Amor Mundi 5/4/14
05-05-2014
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.
This week in The New Yorker, Joshua Rothman writes about the recent scandal over Heidegger's antisemitism and reports on the recent discussion at the Goethe Institute between Roger Berkowitz, Academic Director of the Arendt Center; Babette Babich, Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University; and Peter Trawny, director of the Martin Heidegger Institute at the University of Wuppertal. You can watch the discussion here. Trawny has just edited three volumes of Heidegger's Black Notebooks, philosophical notebooks Heidegger kept from 1931-1941. In these notebooks, Heidegger works out his ideas of what he calls a "spiritual National Socialism" which he distinguishes from a "vulgar National Socialism." Alongside these edited volumes, Trawny has published a slim companion volume, Heidegger and the Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy. In it, Trawny seeks to evaluate Heidegger's antisemitism and to ask to what extent that antisemitism contaminates Heidegger's philosophy. Rothman begins by recounting his own magical encounter with Heidegger's texts. "If I had to rate the best intellectual experiences of my life, choosing the two or three most profound-a tendentious task, but there you are-one of them would be reading Heidegger. I was in my late twenties, and struggling with a dissertation on the nature of consciousness (what it is, where it comes from, how it fits into the material world). This had turned out to be an impossible subject. Everything I read succeeded only by narrowing the world, imagining it to be either a material or a spiritual place-never both." For Roger Berkowitz's commentary on Heidegger's Black Notebooks, check out the Weekend Read.
Anka Muhlstein reviews Georges Prochnik's The Impossible Exile in the NY Review of Books, a chronicle of the life, exile, and death of Stefan Zweig. "On February 23, 1942, Stefan Zweig and his young wife committed suicide together in Petrópolis, Brazil. The following day, the Brazilian government held a state funeral, attended by President Getulio Vargas. The news spread rapidly around the world, and the couple's deaths were reported on the front page of The New York Times. Zweig had been one of the most renowned authors of his time, and his work had been translated into almost fifty languages. In the eyes of one of his friends, the novelist Irmgard Keun, 'He belonged to those that suffered but who would not and could not hate. And he was one of those noble Jewish types who, thinskinned and open to harm, lives in an immaculate glass world of the spirit and lacks the capacity themselves to do harm.' The suicide set off a surge of emotion and a variety of reactions. Thomas Mann, the unquestioned leader of German-language writers in exile, made no secret of his indignation at what he considered an act of cowardice. In a telegram to the New York daily PM, he certainly paid tribute to his fellow writer's talent, but he underscored the 'painful breach torn in the ranks of European literary emigrants by so regrettable a weakness.' He made his point even clearer in a letter to a writer friend: 'He should never have granted the Nazis this triumph, and had he had a more powerful hatred and contempt for them, he would never have done it.'" Thus does Mann give voice to the strange and human power of hatred not only for evil, but also for good.
Last week in the Boston Globe, Austin Sarat wrote of his research into botched executions: "Over the course of the last 125 years we have actively tried to find new ways to impose death without unnecessary pain, and to transform execution from dramatic spectacle to cool, bureaucratic operation. My research shows that we have fallen far short of attaining this aspiration." Two days later in Oklahoma--on the publication day of Sarat's new book Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America's Death Penalty--Clayton Lockett suffered one of the 7% of American lethal injections that go badly. Sarat writes, in The Guardian, that botched executions show that the dream of painless deaths is just that: "Over the course of the last century, while blotched executions have fueled movement from one execution method to another, they have not posed a serious challenge to the continuing viability of death as a punishment. In both law and popular culture, they have been dismissed as isolated accidents and aberrations, as symptoms of a system that is merely temporarily 'out of order', not irrevocably flawed."
In an interview, Nick Yee, a research scientist at video game developer Ubisoft and author of the new book The Proteus Paradox: How Online Games and Virtual Worlds Change Us-And How They Don't, notes that, even given the fantastical possibilities the online games provide--fighting dragons, flying spaceships, even as something as banal as recreating yourself as a wealthy playboy or a famous celebrity--players tend to create online extensions of themselves rather than make an online persona that's wildly different than their offline one: "But what's surprising in 'Second Life' is it tends to be a really stereotypical version of suburban [life], like kind of Malibu, where everyone's shopping for Abercrombie & Fitch knockoffs and living in these very modern houses on the beachfront, that it becomes this hyper-materialistic version of the physical world.... Rather than allowing us to reinvent ourselves, virtual worlds tend to preserve the status quo and perpetuate it in powerful ways." What lies on the other side of this observation is the possibility that we could use social engineering in video games to affect change in the real world. As long as people continue to use virtual reality to escape their own lives, even if that escape, bizarrely, means by and large replicating those lives, they will prove resistant to being changed by what they encounter online.
