Amor Mundi 8/31/14

09-01-2014

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.

Dignity and Reason

The Guardian is asking writers and critics to choose the book that changed them. Rafael Behr answers Darkness at Noon, by Arthur Koestler. It is a good choice. Behr writes: "When I went to university I was only tangentially interested in politics. Then, during the summer holiday at the end of the first year, driving across France, I borrowed Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon from a friend. He was studying philosophy and had been ordered to read it. I was studying languages and was avoiding some untranslated set text. I had never been gripped by anything so theoretical before. The story is sparse. Rubashov, an ageing first-generation revolutionary, is imprisoned and interrogated by an ambitious thug from the steelier, younger generation. Execution is certain. Pacing his cell, Rubashov recalls his past work for the party abroad, manipulating and ultimately destroying idealistic but dispensable foreign communist agents. He composes a tract on 'the relative maturity of the masses' which submerges his personal dilemma - to die in silence or serve the party one last time by submitting to a show trial - in a sweeping quasi-Marxist rumination on history and destiny. The drama is not contained in the action. What excited 19-year-old me was the guided tour of a totalitarian mind." Rightly, Behr sets Darkness at Noon next to Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem, as "companion volumes in my imagination." Both Koestler and Arendt are spurs against the seductions of totalitarian rationalism. For more on Darkness at Noon, take a look at Roger Berkowitz's essay Approaching Infinity: Dignity in Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon.

Lost in Translation From the Classroom to the Dining Room

David Bornstein asks, "How can we repair our public discourse?" And in a recent essay he answers that we need to re-learn how to listen and have meaningful conversations, which is the goal of the initiative "Ask Big Questions." Bornstein writes: "Imagine that you're among a group of college students who want to discuss the big issues of the day. What can be done to bring peace to the Middle East? How can we reduce sexual assaults on campuses? What should be done about immigration? These questions have the potential to produce rich explorations. But they're equally likely to devolve into shouting matches that increase anger and mistrust. Is there a way to frame conversations so that people actually listen to one another?... Ask Big Questions helps students discover how to establish a foundation of trust and confidentiality in a group, invite contributions from everyone, and guide others into deeper learning by interpreting the meaning of poems, texts or images, reflecting on their lives and the implications for action. The interpretive part of the discussion is essential, says Feigelson: 'If you don't have some sort of a text or interpretive object, the conversation can easily veer off into bad group therapy.'" The initiative teaches students how to think and speak about hard questions by seeking to understand opposing views and imagining that the truth might have various shades. This is, of course, one premise of a liberal arts education, which makes one wonder why the lessons from the classroom are not being translated to the dining room.

As the Old Saying Goes...

Adam Gopnick takes on the old adage about those who don't learn from history, suggesting that repetition is even more likely when the history being read is a self serving one: "Studying history doesn't argue for nothing-ism, but it makes a very good case for minimalism: for doing the least violent thing possible that might help prevent more violence from happening... The real sin that the absence of a historical sense encourages is presentism, in the sense of exaggerating our present problems out of all proportion to those that have previously existed. It lies in believing that things are much worse than they have ever been-and, thus, than they really are-or are uniquely threatening rather than familiarly difficult. Every episode becomes an epidemic, every image is turned into a permanent injury, and each crisis is a historical crisis in need of urgent aggressive handling-even if all experience shows that aggressive handling of such situations has in the past, quite often made things worse...Those of us who obsess, for instance, particularly in this centennial year, on the tragedy of August, 1914-on how an optimistic and largely prosperous civilization could commit suicide-don't believe that the trouble then was that nobody read history. The trouble was that they were reading the wrong history, a make-believe history of grand designs and chess-master-like wisdom. History, well read, is simply humility well told, in many manners. And a few sessions of humility can often prevent a series of humiliations."

A Reason to Fight

Molly Crabapple tries to think of an ethical response to the horror and violence of the last few months. One response, to affirm her complicity as a white woman for the police violence in Ferguson, evidences a basic fallacy of collective guilt. Crabapple is not guilty of killing Michael Brown. And if someone is guilty, her musings about her own guilt minimizes his guilt. But Crabapple's second response is infinitely more moving: to affirm the beauty of the world: "Power seeks to enclose beauty-to make it scarce, controlled. There is scant beauty in militarized zones or prisons. But beauty keeps breaking out anyway, like the roses on that Ferguson street. The world is connected now. Where it breaks, we all break. But it is our world, to love as it burns around us. Jack Gilbert is right. 'We must risk delight' in the summer of monsters. Beauty is survival, not distraction. Beauty is a way of fighting. Beauty is a reason to fight." Crabapple's musings on beauty in dark times call to mind Berthold Brecht's poem"To Posterity":

Truly, I live in dark times!
An artless word is foolish. A smooth forehead
Points to insensitivity. He who laughs
Has not yet received
The terrible news.
What times are these, in which
A conversation about trees is almost a crime
For in doing so we maintain our silence about so much wrongdoing!
And he who walks quietly across the street,
Passes out of the reach of his friends
Who are in danger?

In Praise of Universalism

Joseph Luzzi suggests a reason why some books remain important long after their original place and time, attempting to rehabilitate the idea of the universality of literature in the process: "This contrast, between a celebrated and largely unread classic and an enduringly popular classic, shows that a key to a work's ongoing celebrity is that dangerous term: universality. We hold the word with suspicion because it tends to elevate one group at the expense of another; what's supposedly applicable to all is often only applicable to a certain group that presumes to speak for everybody else. And yet certain elements and experiences do play a major role in most of our lives: falling in love, chasing a dream, and, yes, transitioning as Pinocchio does from childhood to adolescence. The classic that keeps on being read is the book whose situations and themes remain relevant over time-that miracle of interpretive openness that makes us feel as though certain stories, poems, and plays are written with us in mind."

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SAVE THE DATE - 2014 FALL CONFERENCE

October 9-10

The Hannah Arendt Center's annual fall conference, The Unmaking of Americans: Are There Still American Values Worth Fighting For?, will be held this year on October 9-10!

Registration is now OPEN! You can register here!

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From the Arendt Center Blog

This week on the Blog, Roger Berkowitz emphasizes the need to restore spaces where freedom can be enjoyed in the Quote of the Week. American poet and writer Sylvia Plath provides this week's Thoughts on Thinking. We look back on a lecture by Philippe Nonet on the history of metaphysical freedom in our Video Archives. And Roger Berkowitz remarks on the needlessly specialized nature of modern humanities scholarship in the Weekend Read.