Amor Mundi 3/17/13
03-18-2013
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.
Lewis Lapham offers a tour through the centuries of how the animal was seen as the educator of man. "Virgil's keeping of bees on his country estate in 30 BC led him in book four of the Georgics to admire their work ethic." "The eighteenth-century naturalists" turned to "the animal kingdom for signs of good government." And Pliny the Elder thought animals so exceptional that "man by comparison "is the only animal that knows nothing and can learn nothing without being taught." But animals, Lapham laments, have disappeared from our world, except in the form of domesticated pets. Along with them, we lose our teachers and models for the humble life "at ease within the great chain of being but also in concert with the tides and the season and the presence of death."
In a paean to Beethoven, Daniel Barenboim writes: "although the focus of this essay will indeed be Beethoven's music, it must be understood that one cannot explain the nature or the message of music through words. Music means different things to different people and sometimes even different things to the same person at different moments of his life. It might be poetic, philosophical, sensual, or mathematical, but in any case it must, in my view, have something to do with the soul of the human being. Hence it is metaphysical; but the means of expression is purely and exclusively physical: sound. I believe it is precisely this permanent coexistence of metaphysical message through physical means that is the strength of music. It is also the reason why when we try to describe music with words, all we can do is articulate our reactions to it, and not grasp music itself."
Caroline Weber reports that the French Government has, 120 years after the fact, released the full dossier on Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer who was tried and sentenced to life imprisonment on a fabricated charge of treason. The Dreyfus affair was born of antisemitism; it awoke acculturated Jews like Theodor Herzl to the fact that Jews could not live safely in Europe and needed a homeland of their own, thus birthing the modern Zionist movement. The Affair also inspired Marcel Proust who saw in the outspoken reaction to an unjust persecution one of the first times when Jews-who previously had lived hidden and clandestine lives-rallied around their own. Weber looks at the Proustian jointure of Jewishness and homosexuality as a first flowering of minority consciousness-something Hannah Arendt explores with much darker overtones in The Origins of Totalitarianism. For Weber, the release of the Dreyfus dossier is an opportunity: "opponents of homophobia, anti-Semitism and all related strains of criminalizing bigotry can take the full measure of the mechanisms at work in the Dreyfus Affair, and can reaffirm the importance of "marginal" identities being allowed to come in from the cold."
Adam Garfinkle talks to Alex Berezow about his new book Science Left Behind: Feel-Good Fallacies and the Rise of the Anti-Scientific Left. In their book Berezow, and co-author Hank Campbell, "challenge the idea that progressivism is the 'pro-science' ideology, or that the Democratic Party is pro-science," and take on "many of their pet positions, from their opposition to nuclear power, to genetically modified foods." In the interview, he focuses on the conflict between culture and politics on the one hand and science on the other, saying that "as someone who has training in science, I am a little offended by someone who was willing to twist the science to create political propaganda. Scientists don't talk like that; we don't sensationalize. We look at the pros and cons and make a reasonable decision from there."
A few weeks ago, newly minted Noble Laureate Mo Yan gave a wide-ranging interview to Der Spiegel. In it, Mo complicates recent criticism that claims that he is a state writer and therefore, as Ai Weiwei put it, "detached from reality" and incapable of representing "current China." Mo Yan said: "Aren't many artists in mainland China state artists? What about those who are professors at the universities? What about those who write for state newspapers? And then, which intellectual can claim to represent China? I certainly do not claim that. Can Ai Weiwei? "
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Blogging and the New Public IntellectualAn Ongoing Series of discussions moderated by Roger Berkowitz and Walter Russell Mead.
April 9, 2013 at Bard Graduate Center
David Frum, blogger for The Daily Beast & The Huffington Post.
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This week on the blog, Jeff Jurgens covered the complicated history and current controversy over Berlin's East Side Gallery. Nikita Nelin considered the implications of the Brain Activity Map initiative. Tracy Strong discussed the role of wonder in Arendt's thinking. Finally, last weekend Roger Berkowitz and Walter Russell Mead had a public conversation with General Stanley McChrystal. You can read Roger's thoughts on McChrystal's new book My Share of the Task here.