Amor Mundi 4/13/14
04-14-2014
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.
Denaturalization and Superfluous People
In 2010, Mohamed Sakr was stripped of his British citizenship. “Seventeen months later,” the NY Times reports, “an American drone streaked out of the sky in the Lower Shabelle region of Somalia and killed Mr. Sakr. An intelligence official quoted in news reports called him a “very senior Egyptian,” though he never held an Egyptian passport. A childhood friend of Mr. Sakr, Bilal al-Berjawi, a Lebanese-Briton also stripped of his citizenship by the British government, was killed in a drone strike a month earlier, after having escaped an attack in June 2011. The cases of Mr. Sakr and Mr. Berjawi are among the most significant relating to the British government’s growing use of its ability to strip citizenship and its associated rights from some Britons at the stroke of a pen, without any public hearing and with only after-the-fact involvement by the courts. Now, faced with concerns that the steady stream of British Muslims traveling to fight in Syria could pose a threat on their return, Prime Minister David Cameron’s government is pushing legislation that would give it additional flexibility to use the power, which among other things keeps terrorism suspects from re-entering the country.” The sovereign right of a nation to control who is nationalized or denationalized is unchallenged, and yet in practice the rise of mass denationalization first emerged in Europe in the 1930s. For Hannah Arendt, it is a truism that “One is almost tempted to measure the degree of totalitarian infection by the extent to which the concerned governments use their sovereign right of denationalization.” This does not mean that Britain is teetering toward totalitarianism. All countries make use of denationalization to some extent. And yet, the normalization of the practice of depriving some people of their status as citizens does not deprive them simply of rights, but also leaves them fully outside the sphere of organized human society. They lack not the right to a trial or the right to speak, but the right to have rights as a member of human society. Mass denationalization is a dangerous road.
Self-described rationalist and atheist Barbara Ehrenreich, who is also a scientist by training, is interviewed about her new book Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever’s Search for the Truth About Everything on NPR. She recounts one of the mystical experiences she had as a teenager in the Mojave Desert: “It was – the only words I can put to it after all these years are that the world flamed into life. Everything was alive. It was like there was a feeling of an encounter with something living, not something God-like, not something loving, not something benevolent, but something beyond any of those kinds of categories, beyond any human categories.” This book, Ehrenreich says, marks the first time she has spoken to anyone about these experiences. “…I think I have a responsibility to report things, even if they're anomalous, even if they don't fit whatever theory I had in my mind or most people have or anything. So it's in that spirit that I take this risk…Now I'm getting responses from people and I'm talking about serious people, serious rational actually nonbelievers, people I know through my work, as well as total strangers who pop up and say, that is so much like my experience.”
In an interview, Mary Szybist, winner of the 2013 National Book Award for poetry, discusses the relationship between her prayer and her chosen medium: "When I was young, I reached a point where I found myself unable to pray. I was devastated by it. I missed being able to say words in my head that I believed could be heard by a being, a consciousness outside me. That is when I turned to poetry. I have always been attracted to apostrophe, perhaps because of its resemblance to prayer. A voice reaches out to something beyond itself that cannot answer it. I find that moving in part because it enacts what is true of all address and communication on some level—it cannot fully be heard, understood, or answered. Still, some kinds of articulations can get us closer to such connections—connections between very different consciousnesses—and I think the linguistic ranges in poetry can enable that."
Only a few days prior to author and naturalist Peter Matthiessen's death last week, the New York Times Magazine published a profile of him in honor of In Paradise, Matthiessen's final book. That novel springs from an experience that the author had during a Zen Buddhist retreat held at Auschwitz; one night, the group fell into dance, a profoundly divisive act, not, perhaps, that different from holding a meditation retreat in a German death camp. A few nights later, responding both to the dancing and to the retreat as a whole, Mattheiessen spoke: “I just got up and made a generality that if we think the Germans are unique in this regard, we’re crazy. We’re all capable of this, if the right buttons are pressed. Our countries have all done it. Man has been a murderer forever...It was no great manifesto up there. I just wanted to say, ‘Come on, we’re all in this together.’” There is, however, a non-minimal difference between those who might have participated in the Final Solution if given the chance and those who did so. To say we are all guilty is to say that no one is, as Arendt never tired of pointing out. I would like to think Mattheiessen knew he was just mouthing a “generality,” as he said.
