Amor Mundi 11/24/13
11-25-2013
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.
Magnus Carlsen—just 22 years old—beat Viswanathan Anand (the reigning world chess champion) this week at the World Chess Championships in Chennai, India. There has been much excitement about Carlsen’s victory, and not simply because of his youth. As Joe Weisenthal writes, Carlsen’s win signifies the emergence of a new kind of chess. Behind Carlsen’s victories is what is being called his “nettlesomeness.” I encountered the idea in an essay by Joe Weisenthal, who himself quotes Tyler Cowen: “Carlsen is demonstrating one of his most feared qualities, namely his “nettlesomeness,” to use a term coined for this purpose by Ken Regan. Using computer analysis, you can measure which players do the most to cause their opponents to make mistakes. Carlsen has the highest nettlesomeness score by this metric, because his creative moves pressure the other player and open up a lot of room for mistakes. In contrast, a player such as Kramnik plays a high percentage of very accurate moves, and of course he is very strong, but those moves are in some way calmer and they are less likely to induce mistakes in response.” Read more about nettlesome chess and humanity on the Arendt Center Blog.
Lincoln Caplan has an excellent essay on Judge Learned Hand in the NYRB this weekend. Hand was one of the most influential legal minds in the United States. Here is Caplan: “To Hand, law’s role is to help shape common purpose and reflect the will of the people as part of the compact between them and their government. He was a small “d” democrat. Case by case, he saw his job as weighing competing views of the law and its application to the facts and working his way toward the best outcome in the circumstances. His psyche, outlook, and practice aligned to make him a model of a restrained judge…. “The spirit of liberty,” he said, “is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interests alongside its own without bias; the spirit of liberty remembers that not even a sparrow falls to earth unheeded….””
Matthew Davis, in a piece that's part memoir and part profile, describes his relationship with the Syrian writer Khalid Khalifa, who is, even now, still working from Damascus. Although Davis's description of his time in and eventual deportation from Syria is striking, and his worry for his friend is palpable, in his conclusion he suggests something that is too easily forgotten: life, for Khalid and Damascus both, goes on, even as Syria appears to be crumbling. “Ever since the war began in January 2011, I had little doubt that Khaled Khalifa would remain in Syria, in Damascus, his paradise, to help usher in the new ideas he spoke passionately about in Iowa City. More than two years on, however, I wonder whether this ending will change, too. Khaled’s health is failing; he is depressed; he has been barred from leaving the country. I get none of this from him, only those close to him. From him, I get positive emails, an optimism as much at Khaled’s core as his rotund gut and passion for writing. Khaled’s fourth novel was recently published in Cairo. I’ve also heard that Qasabji is still open, Nabil still serving arak and beer, albeit at a higher price.”
David Rieff on "Hannah Arendt"
Reviews of the movie "Hannah Arendt" have been thinly veiled opportunities to rehash old scores and attach Arendt once more for her reputed sins. That is why David Rieff’s review in The Nation this week is welcome. It offers meaningful praise for the film, with detailed accounts of what Rieff likes, while also offering serious-minded criticisms. From there, Rieff moves on to the question of the controversy itself. Rieff has little love for Arendt or, in the end, “Hannah Arendt.” I may disagree on both accounts, but he is fair-minded. “For entirely understandable and legitimate reasons, both philosophical and (though she almost certainly would have denied it) biographical, Arendt believed that the Shoah was not only the greatest crime in human history (a claim for which an argument can unquestionably be made), but an unprecedented one. The concluding pages of Eichmann in Jerusalem are suffused with her fear that, as she put it, “once a specific crime has appeared for the first time, its reappearance is more likely than its initial emergence could ever have been.” For Arendt, Eichmann was nothing less than a new type of criminal, one who “commits his crimes under circumstances that make it well-nigh impossible for him to know or feel he is doing wrong.” But it is not clear that she was right.”
William Weaver, the esteemed translator of Italian works including novels by Umberto Eco, Alberto Moravia, Eugenio Montale, Oriana Fallaci, Ugo Moretti, Carlo Emilio Gadda, Elsa Morante, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Italo Svevo died this past week. “Bill Weaver,” as he was known on campus, taught at Bard from 1992-2002. I never met Weaver, but he looms large in the world of the Hannah Arendt Center. The Center is housed in what we refer to as the “Mary McCarthy House,” because Arendt’s close friend Mary McCarthy lived there during both her stays teaching at Bard College. But most of my senior colleagues still refer to our dwelling as the “Bill Weaver House,” since Weaver lived there for 10 years and hosted many a dinner party there during his time on campus. As Bard’s President Leon Botstein wrote, “His contribution to the literary and cultural life of the College was extraordinary. It is through him that the College received the endowment that created the Bard Fiction Prize.” You can read his obituary in the New York Times, which quotes from this 2000 interview in The Paris Review. “Some of the hardest things to translate into English from Italian are not great big words, such as you find in Eco, but perfectly simple things, buon giorno for instance,” he said. “How to translate that? We don’t say ‘good day,’ except in Australia. It has to be translated ‘good morning,’ or ‘good evening,’ or ‘good afternoon’ or ‘hello.’ “You have to know not only the time of day the scene is taking place, but also in which part of Italy it’s taking place,” he continued, “because in some places they start saying buona sera — ‘good evening’ — at 1 p.m. The minute they get up from the luncheon table it’s evening for them. So someone could say buona sera, but you can’t translate it as ‘good evening’ because the scene is taking place at 3 p.m. You need to know the language, but, even more, the life of the country.”
From the Hannah Arendt Center Blog
This week on the blog, Ursula Ludz details Arendt's understanding of herself as a truthteller. In the weekend read, Roger Berkowitz looks at humanity in the computer dominated world of chess.
The movie "Hannah Arendt" has just been released on DVD and features an extensive insert booklet produced by the Hannah Arendt Center!
Become a member of the Hannah Arendt Center and get your copy in time for the holidays!
Learn more here.