Amor Mundi 1/25/15

01-26-2015

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.

What Should Remain Hidden in Private

Dawn Herrera-Helphand draws Arendtian lessons about the meaningfulness of privacy from her experience of giving birth. Writing in The Point, Herrera-Helphand describes the emotional intensity of her natural birth, all of which connected her to pain she did know she could bear and power she did not know she might have. Giving birth was an ecstasy, a standing apart from herself, what she found to be "a liberating intimacy with the immanent force of life." Herrera-Helphand asks: "Could this necessary self-abandon have proceeded if I did not feel sheltered? The body has a sense of fear or safety, precognitive and wholly prior to our rationalizations. To feel vulnerable to the eyes of others, to their designs or interventions, is to want to maintain some semblance of control. The illusion of sovereignty that we cultivate in public is precious, not easily relinquished. The ambition to maintain it is antithetical to the necessary labor of childbirth. Apropos of nothing, my cousin, in her second trimester, told me her fantasy of hiding away to give birth 'like an animal.' It makes sense when you think about it: not wanting a hungry bear to eat the baby, not wanting to be seen so deep in suffering.... Giving birth afforded me a fresh perspective on Arendt's distinction between what should be hidden and what should be shown. This binary of private and public remains deeply problematic regarding questions of domestic work and caregiving. But from another angle, privacy is not so much a question of what is fit for appearance to public eyes as of what cannot fully transpire in view of others. The idea that privacy is proper to the realm of necessity need not be based on shame in the body. Privacy can also shield interests that are literally vital, so as to give them their full weight." It is precisely the power of privacy to give weight and depth to life that makes the loss of privacy in our times so terrifying. Privacy will be the theme of the Hannah Arendt Center's 8^th annual conference this October 15-16^th. Save the Date.

What Would Hannah Arendt Do?

In an exchange of letters with David Mikics, Mark Greif asks: "What would Arendt do? I've often thought I should make up a WWAD necklace. One certainly would like to know what she would have done, or said, in the face of the present day. But part of her charm is that she was surprising and unpredictable. Not unpredictable because she was inconsistent--rather, I think, because she did insist on thinking things through, in each new situation, all the way to the root. She was an intensely annoying figure to her contemporaries. Lately she has become another 'inspiring' figure and source of sanctimony. I wish there were more room to try to think things down to their roots, and see what itineraries you wind up following, right or wrong, usefully or--sometimes--as mere exploration. People in her circles in the 1940s and 1950s liked to point out, in the face of doctrinaire leftists, that this was the real meaning of radical--at least etymologically--to go 'down to the root.' And then to be prepared to tug up the roots--or defend them and nourish them--rather than keep plucking off leaves...." We at the Arendt Center resist the question of what Arendt would think precisely for the reason Greif offers: that her thought was at once deeply consistent and remarkably surprising. To think radically, down to the roots, means that one looks beyond conventional categories, looks at facts plainly and gathers them together informed by a unique and critical perspective, one informed by tradition and yet not a slave to the past. That is how Arendt thought and it is why she has become such an inspiring figure to many even as others insist on using her, wrongly, to advance their pet political positions. Greif's insistence in these letters is that we think well. The terrorists, he argue, thought poorly: "For the kosher supermarket mass murderer, I think the sequence went something like this: The Israeli state, or all Israelis, are in bloody conflict with nearby Palestinians. Israel is a Jewish state. Palestinians are Muslims. I am Muslim. I guess I too am in a bloody conflict with Israeli Jews. Wait--France has Jews. I ought to kill them. I eat Halal, but they eat Kosher. Therefore I know just where to find them. The universe shouldn't have room--I think Hannah Arendt would point out--for such a lethal mockery of thought, or thoughtlessness. Because it undoes all the distinctions that allow political thinking, political difference, ideas, and legitimate conflict, ever to occur." At the same time, Greif worries that too many responses to the attacks are also plagued by poor thinking: "But I think a corollary of this way of judging relative wrongs--here I'm doing my Arendtian ventriloquism, as I understand it--is that actually too wide, flowing, and unanalytic a sense of identification on 'our' side, lumping together of many different things rather than following out their distinctions and differences, is a bad idea, too. Because we won't think well. We won't be able to follow different effects to different causes; keep several incompatible ideas in mind at once, to judge among them; judge rightly. And one thing I do think Arendt would want us to try to keep straight about, is the question of proximity and distance. Time will tell--and near time, too--how much of a fluke the Charlie Hebdo and supermarket murders were. Should European Jews, and European writers, actually expect attacks--should they change their life on that basis?"

