modesty that follows from Copernicus."
Arendt counters that all species think of themselves as the center of the world, to which Anders parries: the fact that we share a defect with other species does not make us better than they. To be met with what Anders calls Arendt's "winning argument": "Naturally not. But perhaps we are the only species that is conscious of this defect; that at the least has a monopoly on the insight into its non-monopoly position."
We'll have a full review of Die Kirschenschlacht: Dialoge mit Hannah Arendt before long. For now, just think, it is only a few months before the cherries are ripe.
-RB
Representation in Absentia-Jeffrey Champlin
“Political thought is representative. I form an opinion by considering a given issue from different viewpoints, by making present to my mind the standpoint of those who are absent; that is, I represent them.”
-Hannah Arendt, “Truth and Politics,” Between Past and Future
When Arendt first refers to political representation, we might think we are on familiar ground. After all, the question of how to move from the citizen to the representative was a vexing problem for the founders of the United States, one that resulted in the creation of the House of Representatives and Senate. The Great Compromise was a way of balancing the representation of small and large states, and the troubling Three-Fifths Compromise sought to guarantee representation to the southern states while preserving slavery. Today, the debate over the influence of lobbyists, political donations, and corporate personhood speaks to a renewed concern over how politicians can best represent the interests of voters.
Arendt does address questions of political representation of this sort in her detailed examination of the move from the late colonial period to the passage of the Constitution in On Revolution. In the above quote, she speaks of “political thought” in terms of the mental process of an individual—one who asks himself, "what would others who are absent think?" Moving from the objective statement of the first sentence to the subjective “I” of the second, she performs what she explains, bringing us inside the mind of someone who thinks through representation. The political subject does not hold on to essential or deeply rooted beliefs, but instead considers one position and then another. One might think of a sequence in a movie that switches between subjective angles, showing how a number of characters view a scene without ever moving back to an objective angle that shows them from outside. The effort of representative thinking is, first, to think from as many viewpoints as possible. This is, at least in part, what Arendt means by "enlarged thinking."
It is important to emphasize that representation does not simply repeat or copy the multiple points of view of others. One does not, for example, ask others what they think and then consider it. Instead, she says those to whom the standpoint belongs are “are absent.” Since they are not there, a space opens in which I can create a version of their view in my mind.
Rather than re-presentation in the strict sense, it is a matter of creatively presenting. In representing all of those who are absent, I must then seek to make a judgment and judge what opinion all of those people would and should share. In such a way, political thought, as representational thought, requires that I make judgments about what all people should agree upon.
From here we would want to move to a careful study of Arendt’s claim that Kant’s aesthetic third Critique, the Critique of Judgment, has important political implications that Kant himself never recognized. A condensed version of this argument in Between Past and Future speaks of "wooing," or persuading, others from one's individual position. An example might be drawn from the Occupy Wall Street movement, which has gained attention in part as a platform for individual stories about injustice. From an Arendtian point of view, the success of the movement would depend on making personal insights universal by imaginatively listening to others. In this way, one does not merely tell of one's own experience but represents the truth. Of course, to speak of representing the truth here requires that we guard against traditional prejudices. For Arendt the truth and the universal are not pre-given but constructed through action an not eternal but rather exist for a determinite period of time.
-Jeffrey Champlin
Hannah Arendt’s Cosmopolitanism
In the year of Hannah Arendt's centennial, 2006, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl spoke at the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College's inaugural conference: Thinking in Dark Times. Young-Bruehl was, along with Jerry Kohn, instrumental in establishing the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard, and she has been a good friend of the Center since its inception. It is with great sadness that we at the Arendt Center mourn her untimely passing. At such times it is important to recall the power of her thought and the beauty of her writing. One example of her thoughtful prose is the talk she gave at that inaugural conference, a talk that has since been published in the volume Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics.
Titled "Hannah Arendt's Jewish Identity", Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's talk traced the roots of Arendt's cosmopolitanism to her Jewish identity, amongst other sources. It is not unimportant, Young-Bruehl begins, that Arendt's teacher, Karl Jaspers, identified the Jews of Palestine as one of the five Axial Age peoples:
The topic of Hannah Arendt’s Jewish identity can be approached from many directions. In this essay, I am going to consider Arendt in the context of the vision of world history articulated by her teacher and mentor Karl Jaspers, in which her people, the Jews of Palestine, were considered as one of the “Axial Age” peoples—the five great peoples who reached pinnacles in their development between 900-800 BC to 400-300 BC. Jaspers was the first thinker to see these great Axial civilizations as the origins of a worldly cosmopolitan civilization, one that attends to the world as it is, and one that could imagine "a world made one by a worldwide war and by technological developments that had united all peoples, for better or for worse."