Heroes and the Public in Pakistan
Saim Saeed turns to Hannah Arendt to think about the declining impact of heroic actions in Pakistan: "But what good are heroes if they die alone, without consequence, without anyone remembering them? Their stories of extraordinary valour have hardly brought about the 'tipping point' many in this country anticipate to fight the many evils that plague us. Despite their own sacrifices to better the Pakistan they live and work in, society has not replied in kind." One reason, Saeed argues, comes from Arendt's insight that "action, in order to matter - to exist - needs to take place in the public domain. It needs to be perceived. And Arendt's own opinion is that action is mattering less and less. According to her, action is being reduced to a statistical aberration because the public sphere, in which action is to be perceived, is shrinking. Arendt has her own explanations for why that is, but for altogether different reasons, this trend is also true in Pakistan. Public places and institutions are being destroyed. Places of worship are being targeted. It is increasingly dangerous for people, especially minorities, to express their religious sentiments in public. The breakdown of law and order in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, Karachi, Balochistan and other parts of the country do not even make it conducive for people to leave their homes. Even free expression online is being curbed. The PTA recently restricted access to QueerPK, one of the only websites facilitating an open forum for the queer community of Pakistan. Women are being raped on the streets. Journalists are being attacked. Girls' schools are being destroyed. People have been hounded in public parks.This has meant greater isolation. People are frightened into staying at home, have been blocked from accessing public forums online; their space to act is receding."
A Different Kind of Plutocracy
Amy Davidson, noting a poll that shows that 69% of Americans think that too many presidential candidates are coming from the same two families, wonders why it is that the consolidation of political capital hasn't received the same attention as the accretion of financial capital: "Why isn't all that investment yielding us any truly interesting products in the candidacy sector? It is as if our entire political portfolio were put into the same few stocks that had been there forever. Maybe it is money that, perversely or purposefully, stifles political entrepreneurship and innovation; maybe other factors are at work. In either case, the current situation can't be for the best, if it serves to make politics seem like a deadened realm rather than a place to bring and work out grievances. We are stretched out, paralyzed, in the polls. What hurts the most is that we may be suffering from a national failure of political imagination."
Adrienne LaFrance and Robinson Mayer argue that "Twitter is entering its twilight." Observing that Twitter isn't the massive, and massively exciting, online hangout of days of yore, they have penned a eulogy for the service: "Twitter used to be a sort of surrogate newsroom/barroom where you could organize around ideas with people whose opinions you wanted to assess. Maybe you wouldn't agree with everybody, but that was part of the fun. But at some point Twitter narratives started to look the same. The crowd became predictable, and not in a good way. Too much of Twitter was cruel and petty and fake. Everything we know from experience about social publishing platforms-about any publishing platforms-is that they change. And it can be hard to track the interplay between design changes and behavioral ones. In other words, did Twitter change Twitter, or did we?"
Don't You Know that Things Don't Go in Cycles?
Amir "Questlove" Thompson, writing about what hip hop is and what it is not, begins with "three famous quotes that haunt me and guide me though my days. The first is from John Bradford, the 16th-century English reformer. In prison for inciting a mob, Bradford saw a parade of prisoners on their way to being executed and said, 'There but for the grace of God go I.' (Actually, he said 'There but for the grace of God goes John Bradford,' but the switch to the pronoun makes it work for the rest of us.) The second comes from Albert Einstein, who disparagingly referred to quantum entanglement as 'spooky action at a distance.' And for the third, I go to Ice Cube, the chief lyricist of N.W.A., who delivered this manifesto in 'Gangsta Gangsta' back in 1988: 'Life ain't nothing but bitches and money.'" It is the first of six essays on "How Hip-Hop Failed Black America."
From the Hannah Arendt Center Blog
This week on the Hannah Arendt Center blog Kathleen Jones marks Holocaust Remembrance Day with a look at solemnity and laughter in her "Quote" of the Week. And Roger Berkowitz discusses Martin Heidegger and the Black Notebooks in the Weekend Read.