Amor Mundi 2/2/14
02-02-2014
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.
Evincing a particular kind of anti-political judgment, the editors at N+1 are trying to wiggle their way out of the internet's world of opinion: "We assert our right to not care about stuff, to not say anything, to opt out of debate over things that are silly and also things that are serious—because why pretend to have a strong opinion when we do not? Why are we being asked to participate in some imaginary game of Risk where we have to take a side? We welcome the re-emergence of politics in the wake of the financial crash, the restoration of sincerity as a legitimate adult posture. But already we see this new political sincerity morphing into a set of consumer values, up for easy exploitation. We are all cosmopolitans online, attentive to everything; but the internet is not one big General Assembly, and the controversies planted in establishment newspapers aren’t always the sort of problems that require the patient attention of a working group. Some opinions deserve radical stack (like #solidarityisforwhitewomen), but the glorified publicity stunts that dress up in opinion’s clothes to get viral distribution in the form of “debate” (Open Letters to Miley Cyrus) do not. We ought to be selective about who deserves our good faith. Some people duke it out to solve problems. Others pick fights for the spectacle, knowing we’ll stick around to watch. In the meantime they’ll sell us refreshments, as we loiter on the sideline, waiting to see which troll will out-troll his troll." Read Roger Berkowitz’s response on the Arendt Center blog.
Ignorance Praised in Art and Education
Barry Schwabsky wonders what the proliferation of MFAs and not Ph.D.’s in art means for artists. Could it be dangerous and lead to intellectually gifted but sterile artists? Don’t worry, Schwabsky writes, since art schools have adopted ignorance as their motto: "Just as no one family of techniques can be prescribed as the right content of art education, neither can any one set of ideas. The instructor’s knowledge and experience are always in principal too limited for the job they’ve taken on. They’re supposed to help usher their students into the not-yet-known, toward what, in Draw It With Your Eyes Closed, the Canadian artist Jon Pylypchuk calls "another place where there was no grade and just a friend telling you that what you did was good." Sooner or later teaching art, and making art, is about coming to terms with one’s own ignorance. Maybe that’s why the art world’s favorite philosopher these days is, whose best-known book—published in France in 1987 and translated into English four years later—is called The Ignorant Schoolmaster. Its subject is Joseph Jacotot, a forgotten French educator of the early nineteenth century whose “intellectual adventure” was founded on a paradoxical—one might be tempted to say nonsensical—principle: “He proclaimed that one could teach what one didn’t know.” The educator’s job, since teacher and student are assumed to be equal in intelligence, is nothing more than to “use all possible means of convincing the ignorant one of his power” of understanding. The teacher is there simply to remind the learner to pay attention, to keep working.” It might be helpful to recall Arendt’s argument in “The Crisis in Education,” that teaching must teach something if it is to give students the possibility of rebuilding the world anew.
Digital journalism professor Meredith Borussard explains why she's banned e-readers from her classroom, and gives a short history of the book while she's at it: "The user interface for a book has been refined for centuries. What we call a ‘printed book’ today is a codex, a set of uniformly sized pages bound between covers. It was adopted around the 3rd or 4th century. A book’s interface is nearly perfect. It is portable, it never runs out of power, and you can write notes in it if you forget your notebook. The physical book is seamlessly integrated into the educational experience: It fits on any desk, even those cramped little writing surfaces that flip up from the side of a seat. You can sit around a table with 15 other people, each of whom has a book, and you can all see each other to have a conversation about what is on the page."
Carol Becker confronts “the first time I was aware that the world had changed and that "we" (my age group) were no longer the "younger generation." Another group was ascending, and its members appeared confoundedly different from us.” Becker reflects on what it is that identifies her generation and suggests that their idealism was hopelessly American: “I was asked if I still believed in making a “better world.” I was taken aback. I could not imagine a life where that was not a goal, nor a world incapable of movement forward. Having grown up believing in progress–not the progress of technology or material wealth but that of personal and social transformation—it probably is the concept of “hope” that most separates my generation from those that immediately followed. Perhaps I am delusional and, like all who suffer from delusions, unable to function without them. Or it could be that I am “hopelessly American”, as my students in Greece used to say, because of my conviction that the world can be changed for the better and that I or we, must have a hand in that process.”
Claude Lanzmann, maker of the magisterial Shoah, has been deeply critical of Hannah Arendt’s appraisal of Jewish leaders. Now Lanzmann has a new film out that is proving almost as controversial as Eichmann in Jerusalem. I wrote about it earlier, here. This weekend, Jeremy Gerard has a short profile of the movie in the New York Times. “Life and death in Theresienstadt were overseen by successive heads of the Judenrat, the Jewish council set up by the Nazis in ghettos and camps to enforce Nazi orders and to oversee labor and the transfer of people to Auschwitz-Birkenau, Dachau and other camps. The first two were executed when their usefulness ended. The final elder, serving from December 1944 to May 1945, was a brilliant Viennese rabbi, Benjamin Murmelstein, who called himself “the last of the unjust,” a phrase that Mr. Lanzmann appropriated for the title of his 3-hour-40-minute look at this divisive figure. In the documentary, opening on Feb. 7, he revisits an intense week he spent filming Rabbi Murmelstein nearly four decades ago. Some critics and Holocaust survivors have found the new documentary overly sympathetic to the rabbi; Mr. Lanzmann himself has therefore become an unlikely player in the continuing debate over how we are to remember Jews who worked in any way with the Nazis.”
From the Hannah Arendt Center Blog
This week on the blog, Ian Storey writes about Arendt, Steve McQueen, and Kanye West. And in the Weekend Read, Roger Berkowitz takes on the editors at N+1 who berate the internet for inciting too much free speech.