Amor Mundi 11/10/13

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.

Skills and the Humanities

The Nobel Laureate J.M. Coetzee has published an open letter on the recent threats to universities and to the humanities in particular. He warns against the idea that the humanities should be thought of as teaching basic literacy or “skills”, in the parlance of recent jargon that dominates committees discussing educational reform. “There is nothing wrong with arguing that a good humanistic education will produce graduates who are critically literate, by some definition of critical literacy. However, the claim that only the full apparatus of a humanistic education can produce critical literacy seems to me hard to sustain, since it is always open to the objection: if critical literacy is just a skill or set of skills, why not just teach the skill itself? Would that not be simpler, and cheaper too?... I believe, you will have to make a stand. You will have to say: we need free enquiry because freedom of thought is good in itself. We need institutions where teachers and students can pursue unconstrained the life of the mind because such institutions are, in ways that are difficult to pin down, good for all of us: good for the individual and good for society.”

Subjective Revolution

Recently, the New Statesman asked several prominent artists and scholars what revolution means to them. Some, like filmmaker Judd Apatow, poet Fatima Bhutto, and cartoonist Molly Crabapple, give long answers. Others keep it short; Chinese artist Ai Weiwei answered, simply "The revolution is a bridge that connects the past and the future. It is necessary, unpredictable and inevitable." The revolutions of the modern era were central to Arendt’s writing and thinking and she held up the American Revolution in particular as the great example of a liberation movement that succeeded in founding a free body politic. It is helpful to recall her own definition of revolution, if there is one: “The modern idea of revolution, inextricably bound up with the notion that the course of history suddenly begins anew, an entirely new story, a story never known or told before, is about to unfold, was unknown prior to the two great revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century…. Crucial, then, to any understanding of revolutions in the modern age is that the idea of freedom and the experience of a new beginning should coincide.”

The Trouble With Heroes

In an interview about his new book Year Zero: A History of 1945, Ian Buruma describes his ambivalence about heroes: "You need heroes sometimes in periods of crisis. You need them when you’re being occupied by the Nazis and in similar situations. But heroes tend not to be very nice people. They can be. There are of course heroic resistors who do it out of sheer decency but there are a lot of adventurers. To be a hero, especially when it involves violence, means you have to be pretty ruthless. Churchill was a hero but he was absolutely ruthless. The British people were absolutely right to cast him out in 1945. Clement Attlee was the man you needed then just as Churchill was the man you needed instead of Chamberlain and Halifax."

Iago's Empathy: On Fiction and Usefulness

Lee Siegel looks at two new studies arguing that reading fiction promotes empathy. “The results were heartening to every person who has ever found herself, throughout her freshman year of college, passionately quoting to anyone within earshot Kafka’s remark that great literature is “an axe to break the frozen sea inside us.” The subjects who had read literary fiction either reported heightened emotional intelligence or demonstrated, in the various tests administered to them, that their empathy levels had soared beyond their popular- and non-fiction-reading counterparts.” But Siegel wonders whether we should promote literature on the practical ground that it fosters empathy: “Though empathy has become something like the celebrity trait of emotional intelligence, it doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the sensitivity and gentleness popularly attributed to it. … There is, for example, no more empathetic character in the novel or on the stage than Iago, who is able to detect the slightest fluctuation in Othello’s emotional state. Othello, on the other hand, is a noble and magnanimous creature—if vain and bombastic as well—who is absolutely devoid of the gift of being able to apprehend another’s emotional states. If he were half as empathetic as Iago, he would be able to recognize the jealousy that is consuming his treacherous lieutenant. The entire play is an object lesson in the emotional equipment required to vanquish other people, or to protect yourself from other people’s machinations. But no one—and no study—can say for sure whether the play produces more sympathetic people, or more Iagos.”

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