Amor Mundi 11/17/13

11-18-2013

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.

Hannah Arendt Amongst the Girls

In an excerpt in the LA Review of Books adapted from her new book Diving for Pearls: A Thinking Journey with Hannah Arendt; Kathleen Jones explores the depth and meaning of Hannah Arendt’s friendships, and especially her intimate bonds with women. “In the landscape of friendship, Hannah Arendt’s capacity stands luminous and large. From the time she was a young woman, she surrounded herself with a circle of friends with whom she exchanged gossip, ideas about politics and philosophy, opinions on culture and the state of the world, and, occasionally, romantic partners.” Jones cites Alfred Kazin who said that Arendt “confronted you with the truth; she confronted you with her friendship.” But above all, Jones explores Arendt’s friendships with women, Mary McCarthy, Lotte Kohler, Hilda Fränkel, Ann Weil (Annchen to Arendt), and Rosalie Colie (or Posie as Arendt called her). “Stories of Arendt’s female friendships such as these reveal a side of her not usually captured in more traditional portraits. Yes, her intelligence was intimidating; yes, she was judgmental, arrogant, and not easily moved from an opinion once formed — whether on ideas or people. But she was also a person of deep feeling, with an appreciation for the vagaries of the human heart. Those she allowed to come closest saw and came to depend upon that.”

Outrage

Cole Carter has an excellent exploration of the limits of liberal outrage in the latest issue of The Point. “Outrage can also cause us to misrepresent or mythologize the past. Morton, for instance, claims that before 9/11, our alleged toleration of torture would have been unthinkable. “We were a people who didn’t torture — whether or not this has ever been completely true, it was a bedrock element of our idea of ourselves.” As Samuel Moyn pointed out in a magnificent essay on the politics of torture in The Nation, this story of regression doesn’t match the historical record. Moyn tells us that torture’s current status as an unspeakable taboo is actually quite recent, tracing its origins to the international human rights movement, which gained steam following the end of decolonization in the early 1970s. Throughout the early twentieth century, and for centuries before, colonial Western powers (the French in Algeria, the British in Malaya, and yes, the United States in the Philippines) were torturing their subjects with hardly a twinge of guilt…. The left’s taste for outrage encourages a minimalist politics which, as a result of a triage of an almost unlimited supply of atrocities, seeks to curb only the most willful and obvious abuses of power. As the possibility of transforming society has receded, the left has contented itself with condemning the worst aspects of the present system.”

When the Ape Inside Us Speaks

In an interview about his new novel A Beautiful Truth, told partially from the perspective of chimpanzees, Colin McAdam thinks through whether or not language is simply a means to an end: "It seems to contradict all the poetry in me, but I feel passionate about us as a species trying to understand what unites us with other apes rather than what distinguishes us. When I was reading various ape language studies — especially those involving sign language, where the relationship between the movement of hands and the movement of the tongue is seated in the same neurological space — I came to understand the physicality of words, that they come from the same place as tool use. For me, understanding words as tools is a way of not distancing ourselves from other apes, of finding that kinship more deeply. My talking to you right now is me trying to convince you of my worldview, trying to show you how I perceive things. You can look at that as being kind of Machiavellian and cynical — repulsive and reductive — but that’s what it is. When anyone is talking to anyone else, we’re trying to make them see what we’re seeing." One wonders if manual dexterity and persuasive force have much to do with the spiritual reveries unleashed by Robert Frost’s “Good fences make good neighbors”?

Losing One's Way in Dante's City

In an essay about her father and her love of public gardens, Zadie Smith describes getting lost in Florence: "Many people set out from a Florence hotel with the hope of getting to a particular place—few ever get there. You step into a narrow alleyway, carta di città in hand, walk confidently past the gelato place, struggle through the crowd at the mouth of the Ponte Vecchio, take a left, and find yourself in some godforsaken shady vicolo near a children’s hospital, where the temperature is in the 100s and someone keeps trying to sell you a rip-off Prada handbag. You look up pleadingly at the little putty babies. You take a right, a left, another right—here is the Duomo again. But you have already seen the Duomo. In Florence, wherever you try to get to, you end up at the Duomo, which seems to be constantly changing its location. The heat builds and the walls of the alleys feel very high; the thought of a green oasis is tantalizing but last time you remember seeing grass was that little strip in front of the train station. Will you ever see it again?"

Didn't See it Coming

Discussing his new book The Confidence Trap, David Runciman suggests that there's a reason democracies can't see, and therefore stop, crises before they happen: Tocqueville saw a link between the tendency of democracies to overreact and their propensity to drift. Because democracies are full of people running around saying the sky is falling in – panic sells far more newspapers than calm reflection does – they also have an inbuilt tendency to discount warnings of disaster. Since the sky rarely falls in, why listen to the people warning of disaster. So mistaking minor dislocations for real crises goes along with mistaking real crises for minor dislocations. That’s why so few people saw the crisis of 2008 coming before it arrived and why the ones who did were routinely ignored."

Featured Events

November 20, 2013