Against Philosophical Cleverness
Paul Sagar reviews Bernard Williams' posthumous collection of essays and reviews. Sagar praises the therapeutic impact of the seriousness of Williams’ public thinking, which may “teach and urge patience regarding the long span of time that is required to acquire, process, and then develop knowledge and ideas. This in turn can have a calming effect, balancing the sense of being overwhelmed by the vast amount that there is to know before one can even come close to saying something worth saying.” Indeed, Williams is one of those few public thinkers who, in the tradition of Hannah Arendt, elevate public discourse by the force of their example. In other words, Williams insists that philosophy remain a humanist rather than a scientific project. “Williams urged that philosophy must be a humanistic discipline. Many analytic philosophers proceed as though the sheer force of their cleverness can scythe through deep problems of human living and understanding, unaided and unencumbered by further learning and knowledge. This attitude frequently goes along with a willful philistinism: a celebration of one’s ignorance beyond one’s academic niche, within which one prowls to do battle with the more or less clever as they dare come forth. Williams’s work stands as an indictment of this way of going about philosophy. He shows that it is most certainly an intellectual mistake. But it is also an ethical one, insofar as we rightfully find ignorance repellant and its celebration a vice. The richness and value of human experience must extend beyond being merely clever, if our lives are to have that dimension of meaning which philosophy, of all disciplines, should surely put first and foremost (the clue, after all, is in the name).”
The NY Times offers pictures of reconciliation, putting faces and bodies to relationships such as this one: “NZABAMWITA: “I damaged and looted her property. I spent nine and a half years in jail. I had been educated to know good from evil before being released. And when I came home, I thought it would be good to approach the person to whom I did evil deeds and ask for her forgiveness. I told her that I would stand by her, with all the means at my disposal. My own father was involved in killing her children. When I learned that my parent had behaved wickedly, for that I profoundly begged her pardon, too.” KAMPUNDU: “My husband was hiding, and men hunted him down and killed him on a Tuesday. The following Tuesday, they came back and killed my two sons. I was hoping that my daughters would be saved, but then they took them to my husband’s village and killed them and threw them in the latrine. I was not able to remove them from that hole. I knelt down and prayed for them, along with my younger brother, and covered the latrine with dirt. The reason I granted pardon is because I realized that I would never get back the beloved ones I had lost. I could not live a lonely life — I wondered, if I was ill, who was going to stay by my bedside, and if I was in trouble and cried for help, who was going to rescue me? I preferred to grant pardon.”” Arendt relates reconciliation to Amor Mundi, to love the world. Reconciliation, she writes, “has its origin in a self-coming to terms with what has been given to one.” The act of loving the world as it is re-imagines one’s solidarity in the face of a wrong that threatens to dissolve that common sense of belonging to a world, even a world that harbors horrific wrongs. In this sense, reconciliation is the judgment that in spite of our plurality and differences, we share a common world.
Rawls on Why Baseball is the Best of All Games
I attended my first Mets game of the season last Sunday, with my daughter. She is learning to watch the whole field, to note where the outfielders shift against right and left handed hitters and when her favorite player, David Wright, covers the line at third. Baseball is a game of pauses that can be filled with strategy, conversation, and hot dogs. Basking in the glory of the beginning of a new season of hope, I was thrilled to come across a short letter by John Rawls extolling seven virtues of baseball. Here are the first two. “First: the rules of the game are in equilibrium: that is, from the start, the diamond was made just the right size, the pitcher’s mound just the right distance from home plate, etc., and this makes possible the marvelous plays, such as the double play. The physical layout of the game is perfectly adjusted to the human skills it is meant to display and to call into graceful exercise. Whereas, basketball, e.g., is constantly (or was then) adjusting its rules to get them in balance. Second: the game does not give unusual preference or advantage to special physical types, e.g., to tall men as in basketball. All sorts of abilities can find a place somewhere, the tall and the short etc. can enjoy the game together in different positions.”