On The Right

Rosie Gray checks in on The National Front, France's newly popular far-right party, which is in the middle of reinvigorating itself and sanitizing its image: "the image of the National Front is starting to change. Marine Le Pen has largely avoided the kind of forthrightly intolerant comments her father is famous for, and she is a savvy public figure, the Rand Paul to Jean-Marie's Ron. The party has seen some of its positions leaking into the mainstream, and even into the left. For example, after the Charlie Hebdo attack, Socialist politician Jean-Marc Germain said that France must re-examine the Schengen zone--the policy of border-free travel within most of Europe, a position that the Front, which wants to remove France from the Schengen area of border-free travel entirely, has held for years. Le Pen has deftly kept herself in the center of the French political conversation during the crisis, announcing that she would not attend the massive unity rally in Paris after French President François Hollande did not invite her. On Sunday night, the New York Times published an op-ed by her, both in English and French, slamming the French government for what she perceives as its unwillingness to clearly name radical Islam as the reason for the attack. 'Now the French people, as if a single person, must put pressure on their leaders so that these days in January will not have been in vain,' Le Pen wrote. 'From France's tragedy must spring hope for real change.'"

Poe's Brain

Marilynne Robinson champions the thinking of Edgar Allan Poe: "Poe's mind was by no means commonplace. In the last year of his life he wrote a prose poem, Eureka, which would have established this fact beyond doubt--if it had not been so full of intuitive insight that neither his contemporaries nor subsequent generations, at least until the late twentieth century, could make any sense of it. Its very brilliance made it an object of ridicule, an instance of affectation and delusion, and so it is regarded to this day among readers and critics who are not at all abreast of contemporary physics. Eureka describes the origins of the universe in a single particle, from which 'radiated' the atoms of which all matter is made. Minute dissimilarities of size and distribution among these atoms meant that the effects of gravity caused them to accumulate as matter, forming the physical universe. This by itself would be a startling anticipation of modern cosmology, if Poe had not also drawn striking conclusions from it, for example that space and 'duration' are one thing, that there might be stars that emit no light, that there is a repulsive force that in some degree counteracts the force of gravity, that there could be any number of universes with different laws simultaneous with ours, that our universe might collapse to its original state and another universe erupt from the particle it would have become, that our present universe may be one in a series. All this is perfectly sound as observation, hypothesis, or speculation by the lights of science in the twenty-?rst century. And of course Poe had neither evidence nor authority for any of it. It was the product, he said, of a kind of aesthetic reasoning--therefore, he insisted, a poem. He was absolutely sincere about the truth of the account he had made of cosmic origins, and he was ridiculed for his sincerity. Eureka is important because it indicates the scale and the seriousness of Poe's thinking, and its remarkable integrity. It demonstrates his use of his aesthetic sense as a particularly rigorous method of inquiry."

Strange Persecutions

Johann Hari has a powerful essay on the unrelenting persecution of Billie Holiday by Harry Anslinger and the FBI. "Jazz was the opposite of everything Harry Anslinger believed in. It is improvised, relaxed, free-form. It follows its own rhythm. Worst of all, it is a mongrel music made up of European, Caribbean and African echoes, all mating on American shores. To Anslinger, this was musical anarchy and evidence of a recurrence of the primitive impulses that lurk in black people, waiting to emerge. 'It sounded,' his internal memos said, 'like the jungles in the dead of night.' Another memo warned that 'unbelievably ancient indecent rites of the East Indies are resurrected' in this black man's music. The lives of the jazzmen, he said, 'reek of filth.'" Driven by racial as well as musical hatred, Anslinger could not crack the intensely insular and loyal Jazz world, but he directed his obsession on one person: Holiday. "One night, in 1939, Billie Holiday stood on stage in New York City and sang a song that was unlike anything anyone had heard before. 'Strange Fruit' was a musical lament against lynching. It imagined black bodies hanging from trees as a dark fruit native to the South. Here was a black woman, before a mixed audience, grieving for the racist murders in the United States. Immediately after, Billie Holiday received her first threat from the Federal Bureau of Narcotics."

My Algorithm, My Self

Evan Selinger is worried that autocomplete is going to turn us into 'personal cliches,' rendering us dead and unthinking: "by encouraging us not to think too deeply about our words, predictive technology may subtly change how we interact with one another. As communication becomes less of an intentional act, we give others more algorithm and less of ourselves. This is why I argued in Wired last year that automation can be bad for us; it can stop us thinking. When predictive technology learns how we communicate, finds patterns specific to what we're inclined to say, and drills down into the essence of our idiosyncrasies, the result is incessantly generated boilerplate. As the artist Salvador Dali famously quipped: 'The first man to compare the cheeks of a young woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it was possibly an idiot.' Yet here, the repetition is of ourselves. When algorithms study our conscientious communication and subsequently repeat us back to ourselves, they don't identify the point at which recycling becomes degrading and one-dimensional. (And perversely, frequency of word use seems likely to be given positive weight when algorithms calculate relevance.)"

The Philosopher and the Man

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