Arendt too, writes Young-Bruehl, had a connection to common cosmopolitan world.
It is Arendt’s Jewish identity—not just the identity she asserted in defending herself as a Jew when attacked as one, but more deeply her connection to the Axial Age prophetic tradition—that made her the cosmopolitan she was....
In her essay, Young-Bruehl identifies four common characteristics of cosmopolitan thinking that she finds in common between Karl Jaspers and Hannah Arendt. These four ingredients are:
1. The capacity for and exercise of “enlarged mentality.” Arendt often invoked this capacity for thinking your way into the viewpoint, the position, the experience, of other people.
2. What Jaspers called “a sense of history.” For Arendt, this meant a sense for the un-predictability of human affairs. Since no one group can have a privileged view of history, the view encompasses the entire world.
3. What Arendt called a sense of the human condition. Arendt named six human conditions—earth, life, world, natality, mortality, plurality—that, although susceptible to change, are human, by which is meant "common to all mankind."
4. That people are shaped by their particular historical experiences—e.g. the way that Arendt was shaped by her experience as a Jew—but that they are also moved, usually unconsciously, by needs and experiences and conditions shared by all human beings.
This last characteristic of cosmopolitanism is most interesting, for Young-Bruehl here argues that Arendt, in spite of her well-known disdain for psychology, had a deep understanding of the unconscious motivations of the human condition.
'Figure at a Window', Salvador Dali
For example, Arendt's well-known recognition of the human need to act politically shows her understanding of unconscious and cosmopolitan human drives. While particular historical experiences might make people look and behave and sound more different than they are, they share more than their differences would suggest. Young-Bruehl concludes:
"As an aphorism by Kant’s contemporary Georg Christoph Lichtenberg that Hannah Arendt once quoted to me conveys: “People do not think about the events of life as differently as they speak about them.”
Read the entirety of Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's essay here.
-RB
Click here to visit the Elisabeth Young-Bruehl Memorial Page.
Elisabeth Young-Bruehl Speaks on Hannah Arendt
In light of Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's recent and untimely passing, we thought it would be appropriate to post two different clips of her speaking about Hannah Arendt. Young-Bruehl was, of course, a student of Arendt as well as her biographer.
The first is an NPR interview from 2006 which marked what would have been Hannah Arendt's 100th birthday. While Young-Bruehl addressed Arendt's writings about Eichmann and the banality of evil, she also discussed Arendt's thoughts on McCarthyism and her fear of close-minded thinking in the United States:
But she, of course, was more worried as the 1950s went on about the implications of the way in which America and its allies opposed Stalin. She was as concerned about this as she was about the Stalinist regime.
Then she was most worried there had come about in America a kind of frame of mind that was quite rigid and obsessional itself, and Joseph McCarthy was the exemplar of this, that found any means to justify the end of anti-communism reasonable.
Listen to the NPR interview here.
The second piece, considerably longer, is a lecture Young-Bruehl delivered at an April, 2010 Conference on Hannah Arendt. Her lecture is entitled, "The Promise of Hannah Arendt's Politics." One of the topics she discussed was Arendt's Post WWII perception of cosmpolitanism and the negative impact of statelessness:
While efforts were being made after the War toward a world politics, a politics in which states could put their resources to the world concerns they shared, working for world peace, intellectuals of various backgrounds were considering the meaning of cosmopolitanism in that historical moment –a window of opportunity before the so-called Cold War gripped the world. In 2002, looking back on this post-war moment ...two British political theorists, Fine and Cohen, contributing to an essay collection called Conceiving Cosmopolitanism, named the moment “Arendt’s moment.” Hannah Arendt had offered an analysis of “crimes against humanity” that was, they argued, defining of the moment.
By concentrating their attention on Arendt’s thoughts about international law and the 1945 Nuremberg Trials, Fine and Cohen overlooked, I think, the centerpiece of Hannah Arendt’s cosmopolitanism, which was her critique of the late 19th and 20th century sovereign nation-states, which, she emphasized, were states that had turned on groups of their own people, eliminating some and creating wave upon wave of stateless others.
No leaders ... had, in Hannah Arendt’s estimation, grasped fully the key stumbling block to any harmonious world organization of nation-states and any Universal Declaration of Human Rights: the problem of statelessness.
Listen to Young-Bruehl's speech here.
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